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03.28.10

Links 28/3/2010: Sabayon 5.2 and GIMP Fun

Posted in News Roundup at 6:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Old phones save lives

    IntraHealth and the Senegalese Ministry of Health are using a simple mobile information system based on FrontlineSMS:Medic, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging. The software was customized for the project in partnership with RAES, the African Network for Health Education. Providers send health data via cell phones to a centrally supported automated response server in Dakar, where it is analyzed by Ministry of Health staff.

  • Making Sense of Open Source Diversity

    Open source needs an app store.

    No, I am not crazy. Well, not about this, anyway. I know that apps for Linux, and open source apps in general, are free and easy to download and install. They are also numerous. Very. To the point where it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of which apps are available to do which tasks. And that’s me talking–someone who is supposed to know what’s what in the community.

  • Editor’s Note: What is There Besides Money?

    My county lives and dies by volunteer labor. If we didn’t have so many generous, far-sighted volunteers filling key positions we’d be in sorry shape. The fire departments are all volunteer, and they are required to have the same training and skills as big-city paid departments. Search and rescue, sheriff’s reserves, home health care and hospice, and on and on and on…all of these jobs that are ordinarily paid positions are capably filled by skilled, committed unpaid volunteers.

    Sound familiar? It is true that a lot of FOSS development is paid, but a sizable amount is still done by unpaid volunteers. The value of diverse, open development and distribution should speak for itself, given its long and successful history, and yet one of the biggest unanswered questions is how can a person make a living from FOSS? Those folks who are quickest with answers like “give away the code, sell service and support” are people who have jobs with paychecks, and have never tried it.

  • Culture in computing.

    This is my quick take on these three computing cultures in an already too long blog posting. In summary, I think that Apple culture is going the way of mobile gadgets, windows culture is as hard and mouldy as two week old stale bread and the open source culture is undergoing a renaissance and bringing computing back to an even keel. I also believe that a very important factor is that the younger generation are much more technologically savvy than my generation of fat balding greybearded eldergeeks :) They realise the intrinsic value and it is their thoughts and opinions which are influencing the change in the current cultures. What do you think? How are the current computing cultures evolving and how will they evolve in the future?

  • GIMP

    • Adobe’s “Magic” Is Gimp’s Old Plug-In

      Suddenly the graphics world is all atwitter about this miraculous new feature they’re previewing in Photoslop. A Photoslop team guy has a video up with a “sneak preview” of what they’re calling “Content-Aware Fill.” As soon as I saw it, I remembered some plug-in that I’d tried in Gimp long ago, but couldn’t remember what it was.

    • Episode 137: A Trip to Hamburg

      I mention two podcasts worth to follow. Jeff Curto’s “The History of Photography” and The World’s “Technology Podcast“. And then there is the Haus der Photographie in the Deichtorhallen, which has good exhibitions and a good bookstore. The map in the bbegin was provided by the Open Street Map Project.

    • Photoshop’s CAF (content-aware fill) – unbelievable? Not quite.

      They can rest assured – it is possible and it has been around for years, e.g. in the GIMP plugin by Paul Harrison called Resynthesizer.

    • Development GIMP Version 2.7 Review

      GIMP 2.7 seems to always start in multi-window mode, even if the user closes GIMP in single-window mode. Although this may have just been a misconfiguration with our GIMP, proper configuration won’t be completely implemented until GIMP 2.8′s release.

      There is another thing. If you maximize the window and then switch tabs it unmaximizes, bringing the window back to the size it was before maximizing.

      With minor GEGL improvements, the current development version of GIMP 2.7 doesn’t appear to have that many new features. We’ll review GIMP again in a while. Until next time…

  • Mozilla

    • 7 Cool Firefox Add-ons

      One of the coolest things about Firefox is its extensibility. Everyone has their collection of favorite Firefox add-ons and I thought I would share mine. Some provide improved organization, some have a certain “WOW!” factor, and others just look pretty.

    • Mozilla Developers Talk Up Firefox as a Key Development Tool

      For many users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web.

      This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5,054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox — and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing.

    • Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 Pre

  • Oracle

  • Business

    • Please break our open source business strategy model

      It included a partial explanation of my theory that those strategies do not exist in isolation, but are steps on an evolutionary process, and also introduced our model for visualizing the core elements of an open source-related business strategy.

    • Reductive Labs, Home of Puppet, Changes Name to Puppet Labs

      Reductive Labs, the home of Puppet, the open source leader in data center automation, has announced that it has changed its name to Puppet Labs. This name better represents the focus of the company on guiding development of Puppet, supporting the large and growing Puppet community and delivering premium tools and services to enable broader deployments of Puppet in large enterprises.

    • New Release of OrangeHRM’s Open Source HRM Software

      OrangeHRM, Inc. is pleased to announce that it released the latest version of OrangeHRM, its open-source HRM software today. Release 2.6 incorporates a Performance Module, a new feature designed to help small- and medium-sized enterprises conduct formal employee performance reviews.

    • Mickos: What’s bigger than open source?

      Mickos is a smart guy. He has deep institutional knowledge of the industry. For Eucalyptus to be wildly successful, it’s going to have to be bigger than just open source, as The VAR Guy points out, i.e., bigger than just an open license attached to otherwise ordinary software. Customers pay for value, and that value, as Mickos thinks, sits at the nexus of cloud, open-source, and collective computing.

    • Former MySQL CEO Mickos Says Open Source Needs More Money Flow

      Mickos also said that part of the reason MySQL kicked off so much open source code for community use was that revenues from it were constant.

    • How do I know if an open source software product is right for my organization?

      More and more organizations are relying on open source software to build, test, deploy, and run mission critical IT applications. From small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, organizations worldwide are continuing to find open source as a cost effective means to deliver quality business applications. With a wealth of commercial and open source software options widely available, how does an organization know if an open source product is right for them?

    • Coming to America: Abiquo Cloud Management

      Open Source or Enterprise License

      The company provides its cloud management product as an open source Community Edition and as a commercial Enterprise Edition. The former is offered via the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3. Abiquo 1.5 will be available within 45 days.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Let’s All Get Together

      But developing standards and open source software are not the only areas where people and companies would like to launch collaborative activities among nationally and internationally distributed participants. The question is, will they know how to go about doing so?

    • ODF Plugfest

      The third in a series of plugfests, aimed at lead developers of commercial and open source ODF implementations, experts from local and regional governments, members of the OASIS TC’s and other stakeholders.

Leftovers

  • 5 Websites With Strange & Unusual Facts

  • Finance

    • Big Banks to Try Putting on Lipstick

      The Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies on behalf of around 100 of the country’s top banks, credit card companies and insurance firms, will undertake a professionally-organized public relations campaign to try to improve the tarnished image of the financial industry.

    • Big Banks Begin Effort to Improve Image, Set `Record Straight’

      One of Wall Street’s main lobbying groups is starting an image-improvement campaign aimed at showing the financial industry as trustworthy and a positive force after more than a year of being chastised in Washington.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • State Insurance Commissioners Take Baton from Congress

      The NAIC, which comprises the insurance commissioners from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, is having its spring meeting today through Sunday in Denver. The fact that more than 1,700 insurance industry executives are also at the meeting should give you an idea of how important the NAIC is to insurers. Just as members of Congress are far out-numbered by lobbyists on any given day in Washington, the commissioners are far, far outnumbered by insurance company executives who come to NAIC’s conferences to try to influence everything the commissioners do.

    • History in the Making

      I have been transfixed by the long health care reform debates in the US, which finally culminated with the House of Representatives passage of the health care reform bill on March 21, and which President Obama signed into law two days later. The House also passed the reconciliation bill which the Senate subsequently approved on March 25. The health care reform bill is now the law of the land.

  • DRM

    • EA’s Own Employees Annoyed At Pointless DRM Solutions

      However, now it appears that it’s even pissing off EA employees. Slashdot points out that the editor of EA.com got really frustrated over the game kicking him out because his DSL was flakey:

      “Booted twice — and progress lost — on my single-player C&C4 game because my DSL connection blinked. DRM fail. We need new solutions.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Hollywood Seeks To Kill Off 3D Golden Goose With Much Higher Prices

      So what’s Hollywood doing? They’re just making it more expensive. Yes, they’re jacking up the prices on 3D movies, in a typical short-term strategy. Rather than recognize how this might just drive more people to more seriously consider getting a 3D setup at home, Hollywood’s simplistic business modeling seems to be “let’s see how much we can squeeze out of people as quickly as possible.”

    • LEGO to Project Legos: Let go of our trademark

      Toymaking giant LEGO is suing a small Minneapolis nonprofit, saying it benefits from the high-profile name.

    • Want to Use My Suit? Then Throw Me Something

      Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century — more than two, some say — and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them.

    • Universal Music Funds Yet Another ‘Educational’ Propaganda Campaign Against File Sharing

      Back in January, we noted that Chris Morrison, the manager of Damon Albarn’s bands, Blur and Gorillaz, stated at a conference that “piracy can be stopped,” while also suggesting he wanted to personally beat up anyone who shared Albarn’s music (oddly, this was right after he had admitted how much wonderful free publicity Albarn had gotten from a leak of the Gorillaz album). Now it looks like Morrison and a former partner of his are involved in a silly and amusing new propaganda campaign, funded by Universal Music, to try to equate file sharing to drunk driving in some cases and racism in other cases. Seriously.

    • Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube

      Sony Entertainment has shut down Beyonce’s official YouTube site. Congrats to Sony Entertainment for wisely spending its legal dollars and working on behalf of its artists.

    • Sony Music Claiming Beyonce’s Official YouTube Channel Violates Copyright?
    • Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June

      The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced.

    • Murdoch Puts Up Some More Paywalls

      Unfortunately, the details look like the rumor was wrong, or the plans changed entirely, because now it looks like both publications are going with your standard everyday super expensive paywall. Starting in June, both publications will begin charging a whopping £1 per day or £2 per week for access — which is actually pretty steep, especially in a market where there’s an awful lot of competition. On a yearly basis, it’s only a bit less than what Newsday is charging for its website — which has been a colossal failure.

    • First Amendment Based Copyright Misuse

      We are at a crossroads with respect to the under-developed equitable defense of copyright misuse. The defense may go the way of its sibling, antitrust-based patent misuse, which seems to be in a state of inevitable decline. Or – if judges accept the proposal of this Article – courts could reinvigorate the copyright misuse defense to better protect First Amendment speech that is guaranteed by statute, but that is often chilled by copyright holders misusing their copyrights to control other’s speech.

    • Fighting intensifies over how to enforce intellectual property laws [UPDATED]

      One fight stems from the secretive negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which began under President George W. Bush. Copyright holders have pressed for provisions that could force Internet Service Providers to do more to combat online piracy, such as cutting off broadband accounts that are used repeatedly for infringement. Such three-strikes provisions are anathema to tech advocacy groups, which also fear that the agreement would make it harder for them to bring some fair-use balance to the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

    • Must Read: CCIA Sets US IP Czar Straight On Intellectual Property

      The RIAA, MPAA and the Screen Actors Guild teamed up to submit their own filing, and as the LA Times noted “it’s a doozy.” Consider it a wishlist of protectionist, anti-consumer, anti-innovation policies, basically demanding that the White House prop up their own businesses, because of their unwillingness to adapt:

      Among other things, the “creative community organizations” urged that:

      * The federal government encourage ISPs to use, and companies to develop, monitoring, filtering, blocking, scanning and throttling technologies to combat the flow of unauthorized material online;
      * Copyright holders be able to combat infringement by making a database of their works available to service providers, rather than submitting individual takedown notices. And once a work is taken down, service providers should be expected to employ “reasonable efforts” to prohibit users from uploading or even linking to them again;
      * Copyright owners be able to block unauthorized streams of live broadcasts without going through the formal notice-and-takedown process;
      * The federal government press search engines, social networks, hosting companies, domain name registrars and online advertising and payment networks to cooperate with copyright holders on efforts to combat piracy (“Encouraging these intermediaries to work with content owners on a voluntary basis to reduce infringements, and assuring these intermediaries that such cooperation will not be second-guessed, should be top priories that call for the personal intervention of senior government officials if necessary.”);
      * A federal interagency task force work with industry to interdict prerelease bootlegs of Hollywood blockbusters and crack down on U.S. services that assist foreign piracy hotbeds;
      * States adopt “labeling laws” that “defined unauthorized online file sharing and streaming as a felony,” giving state and local law enforcement jurisdiction to go after unauthorized copying online;
      * States use consumer protection laws to go after file-sharing sites that “expose consumers to intrusion, viruses and revelation of personal data.”

    • Textbooks are too expensive, so Italian high school tries to produce them in house

      Every year italian families must spend hundreds of Euros in textbooks for every child, while the cost limits set by the government are regularly violated in spite of denounces and warnings from consumer associations. In order to solve this problem, Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini proposed to deduce cost (and weight!) of textbooks by encouraging schools to adopt digital textbooks starting from 2011.

    • ACTA

      • Outrageous Treaty Nonsense, or The Copyright Tail Wagging the Internet Dog

        I’ve been remiss, as the VC’s (sort-of) copyright/Internet law guy, in not commenting previously about a truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf. I am referring to the ongoing negotiations about ACTA, the multilateral “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.” [See Jonathan Adler’s posting earlier today about ACTA here] The US Trade Representative’s office has been conducting these negotiations entirely in secret (on some ridiculous trumped-up ‘national security’ rationale) for several years now on this Agreement; a current draft was recently leaked to the press, and it confirms many peoples’ worst fears. Here’s my attempt at a summary of what’s going on — if you’re interested in more details (and I hope you are), I’ve listed at the end of this posting some excellent sources of further information.

      • The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

        In short, ACTA is geared up to do almost exactly what I predicted in a “Recent Development” in YJIL last year (The Origins and Potential Impact of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), 34 Yale J. Int’l L. 261 (2009)). It amps up IP protection and criminal sanctions, without respecting existing international institutional process and involving the interests of developing countries.

      • Some More Lowlights From The Leaked ACTA Draft: Whole Thing Can Be Rammed Through With 5 Votes

        Michael Geist points us to a rather thorough review, by Margot Kaminski, of some of the more troubling aspects of the leaked ACTA draft. Kaminski highlights 24 different points, but we’ll just pick out a few key ones. For example, she notes that ACTA would create an express lane for intellectual property cases in the courts, and questions: “Why should copyright take precedent over other cases and have such a fast turnaround?” There are a few concerning things about border searches. While ACTA negotiators and defenders keep insisting that ACTA won’t mean border searches for individuals, the draft highlights a few things that are troubling. For example, the US, Canada and New Zealand want to change the exemption criteria for border searches from the current “small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature” to the much lower standard of “reasonably attributable to personal use of the traveler.” In other words, this does, in fact, grant more powers to customs and border patrol to search laptops and iPods and the like, if there’s any indication of more information that is “reasonably attributable to personal use,” — though, that standard seems quite vague and subjective.

      • ACTA’s beginning of the end

        Secondly, Devigne denied the second item in the answer to Hammerstein, who asked about the Commission’s name and shame list. It seems riddiculous to deny such an approach and plan given the “Global Europe” strategy contents, also given earlier statements from the directorate. They would no do that, indicated Devigne. How pathetic!

        Oh, and let’s not mention the desasterous performance of Devigne regarding admitting that they won’t respect the parliament’s resolution on limit to counterfeiting. There he stressed being in line with the acquis again.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Sean Shah, software developer at Eye.fi (2009)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

03.26.10

Links 26/3/2010: Mobinnova Dumps Windows for Linux, Miro 3.0 Gains Subtitles

Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Open Source Rules for Collaboration Software

    The category of collaboration software is growing and changing quickly, encompassing fields like CRM dashboards, enterprise intelligence and analytics. In this category, the very nature of open source software gives it a clear advantage. It doesn’t seek to own the platform, the protocol, the exchange format or the community.

  • Former MySQL CEO: More successful open source startups needed

    Open source is no longer considered the wild underdog, but it will need more new companies making money off the trend, the one-time CEO of MySQL stressed Wednesday at the EclipseCon 2010 conference.

  • Subtitles come to Miro 3.0

    Miro, the open source Internet TV / podcast downloader and player, has been updated to version 3.0 and is now able to display embedded or standalone subtitles for videos. When a video is playing in Miro 3, a drop down menu displays any automatically located subtitles. Alternatively, the user can select their own subtitle files.

  • Mozilla

    • 10 Reasons Why Firefox Could Beat Microsoft Internet Explorer

      2. Extensions

      Part of Mozilla’s appeal is its library of extensions. Users can easily find extensions ranging from business integration to social networks that extend the functionality of the browser far beyond its default installation. Extensions can’t be underestimated. If users can find value in their extensions, they won’t leave Firefox. It’s a major advantage to have as Microsoft is losing its own users.

      3. It’s open source

      Although the average, mainstream user might not care about Mozilla being open source, it really does matter. Open-source software is widely considered superior to closed applications, thanks to the ability for the entire community to work on improving a single piece of software. Closed software, like Internet Explorer, is a different story altogether. Since it’s closed software that only Microsoft can work on, it lacks the benefit of having thousands of eyes working on improving it. The browser is also a major target for hackers.

  • Oracle

    • License change leaves Sun Solaris users at a crossroads

      Oracle’s decision to limit Solaris 10′s free usage to 90 days could be a boon for Linux vendors

      Recent changes to Solaris licensing could further encourage Solaris 10 users to consider Linux — and result in fewer new users considering Solaris at all. If you’re a Solaris customer, don’t overlook this license change.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 7.3 Updates BSD Legacy

      The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team this week put out the FreeBSD 7.3 release which is about four months after FreeBSD 8 was released.

      FreeBSD is known as a solid, stable and reliable open source operating system. It should come as no surprise then that many users of FreeBSD don’t jump to the next major version number right when it becomes available, but rather stay with the legacy version for a while.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU

    • GNU Accessibility Statement

      Project GNU urges people working on free software to follow standards and guidelines for universal accessibility on GNU/Linux and other free operating systems. Multi-platform projects should use the cross platform accessibility interfaces available that include GNU/Linux distributions and the GNOME desktop. Project GNU also advises developers of web sites to follow the guidelines set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

    • [Stallman cartoon]

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Can Flash Survive HTML5?

      There’s been a lot of talk lately about HTML5 and whether Flash is in it for the long haul. Word on the street is that HTML5 will be able to deliver rich content without the need for a proprietary plugin clogging up your Web browser.

Leftovers

  • No harm, no foul

    Such patients have difficulty processing social emotions such as empathy or embarrassment, but “they have perfectly intact capacity for reasoning and other cognitive functions,” says Young.

    A 2007 study by Damasio, Young and their colleagues showed that such patients are more willing than non-brain-damaged adults to judge killing or harming another person as morally permissible if doing so would save others’ lives. That led the researchers to suspect that the brain-damaged patients lacked appropriate emotional responses to moral harms and relied instead on calculating, rational approach to moral dilemmas.

  • World’s cleverest man turns down $1million prize after solving one of mathematics’ greatest puzzles

    A Russian awarded $1million (£666,000) for solving one of the most intractable problems in mathematics said yesterday that he does not want the money.

    Said to be the world’s cleverest man, Dr Grigory Perelman, 44, lives as a recluse in a bare cockroach-infested flat in St Petersburg. He said through the closed door: ‘I have all I want.’

    The prize was given by the U.S. Clay Mathematics Institute for solving the Poincare Conjecture, which baffled mathematicians for a century. Dr Perelman posted his solution on the internet.

    Four years ago, the maths genius failed to turn up to receive his prestigious Fields Medal from the International Mathematical Union for solving the problem.

    At the time he stated: ‘I’m not interested in money or fame. I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

  • Russian maths genius Perelman urged to take $1m prize
  • Grigory Perelman, the maths genius who said no to $1m
  • Rise of the Citizen Scientists

    When his wife was diagnosed with a hereditary disease, Peter Johnson wanted to help. Using a program called Folding @ Home, he found a way to make a difference — by doing genetic research on his home computer. Due to the sensitive nature of his wife’s illness, Peter requested that his last name is changed for the purpose of this story to protect his family’s privacy.

  • Syphilis (Or Was It Facebook?) Blamed For People Not Understanding That Correlation Does Not Mean Causation

    I really really really wasn’t going to write this post, but so many people kept submitting it, I figured it needed to be done. The Telegraph has some ridiculous story claiming, without any actual evidence, that Facebook is “linked to the rise in syphilis.” Quite a claim. The evidence? Oh, that’s not included.

    [...]

    So, yes, you have a bit of weak correlation combined with self-selected anecdotal bias. And that proves what? Uh, absolutely nothing.

  • Facebook Threatens Greasemonkey Script Writer

    If you tell your browser to ignore certain things on a website, that should be your choice. This add-on is there to help people who want it, such that it makes Facebook more useful to them. It’s too bad that as Facebook gets bigger, we’re hearing more and more stories of this kind of bullying activity.

  • Security

    • Gmail geolocation to thwart hackers

      INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has added some rudimentary geolocation technology to thwart Gmail hackers.

      Pavni Diwanji, engineering director at Google, blogged that your Gmail account will automatically notify you if there’s any suspicious activity.

    • Hacker gets 20 years

      IN WHAT MUST BE bad news for Gary McKinnon’s defence team a US court has dismissed Asperger’s syndrome as a hacking defence and thrown the book at Albert Gonzalez.

    • Non-medical staff ‘have access to health records’
    • NHS porters and cleaners can snoop on your medical records
    • Abuse Fears Over Access To Patients’ Records
    • Opting Out – a response to the DoH

      At present it is the NHS patient records system that is muddled between paper and online records – but this could change very soon. As we make clear in the report, the Government’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is slowly rolling-out across the country at great expense and, as was revealed by the British Medical Association (BMA) earlier this month, with very little regard for patient privacy.

