• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Applications

• Festbox, free software tools and documentation for building new speech synthesis voices in English and other languages.

  This project is part of the work at Carnegie Mellon University’s speech group aimed at advancing the state of Speech Synthesis.

• Instructionals

  • Creating self-signed certificates with gnoMINT

  • Ubuntu: Fixing the Blank Screen on Installation Bug

  • How To setup Dmenu with Ubuntu?

  • 3 Unix Shell Scripts – User Activity, View Processes, Display Memory

  • How to install Eclipse SDK 4.0 on Linux (Slackware 13.1)

  • TeXworks with Sweave

  • Install KDE on Fedora 13

  • Why the risk of running as root is overblown

  • Move your logs and temp files to RAM and watch your portable fly!

  • Skipping fsck checks during boot with CTRL-C

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • GSoC 2010: Mind Mapping in KOffice

    A key element of mind map is tree which layouts shapes with text. I decided tree may be usefull not only for mind mapping, but for some other things. So I started working on TreeShape plugin. Plugin makes it possible to layout any KOffice shapes in tree structure and manage it.

Distributions

• Distributions – A Brief History

  It seems as though there are as many Linux distributions as there are letters in the alphabet with which to name them. Certainly, there is a flavor to satisfy almost any palate. It wasn’t always this way, however. How did it happen? Why hasn’t the Linux world just standardized on a single distribution?

  The beginning of the Linux distribution really started with Richard Stallman and his fledgling Free Software Foundation in the early 1980s. The GNU operating system was being developed, intending to re-implement a UNIX-like operating system as free software. Although many GNU tools enjoyed wide use, the project suffered various setbacks and delays in its hunt for a kernel. There was a lack of cooperation from some at Berkeley with using the BSD kernel, and there were licensing issues with Mach (Carnegie-Mellon University’s microkernel). Before these issues were resolved and the GNU Project was able to make headway building its own kernel, Hurd (another free kernel) became available for use.

• Reviews

  • Sabayon – no, I dont know what it means!

    Sabayon on the whole is a very usable system. Not as slick as some of the bigger boys but certainly capable of handling itself in a scrap. Media support is a bit patchy but good enough and XBMC pulls it out of the bag and gives it a purpose and some edge.

  • Mepis Mepis Mepis

    Killer Feature: Hard to find one really. Mepis is solid and the DVD runs nicely but the not wanting to boot from the hard drive aspect worries me that if it doesn’t work for me then its likely to not work somewhere else. Several nice touches like gadgets and widgets on the desktop but nothing that really stands out.

    Final verdict on Mepis is that its …OK. It works for some and not others and has made me appreciate what KDE has to offer in terms of built in software. Not blown away but it looks nice and does most tasks reasonably well.

  • Arch Linux Promising, Disappointing

    Arch Linux looks promising. The installation is easy, the documentation is helpful, and the package manager interface is simple.

    [...]

    In summary, the helpfulness of the Arch docs is directly proportional to the brokenness of Arch packages. To me, Arch is yet another distribution inferior to Ubuntu.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Linux Spring 2010

    So far it has been a smooth ride except for one annoying problem. I am not able to shut down my laptop.

  • Distro Hoppin`: Mandriva 2010.1

    Mandriva enjoys the support of many mirrors for their repositories and the closest one to my location helped me achieve awesome speeds, beyond 10 MB/s. Sadly, there were quite a lot of times when that mirror didn’t work at all. As a simple workaround, you can always change the mirror to a more reliable one from Software Manager → Options → Media Manager → File → Add a specific media mirror.

  • Man Driver – Mandriva Linux

    Verdict on Mandriva is that its the best non-Debian based system I have tried in these tests. Its got all the right ingredients to keep most people happy other than some support for DVDs or an easy way of getting them to work without hours of fiddling and downloading codecs.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Mark Shuttleworth apologises for alleged sexist comment

      Mark Shuttleworth has apologised “unreservedly to all offended” for his “poor choice of language” during LinuxCon 2009 during which a comment made by the Ubuntu founder was deemed to be sexist by many members of the Linux community

      The redress, given in the comment section of his blog, states: – “I apologize unreservedly to all offended by my poor choice of language on that or other occasion.”

    • We’ve got issue 39 out for you!

      That’s right, Full Circle issue 39 is out! We’ve got a review of the iRobot iPad Android tablet, talk about virtualizing Fedora, virtual memory, new interviews, and more! (Oh, and we seem to have the recurring theme of ’13′ in our articles.)

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Yuhnke commentary: Can a free alternative really replace Microsoft Windows on your mobile computer

        Over the past week I’ve been testing out a free operating system designed for netbooks called Jolicloud . I downloaded the installer from their website, went through a few prompts and within about 30 minutes it was up and running. The best part is, I was able to keep Windows on my netbook too. After installation, a prompt appears when I first turn my computer on asking me if I want to load Windows or Jolicloud. This made me feel safe, knowing that I could always go back to Windows if things didn’t work out.

        The first thing I noticed was the simplicity. There’s very little clutter on the screen. The interface is similar to what you see on an iPhone, there are pages of app icons. You can click the “Add” button in the upper left corner to find more applications to add to your netbook. It’s almost like the App Store on an iPhone. Jolicloud is based off Linux so it runs pretty smooth and there are about 700 applications available for Jolicloud. This includes office applications that support Microsoft Office files, video players, music organizers, etc.

      • Kubuntu gets Global Menu

        Kubuntu 10.10 has finally got its application menu integration ready. The application menu, also called “Global Menu” is not same as the one found in UNE 10.10, but it is using the same infrastructure.

      • Pinguy OS (Remastered Ubuntu) – Ubuntu After A Week Of Customizations [Review]

        Pinguy OS is a remastered Ubuntu with a lot of useful default applications – great for those who don’t like to do a lot of tweaking and want an OS that “just works”. Pinguy OS doesn’t rebrand Ubuntu, so you’ll have the same Plymouth theme, the Ubuntu logo for the menu and so on.

