• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Smart Book

While following some links that I had received from a conversation on Diaspora* Alpha, I ran across the Smart Book, a great product from Always Innovating. While they offer them for sale, they do not yet have a shipping date. Reading their press release, it does not look like they plan to sell them in mass quantities. Imaging having a hand held Internet device, a tablet, a netbook, and screen that can be plugged into another computer, all in one device. Along with all of those features it runs multiple operating systems all at the same time. On top of everything else it is Open Hardware and Open Software.

Hack the D-Link DNS-323 to get an array of Linux server options

There are a number of products currently available aimed to meet home storage needs. Rather than purchasing an entire computer to act as a file sever, these NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are cheap, and you can typically stuff them in a corner and forget about them, using them to store backups or files that you want to share with other systems. They can be used to share files with those outside of the home network, or strictly for those inside.

One such device is the D-Link DNS-323, a two-bay NAS system that runs Linux. It is a small box, but large enough to store two 3.5″ SATA drives, so it can be stored nearly anywhere. By itself, the DNS-323 has a web-based administrative console, has multiple disk options (JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, or individual disks), gigabit Ethernet, allows for SMB (Windows file sharing) and FTP access. It has one USB port for a printer to allow it to be a print server as well, and it can also be an iTunes media server out of the box. All of this is available for roughly $200.

OS-Less notebook LDLC recommends the Joli OS

This is one of those very few manufacturers recommending the OS together with the Jolibook that has the JoliCloud preloaded already on the system.

Seven Keys to Success with Linux

Linux Wins Big in Three Coups

A (Finally) Winning Linux Hand

And try as Microsoft might, the public cloud computing services are increasing their dependence on Linux operating systems that don’t require them to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.

Desktop

• German Insurance Firm To Convert 10,000 PCs To Ubuntu

• HeliOS – A Moving Experience…

• HeliOS Project Store Expands Product Line

Audiocasts/Shows

• Episode 0x0E: Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement

  This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana’s talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

Google

• Google insists it will remain open source player

  Google insists that Android will remain an open source platform and takes great exception to reports to the contrary.

  That’s good news.

Kernel Space

• Instituting ‘Defense in Depth’ for PCI Compliance on a Linux Platform

• Linux Kernel Power Bug Now High Importance In Ubuntu

  There is also this Launchpad bug report from a Canonical software engineer that was created earlier this month but now with the attention of Phoronix, 33 others have officially confirmed being ‘affected’ by this bug in its entry. This morning, the Ubuntu Kernel Team has now confirmed it as being a bug of high importance for Natty (11.04) and Oneiric (11.10). It should also be acknowledged in the Ubuntu 11.04 release notes that there is a power issue.

  It doesn’t appear that they are devoting any resources to getting the issue resolved but it looks like they will be waiting for a fix to appear upstream in the stable series or in 2.6.39 and then to have that back-ported into an Ubuntu 11.04 SRU update.

• Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted

  Since Friday there’s been a number of Phoronix articles about a very bad power regression in the mainline Linux kernel, which is widespread, Ubuntu 11.04 is one of the affected distributions, and has been deemed a bug of high importance. This yet-to-be-resolved issue is affected Linux 2.6.38 and 2.6.39 kernels and for many desktop and notebook systems is causing a 10~30% increase in power consumption. Nevertheless, this is not the only major outstanding power regression in the mainline tree, there is another dramatic regression now spotted as well that is yet-to-be-fixed.

• Graphics Stack

  • Will NVIDIA Optimus Inevitably Come To Linux?

    Aside from political issues surrounding open vs. closed-source (graphics) drivers on Linux, the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is widely liked. The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is relatively bug/trouble-free, has a performance parity to the Windows driver, supports new hardware right away, and has a near feature parity to the Windows driver. There’s not much more you could ask for from a closed-source driver, aside from a few missing features. One of the missing features that’s been widely talked about as of late has been Optimus.

  • Wayland Can Now Use Gallium3D Software Rendering

    Besides the obvious requirements and demands of needing to design a display server that can fully replace the needs of the long-standing X Server, and making all the tool-kits and major software support running natively on Wayland, another inhibitor to Wayland’s adoption has been its graphics driver requirements. In particular, Wayland requires kernel mode-setting, EGL (in place of a DRI2 requirement), in-kernel memory management (GEM), and 3D acceleration.

Applications

• Radio Tray – A Radio Player That Fits In System Tray

• Proprietary

  • Fancy some free software, Grandma?

    Yet look at how we describe the benefits of genuinely advantageous software and services. We don’t ask people about saving money on their computers, we ask them whether they want Linux or Windows. Free phone calls? Nah. Let’s talk to them about Skype, another brand name in a world full of them. And what’s all this OpenOffice and LibreOffice stuff? To the everyday computer user, it means next to nothing.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Running Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) unity 3D on virtualbox 4.x

  • How to add Medibuntu repository in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal | Via Terminal and GUI

  • Geek Alert: Administrate Databases Over the Web With phpMyAdmin

  • Tesseract-ocr: convert scanned images into editable documents on Linux

  • Rescue Your Encrypted Home Folder In Ubuntu

  • 31 Great Tutorials for Inkscape!

  • Embracing Streaming Music on Linux

  • How to dual-boot Linux Mint Debian Edition and Windows 7

  • Panda3D Game Development: Scene Effects and Shaders

  • Tesseract-ocr: convert scanned images into editable documents on Linux

  • Negotiating Performance

  • Multi-booting My Way (Not Necessarily the Easy Way)

  • Keeping Things Private – Stripping JPEG Metadata

  • Implement a high available Cobbler provisioning system

  • Failed to submit batch buffer (Xorg)

  • Lazy man’s guide to debugging in Gentoo

  • Skinning Gnome 3 in Fedora 15 pt. 1/2

  • Why does fsck need a scratch file?

  • How To Install Unity 2D In Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narhwal”

  • Subversion Tutorial: 10 Most Used SVN Commands with Examples

  • Network Security Services (NSS) and PKCS#11

  • UDEV – devices mounting twice

  • Control playback in Totem movie player by clapping (no, seriously)

    It’ll feel like the future (albeit that lame, not quite awesome future as depicted in late 1980s hollywood films) but with one plugin you can use ‘clapping’ to control playback of media in Ubuntu’s default media player Totem.

• Games

  • Addictive Game ‘Family Farm’ for Linux Available Now, Coming Soon to Ubuntu Software Center

    Addictive simulation and farming game Family Farm is now available for Linux. The game which focuses on building and maintaining your own farm has RPG elements to it as you can control your character with many RPG attributes like skills etc.

    Players can create and put themselves in control of a small Family Farm inhabited by various characters, each with different skills and needs. As the family grows, the house can be upgraded and the farm expanded into the surrounding area.

  • Vertigo: New Fun Arcade Game for Linux Based on Ogre 3D Engine

    Vertigo is a new fun arcade game for Linux which is based on Ogre3D and BulletPhysics Engine. The game is completely free, open source and cross platform.

  • A look at Minecraft Beta 1.5_01 – A “little guy” with a great product.

  • Linux users willing to pay more for the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle than others

    The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle is well on its way to measuring up. In the first two days, it had sold $500,000. As of this morning, the average Linux user was paying the most at $11.68, while the average Windows user was paying the least at $4.02.

