• Libre Office community grows and works

• New Hampshire Law Demands Free Software and Open Standards

• Science

  • Not so superior after all.

• Hardware

  • Nokia CEO Blames Salesmen For Windows Phone Struggles

    “Steven Elop of Nokia has placed some of the blame for the struggles of Windows Phone on mobile phone shops — for not pushing it. As The Register points out, sales staff ‘want their commission,’ and tend to only show phones they think might sell. Exact details of Windows Phone sales numbers are being covered up by both Microsoft and Nokia, who refuse to state specifics; sales figures to operators are stated at one million, but the majority of those seem to be unsold to consumers, and neither Microsoft nor Nokia will give numbers on activations… if the Nokia N9 had been available in all markets, it might have sold almost 5M units and pushed Nokia into profitability

    See also, this previous article on where patents go.

• Health/Nutrition

  • UCSF: Societal Control of Sugar Essential to Ease Public Health Burden.

    sugar is toxic beyond its calories … At the levels consumed by most Americans, sugar changes metabolism, raises blood pressure, critically alters the signaling of hormones and causes significant damage to the liver … “We’re not talking prohibition,” Schmidt [PhD, MSW, MPH] said. “We’re not advocating a major imposition of the government into people’s lives. … What we want is to actually increase people’s choices by making foods that aren’t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.”

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Beat down in Dallas

    There have been many raids like this in the war against drugs. As US police are militarized there are more injuries and deaths.

• Cablegate

  • Anonymous Leaks Huge Cache of Emails From Iraq War Crimes Case

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • More Damning Evidence Points to Pesticide [Bayer-produced imidacloprid] as Cause of Mass Bee Deaths

  • Climate Emergency: 2 Million Mexicans Have No Water & Drought Expanding Across Southern U.S.

    Two million people have no water. Crops are wiped out in the northern half of the country. The worst drought in Mexico’s history is likely to worsen until summer rains come devastating the northern half of Mexico, damaging Mexico’s economy. Indigenous communities in rural northern Mexico have no water, no food and no crops. Communities have had no rain in 15 months. … Most scientists are careful not to link specific weather events to climate change trends, but NASA’s James Hansen and two colleagues from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University have taken that plunge. They’ve gathered data they say shows that the 2011 Texas and Oklahoma heat wave—as well as a deadly Moscow heat in 2010—were “a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.”

  • Leaked data: Palm biodiesel as dirty as fuel from tar sands

    There are good biofuels and bad biofuels and the worst are as filthy as the foulest fossil fuels. But the good biofuels are essential to tackling climate change

    Lovelock’s carbon sequestering of agricultural waste is not mentioned.

  • What Bill Gates Doesn’t Know About GMOs

    It is also true that more people than ever before are going hungry, needlessly. We have enough food to go around now. We disagree with Gates on two points—one scientific and one political. … Most of the rest of the world’s experts agree that GMOs are not what the world’s poor need to feed themselves. … We must finally recognize that hunger is a problem of poverty and access to resources, especially land, not agricultural yield. … stop kicking farmers off their land and dumping product on the world market that puts them out of business; protect farmers’ rights to save and exchange seed; kick the bankers out of food-crop commodities speculation… ; write fair trade policies; listen to the world’s poor, they know what they need…in short, democratize food and farming if you want to address hunger.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • CreativeAmerica Literally Resorts To Buying Signatures

• Censorship

  • ‘Gasland’ Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans

    Josh Fox tells us what happened here, “This was an act of civil disobedience, yes done in an impromptu fashion, but at the moment when they told me to turn off the cameras, I could not. I know my rights and I felt it was imperative to exercise them.”

  • ACTA’s EU future in doubt after Polish pause

    Keep up the pressure, it works.

  • We need copyright reform, not ACTA

    As a Member of the European Parliament, I very much welcome the increased attention the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has received in the past weeks. It has taken a while for massive outcry to emerge, but we are seeing protest voices getting louder and louder.

• Privacy

  • URGENT: Congress Pushing Broad New Internet Snooping Bill

  • Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers see also this

    Developer Matt Gemmell asked Morin if Path was violating Apple’s Terms and Conditions by not asking users to opt into uploading their address book. Morin said, “This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we’ve been proactively addressing this.”

    Reactive when caught is the new proactive? Free software is the only solution to spyware and other malware.

• Civil Rights

  • Awards given to recognize the world’s nastiest companies

  • One Town’s War on Gay Teens

    In Michele Bachmann’s home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

  • Soaking the Poor, State by State

    There’s not one single state with a tax system that’s progressive. … in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent.

• Copyrights

  • Thousands of Scientists Vow to Boycott Elsevier to Protest Journal Prices

    Price is just one part of scientists problem which is “easily-accessible distribution of their work.” If you are doing research and would like to publish it, Elsevier and other big publishers will make it hard to read. Please sign The Cost of Knoledge Petition

  • G.O.P. Candidates Are Told, Don’t Use the Verses, It’s Not Your Song
    Romney and Gingrich Pull Songs After Complaints

    Powerful people are used to violating copyright laws for advertisements with impunity but Republicans are now so odious that musicians sue for otherwise licensed public performance. Musician feel damaged when Republicans use their music and sue for false advertising when people think the musician has endorsed the candidate.

  • ESR offers Open Access people advice

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• BT Vision plans to leave Mediaroom

  BT Vision is apparently preparing to drop the Microsoft Mediaroom platform and put in place a browser-based replacement running on Linux. The migration away from Mediaroom would be an embarrassment for Microsoft, which developed a special variant to cater for the BT Vision hybrid broadcast and broadband service. BT is a partner in the planned YouView platform, which also specifies a Linux operating system.

  Microsoft created Mediaroom as a platform for IPTV or internet protocol television services, aimed at top tier telcos. BT was an early customer. Others include Deutsche Telekom and AT&T. With more than eight million households through over 40 operators, it is one of the most widely deployed commercial IPTV middleware platforms.

• Hail the penguin

  Last year Linux celebrated its 20th birthday. The operating system began life as a cut-down version of the commercial Unix system, which turned 40 last year, and has become the largest distributed software development project in history.

  The kernel – the bit between the hardware and software – consists of more than 11 million lines of code contributed by more than 500 companies and tens of thousands of developers around the world. It has been estimated that commercial redevelopment of Linux would cost more than US$3 billion, yet it’s yours for free.

• Desktop

  • Writing and GNU/Linux

    He really expects e-books to dominate in book publishing and is at the tipping point. He likes the way FLOSS works for him.

    FLOSS has so many tools for writing. I like LyX for larger projects because it scales nicely. The applications does less during writing and saves the heavy lifting for the rendering process so I can maximize my productivity. The less my PC does to get in my way, the better I write. I use LibreOffice for routine stuff and it also provides a good spreadsheet for handling tabular data. I should also use a FLOSS database to keep track of stuff but WordPress does that already and Google is great so I have not done that yet. I could probably scrape MrPogson.com for hyperlinks and generate a good database for my writing automatically. Whatever we imagine we can do with FLOSS.

  • Don’t Get Excited Over Coreboot Laptops Yet

    There was the Coreboot main track session today at FOSDEM 2012 about Coreboot support on laptops and other areas, but unfortunately, there isn’t much to get excited about at this point.

    While Coreboot has made much progress in providing a “free” BIOS / UEFI for modern systems (particularly those based upon new AMD hardware), there is still much work left to be accomplished. There was an expectation that at this FOSDEM event there would be a new laptop shown off running Coreboot with the expectation that a new vendor might be shipping this device with Coreboot this year.

  • Scholarly work using Linux

    In Linux, I do not have to install anything for my computer to do all that: the OS includes all the functionalities I need. From KOrganizer, I get the computer to wake me up with a song and to launch Firefox and LibreOffice with my article without exposing my computer to any malware. I simply used the process for a song but selected “application/script” instead of “sound”. Then I wrote libreoffice3.4 for “application” and added the path where the file was in “arguments”.

    But that’s not all: Linux has a great tool for copying citations from PDFs: Okular. Its fabulous feature to select text from virtually any PDF, copy it, and paste it truly facilitates the process of adding citations to one’s article. Even in the rare cases when it is not possible to get the selection as text, you can paste it as an image with Okular…simple and quick.

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Intel Gallium3D For Mesa 8.0

      With the Mesa 8.0 release right around the corner, in recent weeks there have been a number of benchmarks on Phoronix looking at this latest open-source OpenGL library and its drivers, including Gallium3D. In this article though are new benchmarks from one of the areas not explored yet: the Intel Gallium3D driver performance.

    • Intel Haswell Graphics Driver To Be Opened Up Soon

      While the Ivy Bridge launch is still a number of weeks out, Intel will soon be publishing their initial hardware enablement code for next year’s Haswell micro-architecture.

      There’s already been Haswell compiler support patches, but for the open-source graphics drivers there will soon be the first bits of public code. The Ivy Bridge Linux support code is mostly all molded into shape, so some attention has already turned to the Ivy Bridge-successor Haswell.

• Applications

  • 4 Best Free Linux Script Writing Tools

    Script writing is the art and craft of writing scripts for the general public. The script can take the form of musicals, plays, novels, films, television programmes, and more. Each time you watch a show on television, visit the cinema, or read a book you are consuming the trials and tribulations of a script writer.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Running ownCloud3 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

    • What to do if your mail server is blacklisted

    • Moving from Windows to Linux: Easy Steps and Resources

    • How to Use Facebook through the Command Line

    • Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

  • Games

    • Now Battle of Wesnoth 1.10 comes with New Campaign and Features

    • Project Zomboid, the final countdown!

    • Turrets, Capital Ships, and Explosions

      Remember that scene in Star Wars where Luke, Leia, and Solo are escaping from the Death Star and some Tie Fighters give chase? Solo commands to get to the turrets, Leia pilots, and together they’re able to shoot down the fighters. Scenes like that are something I was hoping to capture a small part of when adding turrets to the game. I wanted players to be able to play the role of a gunner, while one of their buddies pilots them through a war zone. Or command one of the many on a capitol ship, defending it from the threat of maneuverable fighter craft.

    • Explore The Land of Hyrule, Play Zelda Classic on Linux

      Zelda Classic (ZC) is a tribute to one of the greatest video games of all time: Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda. It has been developed into an exact replica of the NES version.

    • Mind-Controlled Game, Mind Labyrinth, Comes To Linux

      Linux has yet to become a platform for gaming. Ubuntu is doing a decent job by increasing focus on polish and looks of the Debian-based operating system to make to more appealing to users and OEMs. Linux may be missing the high-end games, but there are quite a lot of games that one can play under a GNU/Linux system such as Ubuntu, openSUSE or Linux Mint.

      Now, there is game called Mind Labyrinth which uses Neurosky’s Mindwave headset (read our story on how the headset works) to control the game.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Integrating Shutter With KDE 4.7

      Did you know that you can integrate Shutter with KDE 4.7? Yes, you sure can. Shutter is an excellent tool for screen captures regardless of your desktop environment.

    • KDE Development – A Beginner’s Guide

      During a recent 5 day sprint, four KDE contributors planned and produced a handbook for beginning KDE developers. We had assistance from several generous organizations, worked hard, and learned a lot.

• Distributions

  • RebeccaBlackOS – First Live CD Running Wayland Display Server

  • New Releases

    • Berry Linux Mini 1.13 released. (2012-2-6)

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS 2012.2 has been released

      Bill Reynolds announced the availabilty of PCLinuxOS 2012.2 with Linux Kernel 2.6.38.8 and desktop environment KDE 4.6.5. It is available in 32-bit and 64-bit architecture. PCLinuxOS is mainly forked from Mandriva and very easy to use operating system.

    • PCLinuxOS 2012.02 Review

      There are quite a few distributions out there that are geared towards the novice user, and PCLOS does a great job at it. The website does have a community where one could ask for help and there is even a monthly magazine that they publish monthly with tips and tricks for Linux users. That right there is worth a few bonus points as they are trying to keep a community and help a new user. They have also published a

      What I found strange in PCLOS is what the developers chose to have on the desktop by default. The applications they chose doesn’t make much sense in my opinion as there could have been better ones selected, say Firefox and Thunderbird, compared to LibreOffice Manager, Network Center, Firewall Setup and Localization manager.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • inux Mint 12 KDE review

            Linux Mint 12 KDE is the latest update to the line of Linux Mint editions that are based on Ubuntu Desktop and use the K Desktop Environment. It is actually the first release of the KDE edition in a very long time. The last release before this one was Linux Mint 10 KDE, which was released in February 2011. (See Linux Mint 10 KDE review.)

            So we moved from Linux Mint 10 KDE to Linux Mint 12 KDE because Linux Mint 11 KDE did not make it out of the developer’s box.

          • LinuxMint12 KDE has been released! | Screenshots Tour

            LinuxMint 12 KDE has been released, this edition comes with the latest and recently released KDE 4.7.4. This is the first release of Linux Mint using Hybrid ISO images. Traditionally, tools such as ‘Startup Disk Creator’ or ‘UNetbootin’ were needed to install Linux Mint via USB. With hybrid images, you can simply use the ‘dd’ command or a graphical front-end to make a bootable USB stick with no efforts which acts exactly like a live DVD.

          • Xubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 Screenshot Tour

            On February 2nd, Canonical unleashed for testing the second and last Alpha version of the upcoming Xubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

            Xubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.2 and is built on top of the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment. It features a new greeter and desktop theme, as well as minor changes to various packages and default settings (including the size of the Terminal font).

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • U.S. government, military to get secure Android phones

        Some U.S. officials this year are expected to get smartphones capable of handling classified government documents over cellular networks, according to people involved in the project.
        The phones will run a modified version of Google’s Android software, which is being developed as part of an initiative that spans multiple federal agencies and government contractors, these people said.

      • 10 beautiful Android Live Wallpapers

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Details Emerge About the Spark Linux-Based Tablet

      There’s a new tablet in town (well, on its way to town, at least) called the Spark. The Linux-based tablet, based on the Zenithink C71, was announced several days ago, but the fellow behind the project, KDE developer Aaron Seigo, released more details on his blog in a convenient Q&A format.

    • Linux unveils open source tablet

      The Spark, an open source tablet that will be available for purchase by May this year, is part of the Linux-based MeeGo project, which is hosted by the Linux Foundation, iTWire reports.

      The device will run open source software, as well as a mix of free content, such as digital books from Project Gutenberg, as well as content and apps for purchase, PC World states.

Free Software/Open Source

• Help OSI – Complete Our Survey!

• HP Opens Up Its Switches to OpenFlow

  HP has been a supporter of the OpenFlow effort for several years, but previously had not offered full commercial support on its switching platforms.

  “We have been working with OpenFlow and had a special licensed version available for over four years,” Saar Gillai, Vice President, Advanced Technology Group, and CTO at HP Networking told InternetNews.com. “Now, based on strong demand from our customers, we’re putting out a fully supported commercial release that any of our customers can download and use on their switches.”

• Big Switch releases open source controller for OpenFlow

• OMB Shared First should include open source, says group

  Open source advocates urge the Office of Management and Budget to expand its Shared First strategy to include open source software development in a Feb. 2 comment posted online.

• Open Source Initiative affiliates announced at FOSDEM

  Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member Simon Phipps has announced a group of affiliate organisations who will be providing advice to the OSI as it reforms itself from a self appointed board-based organisation eventually to a member-based organisation. The affiliates, announced during Phipps’ presentation at FOSDEM in Brussels, are the Apache Software Foundation, Creative Commons, Drupal, the Eclipse Foundation, FreeBSD, Joomla (via Open Source Matters), KDE, the Linux Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Plone, Sahana and Wikiotics. The OSI is also undertaking an anonymous survey to gauge what a future personal membership of the OSI should mean in practice.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice 3.5 Will Be Released on February 8

    The Document Foundation proudly announced on February 4th that the third and last Release Candidate version of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.5 open source office suite is available for download and testing.

  • LibreOffice making steady progress

    A little more than a year after The Document Foundation was set up to look after LibreOffice, the fork of the former OpenOffice.org project, it seems that Oracle did the users of the latter office suite a great favour by neglecting it.

• Education

  • Software sans royalty for education

    Open-source software has proven to be cost-effective wherever it has been implemented, including the� education sector.

• Healthcare

  • Peace Corps Selects OpenEMR

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Alfresco Embraces SaaS and the Cloud with Its New CMS Platform

      In a big endorsement of the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, enteprise content management system (CMS) maker Alfresco is embracing cloud- and mobile-based usage of its platform with its new Alfresco 4 release. The open source CMS platform is used by 2,500 enterprises in 55 countries according to the company, and users need to access the content from their mobile devices, share and sync on the go, and more. The new platform is accessible from tablets as well as smartphones, and also allows users to publish straight to social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

• Public Services/Government

  • New Hampshire Passes ‘Open Source Bill’

  • How Did This Get Past Microsoft? New Hampshire Passed An Open Source Software Bill

    New Hampshire (motto: “Live Free or Die”) has passed HB418, a House bill which legislates the requirement that state agencies “consider open source software when acquiring software and promotes the use of open data formats by state agencies. This bill also directs the commissioner of information technology to develop a statewide information policy based on principles of open government data.”

    Whew! According to bill author and Linux kernel contributor Seth Cohn (commenting on Slashdot), this is the first open source and open data bill to pass in any state, ever. Now, it does not require state government officials to pick the open source alternative over the proprietary one at any point in time, but simply to officially document their justification for their software policy.

  • Live Free or Die in New Hampshire

• Openness/Sharing

  • API: Three Letters That Change Life, the Universe and Even Detroit

  • Open source players share their experiences in CC-BY-SA book

    Forty-two contributors from a variety of open source projects have shared their open source development experiences in a new book entitled “Open Advice”. Each author has written a short piece based on their personal experience on what they wished they had known when they started out in open source. Not all of the authors are programmers – contributors also include those who have contributed to open source as, for example, designers, organisers and package maintainers.

• Programming

  • Google Summer of Code 2012

    Google’s 8th year of its program that gives students the chance of working in open source software development during their summer break was announced at the FOSDEM open source conference in Belgium.

  • Google Summer of Code 2012 announced

Leftovers

• Finance

  • Goldman Sachs cooked Greece books

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • White House Petition Demands TPP Process Be Open & Transparent

    It seems that, with every issue that comes up around here, people are quickly putting together White House petitions on the White House’s “We The People” site. The latest, in response to all of these stories about secrecy concerning the negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), is a petition demanding that the process be more open and transparent.

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • ACTA Attack

        ACTA is perhaps one of the most sinister developments in the history of the Internet, and beyond, not only because of the Draconian legislations it proposes, but also because of the manner in which they were proposed.

        You see ACTA has never been democratically scrutinised or debated. It was created and negotiated entirely in secret by private corporations, not transparently by democratically elected representatives, and then ratified without any democratic mandate (by “executive order”). Indeed, the US government actually went so far as to describe these boiler-room “negotiations” as “a matter of national security”.

      • The EU Commission’s Repressive Plans Beyond ACTA

        The EU Commission is relentlessly defending ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which faces widespread opposition in Europe and beyond. Falsely portraying ACTA as an acceptable agreement, the Commission is paving the way for its ultra-repressive copyright enforcement agenda, as revealed in documents just released. Citizens and their elected representatives across Europe must denounce this dangerous drift of the policy-making process, which is bound to undermine freedoms online and the very architecture of the Internet, and instead require a thorough reform of copyright.

      • European spring is over

        The European Parliament has sent me the legal service’s opinion on ACTA. It is almost completely blacked out.

        On 4 October the Legal Affairs committee requested the opinion of the Parliament’s legal service on ACTA. The service concluded the opinion on 8 December. I requested the document on 10 December.

        On 19 December the Legal Affairs committee decided to make the opinion public.

        There was a first indication things were going wrong on 11 January. The Parliament’s register wrote me: “Due to ongoing consultations in view of disclosure of the requested documents, we would like to inform you that in accordance with Article 7(3) of Regulation 1049/2001, we need to extend the reply’s time limit by adding 15 working days.”

        On 4 February (letter dated 31.1) I received the blacked out document. Apparently, the Legal Affairs committee’s decision was overridden. By whom? Probably by the Parliament’s Bureau.

Summary: Backlash against the Gates Crusade to brainwash the young minds all around the world

MONOPOLIST extraordinaire Bill Gates wants a monopoly on children’s minds, so in his crusade for control he is trying to buy the agenda (curriculum) and organisation of US schools. It’s a form of privatisation of a $500,000,000,000 per annum system. Lots of money can be made there at the expense of taxpayers, taking away the very little that the middle class has got left.

This problem is well understood by an increasing number of teachers, despite the fact that Gates is bribing some of the education press to spread good wishes on him (we gave some examples in the past). The man who made a living by breaking the law is currently exploiting US poverty and an imbalanced system where Gates and his pals get richer and everyone else goes broke. Here is what happens in Philadelphia schools:

Last week, Philadelphia became the latest in a long list of cities to be courted by Bill Gates, when his “Great Schools Compact” was presented for consideration to the School Reform Commission. Bill Gates has taken on a reputation as a school reformer as well as philanthropist, dispensing money throughout the country for struggling schools in economically distressed cities while imposing changes in policies and procedures in those locales. Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

[...]

Diane Ravitch, in her recent book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education,” describes how Manuel High, one of Denver’s oldest and most prestigious schools, was forced to divide itself into three separate schools because of the “small school” agenda Gates was pushing at the time; the ensuing disruption caused the school board to close it temporarily. Mountlake Terrace High, just outside Seattle, suffered the loss of many teachers and administrators in 2004 after being forced to split into five separate schools in order to receive the Gates funding.

Into the Philadelphia School District’s state of fiscal desperation rides Bill Gates. Who can say “no” to free money when you are so deep in the hole? But the money is not free, and the price is the democratic procedure in the city and the state under which the community and its elected leaders make informed decisions about its schools.

From the same blog we gather more information about more of Gates’ lobbying groups that push this agenda:

We know that LEV is heavily funded by Gates who is all about charter schools. LEV has showcased over the last year all of the “Stars” of the charter school industry as well as Wendy Kopp of Teach for America Inc. who staffs charter schools with teaching temps. LEV is now, by the way, championing the online learning industry, another cash cow for businesses and corporations including Microsoft.

This is helping Mr. Gates sell Microsoft lock-in and train children this way. For shame.

He is hijacking the voices of American parents, simply because money can buy anything. A Parents Across America member speaks out about it in a letter:

I am a parent with two children in Portland Public Schools. I have been a PTA member for five years and recently came onto our PTA board as a legislative co-chair. I am writing to see if there is any possibility of the PTA dropping its affiliation and funding from the Gates Foundation. I know that must sound shocking that a parent wants less funding, but the reason is that the Gates Foundation is supporting and pushing education policies that are NOT good for our schools and children. If you are not already familiar with well-regarded experts like Diane Ravitch, Stephen Krashen, Deborah Meier, and other groups like Parents Across America and the national Save Our Schools movement, please become familiar with them to realize that there is a growing body of people completely alarmed and speaking up against the policies Gates and his front groups like Stand for Children and others are pushing. For lack of a better term, it is the corporate education reform movement and it is NOT good for our kids.

As far as I can tell, our Oregon PTA hasn’t really gotten on-board with advocating for some of the things Gates supports, such as expansion of charters, on-line learning, data-driven models, merit pay, etc. I hear in Washington state, it is quite different. Apparently the PTA there is pushing for charters schools.

I think we have some really wonderful people who are a part of their PTA, and I would love to see PTA grow. A group that is truly genuine and has parents and teachers working together is a worthwhile thing to support. However, the policies of Gates do not do this. I am thinking that PTA accepted or went after this money due to desperately needed funding. When you look at the grant Gates gave to PTA, it says it is to support education reform, and then you see the focus on the Common Core Standards on the National PTA page and it is just so disappointing. Common Core, as it is now, will line the pockets of Microsoft and testing companies, while narrowing the curriculum and lowering engagement levels of our kids.

Sue Peters, writing for the same blog, notes that:

We still have many challenges ahead of us in Seattle, and Washington as a whole, the biggest being the gathering, moneyed forces that are pushing for charters. We still have the Gates Foundation right here in Seattle, so as long as that foundation pushes for and bankrolls discredited, failed reforms, those of us in the parent activist community will have our work cut out for us.

This form of class warfare ought to worry anyone who was in school or sends his/her children to school. While the press is bribed to take the side of the occupiers, children’s minds are being occupied with this ludicrous idea that those who exploit them are in fact looking after them. Meanwhile, profitable monopolies are established on the back of a taxpayers-funded education system. Socialising the cost, privatising the profit. Bill must be a genius.

We previously showed how state-funded laptops [1, 2, 3, 4] which were supposed to run free software turned into taxpayers-funded Microsoft indoctrination instruments. Richard Stallman is being quoted in the Indian press today as saying wise words:

The Tamil Nadu government may be trumpeting its scheme to distribute computers for free to students but it is setting a poor example for what a state should do, says American software freedom activist Richard Stallman.

“It distributes laptops loaded with non-free software to children, teaching them to be dependent on paid products. It creates a system of digital colonisation,” Stallman, who has waged a storied battle against software giants like Bill Gates, said in an e-mail interview to The Times of India. He criticised the state’s ambitious free laptop scheme that hands out computers with the Windows operating system.

Stallman, who will be in Chennai on Monday to deliver a lecture on free software at IIT-Madras, said he is appreciative of the efforts of Kerala and Karnataka, states that have extended support to the free software movement by moving schools to GNU/Linux operating systems and including lessons on them in the syllabus. “Karnataka put the system in place in high schools a couple of years ago,” he said.

