01.26.11

Michael McLoughlin, Kevin McBride, and Florian Müller

Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, SCO at 9:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Common fiends, common goals

Summary: Some loose connection claimed to have been found between SCO’s boosters, Microsoft’s staff, and Microsoft Florian

Microsoft cannot compete against Linux, so it is trying to destroy Linux instead. Microsoft Florian helps ‘pull a SCO’ using lies right now [1, 2, 3] and somebody helps show a connection between him, Microsoft, and Darl McBride’s lawyer brother, who some months ago also helped ‘pull a SCO’ by making false claims [1, 2]. Anyway, here is the comment of relevance:

Mueller: what is your relationship with M. McLoughlin

Direct question for F. Mueller, will you describe your relationship with MSFT’s M. McLoughlin:

I did a screen cap in Feb. 2010 of twitter friends of Kevin McBride (the lawyer brother of SCO’s Darl McBride).

He had 2 friends: you (Florian Mueller) and Microsoft’s McLoughlin.

McLoughlin’s bio is:

Michael McLoughlin. McLoughlin is

* Director, Enterprise Markets, Office of Strategic Relations at Microsoft

* Board Member atOpen Computing Alliance

It is curious to say the least. Pamela Jones also lays out a theory in Groklaw:

So is it not at least possible that a Microsoft
operative deliberately tried to poison the well?

If I were Florian, I’d put out an over the top
article about it, but being me, thank heaven,
I’ll just note that we should be alert for such
tricks.

Incidentally, I see Florian has posted a request
for info from the community on any infringement
they notice in their projects, promising them
anonymity. First of all, NOBODY from the
community will respond to his request, I’m sure.
I suspect he knows that too, just from reading the
comments on Slashdot and here. So, I have a
suspicion that this is just a cover for future
“revelations” by Florian, and he will refuse
to identify by source with the excuse that he is
protecting them. But in reality, would that not
be a perfect cover to feed the media insider info
actually handed him by proprietary parties who
wish to kill Android?

Just asking. I noticed that he claimed it was
some guy on Twitter who told him about the German
filing showing who make up CPTN. But the person
disappeared that very day from Twitter. But on
the internet, you leave breadcrumbs. So I followed
them. The person who allegedly handed him the
information had an online persona as a guy who
wrote about only one topic online that I could
find, a particular football team in Florida.

Now, you tell me. How likely is it that this is
the guy who found an esoteric legal
filing in Germany and then told Florian about it?

I find that story impossible to accept, particularly
because I tried to track the guy in real space, and
it was impossible.

So here’s my working theory: someone thought it
would be a great idea, since parties to lawsuits
can’t normally safely discuss litigation in public,
to have a “son of Groklaw” — an imitation of what
we did, but for the proprietary side, and just as
those dudes assumed, incorrectly, that Groklaw was
paid to be a public mouthpiece, they hired Florian
to pretend to be just some blogger who just
happens to be interested in
these topics.

It’s a funny theory, if true. And if true, it will
eventually become known as to whether or not it’s
true.

But Florian, as we see in this recent event, is in
over his head. Plus, as the song says, ain’t nothing
like the real thing. And he doesn’t have the benefit of
a community of coders to help him, as we do. Even
the media won’t find his oeuvre helpful over time,
if any of them still believe a word he says, because
he will make mistakes over and over. He won’t be
able to help it. And his malice shines through
everything he writes. He clearly is no expert on US
law, for starters. And if he suddenly seems to
understand it, we’ll all know he has a lawyer
advising him behind the scenes. This mistake he
made will have lasting effects, in other words.
The community had him pegged
already. Now the media
is learning. He should, in my view, tell who he
is working for, because he’s ruining his reputation
this way. And it can only get worse. Look at what
happened to Enderle and MOG and Lyons.

Watch the followups. █

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Good News for Linux: Apple Annoys Everyone and Microsoft Cannot Catch up With Apple

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The software oligarchs fight each other to see who’s more capable at restriction and pollution while Linux quietly emerges victoriously

MORE AND more people come to grips with the threats posed by Apple. The company was never truly committed to freedom or openness; the thing about Apple is, it’s not Microsoft. One might say that Apple is the “anti Microsoft” choice, whereas GNU/Linux and BSD are the “anti slavery” choice. In any event, witness yet another new report about antitrust threat that Apple comes under in Europe at the same time Steve Jobs is leaving:

Apple’s iPad tablet computer may be the perfect vehicle to view glossy magazines, but the iTunes subscription model has some publishers ready to turn the page.

On both sides of the Atlantic, publishers are grumbling about Apple’s iTunes store. Some popular US publications, including the New York Times and Playboy, recently announced web-based subscriptions that will offer more flexible options and control over content than iTunes. But in Europe, Apple faces a probe by Belgian antitrust authorities over whether it is abusing its market position by requiring that publishers only sell subscriptions through iTunes.

It gets worse for Apple, which sank following the departure of Jobs. As longtime watchers of Apple already know, Greenpeace has called Apple one of the worst companies when it comes to polluting and poisoning (Microsoft is around the bottom too) and a new report reaffirms this position:

Apple comes joint last among IT firms in a transparency study drawn up by leading Chinese environment groups

Apple’s hardware (it’s actually just Apple-branded hardware) is very hostile towards just about anything, and as we noted some days ago, Apple screws customers when it comes to screws. Here is TechDirt‘s take on the subject:

One of the interesting questions we’ve been looking at for years is whether or not a business is an enabler or a gatekeeper. Being in the gatekeeper business can work for a period of time, but it’s often difficult to sustain. Apple is an interesting company in that it certainly has elements of both, enabling in some areas, but being a very strict gatekeeper in other areas. As if to reinforce this point, Apple is apparently changing the screws on iPhones to make them much harder to open.