    You’ve only got a day left, so get over there and show your support for games on Linux and for charity.

  • A Python project to play with

  • Dead Cyborg (PC/Mac/Linux)

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • undertow

    # Contour continues to develop, and the OS image track is similarly moving; so these will follow on nicely after the Active App announcement.

    # Plasmate has seen renewed development and is polishing up nicely. We have a new contributor who has popped up recently, and both Sebastian K. and myself have been plonking away on it. I need to do a screencast soon!

  • Kate’s Tab Bar Plugins

  • announcing Season of KDE 2011

    I’m super happy that KDE could accept 51 student for GSoC this year. It’s an impressive number and they’ll make a difference in KDE this year. But this number also means that we had to say no to many students. A lot of tough choices had to be made. Now I can’t magically make more GSoC slot appear unfortunately. But I can do something else. I can run another Season of KDE together with an awesome team of mentors and co-admins.

• GNOME Desktop

  • A revelation of an idea for GNOME3′s Shell

    I’ve made heavy use of the revelation-applet on my gnome 2 desktop panel to search for passwords inside my revelation password file. I’d like to restore that sort of quick password search inside the preferred mechanics of GNOME3 shell.

  • Diodon – GTK+ clipboard manager

    Diodon is a simple clipboard manager for GNOME with application indicator support. Aiming to be the best integrated clipboard manager for the Gnome/GTK+ desktop.

  • One week with GNOME3

    I’ve installed GNOME 3 ppa on my ubuntu natty last week, and have been using it exclusively since then. To be honest I’ve been ranting a lot against GNOME3 before using it for my day to day activities, so I feel I should share my observations now that I really know it. Here are all the good and bad things I’ve seen, with no particular order. I’ll try not being too polemic (that’s hard exercise for me), please keep in mind I’m not pretending being a normal user; I’m a developer so my needs probably are different.

    [...]

    GNOME3 is a good base for upcoming releases.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • An in-depth look at Pardus Linux 2011

    Based on my experience with the Pardus 2009 series of releases I had very high expectation for Pardus 2011.

• New Releases

  • Elastix 1.6.2

  • ALT 5.9.9-20110401

  • Kalumbata Rev 4 released

    The Bayanihan Linux 5 Revision 4 is now available for download! The newest Kalumbata revision now features LibreOffice by The Document Foundation, an Open Source office productivity suite greatly derived from OpenOffice.org. However, OpenOffice.org 3.3, the latest version, is still bundled in the installer. Also packed in the new ISOs is the latest release of BL5′s default web browser, Mozilla Firefox 4. Tons of security updates are also added.

  • 1+1 = Calculate Linux

    Another Monday, another review. This week it’s Calculate Linux 11.3 Gnome Edition! Get ready for another wild and crazy ride into the ever changing landscape known as FLOSS! (Free Libre Open Source Software)

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora dons the new Gnome

    • Fusion Linux 14 Thorium – Fedora Plus Plus

      Comparing to Fedora, Fusion Linux is a clear winner, as it only builds upon the existing without taking away.

    • Ubuntu to the Rescue: A Tale of Broadcom Wifi Drivers, Prerelease Software, and a new Acer Aspire One Netbook

      Let me say, however, that this is a STRONG argument for Fedora to have something like the restricted drivers menu. Sure, I know they want to have a freedom-only desktop. But I see nothing wrong with looking for certain hardware and telling people they may get better performance in the non-free repos. They aren’t doing anyone any favors by making them thing their computer doesn’t work with Fedora. And they’re losing potential users.

    • From Ubuntu to Fedora – Landing on foreign soil (the good, the bad and the ugly)

      During the past weeks I noticed how difficult it was to hack on a desktop environment that I am not using myself. And since most of my work now is about GNOME (and KDE) I came to the conclusion I have to use bleeding edge GNOME 3. Sadly Ubuntu 11.04 with GNOME 3 is pretty shaky for my taste.

      I am a very impatient developer who really does not enjoy compiling stuff and playing with packages a lot. Mutter gave me some hard time on a Virtual Machine. So I chose to move to Fedora, luckily though this has given me a new perspective as I have been a long time Ubuntu user.

    • Moving to Fedora

      Except for the apparently broken Eclipse in F15—couldn’t get the Android ADT plugin to install—and a few glitches and rough edges here and there, the experience has been quite good so far.

    • Fedora Talk: First static, then silence (talk.fedoraproject.org closing up 2011-05-05)

      For many years Fedora infrastructure has been running a talk.fedoraproject.org asterisk server. This allows contributors to talk to each other, or send voice mails, etc.

      However, it gets very very little usage and also has no one really maintaining it or fixing issues with it. In the last 130days there have been a total of 95 calls using the server. There are a number of outstanding infrastructure tickets on the service that no one has dealt with. The server running it is running an outdated OS version and asterisk version.

• Debian Family

  • Ubuntu Unity Keyboard Shortcuts Wallpapers

    Can’t remember all the Unity keyboard shortcuts? Then check out the AskUbuntu keyboard shortcuts thread – you’ll find two wallpapers (one is also available in German) with most of the Unity mouse tricks / keyboard shortcuts:

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Is Canonical Attacking Its Own Ubuntu Communities?

      Ubuntu is growing big – bigger than ever. And there is a price you have to pay when you grow big. The dust of Ubuntu vs Banshee just settled and here is another storm, in a tea cup.

      Anthony Papillion, a blogger and quite a good writer, stirred the bee’s hive by posting an emotional blog about the shut-down of Sounder.

    • Why I love Unity

      In GNOME 3 it was closer to an inch and three-quarters ( or close to 44.5mm), with close to half an inch(12.5-13mm) dedicated to the title bar. I know there are plenty of deeper differences between the two interfaces (which plan to get int in a later post), but given the minor superficial differences, I would take Unity any day just because of screen real estate.

    • Why Is Ubuntu’s Unity Squeezing out GNOME 3?

      Not too long ago, I wrote about Ubuntu’s embrace of the Unity desktop and what that would mean for Ubuntu users who might prefer a traditional GNOME shell.

      At the time, I was called out by some readers regarding my belief that Ubuntu was limiting itself with its choice in relying on Unity. Now as we approach Ubuntu 11.04, it looks as if I might have been right all along.

      While users can certainly select the older GNOME shell, the move to the Unity desktop has clearly not been greeted with unanimous applause.

      Unity is not GNOME 3

      One fact that ought to be made clear from the start is that in the name of Ubuntu seeking to make Unity their default desktop experience, the development team has indeed locked some users into a singular desktop experience. “But Matt, that’s nonsense! Users can install any desktop they choose! Besides, if they want GNOME 3 instead, users can just add the PPA repository for it!”

      The above statement is what I feel makes this entire thing surrounding Unity so amusing. In the Ubuntu development team’s desire to make Ubuntu more “accessible,” they’re actually assuming new users even realize other desktop environments are possible.

    • One more step for Ubuntu Natty

      Final beta release paves the way for this week’s final release of Ubuntu 11.04

      It’s just a few days to go until the next major release of Ubuntu and the developers have issued a final testing version. Released late last week the second Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Beta will be the final pre-release ahead of a planned 28 April final release.