Open to Everyone: How Open Source Communities Can Benefit from Diversity Without Disunity, Teresa Jewell

Open source is at once a type of software licensing, a community model, an ideology, and a social movement. As a movement aiming not only to promote open source software within the software development community, but also to change the attitudes of commercial users, it can benefit from lessons learned by earlier social movements.

Integrating Lessons from Other Disciplines into Open Source Practice, Mekki MacAulay

Open source theory and practice is inherently interdisciplinary. Viewing the challenges faced by open source communities, businesses, and contributors through the lenses of different disciplines can yield novel solutions. This article reviews select lessons from the diverse fields of fashion, gaming, and scientometrics. It examines the way these other industries have addressed issues that are of relevance to the open source community and suggests ways to put these lessons to good use.

Oracle

• Is OpenSolaris About To Be Forked As Illumos?

BSD

• GhostBSD 1.5 Screenshots

  GhostBSD 1.5 is based on the FreeBSD live CD however because this release is a little larger it comes on as a live DVD. As of this release GhostBSD is completely installable by issuing a list of commands and pc-sysinstall. A file with instructions for installing GhostBSD appear on the desktop. Although this install method is a little bit tough to complete, Eric Turgeonhas stated “Now for the next 6 mount I gonna work on a graphic installer for 2.0.” You can find more in the official release announcement. Please keep in mind you can buy Free-BSD and PC-BSD in our cart.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• ZeroPaid Interviews the Free Software Foundation

  Open source has been in the media for quite some time whether directly or indirectly. With ACTA leak and the ASCAP letter two big news items that affects open source, we decided to sit down with the Free Software Foundation and talk about these and other things related to the open source movement.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Emerging-technology expert calls for open access to academic knowledge

    It is almost “criminally irresponsible” to hoard academic knowledge in the digital age, according to a Canadian specialist in the field.

    Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, also said that open educational resources (OERs) could help to reassert the academy’s role as a “leader and guardian of free and open enquiry”.

  • Open Access sceptics: parallels with climate change

    As a closing thought, if we think of academic journals in the OA debate as oil in the climate change debate, we are only going to have less and less access to them as time goes on. Academic libraries cannot afford to subscribe to them all, and that is only going to get worse. In the same way that in 50, 100, 150 years time (whatever it may be) we will have no oil-based fuel to put in our cars, in 10, 15, 20 years time you may be even less likely than you are now to reach your desired audience by simply relying on the subscription base of a given journal. Rather than waiting to see if this happens, why not do something about it now?

  • For the last time – open access is not like stealing bread

    The Times Higher ran a piece on ceviche cooking edupunk Brian Lamb’s keynote at the recent JISC OER event in London. Brian makes his usual good points, but it was some of the comments that were revealing.

    In particular, one that states “We should also have ‘open access’ at Tesco: I should just be able to take from their shelves what I want without paying.”

Programming

• An Accurate Comparison of Perl 5 and Rakudo Star

  Rakudo Star is a useful and usable subset of Perl 6 you can use right now. It does not implement the complete Perl 6.0 specification, and it’s by no means the final release: it contains bugs and misfeatures, and it’s had very little optimization work for speed or memory.

Is Punch Google’s Swing At Microsoft Publisher?

There’s a new mystery on the web today. In an otherwise boring video about “Google Lookup in Google Docs,” the search giant appears to have inadvertently revealed a new Google Docs product called “Punch.” So what on Earth is it?

The blog Google Operating System (which spotted the feature) has its guess: “Maybe Google Punch is a free-form document that lets you combine data from other documents, spreadsheets, presentations and forms.” ReadWriteWeb expands on that a bit for a similar guess: “Perhaps a Punch is a mix of functions and content intended for collaboration, more than for posting publishing like Google Pages is.” Both sound plausible, but we have another guess.

Cautious Arm declines to revise guidance

Arm, the UK’s largest technology company by market value, declined to raise its full-year outlook in spite of beating market expectations with its first-half results.

An e-reader skeptic converted

Science

• Australians are learning what it means to have creationists in the classroom

  Queensland is allowing fundamentalist Christians to teach religious instruction classes in the public schools — and, as we might have predicted, they are teaching nonsense.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Google

• Google Apps for Government: Inextricably Tied to Chrome OS

  While Google Apps for Government, a version of Google Apps certified for use by the U.S. government, is much in the news, not everyone is perceiving how closely tied the move is with Google’s much-ballyhooed upcoming Chrome OS. Google’s operating system, due in a matter of weeks, with numerous high-profile hardware partners committed to making netbooks based on it, is at the center of many initiatives from the company. In the case of Google Apps for Government, Google hopes to lend credibility to its cloud-based applications because Chrome OS is, through and through, a cloud-centric OS.

Kernel Space

• YAFFS2: Yet Another Flash File System

  As flash sizes increased and Linux moved into more embedded niches, the need for read-write flash file systems was answered by JFFS2 which for a long time was de-facto standard Linux flash file system. As flash sizes grew even more and devices such as cellular phones that store large amounts of information (pictures, mp3 files) started using Linux, JFFS2 reached its scalability limits. As a result, new file systems specifically designed for large NAND flash devices were developed — UBIFS, LogFS, and YAFFS. For a long time only UBIFS was part of the mainline kernel and both YAFFS2 and LogFS where available as a patches. At some point in time it looked like LogFS developed was stagnated, with the latest patch available for kernel version 2.6.24. However, LogFS suddenly resurfaced and rather surprisingly was quickly merged into kernel 2.6.34 indicating that its developers kept working on this project, albeit with little publicity. YAFFS2, which contrary to LogFS was widely used, undergoes a similar process with respect to inclusion into mainlaine Linux kernel. It looks like even though in the past YAFFS2 developers did not make any significant effort to put it into the mainline kernel, it is going to change now.

