05.16.12

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Will your site’s media play for Linux users? Here’s why it better.

• Webzilla Webhosting Adds Linux Administration Services to Its List of Standard Client Services

• Linux Warehouse appoints new managing director

  Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for southern Africa, today announced the appointment of its new Managing Director, Jan-Jan van der Vyver.

• Desktop

  • Tens of Thousands of Google Employees Use Ubuntu

    During the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) that took place in Oakland, USA, Thomas Bushnell from Google talked about how Ubuntu is used by Google developers.

  • Here’s why Linux is innovating on the desktop

    Is the Linux desktop catching up on Windows? TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen takes a look a the newest versions of Linux and tells why they’re moving in the right direction.

    Whether or not you like GNOME 3 and Ubuntu Unity, who could deny the real innovation that the developers behind those desktops have brought to bear? If you then take desktops such as Enlightenment (above) and Xfce, you can make a very strong case for more innovation going on with the Linux desktop than in any other area.

• Server

  • IBM’s Powerlinux brings Power7 chips and Linux together

  • StrandVision offering Linux digital signage player

    StrandVision Digital Signage recently announced that it is offering a preconfigured Linux digital signage player appliance that supports playback of digital signage content. The graphics-optimized unit is able to operate independently while automatically receiving content updates over the Internet.

  • IBM Linux Support Gets an Upgrade

    IBM announced boosts for its Linux support, including expert integrated systems and Linux-specific PowerLinux servers. While the IBM-Linux relationship is long-standing (Big Blue has provided Linux support since 1999), these developments underline a growing trend toward open source support by major IT vendors.

  • The rumors of the demise of the mainframe are greatly exaggerated

  • ARM Arrives – Calxeda Shows Real Hardware Running Linux

    I said last year that this would happen sometime in the first half of this year, but for some reason my colleagues and clients have kept asking me exactly when we would see a real ARM server running a real OS. How about now?

  • Calxeda Demo of ARM-Based Server Ups Ante in Intel Competition

  • KePlast i5000 injection molding machine control system now with Linux

    The proven KePlast i5000 platform is KEBA’s high-end solution for the efficient control of all types of injection moulding machines, regardless of whether they are hydraulic, electric or hybrid.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 265 – It Doesn’t Affect Your Ball Control

• Kernel Space

  • The V3 Hot Seat: Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin

    The Linux community is one of the biggest and most prominent examples of open source software collaboration. Increasingly the community is gaining more recognition, particularly from the UK government, which has made a commitment to the open source movement in its ICT Futures agenda.

  • Booting up: Tools and tips for systemd, a Linux init tool

    These days, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva and a few other distributions use the systemd init tool for system starts. It includes its own tools for configuration and diagnosis, and the tricks it needs when the system doesn’t start are different from sysvinit’s.

  • Linux 3.4-rc7

  • Download Linux Kernel 3.4 Release Candidate 7

  • Linux at 21: A new Linux Foundation t-shirt contest

    The Linux Foundation, in honor of Linux’s 21st birthday is having another t-shirt competition. So, if you really love Linux, can make cool t-shirt designs (That leaves me right out), then this contest is for you!

    This year the theme is “Inspired by Linux” and calls on people from around the world to create a design with that in mind.

• Applications

  • LinBerry Hopes to Make it Easier to Use Your BlackBerry on Linux

    Over the years Barry by NetDirect has been my go to solution for using my BlackBerry with Linux. It was worth it just for charging your BlackBerry at a faster rate. Now it seems like there is another alternative called LinBerry that I am guessing is based off Barry but makes things a little bit easier to get off the ground. Michelle @CrackBerry noticed that the LinBerry project has come out of beta since its alpha launch in 2010 and allows you to perform a backup of your device and allowing you to do things live view, edit, and delete contacts. It also extracts cod files and performs other functions.

  • Proprietary

    • Skype for Linux ‘Not Dead’

    • Skype for Linux hotfix plugs security hole

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Blender 2.63a Released, Install On Ubuntu, openSUSE

    • Hack and / – Password Cracking with GPUs, Part I: the Setup

    • How to install MATE desktop environment in ubuntu 12.04(precise)/11.10 (Oneiric)

    • How to Remove Media Players From Ubuntu’s Sound Menu & Add Your Own

    • Set up a free and secure Terminal Server with Linux

    • How to Enable Hibernate feature In Ubuntu 12.04?

    • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (LAMP)

    • Backup and Restore Software in Ubuntu, Sabayon, and Fedora

    • Too many passwords to keep in your mind? Here is a great solution! Cross-platform and portable!

    • An Introduction to Application Development with Catalyst and Perl

    • Protect Sensitive Data on Android with Secret Space Encryptor

    • The Perfect Desktop – Xubuntu 12.04

    • Running OXID eShop Community Edition (Version 4.5.9) On Nginx (LEMP) on Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

    • How to hack your own Wi-Fi network

    • Make a bootable Linux USB key with the Universal USB Installer

    • It’s an easy fix to clean up a GRUB error on your Linux server

  • Wine

    • Why Wine is Important!

  • Games

    • HOWTO: Diablo 3 on Linux

      Like many nerds around the world this evening I am prepping for what, odds are, will be the first of many all-nighters involving Blizzard’s soon-to-be-released Diablo III (which releases tonight at midnight!). If you have been by my blog before then odds are you will know that I prefer to do as much of my gaming as possible on my operating system of choice: Linux. Something else you may or may not know is that I am also a large fan of the company Code Weavers that produces the commercial Wine software Crossover.

    • Native Steam on Linux client firming up

    • Valve excited for Steam on Linux, not so much for Windows 8

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • What’s going on with Krita since 2.4 got released?

      With Krita 2.4 happily released, the Krita team is working hard on what will become Krita 2.5. Krita 2.5 should be released some time in July already, but that doesn’t mean that it will be a boring release! Here’s a short overview to whet your appetite:

    • Kdenlive 0.9 released

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Get Gnome 2 Panel In Ubuntu 12.04

    • Gnome Flavor Of Ubuntu Planned For 12.10

      Gnome users have a gripe that there is no pure Gnome flavour of Ubuntu which they can simply download and install without having to add PPAs or install extra packages. I have been a long time Gnome user (recently switched to KDE due to Unity) and have been looking for a pure Gnome-based version of Ubuntu. I dabbled with Gnome Shell Ubuntu Remix and liked it.

    • Nautilus 3.4.2 Reduces Memory Consumption

      The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project, the graphical file manager for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage your files and browse your filesystem, announced version 3.4.2.

• Distributions

  • Review: SolusOS 1 “Eveline”

    I’ve gotten a couple requests to review this distribution, and I’ve wanted to do it, but for a while all that was being released consisted of beta versions and release candidates. Now, however, version 1 “Eveline” has been released in its final form, so I am reviewing that now.

  • ROSALabs Releases New Distribution

    ROSALabs, Mandriva’s partner on their last desktop, has been working on their own Linux distribution and have recently announced their latest release. If you liked Mandriva 2011, then you’ll probably like ROSA Marathon 2012. In fact, to the casual observer, it looks like ROSA 2012 is Mandriva 2011.

  • Puppy Slacko: different, but the same

    The latest current version of Puppy Linux is 5.3.1, and it was released on the 25th of October 2011. This is the Puppy Slacko version, which tells you that the roots of this Puppy are in Slackware. I believe this is different from Puppy I have used before, because it was previously based on Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu, hence it was named Lucid Puppy.

  • Puppy Linux 5.3.3

  • Swift Linux – LMDE “Slimmed Down”

    Before the general hysteria of a new Ubuntu release starts, I wanted to slip in a note about one other distribution. There have been some comments recently, from @zdnetuk among others, about Linux distributions getting “bloated” because they are becoming too large to fit on a CD. In fact I have made the same observation myself to some extent, because I used to partition my disks in 4GB sections, and have plenty of room to load any Linux distribution I wanted into one of those, but there are a lot which will not fit in that amount of space these days.

  • New Releases

    • Redo 1.0.3

    • Ophcrack LiveCD 3.4.0 released

    • Parted Magic 2012_05_14

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Hits 10-Year Anniversary

      Today marks the tenth anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and many people who have followed the rise of the RHEL platform may be surprised that it is so young. Released while the burning embers of the dot-com boom were still smoldering, it–along with Red Hat’s comprehensive support for an open source platform–appealed to many businesses who wanted a low-cost way to facilitate useful workplace applications without massive IT headaches. And, as Red Hat itself notes, RHEL has also found a home in government installations.

