Vietnam will be a country luring Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects to bring more business opportunities to local enterprises, according to the organizers of the 2009 GNOME Asia Summit.
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According to the GNOME Foundation, Asia, including Vietnam, will be a destination to develop more FOSS projects because many countries in the region have policies to encourage the use of FOSS in business and in Government agencies.
Those who insist on reiterating the same tired line that Linux isn't ready for the desktop may have axes to grind instead of opening their minds. When we have Professionals of many walks using Linux on a daily basis and as their only OS, then you have to question the motive or experience of those making such statements. Besides, we have 12 year olds using it on a daily basis.
The following Linux distributions were announced last week: Fedora 12 Beta, CentOS 5.4, Ubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate and Elive 1.9.51. In other news: Novell releases the second beta version of the upcoming Banshee 1.6 player and Ubuntu 9.04 offering from Dell. An in-depth review of the KeePassX 0.4.1 application is also present in this edition. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.
Over the past few years, any Linux developer you ask would quickly recommend buying computer hardware with an Intel chipset. When it comes to Linux support, especially in the mobile realm, Intel had the best support hands down. In fact, even my first generation Asus EeePC with the tiny 7” screen supported Compiz acceleration out of the box! It was all thanks to Intel and their close relationship with the Linux community.
GDC’s LINUX-based servers are one of the most robust and reliable servers on the market
If you have some combination of Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Solaris and Oracle in your data center and you follow our virtualization selection recommendations, your environment will support multiple virtualization software platforms. Each platform has its own set of virtualization management tools, which creates licensing and maintenance complexity.
I've gotten some flack from a few of my readers over on Desktop Linux Reviews for using virtualization software to run Linux distros. Some people feel that virtualization is "cheating" or that it somehow it warps the review.
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Once you start playing with distros, you may become what is called a distro-hopper. They love playing with various Linux distros, and jump from one to the next, always looking for that special distro that will rock their world once and for all.
So I’ve just returned from Tokyo, where I attended the 2009 Kernel Summit and the first ever Japan Linux Symposium. My body clock is expected sometime later this week. It was a tiring but rewarding week, and not just because the sushi was so good.
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Perhaps the most interesting session was how Google uses Linux, led by Mike Waychison. Mike gave us a much clearer view of how the Linux kernel is employed in Google’s production systems than we have ever had before. It was interesting to see the extreme pressures put on Linux by Google’s workload and the equally extreme responses that Google has had to make.
X Server 1.7 was released earlier this month thereby paving the way for the release of X.Org 7.5, which is finally out there this afternoon. X.Org 7.5 consists of X Server 1.7.1 and all of the latest drivers, libraries, and other modules.
The X Input Extension has also been revamped as part of adding MPX and it is now more dynamic in its handling of input devices.
What interests me about these completist apps is that they are commonplace in FOSS and rare in proprietary software. The reason is probably that FOSS has more demanding and independent-minded users, many of whom are also developers and in a position to insist on their own preferences
NCP engineering GmbH today announced the availability of software-based NCP Secure Enterprise Server for Linux operating systems.
Filip was rewarded with an incredibly annoying bogus app that didn't care what platform it was installed on. Win Police Pro set up shop and began "scanning" his WINE C: drive for "viruses," and WINE neatly transformed the Windows system tray alerts to Gnome notifications. The infection was also able to attach itself to the WINE registry.
While it's not the most positive endorsement of WINE around, it's still pretty impressive that an app like this was able to function without missing a beat (apart from a single error message).
The announcement regarding the CrossOver 8.1 series codenames was made on the CodeWeavers blog. No release date has been given for either the next CrossOver or CrossOver Games releases, but we would expect them to happen before year's end. Left 4 Dead 2 is being released on the 17th of November thereby putting the CrossOver Games release a few weeks out at a minimum.
Among the new features we find support for Jack-MIDI and the ability to summon Linuxsampler as a DSSI or LV2 plugin instrument. Alas, its LV2 incarnation did not work for my current builds of Ardour nor would it instantiate with the lv2_jack_host software. I was able to invoke it as a DSSI plugin under Sean Bolton's ghostess DSSI host, but the UI was minimal to the point of unusability. I'm happy to admit that the problems may be on my end, and I shall continue testing the Linuxsampler plugins with other hosts.
