12.27.10
Posted in DRM, Microsoft at 12:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As Microsoft withdraws Silverlight from the Web one of its biggest clients apparently walks away
Netflix chose Silverlight a long time ago and on various occasions we blamed it on the board, which had former Microsoft staff. Recently, Netflix made a lot of noise about its use (as in exploitation) of Free software, even though it denied access to its services from GNU/Linux- and BSD-running machines, partly due to Silverlight, which is a dead project now (one among many). “For streaming,” wrote Joab Jackson over Christmas, “Netflix mulls using DASH over HTML5 instead of Silverlight” (see our new Silverlight wiki). Here is what Netflix wrote some days ago:
In order to help achieve this goal, we are looking into a number of options. We are already actively participating in the MPEG committee for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) to define an industry standard for adaptive streaming, together with Apple, Microsoft and a number of other companies.
The proposed DASH standard covers the first five items listed above: It defines a way to advertise a range of different streams to a player together with the information it needs to pick which ones to stream. It also defines media file formats suitable for adaptive streaming. The file formats enable efficient and seamless switching between streams, enabling a player to adapt to changing network conditions without pausing playback for re-buffering. The standard considers the differing needs of both on-demand services such as ours, and live services. And it’s all based on the use of industry standard HTTP servers.
We expect to be able to publish a draft of a Netflix profile describing a limited subset of the MPEG DASH standard early next year. It will define the requirements for premium on-demand streaming services like ours and will take advantage of hooks included in the DASH standard to integrate the DRM technologies that we need to fulfill our contractual obligations to the content providers, thus covering the sixth item on our list.
The Netflix case is important because to Microsoft it is a major case study regarding the use of Silverlight. If Silverlight as a whole dies (which inevitably it will), that won’t be good for Vista Phony 7 [sic], either. █
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12.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In the larger world of IT, I see many things happening in 2011, almost all of them are huge positives. ARM will advance on all fronts as will GNU/Linux. I see thin clients moving along smartly. Many will use the expensive VDI systems but many will revel in the efficiency of an old-fashioned virtual terminal provided by the x-window system of GNU/Linux. If GNU/Linux evolves away from X, there surely will be some suitable networked display to permit the thinnest of thin clients to operate. There are moves to eliminate the VGA adaptor but I cannot see that being universal. There are just too many VGA monitors out there with years of life left. Changing the connector is one way to make thin clients obsolete but they are a quick-to-market product and can adapt. I see an end to up-selling. It delayed innovation but has not stopped it. Small cheap computers will soon be everywhere.
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People come up with all of these reasons to explain why they don’t use Linux. But really they are not reasons at all but simply excuses for laziness. You might even think that with all the tripe that is trotted out that most people don’t have the intelligence to be able to use Linux.
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Ballnux
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Samsung is on the verge of realising its 10 million unit sales hopes for its flagship Android powered mobile handset the Samsung Galaxy S, new figures have revealed.
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I’m no huge fan of UI overlays, but even I have to admit that HTC’s Sense is getting better and better. With features like HTCSense.com and even an e-books store, there’s no arguing that it’s become more than just an Android skin – in Europe, at least.
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Kernel Space
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The GRUB bootloader is widely used to get Linux (and other) systems running. Its flexibility and configurability make it a logical choice for many types of computers, as does its “just works” factor: your editor cannot be the only one to smile when he realizes how long it has been since the last “I forgot to run LILO and my new kernel won’t boot” episode. One of GRUB’s nice features is its ability to understand filesystem structures and find bootable kernels on the fly. So the addition of support for another filesystem type would not normally be a noteworthy event. When that filesystem is ZFS, though, people will pay attention.
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Applications
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Most modern computers are powerful enough to run entire operating systems within your main operating systems, which means virtual machines are more commonplace today than ever. Here’s a look at the five most popular virtual machine applications.
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First and foremost, as we first reported back in early November, Shotwell has gained video support. Users can now import them straight from their digital cameras, tag them and add them to events.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.10 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for notification balloons in system tray.
– Obsolete AudioIO sound driver removed.
– More work on ActiveX support.
– Various MSI fixes.
– Preloader now used for 64-bit too.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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Games
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There are often reports regarding concerns about computer games having negative effects on children and adults, with the fear that these games can lead to violent behaviour and addiction. However, studies by leading researchers have shown that there are many positive attributes to playing computer games, some of which we have alluded to in our earlier articles. Computer games can help players to improve their cognitive skills, enhance creativity, deepen language and maths skills, and help people to think on their feet and outside the box, the latter referring to novel, creative and smart thinking. However, above all these things, games offer pure, unadulterated fun.
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Dofus is a massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) for Linux with thousands of players across the world playing it everyday. The game is quite popular and have one of the fastest growing online community.
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While not nearly as much money as successful triple-A commercial game titles, this is a huge success for indie game developers. The $1.8M came in from 232,845 sales. The average Linux user was paying $13.76 USD per game bundle while Windows users came in at just $6.67.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Packages for the release of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6 RC 1 are available for Kubuntu 10.10 and Natty.
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GNOME Desktop
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As you can see, it’s not perfect. The icon is still on the bottom left, the menu is still floating. I’ve made all of the changes necessary to get the GNOME theme working again. I’ve also refactored it so that it loads nicely from SystemPreferences, which the previous version didn’t do.
Once I get the final details worked out, you should be able to run your GNUstep applications alongside GNOME applications without any problems and without them sticking out like a sore thumb.
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I find it amazing that in 2011 the advantages of GNU/Linux package management systems are considered an innovation by “mainstream” IT folks. APT and RPM have been providing such features for more than a decade. I started using GNU/Linux with Caldera eDesktop in 2000. Then “the store” was a single CD. Soon distros were using 3 or 4 CDs of software. Now Debian lists 53 CDs in the set. The CDs are rarely used these days. They are more a unit of measure of the size of the app store. Folks mostly do some default installation and add packages from the store to customize it. The package management system installs requested packages and all dependencies automatically from web servers.
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Red Hat Family
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Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB) research analysts increased their price target for shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from $40.00 to $48.00 in a research note issued to investors on Wednesday. They currently have a “hold” rating on the company.
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Fedora
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So if you care about the future of Fedora’s participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), for the love of all that you hold dear and then some beyond that, please read on.
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All in all, having used Fedora 14 since it was released I can happily recommend it.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When Ayatana was founded, a comprehensive design team was hired by Canonical. The team came from a variety of backgrounds: many came from brand, graphic design, product development, interaction design and other walks of life.
The term ‘melting pot of personalities’ is an understatement, and many were new to open source and still taking it all in, but all were enthused and inspired by the idea of great design infused with strong community.
The first project to come out of the team was called Notify OSD and provided a new approach to notification bubbles, which we were all too familiar with in Ubuntu. For years we had seen these boring yellow square bubbles appear in the top-right of the Gnome desktop when an application needed to tell you something.
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There is a discussion going on @ Ayatana mailing list regarding the merge of Me Menu (the applet that displays your name, used to set your status) and Messaging Menu (Chat, Email, etc.) and mockups have already started to be posted:
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We are pleased to announce that the next Ubuntu User Days event is scheduled to take place from Saturday January 29th 2011, 09:45 UTC until Sunday January 30th 2011, 03:00 UTC. To quote the wiki page, “User Days was created to be a set of courses offered during a one day period to teach the beginning or intermediate Ubuntu user the basics to get them started with Ubuntu”. Logs from the last Ubuntu User Days event are also available for anyone who might be interested.
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Oracle released VirtualBox 4.0 yesterday.
Amongst other major changes [1] one the most noticeable improvement is that they fixed Unity/Compiz crashes in Natty. This means that we can now run Unity in a VM and the performances are pretty good.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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First of all, I think there is a huge difference in American and European assumptions and perspectives, and a big question is whether the rest of the world will end up looking more like Europe or America vis-a-vis two key areas: cost of data plans, and whether phones become much more application centric.
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Ryan Paul, Open Source Editor
My Christmas wish for 2011 is a truly competitive and open MeeGo-based phone from a major vendor. Although Linux has gained considerable traction in the mobile and embedded market, most of the available devices are locked down or have insular software stacks that don’t allow the user to take advantage of the platform’s true underlying power.
MeeGo has the potential to be a game changer because it is closely aligned with the upstream technology ecosystem and gives application developers significantly more flexibility, including a rich, high-performance native toolkit. It could bring much-needed competition to the Linux smartphone space by offering a strong alternative to Google’s excellent Android platform.
Although MeeGo has considerable potential, the platform is still a work in progress and none of the major hardware companies behind it have been able to bring all the pieces together into a compelling product yet. I’m hoping that 2011 is the year that Nokia or one of the other major MeeGo stakeholders will finally deliver MeeGo on a desirable handset.
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Android
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If you are an Android user and you forgot to send Christmas Greetings to your friends and associates because you don’t have access to your PC, Hakuna Matata.
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Fun never stops at Google. The Android ‘maker’ recently sent seven payloads into the near space from Ione California. These payloads carried 7 Nexus S phones. Google says in a blog that they wanted “an opportunity to collect some interesting data about the sensors in Nexus S – GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer.”