    • Deployment Ease, Experimentation Highlights of Ubuntu 11.04

      The latest and greatest release of Ubuntu — 11.04, or “Natty Narwhal” — is nearly upon us. To get a sense of how the new version situates Ubuntu and the rest of the open source community going forward, I recently spoke with Canonical VP Steve George. Here’s what he had to say about the new release and more:

      For starters, anyone who reads Linux blogs at least once in a while knows by now that Natty’s major claim to fame is the Unity desktop interface, which will become the default in new installations. Traditional GNOME will remain available as an option, at least for this release cycle, as will a 2D version of Unity catered to users whose hardware doesn’t support the video acceleration demanded by the default interface.

    • Ubuntu Transforms Your PC Experience

    • Latest Ubuntu Offers Business-Added Cloud Features and Sleek New Desktop Interface

    • Ubuntu 11.04(Natty) installation screenshots Gallery

      The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the open source community has to offer.

    • How Ubuntu Unity can help Linux really succeed

      What the Linux operating system needs, is for Canonical to really step it up, with the upcoming release of 11.04, and get that wonderful Unity desktop on retail boxes and tablet PCs, such that end users do not have to bother with the installation. That is the single biggest hurdle and, as much as it pains me to say it, Ubuntu and Canonical are probably the only shot Linux has of overcoming this monumental obstacle.

    • Ubuntu Download of the Week Episode 1 – TuxCards

    • Top Things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

      The final release of Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is almost out. It’s scheduled to be out in the 28th of this month. After you actually get done with the installation, there would likely exist a heap of things you still need to take care of. This post will share some interesting insight and ideas about what you can and should do after a successful installation.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Developer Interview: Ronald “wattOS” Ropp

        Biff Baxter, real name Ronald Ropp, is a technology consultant based in Portland, Oregon. He’s also the developer behind wattOS, an Ubuntu derived Linux distribution (see our overview). We were quite impressed with wattOS, so we got in contact with him for some Q+A.

      • Linux Minx XFCE Roller Coaster

      • Peppermint Two Plans Publicized

        Shane Remington, co-founder of the Peppermint operating system (OS), announced plans to merge the previous two Peppermint OSes into one OS to be released as Peppermint Two.

      • Linux Mint 5 LTS Elyssa reached end of life

        Repositories will remain open but no more updates or security fixes will be made available. Users of Linux Mint 5 LTS Elyssa are asked to migrate to Linux Mint 9 LTS Isadora (Long Term Release which will be supported until April 2013).

Devices/Embedded

• TI updates DSP line with new chips, Linux support

  Texas Instruments (TI) announced a new single-core TMS320C6671 member of its multicore TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) family, as well as enhancements to its TMS320C6670 radio system-on-chip (SoC). In addition, the company released a free multicore software development kit (MCSDK) update for its C66x DSPs featuring updated Linux kernel support, optimized DSP libraries, and support for the OpenMP programming model.

• Tablets

  • Nook Color gets tablet makeover

    Barnes & Noble announced an automatic update this week for its Nook Color e-reader that turns the device into more of a low-cost Android tablet. New features offered by the 1.2.0 update include 125 apps, an email application, and support for Adobe Flash, says the online retailer.

Open-source backup

Simon Brock rounds up the open-source options for backing up your critical data

Everyone would like all their work securely backed up, with every version of every file instantly accessible, but few backup solutions come anywhere close to this ideal. And making backups is just boring.

Events

• Linux Fest Northwest 2011 This Weekend!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4: A Review

    Popular web browser Firefox unveiled its newest iteration, dubbed ‘Firefox 4: Tecumseh’, free for download just last month. It introduced several new features, as well as several major improvements on already extant features like Tab Groups and App Tabs. Here’s a quick review.

  • Mozilla Can’t Attract Enough Firefox Testers

    Mozilla’s new Firefox channels may have launched with a bang, but they do not seem to be doing so well now.

Databases

• SkySQL Forms Regional Customer Advisory Boards to Deepen Relationships With Key Customers

  SkySQL Ab, the first choice in affordable MySQL® database solutions for the enterprise and cloud, today announced the creation of regional Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) to facilitate deeper relationships with its growing global customer base. In addition to the opportunity to influence future offerings and network with their peers, members of the boards will be the first to try new SkySQL products and services. The board will also provide insight into their business priorities and strategic directions, allowing SkySQL to meet growing customer demands.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Libre Office 3.4 Beta 1

• Oracle’s OpenOffice Surrender

  It’s hard to believe that it was only about six months ago that LibreOffice was born.

  The free and open source productivity software suite was created, of course, in response to Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) unclear intentions regarding OpenOffice.org, which had long been the community’s suite of choice. At the time, Oracle chose to keep OpenOffice to itself, but now — fast forward to just a little more than a week ago — it appears to be giving it up after all.

Project Releases

• VirtualBox 4.0.6 Released, Install On Ubuntu 11.04

• GLX-2.3 released !

Licensing

• Do we want to be 1991 forever?

  KDE’s licensing policies do not allow GPLv3+, LGPLv3+ and AGPLv3+ software in KDE’s repositiories (I guess it is for git, too, not only for SVN). But do we really want to keep that policy? There are more and more web-applications, ugly cloud-stuff, “software as a service”, is growing, and developers want to protect their Free Software by using the GNU Affero General Public Licens e. KDE is going to be adapted on embedded devices, and we should not care about tivoization? We should only use a 1991 license not targeting a lot of important issues of our times? Why should a KDE-application not be relicensed under the conditions of the GLPv3+ or AGPLv3+? In many cases that may be good.

Programming

• Civility Starts with Me

Standards/Consortia

• Google and friends wrap open video codec in patent shield

  Google has announced a patent-sharing program around WebM in an effort to guard the open source web video format from legal attack.

  On Monday, with a blog post, the company introduced the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative, which brings together companies willing to license each other’s patents related to the format. Founding members include AMD, Cisco Systems, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Matroska, Mozilla, Opera, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the Xiph.org Foundation, as well as Google.

Amazon’s Cloud #fail is a wakeup call

Amazon has been the poster child for everything that is good, right and holy about the cloud.

After today, Amazon will also be demonized for everything that is wrong with their own cloud. Amazon today suffered a major outage crippling hundreds (maybe thousands?) or sites (including a few of my favs like reddit).

For years, Amazon has been suggesting that their elastic cloud (leveraging Linux throughout as the underlying OS) had the ability to scale to meet demand. The general idea was supposed to be massive scalability without any single point of failure.

Time for your cloud gut check

From Amazon’s and other providers’ perspectives – the cloud stubbed toe of this week also highlights how communication and reaction are perhaps as critical as the technical aspects of addressing what’s wrong and fixing it. Open source software also provides lessons here, indicating vendors and providers are best served by transparency and openness. What the message boards and Twitterverse are telling us now is that users will accept some degree of downtime and difficulty, but they want straight information on how long and how severely they will be down. Just as vendors face a challenge in fairly yet effectively pricing and charging for cloud computing, it may be difficult to provide guidance on recovery from an outage, but the same rules of PR crisis management apply: don’t over-promise and don’t under-deliver.