Many KDE 3 users swear by the K menu and would dare anyone to challenge it with something better. Fortunately for those people, KDE 4 retained that menu version as an option. For the rest of us, there are a couple of more robust menus that offer a variety of features. Lancelot is a third-party menu that has now entered into the KDE fold. It is the one I use, and many others have found it pretty useful. In this post, I will present to you some of Lancelot’s features so that you can decide if it is right for you.
Yes, really! Kate’s Vi Mode finally support some of the most command commandline mode commands from Vim. What can be done from the Kate editor part is limited by the fact that it can’t control its hosting application, but Kate – the application – has now gotten support for the following commands:
* q, qa * w, wq, wa, wqa * x, xa * bn, bp * new, vnew * edit
Leeenux Linux is an operating system for netbooks, mainly for ASUS Eee PC with 7" screen, but works on all netbooks that have Intel graphics. It is based on Ubuntu and easypeasy and contains only free and open source software.
Vuurmuur 0.8 bèta 2 is released. Vuurmuur (Dutch for Firewall) is a powerful Firewall Manager built on top of the Linux Iptables.
Many mainstream Linux distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva provide support for popular netbook models. Consequently, they run on your little companion pretty much right out of the box. However, the desktop metaphor that works so well on conventional PCs and laptops doesn’t translate very well to the netbook computer.
Why? Because netbooks are designed for radically different usage scenarios. Realizing that, developers have been trying to build an alternative interface that would provide quick access to key applications and let you operate your netbook with a minimum effort.
The Linux operating system continues to grow in the server space, but has yet to make inroads on enterprise desktops.
Q: What do you currently do in open source? What do you love about it?
A: I'm a member of Red Hat's Community Architecture team. I spend most of my time on open source in education teaching professors how to teach open source, leading the Fedora Marketing team, and generally getting things out of the way of people who want to Get Stuff Done. Basically, my job is to be contagiously enthusiastic. It's important to have the tech and communication skills to follow through on whatever gets sparked up – but really, I get to Be Excited for a living, which is pretty awesome. Outside of my day job, I also serve on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board and am learning a tremendous deal about project governance that way.
The attendees were not satisfied with the first answer RMS gave to Brian, that Harish Pillay (Chief Technical Architect, Red Hat Singapore), chose to ask RMS what more he had to say, with regards to the letter he’d written. He answered quite candidly in this video, which Brian chimed in for as well.
My main affiliation is with the pkg-perl and pkg-ruby-extras groups, although my activity has declined in both due to real-life constraints - But I'm always trying to step back in and get back to speed with both. Package-wise, besides this, I am maintaining the Cherokee webserver and few other minor packages.
Besides this, since 2005 (and except for 2008), I have been part of the DebConf organization team. Organizing such a big, complex conference is a real challenge - and a very, very rewarding experience.
What do French gendarmes, Andalucian school children, Wikipedia and San Francisco International airport have in common?
It is not the set up for a tortuous pun. Instead all of them are big users of the free Ubuntu operating system.
The desktop and server editions of the "Karmic Koala" Ubuntu 9.10 release were officially launched today, although Canonical was talking up the server edition two weeks ago, which includes an integrated, EC2-compatible cloud computing environment that is based on the open source Eucalyptus Project and uses KVM virtual machines. But the desktop edition has seen plenty of work, as El Reg explained in this review of the release candidate at the beginning of the month.
1. The User Experience: “We wanted to bring design and user experience to [the Linux] desktop.” Shuttleworth believes Ubuntu 9.10 achieves those goals.
He added that there are real benefits to having a complete platform, giving developers the opportunity to both develop and deploy applications using Ubuntu's brand of Linux.
On October 29, Canonical is set to release Ubuntu 9.10 (codenamed “Karmic Koala”), the newest installment in the Ubuntu product line. In anticipation of this release, we took the release candidate (RC) for a test drive. Ubuntu 9.10 RC comes on a LiveCD just like its predecessors and allows you to test a fully-functional installation of the operating system without installing it. The boot process looks very different from previous versions, especially since the old progress bar has been replaced with one that just moves from left to right while providing very little useful boot progress information.
"What frustrates me is the term 'cloud' has come to mean anything with an Internet connection, including some stuff that really looks familiar like internal IT," said Shuttleworth in an interview. It's fair to say that in Ubuntu's case, though, it's not a stretch.