“Please keep up the good work,” Stallman said to me last night in an E-mail (regarding this site). As some people may have noticed, the FSF refocused on education last week. Can we save the next generation from greedy sociopaths who buy consent from the press? █

“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

–Bill Gates

Summary: The Gates Foundation goes lobbying for Microsoft again, this time in Vietnam

TECHRIGHTS has covered hundreds of examples where the Gates Foundation can be seen hacking the system and making profit while making it look like charity — a travesty to be described positively by the bribed press (that Gates is paying to do this). When the world’s biggest thief is speaking on behalf of poor people we just know something is totally wrong and journalists occasionally speak out about it (those whose publisher has not yet been bribed by Gates). The foundation is again exploiting and piggybacking farmers to spread lock-in, this time in Vietnam. Gates had already stepped into Vietnam under the "Foundation" gown in order to derail Free software adoption over there. But it’s merely a drop in the bucket. See our past posts about this country, notably:

• Cablegate: US Sees Microsoft as Helping to Impose Intellectual Monopolies in Vietnam
• Cablegate: Microsoft Asks US Government to Help Derail Vietnam’s Migration to GNU/Linux, Wants to Treat Vietnamese Like ‘Pirates’ Instead
• Cablegate: In Vietnam, BSA+IDC+Microsoft Assure Microsoft Lock-in in Exchange for Indoctrination
• US Government Helps Microsoft Derail Vietnamese Migration to Free/Libre Software
• Cablegate: Microsoft Rushes Vietnam to Get Rid of Open Source, Including FOSS Policy
• Microsoft Strikes Back In Vietnam (Leaked)

As we explained before, software costs no money to copy, so portrayal of software as “donation” is just a trick to make Vietnamese taxpayers pay Microsoft. The Communist Party paper says this:

Bill Gates fund helps Vietnam farmers go online

[...]

The fund includes nearly $30 million of free support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and $3.64 million worth of Microsoft software. The remaining investment will be raised by the Vietnamese government.

This Windows-powered Web site fails to mention the problems with this, as mentioned at the time by Gates Keepers among several others. It’s all just a story of sentimental blackmail (an old favourite of Microsoft) and yet more Microsoft promotion. We have seen this before. Gates uses this so-called ‘charity’ quite a lot to sell or impose the sale of Microsoft lock-in, especially in places where Free software gains traction. In this case, the government (i.e. taxpayers) bear some of the costs. And then they wonder why there are problems and critics, blaming "communication" problems for the criticism. As one critic of the foundation put it, there is a brute-force charm offence going on:

Basically, I was noting that the Gates Foundation is widely viewed by many outsiders, including grant recipients, as somewhat inscrutable. It has been saying for years it wants to improve on its ability to communicate with perhaps little evidence of improvement (and even as its annual report has dramatically shrunk in size, a good thing but symbolically irresistable to me):

Remember that Bill Gates is still getting richer. The press which he bribes keep telling us that he gives his fortune away, giving people at the bottom the wrong impression and sympathy for a robber baron. By all means be sceptical of any report which sells the story of Gates taking care of the poor; he often just uses the poor for PR and for profit. One just needs to grasp the common spin techniques being crafted. Then the reality becomes very shallow. █

Summary: Challenging the old misconception that patents are beneficial to anything but few multinationals and their patent lawyers

PATENT monopolies form the basis of business of some ruthless multinationals — companies with so many patents that nobody is able to enter their field without fear of litigation. Patents are a form of territory-marking and they are an obstacle or a barrier to the number of people working in a particular field. Surely this cannot result in more innovation. I understand this as a researcher and programmer in the field of computer vision, where people habitually get US patents on matrix operations. That’s mathematics.

According to this news article, an award goes to a company that helps groom the portfolio of patent monopolisers:

On Friday afternoon, Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard announced the winner of a Super Bowl XLVI contest for Indianapolis-area startups presented jointly by Develop Indy and Startup America Partnership. The competition sought to recognize a high-potential startup in the Indianapolis area while raising awareness of Indianapolis as a great place to launch a business.

The winner was Indianapolis-based legal technology startup PatentStatus, a cloud-based software-as-a-service that enables organizations with large patent portfolios to implement a virtual patent marking strategy on their corporate web sites.

Now, let’s think about it for a second. Here we have proprietary and remote software which targets what is essentially a company with many monopolies. By helping such entities mark their territory, so to speak, this Indianapolis-based company essentially does more to scare potential competition. In essence, this depresses innovation and provides yet more examples of how patents stifle progress. In some places, in order to stride forward, employees are actively encouraged not to look at patents — as means of avoiding wilful infringement.

According to a reader of ours, there is the White House response which says “overly broad patents on software-based inventions may stifle the very innovative and creative open source software development community..”

“Like so many others,” notes the reader, “it intentionally or accidentally mistakes the problem as being one for developers, when the issue of patents is really about users. It’s 2012 and it’s tiring to see that canard still being used.”

Here is the Glyn Moody piece that he cites. Moody concludes with the following words:

What’s interesting here is that open source was nowhere mentioned in the original petition. So it shows a commendable savviness on the part of the person who actually wrote the reply – Quentin Palfrey, Senior Advisor to CTO for Jobs and Competitiveness at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy – that much of the concern about software patents is the deletorious effect they have on free software.

So even if the e-petition failed to get President Obama to agree to abolish software patents (admittedly a bit of a long shot), it did have the beneficial effect of eliciting this strong vote in favour of open source from a very high-profile site.

When will US policy-makers realise that patents — and software patents in particular — are a sham that benefit nobody but a tiny proportion (maybe under 0.001%) of the population? There are high costs associated with externalities. █

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Lenovo Wants to be Number One in PCs. Look What They Do in India.

    They are off to a good start clinching a deal for 300K (3 lakh) notebooks running GNU/Linux for ELCOT in the Tamil Nadu state of India.

• Kernel Space

  • Talk Of A Brand New API For KVM Virtualization

    A discussion has been started about a next-generation API for Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization.

    Avi Kivity of Red Hat has written to the KVM developers in a proposal for a brand new API for KVM. The API would rework syscalls, state accessors, KVM’s device model, ioeventfd/irqfd, guest memory management, and the vCPU FD mmap area, among other potential improvements over the existing API.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Is Compiz On Its Deathbed?

      It’s been brought up in the forums about the state of upstream Compiz developments. Some Phoronix readers go as far as calling upstream Compiz being dead. Those comments were largely based upon outstanding Compiz bugs, the lack of Compiz releases, and the lead developer apologizing for the “failure” of the Compiz project on his blog. In his blog posting from December, Sam Spilsbury apologized for the lack of new direction, lack of development, and not any increased stability for the project.

    • Wayland 1.0 Is Set For H1’2012 Release

      A few days ago I wrote that the Wayland Display Server is preparing for a stable 1.0 release and now this weekend from FOSDEM new information has been learned.

      Kristian Høgsberg shared during his session on Saturday afternoon in Brussels that they are indeed planning the 1.0 release. In fact, the Wayland 1.0 stable release should be here soon. This stable (i.e. non-experimental) release is planned to be out in the first half of 2012. So before the summer, we should have a stable Wayland release where the core protocol and APIs will not be broken after that point.

    • Intel’s Brewing New Linux Graphics Driver Features

      Eric Anholt of Intel spoke on Saturday at FOSDEM 2012 in Belgium about the state of the Intel Linux graphics driver user-space and some of their future plans.

      At the bottom is the video I recorded of Anholt’s presentation about the Intel Linux graphics driver developed out of their Open-Source Technology Center. Here are some of the keynotes from his FOSDEM 2012 presentation:

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Dropbox offers an additional 5GB of cloud storage to beta users

      For users willing to be guinea pigs, Dropbox is offering an opportunity to score 5GB of free space through the popular cloud storage service. PCWorld is reporting the 5GB is actually in addition to the standard 2GB issued to free users, making the possible total for free Dropbox users a roomy 7GB.

      Some of you may also be interested to know that Microsoft’s Skydrive is still offering 25GB of cloud storage. Despite the enormous amount of storage space Skydrive offers, limits imposed on the service have made it unappealing for many. Microsoft claims it’s working on alleviating those concerns though, for what it is worth.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Synergy! as many PCs as you like with just one keyboard and one mouse!

    • How to Jailbreak iPhone 4S and iPad 2 on Linux

    • How to : Download Google Maps for Offline Purpose in Android

    • How to create facebook application using PHP and graph api

    • Top Boxee Box tips and tricks

    • Automatically Detect File Changes on Your Server

  • Wine

    • Bordeaux 75% off sale

    • Wine 1.4-rc2 released

  • Games

    • What The New Linux Game Publishing Will Look Like

      Clive Crous, the new CEO of Linux Game Publishing following the resignation of founder and CEO Michael Simms, has issued a message to Linux gamers concerning the future of LGP.

      The key items brought up in the message by the new Linux Game Publishing CEO are listed below while the message in full can be read via this copy in the forums.

      - Michael Simms will still be involved with Linux Game Publishing in an advisory capacity and in porting some titles over to Linux.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd January 2012

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Latest Release: Hanthana 15.5 i386 DVD ISO ~ 3.8 GB

    • Netrunner 4.1 version (32/64bit)

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin Updates: Unity 5.2 Is Available to Update

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Bouncing malware from Android Market

        The battle between malware writers and those trying to make their life miserable is a never ending one, will forever be a never ending one. The nature of the battle field makes it so.

        The bad guys will always find a way, sooner or later, to penetrate the security wall around an application. And as soon as one hole is patched, they will find another one. It is like a movie that never ends, with your device as the stage.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Spark Linux tablet specs updated, going up for pre-order next week

Free Software/Open Source

• SaaS

  • Banks Push Hadoop Envelope to Open Big Data’s
    Secrets

    Given the promise of new analytics technologies, becoming more data-driven is on the minds of most IT decision makers these days. In a recent report on the impact of big data on analytics, “More than half of the organizations polled identified analytics as among their top five IT priorities,” says Julie Lockner senior analyst and VP of data at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an IT strategic advisory firm based in Milford, Mass.

    “With the promise big data is poised to bring,” says Lockner, “organizations are exploring their options for solving business challenges with emerging [data] technologies. It’s just not practical or cost-effective to use traditional [database] platforms and technologies that were designed before the big-data era.”

  • Big Data: Will Open Source Software Challenge BI & Analytics Software Vendors

• Semi-Open Source

  • Analyzing Magento Community Edition

    Magento Community Edition is an open source system, which means that it can be downloaded for free, and modified to suit specific programming and/or design requirements. What’s unique and valuable about this model (compared to hosted solutions-where one is locked into a specific company for hosting and support) is that an ecommerce entrepreneur can have complete control over his/her website.

• BSD

  • KMS For FreeBSD Is Still A Work In Progress

    FreeBSD still lacks mainline support for kernel mode-setting (KMS) on modern hardware, but at least it’s still being worked on.

    As I routinely get such questions via email, for those wondering about the state of kernel mode-setting (KMS) or the ability to use the latest Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) drivers on FreeBSD, it’s still out-of-tree and is considered a work-in-progress to be used by experienced BSD desktop users.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Lecture on free software

    A lecturer on ‘Copyright v/s Community in the Age of Computer Networks’ was delivered by Richard Mathew Stallman developer of GNU/Linux at the BKB Auditorium at Gauhati University today.

• Open Access/Content

  • Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

    Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician.

  • U of T and Western sign agreement with Access Copyright

    I am very pleased to announce the agreement of a voluntary licence between Access Copyright, University of Toronto and Western University (formerly University of Western Ontario). The attached press release went out at 7:00 pm today (Monday) and is now on our website.

  • U. of T. and Western Capitulate to Access Copyright

    In an astonishing development that has caught all but a handful by surprise, U. of T. and Western have signed copyright deals with Access Copyright that appear to be an early and complete capitulation to an important battle over the costs and parameters of access to knowledge in Canadian post-secondary institutions.

• Programming

  • Google Summer of Code 2012 is on!

Leftovers

• Microsoft Loses US Smart Phone Market Share — Again

• Finance

  • Goldman to face mortgage debt class-action lawsuit

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc was ordered by a federal judge to face a securities class-action lawsuit accusing it of defrauding investors about a 2006 offering of securities backed by risky mortgage loans from a now-defunct lender.

• Censorship

  • Transport Canada Issues DMCA Takedown Over On-the-Record Response

    Transport Canada has reportedly issued a DMCA takedown notice to Scribd over an on-the-record response it provided to a journalist. The move is particularly odd (though not unprecedented, see here and here) given the document was issued to a journalist and the government changed its crown copyright licence last year to allow for private and non-commercial public use without the need for further permission.

• Civil Rights

  • Assange followers give a stand-out performance

    WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange faces a tense wait after seven judges of the British Supreme Court adjourned to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault.

    The two-day appeal by Assange against a lower court’s decision to uphold the validity of a Swedish arrest warrant marks the end of a year-long legal battle to avoid extradition, sparked by allegations by two women in 2010 that he sexually assaulted them.