Thistleweb (Gordon) wrote in relation to the above: “Apple invents fool proof screws, to prevent fools …erm…owners from getting inside their own devices”

“Apple invents fool proof screws, to prevent fools …erm…owners from getting inside their own devices”
–GordonDr. Glyn Moody went even further by remarking: “whaddya say to that, #Apple fanbois?” (risking alienation of his Mac-using followers there)

Our reader A* wrote: “Oh, Chinese are already selling screw drivers for those screws. I believe the chinese screwed crApple. ;-D”

All these silly policies will surely help drive some people to Linux (Android, MeeGo, etc.), yet Woody Leonhard from IDG is conveniently forgetting the Linux option and making it seem like a pseudo-two-party competition between Microsoft and Apple. From his new summary regarding tablets:

Microsoft’s marketing strategy for selling Windows 7 tablets to iPad-leaning enterprises proves, once again, Redmond doesn’t get it

Watch Microsoft’s pathetic PR/advertising in response to hypePad (still ignoring Linux). They are trying to persuade people to choose the dud called Vista 7 and apart from some kitsch, there is nothing there to compel people to leave XP/Mac OS/BSD/GNU/Linux. As Mr. Pogson puts it:

I don’t see anything in there that is new or worth the cost of migrating from XP to “7″. These are all minor tweaks that could mostly be obtained by reconfiguration of existing systems. Renaming something is not usually considered innovation or worth tons of money but M$ needs customers to believe this is innovation. I am surprised SJVN uses this as support for his thesis that “7″ is somehow so much better than XP for networking that a migration requiring replacement of almost every PC and server and a new set of paid software licences is justified.

It increasingly looks like tomorrow’s competition will be between proprietary UNIX-like DRM traps from Apple and something more liberal such as Android, MeeGo, and CyanogenMod. The more restrictive Apple becomes, the more fanfare it will get from the old press (like Murdoch’s scarce channels of distribution) and the less fanfare it will get from actual customers, who in turn will find Linux and software freedom. █

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“Open Collaboration” Symposium Hosted by Microsoft

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 8:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The company which impedes collaboration on software development and sharing gets to run things this time around (seventh International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration)

ALARM bells ought to be rung when proprietary software vendors control the message of their principle and principal competition, namely “open source”. They already control the "open source" think tank and Dr. Dirk Riehle informs his readers that the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration will be hosted by Microsoft, helping Microsoft to set the agenda regarding “Open Collaboration” — whatever this actually means (it’s a vague term with conceptual repetition):

In 2011, WikiSym celebrates its 7th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Mountain View, California at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

Thanks to Dr. Glyn Moody for spotting this. As Wayne rightly told him, “Does Microsoft know what a wiki is?”

Suffice to say, Microsoft never properly embraced the ideas of open participation (a PR campaign with the “my idea” motto says it all really… the people in these adverts are paid by Microsoft, whose idea it was all along). Recall what happened when Microsoft hosted plenary meetings of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. █

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Links 26/1/2011: Mageia Comes Soon, Fedora Hack Explained

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers
Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

Linux is a win-win for education

But there are other advantages of using Linux in educational environments, that we may not realize.
Samba 4 ‘will break desktop monopoly’

Free software dynamos Andrew Tridgell and Andrew Bartlett are both hopeful that their next baby, Samba 4, will be due for delivery sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Desktop
- System 76 brings Sandy Bridge to Ubuntu with Gazelle and Serval laptops
  
  System 76 has been doing open source right for quite some time now, and it’s just unleashed what it claims is the “most powerfull Ubuntu laptop in the world” — so powerful it needs that extra L. It’s the Serval Professional, offering your choice of Intel Core i7 processors ranging from the 2GHz 2630QM to the 2.5GHz 2920XM.
- System76′s ‘Serval Professional Serves Up a Powerful Ubuntu Laptop
  
  The 15.6-inch widescreen supports a 1920 x 1080 resolution for True HD viewing. The keyboard is in the chiclet-style, each key its own isolated square. The full-size keyboard also sports a crunched numeric keypad. The palm rest has a soft rubberized texture, I imagine it’s much like that of Alienware’s M11x. The System76 Serval Professional weighs 6.83 pounds, so you most likely won’t be toting this around town. No word on predicted battery life, but based on the high-end components it probably won’t last a coastal flight.
Server
- Appropriation – and the kingdom did not fall
  
  The sequencing of the human genome was an early triumph for Linux and free software, and symbolised an important aspect of the free software movement that goes beyond the immediate objective of free software. As Richard Stallman puts it: “I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.”
- Open Source and Open Research Computation
  
  Free software was inspired in part by the scientific method, but it is only now that science is starting to apply free software’s key insights. For example, opening up the source code would imply that scientific papers should be made freely available for anyone to read and use. And yet it is only in the last few years that this open access approach, as it is called, has made significant headway against the prevailing proprietary system, which says that you have to pay – often handsomely – if you want to read a paper.
Kernel Space
- Graphics Stack
  - AMD Puts Out A Beta Catalyst Linux Driver For The Public
    
    While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that’s targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.
Applications
- VirtualBox 4: First Impressions
  
  It might seem strange to post a “first impressions” article an entire month after developers release a new version but the original wasn’t stable and first impressions weren’t positive. To give VirtualBox and its developers a fair shake, the release of 4.02 is a good starting point. There are still some bugs* in the software but overall first impression are positive. While you shouldn’t use it for production just yet, the 4.x line has potential.
- Apache-Switch – GUI application to Start,Stop and restart Apache server
  
  Apache switch is GUI application to Start,Stop and restart Apache server
- Instructionals/Technical
- Games
  - 5 Best Video Game Console Emulators for Linux
    
    In Computer Science, emulation refers to the capability of a computer software or hardware to replicate the functions of another software or hardware. Hence, video game console emulators are programs that enable computers to imitate the behavior of different video game consoles such as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy (GB), Sega Dreamcast, and Sony PlayStation. To help you understand video game console emulators even more, you may check out this post: Play Classic Super Nintendo (SNES) Games on Ubuntu Linux.
  - Oh my God-it’s full of stars!: Free and Open Source procedural space sim round up (a la Infinity or Elite)
    
    Bowman’s memorable utterance in 2001 A Space Odyssey encapsulates perfectly the way the space and its’ exploration resonates with the imagination and nothing encapsulates the experience of stepping out and living amongst the stars as well as David Braben’s immense procedural opus, the Frontier Elite/Elite series of games.
Distributions
- Reviews
  - Pardus 2011 review
    
    Final Thoughts and Suggestions: Our digital world revolves around apps, applications, software, packages, or whatever you want to call it. And the more that are available, the merrier. Unfortunately, Pardus comes up short in this area. I understand that it is still a relatively young distribution, however, a lot more effort needs to go in to ensuring that the most common applications are available in the repository as soon as a new version is released.
  - Review: Linux Mint 10 Julia Gnome – With Screenshots
    
    Linux Mint 10 Julia has been around for a while now, but I have not gotten around to reviewing it.
    