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It’s a shame there aren’t any video streaming programs on that list. If you use Linux and are familiar with Netflix then odds are you are aware of (what at this point feels like an age old argument) the issue of getting Netflix’s instant stream functional on your Linux system. In case you are not aware of this dilemma, in short:
It does not work
You see, even with all of the FOSS projects Netflix supports they choose to use the DRM ridden Silverlight plugin to stream video over the Internet. This prevents the streaming service from functioning on FOS operating systems (Linux, BSD, ect.) at this current point in time. Why the lack of support? Some will say Linux has a small market share so is not worth the extra time it takes to support the platform.
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According to the Eclipse committer statistics of the Eclipse Dash project, SAP is now the 4th largest corporate contributor to Eclipse projects based on the number of active committers.
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The v0.4 released in January 2010 was the first version when darktable, a digital photography workflow tool for Linux, became actually usable for daily use. With basic catalog management features, advanced editing tools and, above all, HDR precision darktable is rapidly becoming important part of Linux powered photographers’s workflow.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced the release of the first beta for version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Changes in MPL 2.0 include the removal of the “Original Software” and “Initial Developer” concepts, improved globalisation with the removal of many US-specific terms and concepts, better compatibility with other licences, as well as updated patent language that’s more in line with other major open source licences.
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As the FTC eyes consumer privacy issues and investigates an online “Do Not Track” option, it seems as though web browsers are responding in kind, offering their own solutions to better protect Internet users’ data. For its part, IE9 says it will offer “Tracking Protection” via the browser.
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Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 4 beta 8, a new pre-release milestone build of the open source Web browser. Beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices.
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Databases
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Project Releases
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With the release of Drupal 7.0 RC 3, expected to be the final release candidate, the stage is set for the arrival of Drupal 7, the next major release of the most popular open source content management system. The team has announced January 5 as the release date of Drupal 7.
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Oracle has announced the availability of VM VirtualBox 4.0. Acquired through Sun, VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop computers to run multiple guest operating systems simultaneously, allowing users to get the most flexibility and utilization out of their PCs, and supports a variety of host operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Oracle Solaris.
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Government
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Maude is a cabinet minister in the government of the United Kingdom.
“In December, the local government in the Canadian province of Quebec were the latest to announce a preference for open source. According to treasury board president Michelle Courchesne, free and open source software must satisfy three criteria: Does it meet our needs? Is it a quality product? Is the cost favourable?”
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Openness/Sharing
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3) How does Project REALISE leverage principles of the open source way?
REALISE will build on the growing awareness and interest in open source development, including assistive technologies, by:
* Developing an online community with trust in an open development culture
* Identifying relevant projects and people
* Engaging users to help define the problem
* Connecting parties interested in collaboration
* Building the solutions
* Identifying potential revenue streams
* Managing the collaboration and any intellectual property
* Engaging external parties in education and research
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It finally hit me the other day just why the open source way seems so much more elegantly designed (and less wasteful) to me than what I’ll call “the crowdsourcing way.”
1. Typical projects run the open source way have many contributors and many beneficiaries.
2. Typical projects run the crowdsourcing way have many contributors and few beneficiaries.
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Congratulations to Ukrainian Wikipedia on reaching 250,000 articles! The milestone article was officially created on Tuesday, December 21 at 8:45pm, Kyiv Time by user Anatoliy-024. Anatoily-024, a Wikipedian since 2008, has created 206 articles and made 6,000 edits to the Ukranian Wikipedia making this user the 110th most active contributor to this language Wikipedia.
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Programming
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DockBarX 0.42 is of course available in the WebUpd8 PPA for Karmic, Lucid, Maverick and Natty.
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Standards/Consortia/Web
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The new Firefox 4 Beta is here, and comes with WebGL activated by default. You can download this new beta here: http://firefox.com/beta.
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A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County District Court last week.
Jurors – well, potential jurors – staged a revolt.
They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they weren’t about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana. Never mind that the defendant in question also faced a felony charge of criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.
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Pat Robertson, the televangelist who once ran for president, said on his show “The 700 Club” that he thought marijuana should be legalized.
Yep, the Christian conservative preacher who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of punishing America for its abortion policy is now on the side of the marijuana lobby.
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I will soon publish the code (GPLv3-licensed), but in a more scientific society more code would have already been out there for others to collaborate and build upon the work of others.
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This blog is going to be very interesting to readers who feel that being a customer of Bell Canada Enterprises is a lot like flushing your hard earned money down the toilet.
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Skype is the process of recovering from a major outage that left users across the world unable to log into the VoIP service on Wednesday.
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How a star came from the East and was of East and how Ballmer was vexed by ARM
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What do Canada’s Wayne Crookes, the Big 4′s RIAA, Hollywood’s MPAA and brand new ICE agent Andrew Reynolds have in common? They all claim linking is the same as publishing. Crookes is using it to demand Canada’s Supreme Court effectively shut down the net in Canada.
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Science
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The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy released the long-awaited Memorandum on Scientific Integrity today.
If fully implemented by federal agencies and departments, the directive could help protect government scientists from pressure by special interests, and would ensure that the government can make fully informed decisions about public health and the environment.
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Health/Nutrition
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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a stunning exposé on a publicly-traded company called Life Partners Holdings. Are you ready for this? Life Partners creeps around asking the unemployed, the elderly and the sick (especially people with HIV/AIDS) to sell them their life insurance policies for cash. Then they bundle these policies into securities and sell them to vultures — oh, I am sorry, “investors.” Then the “investors” sit around and wait for people to die — the sooner the better for the purchasers of these death bonds. The future of this industry “looks bright,” chirps National Underwriters.
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St Joseph’s in Phoenix no longer affiliated to church as bishop also excommunicates doctor who allowed procedure
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The U.S. Congress approved legislation today to help rescuers and clean-up crews suffering from illnesses linked to the wreckage caused by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City.
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WikiLeaked cables released over the weekend revealed more about the US’ role as a global bully, trying to thrust unpopular genetically modified (GM) crops onto cautious governments and their citizens. In a 2007 cable from Craig Stapleton, then US Ambassador to France, he encouraged the US government to “reinforce our negotiating position with the EU on agricultural biotechnology by publishing a retaliation list.” A list, he added, that “causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility.”
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A West Australian organic farmer is in limbo, awaiting state government test results and facing genetic manipulation giant Monsanto’s legal wrath. Steve Marsh’s organic farm has been decertified over GM canola contamination from a neighbour’s farm.
Monsanto revealed today that it would give legal support to the GM grower if Mr Marsh sought redress for his losses through the courts.
“For years we called for Farmer Protection laws because GM contamination was inevitable once the Gene Technology Regulator issued unrestricted and unconditional commercial licences,” says Gene Ethics Executive Director, Bob Phelps.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Sir Paul Stephenson, the chief of London’s police force, has floated the idea of banning protest marches altogether, although he admits that it might be hard to do this because protesters might be so frustrated by a ban on marching that they become unruly. Interestingly, he doesn’t disqualify the idea on the grounds that protest marches are a legitimate form of political discourse.
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Victoria Borwick encourages protesters at anti-student fees demonstration to make complaints against Metropolitan police after ‘ghastly’ incident
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So when they see government acting in what appears to them an unethical manner, what do you expect them to do?
They protest.
And when the police act in what appear to them an unethical manner, they get even more upset. Even the Police Watchdog has called a video of Police actions ‘appalling.’
You teach them ethics, and then expect them to ignore it when you treat them in what they consider an unethical manner?
David Cameron and Nick Clegg have just given the next election to Labour. The kids won’t forget.
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Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit says it knows the names of all three police officers involved in an alleged assault during last summer’s G20 summit — but without independent witnesses it can only lay charges against one officer.
Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani, attended the SIU office on Wednesday morning accompanied by legal counsel, and was served with a summons and had the charge of assault with a weapon explained to him.
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The verdict in the case of Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak, charged with illegal assembly for his participation in a January 2008 Critical Mass ride against the siege on Gaza, will be handed down on December 27, 2010 at 10:00 at the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court. If convicted, Pollak is expected to be sentenced to three to six months in prison. A conviction in this case will activate an older three month suspended sentence, imposed on Pollak in a previous trial for protesting the construction of the Separation Barrier.
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According to the new thinking, an easier way to defeat the enemy was by attacking its rationale. In this context, “rationale” stands for whatever enables the enemy to operate as a coherent entity which works to achieve certain goals. Even with the enemy’s fighting force largely intact, without a rationale, it cannot pose a serious threat. Fighters can engage in random violence, but they no longer work together to achieve a purpose your own side considers undesirable.
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A Palestinian boy died Friday afternoon after Israeli gunboats opened fire on his fishing boat and flipped it over off the coast of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
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The Obama administration, ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer first reported, is about to issue an executive order that gives shape, contour and future life to indefinite detention for Guantánamo detainees. The order will provide for the continual detention of several dozen detainees – who will have access lawyers in order to periodically contest their detention.
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Many experts are skeptical that the TSA’s new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you’re comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.
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The Supreme Court of Canada knocked down a legal roadblock on Thursday and paved the way for a class-action lawsuit over military veterans’ pensions.
Military mechanic Dennis Manuge filed the suit on behalf of about 6,500 injured veterans and it was certified by the Federal Court. But that certification was later rejected by the Federal Court of Appeal.
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A growing body of psychological literature suggests that suicide bombers aren’t ideologues who are so committed to their cause that they’re willing to die for it — rather, they are suicidally depressed people who use the excuse of dying for a cause to psych themselves up to commit the deed, and as a loophole for committing suicide without committing a sin.