    The appeal ended in a war of words between Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose, and Clare Montgomery, QC, representing the Swedish Judicial Authority, as each sought to persuade the judges to support their respective positions not only on the fate of Julian Assange, but on the future of a controversial extradition treaty that operates throughout the European Union.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Rogers vows end to Internet ‘throttling’ in 2012

    Rogers Communications Inc. RCI.A-T will stop “throttling” Internet traffic on its network later this year – a long-awaited move that follows a similar decision by rival BCE Inc. BCE-T

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You

    • Ten Key Questions and Answers About Bill C-11, SOPA, ACTA, and the TPP

      In recent days there has been massive new interest in Canadian copyright reform as thousands of people write to their MPs to express concern about the prospect of adding SOPA-style rules to Bill C-11 (there are even plans for public protests beginning to emerge). The interest has resulted in some completely unacceptable threats and confusion – some claiming that the Canadian bill will be passed within 14 days (not true) and others stating that proposed SOPA-style changes are nothing more than technical changes to the bill (also not true). Even the mainstream media is getting into the mix, with the Financial Post’s Terrance Corcoran offering his “expert” legal opinion that CRIA’s lawyers are likely to lose their lawsuit against isoHunt.

    • ACTA

      • Acta goes too far, says MEP

        The French MEP who resigned his position in charge of negotiating the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) has said it “goes too far” by potentially cutting access to lifesaving generic drugs and restricting internet freedom.

      • Maladministration complaint against the European Parliament

        I just filed a maladministration complaint with the Ombudsman against the European Parliament for systematically lying about the existence of documents:

        The European Parliament cultivates secrecy.

        On 21 June 2011, the coordinators of the International Trade committee (INTA) decided to ask the Parliament’s legal service an opinion on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The INTA committee’s Chairman, Mr Moreira, sent a letter to the legal service. In the letter, the Chairman allegedly left out a question on safeguards against disproportional criminalisation. While this was known in Parliament, no Member took action to solve this. I requested, among other documents, the coordinators’ minutes of the INTA committee.

      • Ambassador Apologises for ACTA, Anonymous Announces Attacks (adds)

      • Smoking gun on ACTA Criminal Sanctions

        We discovered a smoking gun on the criminal sanctions aspect of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). A declassified document reveals that the Commission made proposals and fundamentally steered the negotiations on criminal sanctions in ACTA for which no corresponding EU harmonisation exists. There is no “Acquis” element on criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights, yet. Criminal sanctions in ACTA were formally negotiated by the Council “Presidency” on behalf of the EU member states.

      • Can Poland stop ACTA?

        The EU Council and Commission have opposing opinions on whether Poland can stop ACTA. Who is right? – only the Court of Justice may tell.

        According to ZDNet, Poland may not ratify ACTA, which could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union:

        “Tusk’s backtracking could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union. If Poland or any other EU member state, or the European Parliament itself, fails to ratify the document, it becomes null and void across the union.”

        ZDNet added: “The European Commission confirmed to ZDNet UK that if just one member state does not ratify ACTA, the deal will not enter into force anywhere within the EU.”

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

Summary: Another look at the OpenStack situation, why Microsoft should not be allowed to enter, and more about patent and copyright complications

SOME days ago we wrote about OpenStack's situation when it comes to Microsoft. Later we showed what Microsoft boosters were doing to spin it as good news. Well, according to this new article:

OpenStack is supposed to be a vendor agnostic open community for building an open source cloud stack. And it is, unless you don’t pull your own weight- or if you’re Microsoft.

I know there is plenty of vitriol in the open source world towards Microsoft and certainly some of that has now surfaced in the OpenStack community.

OpenStack is now removing the Hyper-V capabilities from its stack, after Microsoft didn’t maintain the code. That happens in projects all the time, just think about the Linux kernel where Microsoft has had similar challenges and hey for that matter so has Google.

The hostility towards Microsoft has a lot to do with this monopolist’s continued attacks on Open Source projects. We need not whitewash Microsoft here or claim the above to be an irrational move of irrational hatred. Never mind the fact that Hyper-V is proprietary and not open. Microsoft continues to attack Linux with all sorts of proxies like SCO as well as patent trolls. There are those who wish to just abolish it all, especially patents. Realising the idiocy of many patents, there are some who speak about the harms of patents as a whole, not just software patents. To quote:

“Is this Patent full of crap?”

[...]

The ideas are those of patent lawyer Andrew Schulman, but the story is full of insight on a patent lawyer’s thinking and offers real clues into why the patent system is such a mess–complexity compounded, full of precedents that ordinary humans will find puzzling at best.

Earlier we wrote about many patents becoming just junk. Even Oracle seems to be moving further away from patents and is now trying to use copyrights against Android. Quoting Groklaw:

Today is the due date for Dr. Cockburn’s third attempt at a damages report on behalf of Oracle, and just to make sure Oracle knows what needs to be submitted, Judge Alsup has issue a reminder order. (709 [PDF; Text]) The judge wants to see not only the report but also all of the related reports and studies that support it.

Let’s remember that Microsoft has put code with its copyrights inside Linux and the same goes for Mono. They try to make those things more adaptable to Microsoft’s proprietary software. In the case of Mono, there is lawsuit risk too. Anything with Microsoft in it tends to be tainted. Just see what happened with FAT. █

Summary: Apple products get banned (for the time being) after Apple decided to attack Linux-supporting competitors and then received some blowback

APPLE’S opening of a jar of worms has led to reactionary lawsuits that sometimes trouble Apple and discourage the original strategists (those in favour of suing Android). Some of Apple’s legal leadership has already left or was fired. We covered this at one time.

According to the corporate press and the Irish Times, Apple has its day in court and the outcome is not as Apple originally planned:

Motorola Mobility has won a second German patent ruling against Apple over its iCloud service allowing the company to block sales of devices including iPhone and iPad if they use the software that accesses it.

Apple started this whole war and there is an attempt at deterrence from the defendants. Citing a Microsoft lobbyist, ZDNet tells the distorted version of the story, where Google and Motorola are somehow the “aggressors”. To quote:

Apple was forced to remove several iOS devices from sale on its German online store on Thursday as a result of its patent battles with Motorola.

The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G iPads are currently not available from the company’s web store in Germany following a ruling in favour of Motorola relating to FRAND-pledged patents declared essential to 3G standards.

With more rumours based on Apple patents (like this one) we expect Apple to carry on with its patent strategy, living and dying by the sword (the man behind this strategy is already dead). Apple does not even get sympathy from people who claim to like Apple products:

I like Apple products. God knows I own and use enough of them. But, I hate their out-sourcing business practices and their world-wide anti-Android lawsuits. So, when I learned this morning that Motorola Mobility had won a permanent injunction against Apple’s iCloud service in Germany because of a patent violation and Motorola had followed that up with another patent victory, which has forced Apple to take all its older phones, 3G and 4 and all iPads off its German online store (German language link), I was pleased.

Apple has made enemies it did not need to make. █

Summary: The rise of the junk patents and what we are taught about them by the news, including some news about the unitary patent in Europe

THE UNITARY patent [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] drew opposition in several countries and also among some British MPs. Despite all that we know about the harms of patent maximalism, patent lawyers in Europe keep promoting it and argue for the inevitability of this looting of public knowledge:

It certainly is a sign of progress (although some would say in the wrong direction) that the Secretariat of the EU Council is about to finalise the Regulation for implementing the Unitary Patent (see Document CM 1068/12). Apparently, the dice is cast with respect to the Unitary Patent and, thus, with respect to the highly controversial question as to whether or not Articles 6 to 8 (effects of patents) should remain in the proposed Regulation so that substantive patent law will be subject to review by the Court of Justice of the European Union in future.

We have not heard about the unitary patent in a while, which either means that the public is left out or that no significant progress is being made. Lawyers have their own interests here and therefore a bias too. Over in Australia we see a similar type of crowd doing something similar. Patent boosters in Australia argue in favour of software patenting. It’s from a pro-patents blog that says:

The US Supreme Court has established three exceptions to the broad principle that all machines, processes, manufactures and compositions of matter are patentable under 35 USC §101 – laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas.

In Australia, it is settled law that the ‘manner of manufacture’ test for patent-eligibility excludes laws of nature, mere discoveries, ideas, scientific theories, schemes and plans. Mathematical formulae and algorithms are also excluded, to the extent that claims are not meaningfully limited to their use as part of a patentable practical application.

It can therefore be seen that, while the precise terms used differ in the two countries, there is a broad similarity between the fields of excluded subject matter in Australia and the US.

As we showed last year, there was some lobbying in Australia and a perpetual attempt to spread the venom of the US patent system to another continent (just like in Europe). It’s not about innovation, it is about greed. When multinationals are calling out the alligators with some more litigators (new hirings) they do nothing to promote innovation. Usually they merely impede it. Here is an example of another software patent being granted. Some of them are so embarrassingly trivial and CNET catches up with old news about Microsoft withdrawing one such embarrassing patents among several that it uses to extort Linux/Android (this one in the B&N case). To quote:

Microsoft withdrew a patent from the list of ones that it claims Barnes & Noble violates with its Nook e-readers in the software giant’s case against the bookseller before the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The ITC is not done looking at the anti-competitive patent misuses by Microsoft. Microsoft lobbyists, however, try to change the story. █

Summary: GMO, a robbery of the right of reproduction (and a potential health hazard), is promoted by Bill Gates for profit, whereupon critics strike back

TECHRIGHTS covers patents and it also covers Microsoft, so the area of globalist/monopoliser Gates Foundation promoting GMO is very relevant to us. This post will not repeat arguments we made before, either about Gates’ promotion of GMO monopolies or the dangers of GMO (see the wiki page for an index of previous posts on that). Instead, it will draw some attention to more controversial sites which notice how Bill Gates is bribing the press while Natural News cites it and writes:

Aaron Dykes of Prison Planet recently gave an insightful TV news presentation analyzing The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s influence over the media to promote their “world health and agriculture” agendas while soft pedaling the downside of all they’re doing.

Such items as “Gates using his money to save lives … etc” have been appearing in several news outlets, including ABC news (2). Meanwhile, items that question Gates’ “philanthropic” endeavors are muffled or marginalized. Those endeavors deal with vaccinations, sterilization, and GMOs. These are depopulation favorites.

The Gates Foundation donated $1.5 million to ABC’s News Project “Be the change; Save a Life,” extolling the virtues of ensuring Africans don’t starve. The NY Times mentioned Gates as the principal private funding source and adviser for world food policy and agricultural development.

In a less controversial site we find this toned-down interview which explains what Gates ignores (they pretend he doesn’t know that, politely enough):

The Flip-Side: What Bill Gates Doesn’t Know About GMOs

[...]

TakePart: In the introduction to his letter, Bill Gates cites the Green Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, saying scientists created new seed varieties for rice, wheat, and maize, and that this resulted in increased crop yield and a decrease in extreme poverty around the world. Do you agree that this is a model to use moving forward?

Heather Pilatic: The Green Revolution is a story that some people like to tell, but it has little basis in historical fact. Take the Green Revolution’s origins in 1940s Mexico, for instance. It was not really about feeding the world; Mexico was a food exporter at the time. Rather, the aims included stabilizing restive rural populations in our neighbor to the south, and making friends with a government that at the time was selling supplies to the World War II Axis powers and confiscating oil fields held by Standard Oil (a funding source for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the key architects of the Green Revolution).

We can also learn from India, the Green Revolution’s next stop after Mexico. India embraced the Green Revolution model of chemical-intensive agriculture. Now it is the world’s second biggest rice grower with surplus grain in government warehouses. Yet India has more starving people than sub-Saharan Africa — at more than 200 million, that’s nearly a quarter of its population. History shows that a narrow focus on increasing crop yield through chemical-seed packages reduces neither hunger nor poverty.

So no, we do not agree that the Green Revolution offers a promising model for addressing poverty.

This is not about addressing poverty; it’s about exploiting the poor for yet more profit while hijacking the voice of the poor. The whole thing is evil propaganda for people who run society. █

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• More FUD Gone

  One of the key elements spread by FUDsters is the doubt about being able to do real stuff using */Linux. The naysayers trot out some pet application that they may never have used as an example of an application not available on FLOSS systems. The reality is that FLOSS on a general-purpose computer can do just about anything. Take Android/Linux, for instance. It’s on hundreds of millions of personal computers now and things like AutoCAD are available to run on it. The ISVs cannot pass up platforms that popular. And, yes, Android/Linux is a Linux distro…

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Intel RC6 Support On The Sandy Bridge Desktop

      While RC6 support remains off-by-default as Intel developers are faced by RC6-related bugs affecting a small minority of Sandy Bridge users, this power-savings feature is not limited to only Intel mobile graphics. As discovered at Phoronix, RC6 can manage to boost the graphics performance beyond just extending your battery life. The RC6 performance boost is also quite visible on Intel Sandy Bridge desktop hardware too.