    Now after using it for a while and getting to know it I decided to write up and post a review of this, arguably the best Linux Distro available.
    
    For this review I am using the DVD edition of Linux Mint 10 Julia.
    
    [...]
    
    Linux Mint 10 is worth a try. If you are looking for a Linux Install for your house, if you are looking for something to put on your wife’s laptop, something to give to your dad, something for yourself to use as a work OS – Linux Mint 10 can fill all those needs with aplomb.
- PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
  - mageia warming up – rebuilding perl packages
    
    one of the things that keep me busy those days is the rebuilding of perl packages for mageia. around 2000 have been done, with ~400 still waiting. it’s been a good opportunity to clean up the mess: remove old packages, clean spec files, etc.
- Red Hat Family
  - Fedora
    - FUDCon Tempe 2011
      
      FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. Topics include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, testing and QA, packaging, etc.
    - Fedora 14 for IBM System z 64bit official release
      
      It’s been a long time since we last had an official release of IBM System z on Fedora…
    - The Moods Project
      
      Moods is my latest free graphic project and in a long while the first not linked to openclipart.or of Fedora Design (from the first i am on extended leave and from the second on temporary strike).
    - Security
- Debian Family
  - Debian Derivatives Census
  - Canonical/Ubuntu
    - Multi-touch Ubuntu using a webcam and your hands [Video]
      
      Scoffing at the headline? Sure, it doesn’t sound entirely believable but, in a stroke of awesome-osity, it is.
      
      Developers at the Interactive Computing Lab of ENAC have created just that: the ability to use multi-touch applications in Ubuntu with nothing more than a webcam and a flat surface(- no costly Apple trackpad needed!
    - Taking and storing notes with Ubuntu One
      
      As someone who writes for a living, I take a lot of notes. No, make that a lot of notes. I either use a Moleskine notebook or an online service called Simplenote. If you’re curious, you can read about how I use Simplenote here.
      
      As you can probably tell, I like to keep my note taking minimal. I don’t need to remember everything, just what I need to remember. While I like Simplenote, I’m also very curious. Which often leads me to explore other options.
    - Intelligent Design instead of Evolution
      
      A few years ago I decided to try Ubuntu’s default email client Evolution, as that seemed convenient. It was just there and I had no clear preference, after leaving mutt behind because my approach with it didn’t scale to the amount of email I burdened myself with.
      
      Evolution worked reasonably well, but at some point started to fail at emptying the trash. A few mails would remain in there until a restart. Seeing emails that I moved between folders in the trash kept making feel uneasy, even after I understood that it are just copies. Deleting or renaming folders sometimes works and sometimes results in utter chaos that can only be fixed by restoring a backup.
Devices/Embedded
- Phones
  - Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
    - Developing the MeeGo community
      
      It might be helpful for the reader to browse through threads under Community Matters at the MeeGo discussion forum, as I will be referring to points raised there. However, that won’t be necessary for a high-level perspective. Regardless, a community is actually taking shape so I think it’s time to discuss a few subjects.
    - Winning MeeGo Content
    - Nokia MeeGo Device Based on ST Ericsson U8500 Platform
      
      Yesterday, we showed you a new MeeGo device from Nokia. Well now it seems that the MeeGo device is based on the U8500 Platform from ST Ericsson.
    - Software we’d like to see: contacts and Tracker
  - Android
    - Excitement Builds For Android App Development, Google TV Wanes
      
      If you had to guess what four types of devices developers are clamoring to code for… what would you guess? I don’t think it’s a surprise that the top 4 are the Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Android Phones and Android Tablets. While Apple products still lead in mindshare with developers, Android is a close second and gaining ground while you’d need a telescope to see all the others.

Free Software/Open Source

Next Stop: OpenSim!

The CEO of virtual world hosting service ReactionGrid, Gomboy and his team currently operate more than 100 private regions for educators in the ascendant virtual environment platform OpenSimulator, and, Gomboy says, are renting out space to three to five new schools each week.

Why all the new settlers converging on OpenSim?

They’re part of a wave of K-12 educators packing up their 3D content and moving away from Second Life, long the dominant virtual world. The mass migration was prompted by parent company Linden Lab’s announcement in August that it would be closing the Teen Grid, an area within Second Life reserved for 13- to 17-year-olds and home to hundreds of learning projects belonging to teachers intent on engaging their students through the 3D environment. A second blow came in the fall–the ending of the half-off educator discount, meaning property rates in Second Life would be doubling for K-12 institutions, from $150 a month per region to $300 a month.
Reflections on one year of opensource.com

Dozens of you contributed articles–from students leading open source in their schools to luminaries like Gary Hamel, Tim O’Reilly, and Simon Phipps. These articles were read a combined 1.3 million times by over 500,000 different people.
Lower the barriers to entry

Getting new users actively involved in your open source project is one of the most important aspects of community development. A healthy open source project welcomes new contributors of all kinds and makes it easy for them to contribute. Prospective contributors feel welcome and are guided towards their first contribution, whatever their skills are. My OSS Watch colleague Steve Lee pointed out the website of LibreOffice; they managed to do this very well.
Preparing for the Future of Open Source

The presentation of North Bridge Ventures’ Future of Open Source survey has long been one of the highlights of the Open Source Business Conference, keeping attendees up to date with the views of open source users and vendors alike, and providing details about the trends that will shape open source in the future.
Human Love, Probe – Two New Short Films Using Blender for VFX[Video Trailer]

Here comes even more movies and short films made using Blender for visual effects. For starters, Blender is a free and open source 3D content creation application. If you have seen the brilliant collection of Blender made videos we have featured here before, you probably don’t need any more lecturing on the abilities of this incredible open source tool called Blender.
Events
- Second batch of FOSDEM 2011 speaker interviews
  
  Here is the second batch of interviews with our main track speakers.
  