      To read about the full horrors of this system, please do head to The Big Opt Out – the website of the NHS Confidentiality campaign, which was set up to protect patient confidentiality and to provide a focus for patient-led opposition the government’s NHS Care Records System.

    • Ottawa joins the war on photography

      Mekki sez, “The city of Ottawa has launched a security campaign funded by Transport Canada (federally) that asks people to report any ‘suspicious behaviour’, which includes photographers and sketchers. They explicitly list ‘An individual taking photos or pictures [...], drawing maps or sketches’ as things to report. My friend Sarah Gelbard teaches in the Architecture department at Carleton University in Ottawa. She had her students do a project on transit in the city last year. They all went to transit stations and took reference pictures to help plan out their projects. Security stopped and questioned several of them. And this was before this new campaign. I’m afraid what might happen now if people started calling in the “suspicious behaviour” of students taking photos of a transit station.”

  • Environment

    • Disputed island disappears into sea

      For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone.

    • Heartland data breach could be bigger than TJX’s

      Heartland, a N.J.-based provider of credit and debit card processing services said that unknown intruders had broken into its systems sometime last year and planted malicious software to steal card data carried on the company’s networks. The company, which is among the largest payment processors in the country, claimed to have discovered the intrusion only last week after being alerted by Visa and MasterCard of suspicious activity.

    • China sends emergency food to drought-stricken provinces

      China has sent 1.4m tonnes of emergency grain supplies to drought-stricken southern provinces that are struggling to cope with the worst drought in decades, the local media reported today.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Tech giants criticize Australia plan for Internet filtering

      The Sydney Morning Herald reported that 147 comments were submitted to the government on its proposal to begin blocking certain Web sites – particularly those that present harm to children.

    • U.S. must stop spying on WikiLeaks

      Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Big Content: stopping P2P should be “principal focus” of IP czar

      Thanks to the recent PRO-IP Act, the US has for the first time has an “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator” responsible for pulling together all the resources of the federal government. What should the IPEC be doing with her time and resources? The “core content industries” have an answer: she should turn the online world from a “thieves’ bazaar to a safe and well-lit marketplace” by encouraging network admins to deploy bandwidth shaping, site blocking, traffic filters, watermark detectors, and deep packet inspection.

    • Wishful Thinking And Misinterpreting Surveys Won’t Save The News Business

      Perhaps the most common mistake that paywall supporters make is forgetting that people haven’t paid for the news in 180 years. Newspaper readers used to pay for paper, ink, trucks and delivery boys—and often barely paid enough to cover that bill. Now they pay for internet connections instead. Then and now, the reader only pays for access—advertising always has and will continue to pay for everything else.

    • Hammonton Municipal Government to Copyright Public Meeting Broadcasts

      How exactly Hammonton will enforce a copyright of a public meeting baffles this author, but looks forward to seeing the explanation in Council. Remember, any production by the Town of Hammonton is paid for by public dollars and owned by the public.

    • ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

      • Anti-counterfeiting agreement raises constitutional concerns

        The much-criticized cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the Obama administration’s negotiation of the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was broken Wednesday. The leaked draft of ACTA belies the U.S. trade representative’s assertions that the agreement would not alter U.S. intellectual property law. And it raises the stakes on the constitutionally dubious method by which the administration proposes to make the agreement binding on the United States.

      • A few ACTA notes

        After speaking with people in or close to the negotiations, European Commission and Spanish Presidency of the EU, this is some of what I have gathered despite dealing with very tight-lipped people:

        1. The negotiations are not going that well and many issues are still wide open. It is doubtful they could wrap up soon.

        2. There is a significant problem in making US and EU legislation compatible on a number of issues. One of the important topics of contention, but not the only one, is probably the differences between US “fair use” and the “commercial scale”, term the EU negotiators seem adamant on leaving very ambiguous to be interpreted later a la carte, even with all the risks involved.

      • Report From The Field: ACTA Negotiations Not Going Well

        As well they should. This is a point that we’ve raised repeatedly, noting not just the similarities between the methods used for censorship in authoritarian countries and ACTA, but also in the way that those countries will almost certainly use ACTA to justify their own censorship.

      • Digital economy bill to be pushed through parliament next month

        The controversial digital economy bill will be pushed through in the “wash-up” leading up to an election, after the government confirmed that it will receive its second reading in the Commons on 6 April – the same day that Gordon Brown is expected to seek Parliament’s dissolution.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Where’s Microsoft? (2005)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

Links 26/3/2010: BPhone Debuts, Free Software in Jordanian Schools

Posted in News Roundup at 4:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Top Linux gurus for 2010, gaming advances, and Gnome Gmail
  • Tunisia takes part in Linux exhibition in Paris

    At the initiative of the Free Software Unit under the Ministry of Communication Technologies and with the support of CEPEX and the National Federation of ICT, nine Tunisian companies took part for the first time, at the European exhibition “Solutions Linux / Open Source” held in Paris from March 16 to 18, 2010.

  • Why You Should Be Careful Outsourcing Your Logo Design

  • Desktop

    • No Linux On Netflix

      If you are a Microsoft/Windows or Apple/Mac user Netflix will allow you to instantly play a movie, but if you are a GnuLinux user, they will not allow you to play any of your favourite movies. They have no support for GnuLinux operating system.

    • An Example Of The Kind Of Blogger That Depresses Me

      Here, like a C function in an infinite loop, I repeat again the blazing original ideas that so far I am still the only tech blogger to have ever uttered:

      * Perhaps Linux is not for everyone.
      * Perhaps computers are not for everyone.
      * Perhaps Linux is a self-rewarding idea. If you’re enlightened enough to seek it out, you’re automatically enlightened enough to use it.
      * Perhaps Linux could not replace Microsoft without becoming just as evil as Microsoft.
      * Perhaps Linux is more successful in the industrial sector than the desktop because it’s an industrial system for industrious people.
      * Perhaps the desktop (as in year of Linux on) doesn’t matter.
      * Perhaps it has nothing to do with how operating systems are designed.
      * Perhaps it has nothing to do with computers at all.

  • Server

  • Linux Graphics Stack

    • AMD Catalyst 10.3 For Linux Released

      AMD has just put out their monthly update of the Catalyst Linux driver. Though as we already know based upon AMD giving Ubuntu a new driver, the support for X Server 1.7 is not coming until next month, which also offers official Eyefinity support and other changes. As such, Catalyst 10.3 isn’t too interesting.

    • radeontool 1.6.1 released

      I’ve just done a 1.6.1 release of radeontool from my personal repo, it contains both radeontool and avivotool, and is probably full of ugly but whats in distros now is older and worse.

    • Woah, AMD Releases OpenGL 4.0 Linux Support!

      Woah, here comes a pleasant surprise from AMD with their Catalyst Linux driver. AMD yesterday released a Catalyst 10.3 Linux driver that really didn’t bring anything too exciting (and it still doesn’t support X.Org Server 1.7), but today they’ve delivered a new preview driver that’s based on Catalyst 10.3 and it brings OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support!

    • Benchmarking Recent Mesa 3D Releases

      With Mesa 7.8 arriving this month, we took the time to benchmark a few recent releases of the Mesa 3D stack with the Radeon DRI driver to see how the OpenGL performance has changed — if at all — over the past few months. In this article are our R500 Mesa benchmarks from the Mesa 7.6, 7.7, 7.8-rc1, and 7.9-devel releases.

    • Radeon GPU Recovery To Hit Linux 2.6.34 Kernel

      David Airlie has just asked Linus to pull in his latest DRM branch for the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. This branch provides fixes to the DRM core, Nouveau, and Radeon KMS. The new Radeon DRM code brings fixes, but it also brings a clean-up to the ASIC tables and GPU recovery support.

  • Applications

    • Applications and bundled libraries

      Mozilla is moving to a different release model, which may necessitate distribution changes. The idea is to include feature upgrades as part of minor releases—many of which are done to fix security flaws—which would come out every 4-6 weeks or so. Major releases would be done at roughly six-month intervals and older major releases would stop being supported soon after a subsequent release. Though the plan is controversial—particularly merging security and features into the minor releases—it may work well for Mozilla, and the bulk of Mozilla’s users who are on Windows.

    • 6 of the Best Free Linux HDR Imaging Software

      High dynamic range imaging (HDR) is an important technology for photographers. It is a collection of techniques that allow a wider dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.

    • Instructionals

    • Games

      • Unigine Heaven 2.0 Launches For Linux

        Unigine Heaven has finally arrived! Unigine Heaven, a tech demo / benchmark that offers heavenly graphics and was released for Windows 7 back in October with a DirectX 11 renderer, is now available on Linux with its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. As we suspected, the Linux support has arrived with the release of Unigine Heaven 2.0, which includes an updated Windows binary as well.

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Plasma Javascript Jam: Open For Submissions!

      We’re cool with people re-submitting their Plasmoid if they make some improvements or catch some odd bug after sending it in and we will be testing Plasmoids against the latest ScriptEngine in the 4.4 branch, though if your Plasmoid requires (for whatever reason) the ScriptEngine from trunk we can probably accomodate that in the judging.

    • krunner, QDBusServiceWatcher

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Open source channel buoyant as Red Hat sales surge

        UK VARs have reported a turnaround in end-user attitudes towards open source software, just as Linux kingpin Red Hat posted a double-digit sales surge.

        Red Hat has grown consistently throughout the downturn and its run shows no signs of slowing after it logged its fourth quarter and full-year results. The New York-listed outfit’s share price has doubled over the last 12 months.

      • Red Hat tops off bumper year with 44% profit jump

        Strong increases in both full-year and quarterly net income and revenue as open source enterprise software vendor capitalises on recessionary climate

        Open source enterprise software vendor Red Hat has posted an 18% rise in revenues to $195.9 million for the final quarter of its financial year, and a 44% increase in net income to $23.4 million.

      • Fedora

        • FWN Issue 218

          Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 218 for the week ending March 21, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

    • Debian Family

      • Revitalizing Debian Project News

      • Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Road Test (Final Report)

          So there you have it, Linux passed this test with flying colors, performing consistently throughout the whole month under some intense use. In addition, I want to note that I have not had a single issue or crash during these past 30 days, which may not be a surprise under Linux standards, but significant when comparing it to other operating systems.

          I always recommend people I know to use the software that best fits their needs. I am no die-hard Linux fanboi and have no problem acknowledging Linux flaws or weaknesses. Having said so, I still feel many people try Linux and simply follow their first impression. Eventually, it is mostly an exercise of “Well, this is not how I do it in Windows”, and they just go back to what they know better. If they got past that getting-used-to phase, though, I believe Linux could add a lot of value in terms of performance, consistency, security and flexibility. At the end of the day, that all translates in higher productivity for the end user which, unless you are using your PC as a gaming console or a media center, is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

        • Big Button Game: Metacity Introduces Flexibility

          The current button arrangement redesign in Ubuntu causes numerous bugs in GNOME and Ubuntu. The Metacity team now wants to step in.

        • Less is more. But still less.
        • Ubuntu 10.04 in focus: Empathy

          The default messaging client in Ubuntu 10.04 remains Empathy and although it has some detractors still smarting over the switch from perennial favourite Pidgin Empathy remains a fully capable and easy to use messaging client.

          Lucid sees Empathy ramp up a gear in the usability stakes partly spurred on by the awesome work of the Ubuntu 100 paper cuts initiative that sought to fix the little niggles that tend to get over looked by developers.

        • Things I Hate About Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx (beta)
        • Lay your bets on the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid lynx) trend spike
        • Comments to Ubuntu 10.04 Reads File Sizes Differently

          Correcting all applications to comply to the units policy is a goal for lucid+1 (Ubuntu 10.10). We are too late in the release cycle for the change in lucid (Ubuntu 10.04). My current plan is to create a library for inputing/outputting bytes to users. The user can then configure this library to display the units in base-2 (KiB), base-10 (kB), or the historical totally fucked-up format (KB).

        • Divided we stand, united we fall
        • Cloud computing made simple

          It has been a truly amazing year since we embarked on our “cloud” journey at Ubuntu, hence I thought I’d review some of the highlights.

        • Planning for 10.10: Improving How We Review Patches

          At the heart of Ubuntu development are gifts. People join our community and contribute in a diverse range of ways. This includes documentation, translations, advocacy and many other efforts. Every day we are afforded with many of these fantastic contributions, and if people take the time to contribute a gifts, we should work hard as a community to do the right thing and review and utilize it in Ubuntu if it meets our quality needs.

        • Variants

          • Lubuntu – Ubuntu with LXDE desktop

            The Lubuntu project started in March 2009, with the purpose of creating a lighter and less resource demanding alternative to the Xubuntu operating system, using the LXDE desktop environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to join the ranks of Kubuntu and Xubuntu, and become an officially supported derivative of Ubuntu.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Ubiquitous demos one-second boot tech

      The company is hoping to sell the technology, which it has developed for Linux and Android on ARM-based architecture systems, to OEMs and ODMs creating TVs with embedded computing technology, set-top boxes, highly portable devices such as smartphones and smartbooks, and even the in-car entertainment industry – although has yet to release pricing information.

    • IGEL Technology to launch latest all-in-one UD9 thin client with large integrated flat panel display

      The Advanced firmware pack also supports services such as Flash, VoIP (Linux only), a native SAP GUI, NoMachine NX and ThinLinc printing as well as other web, multi-media, video conferencing and peripheral controls.

    • Man takes photos from space using £500 digital camera kit

      The camera was hooked up to a small, Linux-based computer that was set to wake up the camera at set intervals and snap a picture. A GPS unit allowed Harrison to recover his camera when the balloon eventually came back to Earth.

    • Phones

      • BPhone Quad Band Linux Smartphone

        Its also equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth and plays any of the following formats supports TXT , MP3, WAV, AMR, AWB audio files, 3GP, MPEG4 and AVI video.

      • Unlocked Linux smartphone swivels 180 degrees

        ChinaGrabber is selling an unlocked, quadband GSM cellphone that runs Linux on a 624MHz Marvell PXA310. The $570 BPhone features a 5-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen with 180-degree rotation, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and up to 16GB flash expansion.

      • Nokia

        • Nokia N900 Review

          The N900 is the first linux-based Phone from Nokia. The operating system on the Nokia N900 is Maemo 5 (Fremantle). Maemo is based on the popular Debian linux distribution. The N900 can be seen as an internet tablet with phone capabilities.

      • Android

    • Sub-notebooks

    • Fast Boot

      • Asus Eee PC 1201T review

        The Asus Eee PC 1201T takes a leaf out of the HP Mini 110-1106vu’s book by coming with a pre-OS Linux utility called Splashtop, an instant-on stripped down operating system which logs you online within seconds of turning on the netbook.

      • Lenovo Skylight smartbook hands-on impressions

        The Skylight runs on a custom Linux kernel and Kang noticed that the device lagged when having more than 9 apps open in the background. Playing back YouTube wasn’t smooth either, despite having the ability to play Flash, this is likely to be fixed before launch. The built-in 3G sim card slot is welcome along with the HDMI port.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Symbian plans fightback as phone share slumps

    On a handset running Symbian ^3, he showed me features such as multi-touch, multi-tasking, 3D support, improved shading and transparency on the screen interface, a social address book linked to Facebook and Twitter and moveable and customisable web-based widgets.

  • FOSSBazaar face to face meeting at LF Collaboration Summit

    As in the last two years, we’ll be holding a FOSSBazaar face to face meeting at the LF Collaboration Summit. The Collaboration Summit takes place from Wednesday April 14 to Friday April 16 in San Francisco and our meeting will be on Thursday and Friday.

  • BLOSSOMS: Jordan Chooses Open Education for High Schools

    Jordanian Minister of Education, Ibrahim Badran, announced Jordan’s intention to start BLOSSOMS II in ten selected high schools of the kingdom. BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies) is an Open-education initiative started by MIT in partnership with Jordan and Pakistan.

  • Eclipse

    • Apache Maven Hitting the Enterprise and Eclipse

      The Apache Maven project is used by over 3 million Java developers as a project and build management solution. Java developers also widely use the Eclipse IDE. At the intersection of Eclipse and Maven is the new Maven Studio for Eclipse announced this week by Maven commercial backer Sonatype.

    • Eclipse Foundation Expands Runtime Efforts

      Today at the EclipseCon event, the Eclipse Foundation announced the expansion of its EclipseRT top-level project with Gemini and Virgo, a pair of newly approved projects that both provide implementations of the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) runtime.

  • Oracle

  • Government

    • ESRI to government: aren’t you being a little hasty in making this OS data free?

      ESRI has sent an open letter to government – with a number of co-signatories who are in effect competitors – fretting about the proposal (commitment really) to make a number of OS datasets free.

      Below is the letter, which I’ve blockquoted to make it clear what’s the letter and what’s not. I’ve inserted some comments, based on my personal knowledge; and of course some of this is coloured by my advocacy of the Free Our Data campaign.

  • Openness

    • Cologne-based libraries release 5.4 million bibliographic records via CC0

      From the press release,

      Rolf Thiele, deputy director of the USB Cologne, states: “Libraries appreciate the Open Access movement because they themselves feel obliged to provide access to knowledge without barriers. Providing this kind of access for bibliographic data, thus applying the idea of Open Access to their own products, has been disregarded until now. Up to this point, it was not possible to download library catalogues as a whole. This will now be possible. We are taking a first step towards a worldwide visibility of library holdings on the internet.”
      …
      “In times in which publishers and some library organisations see data primarily as a source of capital, it is important to stick up for the traditional duty of libraries and librarians. Libraries have always strived to make large amounts of knowledge accessible to as many people as possible, with the lowest restrictions possible,” said Silke Schomburg, deputy director of the hbz. “Furthermore libraries are funded by the public. And what is publicly financed should be made available to the public without restrictions,” she continued.

Leftovers

  • Facebook blamed for rising STD rates in Britain: report

    Can Facebook be blamed for a rising STD rate? The incidence of syphilis has quadrupled in the areas of Great Britain where the social networking site is most popular, reports the Daily Telegraph, causing some experts to wonder whether it’s paved the way for casual hookups.

  • Seaweed to Tackle Rising Tide of Obesity

    Seaweed could hold the key to tackling obesity after it was found it reduces fat uptake by more than 75 per cent, new research has shown.

  • BCS turns down e-signature petition

    A petition to hold an emergency general meeting of the British Computing Society (BCS) has been turned down because the signatures were electronic.

  • Science

    • Found: 90% of the distant Universe

      I love this study. It’s a great application of simple logic, though it wasn’t so simple to do: they had to use a lot of time on a monster 8 meter telescope to do it!

  • Security

    • US may give countries the drug war treatment on cybercrime

      The US government disburses a significant amount of foreign aid to many countries and, in recent decades, that money has been used as a carrot to induce more acceptable behavior from its recipients. In a variety of laws, Congress has required that the executive branch certify that a nation has made progress in areas like human rights or narcotics control before different forms of aid to that country can be approved, including continuation of “most favored nation” trading status. Now, there’s a move afoot to extend this protocol to another area of concern: cybercrime.

    • Frenchman Arrested After Hacking Into Obama’s Twitter Accounts

      A Frenchman will face trial after hacking into Twitter accounts, including that of U.S President Barack Obama, a French prosecutor said.

      The 24-year-old man from central France was arrested on Tuesday and could face up to two years in prison in France for fraudulent access to a computer system. The arrest followed a joint operation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the French police, according to French state prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat.

    • Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL

      That little lock on your browser window indicating you are communicating securely with your bank or e-mail account may not always mean what you think its means.

      Normally when a user visits a secure website, such as Bank of America, Gmail, PayPal or eBay, the browser examines the website’s certificate to verify its authenticity.

    • New Research Suggests That Governments May Fake SSL Certificates

      Today two computer security researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, released a draft of a forthcoming research paper in which they present evidence that certificate authorities (CAs) may be cooperating with government agencies to help them spy undetected on “secure” encrypted communications. (EFF sometimes advises Soghoian on responsible disclosure issues, including for this paper.) More details and reporting are available at Wired today. The draft paper includes marketing materials from Packet Forensics, an Arizona company, which suggests that government “users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate keys they obtain (potentially by court order)” into Packet Forensics products in order to impersonate sites and trick users into “a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail, or VoIP encryption”. This would allow those governments to routinely bypass encryption without breaking it.

    • School governor needs our help!

      Ive been contacted by a school governor who doesn’t want to see their school bounced into fingerprinting the kids, and wonders what to do. They’ve prepared this draft briefing for a governor’s meeting this weekend. Looks pretty damn good to me. Is it right? Anything to add?

    • Catherine Bleish: Understanding the Mechanics of the Police State

      Instead of shutting down as pointless, fusion centers gradually began expanding into sharing information about all crimes. Fusion center activity over the years has also raised concerns about government surveillance of legally protected political activity.

    • TSA may install devices at airports to detect and track personal gadgets

      The Transportation Security Administration is said to be considering installing bluetooth sensors at US airports to sniff out personal electronic equipment and track its movement—and by extension, the movement of the human carrying it. USA Today reports that “the aim is to track how long people are stuck in security lines,” and that wait time data could then be posted on websites and inside airports.

    • FBI cyber cop says ‘very existence’ of US under threat

      Cyber attacks threaten the “very existence” of the US, according to a top FBI official charged with worrying about such things.

    • Reporter exposes new security flaw at Schiphol

      A Dutch investigative reporter has demonstrated that it is possible to carry potentially explosive liquids through security at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and onto a transatlantic flight.