Cloud Haters Jump At Amazon EC2 Fiasco

Google Will Save Videos After All

HAPPY WORLD PENGUIN DAY!

Each year, on or about the 25th of April, the Adelie penguins of Ross Island leave their brooding grounds and swim to their winter sanctuary northwest of the Balleny Islands. Some decided to mark the occasion by including all penguins and dubbing the day World Penguin Day.

Most penguins do participate in migratory habits. Why they favor some places more than others as their destination is the current work of biologists. Current belief is that the Adelies favor a place that has more pack ice, thereby providing more protection. This appears to be true, as the Davis Station Adelies migrate north, then west, staying close to the Antarctic continent. Also, Antarctica’s days become much shorter and the Adelies do not feed well in the dark. Traveling north, these birds have longer days in order to fish and feed.

Hardware

• Breaking in a Kingston SSD

  adation over time. Memory devices make use of internal garbage collection to regain areas no longer being used by programs. But due to certain drawbacks with garbage collection (such as time required to move data around), TRIM is recommended as well. The TRIM function detects and “informs” an SSD which blocks are no longer being used and can be wiped and reused. In Linux, one can use TRIM with ext3 and ext4 by adding the word discard to the options when mounting (or in /etc/fstab). An example of use could be: /dev/sda3 / ext4 acl,user_xattr,noatime,discard 1 1.

Finance

• Hidden Handouts to Corporations Found in Walker’s Budget

  The almost $200 million in tax cuts that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has given to corporations have been both lauded and hated by the public and media. When it was discovered that businesses like M&I Bank and others who were large contributors to Walker’s gubernatorial campaign were receiving extra provisions through changes in the consolidated reporting law, questions started cropping up about why Walker was giving handouts to corporations even though he declared the state broke.

• What Did Walker Admit?

  Union supporters celebrated and right-wingers raged when the Associated Press reported on April 15 that Governor Scott Walker admitted Wisconsin saves no money by “weakening government workers’ collective bargaining rights.” When responding to a question from Rep. Dennis Kucinich during congressional testimony, did Walker really admit the union-busting bill costs no money? And will implementing the annual recertification requirement actually cost Wisconsin taxpayers?

• Insurers Getting Rich By Not Paying for Care

  UnitedHealth Group, the biggest health insurer in terms of revenue and market value, earned so much more during the first three months of this year than Wall Street expected that investors rushed to buy shares of every one of the seven health insurers that comprise the managed care sector. In my view, it would be more accurate to call it the managed care cartel.

• What happens to our £220bn annual procurement spend?

  Any business needs to know where its money goes. This is especially so if it is spending £220bn a year – the equivalent of £3500 per adult and child in the UK – purchasing goods and services on our behalf. That is nearly 20% of our gross domestic product.

  The need for decent data on how it is spent and with whom has been highlighted in several reports including a National Audit Office report last May, Sir Philip Green’s report last September and my own, Towards Tesco, published by the Institute of Directors.

Privacy

• State Police can suck data out of cell phones in under two minutes

  You don’t want to be pulled over by the police in Michigan. When law enforcement wants half a million dollars to produce documents for a FOIA request, something is not right. And since the high-tech mobile forensic device in question can grab data in one-and-a-half minutes off more than 3,000 different cell phone models, it could be used during minor traffic violations to conduct suspicionless and warrantless searches without the phone owner having any idea that all their phone data was now in the hands of authorities.

• Big Apple, Big Google, Big Brother

• Android Location Tracking is Opt-In

  The iOS operating system tracks your location without your knowledge and stores the data it collects in an unencrypted form on your phone. For Android users who maybe wondering the same thing, no, your location is will not be tracked without your express permission and approval.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

    • The Digital Economy Act: where we go now

      Yesterday morning Justice Kenneth Parker handed down his ruling on the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. The Judge dismissed all grounds save for one aspect of the claim about the costs imposed on ISPs. The ruling means that Justice Parker deemed the other provisions of the Digital Economy Act are consistent with EU law.

      So what does this mean for those of us who place privacy, freedom of expression and due process ahead of chasing fictional losses from the creative industries’ revenues? On the face of it the decision feels like bad news for those who see important flaws in the Act. But it just means that this particular route to halting what we think is a damaging law may not work, depending on whether BT and TalkTalk appeal.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Sony should pay €100 to man for OtherOS removal, consumer board says

Finnish consumer board balks at Sony’s killing of OtherOS functionality, and thinks the consumer electronics giant should pay up.
A Finnish man purchased a PlayStation 3 (PS3) console last year for €268.90. At the time of purchase, the product was being presented with capabilities to install an alternative operating system, such as a Linux distribution.

I’m considering not to renew your contract, Windows

Furthermore, there is a powerful antagonist that wants XP out. It’s Microsoft, which has decided not to cover XP against certain diseases and marginalized him regarding the new browser they released. This company wants XP’s reputation to taint as much as possible so that they can ask me to replace him with the brother of that Vista punk that came looking for a job four years ago. So, do I need an employee that is even betrayed by the firm he represents?

Linux is Spoiling Me!!

After reading an article about how tests have shown that antivirus solutions, in spite of their struggle to keep Windows systems protected, have fallen behind malware threats (MS Security Essentials among these)–and one company has actually fallen prey of hackers itself–, I realized that Linux is spoiling me.

[...]

Still, I’ve been able to get rid of 22 infections I got in one second after I plugged my USB key into an infected XP computer. It took me only 2 seconds and a single click to clean it. Yes, no AV required!

The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation

There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don’t realize about their Linux systems… this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and how it essentially nullifies all the desktop security. I wrote about it a few times, I spoke about it a few times, yet I still come across people who don’t realize it all the time.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Google to sell subscriptions to Chrome OS notebooks?

  Google will sell Chrome OS notebooks and accompanying software services for a $10 to $20 monthly subscription fee, according to a report citing a “reliable source”.

Kernel Space

• Mobile Users Beware: Linux Has Major Power Regression

• Kernel comment: Perseverance pays off

  Today, there are open source Linux drivers for all major Wi-Fi chips, which was unimaginable five years ago. The constant pressure for open source drivers has thus paid off, and this may also work in other areas in the long term.

  “Buy a Centrino notebook, and then the Wi-Fi chipset will work with Linux.” Five years ago, such simplifications were more common because a lot of the Wi-Fi components either did not run on Linux or took a lot of tweaking, say, with Ndiswrapper and Driverloader to get the NDIS drivers intended for use with Windows to run on Linux. Internet forums contained thousands of comments on these issues, and people repeatedly said that the Linux kernel needed a stable API for external drivers; otherwise, manufacturers would never offer proper Linux drivers for Wi-Fi hardware.

• Mobile Users Beware: Linux Has Major Power Regression

• The Linux Power Problem Is Widespread, Hits Desktops Too

  The major Linux power regression situation seems to only be getting worse at this point. Following the Mobile Users Beware: Linux Has Major Power Regression and The Tests Showing Ubuntu 11.04 On A Power Consumption Binge, a variety of feedback has come in. There’s the usual FUD that it’s “Moronix” benchmarks and the like, but the fact of the matter is it’s a very real problem and it’s about to bite Ubuntu 11.04 and other Linux distributions planning to ship with 2.6.38 kernel or later.