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The Wall Street Journal notes that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg “said the tree symbolizes the city and country’s resilience. … It was discovered in the rubble in October 2001 with snapped roots and a blackened trunk. The (pear) tree measured about eight feet high when it was taken to a Parks Department nursery in the Bronx to be nursed back to health. It now stands about 30 feet high.”
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Ho ho ho: Tennessee anti-terrorist official gave the ACLU of Tennessee a hell of a Christmas present: according to them, the ACLU belongs on a map of terrorism events and other suspicious activity: “Equating a group’s attempts to protect religious freedom in Tennessee with suspicious activity related to terrorism is outrageous.
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Cablegate
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The potential United Nations investigation should therefore provide a gleam of hope to all of the other political prisoners in the US being held without trial and in solitary confinement.
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So far every known piece of evidence against Bradley Manning comes from one source, Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was institutionalized by the police three weeks before he alleges Manning contacted him and confessed to turning over materials to Wikileaks.
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The conditions of Bradley Manning’s confinement became a top issue in the press last week as bloggers traded blows with US officials over allegations that Manning endures inhumane treatment at the Quantico, VA detainment facility. In the midst of this rush by the Defense Department to contextualize Manning’s confinement, I traveled to see the man himself at the Marine Corps detainment facility in Quantico, VA.
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Wikileaks isn’t the only site struggling to stay up these days because service providers are pulling their support. It appears that at least one person who wants to provide mirror access to Wikileaks documents is having the same trouble.
Recently we heard from a user who mirrored the Cablegate documents on his website. His hosting provider SiteGround suspended his account, claiming that he “severely” violated the SiteGround Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy. SiteGround explained that it had gotten a complaint from an upstream provider, SoftLayer, and had taken action “in order to prevent any further issues caused by the illegal activity.”
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gave an interview with msnbc’s Cenk Uygur today.
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Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a “dissent tax” on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one’s ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a “quasi-public sphere,” where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent.
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The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.
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Uncovering the true scale of the WikiLeaks-inspired Anonymous cyber attacks, they were not as bad as we were led to believe, writes Technology Correspondent Benjamin Cohen.
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When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called my cellphone on a Friday afternoon in November, I could barely hear him. The conversation, held amid the usual tumult of Rome’s airport on a weekend, was strangely short. Assange talked slowly, making sure to pronounce each word carefully, his deep, almost baritone voice, reducing itself almost to a whisper at the end of each sentence. A few moments before the conversation, I had noticed how the Italian police seemed particularly interested in the little luggage that I was carrying, and that as the phone had rung, they were examining the cloth that I had used to wipe the screen of my iPad. Were they looking for drugs, or explosives, or both?
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been named “Man of the Year” by French newspaper Le Monde.
The newspaper is one of five publications to cooperate with the whistleblowing website on its its latest release of leaked documents.
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There’s a lot of people using the word “traitor” in conjunction with Pte Bradley Manning, and “anti-American” in conjunction with both Wikileaks and it’s public face and founder Jullian Assange. This post is about whether that’s fair or not; it’s about the motivations of whistleblowers.
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I wrote a book to teach kids and beginners computer programming by making games entitled, “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python”. After a few months of distributing it online for free, I began to use the print-on-demand service at CreateSpace.com (owned by Amazon.com) to self-publish the book. I continue to make the book available for free online ( at http://inventwithpython.com ), but it was nice to receive a form of compensation I could buy burritos with.
[...]
But this is why it is up to us to make defending freedom of speech one of its business interests. Amazon’s own claims that it pulled WikiLeaks for violation of its Terms of Services and not due to political pressure are equally lame and preposterous. We must vote with our voices and our pocketbooks, and I hope to set an example for others with my actions.
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But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime. The sort of information that a news organization can be prosecuted for publishing is limited to: nuclear secrets (Atomic Energy Act), the identities of covert agents (Intelligence Identities Protection Act), and certain forms of communications intelligence (Section 798 of the Espionage Act).
Perhaps lamenting that the U.S. does not have an Official Secrets Act like the United Kingdom, right wing columnists have consistently misinterpreted these Acts, or have cited other provisions of our espionage laws which almost surely do not apply to Wikileaks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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I was here in the desert to investigate a tip-off I’d had that BP had a near-disaster at its Caspian offshore rig that was extraordinarily similar to the Deepwater Horizon blow-out. But BP covered it up.
What I didn’t know was that WikiLeaks was about to release a State Department memo which referred to a small piece of this BP game. Rather than go to Azerbaijan to check the facts, the Wiki newspapers called BP in London for comment.
That put BP on high alert and my sources in high danger.
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Take Climate Change. I know a lot of people who don’t believe that humans can have any effect upon climate. Others think that there’s still question about the issue. It’s not that they are stupid. It’s that there are a lot of people with a vested interest in fooling the general public, mostly because if could hurt their profits.
Over year ago I wrote Astroturf in the Climate Change discussion, which covered how industry has been using fake organizations to fool the general public. Things have only gotten worse since. So I thought it was time to visit the topic again.
[...]
Seriously. British Petroleum helped to write the Climate Legislation adopted by the European Union. The changes that BP asked for will help their profits, by passing the costs for BP’s actions onto the taxpayers of the EU. Wasn’t that nice of them?
And then we’ve got our friends at Wikileaks, who have released a cables covering United States embassy actions to block substantive Climate Change action at Cancun. Curiously those actions seem to benefit the powerful United States energy industry. It’s a rather unusual government conspiracy that benefits those who are complaining about it.
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There is a strong Asterix vibe to the annual cork oak harvest of the Alentejo in Portugal. Deep into one of the 350 remaining cork oak forests (in my case Herdade dos Fidalgos, near Lisbon) sometime between June and August you’ll suddenly come across a team of about 20 men, ranging in ages from 16 to 70, striking huge twisted trees with axes. Then, with a sensitivity you would not associate with an axe, they prise the juicy bark from the tree and it is levered from the trunk in great, satisfying pieces. From the base, right up to the beginning of the branches, it is peeled away to reveal the oak’s red, nude surface underneath.
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NASA reported that it was the hottest ‘meteorological year’ [December to November] on record and likely to be the hottest calendar year.
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And if you haven’t seen that article that’s spreading across the Internet faster than the methane it describes in the Gulf, let me summarize. The media blackout in the Gulf has mostly prevented the news from spreading, but Terrence Aym (the author of the article) wants everyone to know the truth. A massive undersea methane bubble has been disturbed by the Gulf oil spill. Add in a cracked ocean floor and elevated seabed, and you have the recipe for Instant Doomsday, which will be ready for delivery within the next six months or so.
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Various conservative Christian leaders have united with the Cornwall Alliance for the release of a shocking new 12-part DVD series, “Resisting The Green Dragon,” that attempts to debase and discredit the environmental movement by portraying it as “one of the greatest deceptions of our day” that is “seducing your children” and “striving to put America and the world under its destructive control.”
The hyperbolic accusations spewed throughout the video give it the appearance of a ridiculous parody, calling environmentalism “deadly,” a “cult” and a “spiritual deception.” Unfortunately, the comical PSA is anything but a joke.
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Finance
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At first glance, Guo Yilei looks like a Chinese success story. Born to a poor peasant family in China’s remote Gansu province, he’s now a 26-year-old computer programmer in the Big Cabbage (as some call Beijing nowadays). By Chinese standards he makes decent money, more than $70 a week. When he has work, that is. It can take months to find the next job. And meanwhile, he’s living in Tangjialing, a reeking slum on the city’s edge where he and his girlfriend rent a 100-square-foot studio apartment for $90 a month. “When I was at school, I believed in the saying, ‘Knowledge can help you turn over a new leaf,’” says Guo. “But since I’ve started working, I only half-believe it.”
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Two years before the financial crisis hit, Merrill Lynch confronted a serious problem. No one, not even the bank’s own traders, wanted to buy the supposedly safe portions of the mortgage-backed securities Merrill was creating.
Bank executives came up with a fix that had short-term benefits and long-term consequences. They formed a new group within Merrill, which took on the bank’s money-losing securities. But how to get the group to accept deals that were otherwise unprofitable? They paid them. The division creating the securities passed portions of their bonuses to the new group, according to two former Merrill executives with detailed knowledge of the arrangement.
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Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing Website WikiLeaks.
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Although there are many (too many to list) superb categories in which the United States is undeniably “exceptional,” there are several important categories where we lag behind the world.
By “lag behind,” we don’t mean the U.S. simply falls a bit short of the leaders; we mean the U.S. is not even on the same page. And by “the world,” we’re not referring to countries like Sweden, Norway, Germany and Switzerland; we’re referring to places like Latvia, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, Pakistan and Haiti.
Dr. Jody Heymann is director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy, chairwoman of the Project on Global Working Families, and adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Recently, Dr. Heymann and her team put together some statistics comparing America with the rest of the world.
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A huge new port along the Rio coast highlights the Chinese drive into South America, writes Tom Phillips. Investments will guarantee China access to soy, oil and other resources.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Fischer, who also wants to get rid of the “curse” that is the grizzly bear…
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They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Yesterday, following on his ruling this Spring that the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of an Islamic charity’s lawyers in 2004 violated federal surveillance law, Judge Vaughn Walker in the Northern District of California federal court issued his final order in the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama. The order granted the plaintiffs an award of $2.5 million in money damages and well-earned attorneys’ fees for the government’s violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the same law underlying many of the claims in EFF’s ongoing lawsuits against the NSA’s mass surveillance program, Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA. As one of the plaintiffs said of the ruling to the Associated Press, “the system worked.”
