Getting ready for a new competition, it's time for another themed post. How about a Linux-based Gadget Master roundup?
1. Security:
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2. Speed:
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3.Cost:
First of all, it’s not a supercomputer. It’s a commercial system – or rather, a bunch of commercial systems lashed together for parallel processing purposes. The hardware is readily available POWER-based gear that can run either IBM’s AIX Unix operating system or Linux.
In this episode: Microsoft and Nokia form an alliance and the GPLv3 might not be welcome on Windows Phone. Canonical gets controversial with Banshee while openSUSE and Fedora users might have to wait for Unity. Hear our discoveries, our limited success with the challenge, and your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
The first real indication of the Android 2.2 Froyo update for the AT&T Captivate surfaced last week and Wednesday AT&T confirmed the roll-out process to begin as soon as Thursday.
Jim Zemlin is the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, and earlier this month he sat down with the Open Source Programs Office’s Jeremy Allison for a chat about the future of Linux. In addition to talking about the future, Jim shares insights on the history and significance of Linux.
I'm announcing the release of the 2.6.37.2 kernel.
Intel is pleased to announce the BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS), a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS.
Kernel version 38 will offer a new meshing implementation, loads of new and improved LAN and Wi-Fi drivers, plus various minor changes that promise to improve the network subsystem's performance.
This is nice to see Intel is actually working on support still for these older-generations of Intel graphics processors, but it's already long overdue. This quarter we do know Intel is expected to deliver VA-API accelerated video encoding support for Sandy Bridge, which should be quite interesting, if it is delivered on time.
Only a few days have passed since the release of X.Org Server 1.10 RC2, but another release candidate has now arrived. Given the short turnaround time since the previous release candidate and now being days away from the final release, it's a mundane release candidate, right? Actually, no. RandR 1.4 was just pulled in its entirety from xorg-server 1.10, which also caused the server's video ABI to now be bumped again.
In Mesa's quest to catch up to the proprietary Linux drivers (and the graphics drivers available under Windows), they are now a tiny bit closer. David Airlie has announced on the Mesa mailing list that he has implemented support for the EXT_texture_compression_RGTC extension into Mesa.
We have a patched NotifyOSD that provides options to move the notifications to a different corner and such, but unfortunately it doesn't have an option to add a close button, however not many people are aware of the "Notification daemon" Avant Window Navigator applet. This applet has been around for a long time and it replaces NotifyOSD, providing some cool customizations (and of course, the notifications have a close button!): you can place the notifications anywhere on the screen, you can set it to display an icon in AWN that you can use to turn the notifications on/off with a click, set a sound for the notifications, specify custom colors for the notifications (or use the AWN theme colors), transparent (gradient factor) and more.
Linux musicians have to compromise. The industry does not see Linux as a money-spinning venture, and thus the best tools for the job happen to be free. Whilst you won’t need to spend a penny; you may have to compromise on features, support and plugins.
Filelight allows you to understand your disk usage by graphically representing your filesystem as a set of concentric, segmented rings. It is like a pie-chart, but the segments nest, allowing you to see both which directories take up all your space, and which directories and files inside those directories are the real culprits.
Free Gamer has an in-depth post examining the history and current status of what was originally just Glest, a real-time strategy game effort that splintered into several projects...
Surprisingly enough, it seems that GNOME Power Manager does not handle time paradoxes properly. If you run GNOME on a DeLorean or have your computer clock go back in time, it seems that g-p-m’s statistics does not take this into account, and draws… interesting graphs
The first GNOME 3 User Day was held last week. Thanks to everyone who helped out, the event was a real success. Enthusiastic GNOME users from all over the world packed into the #gnome IRC channel to discuss the new release and to ask questions. Attendance was excellent, to the extent that it was almost too busy to keep track of the conversation at times.
As you’re likely aware, guarding your PCs from malware – viruses, trojans, spyware – and hacking is crucial for protecting your files and data. However, don’t forget about your mobile devices. Malware and hacking will be becoming more prevalent on smartphones, pads, and tablets. This makes network-wide security protection even more beneficial. It can cover your entire network, giving you protection for your mobile devices and adding a second layer of protection for your PCs.
There are several ways to implement network-wide security. Today we’ll be discussing the Untangle platform, which you can install on a dedicated PC or run as a virtual machine (VM). It can also serve as your network’s router and firewall, plus can give you many more additional features. As Figure 1 shows, it features a user-friendly GUI to configure and manage all the components.
According to the folks at Splashtop, adjunct Linux versions have been pre-installed on over 60 million computers, which means that these operating systems are a significant part of the overall Linux ecosystem. Splashtop is now based on the open source Chromium code that underlies Google's Chrome browser.
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading session at $43.03 near its 50 day moving average currently set at $45.17.
Apparently, Mepis 11, that is, the new version of Mepis (currently on beta stage) has joined all the other Linux distributions that support LibreOffice.
Ever since the release of Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, there’s an ongoing debate about whether Debian is still relevant or whether the project is going to die.
The Feature Freeze is now in effect for Natty. The focus from here until release is on fixing bugs and polishing.
Recently the Canonical Online Services team, led by Cristian Parrino, has been in discussions with the Banshee project to coordinate a suitable revenue share for the built-in Amazon store. Unfortunately, there were a few crossed wires, but a call today helped to clarify the position.
A new Compiz-based Unity version (3.4.6) was uploaded to the Ubuntu 11.04 repositories minutes ago, getting one of the features you've just seen in the Unity 2D video we've posted earlier: when pressing and holding the Super key, a number is displayed for each application in the Unity launcher and pressing that number will launch / raise that app. However, in the Compiz Unity you also have a shortcut for the application/file places, expo and trash as you'll see in the video below (this isn't available in Unity 2D yet).