Applications

• PDF Shuffler: A Dead Simple, Dead Serious, Dead-On Winner

  If all you do with PDF (Portable Document Format) files is view them, you have very little need for an application the likes of PDF Shuffler. But if you find yourself in desperate need of a tool to let you slice and dice one or more PDF files, then this little app may well be one of the best computing tools you will use on your Linux desktop.

• Creeper strikes back

  Yesterday I wrote a tiny article about Creeper, just for the sake of sharing it. Well, turns out I got a lot of positive feedback, so first of all, thank you!

  About packaging: I’m not sure wether Creeper deserves a package yet, since right now it’s more “pieces of code working together” than an actual app, but why not. I’d still feel bad to ship it right now, since it doesn’t remember anything and isn’t 100% accurate at recognizing windows.

• Productivity Software For Your Desktop

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Weekend Project: Using an IRC Proxy to Stay Logged in from Anywhere

  • Gentoo and EPSON scanners

  • Daily Journal – Journal application for Ubuntu that keeps one page per day

  • Vi: An Introduction

  • Change GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell Or Classic) GTK / Mutter / Metacity Theme

  • Running Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) unity 3D on virtualbox 4.x

  • Which ports is my Linux computer / Server listening to?

  • Create an encrypted USB drive for Ubuntu Linux

  • Two small additions

  • Nginx+Varnish compared to Nginx

  • 10 Easter Eggs in Linux

    Happy easter to all, what’s better than celebrate this holiday taking a look at what have hidden the programmers in our software ?
    A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book or crossword. The term was coined—according to Warren Robinett—by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure.

• Games

  • Humble Indie Bundle’s Source Releases

    The Humble Indie Bundles (HIB) have a tradition of at least part of the bundled games releasing their source.

    While four of five games released source code under FOSS licenses in HIB1, only one released the source in HIB2 under a FOSS license (according to this comment, a license similar to LWJGL’s).

  • Frozenbyte releases Shadowgrounds source code

    The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle has just broken $700,000 in sales with Notch and Garry Newman dominating the top contributor board. Keeping the Humble Bundle tradition alive, Frozenbyte has just released the source code for its classic, top-down, space marines vs. aliens shooters, Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds Survivor. Anyone who has purchased the bundle, can now download the source files from their Humble Bundle download page. We’ve seen a lot of fun projects emerge from the source code during previous bundles (like Aquaria getting ported to the PSP) so we are excited to see what happens next.

  • Nebulous

  • Introducing The R5 Game Engine

    With open-source game developers, the ioquake3 game engine is quite popular to use as a base since the Quake 3 / id Tech 3 engine is well-developed and famous thanks to id Software and then their kid generosity to open-source it when it reached the end of its commercial life. But there are many other open-source game engines out there too, including a new one that’s just recently come about: r5ge, short for the R5 Game Engine.

  • Vertigo Beta

Desktop Environments

• Window Maker – The (Almost) Forgotten Window Manager

  With the big two desktop environments changing massively over the last few years and getting quite a bit heavier at the same time I thought I’ld look again at another alternative that’s been a staple in the area of window managers since release in 1997 – Window Maker. Initially it was WindowMaker by the way, but due to a naming conflict this had to be changed. It is designed to emulate the look and feel of the NeXTstep GUI, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDM In KDE SC 4.7 To Play With GRUB2

    The KDM code for KDE SC 4.7 has just gained one small but noteworthy feature: GRUB2 support. While the KDE Display Manager gaining support for the GRUB2 boot-loader may seem nonchalant, it’s actually quite useful. Now from the KDE Display Manager, users are able to select another GRUB boot entry without affecting the default choice or having to wait for the boot-loader to appear when rebooting.

  • KDE: Strength in Abstraction

    I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified. Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop. Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done. We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone. This is where KDE excels.

  • Marble, Virtual Interactive Globe

    Marble has been designed to be a virtual interactive globe and world atlas that you can use to look-up information. The cross-platform application has recently been updated to version 1.1, reason enough to take a closer look at the software.

    The main interface that you see after installation displays a globe and several controls on screen. you can use the mouse to rotate or zoom in and out of the globe which works on first glance similar to Google Earth or comparable programs.

  • QApt sexiness…

  • KDE Commit Digest for 17 April 2011

  • Blessed by Trinity…

    I am long established fan of KDE3 (Trinity). There might be 2 reasons:
    1) My first ever Linux was SLAX which is based on KDE3.
    2) I prefer old-school menu style with one column in main part with branches for each of them. When I see several columns in main menu I quickly get lost in navigation. It’s like Win95 style compared to Win7 style. Of KDE3 compared to Mint Menu or KDE4 in some Linuxes.
    That’s why every Tux which is blessed by Trinity is interesting for me. That’s why I am very thankful to Sirius Lee who gave me [...]

    Yes, today my guinea pig is Trinity Kubuntu.

  • 19 things we’d change about KDE

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome 3 Look & Feel

    But after looking at all the ways in wich people like to work, and set up things, I don’t think that one way of doing something should be the end-all be-all of an Open Desktop Enviroment.

  • GNOME 3 Live image version 1.1.0 released

    This new image (1.1.0) is now based on GNOME:STABLE:3.0 repository and contains all security and bugfix updates for openSUSE 11.4.

  • On desktop re-invention

    My opinion is that GNOME 3 made a fundamental mistake in breaking with tradition. Innovation on that scale should target new less well established platforms, such as netbooks, tablets, and the like. Places where there’s still opportunity to define the Next Big Thing. Innovate with the new, don’t break with decades of established user experience on the old.

  • Yet another GNOME 3 user review

    I really enjoy using GNOME Shell, the overall experience is a lot better than GNOME 2 and the fonts seem more clear to me. Although I prefer the original workspace switch concept, the changes made by developers right before the release turned the multiple workspace feature into an interesting automatic workspace creator.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Resulinux 3.1

  • Clonezilla 1.2.8-29

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 Beta 2 is Available for Testing| Screenshots Tour

    Beta testers are fortunate enough to lay their hands on new login manager functionalities, a new launcher and welcome application, overall look and feel enhancements, new panel, LibreOffice 3.3.0, and new artwork with a default theme.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Gnome 3: Not Ready for Prime Time in Fedora 15

      I’ve been intrigued by the Gnome 3 desktop and the design decisions that the Gnome project has decided to test. Hearing some members of the Gnome community explain the design decisions in person was very interesting, and helpful when transitioning to the Gnome shell. And I’m proud that the Fedora Project is continuing to lead by incorporating new technologies and designs First.

    • Fedora and GNOME branding drama: Missing the big picture

      Some of the folks on the Fedora marketing list are in a tizzy over the amount of Fedora branding present, or not, in the upcoming Fedora 15 release.

      While I applaud the Fedora folks for being concerned about marketing, I think that they’re losing sight of the big picture — the actual impact of GNOME or Fedora “branding,” in the Fedora desktop is minimal at best.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project mourns the loss of Adrian von Bidder

    The Debian Project has lost an active member of its community. Adrian von Bidder (cmot) died on April 17th.

    [...]

    Adrian founded the “NTP Pool” (crowd-sourced time synchronisation), which our project has since fully adopted.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Natty Narwhal About to Surface

      However, the Linux versus Microsoft story line is an old one in the tech industry, with little sign of the battle lines being redrawn.