  * Martijn Dashorst (Wicket)
  * David Fetter (PL/Parrot)
  * Andrew Godwin (Django)
  * Soren Hansen (OpenStack)
  * Lennart Poettering (systemd)
  * Spike Morelli (devops)
  * Kenneth Rohde Christiansen (Qt WebKit)
- Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two
  
  The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the ‘fathers of the internet’, having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.
- Linux.conf.au 2011 kicks off: photos
  
  This year’s Linux.conf.au kicked off with a bang yesterday, with hundreds of delegates from all over the world converging on Queensland University of Technology, despite the flood crisis which threatened to can the annual conference.
Web Browsers
- Mozilla
  - What’s up with SUMO – Jan. 24
  - ECMAScript 5 strict mode in Firefox 4
    
    Developers in the Mozilla community have made major improvements to the JavaScript engine in Firefox 4. We have devoted much effort to improving performance, but we’ve also worked on new features. We have particularly focused on ECMAScript 5, the latest update to the standard underlying JavaScript.
  - Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 Beta 10
    
    According to Mozilla’s latest platform meeting minutes, the final beta (11) is scheduled for a final build this Friday afternoon.
Databases
- 15 open source projects you should know about as a web developer
  
  Traditionally you might have been using MySQL. Although MySQL still is a great database many new alternatives has shown up trying to solve some of the issues MySQL has.
Oracle
- Oracle Nominates Bruno Souza of SouJava to JCP EC
  
  Oracle is nominating SouJava, the Brazilian Java User Group, to a seat in the JCP Executive Committee. SouJava is one of the oldest and largest Java User Groups in the world with 40,000 members and based in a region where Java and open-source software is prominent. The organization will be represented by its former president Bruno Souza, a well-known independent Java and open source advocate, and earlier member of the OSI.
- Oracle, LibreOffice: ideally a co-opetition, not competition
  
  Choice is great. It’s one of the key selling points of open source — a guarantee that no one company can monopolize a software category, at least illegally.
  
  It’s what enabled the first official release today of LibreOffice 3.3, a version of OpenOffice sponsored by the recently formed Document Foundation. The foundation was formed in September by many leaders of the OpenOffice project, who were not too happy with the way megacorporation Oracle was running the show.
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
- Annual Free Software Foundation Fundraiser
  
  The Free Software Foundation is in the last week of its annual fundraiser and has still has a bit of ground to make up. The FSF needs members and donations to merely sustain its basic activity protecting free software and engaging in minimal outreach. So as I’ve done in the last couple years, I’ve written a fundraising appeal for the organization. That why today my face is plastered, Jimmy Wales style, all over the FSF website. (For the record, the last bit was not my idea and I find it a little embarrassing.)
Government
- Basque Government will make other institutions benefit from its successful Open Source experience
  
  Ms. Mendia said that in the field of free software, her Government “seeks to contribute and share results” with their environment, “starting with the rest of the Basque administrations, in particular for developments that may be in the public interest.”
- FI: Municipalities increasingly interested in open source software
  
  According to a survey of the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities (AFLRA), more than 80 % of the Finnish municipalities use open source software. Four years ago [2006], only 57 % of them invested in open source software.
  
  With open source software, the Finnish municipalities seek to achieve costs savings on licence fees. For example, in Helsinki alone desktop computers and office software licence fees are nearly €5 million a year; licence fees come on top of this for various computer systems and servers. Hence, in November 2010, the Municipal Council of Helsinki decided that the city will try open source software on the client side (desktops).
- FR: City of Rennes opens up its data to the public
  
  A French communication agency in partnership with Rennes Metropolitan District (Rennes Métropole), the City of Rennes and public transports operator Keolis Rennes released under GNU Project’s General Public License version 3 (GNU/GPL v3) an OpenData platform. The platform has served as a base through which Rennes Metropolitan District/City and Keolis Rennes made their data public, at www.data.rennes-metropole.fr and http://data.keolis-rennes.com respectively.
- IT/EU: Emilia Romagna Region shares findings on open source usage in public administrations
  
  The administrative region of Emilia Romagna (Northern Italy), has recently participated in the first international conference ‘OSEPA’ (Open Source usage by Public Administration), an EU-supported project.
  
  The OSEPA project establishes a regional network at European level for the promotion and further spread of open source software within public administrations. The project is intended to conduct a systematic debate among European public administrations, supported by analysis and exchange of experience, on the issue of free and/or open source software (FOSS). Consequently, the exploration of the main benefits /disadvantages and cost effectiveness of FOSS adoption and use by public authorities will be critical for the project.
- EU to Get Feedback on Its Public Procurement Policy
  
  The European Commission will launch a consultation Thursday to get feedback on modernizing the European Union’s public procurement policy
Licensing
- Brazil’s New Trademark License
  
  I’m in Brazil for a few days, having given lectures several times at the start of the week, most notably for the extraordinary Campus Party event. There have been several news items here of interest to open source followers:
  
  * a decree by the new President of Brazil that open source software is preferred by the government,
  * controversy surrounding the expectation that the new Minister of Culture and music industry insider Ana de Hollanda will put a stop to the hard-won copyright law reform that’s in progress, and
  * news that the government will be requiring submissions to its public software portal to grant broad trademark licenses in addition to open source licenses for the copyrights.
Openness/Sharing
- Open Access/Content
  - Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Bessemer Venture Partners Invest $15 Million in Flat World Knowledge
    
    Open Textbook Publisher Presents Viable Alternative to Traditional Industry

Leftovers

China plans city ‘twice the size of Wales’

It’s official: the inexorable rise of China has rendered meaningless ancient units of area such as the square mile, as reporters struggle to express the extent of the country’s megacities in terms the average reader can understand.

[...]

