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Links 30/7/2010: Dell, HP to Resell Solaris, UberStudent Distro Born



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Warning: Five Things to Know Before Switching to Linux


    1. It Isn't Windows

    Although this one should fall under the "duh" category, you shouldn't expect Linux to be Windows. Linux has some striking similarities to Windows: the graphical interface, cascading menus, applications represented by icons, configurable desktop themes, and most of the desktop gadgetry you've come to expect from Windows. It looks and behaves like Windows, but it isn't. Its fans say that it's better because of its stability, its multi-user capability and its overwhelmingly cheaper price (free is hard to beat).


  • Desktop







  • Server







  • Google

    • Interview: Chris DiBona, Google
      Chris Dibona has worked within the open source community years before joining Google. As writer and editor for Slashdot and the coeditor of essay collections "Open Sources" and "Open Sources 2.0." Now, as the open source and public sector manager at Google, he oversees the company's open source endeavors, supervises the distribution of resources to open source projects and generally loves what he does. Trevan McGee had an opportunity to sit down with Mr. DiBona during OSCON 2010 where they discussed Go, Android, and the future of open source technologies.








  • Kernel Space



    • LVM, RAID, XFS and EXT3 file systems tuning for small files massive heavy load concurrent parallel I/O on Debian


      Mainframes have excellent parallel I/O performance. Data storage systems could deliver parallel I/O performance to Debian GNU/Linux if you configure them , your multipath connections , undestand the concepts, application behaviour and follow some hints for confguring and tuning your LVM, RAID, XFS, EXT3.

      The key word is PARALLEL.

      Fiber channel data storage systems, multipath connections, excell at parallel I/O.

      These days of multicore, multi gigabyte RAM, fiber channel and many channels gigabit connected Debian GNU / Linux systems serving thousands of concurrent users need PARALLEL I/O performance and new approach to file system tuning.








  • Applications







  • Desktop Environments



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-07-28
        This week on a *Cloud Based** episode of KDEMU we have Frank Karlitschek, OpenDesktop.org big cheese, OwnCloud master mind.


      • Plasma in KDE's Wikis
        So everything we have had under Projects/Plasma on Techbase really is supposed to be on community.kde.org. We started, and are very nearly complete, that transition. You can see the results on community.kde.org/Plasma. We've used this as an opportunity to freshen up and reorganize some of the content.






    • GNOME Desktop







    • Xfce











  • Distributions





    • New Releases







    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Deltacloud Joins Apache Software Foundation
        Red Hat is mounting a multi-pronged bid to become a larger supplier of cloud computing. One of its key open source projects, Deltacloud.org, which builds a multi-cloud API set, recently moved into the Apache open source incubator.


      • Fedora

        • Fedora Events in LATAM a Big Draw for Participants
          The first of these events was the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, or FUDCon, held in Santiago, Chile from July 15-17. Over a hundred people participated in this event, which brought together contributors for technical sessions and workshops focused on Fedora features, projects, and community building. And as with all Fedora events, FUDCon Santiago gave contributors the chance to meet in person for impromptu conversations on how to continue moving the Fedora Project forward into the future. The event was sponsored by Red Hat’s Community Architecture team. There were also a number of presentations on topics such as virtualization, software packaging, and systems administration.


        • No video for you
          According with the latest thread of doom from the devel list, despite the expectation set in May when WebM was released, we won't have Firefox 4 in Fedora 14, so effectively no out-of-the-box support for web video, nor the other goodies coming in this release (how fast you can say "faster JavaScript"?)










    • Debian Family





      • Canonical/Ubuntu





        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 9 KDE Edition Released
            The distribution is quite large - 1.3 GB, much too large to fit on a CD - so it is listed as a "LiveDVD" distribution. However, the ISO image can also be converted to a LiveUSB drive if you have a running Ubuntu or Mint system (using the Startup Disk Creator utility), which fits very easily onto a 2 GB flash drive. I have just installed it to my HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez laptop, which has an AMD cpu, ATI graphics and Atheros wireless adapter, and it installed easily without a hitch. Total time for download, convert to LiveUSB and installation was well under an hour.
