    • Red Hat celebrates 10 years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

    • Celebrating 10 Years Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

    • Red Hat hits 10-year, $1bn Enterprise Linux birthday

    • Execs: Red Hat to debut EL7 in late 2013, take lead in cloud era

      Red Hat held a press conference today to predict its ascendancy as the top dog in the cloud era, driven by its open source subscription model, open source community driven development model and cloud technologies.

    • Red Hat: No Regrets About Moving to the Enterprise Model

      When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, there was no such thing as Enterprise Linux. Back then there was just Red Hat Linux, a fast moving distribution that had new releases every 6 months. That all changed with the introduction of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) model that debuted 10 years ago.

    • Red Hat, IBM Counter VMware In Gov’t Virtualization Market

    • Rocks “Mamba” release unites CentOS 5 and 6 code base

      The developers of the Rocks Cluster Distribution have released versions 5.5 and 6.0 of their Linux distribution designed for creating high-performance computing clusters. The release, which is code-named “Mamba”, includes several new features such as support for the standard CentOS yum repositories and a common code base for the two versions of the distribution.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora To Remain Monogamist Towards GCC

        While FreeBSD 10 is preparing to fully switch to LLVM’s Clang compiler and deprecate GCC, don’t expect such a compiler change to happen in the Fedora camp in the foreseeable future. Fedora engineers have issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to GCC and stance on “alternative compilers” within this Red Hat distribution.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Administrator’s Handbook published — and Freed

    • Download Debian 6.0.5 Squeeze

      The Debian project proudly announced a couple of days ago, May 12th, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release of the Debian 6 Linux operating system.

    • Derivatives

      • CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” Linux OS now available for testing

        CrunchBang is a Linux-based operating system designed for speedy performance. It has a simple user interface based on Openbox and a core that’s based on Debian Linux.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical’s Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix Evolves

          Ubuntu’s greatest successes are arguably among home PC users and developers who use it in test environments. But there can be little doubt that Canonical remains committed to making Ubuntu the open source desktop of choice for businesses as well. Its latest move in this vein was the recent release of an updated version of Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. Read on for details, and what they reveal about Canonical’s long-term strategy in the world of the enterprise.

        • Updated Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix Arrives

        • Ubuntu Forks Gnome Control Center

        • 5 Minutes Cloud Recipe with Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04

          Have you ever think of baking your own cloud within 5 Minutes? Have you ever think of Elastic Compute (Nova-Compute) within 5 Minutes? Have you ever think of Elastic Storage (Nova-Volumes) within 5 minutes? Have you ever think of your hands on Open Stack Dash Board (Horizon) within 5 Minutes? Now you should think of it. With release of Ubuntu 12.04, It’s time for Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04. My friend Ante Karamati? has released Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04, Hybrid Image, Burn on your DVD , CD or USB Stick, you can say Cloud On DVD, Cloud on Stick, Yes, it’s as easy as you reading this.

        • Ubuntu Forks Gnome Control Center: Is Forking Good?

        • Precision and Reliability in Ubuntu Accomplishments

          In the Ubuntu world we have some common values that are not just focused on freedom, but also in how we build Ubuntu. Values such as cadence, design, quality and precision help guide us in building the best Ubuntu that we can.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 on a high-end laptop

          This time around, the Pangolin experience was a little rougher than before. However, in a weird sort of way, you could say it wasn’t the distro’s fault per se, although average users will not care where the problems stem from. But if suggestions can be offered, then a switch to kill with fire the open-source driver, and an ability to choose which version of Nvidia drivers to install, not only the latest ones, as sometimes regressions happen.

          Anyhow, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin works well on this machine. All in all, it doesn’t offer any revolutionary advantages over Lucid Lynx, but perhaps that’s what long-term releases should be, a small improvement if that. There’s a bit of an aftertaste because of all the graphics card issues, which I’ve really not expected, but then the resolution was quick and simple. Well, I’ll keep you updated as I freshly test new things. Stay tuned.