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We are now ready to propose an alpha version of Privacy Icons that takes into account the feedback and participation we’ve received along the way. We’ve simplified the core set dramatically and tightened up the language. While the icons don’t touch on all topics, we do think they significantly move the discussion on privacy, as well as the general level of literacy about privacy, forward. We do not want to let perfection or devotion to taxonomy get in the way of the good.
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The Register doesn’t take this terribly seriously, because it’s convinced that Vaizey is too shrewd to get dragged into the filtering mess that afflicted the Australian government. Maybe he is, but suppose he finds himself unable to hold back the tide of backbench wrath towards the evil Internet, with its WikiLeaks and porn and all. The implicit logic of the approach would fit neatly with everything we’ve seen so far. First of all, the objective is self-evidently ‘good’ — to protect children from pornography. Secondly, we’re not being illiberal — if you want to allow porn all you have to do is to register that fact with your ISP. What could be fairer than that?
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With all the attempts by corporations to distance themselves from Wikileaks — often claiming dubious legal issues or terms of use violations that don’t seem to really exist — the EFF is pointing out that one of the (many, many) Wikileaks mirror sites was told by his hosting company he had to remove it or he’d lose his account.
[...]
Taking down a site because it might possibly be subject to a DDoS attack in the future? How does that make sense? We were confused enough when EveryDNS claimed that getting hit by a DDoS violated its terms of service, but its even more confusing to think that the remote possibility that at some date in the future you might get hit by a DDoS is a terms of service violation.
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From EFF, a disturbing story about a customer of SiteGround, an ISP, who had his account suspended and was forced to remove a mirror of the Wikileaks Cablegate archive because SoftLayer, the ISP that provides SiteGround with its bandwidth, objected. Imagine a future in which your ability to host a website depends on not upsetting your ISP, its upstream provider, the provider upstream of that, and so on, all the way up to some giant tier-one telco like AT&T.
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Some airlines’ behaviour towards passengers during the snow-disrupted Christmas getaway was ‘unacceptable’, according to a regulator.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) found a number of cases when airlines had failed to meet their obligations to passengers during the disruption.
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At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we’re going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting.
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What do an online donation to the International Red Cross, a bank transfer to family members living in Vietnam, and a payment sent through PayPal for an expensive rug in Turkey have in common? The government wants to know about them. And, if new rules proposed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, go into effect, the government will — along with your name, address, bank account number, and other sensitive financial information.
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Unfortunately, since then, things only got worse. Radley Balko has the full details on what the case was all about, and it seems like a clear case of the government abusing its powers to stifle the speech of someone they found to be annoying. And, unfortunately, it’s worked. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case and so the harassment succeeded. You should read the full details, but the short version is that Reynolds was a very vocal activist on the issue of pain relief. When Assistant US Attorney Tanya Treadway indicted a doctor and his wife, supposedly for over-prescribing painkillers, Reynolds organized protests which apparently succeeded in getting a fair amount of attention.
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Tags:Maoist|Dr Binayak Sen|Christian Medical College
Dr Binayak Sen is a 58-year-old paediatrician and public health physician with a 25-year record of providing health care to the adivasi people of Chhattisgarh.
Binayak sen is a graduate of Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore. One of the top students of his batch, Binayak completed his post graduation in paediatrics in the early 1970s. For most of the years since then, he has devoted his life to health care in poor communities.
[...]
Binayak was among the first to draw public attention to widespread human rights violations in the wake of the Salwa Judum. An all-India team investigated and published a report on Salwa Judum in November 2005.
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A smooth, creaseless type-written sheet of paper might prove to be the decisive piece of evidence in the trial of celebrated doctor and activist Binayak Sen. ‘Article 37′ (A-37) is an unsigned letter urging Dr. Sen to send a fact-finding mission to probe alleged police atrocities in Chhattisgarh in his capacity as the State president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.
The prosecution insists that the document proves Dr. Sen was in direct correspondence with the banned CPI (Maoist). The defence believes that the letter is the clearest indication that the Chhattisgarh police fabricated evidence to frame Dr. Sen.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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An email, allegedly sent by WWF International director of corporate relations Maria Boulos to WWF Germany executive marketing officer Dirk Reinsberg on 10 December, warned that the campaign was “misleading”.
According to the contents of Boulos email, WWF Germany launched “a global product” (the WWF file format) “on a global website”, without advising WWF International of its intentions.
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The driver does not just disable printing it also adds an extra page to the end of the document. They say it’s there “just to inform the receiver”, but I don’t buy it. Marketing, that’s what it is really all about. Every time you make and spread a .WWF file, you are making publicity for the WWF. Bottomline.
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“A Guide to The Open Internet” is a wonderful InfoGraphic that does a masterful job of visually explaining the importance of Net Neutrality, by contrasting the Internet of the present with The Ghost of the Internet Yet to Come. Anyone who doesn’t understand the issue should definitely take a look.
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The Federal Communications Commission is releasing the details of its new net neutrality Order in stages. Although the FCC’s new ban on “unreasonable discrimination” for wired ISPs allows certain kinds of traffic discrimination (not all bits need be equal), the agency made clear after today’s meeting that “paid prioritization” deals with Internet companies are unlikely to be allowed. Critics had worried that the new Order would only affect outright website blocking, leaving paid prioritization untouched (or even implicitly sanctioned).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The IP subcommittee was around for ages, when it was under the control of those who represented the industry. When a reformer is finally in position to be put in charge, the subcommittee is killed and its duties are handed over to the larger committee (controlled by someone who represents the industry). Then, as soon as the reformer is out, the subcommittee comes back? Congress at it’s most shameful: a pretty clear indication that Congressional decisions on intellectual property are driven by the industry. This is how regulatory capture works.
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Copyrights
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Yesterday, we reported on the RIAAs efforts to get Mastercard to cut off payments to MegaUpload. Today, we have received an exclusive response from MegaUpload on this news.
Blocking so-called “rogue websites” isn’t necessarily in the law books in the US yet, but things are heating up between the RIAA, MPAA and several websites they accuse of facilitating copyright infringement. Some of these sites, it turns out, are cyberlockers – websites that host large files for their users and allows for many to download those files as a side bonus of saving some companies bandwidth costs. Some note the recent strategy of pressuring payment methods to cut off funding from websites they accuse of duping consumers into paying for pirated content as a more recent change in strategy in the organizations strategy to fight piracy.
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This augurs well for leave to appeal also being granted in the CMEC K-12 case, in which the application was filed a few weeks later.
If the Supreme Court proceeds in its usual prompt manner, we will likely have a judgment in the CMEC K-12 leave application in late January or February.
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If there ever were a group that should be embracing new business models and encouraging the music industry to look forward instead of back, you would think it would be A2IM — the American Association of Independent Music. After all, they don’t have the same legacy issues facing the big four record labels represented by the RIAA. Instead, they can be more creative and willing to experiment with what works well. In fact, over the years, we’ve noted some really cool and unique experiments done by lots of truly creative and innovative indie labels — including many who are members of A2IM (and even some represented on A2IM’s board).
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Just as in many other copyright troll shakedowns, Righthaven relies on the threat of enormous copyright statutory damages (up to $150,000) to scare defendants, often individual bloggers operating non-commercial websites, into a quick settlements. They also threaten to seize the domain names, a threat without basis in law. Even if a blogger has meritorious defenses, the costs of defending can often be overwhelming – unless they blogger has pro bono counsel to help even the odds.
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Perfect 10 is a company that, for a brief period of time, apparently published a rather expensive porn magazine. Since then, it seems to have served a single purpose: to file ridiculous copyright lawsuits that it almost always loses, but which have helped to define case law concerning copyright issues. Various Perfect 10 decisions are frequently cited in copyright lawsuits — for example, its multiple losses concerning claims that search engines showing thumbnails infringe on copyrights. Earlier this year, Rapidshare filed a very entertaining countersuit against Perfect 10, which goes into great detail suggesting that the company serves little purpose other than being something of a copyright troll. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to not use tools provided to take down infringing content, and to alert internet service providers of potential infringement in ways that are almost impossible for them to do anything about. For example, it’s famous for filing deficient DMCA notices that do not properly indicate where the specific content is located.
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ACTA
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Although the current excitement over the gradual release of the Wikileaks documents is justified in that it concerns what is undoubtedly an important development for the future of the Internet, it has rather overshadowed another area where crucial decisions are being made: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In fact, ACTA finally seems to be nearing the end of its slow and painful crawl through the secret negotiation process that only recently we have been allowed glimpses of. And the more we learn, the more troublesome it is.
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But it was a lie of omission. De Gucht has now admitted that some countries may have to change their local laws to comply with ACTA, but tried to defend the earlier statements by saying since there are no uniform EU rules on penal enforcement for IP, it was technically correct that no changes were required to the EU-wide rules.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Viva Voce
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
12.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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‘The Source’ (formerly known as Radio Shack) appear to have hit upon a rather unique way of selling their Windows 7 running Toshiba laptops to the public judging by a recent flyer…
Show them running what looks like an Ubuntu wallpaper.