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI R600g Gains Mip-Map, Face Culling Support

  • NVIDIA Puts Out Two Drivers, Including For OpenGL 4.1

    While there’s very few people that NVIDIA’s dead open-source driver update helps out, NVIDIA has released two new binary Linux driver updates. The NVIDIA 256.44 pre-release driver adds in support for some new GeForce and Quadro GPUs along with introduces some “Fermi” (GeForce GTX 400 series) stability fixes while the NVIDIA 256.38.02 Linux driver introduces initial OpenGL 4.1 support.

Applications

• Instructionals

  • Collaborate and manage projects with Todoyu

    You’ll need a machine running the Apache/PHP/MySQL stack, or the XAMPP package.
    You’ll also need the latest release of Todoyu.

  • Free Resources For Getting Your GIMP Graphics Game On

    If you’ve spent any time at all working with graphics–whether you favor open source software or not–you’re probably familiar with the power of GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. Of course, if you know your way around GIMP, you’re probably also familiar with the many effects you can execute with it. Scott Photographics has an excellent exploration of how to create see-through text effects posted, and you can learn to do so with GIMP in about five minutes. While you’re at it, check out this post’s collection of useful, free resources for GIMP.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Opinion: Re: Canonical release cycle for Ubuntu Server

      Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc. A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Hacking the Nokia N900 Phone

      Do you remember the Frankencamera? The API used for the Frankencamera has been released for the Nokia n900 Phone, making the phones camera programmable. For those with programming skills this could be a very interesting Journey. FCam API provides you with full low level control of your camera, enabling you to hack your Nokia N900 and program it however you wish.

  • Android

    • Use your Android Phone as a Wireless Hotspot (Rooted Phones Only)

    • In China, Baidu Fights Google for Control of Android’s Search

      Baidu, China’s largest search engine, is working with handset makers to become the default search box on Google Android phones for the Chinese market. Robin Li, Baidu’s founder and CEO, wants “a search box very prominently on the phone’s screen,” says the WSJ. Li’s initiative could be met with a simple Baidu search widget, but a far bigger coup would be if Baidu replaced Google as the default search engine when an Android phone user presses the dedicated search button on the handset.

    • Sprint Opens Android Market Store

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla’s Tab Candy is the first step to sweeter browsing

    Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn’t really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

Oracle

• The AEGIS Conference website is open for business

  As announced recently, the first International AEGIS Conference – “Access for All in the desktop, web and mobile field: an end-user and developer perspective” – will take place in lovely Seville, Spain on October 6-9, 2010. Now the conference website is open for business. You can browse the conference programme, learn about the venue, review the recommended hotels, and most importantly, register for the conference! Also, potential exhibitors are invited to review the exhibitor package.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 4.5.1 Released; GCC 4.5.2 Is Up Next

  Just as expected, GCC 4.5.1 was released today thereby meeting their target of releasing this point update to the GNU Compiler Collection prior to August. GCC 4.5.1 targets regressions and other bugs since the release of GCC 4.5.0 in mid-April.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Mapping Startup CloudMade Raises $12.3M

    Steve Coast, a cofounder of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company founded the OpenStreetMap community mapping project in 2004, and CloudMade draws its data from OpenStreetMap. Through application programming interfaces and other tools, CloudMade helps developers take advantage of OpenStreetMap’s geographical data to power their own location apps, then takes a share from the apps’ advertising revenue.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Judge to RIAA: No LimeWire asset freeze

    In March, U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood ruled that Lime Group, parent company of Lime Wire and founder Mark Gorton are liable for copyright infringement by enabling and “inducing” users of the file-sharing software LimeWire to pirate songs from the four major record companies.

• Devices/Embedded

The Foundations of a Community: Western PA Linux User Group – Part One

The time was ripe for Linux and free software in the late 1990′s. Netscape formed mozilla.org in February 1998 to fight the Microsoft in the browse war. Oracle, the proprietary database, supported Linux as a platform in October 1998. Sun Microsystems released Star Office in November 1998, the previous name of the Microsoft-crushing Oracle Open Office suite. Red Hat went public in August 1999 and quickly acquired Cygnus, the makers of the Cygwin – a bash shell with GNU tools for Windows. Meanwhile Apache gained and maintained at least 50% market share in the web server market, an achievement which Microsoft has never been able to do.

The Foundations of a Community: Western PA Linux User Group – Part Two

Desktop

• Why Windows still has good sales figures

  16:29:53 Agent Makrand_Karante
  is there any thing else that I may assist you with today?
  16:30:07 Customer Alan
  well not really. I just wanted a laptop running Ubuntu.
  16:30:19 Customer Alan
  Do you have any without an operating system at all?
  16:30:28 Agent Makrand_Karante
  I am afraid no
  16:30:36 Customer Alan
  oh
  16:31:23 Customer Alan
  so if I want a laptop from Dell I have to buy windows

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • The State of the Android Ecosystem

      The G1 was almost completely un-branded as an HTC phone. Instead, HTC gave over control of the UI to Google to ship a completely “stock” version of Android OS 1.0 (later given an over-the-air update to 1.6), and carried by T-Mobile. But Google had been clear from the inception of the Android OS: Its intended goal was to have multiple hardware configurations, running multiple versions of the OS, supported by multiple carriers simultaneously.

    • Android’s UK phone sales quadruple

      Sales of Android-based phones more than quadrupled in the UK during the most-recent quarter.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Negroponte Offers OLPC Technology for $35 Tablet

    The nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government’s planned US$35 tablet.

    In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology.

SAP Warms to Open Source

In 2005, Shai Agassi, then the SAP executive in charge of the company’s product group, expressed ambivalence over using open-source software. In the years since, however, the company has warmed to the idea. Certainly, SAP’s chief rival Oracle, for instance, is an active, if controversial, supporter and sponsor of many open-source software projects.

Healthcare

• Wrap-up of the health care IT track at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention

  The first health care track to be included in an O’Reilly conference covered all three days of sessions at last week’s Open Source convention and brought us 22 talks from programmers, doctors, researchers, corporate heads, and health care advocates. We grappled throughout these three days–which included two popular and highly vocal Birds of a Feather gatherings–with the task of opening up health care.