Canonical's Bryce Harrington has just announced he has uploaded a snapshot of the Wayland Display Server to the Universe repository for Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. the upcoming "Natty Narwhal" Linux release.
If you’re a fan of incremental progress then do carry on reading. If, however, you find minor ‘updates’ to be trivial you might want to read something else.
The following small but noteworthy changes landed in yesterdays update to Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. You won’t see anything too startling but where you will find is solid, dependable progress in evidence.
Please note that this is new and I’m really just trying to sucker you into banging on it so you can file bugs and update documentation.
Another episode from your friendly neighborhood Ubuntu Studio project lead discussing more Fun Facts, future plans for Ubuntu Studio, and more Meet the Team. Let's rock it...
Oh, also I'm going to try to rock some new headings that I hope play better with Planet Ubuntu. Blogger likes to set the font-size for headings, but I'm going to use HTML h1 tags.
This V8 engine isn't living in the mainline Qt tree but in a separate Git repository for now. "The status of the V8-based back-end is that we still have some QtScript API that’s not implemented, and there are autotests failing (QTBUG-17640), but several of the QtScript and QML examples and demos run. Aside from behavorial compatibility with current Qt, we also need to ensure that there aren’t any performance gaps in the C++/JS layer before a V8-powered Qt can become a viable solution. As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re simultaneously looking to trim the fat of our current APIs to make a switch feasible."
Unfortunately for Nokia, developers are not jumping from the platform towards the same boat. They are going to miss the Microsoft boat because it is just a raft, right now. However, they will not miss the Android cruise ship, because it is enormous, it has a pool and a casino on it (check this fantastic video, it is amazing to see how fast Android grew).
Giving up on Symbian, waiting for a Windows Phone to appear (at the end of the year), means wasting a long year, probably even two. If you consider where Android was two years ago (nowhere, check the video above for February 2009) and where they are now, you know what I am talking about. This market is moving at Silicon Valley speed, if you miss two years, you are history.
That's why I think Nokia is doomed as an independent company. Before the announcement, their market cap was $43B, now it is $32B (yep, eleven billions jumped off the platform too). That means today Microsoft has 7 times Nokia market cap (they are at $224B).
With the devastation of the Symbian story (and the grow of low-cost devices from MediaTek and Android), I can only see the stock go south from here. In a year, I bet their market cap will be around $20B, just half of what it was before the announcement.
Put yourself in Steve Ballmer's shoes. At that time, your market cap will be ten times Nokia's. Their company will be $20B cheaper. Apple will be out with iPad 2, iPhone 5 and maybe even an iPhone Mini, with the highest margins ever. Android will be over 80% of market share in mobile, with Google making billions in mobile ads. Where can you go? You can't beat Android, because it is open source and it sells for zero dollars (and it has a momentum that cannot be stopped). But you can chase Apple.
That's pretty embarrassing for a company that has a desperate need to be big in the mobile phone market and it is hardly reassuring for Nokia's customers and shareholders.
Still, the writing was always on the cards, even if Elop could never see it. However to the outsider the clues to failure were there, and perhaps most tellingly in the Elop crisis email.
For those who have been following QML , you might remember that we changed the imports to QtQuick 1.0 to allow us minor revisions of the Qt Quick module in minor revisions of Qt. One of those minor revisions is nearly done, and will soon be waiting in the 4.7 branch of Qt. There’s a bunch of good stuff there and one area in particular I’d like to focus on is the improvements we’ve made to versioning.
During the month of January, my team decided to start releasing our working Qt version to the public once a month. We set 25th of February 2011 as the first release date, and as a “release process” we decided that we were not going to produce packages or anything like that but we would simply tag our repository and announce it to the world.
It’s true. There are MeeGo devices being commercially distributed and they are built on Qt. The guys at WeTab GmbH have been shipping their MeeGo tablet, WeTab, since the third quarter of 2010.
Rhonda & I will be hosting a meetup at GDC at the Bin 55 lounge in the Marriott Marquis. We'd like any developers who will be attending GDC to come by and meet us and other AppUp developers. Drop us a note if you're attending. This will be a good opportunity to chat, share stories and have some down time before the Application Lab starts at noon.
Bloomberg news reported earlier this month that RIM was working to make its BlackBerry Playbook tablet compatible with Android apps. The report cited only unnamed sources and seemed to be a strange development.
One of the new features ushered in with the Honeycomb release is a new animation system, a set of APIs in a whole new package (android.animation) that makes animating objects and properties much easier than it was before.
Forget taking the Motorola XOOM home to put it through its paces and experience the delight of Google’s Android Honeycomb operating system, it’s now a matter of how quickly you can install your own ClockworkMod recovery image and ROM Manager, rooting your tablet as soon as humanly possible.
That’s what Koush did with his XOOM, installing the recovery image and ROM manager, obtaining SuperUser priviledges on the device, just two hours after purchasing the tablet. Whilst we haven’t heard of any ROMs in existence, it will mean that developers and Android hackers will be able to install custom Honeycomb ROMs on their Motorola XOOM.
There’s a new popular clock widget every week, but what if you want more control over how you tell time? How do you make my own clock widget on Android? You download Make Your Clock Widget, of course.
Make Your Clock Widget doesn’t give you the ability to build the same amazing widgets that we’ve covered in the past, but it does offer the ability to customize your clock with nice results. The app comes with a set of five pre-made templates, and several more designs available for download, that can be used as starting points to build a widget. Users can adjust font size, positioning, background color, and style to get the right look for their widgets of varying sizes.
Waiting up to a few weeks for the Android 2.3.3 OTA update to roll out may not be your style, so rather than dialing *#*#checkin#*#* in hopes that the update comes to you, Google has not released the zip file updates so you can manually update your phone.