  • Devices/Embedded

    • 32-core processor module claimed to rival 128-core SoC
      NetLogic Microsystems announced a multi-core "solution" using its MIPS-based XLP processor architecture, and says it will soon introduce nine new XLP SoCs. Aimed at high-end networking applications, the Linux-ready XLP8128S integrates four eight-core XLP832 SoCs clocked at up to 2GHz and offers over 160 programmable processing engines, for up to 160Gbps throughput and 240 million packets-per-second (Mpps) processing, says NetLogic.


    • Hackable home media system features touchscreen controller
      Berlin-based Raumfeld is shipping a Linux-based, UPnP and AV/DLNA-ready multi-room audio system claimed to be "hacker/DIY friendly." The Raumfeld System comprises a handheld controller with a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi-enabled speakers, a 160GB music server and access point, and a "Connector" box that integrates existing A/V equipment, says the company.


    • IP-STB DVR transcodes video to and from mobile devices
      Monsoon Multimedia announced a Linux-based IP set-top and DVR that supports streaming to and from remote PCs and Macs, plus the iPad as well as Android, BlackBerry, and iOS phones. The HD-ready Vulkano ranges in price from $259 to $379, starting with the Vulkano (8GB or 16GB storage) and advancing to the SATA-equipped Vulkano Pro (500GB or 1TB).


    • Lantronix releases EDS1100 and EDS2100 Linux SDK
      Lantronix, a provider of device networking and data centre management technologies, has released the EDS1100 and EDS2100 Linux software development kit (SDK), which allows Linux developers to create applications on the EDS1100/2100.


    • Sony Not To Drop Reader Price
      All these e-Readers are powered by Linux, except for the iPad which runs on Apple's proprietary iOS which does have some open source components.




    • Phones





      • Android

        • Google CEO: Android could be a cash cow (worth $10 billion)
          Look, I know Google gets a lot of good will for the open source nature of Android OS but don’t try and think the company isn’t focusing on its bottom line. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal that its mobile platform could soon generate as much as $10 billion for the company through add-on services.


        • Secure phone builds on HTC Desire, while G1 bites the dust
          Infrax Systems announced a version of the HTC Desire Android smartphone designed for encrypted voice and data communications. In other HTC-related news, HTC will sell Android phones under its own name in China, HTC's "Sense" skin will move to Android 3.0, T-Mobile posted a teaser page for what may be the HTC G1 Blaze, and the carrier has discontinued HTC's original G1.


        • Meet Andy: Android’s History In A Nutshell
          Before Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS burst onto the mobile device scene in 2007, there were few significant advances in mobile technology. Frankly, "smartphones" (if we could even call them that at the time) were boring: they did little more than email, general messaging, picture taking, some basic apps and games, rudimentary internet browsing, and enterprise integration.


        • Why Android Will Win the Mobile Platform War
          How would I answer? Like this: The iPhone can be pretty, that's for sure, but it can't hold a candle to Android's allure.

          Linux-based Android is going to win, plain and simple.










    • Sub-notebooks

      • Freescale Smartbook
        This low-cost slate would run Android, Chromium OS, or Linux, include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and possibly come with a detachable QWERTY keyboard. It's unclear when we'll see shipping slates based on Freescale's blueprint, but the $200 price makes it tantalizing.






    • Tablets

      • Olive Pad VT100 brings a voice-capable, 7-inch Android tablet to India's airwaves
        Ha, and you thought Dell's Streak was pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable to hold to one's ear. In a bid to make even the xpPhone look diminutive, Olive Telecom has just announced India's first 3.5G Android (2.1 for now) tablet in the Olive Pad VT100.


      • OLIVE TELECOM LAUNCHES INDIA’S FIRST 3G TABLET OLIVEPAD-VT100


      • Kmart Android tablets and the GPL
        The Augen Android tablet being sold in Kmart stores at the moment is (shockingly) running a 2.6.29 kernel and Android 2.1 on top of that. It's also (shockingly) currently impossible to get hold of the source code for the kernel - Augen (whose corporate address is a small unit in Florida) say that the software comes installed on the units by the OEM and they don't have any access to the source either.