• VistA scenarios, and other controversies at the Open Source health care track

  Yesterday, as I described in my previous blog, we heard an overview of trends in health care and its open source side in particular. Two open source free software projects offering electronic health records were presented, Tolven and openEMR. Today was VistA day, and those who stayed all the way through were entertained by accolades of increasing fervor from the heads of vxVistA, Medsphere, and ClearHealth. (Anyone who claims that VistA is cumbersome and obsolete will have to explain why it seems to back up so many successful companies.) In general, a nice theme to see today was so many open source companies making a go of it in the health care field.

American Psychological Association claims to pay for peer review. Should we send them a bill?

The reality: publishers do not pay for peer review; this is provided on a voluntary basis by the academic community itself.

This is an argument that keeps coming up over and over again, and I am wondering how to get the point across that it is foolish to claim to pay for valuable services that you are getting for free?

Bloomsbury to e-publish one-million page Churchill archive

Bloomsbury is to make its first move into archive publishing, digitising and publishing in electronic form the one-million page personal archive of wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill.

Publisher argues free access to research violates administration’s transparency initiative

Free online access to federally funded research articles defies the White House’s open government directive, a journal publisher told House members at a hearing on Thursday.

A December 2009 presidential memo on transparency in government instructed federal agencies to abide by the precepts of public disclosure, civic engagement in policymaking and collaboration with the private sector, but not at the expense of national security, privacy or “other genuinely compelling interests.”

Security/Aggression

• Nuclear News: Document Reveals Military Was Concerned About Gulf War Vets’ Exposure to Depleted Uranium

  ‘For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans. But a little-known 1993 Defense Department document written by then-Brigadier Gen. Eric Shinseki, now the secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), shows that the Pentagon was concerned about DU contamination and the agency had ordered medical testing on all personnel that were exposed to the toxic substance. Shinseki’s memo, under the subject line, “Review of Draft to Congress – Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army — Action Memorandum,” makes some small revisions to the details of these three orders from the DoD: 1. Provide adequate training for personnel who may come in contact with DU contaminated equipment. 2. Complete medical testing of all personnel exposed to DU in the Persian Gulf War. 3. Develop a plan for DU contaminated equipment recovery during future operations. The VA, however, never conducted the medical tests, which may have deprived hundreds of thousands of veterans from receiving medical care to treat cancer and other diseases that result from exposure to DU.’

• FBI admits probing ‘radical’ historian Zinn for criticizing bureau

  FBI files show bureau may have tried to get Zinn fired from Boston University for his political opinions

  Those who knew of the dissident historian Howard Zinn would not be surprised that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept tabs on him for decades during the Cold War.

• Italy will fine people who disagree with Berlusconi

  THE GLORIOUS GOVERNMENT of the Piccolo Duce Silvio Berlusconi wants to fine bloggers and Facebook users for writing things that disagree with government lines.

  Berlusconi took time away from his busy casting couch for European MPs to push through a law that will fine bloggers up to €25,000 for publishing “incorrect facts”.

Environment/Wildlife/Nature

• Whale fossil stuck in Egypt customs wrangle

  For years archaeologists have been unearthing a remarkable collection of whale fossils, all the more surprising because the area is now inland desert in upper Egypt.

  It is believed that about 40 million years ago the area was submerged in water, part of the Tethys Sea. As the sea retreated north to the Mediterranean it left a series of unique rock formations and also a cornucopia of fossils.

• Will notorious forest destroyer Sinar Mas come clean?

  The short answer: not likely.

  In fact, not only will they not be likely to come ‘clean’, but today we are releasing fresh evidence that Sinar Mas’s notorious forest destroying practices continue unabated and in direct violation of the company’s own environmental commitments on protecting forests and peatlands.

• Al Gore cleared of assault allegations made by masseuse

  Rees also said the masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, witnesses could not remember anything unusual, and that the masseuse failed a polygraph examination and would not say whether she was paid by a tabloid newspaper for her story.

• Curbing Emissions with BRT, Leading with Clean Energy, and Bringing Information and Communication Tools to Remote Areas

  Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging…

• Metroradruhr: Germany’s Ruhr Valley Inter-City Bike Sharing

  This summer brings a new regional bike-sharing system, Metroradruhr, to ten industrial Ruhr valley cities. Started on June 18th in Dortmund, Germany the system has now reached five of the cities. Bikes are now, or soon will be, available in Bochum, Bottrop, Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Hamm, Herne, Mülheim an der Ruhr and Oberhausen. This is not just a series of suburban satellite additions to a larger city system, but a single system connecting nearby cities together.

• Subsidising oil spills

  When oil started leaking from Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, did you know that you were paying BP and Halliburton to contribute to the disaster?

• Oil disaster impacts reach far and wide

  Today we visited one of the Bird Rehabilitation Centers in Louisiana. We saw dozens of birds, from different species, cleaned of oil with detergent, water and toothbrushes and tagged. They are monitored and then released to the wild. The center has treated and release more then 500 birds so far, a small number if you take into account that more then 550 miles (885Km) of shoreline has been impacted by the Deep Water Horizon disaster.

• A funeral and a celebration: grim clouds over Dalian

  I arrived in Dalian on the day of the funeral for firefighter Zhang Liang, who drowned beneath the thick crude when his crew jumped into the ocean – without safety gear – to attempt, in vain, to fix an underwater pipe. Our lead photographer, Jiang He, who by now has reached legendary status globally for capturing the final seconds of Zhang’s life, continued to cover the very emotional moments of this oil spill disaster.

• Oil spill in China worsens

  We continue to keep a close watch on the development of the oil spill in Dalian, China, which has already cost the life of a firemen and continues to grow, posing an increasingly severe threat to the area’s coastal ecosystem.

• Floods wash 3,000 chemical barrels into China river

• Oily action

Finance

• Ponzi Schemer’s Bankruptcy Trustee Sues Florida GOP for Donations Payback

  Bankruptcy attorneys for the Scott Rothstein estate have filed suit against The Republican Party of Florida, seeking the repayment of $237,000 in campaign contributions from the jailed former attorney.