The rooting of Android handsets could soon be encouraged at Sony Ericsson after a tweet from Simon Walker, Head of Developer Program and Partner Engagement for Sony Ericsson Mobile said he was “in favour of rooting if it was done right”.
What options do Android users have, today, to protect themselves against eavesdroppers? Android does support several VPN configurations which you could configure before you hit the road. That won't stop the unnecessary transmission of your fine GPS coordinates, which, to my mind, neither SoundHound nor ShopSaavy have any business knowing. If that's an issue for you, you could turn off your GPS altogether, but you'd have to turn it on again later when you want to use maps or whatever else. Ideally, I'd like the Market installer to give me the opportunity to revoke GPS privileges for apps like these.
At Gettysburg Abraham Lincoln dated this nation's founding to the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate July 4 as our national day.
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So far, I'm glad to say, the drive is doing a lot better than either the American Republic or the Confederacy. Over 40,000 Euros came in during just one week. "Your are our rockstars," Florian wrote.
The Open-By-Rule Benchmark I talked about recently has now had several workouts, and there are a number more under review ready for future posting. So far, it seems to be working out well, with projects receiving scores that (to my eyes at least) are an accurate reflection of the openness. It’s been clear that every project has it’s strengths and weaknesses and that there’s no perfect model. I like the way the benchmark allows for this; as the dial I’m displaying suggests, I think an overall score below -2 suggests a closed project, a score over +2 suggests an open project and in between is a twilight zone.
One of the false charges that anti-FLOSS protestors hurl at FLOSS is that FLOSS is run by amateurs. Begging that question, they conclude that FLOSS cannot be as good as their favourite non-free software.
The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) was inaugurated today by Chief Minister Shri V S Achuthanandan in Thiruvananthapuram. The Technopark based ICFOSS will focus on providing technical assistance for using FOSS to implement various government projects in Kerala in an endeavour to promote open source software.
In his inaugural speech, the CM said, “As per the IT policy of the Government we will support the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in all projects, especially those for governance and education. Kerala was one of the first states in the country to adapt to free software. Today, other states are following our footsteps and we should ensure that we maintain the leadership position. ICFOSS is a step in this direction.” He also added that major projects of national importance like Aadhaar should have been developed on FOSS.
For the last half-thousand years, ever since there has been a press, the press has had a tendency to marry itself to power, willingly or otherwise. The existence of the printing press in western Europe destroyed the unity of Christendom, in the intellectual, political and moral revolution we call the Reformation. But the European states learned as the primary lesson of the Reformation the necessity of censorship: power controlled the press almost everywhere for hundreds of years.
In the few places where the European press was not so controlled, it fuelled the intellectual, political and moral revolution we call the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which taught us to believe, as Thomas Jefferson said, "When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."
But in the world liberal capitalism made, as AJ Liebling declared, freedom of the press belonged to him who owned one. Venality, vanity, fear, lust for profit and other forces brought the owner, slowly or rapidly as character determined, into power's embrace. In the 20th century, the press – and its progeny, broadcast – became industrial enterprises, which married power and money far more incestuously than any megalomaniac press lord ever could, which is why the few remaining corporeal examples, nor matter how semi-corporate their vileness, retained a certain quaint, freebooting flavour.
Now, the vast interconnection of humanity we call the internet promises to divorce the press and power forever, by dissolving the press. Now, every mobile phone, every document scanner, every camera, every laptop, are part of an immense network in which everything we see, we think, we know, can be transmitted to everyone else, everywhere, immediately. Democracy in its deepest sense follows. Ignorance ceases to be the inevitable lot of the vast majority of humanity.
Even If we unable to create workshop by whatsoever reason, I will be able to distribute to 10000+ college in India via IIT and MHRD but we need this FOSS KIT as this stage. I am asking for contribution. please come forward as this contribution will help lakh of student to use FOSS.
Speakers: Scott McNealy, Co-Founder, Former Chairman & CEO, Sun Microsystems Ed Zander, Former Chairman & CEO, Motorola; Former President, Sun Microsystems
I feel that I have to give a public and official response regarding eLiberatica conference. I tried to delay it in the hope that, some kind of miracle will happen – which is not the case. We cannot do this conference this time. There is as very slight chance to do it in autumn. Very light, I would not count on it.
Unfortunately, there will be no eLiberatica 2011.
OpenBenchmarking.org will be going public over the night and for those not in Las Angeles, slides and recordings from this presentation will be published on Monday.
Benjamin Nortier of London is our hero. Why? He's taken on a huge challenge: create a 3D modelling program that everyone can use. He's performed an analysis of available 3D modeling tools and came to pretty much the same conclusion we did: tools are too hard, too expensive or not usable for solid modeling. What's he doing about it? He's creating a fully functional, easy-to-use, browser-based 3D modeling tool: "I'm building a WebGL modelling tool for 3D printing".
It’s been an exciting past few months in the Google Chrome Developer Tools world as we keep adding new features, while polishing up existing ones to respond to your feedback.
It’s the end of February and it appears as if Mozilla will miss yet another important target: It is unlikely at this time that Firefox 4 RC will become available this month, as the next beta is frozen, another beta is planned and 20 blocking bugs remain.
BoomTown spoke with Gary Kovacs, the relatively new CEO of Mozilla, about the near-to-official launch of Firefox 4, the increasing competition with Google and its Chrome efforts and where Mozilla goes next
Three boys decided to create a start-up. We were all into gaming, web development and space, so it was small wonder our project ended up as a browser-based space simulation game. Right from the beginning, we chose to employ only technology that would enable us to create a virtual world free from any limitations, be it platform, bandwidth or gameplay.
A new version of Mozilla F1 is available. This is a bug fix/small enhancement release that builds on last week’s release.