Ubuntu fans will already know that there are three more days until the latest version of Ubuntu drops, and we'll be knee-deep in coverage when it does. Shortly after version 9.10, or Karmic Koala, lands on the metaphorical shelves, the next round of development will hit the ground running.
With Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) set to debut this week, here’s a run down of all the new features and changes covered by WorksWithU in the last several months.
As the final non-LTS release before Lucid Lynx in April, Karmic is heavy on new features–which are likely to be less pronounced in Ubuntu 10.04, where Canonical will concentrate on stability and performance.
Since the launch of Desktop Linux Reviews, I’ve covered a number of different remastered versions of Ubuntu Linux. But I haven’t done a review of Ubuntu itself. I wanted to wait until there was a significant enough release as I’d done a review for ExtremeTech back when I was a full-time employee there.
I’m happy to note that Ubuntu Linux has hit version 9.10 and has some nifty new features that make it worth reviewing here.
Karmic Koala had noticeably improved boot times, and the new IM client seems useful. I was happy to report that the 64-bit flavor seems to be back to feature-parity with the 32-bit one. The Ubuntu One "cloud" thing really doesn't affect me much either way, but it's there for those who might use it.
It's inevitable due to the timing of this release that 9.10 will get compared with Windows 7. I won't go into details but suffice to say I don't see Karmic Koala causing any grand upset of the established Windows userbase. Can it hold its own against Windows 7 in terms of stability, utility on older hardware, and included free software packages? Yes. Is it as shiny as 7? No.
That being said, Ubuntu 9.10 is still a good example of a useful-to-everyone Linux distribution that I'd have no trouble giving away to less than computer savvy friends without much worry about midnight tech support calls.
iWave Systems of Bangalore announced a Linux-compatible, Intel Atom-based reference design for UMPCs (ultra mobile PCs) or in-car computers. The iW-Rainbow-G6 is equipped with a 7-inch touchscreen, and is available with optional cellular and GPS modules, the company says.
Wind River today announced that Belgium-based fifthplay, a subsidiary of the Niko Group, has selected Wind River Linux to enable its new home automation gateway.
Linux provides the ability to partition safety and non safety critical elements of the same application on a single hardware platform. It also provides high potential for features and innovative middleware, often adding a layer of complexity if safety is required.
Most wearable computers we’ve seen feature a head-mounted display tethered to a small PC system in a backpack or worn on a belt. Here’s a slick little system that does away with the cord, fitting the entire system in the glasses.
[Pascal Brisset’s] WXHMD is based on the tiny Gumstix Overo Fire computer-on-module which features a beefy, 3D-capable OMAP processor that runs Linux.
The future smartphone market will be driven by operating systems and user demand for functionality and "experiences" the phone can provide, according to industry analyst In-Stat.
Perhaps, most importantly, it paves the way for a variety of Linux-based mobile OS’s to follow in Android’s already successful footsteps. It will have widely felt ripples throughout the market as OS manufacturers are forced to either adapt or fall behind as relics. The times, they are a-changin’, and in five years, I would not be surprised if the mobile OS market only vaguely resembles the current one.
Welcome to another edition of our State of the Mobile Web report. I think this might be our most fascinating report yet.
The N900 will start shipping around the end of November and will cost $650. We’ll have a full review on the finished hardware before then. So far the N900 shows a great deal of promise — Nokia is definitely doing the right thing when it comes to an open platform and a lack of Symbian. Now if only they could get a carrier to subsidize the device and help bring the cost down a little bit.
In response to the mobile devs, HTC has previously stated it was waiting for its own developers to provide the source before releasing it publicly. As late as last week, HTC representatives had emailed developers saying, "At the moment we do not know when the kernel source for the Hero will be released," and "We are still pushing our developers to provide us with the source code and for the links to be added." Since the Android kernel is licensed under the GPL, this delay was creating both dissatisfaction and controversy in the community.
Droid does replaceable batteries, Droid does open source, Droid also apparently does marketing mishaps. A Motorola employee accidentally launched the official Motorola Droid webpage before quickly taking it down. While the site is now dormant we have a screenshot and a bunch of the specs thanks to the mistake.
That the Google Android operating system has been successful in attracting significantly more applications for consumers in its first year vis-à-vis what the Windows Mobile has achieved in nearly ten years, is quite evident from the fact that the Android has essentially won over some of the biggest cellphone manufacturers in the world!