    • Broken Records: 100,000 hospital administrators, porters and IT staff able to access confidential medical records

      New research conducted by Big Brother Watch reveals that there are at least 100,000 non-medical personnel in NHS Trusts across the country with access to confidential medical records

  • Environment

    • Fishy business

      AS OLD hands tell it, protecting a threatened species used to be a relatively straightforward affair at the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Government officials would turn up at the triennial meetings and, after listening to advice from scientists, conservationists and their own environment ministries, were likely to agree to a “listing”.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How Miracle Whip, Plenty of Fish Tapped Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’

      Online, music-video site Vevo bought a slot on the YouTube home page that referred users to the “Telephone” page on Vevo.com, which crashed the morning of the clip’s premiere. The video broke all Vevo single-day traffic records and had already generated close to 4 million views on YouTube in less than 24 hours.

    • Getting Off the Bottle

      Corporate Accountability International (CAI) surveyed five states (Minnesota, Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon) and found that taxpayers in those states are shelling out between $78,000 and $475,000 a year for government to buy bottled water, a resource that essentially flows free from public taps.

      [...]

      As people become more aware of the uneccessary expense and environmental problems caused by bottled water, companies like Nestlé are fighting back with campaigns portraying bottled water as “Earth-friendly”, and touting the company’s “environmental stewardship.”

    • DNC Co-Opting Conservatives’ “Hands off My Health Care” Slogan

      The Democratic National Committee is launching a radio ad campaign co-opting the conservatives’ slogan “Hands off My Health Care!” The ads warn voters that the consumer protections conferred upon them in the newly-passed health care reform bill will be stripped away if they vote Republicans into office.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Facebook, Google Gear up for Privacy Fight in Europe

      European privacy regulators are looking more closely at whether the Facebook and YouTube practice of allowing users to post videos, photos or other information about others without their consent violates their privacy. The Associated Press reports:

      The Swiss and German probes go to the heart of a debate that has gained momentum in Europe amid high-profile privacy cases: To what extent are social networking platforms responsible for the content their members upload?

    • World’s top domain name service to stop offering Web addresses in China

      U.S.-based GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name service, announced Wednesday it will no longer register new Web sites in China.

    • China, the Internet and Google: what I planned to say

      Today, the Congressional Executive China Commission conducted a hearing titled Google and Internet Control in China: A Nexus Between Human Rights and Trade? They had originally invited me to testify in a similarly titled hearing, “China, the Internet and Google,” which was postponed and rescheduled twice: the first attempt was foiled by the Great Snowcalypse; the second attempt scheduled for March 1st was postponed again at the last minute for some reason that isn’t entirely clear. Meanwhile I had already gone and written my testimony, improved by very helpful input from the CITP community. Unfortunately, when they rescheduled the hearing they said I was no longer invited. They wanted the hearing to have different witnesses from recent related hearings in both the House and Senate. Given that I appeared in both hearings it seems reasonable that they’d want to hear from some other people.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • OSI Opposes Barriers To Open Source Software For Television

      The Open Source Initiative Board has added OSI to the list of organizations asking that the BBC not be allowed to add digital restriction measures to digital broadcasts in the United Kingdom. The BBC’s request to do so is being reviewed by the UK regulator, OfCOM, and OSI is supporting the position statement from the UK’s Open Rights Group and encouraging others to do likewise.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Cameron as Future Avatar of Film Industry

      For some months now, I’ve been touting “Avatar” as a good example of how the film industry should be concentrating on enhancing the experience of watching films *in the cinema* – something that no copied DVD can reproduce – thus making unauthorised copies pretty much into marketing devices that encourage people to go to the cinema for the full experience.

    • ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

      • Entertainment Industy letter to Obama on ACTA

        Just in case anyone does not appreciate how difficult it will be to change the USTR direction on ACTA, note that today the USTR proudly put this letter on the USTR Blog:

        http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/blog/2010/march/new-information-ustrgov/acta

        (Maybe best to first skip down to see who signed it).

      • USTR Wants People To Know That At Least Someone Likes ACTA

        But, really, it’s incredibly telling that the USTR is only willing to promote the letters it’s received in support of ACTA, isn’t it? Lots of people have been contacting the USTR with concerns about ACTA, and those don’t get highlighted on the website at all. It’s as if the USTR wants to make it clear that it works for the RIAA and the ITA, rather than the citizens of the country. It’s reached the point where it’s obvious that the USTR’s focus is not on creating a good trade agreement, but on the trade agreement that some lobbyists wanted. It seems obvious that the USTR is not interested in understanding the complaints, but only in getting ACTA finished.

      • ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws

        The United States is nudging the international community to develop protocols to suspend the internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

      • Written Declaration 12/2010 signatories list
      • [Digital Economy Bill protests photo]
      • File-sharing and the War on the Internet

        Well, as I pointed out yesterday, the reason for this cognitive dissonance is that the Digital Economy Bill should really be called the *Analogue* Economy Bill: it seeks to preserve the old way of doing business in the world of music and films, where people bought CDs and DVDs – physical objects that cost money to make. Today, by contrast, the marginal cost of producing an MP3 file, say, is as near zero as to make no difference.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Prof. David Eisenberg volunteers at a Lindependence 2008 Intalllfest 02 (2008)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

03.25.10

Links 25/3/2010: Free Software Award Winners, Red Hat’s Results Analysed

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • LB – Episode 52 – Podcatching an Asterisk by Linux Basement
  • Linux is a Better Teacher

    I learned a little from my dalliances with Apple products. I learned a lot from PCs running DOS and Windows. I’ve learned the most about computers from Linux.

  • Desktop

    • Compaq Presario 2175us Ubuntu Graphics Driver

      For the average IT consumer the term Operating System equals with Windows. Few of them are aware that there is life beyond Windows. There are many open source operating system out there, the majority are Linux based. Lately the most popular Linux distribution is Ubuntu (current version is 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala). Of course for those of us who were “born into Windows” it could be hard to make the switch to Linux. There are pros and cons about Linux systems. The most important pro is that it is completely free! One of the major drawbacks would be the fact that sometimes it is hard to find the right drivers for your machine.

    • My Mom Runs Ubuntu – Update for Ada Lovelace Day

      So this is not about a single heroine in technology – it is about a general movement: I am convinced, especially Ubuntu with it’s focus on an intuitive interface seems to keep the entry level very low and therefore attracts user groups that might be a suprprise for a lot of people. I know dozens of techie people stating that free operating systems are way too complicated to use for them. When telling about “My Mom Runs Ubuntu” they run out of reasons. At least there is nothing more convincing on using free software than people that are just using it on a daily basis without the need of telling everybody as they just take it as normal.

    • Women In, Near, and Around Ubuntu – Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day – Part 1

      Mackenzie Morgan – (maco) – I met Mackenzie at SELF in 2009. Mackenzie is one of the first folks who offered me feedback on my blog posts, tips on how to be a better Ubuntu User, and how to navigate the community better. Mackenzie recently became an Ubuntu MOTU, and is active in several areas of the Ubuntu Community.

    • AVG kills Windows viruses with Linux and emergency rescue CD

      If your Windows PC has been infected with some net nasty, be it malware, viruses or that fake Facebook password reset slimeware, and you can’t boot up your Windows PC or are stuck with ransomware pop-ups that are popping you out of your mind and stopping your from working, AVG’s new Linux-based emergency boot CD, DVD or USB stick is freely downloadable and ready to help you thrash threatware and get you back to a working PC!

  • Server

    • Supporting The HPC Hero

      Of course, this being Linux Magazine, I’m not going to spend much time discussing Microsoft’s HPC value proposition, but there are real reasons why Windows, and Mac OS X for that matter, don’t have a big foothold in HPC. I covered this five years ago when I wrote Why Linux On Clusters? and what was true then is true today. I’ll save you the detailed reading. Clusters are about building machines around problem sets. To achieve an efficient design you need flexibility and choice. Open source and the Linux OS provide the best flexibility an choice.

  • Kernel Space

    • Open source deduplication software released for Linux

      A new open source project, dubbed Opendedup, has appeared with the goal of creating a deduplication-based file system for Linux called SDFS.

      The project’s developer Sam Silverberg says today’s deduplication solutions only solve the problem of storing deduplicated data, not reading and writing inline data.

    • Now Hear This

      Now, because I’ve given you this tip, you’ll probably never need to use it. Still, it’s good to know USB audio is very supported under Linux, and the devices are fairly standard. Plus, it’s easy to add multiple audio devices with USB audio, which makes things like podcasting much easier!

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

    • Xfce

      • March Xfce desktop

        Shook up my Xfce desktop a bit. I’ve always been a fan of darker environments, especially those with blue tones. This one’s mysterious and fantastic. I did keep the same icon theme as last month, as I don’t have anything more suitable installed at the moment. I’m still looking for something a bit more suited to my current setup.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Based Linux Distributions

        I am somewhat surprised with the number of Linux distributions with Debian roots. A total of 129. This list doesn’t even include all the Ubuntu variations like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.

      • Ubuntu

        • Its beauty is in its potential

          I spent most of this week in various shades of the new Ubuntu, with everything from pure command-line installations to full-blown Gnome desktops, and just about anything in between. I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs, but it was nice to get back to the system that started me out, so to speak.

        • The Awesome Wallpapers of pr09studio

          Well the pantheon of win is about to be joined by another digital artist who’s wallpaper collection of consistently impressive standards has really wowed me.

        • Ubuntu 10.04 Installation Slideshow Gets Updated

          We’ve blogged previously about the new-look installation slideshow (designed by Dylan McCall, Michael Forrest and Otto Greenslade) that will greet all users installing of Ubuntu 10.04 – but today finally saw it get pushed into actual being with plenty of changes – most of which fix issues readers expressed during the initial designs.

          The ever-so-slightly misaligned Ubuntu logo of before is now almost perfectly centred with its frame.

        • Ubuntu 10.04 Proposed Ubiquity Slideshow Goes Live

          The new Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Ubiquity Slideshow which we were telling you about ~2 weeks ago is now live and you should be able to take a look for yourself by downloading an Ubuntu 10.04 daily build starting tomorrow (or by updating the installer but that didn’t work for me – the package is probably not in the repositories yet).

        • Sneak Preview: Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS

          In an unusual decision and what could be considered an unwelcome change for the user interface, Canonical has also chosen the default configuration of the Metacity window manager to use a reverse positioning of the maximize/minimize icons on the upper left of each window.

          This is a departure from the conventional Microsoft Windows-like positioning on the upper right of each window used in previous releases, which may take getting some used to by new Linux users. It certainly annoys this one and I hope Canonical considers returning to the previous default setting it had for release, although the company has said publicly that its design changes were not up for debate.

          [...]

          Additionally, I was surprised by the use of Yahoo! as the new default home page for Ubuntu in Firefox, although this can easily be changed.

        • Variants

          • Trisquel- Ubuntu habla espagnol

            Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5 is released, it is an opensource linux distribution based on Ubuntu: “Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5, code name ‘Awen’, is ready. This release is a fully free Ubuntu 9.10 derivative that includes extra software, better multimedia support, more translations and faster configuration. For this release ext4 is used for the root file system and XFS for the home one, to have a balance between speed and usability. Some important features include a much faster boot process and the ability to encrypt the home directory. All packages were updated, including: Linux-libre kernel 2.6.31, X.Org 7.4, GNOME 2.28, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, a Mozilla-based web browser 3.5.

          • Distro Hoppin`: Gosalia BETA

            Gosalia (codename Mad Monkey) is based on the latest stable release of Ubuntu, which is 9.10. Unlike Ubuntu though, Gosalia takes up a hefty 2 GBs out of your DVD. There’s only one direct link to the ISO (32-bit only) but I didn’t encounter any connection problems. The speed wasn’t all that great, but neither was it painful. Again, a torrent would have been a speedier choice.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Hack your Samsung TV, linux guy

      Interestingly enough, the official Samsung firmware for several different models is based off the Linux kernel.

    • Phones

      • Great Debate: In 5 Years, Will You Own 1 or 20 Computers?

        A strong argument can be made for or against a future with Pervasive Computing. Some people will argue the middle – the devices that make sense to become smarter and Internet aware will happen naturally over time. This is perhaps a more realistic argument and that having a smart toaster isn’t worth the extra dollars, energy and growing landfills full of obsolete ones.

      • Nokia N900 Gets SDK Version 1.2 Update

        SDK version 1.2 also makes it possible to turn screen rotation on and off in the browser, according to Phonesreview, with an updated rendering engine to speed up the system and keep things as smooth as possible.

      • Android

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Jolicloud gets HTML5 ready; releases web app source code

        Jolicloud has released its new web application platform today that is based on Google Chrome rather than the Mozilla Prism of old. Current users need simply to update the system for the new platform to be installed. The new system should be faster with a smaller memory footprint and enables HTML5-ready browsing.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Exchange Alternatives

    The candidates mentioned in those two articles are Open-Xchange, Scalix, Zimbra, Zarafa, Citadel, and OpenGroupware. I also found OpenChange directly from my Google search.

  • Interview: Ethan Galstad – The Nagios future

    Recently, Nagios, an open source application for network, server and application monitoring, has been the subject of a dispute. The operators of the French Nagios site nagios-fr.org claimed that Nagios Enterprises was forcing them to give up the domain because of postings about ICINGA, a fork of Nagios. At the centre of the dispute is Ethan Galstad, creator of Nagios and CEO of Nagios Enterprises. The H talked to him about what had happened and asked how he plans to take the Nagios community forward.

    [...]

    Even before then, as a 19 year old student, Galstad had run into issues with a program to crack the password of Trumpet WinSock software. He named the program TrumpCrack and gained his first experience of a threat of legal action from Trumpet’s lawyers. “It was a scary thing for me back then”. Those experiences led Galstad, when approaching trademark issues with the community, not to use attorneys to send a letter but make personal contact, either himself or Mary Starr (Nagios Enterprise’s Vice President); “It lets people know that there’s a real person on the other end”. Galstad has gone as far as having told the company’s lawyers to only send letters when there’s “a real serious problem that we’ve brought to their attention”. Concerning the trademark policy itself “not everyone is going to agree, nor everyone is going to understand, but the guidelines are there for very specific reasons”. Galstad feels he is being as fair as possible with the trademark policy.

  • 6 Open Source Resources To Help You Get More Done

    Among open source applications, there are an increasing number that focus on boosting productivity. Pervasive themes throughout the world of technology–such as collaboration online–are heavily influencing that. Open source tools focused on productivity include useful Firefox extensions such as iMacros (which lets you record repetitive, multi-step tasks and then execute them with one click) and full-blown collaboration platforms. Here, you’ll find our updated list of six productivity enhancement tools. Everything found here is free.

  • Carving a Ruby red road ahead

    IBM does because they hire people to do Eclipse. Most people actually get a pay-cheque. So there isn’t a business model for Open Source. And so this is the challenge for us. How do you create hybrid models that still give you revenue? That’s part of the reason why we’ve started the Innovation and Technology Trust. The intention is to support Open Source and emerging technologies that need endorsement and visibility in the IT eco-system in India. If there are other communities out there that need the support and backing, the trust is there for this.

  • Third Annual OSC (Open Source eCommerce) Industry Awards Results

    Each year for the past three years I have conducted an annual survey of users of Open Source eCommerce programs to help encourage and foster professionalism and improvement in the OSC industry. Each year there have been some surprises and insights, and this year is no exception.

  • New Release of OrangeHRM’s Open Source HRM Software
  • Open Text CM debuts on BlackBerry

    Hospitality solutions provider GuestCentric has integrated its booking engine Joomla, says Travolution.

  • Interviews

    • Parallels CEO backs down

      Parallels Logo Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, has now clarified his position on open source. In a brief memo to the open source community, he says “In a recent interview I jokingly tried to buck the trend of common perception and play devil’s advocate regarding open source and the community”.

    • WordPress Founder: Open Source Is About People, Not Technology

      We’ve discovered a lot of great ideas here at The Economist Innovation Conference in Berkeley, California. Pixar’s President spoke on how the company creates great films and Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) discussed the history of the @ symbol, among other presentations and workshops.

      Now one of the biggest forces in social media, founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg, has taken the stage to speak about the open source movement, the origins of WordPress (WordPress), and how it has fostered innovation.

  • Education

    • A Teachable Moment: Open Source Platforms for Online Testing

      The Educational Testing Service contracted with Grunwald Associates LLC to conduct a study of educators around the nation, “An Open Source Platform for Internet-based Assessment: A Report on Education Leaders’ Perceptions of Online Testing in an Open Source Environment,” which was released today.

    • Update: Report: School Leaders Interested in Learning About Open Source Platform for Internet-Based Testing

      An Open Source Platform for Internet-based Assessment: A Report on Education Leaders’ Perceptions of Online Testing in an Open Source Environment synthesizes the findings from over 80 interviews with state assessment and technology leaders (representing 27 states) and national education opinion leaders (representing both public and private organizations). The study found that more and more states are rapidly moving toward Internet-based high-stakes testing, and that there was interest in understanding how an open source platform might work in an online assessment environment.

      “Open source software is being used in both higher education and K-12 today, though not for high-stakes assessments. Given the right circumstances, as revealed in this study, we believe it is an option for the future and could be used in the K-12 education community to a great advantage,” ETS Senior Vice President and General Manager, K-12 Assessment Programs, John Oswald, explains. “Not just for assessment, although this research is specifically around that idea, but as an innovative way of using technology — we are aware of open source technology and naturally wanted to explore its benefits.”

  • Events

    • Software conference planned for April

      The Palmetto Open Source Software Conference will be held at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center and USC from April 15-17.

    • GigaOM Bunker Session Coming Up: On the Cloud and Open Source

      In an intimate, upcoming Bunker Session event taking place in San Francisco, staffers from OStatic parent GigaOM will discuss the convergence of cloud computing and open source. The event is Wednesday, March 31st, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 pm., and speakers are seen below.

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Mobile: Where it stands now

      Mozilla continues to actively develop for Nokia’s Maemo/MeeGo platform, the host of the first-ever Firefox for Mobile 1.0. The problem is that Firefox is far from being widely available in its cell phone-friendly form, extensions and all. The Nokia platform’s short reach makes up just a fraction of the mobile market, and Firefox is only available on two devices–the Nokia N900 and the N810 Internet Tablet.

  • SaaS

    • The Next Wave Of SaaS

      Right now if you think about the way software-as-a-service is delivered, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google are the most commonly cited examples. All these companies deliver their software using what is known as the multitenant model. Just as multitenant software knocked on-premise vendors for a loop, new distributed, open-source models for delivery of SaaS software will have a powerful impact.

    • Open-source SaaS to expand software capability

      The development of open-source SaaS software will result in an increased availability of software that provides great flexibility for enterprise and personal use, according to Forbes.

    • Open Source Alternative To Google Earth?

      Today, I fired up Google Earth to find that the ‘points of interest’ category had been removed, and a single checkbox is in its place. Certain layers are now entirely inaccessible. Google triggered a user revolt, but admitted fault, and promised to restore full functionality someday. In the meantime, I’ve found a lack of plausible alternatives.

  • Databases

    • Rackspace Cloud ‘Drizzles’ Into Open-Source Software

      As Oracle continues to shed the former open-source software personnel of Sun Microsystems, other companies are benefiting from the transition. Among those is cloud computing and hosting vendor Rackspace, which recently hired four of the key open source developers behind the Drizzle database effort, a spin-off from the Sun-owned MySQL database.

      Rackspace uses MySQL today in its infrastructure but has said that it sees its limitations when it comes to cloud deployments. That’s the reason behind the company’s interest in Drizzle. In some ways, Drizzle is an enhanced version of MySQL, providing additional cloud scalability features, but Rackspace said the project is not quite ready for prime time yet — but with its investment, it’s hoping to help get it there.

    • Terracotta and EnterpriseDB Partner to Deliver Unmatched Price and Performance Advantages for Private Cloud Data Management

      As organizations seek to move applications to private cloud environments, they are also reassessing the technical and economic viability of their current IT platforms. As a result, organizations are seeking open source-based solutions that are cost effective and can provide the scalability and elasticity to meet the demands of a cloud computing environment.

  • Oracle

    • Does Oracle mean end for MySQL?

      Basically it means that Oracle does see a future for the open-source version of MySQL, as long as it does not conflict with the roadmap for its own proprietary database tools. How Oracle handles this remains to be seen. When contacted, Oracle refused to make any comments, though in an earlier analyst call, Oracle CEO – Larry Ellison, had said that ‘Oracle will make MySQL better’, with Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief open-source architect, promising that Oracle will continue to support the open-source MySQL database.

    • Oracle-Sun: An Insider’s View for Sun Partners

      I continue to be impressed with Oracle’s commitment to partners and extremely excited by the new business opportunities the acquisition can provide to Sun’s value added partner community.

      Sun’s channel partners are some of the best companies in the industry. As they move from the Sun Partner Advantage Program to Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized, I think they will be impressed with what OPN Specialized can offer — providing their business with the ability to differentiate themselves across the Oracle product portfolio, including Sun servers and storage.

  • Business

    • Can Marten Mickos Build Another $100 Million Company?

      Can Marten Mickos capture open source lightning in a bottle — twice? He previously built MySQL into an estimated $100 million open source database company that Sun ultimately acquired for $1 billion. Now, Mickos is stepping into the CEO role at Eucalyptus Systems, the open-source cloud platform provider. Here’s what Mickos has to say about his new position, and the implications for the channel.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU

    • FSF announces Free Software Awards winners

      John Gilmore, one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), won this year’s award for the Advancement of Free Software. Gilmore, who also gave a presentation at the conference on the future goals of the free software movement, said that, “Free software has been very good to me, and I’m glad that I have been good to it.”