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Like I said, something like that is so common that maybe I don’t need a picture after all. Personally I’ve seen BSODs and error messages in airports and restaurants, even in doctor’s offices or factories.
The first of the two things that ran through my mind on the bus last night, as people openly wondered
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Are your friends convinced that they should be paying for their operating systems because Linux sounds too complicated or because they think it won’t do what they want it to?
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Spruce up your Christmas season with The Perfect Tree, a cheerful holiday offering from Anawiki Games! Based on the classic Christmas tale of the same name, the game tells the story of a lonely little pine tree and the player’s efforts to help it become the perfect Christmas tree.
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So my question is, why have all these differences sprung up? For example, the Skype site shows different RPMs for Fedora and openSUSE. (Then again, it shows different DEBs for Debian and Ubuntu as well.) Why can’t the maintainers of these distributions pare away the differences as much as possible to maintain inter-distribution compatibility? Wouldn’t this just make everyone’s life easier?
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It was a dark and stormy night.
The biting wind drove needles of ice into my face as I looked at my Android phone one more time to get a fix on my location. The residential streets of Framingham were winding and far different from the clean grids of my Midwestern home. In the icy wind I’m sure a squinted my way past a street sign somewhere, and though my GPS could tell me where I was, I couldn’t make sense of which direction to go yet.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: We take a look back at our favourite news stories, discoveries, dares and ballots from the previous 23 episodes and ask you to choose your biggest Linux-related events from 2010.
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In this special episode, Fab reviews Gran Turismo on the PS3. Merry Christmas!
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Kernel Space
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The kernel now includes some components for supporting operation as a Xen host (Dom0). Switching into and out of sleep mode should be accelerated by the use of LZO compression. Following years of work, almost all parts of the kernel are now able to run without using the big kernel lock (BKL).
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In early November we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs on an early Linux 2.6.37 kernel as our latest round of tests comparing these two leading Linux file-systems. There were some changes in the Linux disk performance with these file-systems using the latest Linux kernel code, but overall it was not too interesting. However, as the Linux 2.6.37 kernel does introduce a new mount option for Btrfs, the space_cache option, we decided to explore its performance in today’s article.
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Graphics Stack
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Viewsonic provided a patch to Nvidia’s reference Tegra code to support their gtablet today. Which is progress!
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Applications
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Foobnix is very powerfull music player with CUE, last.fm, 3000+ radios, tabs, free online music playing, hotkeys, tray icons, easy navigation, user friendly.
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Both Octave and QtOctave are in the *Ubuntu and Fedora repositories, so they only take a moment to install.
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recordMyDesktop – This is a powerful command-line screencasting application which uses open formats to save the obtaining video (Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio). recordMyDesktop also provides GTK and Qt frontends, for both GNOME and KDE (the Qt version is not included in Ubuntu’s repositories, but it can be downloaded from SourceForge).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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There’s the release of Wine 1.3.10 on this Christmas Eve for those with extra time to test the newest Wine over the holidays. Wine 1.3.10 has a number of changes worth checking out.
Wine 1.3.10 changes include support for notification balloons in the system tray, the obsolete AudioIO sound driver has been dropped, there’s more work on Wine ActiveX support, various MSI installer fixes, and the pre-loader is now used for 64-bit too. There’s also translation updates and various bug-fixes.
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Another month, another Winetricks.
Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today. new verbs icodecs, msnasn1, opensymbol, wmi, xmllite; removed obsolete verbs audioio, dcom98, eadm, urlmon
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Games
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All-in-all, Hedgewars is great. It succeeds in recreating that special feeling you had when playing the original Worms game, and it does it actually better. Great configurability, nice sounds and great music, both single player and online playing support, these are its strong points. Give it a try if you haven’t already!
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The GNU/Linux friendly visual novels developers, Winter Wolves and Tycoon Games (which are run by the same man), are offering a 50% discount on all of their games until 31st December 2010 EST !
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That’s the right direction, and I really hope that 2011 will be remembered as the “Gaming on Linux” year.
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That’s where Undercover UXO, a new game for the XO laptop, can help. With a $77,788 grant from the U.S. State Department and in collaboration with Golden West Humanitarian Foundation, Corey Bohil is developing Undercover UXO to teach children in war-torn countries to spot and avoid the warning signs of land mines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO)
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But the new path that the 0 A.D. team is endeavoring to forge is one to watch closely, as it may open up fascinating new opportunities for VARs on a totally novel front.
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Puppy Games just told us that they will release the source code for Revenge of the Titans if the Humble Indie Bundle reaches $1.75 million! We’re already well past $1.5 million with two days to go, so this should be within reach.
This announcement is special because Revenge of the Titans is a brand-new game, released mere days ago after years of development. This may seem like a reckless leap of faith to some. What if people stop buying it once it’s open-source? What if piracy runs rampant? What if people start selling reskinned clones?
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In March of this year Nexuiz was forked as Xonotic following some disagreements among the Nexuiz developers and other contributors following the announcement of the Nexuiz commercial game. Since that point not too many details have emerged on Xonotic aside from it being said this new game would be a lot different. Well, the wait for finally seeing what’s in store for Xonotic is now over. Maik Merten, the former Nexuiz co-leader, has written to us informing us they have just released Xonotic 0.1 Preview.
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The long awaited Sabayon Christmas Gaming DVD is available for hours of enjoyment. Sabayon is a Gentoo-based binary distribution that’s easy-to-use and comes complete with browser plugins, hardware drivers, and multimedia codecs that enhance usability. It has a large repository of additional software and their own package management solution with graphical interface. Updates come so fast and furious that it could almost be considered a rolling release distro. Now all that goodness comes wrapped up in a shiny new gaming package.
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Yesterday I reviewed AssaultCube, a realistic shooter game based upon the Cube engine, so today it’s time to have a look at Sauerbraten, another game in the series of games based on this engine. The version which I’m going to talk about is the latest available at the moment, “Justice Edition”.
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Desktop Environments
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The window manager is the most important part of the Linux desktop environment. It defines how your windows look, how they behave, how applications are launched, and how they’re closed. In many cases, window managers have evolved into complete desktop environments, helping with file management, configuration editing and computer management.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest:
* Start of a Plasma-based “Welcome Screen” for applications
* Support for searching events and todos by date/range in the Events Plasma Runner, and the start of a first Plasmoid (“BusyWidget”) written in QML
* More work on KMail Mobile, including a change to make it start twice as fast
* Start of work to give Okteta a mobile interface
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The KMyMoney Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KMyMoney version 4.5.2. This is a bugfix version from the 4.5 series and a Christmas present of the developers to the community.
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Right before Christmas, KDE has published the first candidate for the upcoming release of KDE Platform, Plasma and Applications 4.6. The focus at this stage is on fixing bugs and completing translations and artwork. As such, the rework of the Oxygen icon set is nearing completion, many bugs reported by testers in recent weeks have been fixed and stabilization is still in full swing.
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GNOME Desktop
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Today I’m officially joining the GNOME Old Farts Club. I thought it would be a good time to make the first release of The Board. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Board 0.1.0! I wanted to do this a few weeks ago but with so many moving parts in our platform it was actually a bit hard to reach a point where all dependencies were actually working fine together. So, what is this release about?
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I was testing Mandriva ONE 2010.2 and, sure enough, my other partitions could not be accessed in Dolphin (it reported the same error message when trying to mount them). I believe this is done to prevent damage to the primary OS in the computer, be it Linux or Windows.
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Red Hat Family
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Doff your chapeau for leading Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which just uncorked another tremendous quarter. Its 21% sales growth, to $236 million, beat analyst estimates by 4%, but that wasn’t good enough to light a fire under Red Hat’s shares. Earnings only met the consensus target exactly, at $0.20 per share.
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Even in better times, the idea of landing the headquarters of a high-flying tech company with more than a billion in cash would be enough to tantalize even the most seasoned developer.
Factor in current market conditions, and the fact that almost nothing new is getting built, and you can understand the intense interest in Red Hat’s search for 300,000 square feet of office space.
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At first glance, Red Hat Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems are partnering up to jointly promote open source cloud solutions. But take a closer look and TalkinCloud wonders if Red Hat and Eucalyptus are partnering up to compete more effectively against the RackSpace OpenStack cloud effort.
GigaOm does a great job describing a potentially intense showdown between OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Here’s why VARs, MSPs and cloud services providers should care: Traditional cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure are proprietary platforms, meaning that it’s difficult to move customer applications from one public cloud to the next.
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Fedora
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Even though I’m on vacation, I had some fun catching up with some geeky Fedora work, like handling bugs and package maintenance over the last few days.
[...]
I’m still hung up on needing some additional and more complicated Python pieces, like querying the volume level of a source or sink so I can introduce a VU-meter like control as part of the interface changes. But in the meantime, I’ve started to get much better and faster at implementing ideas in PyGTK. I’m not sure my coding style is as good as it should be, but my understanding of concepts has gotten fairly good, so I can translate PyGTK API docs into the ability to do something. I gave a couple conference speeches over the past year on PyGTK that I hoped would give other people in similar shoes — people who can write scripts but aren’t familiar with GUI programming — a primer that allows them to “cross the bridge” into exciting new territory.
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Debian Family
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What a better time than Christmas to bring all the best from 2010 into an updated release of Linux Mint Debian.