    • Codethink Senior Engineer Launches Open Source 3D Device Driver Project: LimaDriver.ORG

    • Radeon R600 Tiling Patches Are Ready

• Applications

  • The Best Calendar App for Linux

    The Best Calendar App for LinuxLinux users have a few calendar programs to choose from, but none of them are particularly spectacular—in fact, most of them aren’t very good at all. As such, we’re bending the rules of the App Directory and recommending that you use the awesome Google Calendar webapp for all your scheduling needs.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Compare And Synchronize Folders With FreeFileSync

    • Wget Download Manager

    • Hardening Postfix For ISPConfig 3

  • Games

    • Linux games compilation 11 – Don’t fear the numbers!

      Long time no see. It’s been a while since I’ve last written a mega-game compilation. You may believe that I’ve given up Linux games. Not at all. Linux gaming is alive and kicking. Not moving forward quite as fast as I’d like, but some games are making tremendous progress, others are sending awareness waves through the fabric of humanity, others yet are fresh new titles, a testament to the slow, yet persistent growth of Linux on the domestic market. More commercial games would be nice, but we’re not here to debate finance or politics. Not much anyway.

      Truth to be told, one day, I am going to run out of available titles for these kinds of reviews, so we will have to switch back to single game articles only. Not today. Luckily for you, I’ve managed to lay my hands on several more useful games, which you will probably like. Let’s see what we have.

    • MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game

      When the Glest team started “Glest” as a college project a few years ago, they probably didn’t expect their game to go such a long way. While “Glest” stopped being developed a couple of years ago in 2009, it was forked in two different projects: GAE (Glest Advanced Engine) and Megaglest (the game I am reviewing in this article). So, how is it? The answer is simple: this game is incredible, polished, enjoyable, addictive, smart, and plain simply fantastic.

      A few years ago, the general consensus was that games could only be developed thanks to big investments, and that there could never be a really good games released as GPL. This theory was proved wrong several times, and I can say that MegaGlest is yet more evidence that fantastic games released for free can — and do — exist.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 15th January 2012

    • Akademy 2012 Call for Papers; Registration opens

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Alpine 2.3.6 released

    • Salix Live Xfce 13.37

    • KahelOS 020212

    • SimplyMEPIS 11.0.12

  • Debian Family

    • Iceweasel/Firefox 10.0 now in the Debian Mozilla APT Archive

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Video Review: Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 – Screenshots

          Well with the release of the Alpha for Ubuntu 12.04, I had to do a short video and screenshot tour. Join in the bandwagon parade of sorts leading up to the main release. Hey, dont get me wrong, I like parades….. I also have used Ubuntu for many years but currently I use Xubuntu but… I still enjoy Ubuntu…..

        • Comment: Unity can’t go it alone

          Open source experts like Red Hat and SUSE learned long ago how difficult and often unwise it can be to try to establish bigger projects with just their own distributions. If Canonical realises this, too, and changes its methods of operation accordingly, the Unity desktop will have a much better chance of becoming the third major desktop alongside GNOME and KDE.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android, Tizen and the End of Java

      I wanted to call this piece Life, the Universe and Everything. If you’re an avid sci-fi reader, or you’ve at least read Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then those words might mean something to you, but this argument is not about the book, or Douglas Adams. Allow me to explain.

    • HP CEO says webOS will be better than ‘fragmented’ Android and ‘closed’ iOS

    • Android

      • Android is the number one mobile OS in the US

      • 5 Best Android Apps For Reddit Lovers

        When does the narwhal bacon? If you know the answer to that question, there’s very little doubt that you’re a regular Reddit user. Reddit, apart from being a social news website, has also become a cultural phenomenon. It has reached millions of internet users and has changed many lives since its inception. Though most users prefer browsing the site in its original avatar, that is the web-based version, there are some Redditors who need to upvote/downvote stuff even while they’re travelling. So, to fulfill that need, here are some of the best Reddit Apps for Android which will let you browse the site from anywhere.

      • MIUI Android ROM is going open source

      • Chinese OEM Xiaomi publishes MIUI open source code

      • DROID 4 rumored to launch February 9th for $199.99 on Verizon [updated]

      • Crittercism: “iOS apps crash more than Android apps”

        Startup mobile app monitoring firm Crittercism has released a new report which is bound to get people talking about Apple vs. Android all over again. As if the fanboys ever take a break. The crux of the finding is this: Apple and its various OS iterations is not any more stable than Android and its ‘fragmented’ ecosystem.

      • LG Reveals Pair of Unknown Androids in Certification Filing

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • 6 Reasons Why Windows 8 Tablets Are Not A Threat To Android

      Microsoft has lost the mobile war. The disappointing performance of Windows Phone even after two years of its release is evident that the market has moved on. Microsoft’s last bet is Nokia which dropped all of its own open source projects and promising OS such as MeeGo to become a hardware delivery truck for Microsoft’s Mobile OS.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open Source Based Workflow Management Systems

• Open Source Migration Checklist

• Next Gen File Systems for Open Source

• Taking the Open Source Pill

• My Experiences With Open Source

• Events

  • National Conference on “Emerging Trends in Open Source Applications and Cloud Computing (OSACC – 2012)” at Jamia

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 11 to get add-on sync

      Following the update to Firefox stable earlier this week, Mozilla released today updates to its Aurora and Beta versions that introduce some pretty hefty changes for the Firefox on PCs.

    • Which Firefox is right for you — 10, 11, 12 or 13?

      As always, the rapid release cycle — a new version of Firefox ships every six weeks — means that changes aren’t as radical as you might expect considering the regular version number jumps. However, the latest batch of updates hints that some major updates are heading Firefox’s way over the next few months. Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your personal needs with our updated guide to what the future holds in store for Firefox.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice stats: 400 total contributors, thousands of code commits every month

    The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project’s rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

  • LibreOffice Development Status Report

• CMS

  • Open Source Software Helps Fitness Professionals Save Money, Time Inexpensive WordPress Themes eliminate the need for costly web design

• Healthcare

  • Open Source Tackles Healthcare In Places Microsoft Can’t

    At one hospital in Kano, Nigeria, 50 babies are born each day. And it’s not exactly prepared to handle them all. “We’re talking about one midwife taking three deliveries at a time,” says Evelyn Castle.

    Nonetheless, Castle aims to create digital records of those births and the hundreds of others happening across northern Nigeria each day — even as she and another American expatriate, Adam Thompson, are working to digitize the health records of adults across the region, including polio cases and expectant mothers who’ve tested HIV positive. It’s an enormous task, but the size is only part of the problem. Castle and Thompson are introducing western technology to facilities that aren’t familiar with it — and may not have the resources to handle what they are familiar with.

    “This is one of the most difficult places on the planet — in many ways,” says Andrew Karlyn, who spent three years as the country director in Nigeria for the Population Council, a nonprofit that seeks to improve living conditions in places across the globe. “If you’ve got a barely literate medical technician, who only knows how to use a microscope to look for Malaria and fill in a form, you can’t just put a fancy computer in front of him and expect him to use it.”

    Or, as Castle points out, if a midwife is juggling three deliveries at a time, recording the details isn’t high on the list of priorities.

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Alfresco Enterprise 4 adds a free public cloud option

      Building on the enterprise CMS’s open source foundations, Alfresco has announced that, alongside the release of its subscription offering Alfresco Enterprise 4, it is rolling out a hosted, multi-tenant cloud version of the platform. Designed for enterprises that want control of their content with their own installations of Alfresco but would find it useful to have a globally accessible, controllable document store in the cloud, Alfresco are offering organisations, with or without its enterprise CMS, free accounts with ten gigabytes of storage on the Amazon EC2 hosted system.

• Funding

  • Science Startups and Basic Researchers Turn to Crowds for Funding

    Having branded itself “the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects,” Kickstarter has become a hub for artists, writers, performers, and filmmakers to connect with philanthropists interested in underwriting their projects. But science is a creative endeavor too, and, like artists, inventors and researchers face dwindling support from traditional sources.

• Public Services/Government

  • Open-government advocates share their wish lists

    We asked open-data advocates to share their top wishes for a Quebec open government, and what provincial data they’d most like to see liberated.

• Programming

  • Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation

  • Hands-on with Node.js support in Komodo IDE 7

    ActiveState has released a major new version of the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE). The update, which is called Komodo 7, introduces several useful new features and support for additional programming languages.

  • Bridging Git Over Open Source and Commercial

Leftovers

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Hey Advertisers! Stop Believing The NFL’s Lies About Trademark Law And Call The Super Bowl The Super Bowl

  • Copyrights

    • The SOPA War: Why the GOP Turned on Piracy (Opinion)

      For Republicans, opposition to intellectual property laws is starting to look like a political winner, and that should terrify Hollywood as it misreads where the pop-culture power base now lies.

    • SOPA Is Top Story for Young People

      Young people under 30 followed protests over SOPA more closely than news about the upcoming presidential election, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

      That makes sense to librarians. They know young people, who spend so much of their lives online would be likely to follow news involving sites they visit.

    • Tell The USTR To Stop Being A Pawn Of Hollywood Lobbyists

      Every year, the USTR puts out its infamously laughable Special 301 report (as I’ve pointed out in the past, I’ve seen people in the ideologically-aligned US Copyright Office mock the Special 301 report openly — showing that even those who support it know that it’s ridiculous). The way it works is that the USTR asks for comments about what countries aren’t doing enough to protect US intellectual property abroad, and then puts out a “who’s been naughty” and “who’s been extra extra naughty” list to publicly shame countries. It’s been so ridiculous that Canada — whose copyright law is much stricter than the US in many ways — is frequently listed as naughty, and has officially stated that it does not consider the Special 301 process to be legitimate.

    • Paramount Wants To Talk To Students About How They’re All Thieves & Then Ask For Ideas On What To Do

      As Hollywood struggles to come up for breath and understand the nature of what hit them last month in the SOPA/PIPA debate, it appears they’re still thinking that part of this is an “education” issue — and if they could just tell young people how evil file sharing is that everything would be good. A whole bunch of folks have been passing on variations on the news that Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom — one of the major backers of SOPA/PIPA) wants to go talk to college kids.

    • Opposing Copyright Extension

    • Corporate Copyright Scofflaws 0012 – Sony Corporation

      The largest copyright pirates are the large corporations, particularly in the content distribution business. Yes, those companies who scream the loudest that their customers are ‘pirating’ movies, songs, books, etc. In this series, we are going to look at cases where these companies have engaged in large scale copyright infringement, or in other ways have been ripping off artists.

    • ACTA

      • Swedes out in force to protest anti-piracy law

      • Bulgarian MPs Wear Anonymous/Guy Fawkes Masks To Protest ACTA

      • ACTA’s EU future in doubt after Polish pause

        The chances of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement becoming law in Europe dwindled suddenly on Friday, after Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said he was suspending ACTA’s ratification in his country.

      • ACTA’s EU Future In Doubt As Poland Suspends Ratification

      • Watch Out: Widespread Protests Against ACTA Spreading Across Europe

      • Is The US Meddling In Polish ACTA Voting?

        Assuming this really was someone from the US embassy checking up on the whether Polish politicians were following the party line on ACTA — there’s been no independent corroboration yet — it does seem pretty extraordinary. Judging by the generally outraged tone of the 1100+ comments on this piece, the Poles themselves don’t seem very happy either. I think we can expect to hear much more about Poland’s resistance to ACTA in the coming weeks.

Summary: A roundup of news about former Novell staff and where that staff is moving these days

NOVELL is a relic, but one that has become almost synonymous with old networks. Novell is no longer a company, let alone one that boasts having about 12,000 members of full-time staff.

Mr. Taylor, a former Novell senior, becomes CFO at Adaptive Computing and the respective press release says:

Mr. Taylor also served as the Director of Finance and Group Controller for the Product Development Organization at Novell, where he worked extensively in the product planning process.

Here is the story of a man who served/advised companies sold to Novell:

Syed, managing principal at PredictSoft LLC, moved to Shrewsbury in early 2005 and has since been driving new initiatives, including funding high-tech companies to drive entrepreneurs to come up with better software products that enhance business productivity. Over the last two years, he has been an investor and adviser to companies that were sold to Novell, Cisco Systems, McAfee and Intel. These companies created jobs in Massachusetts and California.

Another new hire:

Butterfield is the founder and managing partner of SageCreek Partners, where he helps companies with their go-to market, recruiting, finance and business development initiatives. Before SageCreek, he guided Altiris to eight consecutive years of profitability, overseeing growth in revenue from $3 million to more than $300 million. He had similar results at Vinca Corporation, Legato, Novell and WordPerfect. Butterfield is the winner of the 2002 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

More Novell connections here:

Masie worked for 8 years in the USA at Novells head office in Utah as a Global Corporate Technology Strategist. On his return to South Africa he assumed the role of country manager of Novell and thereafter developed, established and launched Google South Africa.

Masie is mentioned here as well:

Masie worked for eight years in the USA at Novell’s head office in Utah as a Global Corporate Technology Strategist.