  In a suit filed Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Lauderdale, Berger Singerman, the law firm for trustee Herbert Stettin, alleges that the Republican Party has refused to return more than 10 different donations made by Rothstein over a four-year period.

  “The Trustee has made repeated efforts over a period of several months to resolve this claim without resort to litigation,” said Paul Singerman of Berger Singerman in Fort Lauderdale.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• How WikiLeaks Could Change the Way Reporters Deal With Secrets

  For the past several decades, there has been an informal understanding between the reporters who uncovered newsworthy secrets and the government intelligence agencies, which tried to keep them from public view.

  We would tell senior officials what we’d learned. And they would point out any unforeseen consequences that might arise from publication, such as the death of an American informant. Ultimately, the call on what appeared rested with editors. But it was a decision informed by more than our own guesswork.

• Sherrod Says She Will Sue Blogger

  Ms. Sherrod also said she intended to sue Andrew Breitbart, the blogger, who runs BigGovernment.com and who posted the edited video of her making what appeared to be antiwhite remarks in a speech that was really about racial conciliation.

  “He hasn’t apologized, and I don’t want it at this point,” she said of Mr. Breitbart, adding that she intended to sue him. “He will definitely hear from me.”

• New partnerships

  There are several marvellous things to note about this latest bombardment from cyberspace. One, when new media challenges old media, it is still possible for the latter to outshine the former.

  Get on to the Afghan War Diary web pages on Wikileaks and you will be suitably fazed. How to get something useful out of these bald listings without investing inordinate time?

• Military transfers Manning to Quantico, VA

• US will press criminal charges against Manning, alleged Wikileaks source

  The U.S. military has announced that it will press criminal charges against 22 year old Pfc. Bradley E. Manning for allegedly transferring classified military information to his personal computer, “wrongfully adding unauthorized software to a Secret Internet Protocol Router network computer,” obtaining “more than 150,000 classified U.S. State Department cables,” and transmitting data to unauthorized persons.

• WikiLeaks: We don’t know source of leaked data

  WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief claims his organization doesn’t know who sent it some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghan war, telling journalists the website was set up to hide the source of its data from those who receive it.

• US Army: alleged Wikileaks source Manning faces 52 years

• A tide turns

  Technology used to help spies. Now it hinders them

• Russia blocks Youtube

  VIDEO SHARING WEBSITE Youtube has been blocked by a Russian Internet service provider (ISP) after a court deemed that the service carries extremist videos.

• Russian city blocks YouTube

Digital Economy (UK)

• Digital Economy Act: users and ISPs hit by Ofcom Code

• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Simmtronics Rolls Out Slim Desktop PCs

  Simmtronics SDC 2711S comes preloaded with Ubuntu.

• Where are Dell’s Ubuntu PCs?

  Back in February, I covered Gripe Line reader Cal’s complaint that Dell seemed to have stopped carrying Ubuntu machines. At the time, I spoke to Anne Camden at Dell, who assured me that the company would be refreshing its Ubuntu line “in several weeks.” Thus, I was surprised to hear from Gripe Line reader Ken recently, who has been watching the Dell/Ubuntu situation closely because he is in the market for a Ubuntu desktop.

  “I just want you to know,” Ken writes, “that Dell still isn’t offering any new Ubuntu machines.” Instead, the company is carrying only one laptop and a netbook.

• Dell release OpenManage Server Administrator for Ubuntu

  Dell has announced the release of its proprietary OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) 6.3 for Ubuntu 9.10 or later. OMSA is a web browser or command line driven system administration tool for servers. The .deb packaged and community supported release was completed with a “generous donation” of several weeks of engineering time by Canonical, which allowed the Dell Linux team to become better acquainted with .deb packaging.

• Dell Adds Linux Desktop PCs, But Stops Web Sales of Linux Laptops

  In a reversal of its long-time approach to Linux, Dell has now added a desktop PC pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux to its Web site, while halting online sales of Linux-based netbooks and notebook PCs.

  Dell started selling the Studio XPS 7100 with Ubuntu on its Web site earlier this week at pricing of $459.99 without monitor. The price includes a one-year basic service plan.

Applications

• Instructionals

  • Ubuntu Linux solution stack implementation, Part 1: Introduction to the UNIX environment

  • How to make see-through text to image in GIMP

  • Speeding up Ruby on Rails

  • Speaking UNIX: Get to know Ksplice

  • Adding periods to SCHED_DEADLINE

  • Setting Up OpenVPN on a DD-WRT Router, Part 2

• Wine

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.

    What’s new in this release (see below for details):
    – Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer.
    – Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop.
    – New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program.
    – Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory.
    – Translation updates.
    – Various bug fixes.

• Games

  • Open games with closed content

    Some Linux users have at least a general familiarity familiar with RMS’s four freedoms and the GPL. Some of the games mentioned in this column, in the past as well as in the future, are licensed such that the game itself is under the GPL or a similarly free license, but the content is not. That is, you are free to do whatever you want with the game engine itself, but don’t mess with the content.

    For example, let us consider the game Sauerbraten. Now, the Cube2 engine that is the heart and soul of Sauerbraten is totally copylefted. You can distribute it, modify it, and even rub it in your belly, if you so desire. However, the data files that are associated with Sauerbraten is not free. While you can run Sauerbraten with the associated data files that compose the actual content of Sauerbraten, you are not permitted to include the data files along with any changes you make to the Cube2 engine itself. If you want to modify the game engine and release your own modified version of the game called Schnitzel, for example, then you need to create your own maps, textures, skins, and music to go with Schnitzel.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Census report now available as free download

    I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license.

Devices/Embedded

• New controller chip sets stage for color e-readers

  Monochrome electrophorescent (EPD) displays sourced from E Ink Corporation have been used in the majority of e-readers to date. Examples include Amazon’s market-leading, Linux-based Kindle — updated today to become smaller and lighter.

Lockheed Goes Open Source. Blankenhorn Hates It.