      • Nicholas Negroponte Welcomes India's $35 Tablet for Education
        One Laptop per Child applauds Minister Kapil Sibal for promoting a $35 tablet. Education is the primary solution to eliminating poverty, saving the environment and creating world peace. Access to a connected laptop or tablet is the fastest way to enable universal learning. We agree with you completely.












Free Software/Open Source



  • Enhancements to Open Source Java Content Management System Aimed at Enterprise
    The latest version of dotCMS, the open source, Java-based Web content management system (WCM), is all about the enterprise. This version sports a totally re-built user interface designed to provide data and HTML-driven commands, as well as a number of enterprise-grade enhancements.


  • 2010 Open Source Awards
    Packt is about to launch the 2010 Open Source award - now at its fifth edition, formerly known as Open Source CMS Awards - an award organized to encourage, support, recognize, and reward Open Source projects selected by a panel of judges and Packt website visitors. This year they have a prize fund of $247,000 spread across six categories.


  • 5 Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux
    5 Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux: The buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks is called electronic commerce (commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce). Today, eCommerce is mostly done on the web and is conducted entirely electronically for buying virtual items such as access to premium content on a website and purchase of physical items using eCommerce payment gateway.


  • Convirture manages open source Xen, KVM virtualization and the private cloud
    In February Convirture unveiled the 2.0 version of its open source virtualization management tool designed specifically for the open source Xen and KVM virtualization platforms. The company also said at that time it had plans to deliver an Enterprise version of the management software. Five months later, Convirture makes good on that promise with the release of a 2.0 Enterprise edition that offers more advanced automation, improved scalability, and extensive enterprise integration necessary to manage a large-scale or mission-critical virtualization environment.


  • Now Available: Open Source Software in Enterprise Application Infrastructure Market
    Open Source Software (OSS) has been a part of the IT market for over two decades. Recently, the commoditization of IT markets, changing attitudes to the production and distribution of intellectual property, and the recession have put the OSS firmly in focus, particularly in the application infrastructure part of the stack.


  • Events







  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 beta 2 arrives as open source browser use grows
        Many observers laud the project’s efforts to overhaul the user interface and address performance gaps in Firefox in an effort to become more competitive against the other big open soure browser — Google Chrome.


      • Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 Drops Next Week
        With the second Beta if Firefox 4.0 now available for download to testers running Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Mozilla is shifting its focus on the upcoming development milestone. The open source browser vendor is planning to release Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 in the first week of August 2010. In this regard, even though Beta 2 did suffer a small delay Beta 3 of the next major iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser might be available to early adopters next week.












  • SaaS

    • Open source faces hurdles in the cloud
      As companies gain ground in cloud computing, a debate is growing over the extent to which cloud companies should collaborate on open standards and open source to protect customers from vendor lock-in.

      In July, a consortium of cloud companies launched the OpenStack scheme to spur the debate and give the cloud industry extra impetus. Companies are discussing the value of opening up: some are worried it could hurt their competitive advantage, while others see it as an opportunity.


    • Facebook, Done the Open Source Way
      Four New York University students have mobilized to produce a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook called Diaspora that they say will give users full control over their privacy.

      Today, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) general counsel Karen Sandler told me that Diaspora was inspired by a lecture that Eben Moglen, director-counsel and chairman of the SFLC, gave in February. The organization provides legal services to open-source projects and organizations.

      During his talk, Moglen cautioned that cloud computing has moved control over privacy far out of users’ hands, and that privacy laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. “The architecture is begging to be misused,” he said.








  • Security







  • Oracle







  • CMS

    • Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in August 2010


    • The Rise of the Web CMS
      Battles over open source preferences verge on holy war, and opinions on what’s best vary widely. If you want to get a simple blog up and running fast, WordPress has no equal, says Tom Wolf, senior Web developer for Summit Publishing. “It’s the ‘best’ blogging engine available and while it is technically a CMS and can be extended to do things other than blogging, you will see diminishing returns fairly quickly,” he says. “The more heavily you customize it (in terms of functionality; visually, it’s easy to make WordPress look however you want) the more you’ll find yourself ‘fighting’ with the underlying system.”

      According to Wolf, Joomla! is in the middle of the three most popular open-source solutions, which also include WordPress and Drupal. “Designed to be a general publishing CMS, Joomla! is still oriented toward a very specific set of workflows which pre-suppose a lot about the way your site does and doesn’t work,” Wolf says. “It also takes more work to set up and configure than WordPress (for a simple site), but that work pays off very quickly because you gain power and flexibility down the line.”