Here is Semel, another familiar person who left, finding his place at a new company:

Mr. Semel joins IntraLinks after serving as senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Novell, Inc. Previously, Mr. Semel served as chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Tele Atlas N.V., a Dutch Euronext company providing digital mapping and navigation solutions. Mr. Semel also served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of Ascential Software Corporation, a provider of enterprise data integration, and vice president, general counsel and secretary of NaviSite, Inc.

Corey becomes Chief Revenue Officer and the press release says:

Prior to USWeb, he served as vice president at Novell’s $1.2 billion NetWare systems business. More recently,

More information can be found here.

More former Novell staff is mentioned in other articles, but these people are not as prominent. For instance:

A seasoned executive, he has held various senior management positions in both start-up and large enterprise companies including Novell Inc., the pioneer in local area networking. At Novell he led marketing, product management, developer and strategic relations organizations.

One who moved to McAfee is already leaving:

She joined the vendor in summer 2009, arriving from an equivalent position at Novell. According to McAfee, she has moved on “to pursue new opportunities”. She is replaced as UK and Ireland vice president by Ross Allen.

Job hopping already?

Other former Novell employees ended up in this company. For example, to quote this new report from Canada:

The move to the worldwide role at McAfee puts Struthers on what he calls his “fourth continental hop.” After starting out in South Africa, he moved to Dubai for Novell about ten years ago, reporting into EMEA. Then it was off to Asia Pacific, based in Australia, for McAfee. And now, onto North America.

The bottom line is, a lot of people whom we know from Novell (where they were managers) are no longer with Novell or even with Attachmate. Novell is where people stay to sink with a ship. █

Summary: PR spin from Novell and money-grabbing moves that promote proprietary software rather than Free/Open Source software

OVER in YouTube, Novell keeps advertising Vibe [1, 2, 3], but how long might it take to see the Windows bias of this product? Well, here we have it right from Novell’s own mouth:

Novell Vibe Add-in for Microsoft Office lets you create or update a document in Vibe directly from MS Office. The new Vibe Add-in feature is integrated into the MS Office environment so users can seamlessly edit and save files directly into Vibe in near real time without leaving the comfort of their MS Office environment.

We previously showed how other Novell communication products got integrated with Microsoft Skype, a reminder of which is here.

Novell’s other products now target Macs, but still, not a word about GNU/Linux. To quote a press release about GroupWise 2012 and something else about Mac support, GroupWise now boasts “iPad support”. More of that Mac hype can be found here, in one among few Novell announcements that we can find. The point we are trying to make is, Novell does nothing to advance GNU/Linux or even Open/LibreOffice in the enterprise. This was very different before the deal with Microsoft. In fact, Novell gave its patents to Microsoft and Apple.

As we find in the news, more GroupWise customers are ditching the platform. Here is one new example:

Utah will be moving off Novell GroupWise, which currently is being used by the state’s executive branch. Novell is based in Provo, Utah.

Even Utah rejects Novell. What a blow. Considering the roots of Novell, this is symbolic too. This other new article states that:

When Macomb County officials a year ago began researching the best method to replace its existing Novell GroupWise technology, the Sheriff’s Office expressed concerns over security.

“I’m all for saving money and doing what’s right on the taxpayer side, but until we have assurances that information is going to be sent securely, we’re going to stay on the GroupWise platform,” said Sheriff Anthony Wickersham, who is concerned about emailing criminal information, driver’s license records and addresses.

GroupWise is not secure either. It’s all very perceptual and Novell used FUD in this case.

Here we have another company that tells us about Novell getting quite rusty in the enterprise:

Much interest in Resara Server has come from Netware users, who are under pressure to modernize their networks. With Novell’s future uncertain, and the prospect of a costly investment in Suse Linux Enterprise or Microsoft Active Directory, Resara Server offers an attractive and cost-effective exit strategy. “The direction of Novell’s products in recent years required us to look at other options”, says Daniel Hedblom, System Administrator for the Sollefteå school district in Sweden. “We moved to Suse from Netware, but the resource needs for mono and .net made Zenworks unusable for us. Resara Server and Samba4 is a much cleaner solution, and we are glad to have found it”.

Novell’s future is indeed “uncertain”; the company itself was sold and the buyer is grappling with debt while GroupWise, for instance, keeps losing customers and the spin department says that there is momentum even where there is none (GroupWise is being ditched in large deployments). To quote:

It’s a new day for Novell and GroupWise, and the future is bright.

It’s nonsense. It’s Novell’s “PR blog” and it shows. Over at YouTube too it’s just a lot of promotional/marketing videos for GroupWise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] spread artificially by marketers rather than users. A look at Novell news summaries [1, 2] reveals more of a rotting company which is now clinging onto proprietary software (even Microsoft and Mac promotion) for cash. Novell deserves no sympathy from the FOSS world. It had its good days but in 2006 it defected. █

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux Format 155 On Sale Today – Discover Linux!

• Desktop

  • 2012 Linux Computer Buyer’s Guide

  • The Rise of GNU/Linux on the Desktop

    don’t know what has changed in NetApplications’ world but in the real world, a rate of growth like that would make GNU/Linux the dominant desktop OS in 3.5 years. Android/Linux is on a more modest pace and will take over the world in 4 years.

  • Soon You Will Be Running Android On Your PCs

    In an exclusive interview with Muktware, Greg-KH one of the leading figures of the Linux world, told us “The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn’t make it into the 3.3 kernel release.”

    Google will finally wash the last remaining stain from their linen as they bring back the Android kernel to the mainline Linux kernel.

  • Coreboot Is Set To Start Booting Laptops

    This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support.

• Server

  • Cray cuts the cost of its midrange supercomputers

    Supercomputer outfit Cray has announced that it is trying to make its mid-range efforts cheaper.

  • Oracle Drags Microsoft, Red Hat Into Itanium Lawsuit Swamp

    As Oracle and HP’s lawsuit over the doomed Itanium chip drags on like some Dickensian subplot, it’s time to introduce two new characters: Microsoft and Red Hat.

    Both companies were served with subpoenas last Thursday by Oracle, which seems hell-bent on unearthing every embarrassing detail on Itanium and then flushing them into the public record.

    On Monday, thanks to Oracle’s lawyers, we learned that HP is paying close to $700 million to keep Intel cranking out its unpopular Unix superprocessor until 2017. Oracle is trying to make the case that HP’s public act of pretending that people liked Itanium was not marketing but fraud. We’ll leave that one for the courts to decide.

  • How Web savvy are Romney, Gingrich and Obama?

    President Barack Obama recently held a Google+ video Hangout; Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich promised to have a permanent U.S. moon-base by 2020; and fellow Republican Mitt Romney, along with Gingrich and Obama, are against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA). So, as politicians go, these guys are all pretty tech-savvy right? Well, yes and no. If you look at their Web sites, which is what Strangeloop, a Web site optimization company, did, you’ll find that neither Republicans nor Democrats are as up to speed as you might like.

  • [Case Study] Lessons in High Performance Computing with Open Source

  • BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux

    UK hybrid TV service BT Vision plans to be the first customer to discard Microsoft’s Mediaroom software, almost imminently, after at least a year-long effort to put in completely new software building blocks to rejuvenate the service.

• Kernel Space

  • Hauppauge USB Receiver Tested Under Linux 3.2

    Support for the Hauppauge Aero-M USB receiver under Linux has improved with the release of the 3.2 kernel earlier this month. After some initial testing I’m happy to report its performance operating under Linux is as good as it is in a Windows environment. The Linux drivers also come with a unique feature that isn’t easily available in Windows.

    I tested the Aero-M using Arch Linux with the latest kernel, 3.2.2-1 and the Kaffeine media player, which I find superior to WinTV under Windows in that it supports the ATSC program guide and scheduling recordings using the program guide.

  • Linux 3.3 Will Let You Boot Into Android: Greg-KH

    Greg KH has quit SUSE and joined The Linux Foundation as a fellow. We interviewed Greg to understand if there will be any change in his role and responsibilities and engagement with the Linux community. We also asked about the status of Android kernel in the mainline Linux kernel.

  • Graphics Stack

    • The First Shots Of “Limare” Running On Linux

      Limare is the open-source program (the code will be dropped by early next week) that was designed to assist in reverse-engineering the ARM Mali 200/400 graphics processors. It’s a simple program, similar to reNouveau or the r600demo back in the day, for drawing simple objects to the screen.

• Applications

  • Final GIMP 2.6 series update arrives

    The GIMP development team has released version 2.6.12 of its open source GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) image editing software. The twelfth point update to the 2.6.x branch is a maintenance update that adds no new features and focuses on addressing “a ton” of bugs found in the previous build from October 2010.

  • GIMP 2.6.12 Released – The Final 2.6 Release2012-02-01

  • Final GIMP 2.6 series update arrives

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (CentOS 6.2 x86_64)

    • Radio Software Airtime 2.0 Released With Easier Icecast And SHOUTcast Configuration, More

    • Running ownCloud3 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

    • Create Your Own Gubuntu Or Pure Gnome Shell 3 Ubuntu

    • How To Install Arista Transcoder In openSUSE

    • TomHenderson
      Understanding Syslog Managers and How to Use Them

    • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (CentOS 6.2 x86_64)

    • Laptop overheating, causing thermal shutdown during prolonged, CPU-intensive tasks

    • Some Useful Command Line Tips For Linux

    • Weekend project: Zap Your Coworkers’ Minds with Multi-Pointer X

    • A second addendum to the second installment

      I really do have things other than outlining with nano to write about. Really I do. For example, there’s the project of installing the Tinycore distribution on some older machines in our computer lab to write about–something I did about a month ago and about which I’ve already started an article; there’s an article about the newsbeuter rss client; one about how to set a weather map as the desktop background; and so forth. But I’ve gone on kind of a jag with this nano project lately, and it’s complex and foreign enough to me that if I don’t record it now, I’m liable to forget important details. So, you’re forced to endure another installment on it.

  • Wine

    • Wine 1.4 Gears Up For Release With More Bug Fixes

  • Games

    • Linux Game Publishing…the return?

      So anyone who has been in the Linux gaming scene for a while will have probably heard of LGP (Linux Game Publising) who port and distribute games for Linux at quite a premium as they tend to go for older AAA titles as opposed to indie titles.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE Tablet Sparks Starts Shipping In May

      Slowly but steadily KDE project has positioned itself at the right spot when tablets are becoming mainstream. You can pick KDE Desktop for your main PC, KDE netbook for your netbook and now Plasma Active 2 for touch based devices such as tablets. Aaron Seigo, the lead of the KDE team, has revealed more information about the KDE powered tablet.

    • Spark answers

      I’m going to attempt to answer as many questions about the Spark tablet as possible here. The questions I’ll be answering are ones found in comments in my blog, on discussion sites around the Internet and that came in by email or irc. Let the fun begin!

    • Spark, free-software Linux tablet, to ship in May

    • The Hunt for Unobtrusive Chat

      Once apon a time, Instant messaging or ‘Online Chat’ was a primary task on it’s own. That is, I remember the days when I would switch on my computer, sign in to ‘MSN Messenger’ (as it was called back then), have a voice conversation with my father (who was working in England at the time), and then be done with it. However, over the last few years, not only have we started to rely more on it, but it’s also become more of a secondary (or even tertiary) task. For example, these days I keep in contact with the rest of the telepathy-kde (or is it kde-telepathy now, or just ‘ktp’ yet?) team on IRC while I’m developing; talk to my friends (with a steam voice call) while playing a game and so on.

      The thing is that, things like that need to be able to be done simultaneously while still maintaining maximum efficiency. Which becomes painfully impossible when you have to switch windows, or the way most IM clients are implemented these days.

      So, shortly before joining the Telepathy-KDE team, I set out to figure out what would allow me to talk to someone while doing my work with the minimum overhang (interruptions).

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Five most downloaded extensions of awesome (gnome) shell

• Distributions

  • Video Review: DreamLinuix 5.0 Really Dreamy?

  • Parabola GNU/Linux: Freedom Packaged

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS 2012.2 Released

      oday, February 2, is Bill “Texstar” Reynolds’ birthday, but it’s the community who received the present. PCLinuxOS 2012.2 KDE was released today in a full sized version as well as a mini.

      This release ships with Kernel 2.6.38 and KDE 4.6.5. It comes packed with lots of your favorite apps like LibreOffice (installer), Firefox, TvTime, VLC, and the GIMP. The appearance hasn’t changed since the last release, but some additional goodies have been added. One of which is the PCLinuxOS Documentation Portal which will take users to the various features of the PCLOS Website or service.

    • PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.02 Has Been Released

      The PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE MiniME 2012.02 operating systems have been released today, February 2nd, and are now available for download.

      PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.02 is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.38.8bfs, optimized for maximum desktop performance, and the KDE SC 4.6.5 environment.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • About Fedora 16

        Before Fedora 16 was released, I was quite excited about all the features that were being planned for Verne. I was looking forward to installing both the GNOME and KDE versions on the same computer and test each back to back, under the same hardware and OS. Unfortunately, I had my share of ISSUES, and that kind of put me off a bit. After a while testing other distros, I had some spare time and decided to go for Fedora 16. Like I said, I tested GNOME and KDE back to back, but before I go on about that comparison (which will be an article in itself), I wanted to share some of my impressions on Verne, both from KDE and GNOME perspectives.

      • Review: Installation and first Look: Fuduntu 2012.1

        Fuduntu started off as a customized Fedora install, but recently forked Fedora to create their own special distro that borrowed a bit from Ubuntu and a bit from Fedora. It has a very nice look when it first starts up and I almost forget that it’s Gnome 2.x:

      • Anaconda to the Rescue

      • Compiz Is Likely To Get The Boot From Fedora 17

        While Fedora 17 has a massive amount of features to look forward to, updates to Compiz is likely not on the agenda. In the coming days, Compiz and its related packages for this compositing window manager are likely to be removed from the Fedora 17 package-list.

        Compiz is on the list of packages that are set to be “retired” from Fedora. There’s a whole list of the packages set to be retired from Fedora 17 in this mailing list message.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released!

          The Ubuntu team has announced the release of Precise Pangolin Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 12.04.

          Kate Steward writes on a mailing list, “Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Precise development cycle. This is the first Ubuntu milestone release to include images for the armhf architecture, for the ARM CPUs using the hard-float ABI.”

        • Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released!

          Pre-releases of Precise Pangolin are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 arrives for testing

          As expected, the Ubuntu release team has published the second alpha of version 12.04 of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, code-named “Precise Pangolin”. Aimed at developers and testers, the development milestone release uses the 3.2.0-12.21 Ubuntu kernel which is based on the recent 3.2.2 Linux kernel.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released

        • How Much Gnome 3.4 Will Be There In Ubuntu 12.04?

          Ubuntu 12.04 is an LTS version so the team has to be very careful about what they pick or drop as this is the version which is used by enterprise customers or by those who want a stable system well supported for a longer period of time. They have to be careful about the individual applications as well, so they are picking different versions of applications from the Gnome stack.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 ARM Performance Becomes Very Compelling

        • Unity: Very Intrusive & A Nightmare To Maintain

          Along with the discussion around a rolling-release version of Fedora Linux, having been discussed recently has been the possibility of providing Ubuntu’s Unity desktop as an alternative desktop environment for Fedora. This is obviously a topic that gets some riled up.

          The discussion about Unity desktop packages as a possibility for Fedora has basically died since there’s no Fedora package maintainers interested in doing the legwork at this point and most importantly is that Unity doesn’t take advantage of many of the upstream GNOME APIs. With incompatible API implementations for some packages, this makes working with Unity a pain if wishing to still fully support the GNOME 3.x desktop in a streamlined manner.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Make Switching From Windows To Linux Easier With Zorin OS

            Despite the many reasons why people preach the use of Linux, actually going through with the switch is a completely different story. I know this only too well as I went through the exact same process before everything came together and I fell in love with Linux. However, I have to admit that it took a while with numerous attempts at using Linux for more than a week.

            It’s not that Linux is hard to use or understand, but it simply doesn’t fit the Windows mindset that most people have. Expecting to do everything in Linux exactly like in Windows is where problems start appearing, which can easily deter a good number of users. Thankfully, there is now a Linux distribution that could make the process a whole lot easier.

          • Linux Mint 12 KDE released!

          • Linux Mint 12 KDE released

          • Can Lubuntu Lure Windows 8 Users?

            One of the biggest challenges that Windows users will soon face is the transition to an unknown territory called Metro which will be introduced with Windows 8. The PC interface has remained same ever since Apple took the concept from Xerox and made it popular through Lisa. It has improved and evolved over ages, but just like the front seat of a car has remained same for some good reason, just the way QWERTY keyboard has been around for ever.

            Given the monopoly that Microsoft has in the desktop market, Windows 8 will come pre-installed on new PCs and users will be forced to use it. I don’t know how the market will react to this massive change. Windows 8 could be yet another Vista in the making. Yes, it will be an incredible OS for touch based devices which is in the league of GNU/Linux’s Gnome 3 Shell or KDE Plasma Active which is optimized for touch-based devices.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspbmc – XBMC Linux Distribution for Raspberry Pi Announced

    First, XBMC playing HD video on rPi was shown shown off at Scale 10x. Now a specific Linux distribution Raspbmc is being developed by Stm Labs which is specially optimized for Raspberry Pi.

  • Openmoko smartphone reborn as hackable GTA04

    German manufacturer Golden Delicious has begun shipping a hackable open source smartphone that runs a variety of Linux software, including a newly optimized Openmoko distro. The Openmoko GTA04 is available as a finished phone or as a board that slips into earlier Openmoko Neo Freerunner GTA01 and GTA02 cases, providing an 800MHz Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a full range of sensors and wireless features.

  • Defunct email service offers handhelds to hackers

    Peek has discontinued its low-cost, email-and-texting service but is challenging hackers to “build something great” with the leftover handhelds, according to The Verge. The Peek devices include a 2.5-inch screen, a QWERTY keyboard, an ARM7-based processor, and a GSM cellular modem, according to the company.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Honeycomb on a Budget: Sprint debuts the $99 ZTE Optik

      • Android Isn’t as Fragmented as You Think, Report Says

        Fragmentation is often held up as one of Android’s biggest problems, posing all kinds of challenges for developers and users alike.

      • Google Android Winning The Open-Source War

        Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Google’s Android is a utopic OS. With it, the company brings the open source philosophy that anyone capable can use, customise and apply it with the end goal of fuelling innovation. In fact, it’s part of the company’s philosophy:

      • Xiaomi opens up Android ROM Source code

      • Android near 50% Market Share in latest comScore results

      • Android fragmentation not so serious, says study

        Android is regularly blasted for fragmentation, but most Android smartphones and tablets use similar builds, screen sizes, and resolutions, according to a study by app analytics firm Localytics. Currently, 73 percent of Android smartphone app sessions use Android 2.3, with 23 percent at Android 2.2, while 41 percent originated from 4.3 inch screens and 22 percent from four-inch screens, says the study.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • ASUS ‘TF300T’ slate makes an appearance, could be the next Transformer?

      While ASUS is still trying to get a firm grip on its latest Transformer, a purported next-gen member of its Eee Pad family is now happily circulating the web. Taiwanese site NCCC claims to have come across what could be a followup to the Transformer Prime.

    • Spark Tablet Coming for the FOSS Crowd

    • Sprint’s seven-inch tablet is just $100 on contract

      Sprint says it will offer a seven-inch tablet featuring a dual-core Snapdragon processor, 3G, and Wi-Fi for just $100 — with a two-year service agreement priced at $20 to $80 per month. The ZTE Optik includes Android Market support, GPS receiver, Bluetooth, a microSD slot, and a bundled headset, according to the carrier.

Free Software/Open Source

• FTDI adds touch capability to its open source platform

  Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) has added a touch control input/output application boards for its Vinco development module.

  The Vinco Touch Key applications board, which the supplier calls a shield mates with the Vinco motherboard, and incorporates a STMicroelectronics STMPE821 8-channel general purpose input/output (GPIO) capacitive touch key controller IC.

• Open source software should be used to secure public sector systems, IT bosses are told

• Free Software Is Just Fine

  FOSS is supported in many ways:

  * Open source – Make the source openly available.
  * Open standards – Use or create common available specifications.
  * Open development – Accept development contributions (source, review, test) from outside contributors.
  * Data ownership – Allow users to maintain ownership of their data by being able to move their data between their choice of solutions or remove their data entirely.

• Events

  • SambaXP 2012 conference call for papers

    The Samba eXPerience organisers have announced that the eleventh international Samba conference will take place from 8 to 11 May 2012 in Göttingen, Germany at the Hotel Freizeit. The event is open to both users and developers of the open source Windows interoperability suite for Linux and Unix.

    The conference will include tutorials on 8 May, with the main conference taking place on 9 and 10 May. For the first time, there will also be a BarCamp on Friday 11 May at which attendees can speak to members of the Samba Team about conference topics and Samba in general.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox

      Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

      The project is part of Mozilla’s broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

    • Seamonkey review: Firefox’s Lightweight Hyper-Functional Cousin

      Seamonkey has an interesting history, in that it is both older and younger than Firefox. Older, because originally it was built from Mozilla Suite code (for those of you that don’t know, Mozilla Application Suite is the parent of Firefox, and was originally built from the code of Netscape Navigator which was open-sourced in 1998). Seamonkey is also younger than Firefox in that Seamonkey’s first version, 1.0, was not released until 2006, 2 years after Firefox 1.0. Quite a few people are not even aware of the existence of Seamonkey or the Mozilla Suite, thinking that Firefox was the successor to Netscape Navigator, created deliberately to enact their vendetta against Microsoft for their monopolistic practices that killed Netscape. But glorious fantasies aside, Mozilla Application Suite was the real successor.

• SaaS

  • 2 Ways To Ease Hadoop Growing Pains

    Interest in Hadoop is booming, so it should be no surprise that commercial vendors are piling on with products that promise to make the open source big data platform more reliable, more versatile, less expensive (by reducing required hardware investments) or faster.

    Enter EMC Isilon and RainStor, both of which say they’re plugging gaps in Hadoop to meet enterprise-grade needs. Each vendor brings a new twist to HDFS, Hadoop’s distributed file system. EMC Isilon has tied its network-attached storage to HDFS, while RainStor has added a database on top of the file system that promises high compression as well as support for SQL analysis.

• CMS

  • The Drupal Release Model and Why it Needs to be Revamped

    Drupal today released a total of four versions of the popular open source CMS. Yes, I said four. Drupal 6.23, 6.24, 7.11 and 7.12 releases were put on the servers today.

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • ActuateOne Demonstrates Leadership by Scaling to 40 Million End Users

    • Continuent Partners With ForLinux In UK

• BSD

  • GhostBSD 2.5 review

    GhostBSD is a desktop distribution based on FreeBSD. It comes as an installable Live DVD image and is developed by Eric Turgeon and Nahuel Sanchez. The latest edition, GhostBSD 2.5, based on FreeBSD 9, is the project’s fourth release, and was made available for public download on January 24 (2012).

    This article provides the first review of this distribution on this website, and it is based on test installations of the 32-bit version. The boot menu is shown below.

• Project Releases

  • SMPlayer 0.7.0 Brings YouTube And Mplayer2 Support

  • Cinnamon 1.2 Released

    Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Gnome 3-based desktop, is now available for free download for use with Linux Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, openSUSE 12.1, Arch Linux, and Gentoo. All APIs and the desktop itself are now fully stable, according to the blog announcement from lead developer Clement Lefebvre.

  • idutils-4.6 released [stable]

• Public Services/Government

  • UK Looking at GNU/Linux for Web Portal

    Glyn Moody has more details on the new web portal being tested by gov.uk. It runs on GNU/Linux on Amazon EC2. They should save a ton of money by running that way combined with centralizing web services.

  • Open thread: An open House of Representatives?

  • 2012: Open innovation for government

    As we turn the calendar to the new year, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve done here at Civic Commons over the past year, what we’ve learned, and where we’re planning on heading next.

• Licensing

  • Understanding Open Source Licensing

    In works licensed under an open source license, anyone is permitted to modify and redistribute, as long as a given set of criterion are met. But, that’s the simple definition. Life in the open source licensing world is much more complex than that. Before going any further, let us catch a glimpse of what an open source license means and what are its associated caveats. Strictly speaking, an open source license must comply with the definition specified by Open Source Initiative, as laid out at http://opensource.org/ docs/definition.php:

  • GPL enforcement sparks community flames

    The debate over enforcement of the GPL took an interesting turn this week, after one developer’s call for more projects to begin enforcement proceedings against alleged GPL violators of the Linux kernel.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age – By Philippe Aigrain

    Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age is out! Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, in collaboration with Suzanne Aigrain, describes the creative contribution, a financial model designed to sustain an expanding creative economy in a context where sharing is recognized as a right.

  • Open thread: An open House of Representatives?

    Today, the US House of Representatives is hosting a 2-day conference about how they can be more open and transparent about what they do under the dome. They are exploring ideas and recommendations on how to create transparency on how legislative information is created and made available for public access. You might be following the conversation on Twitter (#LDTC) or watching the live webcast.

  • Open Data

    • Open-source Weave liberates data for journalists, citizens

• Programming

  • Join the M revolution

  • Programming is the new High School Diploma

  • Zarafa launches git.zarafa.com

    Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of git.zarafa.com, its own Gitorious distributed version control system. The company says git.zarafa.com is intended to enable developers to “innovate, contribute and get real time updates from the Zarafa software development team”.