Developer Nathan Freitas has announced that the native C Tor application has been successfully ported to Android, including an application that "installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users". The Onion Router, commonly referred to as Tor, is free software designed to provide internet anonymity to users while browsing online. It does this by bouncing the communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers from all around the world, preventing visited sites from learning a users physical location.
But I still suspect that "Vista with Lipstick" will not work as well as a good Linux distribution on typical netbook hardware. Even more importantly, while Microsoft has been busy the past couple of years trying to put the lipstick on Vista, various Linux groups have been improving netbook-specific versions. The result is things like Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, which I think is rather nice (and a huge improvement over UNR 9.04), Moblin, which I absolutely hate but apparently it is very good for other types of users, and the KDE netbook version, which is still in early development but the early versions of it on Mandriva and Kubuntu look very interesting.
But Shuttleworth contended today that right now, Ubuntu's "story is pretty good" for peripheral support, pointing to smartphones as the biggest remaining challenge.
People and organizations who want to truly “go open” need to see this as a journey, one which will require that they change their methods of communication and decision-making, not just how their content is published. The extent to which they are able to fully embrace the open paradigm will determine the potential benefits to the project.
Qualcomm said its new firm will develop open source for things like Linux, Webkit, Symbian, Android, and Chrome, and that it has transferred a number of its experienced software engineers to the new subsidiary.
Qualcomm has built a new subsidiary to better integrate its products with mobile open-source software, in hopes of capitalizing on the trend toward open platforms in the mobile industry.
Bangalore: Open source has once again excelled against software companies/vendors. Nearly half of the enterprises think that a software purchase is successful only if the software is installed/deployed.
In addition to the well-known Asterisk, there is a vibrant community of open source software PABX systems that can be used for internal and service provider IP telephony.
By leveraging Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and other standard protocols, open source IP PABXs have achieved some impressive advancements over the years and the integration options for third party apps, like GoogleTalk and Jabber, promises to make them an attractive alternative for enterprises investigating low-cost unified communications (UC) solutions.
The most popular Private Cloud implementation comes from Eucalyptus Systems. This was started as a research project by the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara before it was distributed through Ubuntu Server by Canonical that promotes Ubuntu and other OSS.
The Fosstrak open-source software suite provides core components for RFID applications, and includes an EPCIS Repository, a Tag Data Translation (TDT) Engine, Application Level Events (ALE) middleware and a Low-Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) Commander.
Technology executives from across the country will descend on Nashville Nov. 5-6 for the first ever Enterprise LAMP Summit. The event, created by Nashville-based technology strategy company Remarkable Wit and sponsored by several local companies and business groups, will explore the utility of the open source software stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python and Perl, hence the LAMP acronym — for large businesses.
The fourth annual Actuate Open Source Survey shows open source software use holding its own and steadily growing worldwide.
The study encompasses responses from almost 1,500 respondents from China, North America, the UK, Germany and France and was conducted independently by Survey Interactive.
Although a growing number of smartphone makers are embracing Linux and open source software, the dream of a fully open phone remains elusive. Advocates of software freedom are looking for solutions.
Symbian, one of the oldest of old school mobile institutions, has seen some changes of late. There’s an open source bandwagon rolling through the industry and Symbian’s on it along with Google, the Open Handset Alliance, LiMo and the many other flavours of Linux. But Symbian’s taken the whole open source thing to [its big yellow] heart, shifting from a for-profit venture to a not-for-profit organisation, along with a whole new touchy-feely brand.
Symbian, the world's most popular smartphone operating system, is betting on giving its software free to developers and on including "Qt" technology in its system to stem its loss of market share.
WANdisco, a leading provider of infrastructure software for replication, scalability & high availability, today announced that the company has hired core developers to contribute to the Subversion open source project.
The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.
The plugin's creator, Raphael Mudge, announced today that he has released the source code for After the Deadline (AtD) under the GNU General Public License. "We’re also announcing a jQuery API for After the Deadline. Now you can add an AtD check to a DIV or TEXTAREA with little effort," writes Mudge. This is the same API that powers the Intense Debate plugin I wrote about recently.
The Sarawak General Hospital (SGH) Cardiac Centre, an internationally-recognised leading heart centre, is the latest in the region to use the myCare2x Open Source Software (OSS) Hospital Information System (HIS).