  • Releases

    • Scribus 1.3.6 Released

      The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.6. This version is another major step on the way to the next stable release 1.4.

      Compared to the work on Scribus 1.3.5, the development of Scribus 1.3.6 was focussed on stabilising the code base, and especially on weeding out issues that were mostly due to the porting of the code from Qt3 to Qt4.

  • Government

    • Right to reply: Brown’s digital future needs to be open source

      Last week’s speech by Gordon Brown outlined Labour’s vision for building Britain’s digital future. In this Right to Reply article, Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations, Ingres, the open source database provider, looks at why any future strategy needs to be based on open source technology, rather than tied to specific vendors.

    • Kundra Outlines Open Government Progress

      While the idea of open government is still an abstract one to many, the Obama administration is already seeing real results from its efforts to be more transparent in its activities, Obama’s chief information officer said this week.

      In testimony Tuesday before the U.S. subcommittee on federal financial management, government information, federal services, and international security, federal CIO Vivek Kundra attempted to shed light on how the administration’s Open Government Initiative is already fostering innovation and improving the performance of the U.S. government.

    • Korea Struggles in Developing Open Software

      Korea’s lackluster performance in open-source software continues to hit the country both at home and abroad.

      The state-run National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) disclosed Thursday the results of research regarding the international open-source software industry. Korea chalked up rather disappointing results.

      Out of the four categories assessed, Korea ranked fourth when it came to national policies for open-source software, sixth in overall environment and seventh for usage of the programs.

  • Openness

    • Finding God Through Open Source

      Regardless of your own feelings, there are people who find that this open source religion to be more reasonable and in line with their own spiritual and world outlook. From my investigation, a large number of these people are somewhat “geeky” in nature and have been exposed to open source principles through the open source software movement. But that doesn’t make it any less real for them.

    • Mapping software developed by Idaho State University, USU is international hit

      This free, open-source software is so popular that the ISU geosciences department will host the 1st International MapWindow GIS Users and Developers Conference March 31-April 2 at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. At least 60 users and developers from around the world are expected to attend the conference. Attendees include representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and several private companies and universities.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • BT: Canvas will create open market

      Young said all of the ISPs involved in Project Canvas were promising to make IPTV work like TV all of the time. Fundamentally based on an open source standard, Canvas would create the mass market needed to engage with consumers.

Leftovers

  • Jack Straw unveils plan to curb libel tourism

    Overseas claimants will be discouraged from launching libel cases in UK courts and a “public interest” defence may be introduced to protect investigative journalism, under legal changes unveiled today.

  • Bogus DMCA Takedown Is Not Copyright Infringement And Not Libel

    We’ve had a few discussions concerning the available damages awards for bogus DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately, if you’ve had your content taken down incorrectly, the damages you can get from those who sent the takedown, are greatly limited. This is a big problem, because bogus takedowns are regularly sent for a variety of reasons, including attempts to silence speech and because a copyright holder is taking a machine gun approach to dealing with infringing content. The case that’s received the most attention on this has been the Lenz vs. Universal Music case, involving Universal Music’s failure to take fair use into account in taking down a short video of a baby dancing to music.

  • DMCA ‘Interference’ With Copyright Is Not Copyright Infringement
  • With cheap food imports, Haiti can’t feed itself

    The earthquake not only smashed markets, collapsed warehouses and left more than 2.5 million people without enough to eat. It may also have shaken up the way the developing world gets food.

  • “Haitian NGOs Decry Total Exclusion from Donors’ Conferences on Haitian Reconstruction”

    47 local and international NGOs and civil society groups held a meeting last week to comment on the upcoming donor conference in New York. Afterwards 26 groups signed a statement that decried the absense of local input in the reconstruction plans that are being put forward. The statement is available online here (in Spanish).

  • Science

    • Branson’s SpaceShipTwo rocketplane gets off ground

      Beardy biz kingpin Richard Branson was overjoyed yesterday to announce that his passenger-carrying suborbital “SpaceShipTwo” rocket thrillride craft has left the ground for the first time. However it remained attached to its jet-powered “mothership” for the entire flight: independent operations aren’t expected for some time.

  • Security

    • The Spy in the Middle

      A decade ago, I observed that commercial certificate authorities protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns out to be wrong; they don’t even do that much.

    • Behind the Scenes, Crafting the US No-Fly List

      It starts with a tip, a scrap of intelligence, a fingerprint lifted from a suspected terrorist’s home.

    • Acrobatic thieves hit N.J. Best Buy avoiding cameras, motion sensors, alarms in daring heist

      They never touched the floor — that would have set off an alarm.

      They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.

    • Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card

      Lawmakers are proposing a national identification card — what they’re calling “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security cards” — that would be required for all employees in the United States.

    • Secret Service Paid TJX Hacker $75,000 a Year

      Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez earned $75,000 a year working undercover for the U.S. Secret Service, informing on bank card thieves before he was arrested in 2008 for running his own multimillion-dollar card-hacking operation.

    • Terrorists ‘could use exploding breast implants to blow up jet’

      Radical Islamist plastic surgeons could be carrying out the implant operations in lawless areas of Pakistan, security sources are said to warned.

      Explosives experts have reportedly said just five ounces of Pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate packed into a breast implant would be enough to blow a “considerable” hole in the side of a jumbo jet.

    • Oh, the irony

      There needs to be much more thought given to the privacy and health concerns – how are those employed being trained and vetted and how dangerous is the radiation these machines produce?

    • Get full body scanners in all airports now or face terror attacks, warns damning report
    • Lollipop ladies to be given CCTV on sticks

      The women launched a campaign after becoming concerned at motorists jumping red lights, talking on their mobile phones or drinking coffee while driving near two schools in Reddish, Greater Manchester.

      They say inconsiderate drivers are creating chaos and causing dangerous jams while pupils try to cross the road.

    • Anti-terror police seek help from internet cafes

      Police battling the threat of terrorism have unveiled a new tactic – they are targeting internet cafes.

      As evidence suggests that several people convicted with terrorism acts have visited internet cafes while plotting their crimes, the Metropolitan Police are trialling a new initiative in which owners agree to monitor what customers are looking at, and report any suspect activity to police.

    • Bad Things Happen When Politicians Think They Understand Technology

      This is one of those bills that sounds good for the headlines (cybercrime is bad, we need to stop it), but has the opposite effect in reality: setting up needless “standards” that actually prevent good security practices. It’s bills like both of these that remind us that technologically illiterate politicians making technology policy will do funky things, assuming that technology works with some sort of magic.

    • India Continues to Imprison Human Rights Activist Dr. Binayak Sen

      Last week marked the second anniversary of the detention of the internationally recognized award-winning human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen, who’s worked as a public health professional in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh for twenty-five years.

  • Health

    • Ban on “Pay for Delay” Patent Settlements Cut from Health Care Bill

      Generic drug makers are applauding the latest change to the health care bill – eliminating the ban on patent settlements.

    • Pay-For-Delay Ban Dropped From Health Care Reform

      Basically, big pharma companies threaten (and often sue) the makers of generic drugs, just before a drug is about to go off patent. There is no actual patent infringement as the basis of the lawsuit, but the lawsuit acts as a negotiating ploy, with part of the “settlement” being an agreement from the generic drug maker not to enter the market. It’s a blatantly anti-competitive move. Basically, the pharma companies leverage their gov’t granted monopoly to build up a bunch of cash, which they can then use to pay off potential competitors in order to keep that monopoly for years past the expiration of the patent.

    • Michael Moore: Healthcare Bill “A Victory for Capitalism”
    • What President Obama Didn’t Say

      My decision came last Tuesday morning. There’s a place where I go in the Capitol, just to kind of reflect — before I have to make very important decisions. It’s in the rotunda — right next to Lincoln’s statue. It’s just a bench. And I went over there early Tuesday morning, about seven in the morning when the sun was just coming up, and no one else was around — there wasn’t a sound in the Capitol at that moment in the morning. And I just sat down there in a quiet place and thought about this decision. And that’s literally where I made up my mind that, notwithstanding how much there was in the bill that I didn’t like, that I had a higher responsibility to my constituents, to the nation, to my president and his presidency, to step forward and say, “We must pass this bill. And we must use this bill as an opening toward a renewed effort for a more comprehensive approach to health care reform.”

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • All Your Browsing History Are Belong to Us

      For several years, it has been a poorly kept secret that any Web site you went to could secretly search your browser’s history file to see what sites you had previously visited. All the site owner had to do was ask. And while browser history “sniffing” has been around for a long time, companies are finally starting to actively take advantage of it. The time to act to prevent this clear threat to personal privacy is now.

    • Google fine for uncensored dirty jokes

      A BRAZILIAN court today fined US internet giant Google for not blocking pages of dirty jokes on its social networking site Orkut.

    • Police given powers to enter homes and tear down anti-Olympics posters during 2012 Games

      Police have been handed ‘Chinese-style’ powers to enter private homes and seize political posters during the London 2012 Olympics.

      Little-noticed measures passed by the Government will allow officers and Olympics officials to enter homes and shops near official venues to confiscate any protest material.

    • Google co-founder Sergey Brin urges US to act over China web censorship

      Google co-founder Sergey Brin has called on Washington to take a stand against China’s censorship of the internet, urging the US to make the issue a “high priority”.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Better Homes and Copyrights
    • Response To The White House’s Request For Feedback On IP Enforcement

      The central tenet of copyright law has been, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” and the mechanism for this is both copyright and patents, or more specifically, “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Unfortunately, over the years, all too often we’ve lost sight of the beginning of that sentence, in the assumption that any increase in those “exclusive rights” must surely “promote the progress.” And, yet, as we have expanded and stretched copyright law time and time again — and almost never contracted it — no one ever seems to ask for any actual evidence that stronger and lengthier copyright law leads to promoting more progress.

    • ICANN Threatened by Olympic Committee Over Intellectual Property Concerns

      The International Olympic Committee appears to think it has the rights to all sport, given a recent letter to ICANN that raises concerns on the .SPORT gTLD proposal in particular, and new gTLDs in general.

    • Filmmakers Fake Piracy Threat to Boost Sales

      In a desperate cry for media attention, the filmmakers behind the flopped Danish movie Winnie & Karina have accused Piratgruppen of stealing their film. In two libelous press releases they fabricated a piracy threat from the local group of copyright critics, hoping to draw attention to the upcoming DVD-release.

    • Digital Economy Bill

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Prof. David Eisenberg volunteers at a Lindependence 2008 Intalllfest 01 (2008)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

03.24.10

Links 24/3/2010: SystemTap 1.2, Strong Red Hat Results

Posted in Boycott Novell, News Roundup at 7:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Penguins converge on Austin Texas

      Let’s see … Softlayer, Zenoss, Canonical, Red Hat, Fedora, HP, IBM, Rackspace, Novell, and The Linux Fund are our commercial sponsors. Most of them had people submit session proposals, which was nice (and by that I mean they submitted talks independently of (usually before) being sponsors. We’ve also had several nonprofits lend us support in one way or another, like GNOME, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation. And the media sponsors have done a terrific job just helping us get the word out, which is vitally important when you’re an event that no one has heard of before. That includes the Linux Journal (which is based out of Houston), LWN, Linux Magazine and Ubuntu User, LXer. They’ve not only allowed us to advertise, but have run our announcements and written blog entries to help spread the word.

    • ZaReason Teo

      The ZaReason Teo, that I just discovered on Amazon.com, looks like the successor of the Terra A20, which was the first netbook by ZaReason, who build laptops, desktops, and servers running Ubuntu Linux or derivatives.

    • ZaReason Teo: Pine Trail netbook with an Ubuntu Linux twist

      Linux system builder ZaReason appears to have launched a new Linux netbook. While there’s no information about the new Teo netbook on the ZaReason web site, you can already order one from Amazon for $460.

      The Teo bears a more than passing resemblance to the original MSI Wind U100 10 inch netbook, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ZaReason was working with MSI to supply the chassis and possibly some other components. Spec-wise, the netbook has a 10 inch. 1024 x 600 non-glare display, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 Pine Trail processor and 160GB hard drive.Amazon says it should get 8 hours of battery life.

  • Kernel Space

    • SystemTap 1.2 released

      The systemtap team announces release 1.2.

      prototype perf event and hw-breakpoint probing, security fixes, error tolerance script language extensions, optimizations, tapsets, interesting new sample scripts, kernel versions 2.6.9 through 2.6.34-rc

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Gnome And KDE Might Collaborate Into Creating A FLOSS Alternative To Dropbox

      There is an ongoing discussion on a Gnome mailing list which points out that Gnome and KDE might collaborate for a new project: a FLOSS alternative to Dropbox.

      One might think: well, we have Ubuntu One – but that’s only for Ubuntu (even though work is done to port it to other Linux distributions too – or it was done at some point) and also it’s KDE integration is still experimental (and not official as far as I know). And finally: many will agree that Ubuntu One is not the best implementation of this great idea so there is room for some competition. And also, the Ubuntu One server is not open source (only the client is) and it seems there are no plans to open-source it.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Arista – Multimedia Transcoder for GNOME

        Arista is an easy-to-use multimedia transcoder for the GNOME desktop. It focuses on the goal of transcoding media, namely the devices you wish to play the media on. It is designed for use by people who are not familiar with audio and video encoding and want an easy way to get multimedia to their devices. It supports input from DVD and V4L devices as well as regular files.

      • Five Things To Fix In Gnome Shell

  • Distributions

    • Parted Magic 4.9: New Device Names

      Parted Magic, a Live Linux with programs for partitioning and data rescue, is available in version 4.9. Apart from bug fixes, it includes a few new features.

    • Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • A real distro-hopper-stopper

        Above is the screenshot of the new PCLinuxOS with LXDE as native desktop environment. This baby is still in beta stage but compared to its predecessor, this version is almost complete. Having Firefox 3.6 with built-in flash as browser – watching videos via youtube and the likes is a breeze out-of-the-box.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Recession? What Recession? Red Hat Continues to Grow

        For many in the IT world, the last twelve months are likely ones that they’d rather forget as companies laid off employees and struggled to deal with the ravages of the recession. But for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the past year has been a pretty good one financially: Red Hat is set to report its fourth-quarter fiscal 2010 revenues after the market close today and the forecast is positive.

      • Building on a Linux brand

        Red Hat owns the brand and the quality assurance that goes with the Red Hat trademark, but does not “own” the software it sells. For this reason CentOS and Oracle are able to provide rebranded versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which provide “complete upstream compatibility” with Red Hat’s product without fear of legal approbation.

    • Ubuntu

      • Lucid starts to get some updated icons

        I’ve held off from mentioning last nights arrival of some new (albeit WIP) icons for Lucid simply because I know how such‘minor’ posts irritate some of you.Sods law then that I wake up to an inbox full of people asking why I haven’t mentioned them already!

      • Ubuntu shops prefer the bleeding edge

        In preparation for the rollout of Ubuntu Server 10.04 Long Term Support next month, Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux variant, and the Ubuntu community polled Ubuntu users to see how they use the operating system.

        Canonical is also keen on finding out what Ubuntu shops think of the focus on cloud computing and how relevant it is to them today as well as in the future. In the wake of the delivering of the Ubuntu 9.10 release late last year, the company solicited responses to an online survey of Ubuntu users through the Ubuntu forums and a variety of Web sites and other channels; a total of 2,650 finished the survey, although as you can see from the report, quite a number of people did not respond to important questions that Canonical asked.

      • Ubuntu One Music Store – first pics!!!

        I immediately went to purchase it, by clicking the checkout and signed in to my Ubuntu One account. Although it threw a wobbly when I refused to add my Lucid beta 1 desktop to my One account, I re-ran the purchasing process and it took me straight to billing. Thanks to Rhythmbox and Ubuntu, iTunes – and very probably my Windows dual boot – won’t be darkening my desktop again.

      • 75 Top Open Source Security Apps

        This year, we’ve once again updated our list of top open source security apps. While the list isn’t exhaustive by any means, we tried to include many of the best tools in a variety of categories. We dropped a few projects from last year’s list that have gone inactive or closed source, and we’ve added a few newcomers that are worth your consideration.

      • Variants

        • Mint 9: An overview of the new features

          It’s too soon to talk about what’s going on upstream but you can expect faster boot, the release will be an LTS release, there’s going to be many little improvements in Gnome itself and of course we’re getting a new kernel. I saw the controversy about the position of the window buttons in Ubuntu 10.04. There’s no plan to change anything in Linux Mint, we’re happy with the buttons staying on the right-hand side and away from the File, Edit, View menus.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Cool Linux powered robot boat

      The Roboat is an autonomous robotic sailboat powered by Linux.

    • Fast-boot tech claims to load Android or Linux in one second

      Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Corp. announced the availability of an ARM-focused technology claimed to load Android or Linux in one second. QuickBoot Release 1.0 preferentially restores memory areas necessary for booting from nonvolatile storage to RAM, says the company.

    • Phones

      • Educating the carriers on being open.

        Many thanks to Smart Mobs for bringing this to my attention…

        If somebody writes a book with “open” and “mobile” in the title I pretty much have to read it. Though you can buy a paper copy of Open | Mobile on Amazon you can also download a free PDF from the authors’ site — which is what I did.

      • Those Pesky Migration Issues

        Based on those requirements, it would seem I am leaning towards an Android-based unit. Not because I can hack it if I feel like it (I do not have that much free time) but because it meets my requirements. Would I like to have a Pré? Of course.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Episode 136: Shrinking a Bass Player

    I got the planned episode 136 nearly ready – a photography trip to Hamburg. But then came an urgent job from Chicago and overturned the schedule. (No, John, it wasn’t urgent, it was convenient to have a bit more time to edit the Hamburg show).

  • credativ pre-paid Open Source Support Card leads the market

    credativ UK joins its German counterpart in offering the Open Source Support Card for Linux distributions.

    Today, credativ is launching its unique pre-paid Open Source Support Card. Businesses using Linux distributions such as Debian and CentOS stand to benefit from expert support without being tied into a contract, in contrast to other commercial Linux support vendors.

  • AbiWord: Like MS Word but Without the Junk

    Choices for word processing applications abound for Linux users, but many of them are little more than glorified rich-text editors. AbiWord has the look and feel of a polished application like Microsoft Word but without the unneeded complexities that can bog some writers down.

  • Open Source DNS Enters Next Gen with BIND 10 Y1

    The first public release of the BIND 10 open source DNS server is now out. But don’t rush to update your servers just yet — it’s still years away from being ready for production use.

    The ISC (Internet Systems Consortium) has been talking about BIND 10 since at least 2007 when the BIND 9.4 release came out. Last year, the ISC told me that work had actually started on development of BIND 10 and now here we are a year later and the first public milestone.

  • Mozilla

  • SaaS

    • Suddenly the native app is cool again

      Running applications in the cloud is an ambitious dream, but one that keeps stumbling against the reality of dedicated, native applications, particularly those running on mobile devices.

  • Oracle

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Thoughts from OSBC: What’s driving open source acceptance?

      Recently I was in the audience for the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) keynote panel on the future of open source, and part of the discussion was about the rapidly increasing use of open source in both the public and private sector. No one seemed surprised by this fact, but there was some disagreement on the cause. The one thing all the panelists agreed on was this: IT departments are suddenly much more accepting of open source. One of the panelists asked the question, “What is driving IT’s acceptance of open source?”

    • Top 10 Quotes from OSBC 2010 and What It Means for Open Source Developers

      “Open source isn’t about saving money, it’s about doing more stuff, and getting incremental innovation with the finite budget you have.” – Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat

      In his keynote remarks on Wed., Jim emphasized what many other speakers at OSBC re-iterated. Business units are demanding more innovation through technology, and they need to get it done without getting more budget. With the low acquisition costs of open source software, and easy access to information from open source communities, it’s enabling IT departments to innovate faster and be a hero in their businesses.

  • BSD/UNIX

    • Dru Lavigne made me do it: I killed Debian, installed an unbootable Ubuntu, now I’m running FreeBSD 8.0 with GNOME

      Did I mention speed? This GNOME 2.26 desktop just flies. It’s a pleasure to use, and if I can manage to install FreeBSD 7.2-release and get the same speed with working Java and Totem, I’ll be very, very happy. Working Flash, should I manage it, will be an added bonus.

      And thanks, Dru, for the inspiration to do my first serious FreeBSD test.

    • Evi Nemeth (an Ada Lovelace day tribute)

      These days, Evi lists her office as being “my sailboat, Wonderland, somewhere in the Caribbean.” She has a relatively low profile in the Linux community, despite being one of the authors of (and the inspiration behind) the Linux Administration Handbook, but the USENIX crowd knows her well. Her time at CU launched a whole generation of hackers who are in the field for the joy of it, and every one of them thinks back fondly to one of the people who got them started. Well done, Evi; you helped make all this happen.

  • Openness

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Groups in eleven EU member states participate in Document Freedom Day

      In at least eleven EU member states, groups promoting the use of open standards and open source software, are preparing for Document Freedom Day, 31 March. With workshops, presentations and demonstrations, they aim to make computer users aware of open formats for electronic documents. Many groups will focus on public administrations and governments.

    • Introduction to Document Freedom Day

      This year on March 31, along with more than 200 groups in 60 countries, we will observe the third Document Freedom Day. This grassroots effort aims to educate the public about the importance of open formats and open standards.

Leftovers

  • Robber Barons

  • Security

    • Ferocious hot chili pepper to make nasty weapons

      According to the SIFY news site: When deployed, the grenade showers the targets with a dust so spicy that in trials subjects were blinded for hours and left with breathing problems.