    • Canonical: The Tablet Will Never Surpass The PC

      Canonical today announced its latest Ubuntu Linux release, version 11.04 Natty Narwhal. It follows the trend toward smaller screens with a streamlined interface, but developer Canonical says it will not follow the tablet frenzy – at least not yet.

      Ubuntu 11.04 will be available for download on April 28 and arrive with significant changes in its interface. It will include Unity, which first appeared in Ubuntu 10.10 for netbooks back in October 2010. Unity features an app launcher on the left of the screen. There is also additional touch screen support that now includes gestures for tasks such as scrolling as well as expanding and contracting screens.

    • Canonical shut down Sounder?

      It seems a story is making its way around the various Linux news organizations that is blatantly misrepresented. THIS STORY is the one making its rounds. It claims that Canonical takes another step against the Community. This is totally wrong in every sense of the word wrong. Let me break it down for those of you who actually believe this on the shut-down of the Sounder Mailing List.

    • Canonical shut down Sounder?

      The blogger Anthony Papillion has penned an article about how Canonical has taken another step against the community. It’s all about how Canonical have shut down the sounder mailing list and irc channels because they’re off topic and wildly out of control.

      I have many concerns relating to Canonical and it’s conduct, but this isn’t one of them.

      The first point Anthony raises is easy to debunk. The Community Council was the body to shutter the group, not Canonical. This was a community decision to help make sure the community is healthy. You can check what people were involved and if they work for Canonical or not.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Tiptoes Into OpenStack

      Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed the Natty Narwhal, will be a major release for the Linux distribution’s cloud aspirations. Ubuntu 11.04 will be the first release that includes the OpenStack open source cloud platform, as well as the Eucalpytus platform, providing a new set of cloud deployment platform options for Linux developers.

      “We want people to think of Ubunutu as a Linux platform that is cloud native,” Steve George vice president, business development of Canonical told InternetNews.com.

    • Ubuntu shuns tablets in its fight with Microsoft

      As Canonical, maintainer of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, readies its latest release which sports a dramatic new graphical user interface supporting touch-based input, it quashed the idea that is it preparing to enter the tablet market.

      The outfit has confirmed it will be releasing Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ on 28 April 2011. With Ubuntu 11.04 comes the Unity desktop in place of the familiar GNOME, marking one of the biggest user-facing changes in the distribution’s history.

    • The Tests Showing Ubuntu 11.04 On A Power Consumption Binge

      This is the prequel to Mobile Users Beware: Linux Has Major Power Regression and Uff Da! The Linux Power Bug Even More Mysterious. It was written in advance of tracking down the issue to a matter in the upstream Linux kernel. Though as the Phoronix Test Suite stack is presently bisecting and analyzing the kernel during the period in question (Linux 2.6.37 to 2.6.38), this article is being published now and hopefully on Easter Sunday or Monday the actual offending commit will be known along with much more information. This bug has also now been confirmed independent of Phoronix by at least six separate parties that I’m aware of, with reports of Natty either consuming excessive power or a very significant increase in heat output compared to Ubuntu 10.10. These independent reports have occurred on a range of hardware — including desktops. There is also at least one bug report on the matter for Ubuntu 11.04.

    • My thoughts on Unity

      Today is a good day to comment on Ubuntu Unity. I had refrained from doing so in the past largely because it seemed unfair to do so while it was in it’s formative process and not yet clear where they were trying to go. However, with the release of Ubuntu 11.04 imminent, and now with a much clearer idea of what the intent and design really is, it seemed an appropriate time to do so.

      Perhaps I am not choosing to be as critical of Unity as some are, for there is good ideas in it, and I know some good intentions intended. However I do feel it fails to deliver an effective user experience as a result of it’s design rather than in incompleteness, and I think this is because the people involved did not choose to go far enough in what they were trying to do.

    • Interview with Jessica Ledbetter

      Jessica Ledbetter: Hello everyone, I’m Jessica Ledbetter (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/jledbetter). I’ve been a web developer for a Department of Energy lab in Virginia for about 10 years, and I code primarily in Java and ColdFusion, plus freelance in PHP. I was the first in my family to go to college, and, so far, the only one to finish. I worked while getting my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and later a Master’s degree in Information Technology.

    • Full Circle Magazine #48

      This month:
      * Command and Conquer.
      * How-To : Program in Python – Part 22, LibreOffice – Part 3, Finding eBooks and Using an Arduino in Ubuntu.
      * Linux Lab – Swappiness Part One.
      * Review – Remastersys.
      * Top 5 – Project Management Tools.
      plus: Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games, My Story, and much much more!

    • A tour of Software Center 3.1| Natty’s new Software Manager | New User series #2

    • Ubuntu Unity 2D tweaking tool lets you adjust the Launcher, Dash & enable compositing

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Peppermint Two Wallpaper Challenge

        Hello to all from Peppermint Headquarters in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina. As many of you know we are poised to release the much anticipated Peppermint Two operating system. We are in the final stages of development and now is the time where we need to seek talented artists to apply the finishing touches – We need a Default Wallpaper that is creative and eye-catching !!

      • Moving from Ubuntu 10.10 to Linux Mint 10

        With a long Easter weekend available to me and with thoughts of forthcoming changes in the world of Ubuntu, I got to wondering about the merits of moving my main home PC to Linux Mint instead. Though there is a rolling variant based on Debian, I went for the more usual one based on Ubuntu that uses GNOME. For the record, Linux Mint isn’t just about the GNOME desktop but you also can have it with Xfce, LXDE and KDE desktops as well. While I have been known to use Lubuntu and like its LXDE implementation, I stuck with the option of which I have most experience.

      • Linux Mint Debian Edition Xfce review

        Out of the box, it is a lot more usable than Sabayon 5.5 Xfce.

      • An unlikely hero: Xubuntu

      • Bodhi Linux Road Map

        It’s been about a month since our Bodhi Linux 1.0.0 (stable) release and I would like to say thank you to everyone that has helped make it a success! We have climbed to rank #50 on distrowatch and have seen about 16,000 downloads in this last month. If there was ever any doubt that we are filling a needed spot in the Linux world, then I am fairly certain it is gone now.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Insider’s look at Nokia’s exit from MeeGo

      In MeeGo now, upstream MeeGo is completely 100% open both the code and the processes, though this is a bit of a work in progress, of course because the stake holders in the companies that are involved quite often kind of keep their corporate culture without realizing that they should discuss things in the public.

  • Android

    • The Toshiba Regza AT300

      For those of you who keep up with tech news, you’ll remember Toshiba saying something about a new tablet they had in the works way back in January some time. Well, they’ve now announced a price, a release date, technical specifications, and a name: They’ve christened their tablet the Toshiba Regza AT300.

    • US Army picks Android to power its first smartphone

      The Army wants every soldier to carry a smartphone to stay networked. It doesn’t yet have a program for that, having spent the last year working through the implications of what it might mean to have such a system—like, for instance, what operating system would power it. An initial answer: Google’s Android.

      A prototype device running Android called the Joint Battle Command-Platform, developed by tech nonprofit MITRE, is undergoing tests. The development kit behind it, called the Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment, will be released to app creators in July, the Army says.