  • Education

    • 4 More Tips for Open Source in K-12
      Open source isn't just about cost savings. As with any technology deployment in education, it's about rolling out the right tool to accomplish a goal, whether it be enhancing classroom teaching and learning or streamlining the operations that support education.


    • Unique Linux Distro Geared Up To Impact Higher Education


      UberStudent, which dubs itself “a free Linux learning platform for learning, doing, and teaching academic computing at the higher education and advanced secondary levels,” is coupling its ground-breaking educator-designed distro with plans to offer free online courses to teach students to academically excel with its platform.








  • Funding

    • Open-source Lustre gets supercomputing nod
      A new start-up called Whamcloud is coming out of stealth mode Wednesday with $10 million in private funding and a notion to disrupt the often academic world of supercomputing by leveraging the Lustre open-source project.


    • Open source HPC file system gets startup
      High performance computing – by which is meant traditional parallel supercomputing as well as data analytics and hyperscale cloudy infrastructure – is facing a looming file system and storage bottleneck, and Whamcloud, a startup backed by $10m in private funding and some of the top people behind the Lustre file system, want to help.

      And get a piece of the exascale action, of course.

      Whamcloud is not saying much about its plans for the Lustre file system, and that is in part because Lustre is an open source project controlled by Oracle.








  • Project Releases







  • Government

    • No need to debate on open source definition: Tifatul


      In his next statuses, Tifatul clarified that he did not mean to introduce a new definition of open source. He said he was referring to the Open Source 2010 Award event, which aims to reward local software developers. The event is sponsored by his ministry and the Ministry of Research and Technology.


    • Info minister deems open source as ‘domestically made software’


      Information and Communication Minister Tifatul Sembiring may have a different perspective from the commoners when it comes to the definition of “open source” software products as he describes them in his Twitter update as “software products that are domestically developed using local language”.


    • Tifatul causes new stir in Twitter
      Communications and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring shook the very basic of the software industry on Wednesday describing an “open source” as “software that is domestically developed using local language”.


    • Shift to Open Source Could Save Trillions, Govt Claims
      A government campaign to migrate to open source software instead of paying for proprietary products could save the state as much as Rp 3.6 trillion ($400 million), the State Ministry for Research and Technology said on Wednesday.

      [...]

      “We estimate that by that time, we would have saved as much as Rp 3.6 trillion,” said Kemal Prihatman, the Research and Technology Ministry’s assistant deputy for information technology development, after the opening ceremony of the Indonesian Open Source Award.


    • Lockheed releases open-source social networking tool
      Government technologists may soon have a new way to address the complexities of managing IT: Lockheed Martin has introduced a new open-source enterprise social networking tool, Eureka Streams.


    • Lockheed Martin Debuts Open-Source Eureka Streams


    • 5 lessons for win-win open source projects
      Lockheed Martin's newly open sourced social networking platform, Eureka Streams, has faced FUD when it should be received with open arms. IT decision-makers can learn important lessons from Lockheed Martin when evaluating whether to open-source an internal project.


    • Who had the first government open source policy?
      Brian Purchia of Burson-Marsteller has a post over on GovFresh about the value of open source to unions. His argument pivots on cost-savings. I think you could make a more expansive argument that includes risk mitigation and innovation, but describing the advantage to unions is an interesting angle I hadn’t seen before.








  • Openness/Sharing

    • Towards a Commons Taxonomy
      Here's one such attempt:

      The Five Commons constitutes an evolving vision of the emerging 21st Century economy. Each of the five commons represents a key area in which transition is apparent.

      The Forward Foundation hopes that by sharing this vision, people will find clues and insights into new ways of structuring human activity and sustainable living.

      Five Commons Presentations

      Here are links to presentations of each of the Five Commons.

      * Thing Commons * Culture Commons * Energy Commons * Food Commons * Access Common






    • Open Hardware

      • Frankencamera Programmable Open-source Camera Debuts
        Stanford's open-source digital photography software platform, "Frankencamera," which allows users to create novel camera capabilities, is now available as a free download for Nokia N900 mobile computers. At the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, the Frankencamera engineering team will describe the platform and several sample apps created with it.