* All Mint 10 features
* 64-bit support
* Performance boost (using cgroup, the notorious “4 lines of code better than 200″ in user-space)
* Installer improvements (multiple HDDs, grub install on partitions, swap allocation, btrfs support)
* Better fonts (Using Ubuntu’s libcairo, fontconfig and Ubuntu Font Family) and language support (ttf-wqy-microhei, ttf-sazanami-mincho, ttf-sazanami-gothic installed by default)
* Better connectivity and hardware support (pppoe, pppoeconf, gnome-ppp, pppconfig, libgl1-mesa-dri, libgl1-mesa-glx, libgl1-mesa-dev, mesa-utils installed by default)
* Better sound support (addressing conflicts between Pulse Audio and Flash)
* Updated software and packages
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There is a discussion going on @ Ayatana mailing list regarding the merge of Me Menu (the applet that displays your name, used to set your status) and Messaging Menu (Chat, Email, etc.) and mockups have already started to be posted:
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Nothing is open until your OS is open. And, this is why I work on Ubuntu.
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Giz-China has acquired screenshots of an upcoming Ubuntu Netbook 10.10-powered, 10-inch tablet from an unspecified manufacturer. Aside from a few hardware specs, the details surrounding the mystery tablet are rather slim, providing no indication of a targeted release window or cost. That said, the device may get a formal showing next month at CES 2011 if it’s actually legit.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint community brings Linux Mint 10 features and new enhancments to the new release Linux Mint Debian 201012 based on Debian 6 Squeeze along with many up todate packages. so in this post we will take a quick screenshots tour for LMDE 201012.
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Phones
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Global sales of handsets topped 1.35-1.45 billion units in 2010, with smartphones reaching 270-280 million units for a penetration rate of 20%, according data released by market research firms. For 2011, sales of smartphones will increase to 400-420 million units, accounting for 25-27% of total handset sales of 1.45-1.55 billion units projected for the year. Smartphone sales will increase 40-50% versus just 10% for the overall handset market in 2011.
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Tablets
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Giz-China has revealed some images of an Ubuntu powered multitouch tablet by an unknown manufacturer showing off the Unity interface.
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Amid an enterprise environment that is now more receptive to utility computing and focused on service-based contracts, open source software adoption has grown over the past two years and entered the IT mainstream.
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Are companies really willing to spend thousands of dollars per year just ‘renting’ a licence for one or two copies of MATLAB, which keeps nagging them for it assumes they are so-called ‘pirates’ (and the BSA comes knocking to ensure there are up-to-date licensing instances)? The answer is usually “no”, but users of MATLAB may not know that software already exists to offer them an alternative, just as Firefox helps replace Internet Explorer and also outperform it in many technical ways.
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Closed source software means that Microsoft owns the software, and prevents any kind of unauthorized use of the software, which means that when you find a bug, performing a “workaround” for the bug is at Microsoft’s whimsey. Why would anyone want closed source software? By definition, the software writers have no interest in using their own software. Rather, they have every interest in being an roadblock to fixing bugs. Unless Bill Gates is watching them, they really have no reason to focus on the customer.
I have a Windows horror story. Windows DRM won’t let me uninstall it. Because the software is in an opaque box, I might as well be a flint-weilding neanderthal for all my ability to correct the uninstall process. Now I have to reinstall windows, the walk of shame. The only workaround is to destroy every software on my PC.
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Find a nice holiday picture on the Internet (make sure it is freely licensed, perhaps by Creative Commons) and use GIMP, Inkscape or some other freely available software to make a greeting card out of it. Put your own sentiments down on the card, telling the person why you like them, and how you would like to spend some more time with them this coming year. Make a little “coupon” as an offer to do a certain number of hours of “computer work” for them and put the “coupon” in the card.
I do some of this “computer work” every year when I visit my family in Pennsylvania. Some of them would be considered “power users” and some would be considered “powerless users” (and some actually considered “Luddites”), but none of them have the training and experience that I have. So I help them fix small problems, upgrade their software, do a backup of their software and even help them evaluate new purchases (and even advise them when new purchases would not do much for them).
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Why buy the cow when the milk is free? While commercial software is usually worth the cost, free is better. And of the open source applications that abound throughout the world, many are as good or better than their for-pay counterparts. The “free-as-in-beer” philosophy that gave rise to Linux often also applies to apps written for the platform, with programs like KOffice giving Microsoft Office a run for its money.
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If 2010 was the year that taught open source “how to disappear completely,” 2011 will be the year we’re reminded that “anyone can play guitar”…or open source. At present, open source is de rigueur with the underdog class, those vendors seeking to challenge incumbents like Apple and Oracle.
But open source will take center stage with industry leaders in 2011, as it already has in the mobile battlefield with Google’s Android, much to Apple’s chagrin. It’s not just about using open source to gain market share. It’s also a matter of using open source to keep regulators at bay. As Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco rightly points out, open source saved mobile telecom operators from net neutrality regulations. The FCC decided that “meaningful recent moves toward openness” largely obviated the need for more regulation. That’s a message that even the stodgiest of proprietary players will want to mimic.
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But it turns out that this 150-page report from the Spanish CENATIC Foundation offers the best country-by-country analysis of the growth of open source around the world that’s currently available. Whether intended as such or not (it’s aimed principally at Spanish businesses), it forms an invaluable consolidated description of who’s been doing what where – complete with online links to referenced material.
As such, I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the larger and longer-term trends in the world of open source should download it [.pdf] – it’s free – peruse it (although maybe not over the holidays) and keep it for future reference.
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The battle lines for the mobile marketplace have been drawn, and the battle of the titans – Google, Apple, Microsoft — has begun. While the generals amass their troops, what have we here in the corner? A bunch of doodlers, cartoonists, storytellers, and other amateurs. Surely, this ragtag group won’t have any effect on the outcome of the battle–or will they?
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Google is to release as open source the developer tools WindowBuilder Pro and CodePro Profiler, both of which were acquired as part of its takeover of Instantiations. The code for the two tools is to be donated to the Eclipse Foundation. At the time of the takeover there was much speculation that the Eclipse-based tools could become Eclipse projects – this speculation has now proven to be correct. Other products which Google has made available free of charge since September, include GWT Designer, WindowTester Pro and CodePro AnalytiX, retain their proprietary status.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 will not include a ‘do not track’ privacy option to block targeted advertising, according to the web browser’s maker Mozilla.
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For Mozilla’s next browser version, let’s hope eight is enough. The independent software foundation has just released Beta 8 of the heavily overhauled new version of Firefox. Firefox 4 sports a trimmed-down user interface (as has been the trend started with Google Chrome and followed by Opera and IE9 beta). The browser also makes some significant internal changes, with a new add-in system, a faster JavaScript engine, and lots more HTML5 compatibility.
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Mozilla has pushed out a series of privacy icons that tell web surfers how their online data might be used depending on what site they’ve visited.
The open source browser maker’s user interface design guru, Aza Raskin, who announced just last week that he was leaving Mozilla in January, released an alpha version of the icons yesterday.
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CMS
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We are proud to present to you the third (and likely final) release candidate of Drupal 7.0. Big news since last time!
1. We’re back down to 0 critical issues again!
2. We’ve announced a January 5 release date for Drupal 7!
3. There are release parties being thrown worldwide on January 7. Please set one up in your town! (tips)
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BSD
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During this time of the year I expect to be bombarded with marketing messages aimed at getting me to open my wallet. Considering the FreeBSD Foundation’s own financial needs, I understand and tolerate the pledge drives and postal mail pleas from charities.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In the first article, operations manager at the FSF, John Sullivan talks about how the lending problem is an artificial scarcity in the digital age.
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Project Releases
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The GnuCash development team has announced the arrival of version 2.4.0 of its free accounting software for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. According to a mailing list post by developer Phil Longstaff, the latest stable release replaces the GtkHTML-based HTML engine used to display reports and graphs with WebKit, the engine used by Google’s Chrome web browser and Safari – while the WebKit-based renderer is preferred, the current GtkHTML engine can still be used.
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Government
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The crisis room at the European Union’s Directorate-General for External Relations has published several open source data mining tools, meant to provide real-time support for early warning and crisis response.
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Government policies that promote and encourage the use of open source software, and public administration using this type of software, are the two most important factors that explain the differences between geographic region’s uptake of open source.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia/Web
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The newest browsers boast huge performance improvements, but how much do you trust benchmarks trotted out to prove those claims? Do they reflect the real uses to which developers will put HTML 5 and JavaScript? We’ve extracted several benchmarks from our existing programs to measure actual versus theoretical performance.
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I’m not bragging when I note this, because who would? All I’m saying is, I’m a writer, I sit in front of my computer all day, I keep Twitter running in the Tweetie app, and I participate actively and avidly in the service. A person like me can pile up 4000 tweets in a matter of a couple of years as he goes about the business of earning a living. And the thing about those tweets is, you miss them when they go, like nieces and nephews. So when my tweetstream got mysteriously truncated to a measly 147 entries a week or so ago, I practiced due diligence. I tweeted Twitter’s Support account and posted a comment to its user forum, and sat back and waited for the absent posts to be restored. And waited. And waited. And waited. I’m still waiting.
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For the past several years at this time, Fox News has made certain that Christmas is the time of year for all good Americans to shun everyone who isn’t Christian. From Sarah Palin to Glenn Beck to Neil Cavuto, the call to reject such inclusive greetings as “Happy Holidays” is heard throughout the Fox News village.