      But until then, the envisioned apps for the Joint Battle Command-Platform will run a gambit of Army tasks. There will be a mapping function like the kinds the defense industry is developing for soldier smartphones and tablets. A Blue Force Tracker program will keep tabs on where friendly forces are. “Critical messaging” will exchange crucial data like medevac requests and on the ground reporting.

• Tablets

  • Motorola XOOM pricing falls in line at Amazon Prime

Open source gaming – or things I do when I should be working

“What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself” – Steve Wozniak

FOSS marketing is stupid

I have been reluctant to get into one of this potentially flamey posts again, as they seem to result in the most vague comments and little outcome. Yet this issue is important and therefore I’ll take my time today to get it out. As Dion points out very valuable and thoughtful points about the presentation of KDE, also others both in KDE and on the outside use the term “marketing” self-evidently when they talk about presentational, distributional or promotional issues. Though using this buzz-term seems to attract some people to join the related groups and efforts it makes you look pretty dumb to outside people who know what marketing is. Instead of seeming more professional and mature projects, it shows how little FOSS people still understand about what they do economically. They know a lot about the details and many FOSS-enthusiasts seek for ways to transfer the FOSS-attitude of openness and collaboration to the “old” economy, yet the terminology is still caught in the “old” ways.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla: Soon Your Add-Ons Will Work With Firefox Beta and Aurora

  • Firefox 4 at 100 Million Downloads

    As you can see, Firefox 4 is already well above the 8% mark while IE 9, is right around 3%. (I’m sure you can also see the point in the graph where Microsoft started enabling Windows Updates for IE 9)

  • Firefox 4 zooms past 100 million downloads

  • Firefox 5 Is Looking Great

    Firefox 5, which is currently available on the Aurora channel, has received some nice polish that streamlines the primary interface in really nice but subtle ways.

Databases

• MySQL, State of the Ecosystem 2011

  It was a radical thought at the time. In part because when I expressed it, I did it not only outwardly to the world, but inwardly to the company as well. Many at the time thought that the ecosystem danced at the whim of the MySQL AB entity. When Peter Zaitsev left to form Percona I remember very clearly a management meeting where there was a hubris that his business would amount to nothing, and that he was missing his opportunity to be a part of something greater. History is of course writing a very different story.

  So how is the ecosystem?

  It turns out it is pretty healthy.

  I wasn’t sure if that was the case up until a couple of weeks ago. I was having lunch with Moshe Shadmon of ScaleDB and I asked him “Do you think the market is collapsing?”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Will Oracle alienate Java community next?

• Google’s showdown with Oracle over Android will go to trial before November

  Oracle sued Google last year claiming that Google had infringed Java patents in the Android operating system. Initially Oracle said that Google had infringed its Java patents but then filed an amended complaint to allege Google “directly copied” its Java code. However with Judge Alsup’s comments, it doesn’t look like he’s of a mind to let this lawsuit drag out for very long.

• Oracle Advances NetBeans for Java 7

  Not everyone in the open source community has had a positive experience with Oracle. The NetBeans community however is thriving under Oracle, with multiple releases and nearly a million active users.

  This week Oracle continued its support for NetBeans with its third release since the Sun acquisition. NetBeans 7 provides new support for the upcoming Java 7 language release, in a move that is all about fostering Java adoption.

• Oracle Patches 73 Vulnerabilities in April Update

• LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 2 Released

  Just one week since beta 1 hit the Internet, LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 2 was released today. These developmental releases fulfill the plans to release weekly betas until final. The original 3.4 release date has slipped a bit from the earlier May 2 estimate, but is on track for May 31.

Education

• GNU/Linux in Russia

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • SproutCore 1.5 Released

    We’re excited to announce the final release of SproutCore 1.5. It’s been almost four months since 1.4.5 shipped, and we have lots of exciting new stuff for you.

BSD

• Running OpenBSD in a live environment with MarBSD-X

  After a bit of searching I found a new-to-me OpenBSD Live project called MarBSD. I downloaded the X image, burned it to a CD and fired it up on the Lenovo G555.

  It had been awhile since I tested an OpenBSD live image on the Lenovo. I still had to manually bring up the network, since no BSDs automatically bring it to life. My previous method worked.

• A company helps bring OpenBSD to corporate desktops (yes, I said DESKTOPS)

  A very interesting article in Undeadly — the OpenBSD Journal tells the story of m:tier, a London consultancy that works with Fortune 500 companies to equip them with OpenBSD firewalls, servers and desktops.

• Installing OpenBSD to a bootable USB flash drive

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fellowship interview with Michiel de Jong

  Michiel de Jong: There are several ways you could explain it; my favourite angle is the software freedom angle. Software freedom used to mean the right to control (use, share, study and improve) the source code / the program that the application executes – the definition that FSFE use. Back in the day, that was enough. It was taken for granted that you already had control the data that the application handled; of course you do, it’s on your computer, or on a server where you have full access to at least the data that your applications are using.

  For installed software, both desktop and server, that view used to be accurate: if you controlled the source code you had software freedom. But then, slowly, installed software was pushed further away from the user by hosted software (stuff like Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter). Hosted websites like these aren’t primarily a source of information; they are interactive applications, and in this context software freedom doesn’t exist.

  It’s absurd that hosted software makes you surrender your data to the author of the application in question, but it’s what happens. It happened slowly, because informational websites became dynamic websites, and those dynamic websites then started accepting user input and slowly became interactive software. Now fully hosted software is widely used, and people use it to replace locally installed desktop applications.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Acer Web Surf Station packs simple browser/media into Full HD monitor

    Acer‘s latest may look like a regular monitor, but the Acer Web Surf Station is actually the latest all-in-one internet terminal for people who really don’t want to invite a PC into their lives. Based around a 24-inch Full HD 1920 x 1080 LCD display, the Web Surf Station has an integrated web browser together with a media player – using Acer’s Clear.fi branded DLNA – that can stream content across a network (or indeed play it back from USB media).

Programming

• That’s a lot of git repositories

  Many people assume GitHub is filled with Ruby and Javascript projects. Let’s look at the numbers.

Standards/Consortia

• Google’s showdown with Oracle over Android will go to trial before November

• Mmm mmm good – YouTube videos now served in WebM

  If you travel abroad frequently, you know that charging your electronic devices is not always an easy task. Power adapters for cellphones and computers don’t always fit into local power outlets, meaning you have to pack converters. Think of video on the web in a similar way. Currently, there are countless devices used to record videos and hundreds of different video file formats. Even more, certain web browsers that you use to view video online only accept certain ‘codecs’ – or programs used to encode, transmit and playback video files – and others require plug-ins (converters) to integrate the video file with the browser.

• Google Starts Converting YouTube Videos to WebM, Open Source Format

• Why open standards are always a good idea

  The necessity for open and unencumbered standards is an unending issue for open and closed software. Richard Hillesley looks at the reasons why open standards are always a good idea…

Former engineer who sued Cisco now faces criminal charges

A onetime Cisco engineer who had sued his former employer, alleging it monopolized the business of servicing and maintaining Cisco equipment, has been charged by U.S. authorities with hacking.