This, of course, is properly expressed as 35,636,280 linguine, 541,173 double-decker buses laid bumper-to-bumper or 36,078 brontosauruses/brontosauri, give or take the odd tail.
People’s Medical Publishing House: to build a media group with 10 billion RMB in assets and sales (China)
Why TripAdvisor is getting a bad review

In quiet moments, Jared Blank likes to kick back by looking at reviews of the world’s greatest hotels on TripAdvisor. Specifically, the terrible reviews. Blank is a long-time analyst of the travel industry, and a user of TripAdvisor – the consumer review site that has become one of the world’s biggest travel resources, attracting 41.6 million users a month, and featuring 40m reviews of hotels and restaurants worldwide. But the pettiness and hysteria of some of the complaints never fail to astonish.
Google to hire 1,000 in Europe

The outgoing chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, has announced a plan to hire more than 1,000 staff over the coming year to boost its European operation.
Cuba continues to provide Venezuela with electricity know-how

Vice President Ricardo Cabrisas met with Electric Energy Minister Alí Rodríguez Araque Monday in Caracas to assess the state of 23 one-year old cooperation agreements on electricity, and to announce new projects.

Cabrisas was accompanied by Vicente Delaó, general director of Cuba’s Unión Eléctrica.
Berlusconi’s “Rubygate” in Italy: Private Vices, Public Virtues

Of course they refer to the Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, and his endless squalid story with underage girls, professional paid escorts, TV stars who become deputies and government officials, all thanks to his protection.

“Rubygate” they call it in the Italian press: it’s named after his biggest and weirdest sex-scandal yet, with an illegal, thieving, juvenile delinquent belly dancer from Morocco.
TV show stings Berlusconi into action

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi rang a TV show discussing his alleged prostitution scandal, exchanged insults with the host and said the programme was like a “brothel”.
Clarence Thomas failed to report wife’s income, watchdog says
Unix dynamic duo awarded Japan Prize

Gray beard Bell Labs scientists and Unix operating system co-creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications.
Science
- The Fantastical Promise of Reversible Computing
  
  The world of computing is in transition. As chips become smaller and faster, they dissipate more heat, which is energy that is entirely wasted.
  
  By some estimates the difference between the amount of energy required to carry out a computation and the amount that today’s computers actually use, is some eight orders of magnitude. Clearly, there is room for improvement.
- What is it with researchers and peer review? or; Why misquoting Churchill does not an argument make
  
  I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the attachment of the research community to traditional approaches. A news article in Nature though, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people and has prompted me to actually write something.
- ‘Darwin talk’ at Turkish school goes to court, sparks new debate
  
  A warning issued to a primary school teacher for talking about Darwinian evolutionary theory during class has sparked a debate over whether education in Turkey is becoming more religious.
Defence/Police/Aggression
- More troops lost to suicide
  
  For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Terrorists, technology and fighting back
  
  Firstly, the explosives were hidden inside a laser printer toner cartridge. Furthermore, it was reported the bomb contained a detonator connected to a mainboard and battery taken from a regular mobile phone.
  
  According to various accounts, the bombs could have been set off by calling the phone and subsequently activating the vibrating motor. A calendar alert set in the phone could also have triggered the vibrator and therefore the bomb as well.
- Protests in Egypt and unrest in Middle East – as it happened
  
  Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters have clashed with police in Cairo and other cities in the largest demonstration in Egypt in a generation. Demonstrators want an end to the authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak’s near 30 years of power.
- Revolution Day in Egypt
  
  Egyptians will be demonstrating today in solidarity with Tunisia and in hope for change within their own government. An Egyptian national holiday in honour of the police, has been renamed ‘The Day of Wrath’, ‘Revolution Day’, and the ‘Koshari Revolution’, the latter referring to a rice, lentils and pasta dish frequently eaten by lower income Egyptians.
- Will Tunisia’s ‘Internet revolution’ endure?
  
  There has been a great deal written online about how much of a positive role the Internet played in recent events in Tunisia (if you’d like to catch up, Alex Howard’s link round-up provides a good summary of the many sides, both for and against). At CPJ, our focus is on slightly different questions: How did the repression of the Internet hamper the ability to safely gather news, report and analyze such events? Did that repression grow worse in the dying days of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s government? Will it improve in the future?
- Police officers guilty of assaulting disabled man
  
  Two Toronto police constables have been found guilty of assault causing bodily harm during the arrest of a disabled, verbally abusive man in Cabbagetown.
  
  Edward Ing and John Cruz were stone-faced and had no comment on after Justice Elliott Allen gave his verdict in Brampton court Tuesday morning.
- Jesse Ventura slams TSA with lawsuit
  
  Count Jesse Ventura among fliers who don’t want their “junk” touched by Transportation Security Administration agents.
  
  The former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court in Minnesota against the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA.
  
  The suit alleges enhanced airport security procedures, including pat-downs and full body scanning, violate Ventura’s rights under the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures.
- Ventura sues over body scans, pat-downs
  
  Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, alleging full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
- Met counter-terrorism chief to take over protest spy unit
  
  Britain’s most senior police officer in charge of counter-terrorism will next week take over a secretive unit that deploys undercover police officers in the environmental protest movement.
  
  John Yates, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, will take command of the operation to monitor climate change campaigners in a move that police chiefs hope will bring greater accountability.
  
  However, the move, which was confirmed in parliament today, is likely to cause controversy among activists who complain that their peaceful movement is being equated to terrorism.
  
  Tim Godwin, the acting head of the Met, and another senior Scotland Yard officer, Bob Broadhurst, were today brought before parliament to apologise for misleading MPs over the presence of undercover police at the G20 protests two years ago.
- US child appeals against being tried for murder as an adult
  
  Jordan Brown, who was 11 when he allegedly killed his father’s pregnant fiancee, could face life sentence with no parole
Cablegate/Leaks
- Swedish PM denies political role in Assange extradition case
  
  We know from the cables and other sources (see the summary in section 7, 92-96, of the “skeleton” legal argument) that Swedish courts have in the past been complicit in the illegal kidnapping of refugee claimants by US agents. More broadly, the role of diplomacy as mediator between law and politics has arisen repeatedly in many of the cables released by its major media partners and WikiLeaks.
- PdF presents: A symposium on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom (II)
- PdF Presents: A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom (II)
- Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi
  
  Activists David House and Jane Hamsher tried to visit Pfc. Bradley Manning, who stands accused of leaking classified US government documents, at Quantico on Sunday. They allege that while still outside the base, they were given a run-around, threatened with having their car towed, and then essentially detained for two hours, until the 3:00 pm end to visiting hours arrived. They were not on the base, and House is on an approved visitor list. They were trying to see Manning, whose health they say has deteriorated because of the harsh terms of his detainment, and to deliver to the base commander a petition with 40,000 signatories asking that the terms be eased.
- Inhumane Treatment of WikiLeaks Soldier Bradley Manning
  
  US authorities must alleviate the harsh pre-trial detention conditions of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking information to Wikileaks.
  