Last week I spoke at the London Web Meetup in London, England about a topic that is close to my heart: finding harmony as a group of professionals in web development. If you come from the outside of our little echo chamber and you see how developers communicate with each other and how we get incredibly agitated about certain subjects you get a very strange impression.
One of Home Dash‘s goals is to create a browse interface where users can discover interesting websites. Home Dash 6 moves closer by adding some initial support for customizing the snapshots of these websites in the dashboard.
Oracle and Google have filed a joint claim construction statement [PDF]. This is a standard thing that you have to do in all patent infringement cases in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It's a statement where the parties let the judge know how they each construe the words in the patents allegedly infringed.
Despite the bravado of chief executive Larry Ellison, Oracle continued to take a pounding in the EMEA server market during Q4 2010.
Figures from Gartner reveal global server revenues in 2010's closing quarter rose 16.4 per cent on the corresponding period last year to $14.7bn (€£9.1bn). Across the full year, server sales rose 13.2 per cent to $48.8bn.
In EMEA, Q4 server sales were up 10.4 per cent annually to $4.3bn, while unit shipments increased 4.4 per cent to 706,202.
Thousands of donors contribute €50,000 in just eight days to The Document Foundation
Research programme publishes damning report of public health ICT, and recommends Free Software and Open Standards.
Professor John Chelsom, founder of the Centre for Health Informatics at City University London (CUL), published a paper this week calling for the NHS to stop investing in proprietary software, and eliminate "once and for all, the product-centric culture" that has "held back" British healthcare. Arguing that the NHS is "just emerging from a decade of wasted opportunity", the paper states that the National programme for IT (NPfIT) is a failure.
The Direct Project took a page from the open source community by bringing together several dozen organizations to collaborate to create "a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the Internet." The group is working to establish standards and documentation to support simple scenarios of pushing data from where it is to where it's needed.
BSD users can be excited this week not only for the release of FreeBSD 8.2, but their open-source graphics stack is finally beginning to catch-up with Linux too. Kernel mode-setting is finally becoming a reality with the FreeBSD kernel and with that support for the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) memory management under BSD and updating the Intel DRI graphics driver.
The February issue of DACS' (Data and Analysis Center for Software) Software Tech News focuses entirely on the U.S. Department of Defense and open source software. However, even if you aren't interested in the use of open source in the military, there are still some gems that apply to all U.S. government agencies that you might want to check out.
I am speaking at the ODF Plugfest here in the UK this morning, on the subject of the challenges facing the procurement of open source software by traditional enterprises (including the public sector). Based on a selection of experiences from ForgeRock’s first year, my talk considers procurement challenges that legacy procurement rules raise for introducing true open source solutions
The U.K. has become the latest country to conclude that for information and communications technology (ICT) procurement purposes, “open standards” means “royalty free standards.” While apparently falling short of a legal requirement, a Cabinet Office Procurement Policy Note recommends that all departments, agencies, non-departmental bodies and “any other bodies for which they are responsible” should specify open standards in their procurement activities, unless there are “clear business reasons why this is inappropriate.”
We at the Centre for Internet and Society are very glad to be able to participate in the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). Our interest in the conference arises mainly from our work in the areas of intellectual property rights reform and promotion of different forms of ‘opennesses’ that have cropped up as a response to perceived problems with our present-day regime of intellectual property rights, including open content, open standards, free and open source software, open government data, open access to scholarly research and data, open access to law, etc., our emerging work on telecom policy with respect to open/shared spectrum, and the very important questions around Internet governance. The article by Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash was published in the journal Common Voices, Issue 4.
It’s an intriguing phenomenon, but it’s not the only one Boczkowski is studying. Another fascinating aspect of the professor’s research — the aspect, in fact, for which the book is named — is the study he conducted of the environments in which people consume their news. People tend to read the news at work; and that, in turn, skews the news content they consume. (For more on that idea — and for the broader trends it suggests about information consumption and civic life — check out the talk Boczkowski will be giving this evening, with the Lab’s own Josh Benton, as part of MIT’s Communications Forum. If you’re in the Cambridge area, the discussion will take place from 5 to 7 on the MIT campus; it’ll also be recorded and archived.)
The French influx to London suggests what governments can and can’t do to boost their cities’ allure
DDG (DuckDuckGo) is great for a number of reasons:
* DDG doesn’t track your searches (Google does) * Uses a cool !bang syntax to make searching faster (example: ‘!w linux’ will take you directly to the Wikipedia page for linux, hundreds of !bang shortcuts are available for many popular sites and topics) * Almost as good search results as Google, there have only been a tiny handful of searches that havent been very good * Fast and minimal * The API is open source
The American workforce needs a third world makeover if it wants first world corporations to find it attractive.
"To be fair, Craigslist as an entity can’t be blamed for the things that happen among its users. It’s merely a facilitator of commerce, after all," says Zollman in a blog post. "And we understand thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions happen safely between Craigslist aficionados. Long before Craigslist, even, robberies were linked to newspaper classifieds from time to time."
A Cherokee County teacher who duct-taped an autistic boy to a chair and confined a blind girl under a desk pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and was sentenced to six years of probation and $2,000 in fines.
A collection of Max Newman's hand-annotated offprints from sixteen of Alan Turing's eighteen books have been purchased by the Bletchley Park Trust with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and a USD100,000 donation from Google.
Almost nothing tangible remains of genius Bletchley Park codebreaker, Alan Turing; so when an extremely rare collection of offprints* relating to his life and work was set to go to auction last year, an ambitious campaign was launched to raise funds to purchase them for the Bletchley Park Trust and its Museum. The Trust is today delighted to announce that the collection has been saved for the nation as the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) has stepped in quickly to provide €£213,437, the final piece of funding required.
According to the BBC, the final tally of public donations was still €£200,000 short. It's a shame that Apple couldn't part with any of the €£60 billion cash pile it's sitting on and that other cash rich information technology companies didn't donated something. Turing was, after all, a founding father of modern computing.