    • Wikileaks Receiving Gestapo Treatment?

      “Wikileaks announced on Mar 21 (via its twitter account) its intentions ‘to reveal Pentagon murder-coverup at US National Press Club, Apr 5, 9am.’ It appears that during the last 24 hours someone from the State Department/CIA decided to visit them, by ‘following/photographing/filming/detaining’ an editor for 22 hours. Apparently, the offending leak is a video footage of a US airstrike.”

    • The battle for Internet freedom

      In Italy, the government of neo-Fascist Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate who detests the very idea of having anyone else in control of any news media, has drafted legislation to impose government examination of all videos before they can be uploaded to the Web. In a related case, an Italian judge convicted Google executives of violating a child’s privacy rights because someone posted an abusive video on Google Video and Google staff didn’t remove it fast enough to suit the judge.

      In contrast, in Iceland, the Wikileaks organization, devoted to open publication of information about government malfeasance, is receiving support from legislators.

  • Environment

    • Open Biodiesel

      During my time with OpenNMS I was migrating toward biodiesel. Biodiesel is a cleaner-burning renewable fuel that is made from fats, oils, and greases. I was making the stuff in my backyard and signed up for the fledgling Bio Fuels program at Central Carolina Community College.

    • Designing Open Source Washing Machines for Underdeveloped Nations

      Aside from being eco-friendly, this smart little machine could change the way people in under-developed nations tackle the challenge of having clean clothes to wear. The Open Source Washing Machine Project got underway in the spring of 2008 during a workshop examining ways to implement open source hardware to improve the quality of life in impoverished nations.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 03 (2004)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

Links 24/3/2010: Linux 2.6.34 Preview, Parted Magic 4.9 is Here

Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Total PC Gaming staff jobs safe

    Previous editor Russell Barnes confirmed to MCV that he is moving across to Imagine Publishing’s Linux User, where he will take the role of editor.

  • Team Seattle Raises Almost $400,000 for Seattle Children’s Hospital, with Support from Pogo Linux, at Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona

    Pogo Linux (www.pogolinux.com), a Seattle computer-hardware company focusing on the open-source Linux operating system, was proud to support Team Seattle and the team’s fundraising efforts for Seattle Children’s Hospital and its Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) at this year’s Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona 24-hour endurance race.

  • Linux support à la carte

    Credativ has launched a pre-paid Linux Support Card in Britain, Germany, USA and Canada, which gives holders access to case-based Linux support for Debian and CentOS with no contractual commitment. The support is available for all servers and desktops within an enterprise and is carried out over email, telephone and remote access.

  • [LCA] Talk Slides

    This page is simply a place to collect links to presenters’ slides.

  • Server

    • Linux Wins Again for HPC

      The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has announced that the much anticipated Blue Waters supercomputer will be using Linux as its operating system.

    • FAI: Automated Install, Management and Customization for Linux

      FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) is a non-interactive system to avoid the boring and repeating task of installing, customizing and managing Linux systems manually. Nowadays FAI is used for maintaining chroot environments, virtual machines as well as physical boxes in setups ranging from a few single systems up to deployments of large-scale infrastructures and clusters with several thousands of systems.

  • Virtualisation

    • Virtual PC

      Many server-side applications are available in virtual-appliance versions. These are VM images that include an OS (Linux, typically) and a copy of the application pre-loaded, so the whole thing can be deployed and run by simply booting the virtual PC and connecting to it over the network. WordPress, SugarCRM, Joomla! and Drupal, just to name a few such apps, all exist in virtual-appliance editions.

    • Tool Time: Run VMs and More with VMware Player 3.0

      Browser Appliance is a Ubuntu Linux-based VM installed with Mozilla Firefox. It lets you securely browse the Internet without leaving a trace on the physical computer. This is a good VM to test drive initially as well as use later on.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Proprietary

      • The First Opera 10.51 Snapshot for Linux Is Here

        Opera 10.50 has been available for a couple of weeks on Windows and Opera 10.51 has just been released, but Linux fans are still stuck at Opera 10.10. Hopefully, this won’t be for much longer, as the new browser is packing some serious punch and is coming with an impressive feature list. The final release isn’t here, but Linux users can finally get to testing Opera’s latest creation as the first snapshot builds of Opera 10.51 6252 for Linux have been made available by the development team.

      • AVG Rescue CD: Free toolset for repair of infected machines

        The AVG Rescue CD is essentially a portable version of AVG Anti-Virus supplied through Linux distribution.

      • Coraid offers EtherDrive storage arrays and HBAs

        Coraid’s EtherDrive storage platform has organically amassed over 1,100 customers, including large enterprise and government organizations, since its 2005 launch into the Linux market.

    • Instructionals

      • Best of both worlds

        If you don’t wish to tamper with your system, there are ways to run Linux with USB sticks. The easiest way to go about is to take the help of http://www.unetbootin.com UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux. You can let unetbootin download a distribution or use your own Linux.iso file if you have one.

      • Bitdefender: Linux antivirus made simple
      • Replace a failed drive in Linux RAID

  • Distributions

    • Parted Magic 4.9 arrives

      Parted Magic developer Patrick Verner has announced the release of version 4.9 of the open source Parted Magic, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+, LVM and RAID are also supported. The latest 4.9 release is based on the 2.6.32.9 Linux kernel and includes several bug fixes, updates and changes.

    • Red Hat founder aims for another IPO home run

      Robert Young, author of one of the hottest IPOs markets have ever seen, is out to prove that he’s got another bestseller up his sleeve.

      The founder of software firm Red Hat Inc. is in the midst of an initial public offering for Lulu Ltd., a book publishing company with a premise no less revolutionary than Amazon.com.

    • Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 10.4 beta is bloody brilliant

        I’ve been playing with the Ubuntu 10.4 beta for the past two days, and it’s bloody brilliant.

        [...]

        Thankfully, the wealth of free software that’s always been such an integral part of Linux’s allure can now be accessed through the Ubuntu Software Centre, which is essentially an open-source app store, complete with a “Featured Applications” section that provides a handy stepping off point for software experimentation.

      • Ubuntu 10.04 in Beta, Stable Release in April

        Ubuntu is Linux for the rest of us. It is simple to install and use. Despite that, not that many users are on board with estimates of 1-2% of all computer users running various Linux operating systems. But with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, there might be a few reasons to give it a try. It is currently in beta, so you may not want to install it on your primary computer.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • PI launches motion controller for PILine motors

      The software package includes the user program PIMikromove, Labview drivers, DLLs and support of Linux operating systems.

    • i.MX51 board initialization and memory mapping using the Linux target image builder (LTIB)

      This application note provides general information regarding the board initialisation process and the memory mapping implementation of the Linux kernel using the LTIB in an i.MX51 board support package (BSP).

    • JetBox 9532 Linux-ready VPN Router allows users to connect and remotely manage card readers, cameras and speakers

      Equipped with 4 additional RS232/422/485 serial ports, the JetBox 9532 Linux-based embedded platform allows users to connect and remotely manage card readers, cameras, speakers and other access and security control devices via Ethernet.

    • VIVOTEK’s first IP surveillance road show is a grand success

      The introduction of Linux-related technology, such as video recorders, storage, video management, video analytics, I/O controls, and embedded systems were also introduced in the road show for the first time.

    • Stretch S6000 Family Processors Power New NVR Server From Exacq

      Stretch Inc., the pioneer and leader in software configurable processors, today announced that Exacq Technologies, Inc., developers of the exacqVision VMS software and systems for video surveillance applications, is using Stretch S6000 family processors to power its new exacqVision EL-S embedded Linux NVR appliance.

    • Opera and Ocean Blue launch HbbTV solution

      This solution combines the Opera Devices SDK for Linux, Opera’s fully compliant HbbTV framework and Ocean Blue’s DVB middleware, which incorporates HbbTV extensions. The resulting package gives full flexibility to OEMs, enabling them to implement HbbTV portals and services, such as ARD/ ZDF Mediathek, Tagesschau and Arte.

    • Loewe selects Opera to deliver premium Web technology to connected TVs

      Opera Software today announced that its Opera Devices SDK 10.15 for Linux was selected by Loewe, the premium European brand in-home entertainment. Opera will help Loewe fulfill its promise to deliver “innovation for the senses” by providing Web browsing, widgets and HbbTV implementation on Loewe connected TVs.

    • Control Issues: Reviewing the Behringer BCF2000 and FCB1010

      That’s it for this week’s report. If you’ve been hesitating over the purchase of either the BCF/BCR or the FCB, hesitate no longer. The units are well-supported by Linux, they work beautifully, and software editors are available that can help you design more creative and effective configurations.

    • Multi-Tech Systems Announces Cellular Development Platform for M2M Applications and Products

      Set to be available in May 2010, the Platform enables developers to bridge multiple interfaces and create gateway access to the cellular network by leveraging Linux-based open source software and field-tested, globally approved hardware.

    • Ubiquitous Corporation Launches “Ubiquitous QuickBoot”, as a Break-Through Booting Innovation for Various Embedded Devices

      By using the epoch-making Ubiquitous QuickBoot on ARM platform, Android or Linux can boot in 1 second, after turning on the power as a “cold” boot.

    • Marvell Moby Tablet – the Linux factor

      It’s going to be running Linux. Now I love Linux. I use it for my web servers, all of my thin clients have a light Linux OS, and whenever I can get someone to give it a shot on their own computers, I hand them a live CD. Ubuntu will be the only way that these little tablets will be able to run on the Marvell chipset and the only way to hit that $99 pricepoint (or, for that matter, a sub-$200 pricepoint). The Flash implementation that Rachel King reported rules out Windows 7 Mobile as well.

      So Linux it is (and I say Ubuntu because that has been well-developed for embedded applications and runs the Tonido Plug quite handily). The problem with Linux is two-fold: 1) Most people don’t like it as much as I do and teachers will be put off by “something different.” 2) Development efforts in interactive ebooks are favoring the iPad and Microsoft slates, not Linux-based devices.

      While most folks don’t realize that their Kindles and other e-readers are running Linux, they expect these devices to be “different.” Over and over, though, I’ve encountered users who expect a computer-like device to either look like Windows or look like OS X.

    • Phones

      • The new ZTE smartphone is a must-have.

        With features including new operation systems like OMS and Linux giving high quality functionality, and an assortment of different options, the ZTE is sure to be a very sought after phone once it’s released to the public.

      • bphone flipscreen smartphone runs linux, java

        If you’re thinking about getting your hands on one, head on over to Chinagrabber, where it retails for $569 (USD).

      • Nokia

        • Maemo 5 SDK Update 5 Now Available

          A new version of the Maemo 5 SDK is now available for download, yet it seems that it comes only as an early access version of the SDK update 5, and that it includes a series of known issues, which are expected to be fixed as soon as the final update 5 release is delivered. The new version comes with a wide range of additions, updates and more, as well as with the Qt4.6 library.

      • Android

        • Android – From the Beginning to World Domination

          Android’s co-founders Andy Rubin, Nick Sears, and Chris White went to work for Google. Rubin is also the co-founder of Danger, Sears is a former Vice President of Product Marketing at T-Mobile USA, and White headed design and interface development at WebTV. Android Inc was an unknown company that made software for mobile phones. Then rumors were circulating that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market. At Google, a team lead by Rubin developed a mobile platform powered by the Linux kernel which they marketed to headset makers and wireless carriers on the premise of providing a customizable and upgradeable system.

        • DropBox cloud syncing app for Android on the way

          File syncing service DropBox is set to get an Android app very soon, which means that another swathe of smartphone users will be able to access their Desktop files via the cloud.

    • Tablets

      • WePad is an Android tablet from Germany

        Another product is joining the tablet wars. It’s WePad, which comes from the German company Neofonie. Specs wise, we’re talking about the device that’s more powerful than the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPad, but as you know, it’s not the specs that win the consumers’ hearts, minds and ultimately wallets.

      • Apple iPad? How about a little German innovation instead

        The Neofonie WePad has similar form and function as the wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad. Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam. Beat that baby.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Are Linux and FSF complementary?

    What is Free Software Foundation then? Free Software Foundation (FSF) happens to be a non-profit corporation founded at the behest of Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 and the main intention was to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement with the sole objective to encourage the universal freedom to forge, disseminate and change computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA.

    Ever since its foundation in the mid 80s, the organization has been working relentlessly based on its sole dedication to the cause. It should also be noted that in agreement with its goals, only free software is used on FSF’s computers.

    What do we get from all these? The descriptions of these two entities indicate self-confident software scenario. However there is also a question and this is rising gradually. What is that? Many have started to enquire whether the advocacy group has been solely responsible behind the exponential success of Linux.

  • How Thunderbird 3 works on Mac OS X: Better than Apple Mail?

    The one place where Thunderbird blows Mail out of the water is with the add-ons. Using the add-ons, you can GPG sign mail using the Enigmail add-on; you can sync contacts with Gmail or Zimbra using the Zindus add-on; and expand tiny URLs (via URL shortening services) using TheRealURL. Looking at the Thunderbird add-ons page, there truly is something for everyone: with over 640 “miscellaneous” add-ons alone, how could there not be?

  • Richard Stallman on SaaS

    At Saturday on Libre Planet, Richard Stallman announced the publication of an essay on software as a service (SaaS). By my count, it is his first published piece on the subject since Stallman’s controversial comments on GMail a year and a half ago. Readers of this blog will all be interested in reading the new essay if they haven’t already already done so.

    In his article, Stallman defines SaaS as, “a network server that does certain computing tasks … then invites users to do their computing on that server.” His basic message is simple: users should reject SaaS network services because SaaS users are inherently disempowered and out of control. Indeed, users should reject SaaS even if a service is implemented using free so

  • Free Software Awards Announced

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday March 20, held during the LibrePlanet conference at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA.

    The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by John Gilmore. The award for Project of Social Benefit was won by the Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president and founder Richard M. Stallman.

  • Openness

    • Eyes wide shut?

      A debate is underway among the proponents and gainsayers of open access about the reality of whether OA leads to more citations. I am not over-concerned with citations as they are not the sole indicators of the usage of research output. As one of the contributors has said, there is an ‘invisible college’ within which data, methodology, ideas are shared among researchers via conferences, coffee-breaks, workshops, emails, reports, social networking and other communication devices. While this ‘college’ informs, it is seldom cited.

      Another statement made in these exchanges was that ‘open access is a solution looking for a problem’. This stopped me in my tracks, since over the last decade, evidence has been accumulating showing the high level of information imbalance and paucity, especially – but by no means only – in the developing world. And it was for this reason that the EPT and many other initiatives were formed to help resolve the problem. It is indisputable that access to all necessary research findings had not been met in pre-web days. Researchers, we had a problem.

    • Sharing Ideas about Open Philanthropy

      As regular readers of this blog will know, for the last five years or so I have been tracking the diffusion of the ideas behind open source into other spheres. I’m particularly interested to see what does and does not translate easily to other domains.

      Here’s another application: open philanthropy.

    • How to Spark a Snowcrash, & What the Web Really Does

      In order to understand the implications of the shift and to internalize it, you need to experience it firsthand. You can’t tell your organization that you’re going to be implementing “social media” and everyone is going to start “collaborating,” and assume that waving a magic wand is going to make this happen. My experience has been that I had to learn what trusting and sharing means on my own.

      [...]

      What does society reward? Cheating. Stealing. Exploitation. Fame. Big houses. Fancy cars. Executive titles. Material stuff. All these things are attached to something else. Something has to be sacrificed to get these things. And they often don’t make you happy in the end. They’re not who you really are, or what you really care about, but you do them because that’s how it’s set up, and we’re just operating within the framework that exists.

      But, there’s this other way.

      In this experimental society in which you can participate, if you want – people are a little more “real.” People will give you advice, pass along a link they think might interest you, offer to collaborate on a real project, or exchange some information with you, for no other reason besides that it’s “how THIS system works.”

      The precondition is trust. You can’t buy trust. You can’t force trust.

      You earn trust.

    • Open Notebook Science

      Open notebook science (ONS) is the practice of making the primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is generated. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher(s) online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material. The approach can be summed up by the slogan “no insider information”.

Leftovers

  • Texts Without Context

    Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

  • Libel reform bill to tackle ‘libel tourism’

    Foreign claimants will find it more difficult to initiate libel cases in UK courts and a “public interest” defence should be introduced to protect investigative journalism, under reforms unveiled by the government today.

  • Crime novelist sued for setting plot around Paris landmark

    When Lalie Walker set about using the Marché Saint Pierre as the setting for her latest crime thriller she thought she was paying a nostalgic tribute to a much-loved Parisian landmark.

    But, after reading her tale of a crazed killer who sews fear and loathing among the rolls of taffeta, the owners of the much-loved Montmartre fabric store have signalled that they do not appreciate her gesture.

  • Student Punished for Facebook Group Starts $10-Million Lawsuit

    Chris Avenir faced 147 charges of academic misconduct two years ago for his Facebook group, which let engineering students “discuss/post solutions” to homework problems. The course stipulated that students had to conduct independent work. Mr. Avenir faced expulsion, but a faculty committee ruled he should instead receive a zero for one assignment and a disciplinary note in his file.

  • Science

    • Will reclusive mathematician accept $1 million prize?

      A million-dollar prize for solving one of toughest problems in mathematics has been awarded to a Russian mathematician, but the real puzzle is whether he’ll accept it.

      The reclusive Grigori Perelman has been recognised for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, one of seven Millennium prize problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) in 2000 as the most important unsolved problems in mathematics.

  • Security

    • Policeman who hit G20 protester with baton mistook drink carton for weapon, court hears

      Opening the case, Nicholas Paul, prosecuting, said Smellie had “lost his self control” during an “excessive and unjustified” attack on Fisher. “He went from level one to level five without considering the intervening steps,” said Paul.

    • Author found guilty of Blue Water Bridge assault

      Toronto author Peter Watts was found guilty Friday of assaulting, resisting and obstructing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at the Blue Water Bridge.

      Jurors returned the verdict about in St. Clair County Circuit Judge James Adair’s courtroom. He will be sentenced April 26. Watts, 52, faces up to two or three years in prison.

    • New Amnesty briefing urges full inquiry to end secrecy over UK abuse involvement

      Amnesty International today (23 March) released a new briefing outlining its call for a full, independent and impartial inquiry into UK involvement in human rights abuses overseas post-11 September 2001. The briefing outlines ten key questions that an inquiry should seek to answer.

      [...]

      1. What have been the UK government’s policies and practices in response to grave violations of human rights such as torture or other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances, renditions and unlawful detentions perpetrated by the USA and other states against people, including UK nationals, held overseas since 11 September 2001? Have they changed since then? If so, when, how and why?

  • Environment

    • Tories criticise UK for failing to support 20-year ban on African ivory sales

      The Conservatives today criticised the government for failing to support proposals from a number of African countries to impose a 20-year ban on any legal sales of ivory.

    • Bye-Bye Bluefin Tuna

      So, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) rejected international trade restrictions on northern bluefin tuna, thus probably consigning it to extinction, and removing a key predator from the oceans, with who knows what knock-on effects.

    • Politics and Peak Energy

      Below the fold is a guest post by John Howe, an engineer who invented the solar tractor. In this post, John says, “Our only hope for a drastic course correction is to support grass-roots movements to elect leaders who clearly understand energy and the growing tension between an economic system based on continued growth (especially population) and declining energy.”

    • Institute for Energy Research Admits It Was Behind Anti-Wind Study

      Danish journalists have confirmed that The Institute for Energy Research commissioned and paid for the anti-wind energy study released last year by a Danish think tank that claimed Denmark exaggerates the amount of wind energy it produces (it doesn’t), questioned whether wind energy reduces carbon emissions (it does), and asserted that the U.S. should choose coal over wind because it’s cheaper (it’s not when you count the true costs of coal).

      [...]

      IER has railed against green jobs, arguing that oil and gas are better job creators, despite the fact that investment in clean energy technology creates four times as many jobs as investment in oil and gas. IER continues its campaign against wind energy as well, asserting recently that the Obama administration had been “caught red-handed working with Big Wind energy lobbyists.”

      Yes, those scary “Big Wind energy lobbyists” pose a real threat to America. You can’t make this stuff up folks. Unless, of course, you work at the oil-and-coal-funded Institute for Energy Research.

    • Harper Government Stifles the Truth

      The scandal is growing at Environment Canada of how Canadian climate researchers are being “muzzled” by draconian policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

      This week the Montreal Gazette reported on a leaked document showing that the information restrictions brought in by the Harper government have severely restricted the media’s access to government researchers.

      “Scientists have noticed a major reduction in the number of requests, particularly from high-profile media, who often have same-day deadlines,” said the Environment Canada document. “Media coverage of climate change science, our most high-profile issue, has been reduced by over 80%.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • NCAA games coming to Syracuse, but businesses can’t mention it

      But the NCAA and its trademarks, restrictions and sponsor partners are putting the lid on any sanctioned events — rallies, parties and the like — for the Syracuse community and the other three cities hosting what’s come to be known as the Sweet 16.

    • China

      • What Chinese Censors Don’t Want You to Know

        Following are excerpts from media guidelines that the Communist Party propaganda department and the government Bureau of Internet Affairs, conveyed to top editors before this month’s annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

        The sessions are often referred to here as “the two meetings.” Such internal guidelines are typically circulated weekly, and the list issued before this year’s sessions was described as considerably lengthier than the norm.

        [...]

        10. During the two meetings, do not feature or sensationalize news about petitioners.

        11. Do not report on the hunger strike by Ai Weiwei and other artists. [There was no hunger strike, but Beijing artists are protesting being forced to relocate their studios without fair compensation.]