  • Komodo IDE 7.0 adds Node.js, LESS and CoffeeScript support

    ActiveState has announced the release of version 7.0.0 of its Komodo integrated development environment (IDE) for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl and web development. The new version includes a code collaboration tool for sharing changes to selected users in real time and a sync feature for synchronising key bindings and preferences across multiple machines. Komodo 7.0 language support has been extended with editing and syntax checking for Node.js, CoffeeScript, LESS, CSS, EJS and Mojolicious. New code profiling features have also been added, but currently only support PHP and Python.

Leftovers

• Confused about iPads in Education

  Maybe I’m just not “hip” enough to see the need for them, but it seems to me if we want to revolutionize how our students learn using technology they would be better served if that technology came in the form of something other than an “iPad” or capacitive tablet of any sort. Whats your take on it?

• VeriSign, maintainer of net’s DNS, warns it was repeatedly hacked

  VeriSign, the company that manages a key internet database for routing traffic to websites and email addresses, exposed private information after being hacked on multiple occasions in 2010, the company quietly disclosed late last year.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Whistle-blowing Scientists (Trying To Prevent Dangerous Products From Reaching The Market) Sue FDA For Snooping On Their Personal Email Accounts

    Last year, we wrote about the federal whistle-blowing act, which was designed to give protections to federal employees who blow the whistle on federal fraud and abuse. For reasons that still aren’t clear, that bill was killed by a secret hold by either Senators Jon Kyl or Jeff Sessions. That fact only came out due to an amazing effort by the folks at On The Media, who kept hounding all 100 Senators to find out who would possibly kill such a bill. Recently, On The Media revisited the topic, noting that there was a new version of the bill. The report also talks about just how vindictive the government has been against whistleblowers. Even as President Obama has insisted that whistleblowers are important and should be protected, that’s not what’s happening in real life, with many getting stripped of their responsibility and demoted — all for daring to point out waste, fraud and abuse. The worst example to date, remains the horrifying story of Thomas Drake, who was threatened with 35 years in jail in a bogus vindictive lawsuit against him, due to his blowing the whistle on a bogus NSA project.

• Security

  • Critical PHP vulnerability being fixed

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • One Nation, Under Guard

    Bad news about the impending police state here in America: it’s already here. From the indefinite detention (without trial) of terrorism suspects both foreign and American to the escalating militarization of our nation’s police forces, there’s little to indicate that any level of government is willing to “walk back” the overreach of law enforcement, much of which stems from the Patriot Act’s anti-terrorism aims.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • ‘Gasland’ Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans (UPDATES)

    In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Initial reports from sources suggested that an ABC News camera was also prevented from taping the hearing; ABC has since denied that they sent a crew to the hearing.

• Finance

  • Richard Siewert, Former Treasury Counselor, Could Move To Goldman Sachs

  • Global Gold Production: How Sustainable a Rebound?

    Recently released data from the US Geological Survey shows that global gold production, after falling every year between 2001 and 2008, finally rose for the past three years. In 2011, production reached 2,700 metric tons.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC Education “Academy” Launches on Island Resort

    Today, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation will head out to an “island” resort on the coast of Florida to a unique “education academy” sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There will be no students or teachers. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations will meet behind closed doors to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise.

  • ALEC Exposed, for 24 Hours

• Censorship

  • This Week in Censorship: Arrested Bloggers in Vietnam, Google’s New Censorship Policy, and China Blocks Tibetan-Language Blogs

    As we have previously covered, the Vietnamese government continues to crack down on bloggers and writers who have spoken out against the Communist regime. Alternative news site, Vietnam Redemptorist News, has been targeted by the state and several of their active contributors have been arrested. Paulus Le Son, 26, is one of the most active bloggers who was arrested without a warrant.
    Vietnam is increasingly applying vague national security laws to silence free speech and political opposition. He is one of 17 bloggers who have been arrested since August 2011. Charged with “subversion” and “activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration”, there is a campaign to release him and the others who have been detained

  • When Judges Are Determining Whether Or Not Art Should Exist… We Have A Problem

    We’ve written about the somewhat horrifying ruling in the Richard Prince appropriation art case before. If you haven’t been following the details, Prince is an appropriation artist, who takes works he finds elsewhere, and modifies and transforms them into different pieces of artwork. The law around this kind of artwork is tragically murky — with some cases ruling that appropriation art is fair use, and some ruling otherwise. The Prince case got extra attention for a few reasons. One is that Prince is considered one of the biggest name artists around, and his works can sell for millions of dollars. The second is that this case also implicated the gallery that showed Prince’s work, raising some serious questions about secondary liability for galleries, and whether or not galleries themselves must become copyright experts. Finally, the ruling suggested that Prince’s artwork — valued at a few million dollars — might need to be destroyed..

• Civil Rights

  • Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist

  • WikiLeaks aside, Assange case strikes core of civil liberty

    JULIAN Assange’s current court appearance in Britain has nothing to do with sex or United States diplomatic cables or even with WikiLeaks. But it may make an important contribution to European law.
    The United Kingdom Supreme Court will be considering the point I raised on his behalf when a Swedish prosecutor claimed to be a ”judicial authority” empowered to issue a warrant to have him extradited to prison in Stockholm. My written argument began quite bluntly: ”The notion that a prosecutor is a ‘judicial authority’ is a contradiction in terms.”
    Judges must, as their defining quality, be independent of government. Police and prosecutors employed and promoted by the state obviously cannot be perceived as impartial if they are permitted to decide issues on the liberty of individuals.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Jenzabar Continues To Try To Censor Criticism Via Trademark Bullying

      Some people continue to insist that intellectual property and censorship are two totally separate issues, but that’s ridiculous. Yet another example is in the ongoing case concerning software company Jenzabar, which we’ve covered before. If you’re just picking this up now, one of Jenzabar’s founders, Chai Ling, many years ago, was one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square uprising — a point that the company regularly used in its PR efforts. A documentary film from Long Bow Productions showed Ling making some comments years ago about how she hoped the uprising would lead to bloodshed, in order to incentivize a wider uprising. Most people might write off such comments as extreme comments in the heat of the moment from a young, immature activist, and let it go. If Ling had just said that she regretted the comments, the whole thing would have probably blown over.

  • Copyrights

    • The Supreme Court’s Golan decision gives short shrift to the public domain

      In a decision that favored the 1% (copyright owners) over the 99% (consumers and the public domain), the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that neither the Patent and Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution nor the First Amendment prohibits the removal of works from the public domain. Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545. Prior blog coverage of the case: certiorari granted and the 10th Circuit opinion.

      The majority opinion was written by Justice Ginsburg for herself and five other justices. Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Alito, dissented. (Justice Kagan recused herself, as she had participated in the case as Solicitor General before being named to the Court.) The line-up of justices was therefore essentially the same as the 7-2 opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), which upheld the Constitutionality of copyright term extension, with Justice Alito replacing Justice Stevens in dissent, and Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O’Connor, respectively, in the majority.

    • Book Review: Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! by Tony Mullen

      YouTube is good, but not ideal, and the lack of a download link is somewhat annoying. So I spent some time researching good free media hosting sites for large files and ISOs. Torrent sites are particularly good for hosting the high-definition versions.

      These days I get a little paranoid doing this, and indeed, if so-called “anti-piracy” laws are passed (like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, or others as-yet-unnamed), there really might come a time when I suddenly start running into walls because these sites have been cut off, blocked, and people like me who are looking for them are profiled as “potential copyright offenders” to be prosecuted or otherwise harassed. Because a list of what the MPAA and RIAA’s think of as “rogue sites” looks an awful lot like a list of “free distributor sites for free culture media”. Many of them have a mixture of legal free content and illegal pirated content. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.

    • The Death of File Sharing

      Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.

      The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snakes have already taken over the garden and are hanging from every tree.

    • Shoe on the other foot: RIAA wants to scrap anti-piracy OPEN Act

      The Recording Industry Association of America found itself in an unusual position this week: opposing an anti-piracy bill that’s gaining momentum in Congress.

      “The OPEN Act does nothing” to stop online infringement and “may even make the problem worse,” the industry group says in a statement it is circulating on Capitol Hill this week. “It does not establish a workable framework, standards, or remedies. It is not supported by those it purports to protect.”

    • Book Review: No Safe Harbor by the US Pirate Party

      When I first heard the expression “Pirate Party”, I was sure it was some kind of a joke. When I found out they were actually getting elected to representative seats in Europe, though, I certainly started taking the idea seriously. But could a political party in the USA actually get somewhere with a name like the “United States Pirate Party”. Certainly not without a good platform introduction — and that’s what this book of essays is all about.

    • Rather Than Bitching About The Failure Of SOPA/PIPA, Rupert Murdoch Should Take A Closer Look At His Own Policies

      Danny Sullivan recently put forth an open letter to Murdoch, talking about the difficulty of getting The Simpsons legally, despite paying for it…

    • Neil Young on music and Steve Jobs: ‘piracy is the new radio’

    • Why History Needs Software Piracy

      Amid the debate surrounding controversial anti-piracy legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, our public discourse on piracy tends to focus on the present or the near future. When jobs and revenues are potentially at stake, we become understandably concerned about who is (or isn’t) harmed by piracy today.

    • Red Box To Warner Bros: Shove That 56-Day Rental Delay Up Your Ass!

    • BEACH BOYS LYRICIST TELLS PAINTER TO CEASE-AND-DESIST

      Perhaps no one was more excited by the long-awaited release of the Beach Boys’ unfinished 1966 album Smile than Erik den Breejen. Even before Smile came out late last year, the young painter (and lifelong Beach Boys fan) had set to work on a series of paintings that transformed the lyrics into brightly colored text-blocks, assembled into shapes of ocean waves and smiling lips.

    • ICE Seizes 300 More Sites; Can’t Have People Watching Super Bowl Ads Without Permission

      Despite the massive failures of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) program to seize domains on questionable legal theories, it’s right back at it. ICE has just seized over 300 domains apparently all related to the Super Bowl (of course). They did this last year too… and now the US government is in court over it with the Rojadirecta sites. Many of the sites were selling counterfeit merchandise, which is a more reasonable target, but still seems to be overblown. I’m still at a loss as to how this is any of the government’s concern, rather than a civil issue that could be taken up by the NFL itself. Do we really want law enforcement officials spending time working for the NFL?

    • The SOPA/PIPA Protest Shows Why There Needs To Be Complete Transparency With TPP

    • Before the Movie Begins

      Please note that the use of any recording equipment to capture this film is strictly forbidden, including: camcorders, cameras, cell phones, charcoal, ink, paint (oil or water-based), and the human brain. On leaving the theatre, you will be assaulted by baseball-bat-wielding ushers, who will pummel your skull until you forget what you have seen.

      Any remaining memories are yours to keep and enjoy, provided you do not discuss them with others or make them available via mankind’s collective unconscious. In addition, your experience of this film may not be remixed in any form; dreams involving any of its characters must adhere strictly to the film’s actual plotline and running time, and must also comply with copyright laws in your state or territory. Any sexual fantasies based on it may not exceed the film’s M.P.A.A. rating.

    • Steele files an opposition to EFF’s brief: nothing but insults

    • If Politicians Pushing SOPA/PIPA Want To Create Jobs, They Should Support The Internet — And Stop Treating Copyright Companies As Special

      A key element of the political rhetoric around SOPA/PIPA was the idea that it was about jobs, and that jobs are so critical in the current economic climate that safeguarding them overrides any other concern the Net world might have about the means being proposed to do that. But then the key question becomes: who are really more important in terms of those jobs – the copyright industries, or companies exploiting the potential of the Internet that would be harmed if the Net were hobbled by new legislation?

    • ACTA

      • Full Text Of Slovenian Ambassador’s Apology For Signing ACTA

Summary: The company that bought Novell has a poor outlook, financial issues, and little signs of expansion/renaissance

THE CIRCUMSTANCES under which Novell got sold were mysterious to say the least. Nowadays, Novell products are still traded and marketed under the Novell brand, but the owner is not Novell. To quote a new example:

NetIQ’s partner ecosystem includes more than 600 MSPs and resellers that serve over 12,000 business customers in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The release arrives roughly one year after NetIQ gained identity and security management solutions from Novell, which Attachmate acquired.

We do not hear much from NetIQ. Then again, there is hardly any news from Novell and Attachmate, either. When there is news it is often bad news (like departures), but how about this from the business press? Attachmate wants loans:

Attachmate Corp. (ATTM), a systems infrastructure software provider, is seeking $400 million in loans to fund a dividend to sponsors, according to a person with knowledge of the transaction.

A $300 million incremental first-lien term loan due in April 2017 will pay 5.75 percentage points more than the London interbank bank offered rate, said the person, who declined to be identified because the terms are private. Libor, the rate banks say they can borrow in dollar from each other, will have a 1.5 percent floor.

Attachmate also needed to borrow money to buy Novell. Moody’s, a corrupt analysts firm, downgrades Attachmate to negative outlook:

Moody’s revises Attachmate’s outlook to negative after dividend announcement, affirms B2 rating

Might Attachmate just die in a matter of years, just like Novell? Here is another news report about those loans. We are going to keep track of that in months to come. Later today we’ll write more about Novell. █