Wait, what? Open source advocates have, for years, been trying to encourage more code to come out from behind corporate skirts. Where companies can build business models around governing and supporting open source projects, we want them to take the plunge. If more code is open, that makes everyone smarter. And that, my friends, is exactly what Lockheed Martin did today. Someone who probably never contributed code in their lives just gave the community a project they’ve been working on for months, or even years. I think that’s amazing. In return, this brave developer gets painted as a nefarious secret agent out to steal our thoughts and bug our laptops. Or whatever.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Presentations at Debconf in NYC

  The first is “FSF’s Campaigns for Freedom” on Sunday, August 1st, from 14:00 to 15:00 in 414 Schapiro. I’ll give an overview of some of the current FSF campaigns, like the GNU Project, Working Together for Free Software, Defective by Design, PlayOgg, Windows 7 Sins, and the High Priority Projects List; and resources like the Licensing & Compliance Lab, Free Software Jobs page, Hardware Directory, and the Free Software Directory. But I’m going to save plenty of time to talk with the room about things the FSF should or could be doing.

• Pictures from the GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague (July 2010)

  The European GNU Hackers meeting took place this weekend in the Hague. Two days of talks about GNU projects, nearly 50 hackers, prodigiuous amounts of coffee, and exotic food. All followed by two days of coding for those who stayed on Monday and Tuesday.

Science

• Mars site may hold ‘buried life’

  Researchers have identified rocks that they say could contain the fossilised remains of life on early Mars.

  The team made their discovery in the ancient rocks of Nili Fossae.

  Their work has revealed that this trench on Mars is a “dead ringer” for a region in Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth has been buried and preserved in mineral form.

Environment/Wildlife

• Saudia Arabia and Russia

  As I have discussed previously, without Russia the world of Non-OPEC supply would have fallen down into a hole shortly after 2003. Indeed, without Russia Non-OPEC production (Non-OPEC ex-Russia) would have fallen every year from 2004 through the present day. What’s been a surprise is that Russia has been able to sustain its current ~9.5 mbpd for over four years now.

Finance

• High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay

  Last year Gomberg and a fellow programmer quit their jobs and cut a deal with HTG Capital Partners of Chicago, whose programmers typically trade on regulated futures exchanges. HTG supplies office space, technology and access to exchanges. Gomberg keeps 40% to 80% of net profits, with the percentage rising as his profits do. More importantly, says Gomberg, the programmers retain ownership of the code they write.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google Search Engine Is Blocked in China

  Google said that the search engine was functioning normally in China. “It’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night, when there was a relatively small blockage,” said Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Google adds ‘phone home’ DRM to Android Market

  Google has added a licensing server to the Android Marketplace which will allow an app to verify whether the user has purchased it or not before opening.

• Internet ‘Key Holders’ Are Insurance Against Cyber Attack

  In a move that seems inspired by “The Lord of the Rings,” seven “keys” have been handed out to a trusted circle of people who might get called upon to “save” the Internet in the aftermath of a cyber attack.
  But contrary to other news reports, the seven key holders have not been vested with the power to resurrect the entire Internet should it be sabotaged by hackers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Tech Comics: “Intellectual Property Infringement”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Device support in Windows vs. Linux

One of the highly debated subjects with Windows and Linux is with device support. The two have different methods of how drivers are created and implemented into the operating system. With Windows, Microsoft writes generic drivers to help ensure that users can get up and running, then 3rd party supplied drivers can be installed to optimize performance. With Linux, drivers are all included with the Linux kernel, and devices are detected and the appropriate drivers are then activated on the fly. There are no 3rd parties to contact for drivers (unless a proprietary driver is needed, in which case it has to be manually installed, similar to Windows; this is rare but sometimes necessary).

I’ve found that driver support in Linux is excellent.

Server

• Unisys floats mainframe cloud

  A mainframe cloud may seem oxymoronic like a lead Zeppelin (“a” included on purpose), or intuitively obvious (given the virtualization and metering capabilities that have been in mainframes for decades). But Unisys has nonetheless fluffed up a mainframe cloud for its ClearPath mainframe customers.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA’s Dead Open-Source Driver Gets Updated

    The last time the xf86-video-nv driver was updated was in early March — just a couple weeks before NVIDIA announced it would stop supporting future ASICs in this driver nor would it deliver any support for features like DisplayPort. That March update didn’t bring much to the table nor does this update that’s coming out of NVIDIA’s Santa Clara offices on a Friday afternoon.

Applications

• Instructionals

  • Weekend Project: Cache Local DNS Queries

  • Banish Flash cookies forever under Linux

• Games

  • Foobillard, an opensouce Billiard Simulation game for Linux

    My whole experience with the game might look a bit false based upon the fact that I haven’t played such games in real-life much, but listen to this, “Foobillard was actually suggested to me by a college friend who is a die hard fan of cue sports and a good player too”. So, if a real-life player is recommending it, you have got to give it a shot.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation to Co-Host 2011 Desktop Summit in Berlin

    The 2009 Desktop Summit was a fantastic opportunity for the leaders of the free software desktop community to share talks, address common issues, and build relationships between the communities with combined social events.

    The 2011 Desktop Summit will build on the first Summit’s success. More than 1,000 contributors from more than 50 countries are expected to attend the 2011 event in Berlin. In addition to members of the GNOME and KDE development community, the conference will also attract many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Three Months Until Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 End of Life

    Red Hat has issued another notification signaling the approaching end-of-life (EOL) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. The aging Linux distribution is approaching the end of its support cycle, patches and security updates will only be issued for another three months.

Devices/Embedded

• Where do you find Linux?

  Looking through my home for Linux systems I just realized that it is everywhere. First of all, I find it on my computers – from servers to laptop. That is the obvious place though. I wonder, where else can I find Linux running?