        • Open Source Startup Inktank Sets Gaze On Ubuntu Server

          As a company, Inktank, one of the open source ecosystem’s newest commercial enterprises, is only days old. But it has already made a determined foray into the Linux server market with the announcement this week of integration of the Ceph distributed file system into Ubuntu 12.04. Here’s the scoop, and what it says about both Inktank and Ubuntu.

          Launched earlier this month, Inktank is the creation of the Ceph development team, led by Sage Weil. Weil started writing the Ceph code in 2004 as part of his Ph.D. dissertation at USC Santa Cruz and continued to develop it after graduating in 2007.

        • Wil Wheaton: ‘Yo Hollywood, Let Me Download Ubuntu’

          Having boldly gone where no-one had gone before, it was no surprise to learn that actor Wil Wheaton is concerned about the erosion of ’Net Neutrality‘ – the principle that all web traffic, users and means of access should be treated fairly and without favour.

        • 125,000 Ubuntu PCs to land in Pakistani students’ laps

          As the One Laptop Per Child initiative goes from strength to strength around the world, there are signs that Pakistan may be getting the message too, after the Punjab government began handing out 125,000 free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 – Most Common Problems and Solutions

        • Will Linux Desktop Adoption Grow Thanks to Ubuntu 12.04?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Edubuntu: Linux In Education

            GNU/Linux and FOSS in general has changed the way in which we interact with Computers and with the World. It has opened gateways that none of us could’ve imagined. GNU/Linux contributes to the world in many ways but one contribution that I highly appreciate is that in the field of Education.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The Raspberry Pi: My First Hardware Experiment

    My shiny tiny new Raspberry Pi arrived last month, bringing with it a lot of hoopla and renewed enthusiasm for computing. Now that my first task of getting Slackware ARM installed to it, and configuring it to run “headless” (network only, no video or keyboard connected), it’s time to turn my attention to some hardware hacking. I decided to try out some basic cooling systems for it, to see if they make any appreciable difference in the RPi performance.

  • Adafruit announces prototyping Pi Plate kit for Raspberry Pi

  • Adafruit bears Raspberry Pi prototyping kit

  • Easy-to-Use ARM System on a Board

    If you haven’t heard of the open platform-friendly, inexpensive Linux-powered computing platform known as Raspberry Pi by now, you will be for years to come. Just as the Altair hailed the era of the personal computer, the Raspberry Pi is ushering in a new era of powerful, stunningly low-cost PCs on a board not much larger than an Arduino Uno. Think of a traditional PC motherboard with integrated graphics, network, and keyboard/mouse (USB) IO shrunken down to the size and slightly higher cost of an Arduino, and you’ll get the idea of what the Raspberry Pi is all about.

  • Pogoplug pitches cheaper cloud storage alternative

    Here’s the thing about cloud storage for business: It’s not as cheap as you think. Pogoplug says small and medium businesses can do better by using existing hardware and still get the sort of shared storage and file access that have made Dropbox such a great success in the consumer realm.

  • Phones

    • Purported Samsung-made Tizen reference hardware spotted (update: video)

    • Sprint joins Team Tizen for reasons no one understands

    • Android

      • MoboTap Inks Deal With KDDI, Dolphin Browser To Be Preloaded On New Japanese Android Phones

        MoboTap‘s popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn’t stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally.

        The company announced earlier this morning that they have entered into a new agreement with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI that will see their browser pre-loaded on a number of new Android handsets going forward.

      • Android continues to conquer the world

        The firm’s latest research showed that Android picked up strong market share gains in most of the seven major nations around the world, including the United States, Australia, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The gains were measured over a 12-week period up until mid April.

      • Baidu launches Android phone with eye on Windows Phone, iOS

      • Samsung Galaxy S II LTE getting bite of Ice Cream Sandwich

        The company’s Korean Samsung Tomorrow Web site (English translation) today published an upgrade guide confirming and explaining the path from Android 2.3 to Android 4.0.

      • Android 4.0 starts rolling out for German Galaxy Notes

      • HTC Desire C Leaked Photos Exclusive

      • NTT DOCOMO announces sixteen Android 4.0 phones and a tablet

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Code Clues Reheat Google Tablet Rumors

      Source code from Google and Samsung suggest that the two companies are on track to produce a Nexus tablet — a slate running a plain-vanilla version of Android. However, “it still appears that Android just doesn’t have what it takes to compete with the iPad,” Retrevo’s Andrew Eisner said. “Amazon’s Kindles had a competitive price, and that seems to have run its course.”

    • Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 screenshot tour

      This screenshot tour was created to accompany an upcoming in-depth review of Samsung’s new 7-inch Android tablet, the $249 Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. The tour comprises more than 300 screenshots, which showcase numerous aspects of the Android 4.0-based tablet’s user inteface, home screens, customization, and applications.

Free Software/Open Source

• Interview With Arista Creator Daniel G. Taylor

  Arista is one of the most useful open source transcoders. It comes with presets for your devices which makes it extremely easy to trancode videos for your devices. We interviewed Daniel G. Taylor, the creator of Arista to understand what drove him to create an open source project.

• VIDEO: Dan Pitt Exec Chair, Open Networking Foundation

  At Interop 2012, there was one theme that dominated all others – Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the center of the SDN revolution is OpenFlow and the center of that is the Open Networking Foundation. I got the chance to catch up with Dan Pitt, Exec Chair of the ONF at Interop, where there was a high-activity OpenFlow lab.

• VLC player rocks, and Jean-Baptiste Kempf talks about it!

• Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS – Same same but different

• Events

  • Hobart to host Python conference in August

    Two years ago, the first PyCon Australia, a conference devoted to the Python programming language, was held in Sydney because the local developer community saw the need for a targeted conference.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • How to Purge Memory in Google’s Chromium browser

  • Mozilla

    • Is Mozilla Punting on Web Apps for Linux?

      While Mozilla is a leading light in the open source community, every so often I’m reminded that the same isn’t always true in the Linux community.

      There has been an ongoing thread over the course of the last week about Mozilla’s lack of initial support for the Web Apps Marketplace on Linux.

    • Google Chrome 19 Syncs Your Life. Didn’t Firefox Do that Last Year?

      For those of you keeping score in the open source browser numbering acceleration, Google is now out with Chrome 19. As always, lots of security fixes, but what Google chose to highlight in their announcement blog post is a feature many of us have enjoyed for some time now – tab syncing across machines.

    • Firefox Gestures

    • Linux lacking from Mozilla Marketplace launch

      According to a bug report filed against Mozilla’s web application Marketplace on the company’s bug tracker, the software will not support Linux at launch. The same bug report is being used by contributors to work on the problem and a first patch has also been submitted.

    • This Phone Is All Firefox, All the Way

      This year’s CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans is surprisingly short on major new smartphones. But at last night’s MobileFocus press event, I happened across a fascinating, one-of-a-kind handset which I hadn’t seen in person yet: Mozilla’s alpha version of a phone running Boot to Gecko, its project to turn the web technologies behind Firefox into a stand-alone mobile operating system.

• SaaS

  • Marten Mickos: Openness is Winning in the Cloud

• Databases

  • PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta 1 Available for Testing

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Build Your Business Around LibreOffice, LibreOffice Certification Program Announced

    Individuals and firms can now build business around the open source office suite LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has announced the LibreOffice Certification Program, to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice and help the growth of the ecosystem of LibreOffice.

  • LibreOffice fires shots across OpenOffice bow

    LibreOffice has had a very successful time after its fork from the OpenOffice.org project last year, and Michael Meeks wants you to know it.

  • Can Apache OpenOffice Still Compete with LibreOffice?

    It used to be that OpenOffice.org was the leading open source alternative to proprietary productivity suites like Microsoft Office, and it was included in pretty much all the major Linux distributions.

• CMS

  • Which CMS Systems Is Right for You? Take a Test Drive

  • Which CMS System Is Right for You? Take a Test Drive

  • BlueHost Joomla Hosting Review Released By TCWH

• Healthcare

  • OpenEMR Support

    ViSolve Healthcare IT team has extensive experience with OpenEMR. As a prominent member of OpenEMR Board, ViSolve team has contributed significantly towards Meaningful Use Compliance and helped attain ONC Certification successfully.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Gimp 2.8 gets a whole new look

• Project Releases

  • PowerTOP v2.0 Release

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • How open educational resources from pre-K to 12th grade present accessibility problems

• Programming

  • Open source Java moving to Linux, AIX on PowerPC

    Open source Java will be brought to the PowerPC architecture for Linux and IBM’s AIX OS under a proposal floated this week that could eventually benefit the different Linux distributors.