The bandwidth available to mobile phones, digital television and other communication technologies could be expanded enormously by exploiting the twistedness as well as wavelength of radio waves. That is the claim being made by a group of scientists in Italy and Sweden, who have shown how a radio beam can be twisted, and the resulting vortex detected with distant antennas.
The simplest kind of electromagnetic beam has a plane wavefront, which means that the peaks or troughs of the beam can be connected by an imaginary plane at right angles to the beam's direction of travel. But if a beam is twisted, then the wavefront rotates around the beam's direction of propagation in a spiral, creating a vortex and leaving the beam with zero intensity at its centre.
There was lots of noise and distraction on the crowded Expo floor of the RSA Security Conference this year. After a grueling couple of years, vendors were back in force with big booths, big news and plenty of entertainment designed to attract visitor traffic. Wandering the floor, I saw - variously - magic tricks, a man walking on stilts, a whack-a-mole game, a man dressed in a full suit of armor and a 15 foot long racetrack that I would have killed for when I was 10.
The most telling display, however, may have been the one in Booth 556, where malware forensics firm HBGary displayed a simple sign saying that it had decided to remove its booth and cancel scheduled talks by its executives. This, after the online mischief making group Anonymous broke into the computer systems of the HBGary Federal subsidiary and stole proprietary and confidential information. The HBGary sign stayed up for a couple days, got defaced by someone at the show and was later removed. When I swung by HBGary's booth on Thursday, it was a forlorn and empty patch of brown carpet where a couple marketing types where holding an impromptu bull session.
Transport for London has confirmed that by the end of 2012 it will accept contactless credit and debit cards at the tube turnstiles, just after the Olympic tourists leave.
Those tourists will be able to pay for bus journeys, as London's 8,000 buses will be equipped to accept PayWave, PayPass and ExpressPay before the July kick-off, but upgrading the underground network will take a little longer so Londoners will have to wait until the end of 2012 before being able to cut up their Oyster cards.
This was a particularly interesting to Mehta, who is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and former New York Times video journalist currently working on ways to develop what he calls “participatory reporting.” After the initial celebration, he developed a project that he hopes will result in a crowd-sourced interactive documentary about the 18 days of protests that led up to the revolution.
The project, #18DaysInEgypt, asks people who witnessed the protests to label what they recorded of them on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube with specific tags. Eventually, Mehta will put the entries together to create an interactive narrative. He hasn’t decided whether that narrative will involve a timeline, place the viewer at a specific location to observe what is going on, create a customized video depending on what the user wants to experience (Arcade Fire-style) or something else. For now, the biggest hurdle is collecting the content, a project for which he is soliciting help from partners in Egypt.
South Korea's military has been dropping leaflets into North Korea about democracy protests in Egypt, a legislator said on Friday, but doubts lingered it would trigger calls for change in the tightly controlled country.
As part of a psychological campaign, the South Korean military also sent food, medicines and radios for residents in a bid to encourage North Koreans to think about change, a conservative South Korean parliament member, Song Young-sun, said.
The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in "psychological operations" to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.
A US general in Afghanistan illegally ordered a military psychological operations team to manipulate visiting US dignitaries into supporting their calls for further troops and funding, it was reported yesterday.
9.46am – North Korea: In the comments thread Benghazi217 reports that North Korea has seen protests in the past few weeks, while the economic and food situation is deteriorating. Earlier we heard reports that South Korea is dropping leaflets into its northern neighbour documenting the revolutions in Egypt and Libya.
Mubarak and Berlusconi are cheerful. After dinner, they chat and laugh about "their meetings with that madcap Qaddafi." Who knows, they may even have talked about "bunga bunga" (think steamy frolics), a phrase invented by the Libyan leader. And there was much good cheer too during a private lunch not so long ago between the Cavaliere (Berlusconi's nickname) and the Tunisian president Ben Alì at the latter's Hollywood-style villa in Carthage. "Old friends, new deals" is how the US ambassador summed it up. But when the subject of the Mediterranean comes up, Italy's foreign policy always goes off on two different paths: Berlusconi deals with the "sexier portfolio", in other words special deals and the like, while foreign minister Frattini handles down-to-earth matters. The US diplomatic documents – obtained from WikiLeaks and published exclusively by "L'Espresso" – show how the regimes of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia were a personal question for Silvio Berlusconi. After all, his style is to embrace the world's dictators, from Putin to Lukashenko, from Chavez to Assad, while ignoring warnings from his ministers and allies. Not to mention the fact that he welcomes the sudden influx of "non- transparent" Libyan capital into the Italian bank Unicredit. With the risk that very private and hastily concocted deals will now carry a high price for the whole of Italy. While North Africa's Maghreb region is undergoing dramatic changes affecting Italy's future – refugees seeking asylum, energy cutbacks and stock exchange tremors – the government seems unable to come up with an appropriate response. And the WikiLeaks cables show how Italy's executive is split from top to bottom – ministers with no compunction about trampling on their colleagues, a marked inability to find a single voice on major problems, bitter feuds amongst party factions, clashes with Bankitalia and with the President of Italy. For months the US ambassador David Thorne has been filing reports to Washington D.C. about the all-out fighting in the government coalition "while waiting to find out who will take over from Berlusconi."
When Omar Shibliy Mahmoudi exchanged sweet nothings on the Muslim dating site Mawada, it wasn't for love but for liberty.
5:05 Wired: Pay Pal denies anything political about it freezing that Bradley Manning support fund. "Asked why, if the Courage to Resist account was opened in 2006, PayPal hadn’t raised the issue of linking it to a bank account earlier, Nayar did not have an immediate response. He said only that nonprofit organizations are allowed to open accounts easily and quickly."