The first mistake the jury has made is blame any migration costs on the software you're moving to, not from. While any software migration will use up resources, this is as true of moving from one version of a proprietary package to another, as it is of moving from proprietary to open source. In bringing this argument up, the jury is admitting they've been caught by the proprietary software trap — exit costs.
In 2005, programmers began work on Abdera, an open source Java-based implementation of Atom that has been used in Lotus Connections, WSO2 Registry, and Mule. Version 0.4 was released last year. The project was moved out of incubation status to its new home on the Apache site late last year.
RFID software company Pramari has released an open-source middleware platform, the Rifidi Edge Server, that is free to download and use.
Better business decisions are in the forecast for Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, a Southern California college that recently implemented the Smart i Appliance, which is based on IBM's DB2 Web Query. A key element of the System i-based business intelligence solution is Talend's Integration Suite, an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool that was updated last week to include change data capture for DB2/400, among other new features.
Mark Donald, associate general counsel of Baltimore-based Vertis Communications, offered attendees a variety of ideas for leveraging open-source technology to streamline operations and eliminate unnecessary expenses.
OpenOffice is a free office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems.
The package is designed as a single piece of software comprising five powerful applications: Writer, its word processing software: Calc, its spreadsheet creator: Impress for creating multi-media presentations: Draw for creating simple graphics: and Base which allows you to create and maintain databases.
The best download for most users will be the OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 suite, which is compatible with all versions of Windows up to and including Vista, as well as most Apple Mac operating systems, including the new Snow Leopard v 10.6.
Just to let you know, we are experiencing a very important breakthrough in the municipalities right now.
City of Gribskov has been using OpenOffice for a few years.
City of Tønder has been using OpenOffice in schools for about a year.
City of Lyngby-Taarbæk has decided to use OpenOffice in schools.
AbiWord, the open-source word processor that is part of GNOME Office, has reached version 2.8 this morning. While AbiWord may not be as popular as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord 2.8 does bring an impressive set of changes with some notable new features in particular.
Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser has gained 30 million users over the past eight weeks, as it continues to gain on Internet Explorer.
Though the Thunderbird team at Mozilla is developing Raindrop, the group explains that Raindrop is not another e-mail client, but rather, a communication application. I don't completely agree with this distinction. Today's e-mail clients are communication applications, aren't they? They may not be as well suited to handle current Web communications as Raindrop can, but they're still communications applications. In any case, I'm pretty excited about Raindrop and suggest you watch this demo video.
He cites Mozilla’s Firefox, which he calls the “best browser in the world” as proof of the success of open source development. Examples such as this, and the growing maturity of open source licensing environments, “gave us the confidence that this was possible,” he says. And, while he doesn’t believe that all software development will be open-source, he is confident, he says that “while Apple and RIM will remain significant players, the really exciting innovation will move to the most open platform.”
Though it's easy enough to change your browser's language to Spanish, using a browser that's customized specifically for a Hispanic audience is even better. The folks behind Flock, the Mozilla-based social Web-browser, have teamed up with Spanish-language media company Univision to develop the an exclusive edition of the browser that will provide content aimed specifically at Hispanic audiences.
Halloween is just around the corner so you may want to pimp your desktop a bit to suit the occasion. A good way would be to change the look of your Firefox web browser to make it a little bit spooky. That can be easily done by first installing the Firefox add-on called Personas, and then choosing or wearing the skin that you like.
Currently, there are about 90 themes available but we will get to that later on. In the meantime, here are my top 10 favorite Firefox Personas Halloween themes that you should check out first...
Linux leader Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is investing in open source database vendor EnterpriseDB, the official announcement is set for release on Tuesday October 27th.
EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company today announced that Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, has made a financial investment in EnterpriseDB as part of a partnership aimed at increasing enterprise adoption of open source IT infrastructure.
The www.whitehouse.gov site was previously served by Microsoft IIS 6.0, but the new server software identifies itself as "White House". The new site continues to use Akamai's content delivery network for caching.
But the open source wins don't stop there. Drupal is running on top of the LAMP stack based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Written primarily by my friend Dan Risacher at the Office of Secretary of Defense the memo is intended to clear up common misconceptions and make it easier for DoD program managers to include OSS in their programs. Its goals are to improve agility, eliminate lock in, and reduce cost.