  • Programming

    • Python development – the golden rules
      As part of his massive Python Masterclass article, Kunal Deo drew up some golden rules when working with Python. Click here to jump straight to the article, or add a few of your own golden rules in the comments thread below…

      Keep it simple “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” (Einstein)

      Do one thing well The UNIX Philosophy certainly applies here.

      Don’t fret! Don’t fret too much about performance – plan to optimise later when needed.

      [...]


    • The PHP Content Management/Framework Upgrades in ExpressionEngine 2
      A few months ago I wrote a series of articles highlighting PHP-driven content management systems and frameworks, and I singled out ExpressionEngine as one particularly impressive solution that effectively balances the best features of both. This popular Web development solution recently took another major step forward with the July 12 release of ExpressionEngine 2.1, the product's first major upgrade in several years. Version 2 sports a number of new features and significant improvements over its predecessor, many of which I'll highlight in this article.








Leftovers



  • Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant in The Social Web
    Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours)


  • It's our duty to delve into the Wikileaks debate
    I HAVE written a great deal in this column about “open source software”, a term coined by technologist Christine Peterson in 1998 to describe software that was openly developed and freely modifiable. “Open source”, though, has an older meaning in a different context.

    “Open source intelligence” is a term in the spy community to describe obtaining and analysing information that is publicly available – as opposed to secret knowledge obtained through exclusive sources, such as informants and espionage.

    Last Sunday, a huge chunk of military sources switched abruptly from covert to open source.


  • Is WikiLeaks More Than Just a High-Tech Brown Envelope? Yes
    WikiLeaks, the crusading anti-secrecy organization that just published 90,000 pages of secret government documents about the war in Afghanistan, has gotten a lot of attention for its campaign to become the world’s repository of whistle-blowing and embargo-busting information, and leader Julian Assange has become the star of the political talk show circuit. But the most interesting thing about WikiLeaks and the release of the secret Afghan documents isn’t the details of the U.S. campaign — it’s what the incident says about the evolution of a truly distributed and dis-aggregated new media ecosystem.


  • New Benefits for Linux Foundation Members
    When someone discusses the Unix operating system on a PC, many modern computer users think of Linux, a Unix work-alike first released by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linux is a relative newcomer to the field; Unix and Unix-like operating systems have been released for Intel x86-based systems as far back as 1979. This article covers some lesser-known Unix variants for IBM PC-compatible systems, both those that survive today and the ones that were not long-lived or commercially successful.




  • Hardware



    • For ARM, It’s Server Side Up
      Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at ARM Holdings, a Cambridge, U.K.-based company that makes semiconductors powering a majority of the smartphones, tablets, 70 percent of world’s hard drives and half the world’s printers, is on a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley. And what everyone (including me) wants to talk to him about is servers, or rather low-power server chips that can power the data centers of tomorrow.


    • The end of Wintel
      Regardless of whether Microsoft and Intel prosper individually, they will drift apart as a couple. Since Microsoft has yet to deliver a competitive version of Windows for smart-phones and tablets, for instance, Intel has teamed up with Nokia, the world’s largest maker of handsets, to develop Meego, an open-source operating system for mobile devices.


    • SoC has dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores
      Operating system support was not detailed for the SPEAr1310, and we noted mention of only Linux for the SPEAr300, 310, 320, and 600 SoCs. However, earlier SPEAr offerings were also said to support Windows CE.








  • Security/Aggression

    • DNSSEC is Here. Now What?
      Two years ago at the Black Hat USA 2008 conference, security researcher Dan Kaminsky detailed a critical flaw in DNS that could have destroyed the Internet as we know it. Two years later, the root zone of Internet DNS is now signed with DNSSEC, partially as a response and a solution to Kaminsky's 2008 finding.

      A panel of experts, including Kaminsky, addressed the issue of DNS security and what's next at the Black Hat USA 2010 conference currently underway in Las Vegas.