I’m disappointed that she used this speech to once more attack Wikileaks (even as she praised other nations’ citizens’ efforts to use the net to bring transparency to their governments) and that the Administration has not taken the opportunity of Wikileaks to examine its own level of classification and opacity. They could still disapprove of Wikileaks while also learning a lesson about being more open. By not doing that, some of the high-minded words in a speech such as this come off as at least inconsistent if not hypocritical.
For years his regime has given the west nothing but grief but been kept sweet for reasons of oil, trade and on the spurious notion that the “Great Leader” might be a useful ally in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Earlier this week a fresh batch of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks again revealed the true nature of the corrupt and lavish lifestyles of the Gaddafi family. In what amounts to a personal fiefdom, his oldest son, Muhammad, dominated telecommunications, while another like Muatassim, was National Security Adviser, Hannibal was influential in maritime shipping, Khamis commanded a top military unit, and Saadi was given the job of setting up an Export Free Trade Zone in western Libya.
PayPal has lifted its ban on the account of Courage to Resist, an organization that has raised a substantial portion of the funds needed for the legal defense of Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old former U.S. army private accused of leaking classified U.S. information to WikiLeaks in 2010.
Anonymous recently revealed internal emails and documents from security firm HBGary that showed how it proposed targeting WikiLeaks and journalists, expecially Glenn Greenwald, on behalf of Bank of America.
Since 2006, the whistleblowers' website WikiLeaks has published a mass of information we would otherwise not have known. The leaks have exposed dubious procedures at Guantanamo Bay and detailed meticulously the Iraq War's unprecedented civilian death-toll. They have highlighted the dumping of toxic waste in Africa as well as revealed America's clandestine military actions in Yemen and Pakistan.
Julian Assange will, according to the judge's finding of fact, be held in prison in solitary confinement when he is returned to Sweden and will then be interrogated, held without bail and later subjected to a secret trial on accusations that have been bruited around the world, not least by this newspaper. He has a complete answer to these charges, which he considers false and baseless. Even if acquitted, however, the mud will stick and, if convicted, the public will never be able to able to assess whether justice has miscarried. This country, which has given to the world the most basic principles of a fair trial – that justice must be seen to be done – denies that basic liberty for those that are extradited to Sweden.
Though the media may attack WikiLeaks on their editorial pages, Mitchell says many outlets depend on the cables for juicy details about Libya. Where else could we learn that US diplomats consider Qaddafi and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez "revolutionary brothers"?
There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it.
The drill bit spun, whining against the alluvial mud and rock that folds beneath the Wind River Range foothills. It ploughed to 160 feet, but the water that spurted to the surface smelled foul, like a parking lot puddle drenched in motor oil. It was no better — yet — than the water Meeks needed to replace.
Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. For 35 years he drew it clear and sweet from a well just steps from the front door of the plain, eight-room ranch house that he owns with his wife, Donna. Neighbors would stop off the rural dirt road on their way to or from work in the gas fields to fill plastic jugs; the water was better than at their own homes.
But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.
I am not a fan of our corn ethanol policy as I made clear made clear during the last food crisis (see “The Fuel on the Hill” and “Can words describe how bad corn ethanol is?” and “Let them eat biofuels!“). In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.
I was glad to see former Pres. Bill Clinton start talking about this in a Washington Post piece headlined, “Clinton: Too much ethanol could lead to food riots” — though I tend to see the world’s increasing use of crops for fuel as an underlying cause for growing food insecurity, something that makes the whole food system more brittle and thus more vulnerable to triggering events, like once in 1000 100 year droughts and once in 500 year floods, which is to say climate instability (see WashPost, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).
Real Climate, a prominent blog run by climate scientists, may be sued by a controversial journal in response to allegations that the its peer review process is "shoddy."
Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and Real Climate member based at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has claimed that Energy & Environment (E&E) has "effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor's political line." The journal denies the claim, and, according to Schmidt, has threatened to take further action unless he retracts it.
"This is an insult, and what's more it's not true," says Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, the editor of E&E and an emeritus reader at the University of Hull's department of geography. Every paper that is submitted to the journal is vetted by a number of experts, she said. But she did not deny that she allows her political agenda to influence which papers are published in the journal. "I'm not ashamed to say that I deliberately encourage the publication of papers that are sceptical of climate change," said Boehmer-Christiansen, who does not believe in man-made climate change.
Libya's secretive sovereign wealth fund has $32 billion in cash with several U.S. banks each managing up to $500 million, and it has primary investments in London, a confidential diplomatic cable shows.
While rumors that Libyan ruler Muammar Gadhafi had been shot surfaced, the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs announced it would freeze any and all assets held by Gaddafi or his “environment” to avoid any “misuse of state funds.”
Kaplan University Online promises convenient college degrees paid for with easy federal aid. But for many students, all they deliver is debt, unethical practices and misleading claims. Who cashes in? The Washington Post Company, which owns the lucrative chain of colleges and lends its stellar reputation to a scam for low-income students.
Shannon Croteau was 11 classes away from a degree from Kaplan University Online when she learned she was out of financial aid, owed $30,000 and that the degree would be worthless in her state of New Hampshire.
Croteau had been told by Kaplan -- a lucrative chain of "for-profit" colleges owned by the Washington Post Company -- that she could make more than $65,000 a year as a paralegal. Getting financial aid from the government was easy, they said, and earning a degree would be a snap.
At a press conference Monday, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight D. Eisenhower for years.
So many messages are being examined by Scotland Yard's phone-hacking inquiry that it is difficult to identify every mention of a celebrity's name among "hundreds of intercepts", lawyers for the police have claimed.
The proliferation of legal actions generated by complaints against the News of the World is also in danger of congesting the courts with "parallel claims", the judge hearing applications for disclosure in three cases has implied.