Free and open source software (FOSS) may just be ready to shed its tag of being a poor cousin of proprietary software, as a range of users from classrooms to boardrooms are finding it a profitable option to expensive proprietary software.
Users as diverse as government schools in Kerala to the Life Insurance Corporation, and private sector majors to NGOs have warmed up to the FOSS advantage. Significantly, not all of them have adopted FOSS merely on the cost advantage, but also for the pleasure of being different
The wave of migration from propriety software to open-source applications is gaining momentum as big companies are jumping on the bandwagon to make cost efficiencies and avoid legal charges for piracy.
The enthusiasm for "going open-source" was summed up at the 2009 Global Conference on Open Source held at the Shangri-La Hotel in Jakarta on Monday which was attended by hundreds of open-source users from across the globe.
Indonesia's largest telecommunication company PT Telkom has studied the use of open-source software applications since 2005.
Maybe the wide range of licences available is a response to people's differing responses to the freeloader issue. Those that don't particularly care will be happy to work on projects with more permissive licences; those that do care will stick to those using the GNU GPL to fend off the freeloaders. Such a correlation might also explain why something apparently so dry as licensing provokes such powerful and abiding passions: it's actually tapping into something very deep and personal that helps define how we look at the world, and hence who we are.
In today’s new business video show available to watch for free, Bob Young explains open source and how it relates to business.
WSO2, the open source SOA company, today announced the newest release of the WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ (WSO2 WSF/C++). The software brings simple, effective, high-performance service-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities to C++, which is one of the most popular languages used for developing high-performance business applications.
SONY HAS ADMITTED that it is being investigated by US antitrust regulators and expects Inspectors Knacker of the Yards of many nations to carry out similar probes.
Asustek Computer unveiled its first supercomputer on Monday, the desktop computer-sized ESC 1000, which uses Nvidia graphics processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops.
Most of the protesters on the Chicago streets Monday appeared to be with a union and many of them were brought in on yellow school buses from across the Midwest. The message was one of ire at bank executives' large bonuses, bank foreclosures and predatory lending.
"I'm here basically for my grandchildren," said Peggy Sower Knoepfle, a protester who traveled in on a bus from Springfield, Ill., with National People's Action. "If we don't stop these foreclosures we're not going to have a country left."
Bank of America said in a statement: "At this point we're testing the fee on a very small number of accounts and haven't made any final decisions." Citigroup is also trying out an annual fee with some card holders, and analysts expect more banks to follow their lead.
Really? I'm really trying to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, but I can't come up with a single explanation for why he would write "XYZ Organization" when writing a letter himself from a group of people he supposedly represents. If you're the one writing the letter, on behalf of your supposed organization, why would you include "XYZ Organization"?
As the FCC prepares to lay down tougher net neutrality rules, hundreds of nonprofit groups are filing comments urging the agency to go slow on the policy. Is telco funding behind this push? Ars investigates the murky world of lobbying.
This is quite similar to when CBS tried to stop the McCain campaign from using a snippet of a broadcast in an ad. In both cases it seems that the use is a clear situation of fair use, with the content not being used for commercial reasons (yes, we'd like to believe that politics still isn't commercial) and only a snippet was being used.
While we weren't sure that the EFF was correct in suggesting the Yes Men's fake U.S. Chamber of Commerce website was a parody, we did think that it was rather short-sighted of the CoC to try to takedown the site, since it would only serve to give the Yes Men and their anti-CoC campaign more attention.
British journalist Matt Salusbury decided to investigate the information that the London police had gathered on him as part of their intimidation campaign against activists and protestors -- the Met spends over GBP9MM/year gathering "intelligence" on nonviolent, noncriminal demonstrators -- and discovered a file filled with paranoid notes about his presence at lawful public gatherings.
THE BRITISH HOME SECRETARY has thrown a lifeline to hacker Gary McKinnon with a promise to examine new medical evidence "very carefully" before deciding on his extradition to the United States.
Reports seem to suggest that the hack was cunningly disguised, although no one is saying what it was disguised as.
However it was spotted by Microsoft employees who were looking after the network and stopped it by pulling the plug out of the wall.
A Harry Potter themed dinner at a house in West London has been banned by Warner Brothers, because they say it infringes its copyright.
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2009-11-10 20:50:34
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