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Health/Nutrition
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Fighting fraud committed against public health care programs is a top priority for the Obama Administration. On May 20, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the creation of a new interagency task force, the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), to increase coordination and optimize criminal and civil enforcement. These efforts not only protect the Medicare Trust Fund for seniors and the Medicaid program for the country’s neediest citizens, they also result in higher quality health care at a more reasonable price.
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Except over a glass of ruby Tannat wine or a sizzling tenderloin, most people pay little mind to Uruguay. But just mention this demure South American nation to the tobacco industry and watch the smoke billow. A long-burning row between the government in Montevideo and cigarette maker Philip Morris is slowly turning into the mother of asymmetric battles.
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Maya Parham loves McDonald’s. But not because of the food. According to a lawsuit filed in California last week the fast food giant is using Barbie, Shrek, Strawberry Shortcake and a galaxy of other toy and cartoon characters to lure in the six-year-old. Now Maya’s mother, Monet, wants it to stop.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Today, the Daily Mail publishes for the first time the legal document which could trigger a full coroner’s inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly.
The document, formally known as a memorial was written by group of campaigning doctors who have been trying to secure an inquest since 2004.
It lists the sequence of events which led up to Dr Kelly’s death and the legal reasons they believe an inquest ought to be held.
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Danish police have been ordered to pay tens of thousands of pounds compensation to hundreds of climate protesters, after a court ruling today. The unprecedented ruling coincides with the release of an audio recording from the policing of a protest outside the UN climate talks in Copenhagen last December, which allegedly shows Danish police ordering officers to beat activists and journalists.
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Six of Kenya’s most powerful men, including the son of founding president Jomo Kenyatta, two cabinet ministers, the head of the civil service and a former police chief, have been formally accused by the international criminal court of committing “massive crimes” during the 2007 election crisis.
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TSA checkpoints at airports are at the front lines of preventing terrorism. When you go through security, you expect to be scanned and searched. And you expect TSA to prevent contraband from getting on planes, but as we’ve learned, that doesn’t always happen.
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The police tactic of “kettling” to confine protesters during public demonstrations, such as those in London last week, is to be challenged at the High Court.
Leading the challenge is Bethany Shiner, daughter of a high-profile human rights lawyer, who was kettled during tuition fee protests last week.
Ms Shiner is launching proceedings against the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police after being detained on Thursday in Trafalgar Square.
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The anaesthetist from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, who gave medical assistance to the protesters, said that officers forced demonstrators into such a tight “kettle” on Westminster Bridge that they were in danger of being seriously crushed or pushed into the freezing River Thames.
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The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.
The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.
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Cablegate
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The case of the Afghanistan war logs and the hounding of Julian Assange prove that there’s never been greater need to speak truth to power than today.
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This legal instrument has been controversial since it was introduced in 2003, creating everyday injustices; but rarely has anyone outside the small group of lawyers that handles cases really cared. Now followers of the WikiLeaks story wonder how Assange could be extradited with so few questions asked. Why, for example, can our prisons detain someone (Assange is currently on remand in Wandsworth prison) for an offence under Swedish law that does not exist in British law? And how can a judge agree to an extradition without having seen enough evidence to make out a prima facie case?
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WikiLeaks will release top secret American files concerning Israel in the next six months, its founder Julian Assange disclosed yesterday.
In an excusive interview with Al Jazeera, Assange said only a meagre number of files related to Israel had been published so far, because the newspapers in the West that were given exclusive rights to publish the secret documents were reluctant to publish many sensitive information about Israel.
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On Friday a 24-year-old navy medic faces a decision that could lead him to military prison after becoming one of the few conscientious objectors in the Royal Navy since the second world war. That man is my husband, Michael Lyons. He joined the navy in 2005 at 18, as a medical assistant submariner. He chose the medic path because he wanted to help people. In 2008 Michael was promoted to the role of leading medical assistant, and has been very proud of his service to his country for the past five years.
[...]
However, in July this year Michael learned 76,000 military documents had been leaked on the internet and published in analysed form in various newspapers. These documents detailed the military’s under-reporting of civilian casualties caused by Nato troops, both in the air and on the ground. Examples included the convoy of US marines apparently driving down a six-mile stretch of highway firing at everyone they saw: 19 unarmed civilians were killed and a further 50 wounded. Closer to home there were the allegations that Royal Marines had shot innocent drivers and motorcyclists on eight separate occasions over a six-month period, and that Ghurkhas had called in an air strike on a family compound, leaving seven innocents dead. These were just some of the reports.
I remember the day I asked Michael how he felt going to Afghanistan, considering the publication of these reports. Upset by what he had read, he said he didn’t believe we were over there for the greater good. He went on to tell me he wouldn’t be able to live with himself knowing he had been a part of that. He said: “I can’t have that on my conscience.”
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In their latest attempt to find legitimate grounds for charging Julian Assange with a crime, US federal prosecutors have landed on the idea of charging him as a conspirator through a plea bargain that has been offered to Pfc. Bradley Manning. The plea bargain would have Manning name Julian Assange as a fellow conspirator to the leaks, which include the now infamous Collateral Murder video of April 2007.
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The Dalai Lama told US diplomats last year that the international community should focus on climate change rather than politics in Tibet because environmental problems were more urgent, secret American cables reveal.
The exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader told Timothy Roemer, the US ambassador to India, that the “political agenda should be sidelined for five to 10 years and the international community should shift its focus to climate change on the Tibetan plateau” during a meeting in Delhi last August.
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“Was it worth it?” That was what Julian Assange was asked, through his mother, by an Australian TV channel last week as he sat in Wandsworth jail. It was, perhaps, a not unexpected question for someone who had found himself in solitary confinement, facing extradition to Sweden and the United States and death threats from conservative American politicians.
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American diplomats made up a story that Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, in an attempt to discredit the film which painted an unflattering picture of the US healthcare system, the film-maker said today.
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Assange makes the point forcefully that he is a journalist speaking out to examine and check the power of government and his speach should be protected. He also comments on Manning’s detention without trial in conditions that could be considered torture.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In a perfectly enlightened, technologically advanced world, computer software could be used to analyze existing data and determine what happened on the Deepwater Horizon just before it exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. In that world, all relevant parties with access to such data would be ready and willing to offer it up.
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Meteorologists have already warned Europeans that in decades to come, the record temperatures of 2003 will seem mild. Cities – urban heat islands on average 5C and sometimes 10C hotter than the surrounding countryside – will become increasingly dangerous: no place for the elderly, the poor, the sick, the very young, or anybody without access to cool fresh water and air-conditioned buildings.
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But perhaps my surprise at this intimate connection between campaign cash and events just shows me up as a naive limey, and is not surprising at all to those of you in the US.
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Governments in Cancun have chosen hope over fear and put the world on a difficult but now possible-to-navigate path to a global deal to stop dangerous climate change.
“Cancun may have saved the process but it did not yet save the climate,” said Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio. “Some called the process dead but governments have shown that they can cooperate and can move forward to achieve a global deal.”
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Governments are gambling recklessly with human lives by wilfully underestimating the depth of the emission cuts they must makein the next 40 years, a new study has found.
Governments have so far based their calculations for cutting emissions on only a 50:50 chance of holding temperature rises to 2C, the point that many scientists consider to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change which, once passed, will leave millions exposed to drought, hunger and flooding. This constitutes an unacceptable risk, says the report from Friends of the Earth.
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California regulators yesterday approved the first system in the United States to give polluting companies such as utilities and refineries financial incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases.
The Air Resources Board voted 9-1 to pass the key piece of California’s 2006 climate law – called AB32 – with the hope that other states will follow the lead of the world’s eighth largest economy. State officials are also discussing plans to link the new system with similar schemes that are underway or being planned in Canada, Europe and Asia.
California is launching into a “historic adventure,” said Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the state’s air quality board.
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Finance
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Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole says a source at AIB told him the bonuses were “a looting of the bank by management before the government became involved in the institution”.
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If the Irish MEPs felt reassured on the issue of corporation tax following their meeting with Commissioner Ollie Rehn, the same cannot be said of their experience with other MEPs at the European Parliament this week.
Indeed there was a distinct hostility in the air when members of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee signed a written declaration calling for the imposition of a standard 25 per cent corporate tax rate across all member states.
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Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation’s wealth and the wellbeing of its citizens.
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Moody’s, S&P’s, Fitch: they are unelected, unaccountable and have hugely inflated powers. We must curb them
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Tehran predicts unrest as ILNA news agency reports price of petrol rising fourfold and electricity almost threefold
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Stung by fury on the streets, criticism within his own party and rising poverty, the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, addressed an emergency session of his socialist MPs yesterday as parliament prepared to debate one of the toughest budgets in the near-bankrupt nation’s modern history.
Amid mounting hostility over austerity measures that last week sparked some of the ugliest scenes of violence since the eruption of Europe’s debt-crisis in Athens, he appealed for calm in navigating what he has increasingly come to call a “state of war”.
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Protesters against corporate tax avoidance carried out their biggest day of action to date by targeting businesses in 55 towns and cities across the UK.
In Brighton, activists dressed as Santa Claus glued themselves to structures inside department store BHS to prevent themselves from being ejected.