  The US army private, 23, has been held for 23 hours a day in a sparsely furnished solitary cell and deprived of a pillow, sheets, and personal possessions since July 2010.
  
  Amnesty International last week wrote to the US Defence secretary, Robert Gates, calling for the restrictions on Bradley Manning to be reviewed. In the same week, the soldier suffered several days of increased restrictions by being temporarily categorized as a ‘suicide risk’.
- WikiLeaks, hackers and conspiracy theories
  
  At the time, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a staunch supporter of WikiLeaks, tweeted “the point of the Quantico episode was to deny Manning his only real visitor: more likely solitary will crack him & induce anti-WL testimony.”
  
  Greenwald’s claim — for which of course there’s no evidence, only the logic that that’s exactly how law enforcement frequently operates — echoes Julian Assange’s comments about Manning. He recently told John Pilger “cracking Bradley Manning is the first step. The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States.”
  
  But while there’s more than a touch of the conspiracy theorist about these claims, it’s hard to avoid seeing a pattern in a number of recent events around WikiLeaks and its supporters.
  
  First there was the claim, advanced with virtually no evidence, that WikiLeaks might have obtained information by hacking, rather than receiving material from whistleblowers. Last week, Bloomberg ran a piece on claims made by the Pennsylvania company Tiversa that “it discovered that computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The same information obtained in those searches later appeared on WikiLeaks.”
  
  One assumes Bloomberg meant “trawling”, but anyway. “Trolling” sounds worse.
- Palestine papers reveal MI6 drew up plan for crackdown on Hamas
  
  British intelligence helped draw up a secret plan for a wide-ranging crackdown on the Islamist movement Hamas which became a security blueprint for the Palestinian Authority, leaked documents reveal. The plan asked for the internment of leaders and activists, the closure of radio stations and the replacement of imams in mosques.
  
  The disclosure of the British plan, drawn up by the intelligence service in conjunction with Whitehall officials in 2004, and passed by a Jerusalem-based MI6 officer to the senior PA security official at the time, Jibril Rajoub, is contained in the cache of confidential documents obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared with the Guardian. The documents also highlight the intimate level of military and security cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli forces.
- New York Times, Al-Jazeera Do An End-Run Around WikiLeaks
  
  The New York Times is considering creating an electronic tip line so that leakers of classified documents can go direct instead of having to use a middleman like WikiLeaks, according to executive editor Bill Keller. Keller said the plan is still in its formative stages, but the idea is to create a “kind of EZPass lane for leakers,” to make it easier for them to contact the paper and deliver information. And the Times isn’t the only one doing this; Al-Jazeera has already launched its own drop-box for leaks called the Transparency Unit, and recently released thousands of documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
- NYC Installs Virtual Suggestion Box
  
  New York City is harnessing the power of employee-based collaborative filtering to solicit new ways to save money and improve city government.
  
  The city has set up what is in effect a virtual suggestion box, called IdeaMarket, where eventually all 300,000 of the city’s employees will be able to give the city their ideas about how to improve operations.
- Blow the Whistle!
  
  On December 22nd, in the face of seemingly unanimous bipartisan support, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (Bill S.372) was killed at the last minute when a mystery Senator placed what’s called an anonymous hold on the bill. This bill had already been passed by the Senate earlier in December and by the House earlier that same day, but in the final vote on the reconciled bill, which is designed to protect government workers from being punished – as they usually are – for exposing illegality, waste and corruption – it was shut down by a lone anonymous hold.
- The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Tuesday, Day 59!
  
  4:50 Assange tells AP in London that WIkiLeaks now seeking SIXTY media partners to spread the release of the almost 99% of cable still not published. Would be dramatic expansion of its collaborative efforts and in line with much else happening this week. But outlets would have to agree to full redaction of names. “Sometimes, that could mean doing what Assange called ‘triangulating the politics of a country’ — giving documents to a left-wing paper in a country with a right-wing government, or offering cables to conservative titles in countries with a left-leaning administration.”
- AP Interview:WikiLeaks seeking more media partners
  
  WikiLeaks hopes to enlist as many as 60 news organizations from around the world in a bid to help speed the publication of its massive trove of secret U.S. diplomatic memos, the site’s founder said Tuesday.
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
- Rolling Stone names 12 politicians and executives blocking progress on global warming
  
  1. Rupert Murdoch: No one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch. In a year of record heat waves in Africa, freak snowstorms in America and epic flooding in Pakistan, the Fox network continued to dismiss climate change as nothing but a conspiracy by liberal scientists and Big Government. Glenn Beck told viewers the Earth experienced no warming in the past decade — the hottest on record. Sean Hannity declared that “global warming doesn’t exist” and speculated about “the true agenda of global-warming hysterics.” Even Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the chatty Fox & Friends, laughed off the threat of climate change, joking that the real problem was “too many polar bears.”
  
  Murdoch’s entire media empire, it would seem, is set up to deny, deny, deny….
  
  Murdoch knows better. In 2007, he warned that climate change “poses clear, catastrophic threats” and promised to turn News Corp. into a model of carbon neutrality. But at his media outlets, manufacturing doubt about global warming remains official policy. During the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the Washington editor of Fox News ordered the network’s journalists to never mention global warming “without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” Murdoch may be striving to go green in his office buildings, but on air, the only thing he’s recycling are the lies of Big Coal and Big Oil.
- Was Genghis Khan history’s greenest conqueror?
  
  In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan’s unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere.
- Newt Gingrich proposes abolishing EPA
  
  Gingrich has long been just another pro-pollution conservative eco-fraud pretending to care about the environment while adopting the anti-regulation, pro-technology rhetoric suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah” and “Eco-fraud Gingrich has always opposed clean energy, climate action“).
Finance
- [Satire] Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World
  
  At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” describing the global wealth divide as the “most colossal and enduring of mankind’s creations.”
- Banks Return With a Goal: Pushing Back
  
  Bankers at last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, played the roles of bogeymen. French President Nicolas Sarkozy lashed out at their “indecent behavior” and “morally indefensible” pay packages.
  