The culprit in this case is Mr. Timothy Johnson, who just went off on my extremely sweet and mild-mannered colleague Leena Rao because she declined to cover some tidbit of news about a company he represents.
Getting politicians to bend policy to your company’s will is a fine art – requiring a combination of charm, dogged persistence, threats and bushels of cash. But corporate lobbyists know just which buttons to press in order to get politicians to stuff human rights, public health and the dear old environment – and put business interests first.
Much as they shrink from the limelight, we feel they deserve a bit of exposure. So here’s why we think these 10 lobby groups have earned their place in the hall of shame.
Is it a problem that the top six media corporations dominate the information flow to most of the developed world?
I think so.
The Chinese Communist Party can move like a gazelle when it senses that its grip on social stability might be at stake. Within days of Mubarak’s downfall, Beijing had rounded up liberal activists, slowed the Web to a crawl, and poured security forces into areas that it thought could be used for the kind of online organizing that is sweeping the Middle East. Smack in the middle of that, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on “Internet freedom” last week, and she singled out China and other authoritarian countries for facing a “dictator’s dilemma” in their attempts to control the Internet. For analysis, I turned to Rebecca MacKinnon, who knows as much as anyone about the Internet in China. She is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices Online, an international citizen media project. (Her book “Consent of the Networked” will be published next year by Basic Books.)
A senior Chinese leader says Beijing should launch a fresh struggle against the influence of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.
The comments were made by Jia Qinglin, who sits on the standing committee of the Chinese Communist Party's powerful politburo.
He said China also needed to raise the living standards of Tibetan people.
The call comes nearly three years after riots and unrest in Tibetan areas which China blamed on the Dalai Lama.
Business networking site LinkedIn appeared to have been blocked in some parts of China, the company said.
No explanation was given for the move, which LinkedIn is still investigating.
The health care industry's toothless tiger finally bared its teeth, as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a $4.3 m fine to a Maryland health care provider for violations of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. The action is the first monetary fine issued since the Act was passed in 1996.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a Notice of Final Determination to Cignet Health care of Temple Hills, Maryland on February 4. The notice followed a finding by HHS's Office of Civil Rights that Cignet failed to provide 41 patients with copies of their medical records and for failing to respond to requests from HHS's Office of Civil Rights for information related to the complaints.
US law is surprisingly clear on the topic of encryption -- companies are free to build it into their products, and if they don't have the decryption key, they can't be forced to deliver their customers' unencrypted communications or data to law enforcement agencies.
While Skype uses some form of proprietary end-to-end encryption (although it should be noted that the security experts I've spoken to don't trust it), and RIM uses encryption for its Enterprise Blackberry messaging suite, the vast majority of services that consumers use today are not encrypted. Those few services that do use encryption, such as Google's Gmail, only use it to protect the data in transit from the user's browser to Google's servers. Once Google receives it, the data is stored in the clear.
[...]
Building encryption into products, turning it on by default, and using it to protect all data is the ultimate form of privacy by design. While the FTC is encouraging firms to embrace this philosophy, the FBI is betting that poor security will remain the default. Sure, a few individuals will know how to encrypt their data, but the vast majority will not. It is because of this that the FBI can avoid a fight over encryption. Why bother, when so little data is encrypted?
You know what else Human Rights Watch vehemently condemns as human rights abuses? Guantanamo, military commissions, denial of civilian trials, indefinite detention, America's "enhanced interrogation techniques," renditions, and a whole slew of other practices that are far more severe than the conditions in Haiti about which Lopez complains and yet which have been vocally supported by National Review. In fact, Lopez's plea for Allen is surrounded at National Review by multiple and increasingly strident attacks on the Obama administration by former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino for (allegedly) abandoning those very policies, as well as countless posts from former Bush speechwriter (and the newest Washington Post columnist) Marc Thiessen promoting his new book defending torture. Lopez herself has repeatedly cheerled for Guantanamo and related policies, hailing Mitt Romney's call in a GOP debate that we "double Guantanamo" as his "best answer" and saying she disagrees with John McCain's anti-torture views, while mocking human rights concerns with the term "Club Gitmo." And National Review itself has led an endless attack on the credibility of Human Rights Watch, accusing it of anti-Israel and anti-American bias for daring to point out the human rights abuses perpetrated by those countries.
On Identi.ca this morning we’ve been discussing the criminal charges against Byron Sonne, and the other people who were charged in the G8/G20 witch hunt. And of course someone reposted the link to the Gawker interview with one of the people that the FBI raided for being a member of Anonymous.
All of which reminded me of another witch hunt…
I used to run a BBS called ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ Hey, I’m a creature of habit :)
It was a private board. You got invited to join if you were interesting. You had to be able to communicate. There was a posting requirement – you have to keep your ratio of posts above a certain level, or I’d kick you out.
Quite frankly it was a lot of fun. We had a great bunch of people, and held brisk discussions about a wide range of topics. There were only 30 members, so everyone knew everyone quite well. It was a private club style setup, you didn’t even get considered for an invite unless someone who was already a member recommended you – and they were careful about who they recommended because we were all having so much fun.
And then a MORAL PANIC hit southern Ontario. Some brainless cretin realized that Electronic Bulletin Board Systems could be used to distribute child pornography.
The Wisconsin State Assembly has just passed Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill, including its controversial provisions to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for public employee unions as well as many other provisions to weaken union organizing.
To people down here in the U.S., Thompson, Canada and its fight with the Brazilian mining giant Vale may seem very far away.
- Definition of Cybercafe: According to the IT Act, “Cyber Cafe means any facility from where access to the Internet is offered by any person on the ordinary course of business to the members of the public,” and this is where a large part of the problem lies. By saying that the rules are applicable to any facility, it could refer to all WiFi hotspots, whether run by Aircel, Tata Indicom, or even small cafes and restaurants that want to offer patrons free WiFi access. And I’m not sure if those who framed these rules are aware, but today you can use an Android phone to set up a WiFi connection, and offer public Internet Access.