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Giveaway for the super-rich is ‘indefensible’ says Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott
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Leading accountancy firm Ernst & Young is facing legal action for its alleged role in “window dressing” the accounts of Lehman Brothers as it careered toward collapse.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences.
In the Wikileaks punch-up the commoners appear to have the upper hand. But it’s just one battle. There’s a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning.
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Only 28 people work in ALEC’s dark, quiet headquarters in Washington, D.C. And Michael Bowman, senior director of policy, explains that the little-known organization’s staff is not the ones writing the bills. The real authors are the group’s members — a mix of state legislators and some of the biggest corporations in the country.
[...]
With that money, the 28 people in the ALEC offices throw three annual conferences. The companies get to sit around a table and write “model bills” with the state legislators, who then take them home to their states.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The FISA Amendments Act allows the government to engage in mass acquisition of U.S. citizens’ and residents’ international communications with virtually no restrictions.
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Leading US art foundations are threatening to withdraw support from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in protest at what they see as blatant censorship in the decision to remove a video from an exhibition on sexuality in portraiture.
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Sotoudeh, 45, has been kept in solitary confinement since her arrest in September. She is charged with “propaganda against the regime” and “acting against national security”. Her supporters describe the charges as bogus and unsubstantial.
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A Catholic hospital saved the life of a young mother of four. The woman was pregnant and suffered from life-threatening pulmonary hypertension, which caused her heart to begin to fail. Doctors determined that she would almost definitely die if she did not end the pregnancy immediately, and the woman agreed to terminate. Surgeons and physicians acted quickly and saved her life.
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Palestinian feminist Asma Al-Ghoul arrived to our meeting at a Gaza coffee shop sporting blue jeans and a T-shirt—in stark contrast to the Islamic headscarves and tent-like dresses worn by the vast majority of Gazan women.
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Many worry about the decline of liberalism. But liberalism is strongest when it feels pressured from the left, while no left can be robust without its own ideas and analysis, distinct from those of liberals. As long as leftwing intellectuals put most of their energy into figuring out what the Democrats should do, rather than figuring out what a 21st-century left should stand for, none of us will get very far.
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The mural, depicting serried ranks of coffins draped not with the Stars and Stripes but with the dollar bill, was duly created in early December. At first, all was well. Blu even stayed at the home of MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch. When Deitch went off to attend to the arduous business of the Miami Art Fair, Blu got down to the messy process of painting. Luckily, pictures were taken as he picked away at the detail of the coffins, and they soon surfaced on a variety of street art blogs.
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Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera’s serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.
This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.
Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD’s which clandestinely installed a rootkit onto PC’s that provided administrative-level access to the users’ computer. The copy-protected music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying prevent consumers from making multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally, the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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One of the tactics of cyberwarfare has become persuading credit-card/payment businesses to block transfers to organizations being attacked. Recently we saw that tactic applied to WikiLeaks. Now it is a file-sharing site, MegaUpload. The RIAA has branded MegaUploads a “rogue website” even though 70% of Fortune 500 companies use MegaUpload as a file distribution service.
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ACTA
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The Guardian has posted two Wikileaks cables that focus on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The first is from Italy in November 2008. It provides a useful reminder that the U.S. at one time hoped to conclude the ACTA negotiations by the end of 2008 (and the George Bush term).
Google Maps 5.0 for Android
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Fraud, ISO, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
(ODF | PDF | English/original)
Resumen: Recordemos El lado Feo de Microsoft
De Linux Magazine (artículo 2008): “Los activistas en el foro Boicot Novell han puesto de manifiesto el documento más de 5.500 páginas en formatos PDF, HTML, hojas de cálculo, y varios otros formatos en su página web. A pesar de que OOXML ha sido certificado como un estándar ISO bajo circunstancias TURBULENTAS e INESTABLES, la ISO (Organización Internacional de Normalización) ha querido conservar la documentación completa en secreto. Los activistas Boicot Novell describen la exposición documentación como una reacción al “abuso sistemático y el paso a la irrelevancia de ISO.” Alex Brown, quien fue en parte responsable del proceso de OOXML en ISO, describe la exposición en su blog como un “descarado acto de violación derecho de autor.”
“Brown va a decir que “los piqueros incluso han sido tan buenos como para jactarse de los requisitos de banda ancho que sus crímenes han ocasionado “y termina con las palabras:”Incluso ahora, puedo escuchar los abogados de Ginebra lamiendo sus labios sobre esta … ” Boycott Novell webmaster Roy Schestovitz no se inmutó por la posible legalidad. Y añade: “No dude en pasar esto (o incluso ridículizó) los ~60 megabytes de LOCK-IN, que MICROSOFT NO TE DEJA VER.” Él no está solo en esta opinión: los numerosos comentarios en curso están etiquetados con los autores los nombres.
“Los contribuyentes sitio web también apuntan a la reciente “llamada provocativa” de IBM, para la que la ISO “haga un mejor papel”, con IBM haciendo difícil su participación en el proceso (información aquí).”
Como alguien señaló en los comentarios, “Alex Brown cada vez más se parece a un TITERE de MICROSOFT haciéndose pasar por un oficial de la ISO imparcial” (afirmación correcta)[http://techrights.org/2009/10/30/alex-brown-the-fox/] y vamos a escribir sobre el tema de nuevo muy pronto. Esto también se relaciona con Novell.
Como la saga del OOXML (“Open” Office XML) ayudó a mostrar que Microsoft es una empresa CORRUPTA que matonea a sus críticos. Ellos -MICROSOFT- tratan de hacer que sea un riesgo para exponer SU MALA CONDUCTA. Pero eso no importa, mirar Relaciones Públicas en su lugar es mucho más reconfortante que hacer frente a los males de este mundo.
“El mundo tiene muchos problemas y que necesitan ser reformados. Y sólo se vive una vez. Cada persona que tiene cierta capacidad para hacer algo al respecto, si es una persona de buen carácter, tiene el deber de intentar solucionar los problemas en el medio ambiente en el que viven.”
“Eso es un valor, que sí, que proviene en parte de mi temperamento. También hay un valor que viene de mi padre, que es que los hombres capaces, generosos no crean las víctimas, si no que tratar de evitar que las personas se conviertan en víctimas. Eso es lo que tienen la tarea de hacer. Si no lo hacen es que no son dignos de respeto o no son capaces.”
-Assange Julian 21 de diciembre 2010 Transcripción de la BBC: El Assange
Eduardo Landaveri adds to the above translation:
This pharisee -Alex Brown -dared to attack you personally as well as Groklaw, years have passed & now he’s sobbing about how MS never complied following its duties to ISO but he never issue an apology about his accions.
Instead of threatening people he should be investigated & audited before he retires. I hope the EU does something about him
Or in Spanish:
Este fariseo se atrevió a atacar a usted personalmente, así como Groklaw, los años han pasado y ahora está sollozando acerca de cómo Microsoft nunca cumplió sus funciones hacia la ISO, pero nunca emitió una disculpa por su acciones.
En lugar de las que amenazan la que debe ser investigado y auditado antes de retirarse. Espero que la UE haga algo al respecto.
Many thanks to Eduardo for his quick translation. █
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Posted in Fraud, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Joe Lieberman: The man who tries to shut down Wikileaks
Summary: The ugly side of Microsoft recalled
From Linux Magazine (2008 article): “Activists in the Boycott Novell forum have exposed the more than 5,500 page document in PDF, HTML, Microsoft spreadsheet, and various other formats on their website. Even though OOXML was certified as an ISO standard under turbulent and unsteady circumstances, ISO has been keeping the comprehensive documentation under wraps. The Boycott Novell activists describe the documentation exposure as a reaction to the “systematic abuse and the demise of ISO.” Alex Brown, who was partly responsible for the OOXML process at ISO, describes the exposure in his weblog as a “brazen act of copyright violation.”
“Brown goes on to say that “the boobies have even been so good as to boast about the bandwidth requirements their crimes have occasioned” and ends with the words, “Even now, I can hear those Geneva lawyers licking their lips over this one…” Boycott Novell webmaster Roy Schestovitz is not fazed by the possible legalities. He adds, “Feel free to pass around (or even ridicule) those ~60 megabytes of lock-in, which Microsoft won’t let you see.” He is not alone in this opinion: the numerous ongoing updates are tagged with the authors’ names.
“The website contributors also point to IBM’s recent “provocative call” for ISO “to do better,” with IBM challenging their participation in the process (reported here).”
As somebody pointed out in the comments, “Alex Brown increasingly looks like a Microsoft puppet posing as an impartial ISO official” (correct assertion) and we’ll write about the subject again very shortly. This relates to Novell, too.
As OOXML helped show, Microsoft is a corrupt company which bullies its critics. It tries to make it risky to expose misconduct. But never mind that, watch PR instead because it’s so much more comforting than addressing the evils in this world.
“The world has a lot of problems and they need to be reformed. And we only live once. Every person who has some ability to do something about it, if they are a person of good character, has the duty to try and fix the problems in the environment which they’re in.
“That is a value, that, yes, comes partly from my temperament. There is also a value that comes from my father, which is that capable, generous men don’t create victims, they try and save people from becoming victims. That is what they are tasked to do. If they do not do that they are not worthy of respect or they are not capable.“
—Julian Assange 21 December, 2010 BBC Transcript: The Assange interview
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