  The bankers aren’t likely to win any popularity contests at this year’s gathering at the Swiss ski resort. But they are hoping some of the stigma of having helped plunge the world into a financial crisis has faded.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
- UK gives Murdoch last chance to avoid BSkyB probe
  
  Britain will give News Corp (NWSA.O) a final chance to avoid a prolonged investigation into its $12.5 billion buyout of BSkyB (BSY.L), a move likely to draw flak for the government’s relations with Rupert Murdoch.
- Hunt and Cameron’s extraordinary decision on Murdoch/BSkyB
  
  Just 11 days ago I speculated that a judicial review was a near-certainty when the Culture Secretary made his decision on whether to refer Murdoch’s News Corporation bid to take full control over broadcaster BSkyB to the competition commission over concerns of media plurality in the UK.
  
  Ofcom’s widely-leaked recommendation was confirmed today: the bid should be sent for competition review. Whether the full Ofcom report will be unveiled is at this stage unclear, and in my guess unlikely.
  
  But the extraordinary part is Jeremy Hunt’s decision to grant a stay of execution and allow News Corp extra time to address concerns over media plurality if Murdoch’s group controlled news output from Sky, along with a raft of newspapers and news websites it already owned.
- Chevron, under pressure for destruction Of Amazon, was top oil lobbyist last quarter
  
  Chevron, responsible for a multi-billion-dollar environmental disaster in Ecuador, is instead spending millions to shore up political support and to evade the clean up. Brad Johnson has the story.
  
  Senate disclosure forms reveal that oil giant Chevron spent $2.9 million lobbying the federal government last quarter, eclipsing even Exxon ($2.6 million) and BP ($2.2 million). Chevron’s 2010 lobbying totaled $12.89 million, following a tremendous outlay in 2009 of $20.8 million.
- People trust search engines says PR company
  
  Whether people trust PR firms is another question
- Pat Sajak says he’s profoundly sorry for infecting the country with Keith Olbermann
  
  Pat Sajak is finally taking full blame for giving Keith Olbermann his start on national television. Historians note that civil discourse has never been the same in American politics.
  
  Sajak clearly feels guilty about launching the liberal lamenter into the nation’s thought process like a virus.
Censorship
- Hungary’s New Media Law Faces Opposition in the EU
  
  Just three weeks after Hungary took over the European Union’s presidency, the Hungarian government is already facing protests over a newly passed media law in the nation. According to Digital Civil Rights in Europe, the approved legislation gives the government the right to “unilaterally judge content material on the basis of broad and unclearly defined criteria,” including protection of the “public order.” The law gives Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn’s party the right to take down media outlets in the country. Furthermore, it also requires media sources to register before publishing.
- Twitter Is Blocked In Egypt Amidst Rising Protests
  
  Inspired by the recent Tunisian demonstrations against corruption, protesters are filling the streets of Cairo. And like the protests in Tunisia, the Egyptian ones were partly organized on Facebook and Twitter. And now Twitter appears to be blocked in Egypt, according to various Tweets and tips we’ve received. However, so far only the Twitter website itself is blocked (including the mobile site), but people in Cairo are still using Twitter third-party clients to keep on Tweeting. There are also reports of the entire mobile Web being blocked through mobile carriers, but at least one carrier, Vodafone Egypt, denies that it is blocking Twitter, attributing the problem to overloaded networks instead. Update: one tipster says Twitter apps are blocked as well and that the only way to Tweet is by using Web proxies. Update 2: Asked to confirm that Twitter is blocked in Egypt, Google PR points to this Herdict Report, which indicates that it is in fact inaccessible in that country.
- Tunisian State Secretary Says Censorship Is Fine Because The West Does It Too
  
  Both the US and the EU are obviously failing to be a rolemodel when they should be. Many politicians in the EU have embraced the idea of an internet filter to block child pornography. As for the US, they could be seen seizing domain names of ‘rogue websites’. On the one hand, politicians of the west love talking about the principles of freedom, but on the other hand they hate to actually live up to their own standards when something like WikiLeaks or a music blog comes along. The problems of this for the US and the EU have been discussed here in detail before.
Privacy
- Justice Department seeks mandatory data retention
  
  Criminal investigations “are being frustrated” because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing, the U.S. Department of Justice will announce tomorrow.
  
  CNET obtained a copy of the department’s position on mandatory data retention–saying Congress should strike a “more appropriate balance” between privacy and police concerns–that will be announced at a House of Representatives hearing tomorrow.
Civil Rights
- Human Rights Watch Film Festival Comes To Washington D.C.
Internet/Net Neutrality
- Will our Internet Rates Suddenly Climb?
  
  Met an interesting couple at Mayor Cowan’s Levee. In this small world, turns out they are in-laws of a guy I went to school with. In any case, they have a blog about the CRTC approving a change that could put our internet rates through the roof, particularly if you use something like Netflicks or WOW.
- Two-thirds of U.S. Internet users lack fast broadband
  
  Two-thirds of U.S. Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps, putting the United States well behind speed leaders South Korea and Japan.
- Don’t Take Digital Innovation for Granted
  
  For example, Over 22,000 people and counting have signed the Stop The Meter petition, demonstrating widespread discontent with big telecom companies who are attempting to hogtie competing indie Internet service providers (ISPs) and make the Internet much more expensive to use.
- A damaged process and a damaged community
  
  Here’s the big news from the world of Internet governance world: some vague details of a meeting between the ICANN Board and governments, in the form of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), have emerged. But adding concern to the the general vagueness is the inclusion of precise wording that means something specific, although no one is quite sure what. It is this:
  
  This meeting is not intended to address the requirements/steps outlined in the Bylaws mandated Board-GAC consultation process.
  