Leftovers

• Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was Nearly Lost because of a Linux Command

  In ‘The Movie Vanishes’ short animation film by Pixar, Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman tell how a big part of Toy Story 2 was almost deleted because of an accidental Linux command ‘rm’ and poor backup system.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Media Coverage of Mad Cow: USDA Calls “Misleading,” Columbia Journalism Review Calls “Sane”

    A downer cow at a California dairy was recently found to be infected with an “atypical” strain of “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” (BSE), or “mad cow” disease. There has been some significant media coverage of the case, and the USDA wants the media to know they are not pleased.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Virginia Firm Sells Gun Targets Resembling Trayvon Martin

    An online gun retailer has been criticized for promoting an advertisement for shooting targets that resemble 17-year old shooting victim Trayvon Martin. The target depicted a hooded figure holding skittles and tea with crosshairs on his chest. Martin was reportedly holding skittles and tea when he was shot dead — in the chest — by George Zimmerman in Florida in February 2012. The horrific shooting of the unarmed youth led to a national conversation about the NRA-crafted Stand Your Ground/Shoot to Kill law and the role the American Legislative Exchange Council played in spreading the Florida law across the nation.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Greenpeace rains on Apple’s iCloud (again)

    Environmental activists at Greenpeace took their campaign to pressure cloud computing providers on energy to Apple’s headquarters today.

• Finance

  • LISTEN: Occupy Wall Street Gets an Album and Everyone Is On It

  • Gupta seeks calls thrown out of U.S. insider trial

    NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, the most prominent corporate figure indicted in a U.S. crackdown on insider trading, has asked a judge to throw out more than two dozen phone conversations that the government has sought to present as evidence at his trial.

  • Goldman Traders Tried to Manipulate Derivatives Market in ’07, Report Says

    Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • CMD Special Report: New Documents Confirm Koch Was on ALEC Crime Task Force Led by NRA

    ALEC announced it was dropping that task force in the wake of the controversy over the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin and so-called “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws. However, the co-leader of that task force, Rep. Jerry Madden (R-TX), revealed ALEC’s announcement to be a PR maneuver when he reassured The Christian Post that his task force’s work would continue through other ALEC task forces.

• Censorship

  • Dutch Judge’s Anti-Piracy Activities Draw Accusations Of Corruption In Pirate Bay Censorship

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • US Supremes hammer final nail into Psystar coffin

      The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher’s request to review an appeals court’s September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones.

    • Music labels force pioneering MP3tunes into bankruptcy

      MP3tunes, a music locker service that has spent years locked in litigation with major record labels, announced last week that it was closing up shop. The startup scored a partial victory in court last year, helping to establish the legality of cloud music services in the process. But founder Michael Robertson says that “four and a half years of legal torment” forced his company to file for bankruptcy on April 27.

    • Who Needs SOPA When Courts Will Pretend SOPA Already Exists?

      Back in November, we wrote about one of a series of cases we had seen where trademark holders were going to court with a list of domain names that they insisted were selling counterfeit goods and getting the courts to issue injunctions that appeared to be quite similar to what SOPA would have allowed had it passed. That is, basically upon request, a trademark holder was able to get domain registrars to kill domain names, while forcing search engines and social networks to put in place blockades barring such sites from being listed. It appears that more trademark holders are taking notice. Jeff Roberts has the story of (regular IP extremist) Louis Vuitton trying the same thing.

    • IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules

      The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it’s therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent pirates. As a result, 15 of these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits were dismissed.

    • MCA, the DMCA, and stifled collaboration

      Earlier this month, the world lost a music pioneer when Adam Yauch, a.k.a “MCA” of the Beastie Boys, succumbed to cancer at the age of 47. A founding member of the Beastie Boys, Yauch expanded upon his success in the music industry to exert his considerable influence and contributions outside music. He had a strong interest in film, which resulted in him directing several of the Boys’ music videos and in 2008 led to him founding Oscilloscope Studios, which produces and promotes independent films. In the 1990s, Yauch adopted Buddhism and began getting involved socially and politically in a variety of charities and activism.

    • ACTA

      • ACTA referral to the ECJ – JURI grills De Gucht