  Next, I find it on my set-top-box, a DM500 – a dreambox. The dreamboxes range from my very basic PAL receiver to devices with multiple receivers and HD-support. All are based on a Linux system running on a PowerPC processor. The box has networking and there is community driven development version of the software running on the box. The result – I can stream TV to my laptop, play content from my server and set record timers over the internet.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo at OSCON Wrap-Up

      There were also several MeeGo demo stations in the Intel booth at OSCON showing Netbook, Handset and In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) demos. While the netbook demos have been around for a little longer, this was the first time many people had a chance to get a hands-on, closeup look at IVI or a handset running MeeGo, so those demos were very popular. Here is a picture of the IVI demo station in case you missed it.

GNU and Open Source

The GNU project developed some of the 21st century’s most important software. The GNU Compiler Collection is used on Linux systems, BSD/OSX systems, and on Windows. GNAT has, for the most part, replaced any other Ada compiler ever created. The list could go on, but you get the idea. The sad thing about GNU is that it is so ideologically bent that I can no longer support it.

I am not looking to start a fight here. Please respond with your opinions on this topic. Let me know where you stand. My mind is open.

Databases

• Does NoSQL Spell the End of Relational Databases?

Programming

• Eclipse 4.0 SDK released for early adopters

  The Eclipse Foundation has announced the official availability of version 4 of Eclipse SDK. With this new generation of the Eclipse development environment, the Eclipse developers are aiming to modernise the IDE’s underlying architecture to include contemporary features such as a model-based user interface framework, CSS-based declarative styling of the UI and a services oriented programming model for consuming Eclipse provided services. A more modern look and feel for the workbench has also been incorporated along with binary API compatibility with previous releases to make migration simpler.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs bans traders from swearing in emails

• Goldman Sachs Bans Swearing

• Goldman Sachs bans traders from swearing in emails

  Screening software that identifies offending words will be used to enforce the policy.

• Citigroup Hires Narita From Goldman for Japan Currency Trading

  The hiring of Narita is “representative of the significant investment we are making in FX in Japan,” Bapi Maitra, managing director and head of foreign exchange at Citibank Japan, a unit of New York-based Citigroup, said in an emailed statement sent today by company spokesperson Atsuko Yoshitsugu. Narita joined Citibank Japan on July 26.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Reject UltraViolet DRM

  Throughout the relatively short history of Digital Restrictions Management, we have seen various methods of user restriction come and go. Now, there is a new threat on the horizon: UltraViolet. A soon to be implemented DRM scheme, UltraViolet — or should that be Ultraviolent — is a joint effort between companies such as Sony, Adobe, Cisco, HP, Microsoft and Intel. What seperates UltraViolet apart from other types of DRM is its use of “the cloud.” Whereas most other DRM schemes are implemented locally, UltraViolet intends to store the digital media you purchase on a centralized server with the goal of preventing users from storing their digital media on unauthorized devices, sharing and making copies.

• Distributions

The Best Way to Learn Linux – Ubuntu

You have no doubt heard some of the “I lost everything on my hard drive” stories that have come from feeble attempts to install various flavors of Linux in a dual boot system with Windows.
Partitioning hard drives is probably not a good idea for the typical computer user, but the desire to learn more about Linux while keeping the Windows option open is entirely too mouth watering for the eager mind to resist. I have a story or two myself. Here are the basics I have learned about Linux and the best way to learn Linux while preserving ALL of your Windows files, etc.

Applications

• Instructionals

  • Open Source Toolchains for Linux Systems Administrators

    Software developers are very familiar with toolchains, series of programs where the output of one program forms the input for the next. A free software example would be using the GNU Emacs editor, the GNU bin-utils and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to write a program. Software developers frequently create programs and subroutines that are used in other programs rather than recoding the same process over and over again.

Distributions

• UberStudent To Offer Online Courses

  UberStudent is upping the ante with its plans to offer free online courses, using the Moodle learning environment, to teach students to academically excel with its platform. UberStudent dubs itself ‘a free Linux learning platform for learning, doing, and teaching academic computing at the higher education and advanced secondary levels’.

  “I began UberStudent as a way to place sets of smart and dedicated computing tools, and just the right amount of support, into the hands of college and college-bound secondary students,” said Stephen Ewen, UberStudent’s founder and lead developer. “At core, it’s an academic success curriculum in the form of an installable, ready-to-go learning platform. With UberStudent, students can learn to really excel at the skills and habits they must have to succeed in college,” he added.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva One 2010 Spring KDE

    Like Mandriva Control Center, for example. It’s a very user friendly distro. It just needs to be a bit leaner, faster and less obnoxious to look at. If you want a heavyweight distro with a general ease-of-use, speed and looks, with a good KDE implementation and the latest software, plus all the proprietary drivers out of the box and um, music playing while the OS boots, I’d recommend going for Sabayon rather than Mandriva. The two fall in the same category, but Sabayon seems to be winning.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Meerkat Sound Applet scrubber now works, playlists in holding & a few other updates

      Meerkat’s new Sound Applet – seemingly more divisive than Jedward – received some updates this morning.

      The seeker/scrubber now works (pretty much) as it should and place-holders for the planned playlist support have also appeared.

Does Neoclassical Economics Rot Your Brain?

This is, of course, ridiculous. There’s no reason all lemonade stands need to be for-profit enterprises. Kids learn a variety of lessons from lemonade stands. Charging might teach valuable lessons about budgeting and self-sufficiency, but giving lemonade away can teach equally valuable lessons about generosity and public service. Savage apparently doesn’t care what the girls’ parents might have hoped their kids would get out of the experience. The mere fact that the girls were failing to conform to the neoclassical model of homo economicus was enough to condemn their activity.

That’s a frivolous example, to be sure, but the same mixture of intellectual laziness and arrogance crops up in more serious contexts. I’ve written before about this Richard Epstein column where he criticizes the free software movement for, basically, failing to conform to the assumptions of the neoclassical model:

The open source movement shares many features with a workers’ commune, and is likely to fail for the same reason: it cannot scale up to meet its own successes. To see the long-term difficulty, imagine a commune entirely owned by its original workers who share pro rata in its increases in value. The system might work well in the early days when the workforce remains fixed. But what happens when a given worker wants to quit? Does that worker receive in cash or kind his share of the gain in value during the period of his employment? If not, then the run-up in value during his period of employment will be gobbled up by his successor – a recipe for immense resentment. Yet that danger can be ducked only by creating a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity in exchange for their contributions to the company.