Peter Alfred-Adekeye, who left Cisco in 2005 to form two networking support companies, has been charged with 97 counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer system without authorization for the purposes of commercial advantage, according to an arrest warrant. He faces 10 years in prison and a US$250,000 fine if convicted on the charges.

The Lawsuit’s in the Past, But Taco Bell is Still on the Offensive

As we told you on Tuesday, the law firm Beasley Allen recently dropped its high-profile lawsuit against Taco Bell which claimed that the meat used in Taco Bell’s food was something other than advertised.

Now, most large corporate clients would use the voluntary dropping of a lawsuit as an opportunity to do, well, nothing. To quietly let the matter drop and move on with other matters at hand.

10 more classic mistakes in sci-fi movies

That’s it, another supreme list compiled. After overrated movies and the first part, this comes as the new crown jewel of poetic justice, wielded in the hands of Dedoimedo. Science fiction is a lovely genre, but some things are just not meant to be. I’m especially proud of the fecal weapons in the last point raised. That was a stroke of brilliance. But all other mistakes are valid annoyances that movie producers try to slip under the radar, unnoticed. Unfortunately for them, I’ve got the eye of the tiger and nothing gets past. The laws of physics must be obeyed.

I hope you liked this. There might yet be a third part, but it depends on YOU. Send me your ideas, the things that bother you from the scientific and technological perspective, and they might feature in the next article. That would be all. Have fun science-fictioning.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs, the Tallest Midget in the Room

  What passes for top-notch financial journalism these days is an in depth report in the New York Times about why Goldman Sachs, the most successful of all Wall Street firms, is so modest. Amid billions of dollars in profits, a rising share price, the big Wall Street firm doesn’t like to take full credit for its success.

  The Times seems to think the Goldman brass, led by CEO Lloyd Blankfein, is being too modest mainly because the firm is afraid to flaunt its brilliance at making money during a time of economic hardship. The writer implores Blankfein & Co. to remember that making money is good for shareholders and taxpayers, and thus they should “take a bow. Don’t hide behind the curtain” and starting telling the world how great they really are.

• Banks 1, nation states nil

  The battle between the banks and nation states is shaping up as something that lies between a phony war and a rout.

  The bald facts are that three years after the crisis in which banking almost brought down the global economy, the biggest banks are bigger, more global and more entrenched in their positions courtesy of a now all-but-explicit government guarantee.

• Best Way to Raise Campaign Money? Investigate Banks

  A hilarious report has come out courtesy of the National Institute of Money in State Politics, showing that Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller – who is coordinating the investigation into the banks’ improper mortgage dealings – increased his campaign contributions from the finance sector this year by a factor of 88! He has raised $261,445 from finance, insurance and real estate contributors since he announced that he was going to be coordinating the investigation into improper foreclosure practices. That is 88 times as much as they gave him not over last year, but over the previous decade.

  This is about as perfect an example of how American politics works as you’ll ever see. This foreclosure issue is a monstrous story that is somehow escaping national headlines; essentially, all of the largest banks in the country have been engaged in an ongoing fraud and tax evasion scheme that among other things has resulted in many hundreds of billions in investor losses, and hundreds of thousands of improper foreclosures. Last week, the 14 largest mortgage lenders a group that includes bailout all-stars like Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, managed to negotiate a settlement with the federal government that will mandate some financial relief to homeowners who have been victims of improper foreclosure practices. It’s unclear yet exactly what damages and fines will be involved in the federal settlement, or how many homeowners will be affected. But certainly there are some who believe the federal settlement was a political end-run around the states’ efforts to extract their own deal from the banks.

• My Comment Turned Post – Criminal Activity Never To Be Prosecuted

• Spitzer on Institutional Corruption on Wall Street

• Senate Investigations Subcommittee Releases Levin-Coburn Report On the Financial Crisis

  #
  # Investment Banks and Structured Finance. Investment banks reviewed by the Subcommittee assembled and sold billions of dollars in mortgage-related investments that flooded financial markets with high-risk assets. They charged $1 to $8 million in fees to construct, underwrite, and market a mortgage-backed security, and $5 to $10 million per CDO. New documents detail how Deutsche Bank helped assembled a $1.1 billion CDO known as Gemstone 7, stood by as it was filled it with low-quality assets that its top CDO trader referred to as “crap” and “pigs,” and rushed to sell it “before the market falls off a cliff.” Deutsche Bank lost $4.5 billion when the mortgage market collapsed, but would have lost even more if it had not cut its losses by selling CDOs like Gemstone. When Goldman Sachs realized the mortgage market was in decline, it took actions to profit from that decline at the expense of its clients. New documents detail how, in 2007, Goldman’s Structured Products Group twice amassed and profited from large net short positions in mortgage related securities. At the same time the firm was betting against the mortgage market as a whole, Goldman assembled and aggressively marketed to its clients poor quality CDOs that it actively bet against by taking large short positions in those transactions. New documents and information detail how Goldman recommended four CDOs, Hudson, Anderson, Timberwolf, and Abacus, to its clients without fully disclosing key information about those products, Goldman’s own market views, or its adverse economic interests. For example, in Hudson, Goldman told investors that its interests were “aligned” with theirs when, in fact, Goldman held 100% of the short side of the CDO and had adverse interests to the investors, and described Hudson’s assets were “sourced from the Street,” when in fact, Goldman had selected and priced the assets without any third party involvement. New documents also reveal that, at one point in May 2007, Goldman Sachs unsuccessfully tried to execute a “short squeeze” in the mortgage market so that Goldman could scoop up short positions at artificially depressed prices and profit as the mortgage market declined.

Privacy

• Transparency and Privacy

  One of the keys to a successful open source community is the equality of every participant. An community that is open-by-rule will have strong values around transparency as well as respecting its participants privacy and independence. Such a community will also be unlikely to have a copyright assignment benefiting a commercial party. Here’s why.

• Android data tied to users? Some say yes

  Like iOS devices, Android phones do collect location information in a local file. But they seem to erase it relatively quickly instead of saving it forever.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • More Wayne Gray. No! Again? Still?! Yes. He Wants to Reopen Discovery in the USPTO Dispute

    Even I finally got my bellyful of SCO. But there is yet one guy left who still can’t get enough. And so it transpires that there are new developments in the never-ending trademark dispute that was initiated by X/Open in 2001 when Wayne Gray tried to trademark the mark INUX. If you recall, the dispute was put on ice back in the summer of 2010, pending resolution of Gray’s civil litigation.

    He lost. Big time. Now he’s back at the USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, filing a motion to reopen discovery there. Yes. He claims he has discovered “dispositive new evidence” from the SCO v. Novell trial, and he wants five more months of discovery to flesh it out.

• Copyrights

  • Righthaven Defies Court, Ignores Domain Name Ruling

    Last Friday, the Chief Judge of the federal court in Nevada, which is overseeing more than 200 Righthaven copyright cases, dismissed Righthaven’s meritless claim to seize its victim’s domain names. In each case so far, Righthaven contended that the mere hosting of any infringing material means that the entire domain name was forfeit to the copyright troll. Chief Judge Hunt rejected that claim, explaining that the “Court finds that Righthaven’s request for such relief fails as a matter of law and is dismissed.”