    • Millions of Home Routers at Risk








  • Environment/Wildlife

    • Geoengineering: the risks and rewards of tackling climate change
      Any scheme which aims to artificially and deliberately change the Earth’s climate is called geoengineering. This includes everything from planting new forests to soak up greenhouse gases through to high-tech ideas, such as putting mirrors in space to reflect some of the Sun’s rays.






  • Finance



    • Goldman Sachs: No More "Sh**ty" Deals
      Goldman Sachs might still be able to sell a bad mortgage-backed security, but there'll be no more "sh**ty" deals.


    • Diversions: Goldman Sachs says no more s***** expletives in emails
      1. 34,000 Goldman Sachs employees are now banned from using an array of curse words on email. Under the new directive, typing out "s------ deal"--the phrase used to describe a now infamous mortgage deal that came up at a Capitol Hill hearing in April--is no longer allowed.


    • Goldman Sachs Bans the Phrase “Shitty Deal”; Making Shitty Deals Still O.K.
      The employees of Goldman Sachs have been told to please watch their language. Bad words—for instance, bad words that may have featured prominently in a certain e-mail characterizing a business transaction as a “shitty deal”—will no longer be allowed to sully the firm’s e-mails. Naturally, this mandate was not delivered in an electronic correspondence. “Of course we have policies about the use of appropriate language and we are always looking for ways to ensure that they are enforced,” a Goldman spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.


    • Goldman Sachs bans employees from using swear words in e-mails, texts and instant messages
      The troubled Wall Street titan told its employees that they can’t use swear words — even ones with asterisks — in their emails, text messages or instant messages, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.


    • Two Goldman Lawsuits on Abacus Placed on Hold
      A New York judge put two shareholder lawsuits against executives and directors of Goldman Sachs Group Inc on hold until progress is made on 16 other lawsuits related to a controversial debt transaction involving the Wall Street bank.

      The lawsuits, brought in state Supreme Court by Robert Rosinek and Morton Spiegel, accuse Goldman officials, including Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein, of breaching their fiduciary duties by letting the bank enter transactions involving risky collateralized debt obligations tied to subprime mortgages.


    • Volatility Trade Buffett Embraced Backfires for Wall Street Hedge Experts
      A bullish stock market trade embraced by the smartest money is backfiring. And that has investors wondering if what Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. know about derivatives is obsolete.

      Goldman Sachs, the world’s most profitable securities firm, reported losses from derivatives last quarter after selling insurance that protected clients against stock swings during the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s biggest retreat in more than a year. Buffett, the chairman of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., underwrote $37 billion of the contracts since 2004, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show.








  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • 90% of web snoop document censored to stop 'premature unnecessary debate'
      Government censors docs for web plan

      From black list to blacked out. Documents on plans to store web surfing data are heavily censored due to the possibility of 'premature and unnecessary debate'.


    • Are CIA and Google teaming up?
      Hey, all you folks who like to plaster all the details of your daily lives on YouTube, did you know that your videos could soon be scanned and evaluated for terror threats? Yes, thanks to a new project funded by the US intelligence community, they soon hope to create a searchable warehouse of open-source clips.

      Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, is behind the program called Automated Low-Level Analysis and Description of Diverse Intelligence Video (ALADDIN).


    • Google Teams Up With CIA, Invests in Analytics Firm


    • Google, CIA Back a Startup that Predicts the Future
      Google and In-Q-Tel, a non-profit investment firm launched by the CIA in 1999, have both backed Recorded Future, a company that looks for patterns in publicly available data to predict future events.

      Recorded Future scans tens of thousands of Twitter accounts, blogs and websites looking for relationships, organizations, actions and incident data. RF then plots that data over time to determine the momentum behind a particular event and when in the future it might happen.

      Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel each invested under $10 million in Recorded Future back in 2009, just after the company was founded, according to Wired. Google's investment was revealed earlier this year, and In-Q-Tel's was quietly announced a few weeks ago.


    • Google, CIA team up to invest in web monitoring software








  • Intellectual Monopolies





    • Copyrights

      • U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website
        The United States Copyright Group (USCG) has been all over the news in recent months. The lawyer group sued thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly file-shared motion pictures belonging to their clients, including the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. However, it turns out that USCG are not copyright purists either, as they have blatantly copied the website of a competitor without permission.












Clip of the Day



Happy System Administrator Day



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