      • Chinese netizens’ open letter to the Chinese Government and Google

        The letter concludes with several statements about censorship. “We support necessary censorship of Internet content and communications, whether it is on Google or any other foreign or domestic company,” the authors write.

      • Google’s unwise move to Hong Kong

        You know things are getting serious when Chinese editorial writers start invoking the specter of the infamous Brtish East India Company in the context of Google’s decision to withdraw its search engine services from China. As a symbol of oppressive imperialism, the British East India Co. is hard to beat in a nation where the scars from the Opium Wars still linger, raw and tender.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Stop BBC “Digital Rights Management” from disabling your HD TV

      The BBC want an offshore consortium of entertainment companies called the “Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator” to decide how your high definition TV and video can work.

      The American courts rejected these draconian restrictions, so the DTLA has chosen to pick on British TV viewers instead.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Happy Birthday, Gnutella: Pioneering P2P Protocol Turns Ten

      Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.

    • Why Google Made BitTorrent a Success

      BitTorrent is undoubtedly the most efficient way to share large files on the Internet. The key to BitTorrent’s widespread adoption can nevertheless not be exclusively attributed to its technical superiority. Much of BitTorrent’s success lies in the fact that it is web-based, easy to monetize and indexed by Google.

    • UK Anti-Piracy Lawyers Threaten File-Sharing Forum

      ACS:Law have been making news headlines damaging to their reputation ever since they started sending out thousands of threatening letters to alleged file-sharers in the UK. Now they are threatening to sue Slyck.com, one of the Internet’s oldest file-sharing forums, because they don’t like what members have written about them.

    • Spanish Gov’t Moves Forward On New Law To Make File Sharing And Links

      The news of the approval sparked an immediate wave of protest on the Internet. Several Web sites that offer unauthorized links, such as Cinetube.es, Series Yonkis.com and Divxonline.com shut themselves down until midnight, showing only the message “For freedom in the Web. No to the closure of Web [sites],” with a black background.

    • MGMT’s Congratulations Leaked Like Watergate

      Most Americans were too busy tweeting about health care to notice, but MGMT’s forthcoming album Congratulations leaked over the weekend. The band is now streaming the whole thing from their website. Full disclosure: I listened to about five seconds of the first song, and it totally justifies that insane cover art.

    • More And More Musicians Embracing Free Music With Subscriptions For Support

      In many ways, all of this business model experimentation is similar to the kind of experimentation these musicians do in the music itself. That is, they take ideas they have themselves, combine it with ideas inspired from others, and come out with something wholly unique and creative, which best matches with their own community. It’s improvisational business modeling.

    • Why ‘TV Everywhere’ Will Fail

      Taking away choice.
      While Comcast pitches Xfinity as giving users more control over content by being able to watch what they want when they want, the reality is that Comcast is locking people into their menu of offerings for cable TV. And, most importantly, they are giving people the chance to watch content on other platforms — laptops, smartphones, etc. — only if they keep paying their cable bills. There is still no choice for people who want to pay less for just the shows they want. The ultimate in customization comes from the Internet, where you watch what you want and aren’t usually forced into bundles of content and channels.

    • Kulula Responds To FIFA Legal Threats With Hilarious Clarifying Ad
    • EMI pawns its pop stars in £400m rescue bid

      EMI is in talks to mortgage its back catalogue of music recordings in a last-ditch attempt to solve its mounting cash crisis.

      The group is offering rival labels the chance to manage its North American catalogue business, which includes tracks by The Beatles and Blondie, for a five-year period.

    • ACTA

      • [ACTA leak]
      • ACTA and the European Commission: The great escape

        Members of Act Up-Paris and La Quadrature du Net attended this morning a « stakeholders meeting » on ACTA hosted by the European Commission. Questions asked by the public faced a wall of condescendence and disdain. Luc Devigne’s answers did not reassure us. On the contrary, they strenghtened Act Up-Paris, April and La Quadrature’s concerns that ACTA could endanger access to medicine, Free Software and freedom of expression on the Net, while circumventing democratic processes.

      • ACTA – Stakeholders’ Consultation Meeting
      • ACTA New Zealand meeting agenda
      • ACTA: an unseen treaty in the making

        Le Monde diplomatique has just obtained a copy of section 2 of the ACTA treaty project, titled “Border Measures” and consisting of a dozen pages outlining, in very detailed practical terms, the future of customs practices with respect to “goods suspected of infringing intellectual property rights”.

      • EU defends itself from attack on ACTA

        At a public hearing in Brussels today, the EU executive tried to reassure business and civil liberties groups that the EU would impose criminal sanctions only on counterfeit goods “on a commercial scale,” but not on “proverbial housewife file-sharing,” meaning by private individuals.

      • EU Negotiators Insist That ACTA Will Move Forward And There’s Nothing To Worry About

        The talking points from ACTA negotiators seem clear. When accused of being secretive, deny it and insist that you’re being open. If really pushed on the matter, blame mysterious, nameless “others” for keeping the documents secret. Then, when specific items in the text are brought up, insist that these are being misrepresented, and if only you could see the real text (which you can’t, because it’s a secret) you’d know that it was all blown out of proportion. Then, finally, insist that ACTA won’t change any laws. Of course, if that were the case, there would be no need for ACTA at all.

      • To: EC’s Directorate General for Trade

        Without much fanfare, the European Commission has arranged an “ACTA Stakeholders’ Consultation Meeting”. Of course, the big problem is that it’s in Brussels, and few of us can afford to take a day off work to attend – unless we are professional lobbyists, of course, who get *paid* huge sums to attend.

      • Big ACTA Leak: Full Consolidated Text

        La Quadrature du Net has obtained another ACTA document – and it’s a biggie, but at the moment only a 56-page PDF. You can help convert it into text.

      • ACTA’s De Minimis Provision: Countering the iPod Searching Border Guard Fears

        The E.U. version:

        Where a traveler’s personal baggage contains goods of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance and there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider to leave such goods, or part of such goods, outside the scope of this section.]

        Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore support alternative wording:

        Where a traveler’s personal baggage contains trademark goods or copyright materials of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance {Aus: or where copyright materials or trademark goods are sent in small consignments} and there are no material indiciations to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, Parties may consider such goods to be outside the scope of this Agreement.]

        Japan favours the following:

        Where a Party excludes from the application of the provisions in this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in traveler’s personal luggage, the Party shall ensure that the quantitites of goods eligible for such exclusion shall be limited to the minimum allowed within its available resources.]

        And Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. would also support this approach:

        Where a traveler’s personal baggage contains goods of non-commerical nature in quantities reasonably attributable to the personal use of the traveler there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider that such goods are outside the scope of this section]

    • Digital Economy Bill

      • A state-sponsored book-burning parade.

        For months, my head has been jammed with anger and ideas about the Digital Economy Bill that’s in the last stages of being rushed through parliament. I keep meaning to discuss it on this blog, and I haven’t. Not because I don’t care – actually, this piece of legislation offends me personally and politically more than anything Labour have done since they took us into Iraq – but because I care so profoundly that I don’t think anything I can say can really do it justice. Pathetically, I’m also a bit intimidated by the volume of clever stuff that’s been already been said about corporate copyright protection, and I’m scared that if I try to express how I feel I’ll reveal myself as a Stupid Shouty Girl who Doesn’t Understand. But I’ve got to at least acknowledge that this matters to me. It matters because the Digital Economy Bill is one of the most significant assaults on human rights that Labour has managed to execute in its twelve-year trigger-happy showdown with British civil liberties.

      • Debate: Will The Digital Economy Bill Undermine Our Basic Rights?
      • The Digital Economy Bill: A wise move?

        In one corner, we have the major record labels saying filesharing is theft that has “cost” billions; in the other we have the rest of the market showing that they don’t agree. That cost includes the death of a retail market, which would seem an inevitable part of all downloading, not just illegal downloading. Music is downloaded (legally and illegally) on a scale that record sales never matched and there is evidence to show that consumers who download and share the most music are also the people who are buying it. Some companies want to grasp the opportunities the internet gives, but not adjust to its challenges.

      • Brits: last chance to demand debate on Digital Economy Bill — act now!

        We’re in the final days for the British Digital Economy Bill. This Thursday, the House of Commons will decide whether to subject the bill to line-by-line debate (which will probably kill it or at least delay it until after the election), or whether to pass it without any real scrutiny or debate. Given that the DEB will touch every part of British life, from education to civic engagement to health to law enforcement to justice, it’s insane to think that Parliament might pass it without even examining what it says.

      • BPI Boycott
      • BPI lobbyist Mollett tries for parliament

        What does the Parliamentary candidacy of the BPI’s main spokesperson tell us about the links between the BPI (the four major record labels) and the Labour party?

        [...]

        Mollett is unlikely to be elected. In fact, Mollett stands a greater chance of scaling the north face of the Eiger than he does of winning leafy Farnham under a Labour banner. But his candidacy tell us more about the close ties between the organisation he lobbies for – the BPI – and the Labour party. The BPI, for which Mollett is head of corporate communications, has lobbied extensively for the Digital Economy Bill, and wrote at least one amendment. The BPI is currently trying to get the bill through Parliament without a debate, before the election. It is lobbying for the bill to either be voted through by lazy and uncaring MPs, or that in the so-called ‘wash-up’ before the election, a deal will be done which ensures it goes through. A leaked email recently exposed the BPI’s attitude (see also my previous article on the BPI email).

      • The Pirate Party UK Launches its 2010 Election Manifesto
      • U.K. Anti-Piracy Law To Allow Appeals

        The U.K. government says it will add measures to the Digital Economy Bill that will create an appeals procedure for those accused of online copyright infringement.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 02 (2004)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

03.23.10

Links 23/3/2010: MySQL Does Fine, Many GNU/Linux Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 8:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 50 Places Linux is Running That You Might Not Expect

    It was not long ago when Microsoft Windows had a tight stranglehold on the operating system market. Walk into a Circuit City or Staples, it seemed, and virtually any computer you took home would be running the most current flavor of Windows. Ditto for computers ordered direct from a manufacturer. In the last decade, though, the operating system market has begun to change. Slightly more than 5% of all computers now run Mac, according to NetMarketShare.com. Linux is hovering just beneath 1% of the overall market share in operating systems. And although that might sound like a small number, Linux is far more than just a fringe OS. In fact, it’s running in quite a few more places than you probably suspect. Below are fifty places Linux is running today in place of Windows or Mac. For easy reading, they are divided amongst government, home, business, and educational usage.

  • Kernel Space

    • Compressed File Systems on Linux

      Perhaps the title should have been; ‘the lack of a suitable compressed file system on linux’. A compressed file system in this case refers to a setup where the files are saved on the disk in a predefined compressed format (such as gzip or bzip2). When you read from those files they will be automatically decompressed by the file system. Similarly when you attempt to create a new file or modify an old file, it should be automatically compressed before saving. Such a file system is sure to be very slow for random access but for sequential access it wouldn’t matter so much. It might even be faster than an uncompressed file system because hard drives continues to be the real bottleneck in most computers today.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Testing AMD’s New FirePro Linux Driver With The FirePro V8750

        Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled “Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver,” so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.

      • X.Org Server 1.8 Release Candidate 2

        X Server 1.8 may be the first X.Org release in recent times where it’s released on time or at least close to being on schedule. Back in October, X Server 1.8 was given a release date of the 31st of March. This is just a little over a week away, but it looks like this next major update to the X Server that brings udev input handling, DRI2 updates, xorg.conf.d support, and other changes.

      • Mesa 7.8 Release Imminent: RC2 Pushed

  • Applications

    • Interaction With Proprietary

      • iPhone/iPod Linux Library Hits Version 1.0

        While Apple provides support for the iPod and iPhones on Mac OS X (of course) and even Windows, complete with iTunes support, they provide no such love for those wishing to use their gadgets on Linux. This has led the Linux community to reverse-engineering Apple’s USB protocol for the iPod/iPhone devices, developing different hacks, and in some cases even needing to “jail break” the product in order to use it fully under Linux. There’s a few different projects around that seek to implement iPhone/iPod support on Linux, but one of them that takes an entirely free software approach and does not depend upon any DRM or proprietary libraries is libimobiledevice. This week the libimobiledeviceproject is celebrating their version 1.0 release after being in development for nearly three years.

      • ANGLE wined3d in reverse

        Were happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGLs subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls. Were open-sourcing ANGLE under the BSD license as an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers like Google Chrome to run WebGL content on Windows computers without having to rely on OpenGL drivers.

    • Instructionals

    • Games

      • Indie Gamers See The Linux Market

        It hasn’t been that long ago that we brought you news of 2d boy World of Goo and the Frictional Games trilogy Penumbra. Since then, things have been pretty quiet on the Linux Game Front…at least to my ear, but then again, I’m not much of a gamer.

        Sure, I’ve played all the repository shooters…bloody chunks flying and monsters galore. I have a short attention span…mostly because I suck at shooter games. I just don’t play them often.

      • Welcome to Xonotic!

        We would like to formally announce the arrival of Xonotic – A free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • KDE in the Google Summer of Code 2010

        This summer the KDE project will once again participate in Google Summer of Code! Summer of Code will allow KDE to grow and bring in new developers to the community.

      • The Tokamak4 Files: Solid

        This is the first article in a series of articles that wrap up achievements, work in progress and some background of what happened during Tokamak4, the Oxygen, KWin and Plasma sprint. Tokamak4 took place from 19th to 26th February 2010 in Nürnberg, Germany in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V. During the sprint, 26 hackers gathered to work on various aspects of the KDE user experience. The combined sprint of the workspace and window manager teams and the Oxygen artwork team made cross-collaboration possible across these KDE software components.

        In this article, we actually start off with a side-track of Tokamak4 which was hardware integration. It turned out that many people working on this were actually participating in Tokamak4, so the team took the opportunity to sit together and hack some on different aspects of hardware integration in KDE SC and specifically Plasma.

      • KDE Partying Around the World for New Release

        KDE’s Plasma Team took the opportunity of their Tokamak 4 get-together to also celebrate the release of KDE SC 4.4. The team went out for dinner and then headed straight into a Karaoke bar, where various performers brought real culture to this part of Frankonia. One highlight was Chani performing the German 80s anthem “99 Luftballons” and making everybody in the audience be in awe of her mad language skills. Previously, Sebas had taken the stage to present a KDE version of The Man in Black (Johnny Cash) performing Ring of Fire. After a good couple of hours of Karaoke, the team decided to move on and conquer a 70s-style bar in the heart of Nuremberg to lift the glasses on a great KDE SC 4.4 and a successful Tokamak 4.

      • semi-random thoughts for the day

        We also need to learn how to define ourselves by our successes and see our failures as interesting, expected and required by-products of the road to those successes. There are people in the community who look at our success in countries around the world and discount it all as being “not relevant” because it isn’t in the country they live in, and therefore conclude Free software has failed generally. Similarly when we talk about using KDE (or other F/OSS) software in production usage, instead of defining our successes and positioning ourselves in line with them we too often discount all possible usage of that software because of failures that affect only a portion of the market. This leads to us eliminating ourselves from entire market segments that we are perfect for just because we aren’t (yet? :) universally perfect.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Testing the Gnome 2.30 Release Candidate

        If Gnome developers are to be believed, the desktop of the future arrived last week when the release candidate for Gnome 2.30–which could become Gnome 3.0–was made available. My CPU needed a workout, so I recently compiled the new desktop and gave it a run. Here’s a look at the desktop environment that–like it or not–may soon be coming to a computer near you.

      • Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

        Bottom line: Software can’t save a mailing list full of people who actively dislike each other. Maybe I’m crazy, though, but it seems like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people.

      • GNOME Shell 2.29.1 released

        GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Trisquel 3.5 Awen release announcement

        Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5, codename Awen is ready. Click on the player below to see the video announcement (HD version) we made for the LibrePlanet 2010 conference. More info after the jump.

      • Tiny Core Linux 2.10 released

        Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.10 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that is based on the 2.6.29.1 Linux kernel and is only 10.6 MB in size. In addition to the usual bug fixes, the latest update includes several changes and updates.

      • Changes to PC/OS 10.1.1

        The interface changes. We were planning to release these with PC/OS 11, but since we have to do an update to PC/OS 10.1 we figured what the hey. There isnt much change to the panels, just the theme. We now use the PC/OS Daylight theme, derived from Light X as the standard theme.

        Up…date Manager is now included with PC/OS 10.1.1. This just delivers critical system updates and will not allow you to update to a later Ubuntu system. But for critical updates its a must have.

      • MoLinux 2.0 (Zero)
      • Clonezilla Live 1.2.4-28
      • Absolute 13.1.0 released

        Should be 14.0 due to new kernel, new Xorg, new GCC, new GTK… but we follow Slackware versioning for compatability. Kernel is 2.6.33, Xorg is 1.7.5.

      • SystemRescueCd 1.5.0
      • Parted Magic 4.9
      • Owl Current-20100323

    • Red Hat Family

      • IBM Implements Red Hat Technology in Development and Test Cloud Solution

        Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that IBM has selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a platform in its new cloud computing service for development and test.

      • Will Red Hat Stay Red Hot?

        Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have been red hot this past year.

      • Earnings Preview: Red Hat

        Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading higher by +0.17% ahead of its quarterly earnings release. Red Hat, world’s leading open source technology solutions provider is expected to release its quarterly results on March 24th.

      • Red Hat Extends SOA Platform Offering For Expanded Enterprise and Cloud Adoption

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0. with enhanced functionality to update its JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is a comprehensive platform designed to integrate applications, services, transactions and business process components into an architecture for automating business and IT processes.

      • Red Hat ramps up SOA in the cloud with JBoss 5.0

        JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is the latest major upgrade to Red Hat’s middleware platform. Along with the improvements to web services integration, Red Hat said the product includes an updated enterprise services bus with enhanced protocol listeners, management consoles and a new rules engine that can be managed by JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System). The enhanced platform enables enterprises to deploy new applications and services more rapidly.

      • Red Hat Delivers New JBoss Tools, SOA Platform at EclipseCon

        Red Hat announces new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform at EclipseCon 2010.

        Red Hat has announced new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture platform.

      • Tokyo Stock Exchange Executes Millisecond Trading with New System Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was selected by Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) as the standard operating platform for its next-generation “arrowhead” trading system. Developed by TSE and Red Hat strategic partner FUJITSU LIMITED (Fujitsu), the “arrowhead” platform was designed to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds to bring a new level of execution to the Tokyo stock market.

    • Debian Family

      • Loving Squeeze

        Squeeze works well enough as it is for production use here. Where are they hiding those bugs?

      • Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu, Buttons, and Democracy

          When Ubuntu drinks, the free and open source software (FOSS) community gets a hangover. The distribution is so influential that its every development sends echoes rippling through the greater community. How else to explain how a simple change in desktop themes should spark not only debates about usability, but about how decisions are made in FOSS?

        • Lucid vision

          Still, the Lucid beta is pretty enough as it is out of the box. With its speed and performance improvements, users can look forward to an exciting, and even ground-breaking release when the final version becomes available next month.

        • Ubuntu One Music Store Now Available For All
        • Hands-on: Ubuntu One music store will rock in Lucid Lynx

          After downloading a few tracks myself, my overall impression is positive. Canonical has largely succeeded in making the music store feel like a convenient and well-integrated part of the Ubuntu user experience. Although it’s impressive, the software is still in the beta stage of development and isn’t entirely stable yet. It functions properly, but I experienced several crashes during my tests, primarily during the checkout stage of the purchasing process. There are also some minor bugs in the HTML user interface, like links that accidentally cause it to load the regular 7digital Web site instead of the one that is customized for Rhythmbox.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • ARM Helps Bridge the Gap between Consumer Products and Automotive Infotainment

      ARM and its extensive Partner ecosystem can now leverage its considerable knowledge and experience working with a wide range of these elements, together with many years of Linux-based open source collaborations, to deliver innovation and diversity to enhance the end-user automotive experience.

    • Cool: Or Hot? Linux really making your coffee, live a linux coffee machine

      Too bad it’s only for professional use the HGZ Linux based coffee machine. I’d love to have on of these. A Dream come true. The Linux coffee maker.

    • 3D-ready IPTV SoC sports three app processors

      ViXS says each of the XCode 4210′s application processors runs its own RTOS (real time operating system) simultaneously. However, the MIPS core runs Linux 2.6.28, with support for the Linux DVB driver subsystem.

    • HD video chip gains Linux development framework support

      Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework for custom embedded Linux devices supports the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM365 DaVinci video processor. The LinuxLink for DM365 service offers Linux development tools and a pre-integrated build environment for the ARM-based chip, says Timesys.

    • Wind River extends support for MIPS64 SoCs

      Wind River and Cavium launched their original partnership to support the Octeon processors back in 2007. In September of last year, after Wind River was acquired by Intel, the company signaled that it would continue to work with Cavium when it announced that Wind River Linux 3.0 for MIPS complied with the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0 networking equipment specification, thereby extending CGL 4.0 support for Cavium’s Octeon processors. The support was also extended to MIPS64-based multi-core processors from RMI Corp., which has been acquired by NetLogic Microsystems.

    • Android

      • Push-to-talk phone runs Android

        Motorola announced what it says is the first push-to-talk phone to run Android. The rugged Motorola i1 runs on Sprint’s iDEN-ready Nextel Direct Connect service, and offers a 3.1-inch, 480 x 320 touchscreen, up to 32GB of flash, WiFi, a five-megapixel camera, plus the Opera Mini 5 browser running on Android 1.5.

      • Fast-boot tech claims to load Android or Linux in one second

        Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Corp. announced the availability of an ARM-focused technology claimed to load Android or Linux in one second. QuickBoot Release 1.0 preferentially restores memory areas necessary for booting from nonvolatile storage to RAM, says the company.