  This wording is indecipherable to any but the greatest of insiders. And that fact, combined with the reality that this Board-GAC meeting is one of the most significant Internet governance meetings in the past five years, makes it all the more frustrating. Despite the global impact, and the open processes, and the much-vaunted bottom-up multi-stakeholder model, here is a very, very small group of people making crucial decisions about the future of the Internet and they are using arcane and indecipherable terminology in order to keep everyone else out.
- France Telecom To Buy 49% of Video-Sharing Site Dailymotion
  
  France Telecom’s Orange has announced plans to buy a 49% stake in video sharing site Dailymotion for €58.8 million ($79.9 million).
Intellectual Monopolies/Publishing
- Newspapers Try to Reimpose Scarcity on News With Ongo
  
  In what feels like another attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, three traditional media companies — the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Gannett chain, publisher of USA Today — have launched a new service called Ongo that they hope will convince readers to pay for their content, even though much of that content is already available for free. Although it has some interesting features aimed at compensating readers for sharing content, Ongo seems like yet another Hail Mary pass aimed at trying to rewind the clock and impose scarcity on media content, and one that will likely fail just as quickly as others have.
- This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers.
  
  In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public. And there were several successful publishers who knew that some of their authors would never sell a lot of copies, but they kept publishing them because they liked their work. It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.
  
  Not any more, because the greedy ghost of market madness has got into the controlling heights of publishing. Publishers are run by money people now, not book people. The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn’t sell enough. Stop publishing him. Look at this list of last year’s books: over half of them weren’t bestsellers. This year you must only publish bestsellers. Why are you publishing this woman? She’ll only appeal to a small minority. Minorities are no good to us. We want to double the return we get on each book we publish.
- Copyrights
  - Obama nominates former RIAA lawyer for Solicitor General spot
    
    President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation’s solicitor general.
    
    If confirmed by the Senate, Verilli, now the White House deputy counsel, would assume the powerful position left vacant by Elena Kagan, who was elevated to the Supreme Court. Obama said he was “confident” that Verrilli, one of five former RIAA attorneys appointed to the administration, would “serve ably.”
  - ACS:Law Can’t Take The Pressure, Quit Chasing File-Sharers
    
    ACS:Law, the law firm that has terrorized untold thousands of alleged file-sharers in the UK, has quit the anti-piracy business. The company made the announcement in a hearing at the Patents County Court yesterday set to a backdrop of scathing comments by a senior judge who said he found their cases “mind boggling”.
  - Law firm ACS: Law stops ‘chasing illegal file-sharers’
  - Mysterious Non-Company ‘Helping’ ACS:Law Collect Fines Now Says Forget The Whole Thing
    
    As ACS:Law’s legal mistakes mount, there was a recent story about how the company had passed on some collections efforts to a firm called GCB, but the details suggested another total screwup. People tracked GCB back to an accounting firm, which quickly put on their website that while GCB was formed by it, it “appears to be being misused by some third party,” and that it was “taking urgent steps” to end this
  - How many Internet pirates are there, anyway?
    
    For US numbers, we can turn to Warner Music, one of the world’s largest music labels and a company that devoted plenty of time to researching the audience for its products. Last year, Warner execs stopped by the offices of the Federal Communications Commission to brief the agency on its findings—and what it found was that 13 percent of Americans were music pirates.
  - Why Tyler Cowen’s new book will be on Kindles, not bookstore shelves
    
    Cowen is a noted libertarian economist at George Mason University who writes for The New York Times and other esteemed publications — but he’s probably best known as the coauthor, with Alex Tabarrok, of Marginal Revolution, the very popular economics blog they’ve run for approaching a decade.
  - Google/Coadec Copyright Report: We Want Your Case Studies
    
    In early November, the government announced that it was launching a review in the country’s intellectual property laws, with a view to spurring technological innovation and “to see if we can make them fit for the Internet age.” The review, which is being chaired by Professor Ian Hargreaves of Cardiff University, has now called for evidence on how the current IP regime affects innovation.
  - Law to Shutdown P2P Sites Resurrected By Spanish Coalition
    
    In recent months a controversial piece of legislation aimed at shutting down file-sharing sites has resulted in massive opposition from the public in Spain. In December the protests appeared to have been successful as the House of Representatives rejected the proposal. However, yesterday the Spanish Government resurrected the law with some minor changes, a move that has outraged the public.
    
    Traditionally, Spain has been one of the few countries where courts have affirmed that P2P-sites operate legally. This, to the disappointment of the United States who behind closed doors helped the Spanish Government to come up with new laws to protect the interests of copyright holders.
  - Will New Solicitor General Take Harder Line On Copyright?
    
    To fill the key legal post of Solicitor General, the Obama administration has turned to a lawyer with deep entertainment-industry roots who has taken on some of the industry’s toughest copyright battles. The nominee, Donald Verrilli, is best known for having buried the Grokster file-sharing service at the Supreme Court. Verrilli is one of several lawyers with recording-industry backgrounds who were brought into senior positions in the Department of Justice under Obama.
    
    The Grokster win is without a doubt one of the most significant entertainment-industry legal victories in the internet age. It created a new copyright doctrine of “inducement” that has allowed other peer-to-peer services, such as Limewire, to be shut down under the theory that even though the services didn’t handle copyrighted material themselves they went too far in encouraging users to illegally share.
  - China Authorities Threaten BitTorrent Sites with Prison Time
    
    Country’s Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security jointly announce that anybody guilty of illegally distributing copyrighted material that reaches 50,000 hits will face between 3 and 7 years in prison.
    
    Chinese authorities are stepping up their anti-P2P efforts with news of a joint declaration made by the country’s Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security earlier this month that anybody caught sharing copyrighted material without authorization will face criminal penalties of between 3 and 7 years in prison.
  - ACTA
    - LQDN at the EU Commission’s Ad Hoc Meeting on ACTA
      
      Today, La Quadrature du Net is attending the European Commission’s meeting on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
      
      Now that the negotiations on ACTA have come to an end, the Commission wants to “inform and consult civil society” about ACTA. That’s something that should have been done years ago.
      
      We will be distributing a one-page memo explaining why ACTA — which seeks to establish extremist enforcement measures for copyright, patent and trademarks — runs counter to fundamental rights and innovation. As suggested by dozens of academics across the EU in their common analysis, ACTA is a fundamentally flawed international agreement that needs to be rejected by lawmakers.

Clip of the Day

SmallLuxGPU 1.6 Blender 2.5 Exporter

Credit: TinyOgg

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IRC Proceedings: January 25th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 1:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz


#techrights log	#boycottnovell log	#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

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01.25.11