Sadly, the last point is what municipal wireless networks in the United States never got a chance to achieve. Municipalities in the US were trying to roll out these networks, a few years too early, before launch of the iPhone and the tsunami of Android phones.
In life, timing is everything: the massive demand from mobile users had not yet occurred and there was (and perhaps still is) not enough wired backhaul in the form of fiber networks. There are a few successful muni WiFi networks in the US, but I believe that most of them will be deployed outside the United States.
PS3 hacking community member graf_chokolo says that Sony and the police raided his home and warns others to “be careful from now on.”
A member of the PS3 hacking community known as graf_chokolo is learning the hard way that Sony means business when it comes to preventing people from circumventing the gaming consoles DRM protection scheme.
Two weeks ago I proclaimed a winner in the microcontroller dev board arena with “Why the Arduino Won, and Why It’s Here to Stay.” There’s still lots of great debate going on, and conversations that still haven’t ended. Is my prediction right? We’ll see what happens in the upcoming months and years.
This week I’m going to switch gears a little and declare an enemy for all makers, hackers, and innovators — it’s in a very different space: the consumer electronics industry. And who is this slayer of progress? Sony.
I don't think even Sony believes it can be successful at producing hack-proof PlayStations. If they did, they wouldn't be hiring lawyers and raiding people's homes and grabbing their computers and PlayStation 3s, leading The Inquirer to call Sony the "overbearing Japanese company".
Two administrators of FileSoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – had their case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today. The prosecution relied solely on one-sided evidence provided by the anti-piracy group FACT and was not able to build a case. Following the trial of OiNK BitTorrent tracker operator Alan Ellis, the FileSoup case marks the second where UK-based BitTorrent site operators have walked free.
Limewire wants to know all about the deals that the record labels have struck with online services in the past. That’s likely because Limewire wants to show that the actual deals done by the record companies don’t justify their outsize damage demands. The record labels have said in the past that their damage demands against Limewire could be hundreds of millions of dollars, or even top $1 billion. There’s no way Limewire ever made that kind of cash, but the labels are hoping to force founder Mark Gorton, who also owns and manages a hedge fund, to pay up out of his personal fortune.
Today’s judgment by the Full Bench of the Federal Court could clear the way for internet service providers to disconnect subscribers accused of copyright infringement.
The majority ruling in the split judgment handed down today gives internet service providers no absolute protection over the actions of their subscribers.
But this sounds mostly like merely a hard drive in the sky - a new place for existing customers to store files they already “own”.
Despite an anti-piracy group blundering through an investigation and breaking the law in the process, the administrator of a BitTorrent site has been ordered to pay compensation to rights holders. Jonas Laeborg, the operator of the EliteBits private tracker, was found liable for contributory infringement and ordered to settle to the tune of $18,500.
We've seen some of the defenses to Righthaven suits raise some of these issues, but never in such a detailed manner. And it's especially interesting in this case, where the filing comes as an amicus brief, rather than lawyers for the defendant. In fact the defendant in the case, Bill Hyatt, did not reply. As we've discussed in the past, normally when that happens, the court will make a default judgment -- basically giving the plaintiff everything requested. However, they don't have to and Randazza points out that Righthaven's claims reach far beyond reasonable. Among other things, it also challenges Righthaven's ridiculous standard demand that those sued hand over their entire domain name, noting that copyright law does not allow such a remedy.
Free streaming services are replacing piracy as the chief culprit of music industry revenue loss in the minds of fiscally frustrated executives, if a number of panel discussions at a New York digital music conference are any indication.
TPB-AFK is an upcoming documentary about The Pirate Bay and its founders, expected to be released later this year. To complete the project, Swedish filmmaker Simon Klose has now received over $30,000 in funding from the Swedish Government. This money will be added to the $50,000 that was already donated by peers through a successful Kickstarter project.
RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth defended the verdict as necessary to address her “blatant disrespect for artists, the legal system, and the law,” but doesn’t acknowledge that the amount is still so high – $1.5 mln – that the only message it’s sending is that the RIAA is completely removed from reality.
You know it's tough out there for a P2P lawyer when even some random, anonymous, non-lawyer defendant is the more convincing party. That strange scenario unfolded yesterday in Illinois, where divorce-attorney-turned-porn-copyright-lawyer John Steele had his entire case against 300 defendants thrown out completely.
The case involved CP Productions, "a leading producer of adult entertainment content within the amateur Latina niche." The company ran a site called "Chica's Place" from which a bit of material referred to as "Cowgirl Creampie" was allegedly downloaded illegally by 300 people. Though based in Arizona, CP Productions signed up with Steele, a Chicago lawyer, to bring the case.
A story on TechDirt caught my imagination, about a P2P law firm who were sending out extortion letters after a judge had dismissed the defendants. It seems that you have to get pretty low to be less ethical than lawyers in some rackets these days. It seems that nothing stands in the way as a deterrent for them. I have a suggestion.
Since their business model is about mass mailing extortion "pay up or else" threats, knowing that a significant number will pay out the $5000 or whatever the settlement fee is, than go to court with the intentionally inflated "$100,000's" in fines and costs, why not fine them $5000 for EVERY letter they've sent illegally in addition to refunding everyone who's paid up double?
Another cable includes commentary on specifically excluding other international organizations, with the USTR stressing that the G8 or OECD "might make it more difficult to construct a high-standards agreement."
From a Canadian perspective it is worth noting that the Japanese proposed keeping Canada out of the initial negotiating group.
Richard Stallman w Polsce - AGH Kraków 14 styczeà â 2009 [part 1/4]