        QuickBoot, which is available in a Linux SDK (see below), is aimed at TVs, STBs, automotive infotainment systems, smartbooks, and smartphones, says Ubiquitous. QuickBoot 1.0 supports ARM9, ARM11, and Cortex-A series processors, says the company, which develops “compact, efficient and high-speed network and database software” for embedded devices.

      • Nexus One on Android 2.1

        But right now, the N1/Android 2.1 combo is in a really sweet spot.

      • Life at Google

        At 7:45 AM on Monday the 15th, I and a bunch of really nervous-looking new employees stood together in a lobby at the Googleplex, waiting to be led in. Here are some random first-week notes while my eyes are still fresh.

        This might turn into a series, because I recognize that my current employer is sort of a technology tourist attraction and people might want to read about it. On the other hand, it has a culture of very cautious communication, so I’ll have to be careful.

      • Dell Aero – Android Never Looked So Good

        This phone is announced along side the first pair of GSM webOS smartphones, Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, to make it to the United States. It also marks the second Android phone to come to AT&T since the Motorola Backflip. We can only hope that the Dell Aero does not follow in the Backflip’s disastrous footsteps. No release date known yet.

      • Dell Aero claimed to be world’s lightest Android phone

        With the addition of the three new phones, AT&T is the only U.S. carrier to offer devices representing all major OSes, says the company. Two weeks ago, AT&T added Motorola’s Backflip to its lineup in a so-far exclusive arrangement, thereby making the carrier’s Android debut. In October, the company began selling the GarminAsus Nuvifone G60, which runs a custom Linux OS.

      • Sprint to announce ‘groundbreaking new device’ (HTC Supersonic?) tomorrow
      • MoSync Comes Closer to “One Tool for All Mobile Platforms” by Adding Android Support

        Swedish software company MoSync AB today announced support for Android devices in its cross-platform mobile development SDK.

      • Moto, Sprint to Offer Push-To-Talk Android i1

        Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Sprint (NYSE: S) today released details of a new push-to-talk, Android-powered smartphone, the Motorola i1, combining the popular ruggedized form of the iDen device family with the features typically found in smartphones.

        The curtain was raised on the i1 at CTIA 2010, being held this week in Las Vegas, and is expected to be available this summer. While pricing details were not disclosed, the two companies had plenty to share in terms of features and specifications.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OggCamp 10
  • Open Source from a European Perspective

    Miguel: We are in Grenoble in the Alps, 3 hours from Paris and also pretty close to Switzerland and Italy. The Bonita Open Source project was created in 2001 at INRIA labs. Then, in 2003 Bull was interested in building a middleware stack based on Open Source and Bonita became one of the key pieces of this stack. Bull supported Bonita development between 2003 and 2008 and by the end of 2008 we had released version 4. We got quite good momentum from a community point of view, with thousands of downloads. And we started to sign some big customers, mostly in Europe.

  • O’Reilly at OSBC: The future’s in the data

    Tim asked a question to the audience: “Could anyone in the Open Source community build the infrastructure to deliver Google Voice Search?” The response: a stony silence. The implication? Vendor lock-in is lo longer about proprietary source code. It’s about massive, hard-to-replicate data sets — making Google a potential Microsoft of the next decade. The corollary? The future will be about who has the most data, and who is able to extract meaning from it and deliver it in real time.

  • Working with Open Source Software Vendors

    IBM executive Bob Sutor had a message for attendees at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco last week: “Ask the hard questions.”

    Sutor, despite himself being an open source software enthusiast (his full title is vice president of Open Source and Linux in IBM’s Software group) said, compared to traditional software vendors, too many companies give open source a pass when it comes to due diligence and scrutiny. And while he said open source has matured quite a bit to where it’s now a proven enterprise asset, that doesn’t mean it should get a rubber-stamp approval.

  • Athena Offers Free, Open Source Network Tool

    Athena Security’s Firewall Browser offers network admins a number of options for troubleshooting on firewalls. According to the company in its press release on The Open Press, Firewall Browser was developed in the spirit of other free and open source network tools like Nessus or Snort, based on the value that functionally-rich non-commercial alternatives should exist for practitioners.

  • Open source and the Morevna project

    Konstatin Dmitriev’s Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation’s Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing, feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while raising awareness of the quality of the code.

  • BIND 10: The First Year
  • Ada Lovelace Day – My Heroines

    “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010.”

    I have many heroes that inspired me to go ahead. Valorie Aurora, Telsa Gwynne, Pia Waugh, Akkanna Peck, Carla Schroeder, so many… but today I would like to talk about two women, who were the most inspiring for me from the beginning. One is a historical figure, other you may not know.

  • SaaS

    • Lock-in, One Way or Another

      Fortunately we know FLOSS thrives on servers and will continue to do so in the cloud or on a thick client or terminal server. My servers dance and provide a much better environment for users than that other OS.

      The question remains whether the big guys can lock us in on the cloud so that the monopoly moves from the thick client to the cloud and nothing really changes regarding the cash-flow of the big guys.

    • NorthScale launches data infrastructure tools; announces Zynga as first customer

      A new company is launching today to helped popular web applications handle their growing data management needs. NorthScale built its tools around the open source memcached technology, and it has already enlisted some high-profile venture firms and customers.

    • Open Source and the PaaS Paradox

      People with an open source background prefer this solution because they instinctively distrust the idea of proprietary platforms controlled by a single vendor. The open source movement has demonstrated the ability of software to move ahead at a rapid pace of innovation when many top developers all have a stake in moving the code forward.

  • Oracle

    • OpenOffice.org Italian Association Thanks Tax Payers!

      The Italian revenue agency has just released the list of ONLUS and volunteer organizations that are eligible for tax payers’ donations (5 per mille), and PLIO, the Italian OpenOffice.org association born in 2007 ,is among them!

    • Oracle/Sun Enforces Pay-For-Security-Updates Plan

      An anonymous reader writes “Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures. What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications.”

    • Free software’s second era: The rise and fall of MySQL
    • Where did all of the MySQL Developers Go?

      The vast majority are still at Oracle, some have left, but plenty are still there. This got me thinking about “who wrote what”. Innodb is a sizable piece of code and it continues to be at Oracle. Without Innodb, you don’t really have a database that is 24/7. Innodb has been there for years.

    • Russia approves Oracle, Sun merger with conditions

      Russia’s anti-monopoly regulator (FAS) said on Friday it had approved a $7 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems JAVA.O by Oracle (ORCL.O) on condition that Oracle continues to develop Sun’s MySQL database.

    • MySQL’s new best friend forever? Oracle

      MySQL still has one major ally, however, and it’s the one that most people thought was its biggest enemy:

      Oracle.

    • Time flies (one year of MariaDB)

      It is now one year since a few colleagues and I left Sun to start our own company, Monty Program Ab (after which more have joined). A lot has changed during the year. For instance we ended up producing a full fork of MySQL rather than focusing on the Maria engine as I planned a year ago.

      This February we released the first stable version of MariaDB, version 5.1.42, which is our enhanced and backwards compatible MySQL branch/fork. You can download it from the askmonty.org website. Please test it out and comment upon it here or on Launchpad, the code host for the MariaDB project.

    • Kiss your MySQL website goodbye

      The fact is that if you run a business website, you need to perform proper backups, and not just the stuff that gets put on a tape and thrown in a closet each evening.

      I am writing this article specifically for those beginning Linux web administrators who need to know how to properly backup their website. Just because you’re new to Linux and web serving does not mean it is difficult or that you should try to avoid performing proper website backups.

  • Business

  • Releases

    • Google releases web security scanner

      Google has released an open source scanner that allows web application developers to test their applications for security holes. The application, called Skipfish, offers a similar functionality to that of tools such as Nmap or Nessus, but it’s said to be much faster. Using fully automated heuristics, it detects code that is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), SQL and XML injection attacks and many other attack types. The tool’s comprehensive post-processing of the individual test results is designed to help with the interpretation of the final report.

  • Government

    • Pirate Party UK launches manifesto

      That shouldn’t affect too many people, though, if there are any photographers still left with a business. The Party believes that “in this fast moving world [sic] 10 years of copyright protection is long enough”. The creator would need to re-apply after five years, however, or the work would fall into the public domain.

      “An exception will be made for software, where a 5 year term will apply to closed source software, and a 10 year term to open source, in recognition of the extra rights given to the public by open source licences.”

    • Gordon Brown: superfast broadband vital to prevent ‘digital divide’

      The speech is a clear sign of the parties’ maneouvring ahead of the election, expected to be called on 6 April to be held on 6 May. In the past month the Tories and Labour have been jockeying for position over their commitment to creating more accessible online government services, broadband and also public access to non-personal government data, with the Tories saying they would introduce a “right to public data” bill to let people request and receive public datasets, publishing details of government contracts worth more than £25,000 online, encouraging use of free open-source software in government development, and encouraging telecoms companies to offer superfast broadband.

    • What Was Gordon Brown Thinking this Morning?

      Not only do we have the key words “open” and “open source” in there, but the UK government is talking about “the will and willingness of the centre to give up control” (and if you believe that last part, then I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.) And yet there is something deeply disturbing about this speech that makes me wonder what on earth Gordon Brown was thinking when he uttered it.

    • Gordon Brown proposes personalised MyGov web services

      Instead of civil servants or politicians being the sole authors of government information, he claimed that open source information will allow citizens to shape information for their own needs.

    • Gordon Brown slammed for supporting Oracle, Microsoft

      Open source technology was cited as the ethos on which Digital Britain will be built. The PM used the shared services centre in the Department for Work and Pensions (the Dole), which already supports 140,000 staff in three departments and plans to take on four more in the next year, as an example of what he wanted.

      Needless to say the Open Source companies are thrilled. Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations, Ingres, the world’s largest open source database provider released a statement saying that this was just the beginning.

    • Tech Companies Play the Franco-Israeli Nexus

      Until now, businesses and government agencies in Israel have been heavy users of Microsoft software, but the open source movement is gaining traction thanks in part to the help and encouragement of the French tech community, says Stolar. “We hope HaCantina will create the necessary ground for collaboration and development and new innovation,” he says. HaCantina doesn’t yet have a physical home, but Kesos and Stolar hope to find a location soon.

  • Licensing

    • A small and unscientific exploration of OSS license use

      I was intrigued by an excellent (as usual) post by Matthew Aslett of 451 group, titled “On the fall and rise of the GNU GPL“, where Matthew muses on the impact of cloud computing and other factors in the decreasing role of the GPLv2 versus other type of licenses. Simon Phipps twitted “you only consider number of projects and not volume of deployed code.

  • Openness

  • Programming

    • EclipseRT Community Continues to Grow with New Projects and Contributors

      Our goal is to create the EclipseRT community for runtime technology similar to what Eclipse has done for developer tools. The foundation of EclipseRT is based on the OSGi standard, supporting a wide spectrum of contributing organizations/individuals. EclipseRT delivers the ability for organizations and developers to build customizable runtime solutions from existing open source technologies.

    • Sonatype Introduces Maven Studio for Eclipse

      Sonatype, caretaker of the Maven project and leading provider of enterprise software development infrastructure, today announced Sonatype Maven Studio for Eclipse. The Studio is the only Eclipse Integrated Development Environment specifically optimized for Maven, the de facto standard for Java project and build management used by more than 3 million Java developers worldwide.

  • Applications

    • Linux Arpeggiators

      There are a host of smaller tools (QJackCtl is indispensable and worth special mention) that help round out a project studio, but the biggest shift in thinking was from running one program, to connecting multiple ones together via Jack.

      It’s funny because in that sense even GUI-heavy big applications mirror the “do one thing and do it well” Unix philosophy.

Leftovers

  • Briton sacked for eating colleague’s snacks

    A British worker on night shift was arrested and later sacked after he helped himself to a few biscuits from a colleague’s desk, a media report said on Tuesday.

    [...]

    Pamela Harrison said that taking biscuits from her desk on December 9 had invaded her privacy, adding: “I’m disappointed that someone who is working as a work colleague finds the need to prowl around people’s personal space and take items which, though of low value, can make someone feel insecure.”

    After the hearing, Campbell said he couldn’t believe that he was being prosecuted.

  • How I blew up the duck house: Heather Brooke on lighting the fuse on the biggest political scandal of our time

    She was a young American journalist living in East London – and she was fed up the secrecy of officialdom. Then Heather Brooke decided to ask for MPs’ expenses receipts. In her new book she tells how she changed Parliament forever…

  • A judge may google to confirm intuition: court

    A federal appeals court said it can be acceptable for a judge to conduct an Internet search to confirm an intuition about a matter of common knowledge.

  • Science

    • Areva plans new reactors that make nuclear waste disappear

      A new type of nuclear reactor that could permanently “destroy” atomic waste is being developed by French scientists, according to the chief executive of Areva, the world’s largest nuclear energy company.

      Anne Lauvergeon told The Times that the French group was developing a technology to burn up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes that are the waste products of nuclear fission inside a reactor. The technology could be critical in winning greater global public support for nuclear energy and cutting emissions of carbon dioxide.

  • China

    • China denounces Google ‘US ties’

      China’s state media has attacked Google for having what it said were “intricate ties” with the US government.

      Google provides US intelligence agencies with a record of its search engine results, the state-run news agency Xinhua said.

    • Academic Paper in China Sets Off Alarms in U.S.

      It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

  • Security

    • 58% of software vulnerable to Google-style security breaches

      Research just released claims to show that 58% of business software is vulnerable to the same security breaches as a seen on Google, the US Department of Defense, and other sites.

    • IRS security faults leave taxpayer information at risk

      In this the heavy tax season where billions of dollars and tons of personal information is relayed to and from the government, it’s more disconcerting to hear that the Internal Revenue Service is still struggling to keep private information secure.

    • House moves to limit use of full-body scanners

      Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, has some serious concerns about the use of whole-body imaging machines, which are becoming more common in airports and government building. Thursday, lawmakers approved Hart’sbill to restrict use of the machines in Idaho.

    • Westminster Lifestyle Survey

      But the overall impression one gets reading this survey is that it is all about building a profile for each person in the area, so that they can be targeted and sold-to at every opportunity. The state wants to know what we eat, drink, smoke and feel because it already knows where we go, how much we spend and what our interests are.

  • Environment

    • I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

      Patel’s career – spent at Oxford, LSE, the World Bank and with thinktank Food First – has been spent trying to understand the inequalities and problems caused by free market economics, particularly as it relates to the developing world.

    • World water day 2010

      Activists around the world marked World Water Day 2010 by highlighting the growing presence of industrial hazardous chemicals in the world’s water supplies.

    • Alaska’s Climate Change Double Agent

      Murkowski, who once seemed to represent a pro-environment voice among Republicans, is now among the most effective forces obstructing legislation to help the environment.

    • Secrets of the Tea Party

      As chairman of FreedomWorks, the group credited with mobilizing the Tea Party movement, Armey is the movement’s de facto leader. Yet Armey’s years spent lobbying for a group recognized by the State Department as being a terrorist organization—should give Tea Partiers pause.

      In the weeks before April 15, 2009, local newspapers began reporting that groups calling themselves TEA, or Taxed Enough Already, were planning rallies to protest wasteful government spending. By the time Tax Day rolled around, over 300 protests were under way in all 50 states. More than 100,000 people took to the streets, gathered in parks and city centers with signs, slogans and costumes evoking America’s revolutionary past.

    • Bill would define tire burning as renewable energy

      With just five words quietly slipped into legislation, Illinois lawmakers are moving to include tire burning in the state’s definition of renewable energy, a change that would benefit a south suburban incinerator with a long history of pollution problems.

  • Finance

    • No comment needed
    • Headline stock news delayed to the benefit of big traders

      In another of those court decisions that infuriate critics of intellectual property, Judge Denise Cote, of the United States District Court in New York, ruled in favor of Barclays, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. The banks claimed that the website, theflyonthewall.com, violated their copyright when it published headline news like changes in stock ratings link here. The site must now wait until 10 a.m. to publish news about research that was issued before the 9:30 a.m. opening bell or if issued during the day, by a full two hours.

    • Dodd Move Blocks Progressive Reforms

      With over 400 amendments readied for the committee debate on Senator Chris Dodd’s financial reform package, Banking Chairman Dodd decided to ditch the democratic process and vote his own version of the bill out of committee. This moves the real debate to the Senate floor and worsens progressive’s chance of improving the bill.

    • Lehman Scandal: Where’s the Follow Up?

      In the banking world, there are generally four types of risk; liquidity risk, credit risk, operational risk and reputational risk. Of these, only reputational risk failures threaten the entire value of the business and its goodwill. If our questions remain unanswered, the entire financial system will remain dangerously exposed.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Attorney-General Michael Atkinson quits front bench

      TROUBLE-plagued Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has fallen on his sword to make way for fresh blood in a new Labor ministry.

      [...]

      He has been dogged by a string of controversies – think internet censorship, stashed cash, Ashbourne-Clarke and the senior magistrate defamation case.

      He also has attracted national criticism over his refusal to allow an R18+ rating for video games.

      His humiliating backflip over internet censorship laws on the night of Februrary 2 came after a furious reaction on AdelaideNow to The Advertiser’s exclusive report on the new law.

    • Anonymous Comments: Are They Good or Evil?

      In a nutshell, Howard said that anonymous comments were an abomination (I’m paraphrasing somewhat) and were in fact unethical, since commenters on a news site had a “fundamental right” to know the identity of the other people commenting. I tried to make a number of points, including the fact that anonymity is a red herring, and that the more important thing in encouraging a strong and healthy community conversation is standards of behaviour, regardless of anonymity. I also tried to make the point that anonymity has its benefits, and that many people — some of whom might have valuable contributions to make — would never comment if they had to use real names (Howard made the point that allowing anonymity excludes other people).

    • Egypt regulator enforces Internet voice call ban

      Egypt has begun enforcing a ban on international calls made through mobile internet connections, the head of the telcoms regulator told Reuters on Tuesday, potentially boosting voice revenues at landline monopoly Telecom Egypt.

    • DOJ Might Be Facebook-Stalking You

      With the help of the University of California Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents from the government about how they monitor and use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn to gather information for investigations. The EFF struck gold with this request, as both the IRS and the Department of Justice released training presentations on social networking sites. While this may seem benign, the training material from the DOJ suggests that feds go undercover on sites such as Facebook to gather information on crime.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • BBC Link Policy: We Want To Send A Lot Of Traffic To Other Sites

      It then goes into a list of specific policies, which pretty much all focus on adding lots of external links to stories. Of course, given how UK newspapers are suddenly working hard to block links from others, you have to wonder if those same papers are going to start blocking the BBC as well…

    • Cablevision Buying Blogs… Will It Lock Them Up Behind A Paywall Too?

      True to form, Cablevision decided the best thing to do with Newsday was to spend $4 million redesigning and putting up a paywall that drove away some writers and convinced 35 people to sign up in its first three months. Yes, 35. Of course, Cablevision insisted that the goal was really about reducing churn by offering the newspaper website to Cablevision cable TV and broadband subscribers, but it still seems like a pretty big failure all around.

    • Frost & Sullivan Analyst Apparently Has Never Heard Of Network TV: Says Video Can’t Be Free To Consumers

      Basically, there’s proof that free-to-the-consumer video has worked in the past, and can work again.

    • Beware of Default Judgments: Captcha Gotcha Spammers Under Digital Millenium Copyright Act

      Craiglist was told by the spammer that he’d sold about $40,000 worth of the autoposter software. Craigslist pursued both Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201 (“DMCA”) and the TOU (Contract) claims.

      The spammer did not hire a lawyer to defend the lawsuit and failed to respond to pleadings and court notices.

      Craiglist obtained default judgments pursuant to Rule 55 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure under both the DMCA for statutory damages of $470,000 and under the TOU (Contract) for $840,000. The court found the liquidated damages clause of $200 per unauthorized post to be enforceable. The court accepted Craigslist’s lowest estimate of unauthorized posts. The spammer, Igor Gasov was held personally liable.

    • Viacom’s Real Intent? To Pretend The DMCA Requires Filtering

      So please pay careful attention to the actual arguments being made here. No one is saying that copyright infringement should be allowed on YouTube. The only question is whether or not it should be YouTube’s responsibility to proactively monitor that content and stop it from being uploaded. The law is pretty clear that this is not required — and, as Google’s filing makes clear, even if it were required, given Viacom’s own actions, this would be impossible.

    • Hollywood Continues To Make Up Facts; AP Continues To Parrot Them

      With these big professional reporters, you might think they would try to fact check a claim like “90% of all “pirated” DVDs come from camcorded movies.” They might have trouble doing that, because the actual research suggests something quite different. A study that we wrote about a few years ago found otherwise. Specifically, it found that “77% appear to have been leaked originally by industry insiders.”

      But, of course, we need to save the AP, because they do real fact checking, right?

    • Don’t Call Them “Pirates”

      I agree. Copyright infringers should not be called pirates. A pirate is a robber, plunderor, predator. The term much better describes the patent and copyright lobbies, which use state monopoly grants to plunder and rob the masses.

    • Can The Government Use The Term ‘Music Piracy’ In A Criminal Copyright Trial?

      Via Michael Scott, we learn that there was recently a debate over whether or not the government could use the phrase “music piracy” to describe the actions of an individual who had been charged with criminal copyright infringement.

    • A Supersized Custody Battle Over Marvel Superheroes

      WHEN the Walt Disney Company agreed in August to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel Entertainment, the comic book publisher and movie studio, it snared a company with a library that includes some of the world’s best-known superheroes, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four.

    • ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

      • ACTA Set To Cover Not Just Copyrights & Trademarks, But Seven Areas Of IP

        1. Copyright and Related Rights
        2. Trademarks
        3. Geographical Indications
        4. Industrial Designs
        5. Patents
        6. Layout-Designs (Topographies) of Integrated Circuits
        7. Protection of Undisclosed Information

      • ACTA to cover seven catagories of intellectual property

        The ten defined terms include:

        * days
        * intellectual property (See below)
        * Council (ACTA Oversight Council)
        * measure
        * person (natural or juridical)
        * right owner (includes federation or assicaitons that have legal standing or authoirty to assert rights)
        * territory
        * TRIPS Agreement
        * WTO
        * WTO Agreement

      • I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills: EU’s Latest ACTA Proposal Outlaws the Internet

        Sometimes a story is so insane that you can’t help but wonder if someone has slipped you some crazy pills. See, for example, the Google prosecution in Italy. I honestly thought that story could not be topped. But lo and behold, it appears that the EU has proposed to add third-party CRIMINAL liability to the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA). This essentially outlaws the entire Internet. Insanity.

        Background: Third party civil liability for copyright infringement is an emerging, but still controversial, doctrine as applied to the Internet. A site may be liable if it has incited and/or facilitated the violation of copyright, see Grokster. The limits of this doctrine are still being tested: it is not clear what level of hosting or facilitating actually triggers liability. For an example of this endemic uncertainty, the § 512 of the DMCA creates a safe harbor for ISPs, provided that the ISP expeditiously removes infringing content after the ISP is put on notice. However, it is unclear what material is so obviously infringing that its very presence should put the ISP on notice (this is the controversial “red flag” test).

      • The broad threats of ACTA

        DEMOCRACY:

        ACTA aims to create a new model of global governance that bypasses the normal procedures of multilateral international institutions, the European Parliament and national legislatures.

        A FAIRER WORLD:

        ACTA is a vast protectionist initiative to defend a few economic interests of the richest countries and to limit access to knowledge and other socially essential goods like medicines in the developing nations. Poorer countries will be forced to agree to ACTA’s unfair provisions as a condition for free trade agreements and other bilateral accords.

        ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE, SAFE MEDICINE:

        ACTA willfully confuses fake, fraudulant drugs with legal, generic drugs under the same suspicion and same possible confiscation. Draconian border measures and criminal enforcement imposed on third countries will create barriers to trade in essential, life-saving medication and other goods.

      • The EU ACTA Consultation: European Commission vs. European Parliament

        The European Commission hosted a fascinating consultation on ACTA today. Luc Devigne, the lead European negotiator, opened with a brief presentation and proceeded to field questions for over an hour. The full consultation video is available online. The discussion touched on many issues including Devigne arguing that the WTO consistently blocked any attempt to address IP enforcement issues and stating that the treaty is limited to enforcement and not new substantive provisions (this assumes that anti-circumvention rules are a matter of enforcement, not substance).

      • 10,000 people call for proper debate on the Digital Economy Bill

        So far, over 10,000 people have written to their MPs demanding that the government does its job and holds a proper debate on the Digital Economy Bill. If you haven’t done so already, send a letter to your MP now, and ask your friends to do the same. It’s a simple, quick and easy process. You can either email the standard letter provided on that site, or write your own.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 01 (2004)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

Links 23/3/2010: KDE 4.4.1 in Mandriva 2010, Demand for GNU/Linux Skills Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 6:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What is this Linux thingy and why should I care?

    Linux is a free operating system just like Windows or Mac OS. The great thing about Linux is that it is completely free to download and use. I am shocked when I see people going into computer stores and paying hundreds of dollars for Windows. Most people do not know about Linux because there is no single company behind the project. It is a community effort and many individuals, companies and organizations are involved to bring you this amazing OS.

  • Using Ubuntu Linux to Rescue Windows

    Did Windows crash beyond repair? If so, you probably want to get your files off of the drive before you erase everything and reinstall Windows. This tutorial will help you do exactly that.

    We’re going to use Ubuntu’s LiveCD mode. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution that’s a free and open source alternative to Windows. The LiveCD mode lets you boot into and use the operating system (OS) without installing anything on the computer. You should be able to view your files and copy them to another drive, backup to discs, or transfer via a network. Now let’s get started!

  • XtreemOS 2.1: Linux for the Grid

    The XtreemOS consortium developers have announced the release of version 2.1 of their Linux-based Grid operating system. The project, which has as its motto “Making Grid Computing Easier”, is aimed at creating an open source Grid OS with native support for virtual organisations (VO) and the ability to run on a wide range of platforms, from clusters to mobiles.

  • Going Linux for Mar 22: #097 – Linux and Cloud Computing-Introduction

  • Server

    • Linux: A Platform for the Cloud

      The goal of this article is to review the history and architecture of Linux as well as its present day developments to understand how Linux has become today’s leading platform for cloud computing. We will start with a little history on Unix system development and then move to the Linux system itself.

    • The Linux of stock markets

      Today’s news that TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) has moved to Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as the operating platform for its next-generation “Arrowhead” trading system shouldn’t come as a surprise. Linux has become the smart stock market’s operating system of choice.

      Red Hat has been working with TSE and Fujitsu for some time on the Arrowhead platform. As always with stock markets, the name of the game is to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds. According to Red Hat, “Arrowhead is designed to combine low latency with high reliability to accommodate diverse products, trading rules and changes within a short time window.”

    • Open source finds its way into CFD trading

      Czech-German company xITee has announced a recent delivery of a new version of the CFD–Trading-Platform to the German company Panthera Capital AG, which is the technical solution provider for CeFDex AG.

      Version 2.1 is fully based on open-source software. It uses an EnterpriseDB/PostgreSQL database, and JBoss server as an application server.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • New brush in Krita: Softbrush

        I stared to change the function that produce the brush mask and affects it’s softness. I selected Gaussian as it is nice function and I experiment with this function, but I found it complicated to control it (you setup sigma, uh what is sigma, you artist ask?). So let’s add some different function to the brush mask code. Oh, let’s put this decision to the artists hands, let’s give him some curve he can model as he want. We already has nice widget for that in Krita, so use it. So you can setup the brush mask by curve!

      • muscle memory

        A friend was showing me his Hackint0sh today, and while it was interesting to see that fine OS on an non-approved platform, it confirmed a few things to me, such as the idea that regardless of where it was installed or how hacked it is, I still wouldn’t use it. This I knew already, but it was nice to come back to it after a year of not really having touched it and confirming what I already knew.

        [...]

        For years, before I knew how to create my own keyboard shortcuts really effectively in KDE, I would subconciously hit unique-to-App1e keyboard shortcuts (like command-shift-3 or command-shift-n) and expect them to work on KDE. I’d do a double take when they didn’t work, then my brain would kick in and override the muscle memory and I’d do whatever the correct procedure was.

  • Distributions

    • Elive 2.0 – Distro Review

      This is Elive’s slogan. As I am sure you can guess, it is a Debian based distribution that uses the Enlightenment window manager. I always like to jump in with both feet when it comes to playing with technology, so to get the best feel for what Elive is and how it works I downloaded the LiveCD and installed it as the primary operating system on my Sager Laptop.

    • KDE 4.4.1 available for Mandriva 2010 !!

      The first bugfix release of KDE 4.4 was released at the beginning of this month and again thanks to neoclust we have packages for Mandriva 2010 available since last week. You can follow the instructions of my previous post about the upgrade to KDE 4.4.0 to upgrade to 4.4.1. If you are upgrading from KDE 4.4.0 then don’t forget to disable or delete the old KDE 4.4.0 repository before starting this upgrade, just in case.

    • Epidemic GNU/Linux

      Epidemic GNU / Linux is a Linux distro created by Brazilians using the KDE graphical interface. Modern is one of the main attractions which classify Epidemic distrobuições one of the best current Linux using KDE.

    • Red Hat Inc. Call Buying Spikes Ahead of Earnings

      Linux specialist Red Hat Inc. (RHT) is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings report after the close of trading on Wednesday, March 24. Analysts are currently looking for a profit of 16 cents per share from the company, up from earnings of 14 cents per share in the same quarter last year. Historically, Red Hat’s results have been modestly better than expected during the past four quarters, topping the consensus estimate twice and matching twice for an average upside surprise of more than 14%.

    • Ubuntu

      • Lucid Lynx beta boasts social networking features

        The Ubuntu project released its first beta of Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”), offering two new themes, social-networking tools, cloud-related enhancements, faster boot-times, and an updated Firefox browser with Yahoo search as default. Meanwhile, an oddball icon placement in one theme has Ubuntu users up in arms.

      • Free Software is a democracy, Mark Shuttleworth!

        No. Ubuntu has a kernel team because Canonical thinks it needs one, Canonical feels the need to change the kernel. How many serious security flaws have there been in Ubuntu? And how many were specific to Ubuntu? Linus Torvalds makes the kernel decisions, not Ubuntu’s kernel team. Ubuntu’s kernel team should only be there to make appropriate changes, like which modules are included, swappiness, hard disk parameters, and which kernel version should be used.

        Linus makes these decisions because he started the kernel. Ubuntu’s kernel team’s messing with it has only caused problems. And because Linus believes in democracy he doesn’t complain when Ubuntu’s kernel team messes with it. He wouldn’t have any right to anyway, because the GPL is designed to allow open development and democracy of software development.

      • Ubuntu users, Shuttleworth doesn’t owe you anything

        It’s difficult to understand why GNU/Linux users have this sense of entitlement and often make meaningless threats to try and get their preferences implemented. The software is free, one benefits by using it (else I doubt anyone would be doing so) and it comes out with clockwork-like regularity. There really is not much scope for complaint.

      • Unleashing The Ubuntu LoCo Directory

        In terms of resources for this community, we have the following key components:

        * Wiki Pages – these wiki pages include best practise and details about how to join the community.
        * Teams List – this is the big list of teams, complete with contact details and online resources.
        * Mailing List – this is where the LoCo community discuss general LoCo related topics. In most cases cases teams have mailing lists too.
        * #ubuntu-locoteams on Freenode – this is an online discussion channel where you can ask questions and socialize with other LoCo community members.

      • Two Ubuntu Community Team Intern Opportunities Available

        I want to be clear that my team is a fast-paced, hard-working, hectic environment. I am going to work you hard, and you should expect that, but my goal here is to help you squeeze every ounce of opportunity out of your internship. We will have 1-on-1 weekly calls, I will help guide you on what to work on, help you manage your work, solve problems, and be effective in your projects. In other words: when you sign up for your internship, expect a solid six month adventure, but an adventure that will sow the seeds for many great opportunities in the future.

      • Ubuntu’s Latest Should Scare Microsoft

        The Ubuntu community, shepherded by the company Canonical, has delivered not only its fastest operating system to date but has included so many flourishes that are relevant to today’s PC market that it should receive much stronger consideration in competitive engagements than ever before. From social networking to security to desktop cloud services, the Beta 1 of Ubuntu 10.04, the so-called Lucid Lynx version, leaves Windows 7 behind in several areas with tightly integrated applications.

      • The UbuntuOne Music Store Now Open

        The store is “built in” to Rhythmbox meaning you don’t need to install any extra add-ons to use it – simply start Rhythmbox and click the ‘UbuntuOne’ sidebar entry to load up the store and do some browsing.

      • Ubuntu 10.04 in Beta, Stable Release in April

        Ubuntu is Linux for the rest of us. It is simple to install and use. Despite that, not that many users are on board with estimates of 1-2% of all computer users running various Linux operating systems. But with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, there might be a few reasons to give it a try. It is currently in beta, so you may not want to install it on your primary computer.

      • Ubuntu One Music Store Public Beta Begins
      • Ubuntu One and the Lucid Lynx (Ubunt 10.04)
      • Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

        Overall there seems to have been quite a few changes to Ubuntu in this release. However, most of these are cosmetic measures. As well, many of them look like an attempt to boost revenue at Canonical. Over the long term, this may not go down too well with the community. Still, I’ve found this to be an excellent release, far better than the 9.10 which I didn’t give a lot of love.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Dual-core SOC for thin clients runs Android locally

      NComputing shipped a SoC (system-on-chip) designed for thin clients that will provide multimedia-enabled remote access to Windows and Linux desktops, and optionally run Android 2.1 locally. The $20 Numo SoC is based on a dual-core ARM-based CPU, and is designed to work with the company’s VSpace virtualization software.

    • Dell Aero claimed to be world’s lightest Android phone

      AT&T said it will soon announce the Dell Aero, which appears to be a version of Dell’s Android-based Mini 3 phone, and is claimed to be the lightest Android smartphone on the market. The wireless carrier also announced that it will soon offer the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus smartphones.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OpenSSO becomes OpenAM

    This entry in the not403 blog discusses OpenSSO, a single sign-on project which Oracle acquired from Sun and has subsequently shut down.

  • Mario Goes Open-Source with Arduino

    The open-source Arduino electronics platform has received a ton of attention from the hardware enthusiast community. And one more follower is joining the fray–Mario himself. The mustachioed plumber of console video game fame has been converted into an eight-by-eight LED matrix by Carnegie Mellon University student Chloe Fan. And, yes, she’s even made a separate Arduino device to give her side-scrolling adventure the classic Mario theme.

  • Why Community Projects Need CRM Too

    You might think of customer relationship management (CRM) software as something that’s only useful for businesses, but it can play an important role in the health of a community project as well.

    Think of it not as “customer” relationship management, but community management software. In every community I’ve worked with, there’s been a revolving cast of participants who each have contact with a slice of the internal community and external contacts for that community. Think about everything from managing conferences and sponsorships, to working with other open projects.

  • Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Announced

    The role of a mentoring organization is to provide a list of projects for students to choose from, and shepherd a student through the Summer of Code process. The organization is also expected to provide feedback and a written evaluation of the student’s work, as well as make sure work is down well and turned in on time.

  • Why Webscale Companies Need open Source

    Facebook, et. al., would not be possible today if it weren’t for open source software. Commodity hardware and open source software have provided the fertile breeding ground for Web-scale sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others. Of course they’re going to turn to open source for the next generation of software. Had the initial stack of software they rely on been proprietary, their existence wouldn’t have been possible. But these companies have enjoyed the control and flexibility that open source enables and they are wisely choosing to invest their profits into more of the same.

    Web companies should absolutely, and fully, commit themselves to rolling their own code or hitching their wagon to existing open source solutions. The alternative is to cede an unhealthy amount of control over their infrastructure to outside parties.

  • Must-have Open Source Applications for Writers
  • Bursting with reports to deliver? Here’s a tool for you

    DocumentBurster is a light, loosely coupled free report-bursting tool that lets you automate high-volume document delivery to customers, vendors, employees, and prospects. You can pay the big money to buy a similar solution from the likes of Oracle, IBM, or BusinessObjects, or you can turn to this open source application.

  • Skills

    • Need for Open Source Developers Continues to Increase

      And while open source jobs declined slightly in the nearly 40,000 jobs posted on U.S-based online workteam builder oDesk (PDF link) that was mainly due to a surge in job requests for folks with social media skills. MySQL, Joomla, Linux, PHP and other open-source skills were comfortably in the top 50 skills requested by job posters.

    • Demand grows for SQL and Linux skills

      Demand for nearly all skills fell in the period compared with Q4 2008. Only demand for PHP and AJAX skills grew in Q4 2009 compared with the same period in 2008, 17 percent and six percent, respectively.

  • Oracle

    • OpenOffice in Afrikaans

      Translate.org.za has recently released local language versions of OpenOffice.org which give users a full set of office tools including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and a drawing application.

  • CMS

    • Vosao: CMS for Google App Engine

      This is on top of Vosao’s support for WYSIWYG editing, content versioning, SEO-friendly URLs and other standard CMS goodies. The goal of the project isn’t just to produce a free software CMS (it’s licensed under the GPLv2), but to support App Engine, which allows free hosting for sites with up to 500 MB of storage and 5 million page views per month.

  • Programming

    • New Python versions released

      The Python developers have released two new version of the programming language. Versions 2.6.5 and 3.1.2 are both new maintenance releases; 2.6.5 of the older Python 2.6 development strand, and 3.1.2, of the current Python development version. Because Python 2.6 is currently in bug fix mode, there is no added functionality, but over sixty bugs have been fixed in the Python 2.6.5 release since the previous version.

    • The Difficulties of Unwritten Community Standards

      The strong sense of community standards in Perl and the CPAN offers many benefits. The uniformity of conventions suggests that all of the code I’m likely to use has decent documentation, a test suite, a project page on the CPAN, dependency tracking, and a very reasonable chance of installing correctly (or at least strong community pressure to figure out why it doesn’t and to fix it).

Leftovers

  • Web

    • The Government has allocated millions to create an Institute for Web Science.

      Alongside promises for superfast broadband, the government today announced £30 million to create an Institute for Web Science, lead by web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee and professor Nigel Shadbolt.

    • H.264 – A sting in the tail

      In the view of Tim Berners-Lee, “the lesson from the proliferation of new applications and services on top of the web infrastructure is that innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards, a flexible, scalable architecture, and access to these standards on royalty-free terms.”

      H.264 is owned by MPEG-LA, the company that runs the patent pool shared between companies with patents on the codec. It is in the interest of the patent pool to encourage adoption of the codec, and to this end, MPEG-LA has promised that H.264 will remain royalty-free until 2016.

    • An Overview of HTML5 and Its Anticipated Features

      “Standards are as interesting as a Russian Truck,” said Ken Olsen, president and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, at that time the second largest computer system company in the world.

      It was a fairly strange statement to come from a person whose company had helped develop more computer standards than almost any other, and the press had a field day with that quote. If he said it today, Ken might be thought to be addressing HTML5, the long-awaited standard of what has become the most important publishing mechanism on the face of the earth…the web.

    • Kaltura Brings Video Services to Higher Education

      Kaltura, an open source online video platform, is headed to college. The company has partnered with IT consulting firm Unicon, Inc. to deliver its video services to higher education institutions. Kaltura’s software already integrates with popular learning management systems like Moodle, so Unicon’s role as an authorized reseller will be to do the heavy lifting associated with getting the product up and running in schools and universities.

  • Security

    • Peter Watts may serve two years for failing to promptly obey a customs officer

      That’s apparently the statute: if you don’t comply fast enough with a customs officer, he can beat you, gas you, jail you and then imprison you for two years. This isn’t about safety, it isn’t about security, it isn’t about the rule of law.

      It’s about obedience.

      Authoritarianism is a disease of the mind. It criminalizes the act of asking “why?” It is the obedience-sickness that turns good people into perpetrators and victims of atrocities great and small.

    • Computer glitch prompts 50 raids on elderly couple’s home

      New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized to an elderly Brooklyn couple on Friday for about 50 door-pounding visits police made to their home resulting from a glitch in one of the department’s computers.

  • Finance

    • Bernanke Asked by Towns on Friedman’s Goldman Stake

      A House committee requested that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke turn over documents related to Stephen Friedman’s purchase of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. shares while he was on the boards of both the Wall Street firm and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

    • Goldman Sachs: Need… More… Evil!

      Which begs the obvious question: Why on EARTH would Goldman, if it has the slightest interest in rehabilitating its public standing, bring in a former honcho from Wal-Mart to help oversee its management?

    • Who Needs Wall Street?

      The idea of a transfer tax, on financial trading generally, has resurfaced. European leaders, like Gordon Brown in England, are in favor. Timothy Geithner, the U.S. Treasury secretary, has resisted the idea. The ideal of a frictionless market is so instinctual that we have lost sight of the peril that comes with speed. Maybe it’s time to slow the markets down.

    • Goldman’s Huge Call: Don’t Be Fooled, There Won’t Be Any Real Tightening This Year

      So the message from Goldman seems to be: Don’t expect any significant form of tightening in 2010.

    • The Pay Czar Threatens Goldman Sachs And Morgan Stanley With More Clawbacks

      Government officials told the WSJ that the pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, will review compensation at all 417 firms that took government bailout funds, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley.

    • The Perks of Being a Goldman Kid

      But the filing did note that Ms. Stecher’s son made $200,000 last year and that Mr. Viniar’s stepdaughter made $225,000 last year. That’s a substantial increase from 2008, when the two children made $124,000 and $150,000, respectively, according to Goldman’s 2009 proxy.

    • Pay czar widens review of executive pay at banks
    • Reining In Greed at Goldman

      Last year, the high compensation accrued across the banking industry — at a time when most people were suffering from a recession partly created by bankers’ excesses — provoked an angry response. A special industry tax was imposed in Britain, and various levies were proposed in the United States. Ultimately, most banks reined in pay.

    • Volcker Rule Hinges on Dodd’s ‘Shall’ Becoming ‘May’

      Lobbyists for financial firms are seeking to water down language in Section 619 of the 1,336-page proposal by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat. Their message: Study the issue first to see if it’s needed, then give regulators the option of imposing a ban.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Command & Conquer 4 requires constant online connection

      EA proudly declared that C&C4 has “NO DRM” but clearly this is not the case. C&C4 will boot you if your connection drops, making it no less insidious than Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5. Electronic Arts is trying to justify the DRM by saying the game updates user statistics, but it’s a poor excuse given that other games simply wait until a player is back online to update stats.

  • ACTA

    • Your life will some day end; ACTA will live on

      The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn’t just another secret treaty—it’s a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement.

      Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week, including a chapter on “Institutional Arrangements” that has not leaked before. The chapter makes clear that ACTA will be far more than a standard trade agreement; it appears to be nothing less than an attempt to make a new international institution that will handle some of the duties of groups like the WTO and WIPO.

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