This passage bears no relationship to reality. Free software projects scale up just fine without “a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity.” Contributors are not employees or shareholders. The inability to cash out does not, in fact, generate “immense resentment.” And Epstein could have learned all of this pretty easily if he’d talked to a few people in the free software community before writing his column. But why let facts clutter up a perfectly good theory?

Swivel Viewer, an open source embeddable album viewer

If you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out
the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you’ll find an open source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning.

Military Open-Source Software Could Increase Flexibility, Lower Cost

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software — programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved.

Bringing many minds to bear on a given program can lead to software that is both high quality and low cost, or even free. For example, the Linux operating system, which licenses its basic source code for free, is now used to run many servers in companies, government and academia.

Europe’s Tender Words About FOSS

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Science Online 2010: What shall I say?

    Seriously – is there any exciting and new we could communally do before in the next month? My guess it would have to be in the area of data-driven chemistry. I was talking with Jean-Claude Bradley at breakfast about liberating chemical reactions from the literature. There will be new science in that. Not world-shattering, but worthy.

  • Open Data needs Open Source tools

    The biggest problem many data-driven apps contests have is that it’s too hard to get started. A developer has to download some strange dataset off of a website like data.gov or the National Data Catalog, prune it, massage it, usually fix it, and then convert it to their database system of choice, and then they can start building their app. It reminds me of being a Linux user before APT existed. While fun, it was still a hassle to get all dependencies and compile everything from source.

Programming

• SourceForge Traffic Distribution: A Picture is Worth a Thousands Words

  One year ago, talking about open source adoption in Italian Public Administrations, I reported some SourceForge traffic distribution numbers, showing that Italy was at the fourth place after Brasil.

D.C. judge issues injunction against news organization

D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff issued a temporary restraining order against the National Law Journal last Friday after she discovered the news organization was planning to publish a story regarding the fee dispute between District of Columbia-based law firm Hogan Lovells and one of its former clients, beverage maker POM Wonderful. POM had hired Hogan Lovells to represent the company during a regulatory investigation.

Glenn Beck’s gold-investment scam/scheme: an explanatory infographic

Jess Bachman, infographic designer extraordinaire, shares this new work which shows how Glenn Beck “uses his influence to peddle dubious information and endorse fraudulent companies, and how how those companies go about scamming fear ridden consumers into buying terrible investments.”

U.S. sues Oracle, alleges software contract fraud

The Justice Department said on Thursday it sued Oracle Corp, alleging it defrauded the federal government on a software contract in effect from 1998 to 2006 that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

Security/Aggression

• Cell phone eavesdropping enters script-kiddie phase

  Independent researchers have made good on a promise to release a comprehensive set of tools needed to eavesdrop on cell phone calls that use the world’s most widely deployed mobile technology.

• Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Giving Up On Victory, Not War

  If you ever needed convincing that the world of American “national security” is well along the road to profligate lunacy, read the striking three-part “Top Secret America” series by Dana Priest and William Arkin that the Washington Post published last week. When it comes to the expansion of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), which claims 17 major agencies and organizations, the figures are staggering.

Environment/Wildlife

• Scientists warn of global warming threat to marine food chain

  Numbers of phytoplankton – the microscopic organisms that sustain the marine food chain – are plummeting as sea surface temperatures rise

• Global warming pushes 2010 temperatures to record highs

  Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world’s leading climate research centres.

  Scientists have also released what they described as the “best evidence yet” of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators – from air and sea temperatures to melting ice – each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.

Finance

• Citigroup Pays $75 Million to Settle Subprime Claims

  Citigroup agreed on Thursday to pay $75 million to settle federal claims that it failed to disclose vast holdings of subprime mortgage investments that were deteriorating during the financial crisis and ultimately crippled the bank.

• Federal Reserve’s James Bullard: Long-term deflation is a possibility

  A top Federal Reserve official warned Thursday that the nation faces the risk of an extended period of falling prices known as deflation, such as that experienced by Japan over the past two decades.
  This Story

  *
  Fed official warns of deflation risk for U.S.
  *
  Fed ready to step in if economy relapses
  *
  Ezra Klein: The economy can’t recover until the economy recovers

  James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, argues in a new paper that large-scale quantitative easing — or purchases of government bonds and other assets by the central bank — would be the best policy tool to prevent that possibility, though he doesn’t endorse making such a move now.

• SEC charges billionaire Texas brothers who donate to GOP with fraud

  Sam and Charles Wyly, billionaire Texas brothers who gained prominence spending millions of dollars on conservative political causes, committed fraud by using secret overseas accounts to generate more than $550 million in profit through illegal stock trades, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Thursday.

• Obama hails auto bailout as good news in Michigan

  President Barack Obama on Friday heralded the recent turnaround for U.S. automakers, arguing that thousands of jobs and increased production vindicate his unpopular decision to bailout the industry.

  With Americans facing a still-limping economy and potentially pivotal congressional elections in three months, Obama is seizing on the positive new trends in the auto industry as evidence of broader economic good news. He launched an intensive campaign to highlight the story as a concrete area of improvement with direct ties to his administration’s actions.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Senators fail to agree on privacy approach

  After six months worth of allegations of privacy invasions involving some of the largest Internet companies, it should come as no surprise that politicians are calling for new laws. The fact that it’s an election year probably made it inevitable.

• Second Student Sues School District Over Webcam Spying

  A webcam scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district expanded Tuesday to include a second student alleging his school-issued laptop secretly snapped images of him.

• DHS tries to defuse privacy criticism, asks for help

  A top Homeland Security official on Wednesday sought to downplay concerns about privacy and Internet monitoring raised by recent reports of the department’s activities.

• Court Says Privacy Advocate May Publish Social Security Numbers

  A federal appeals court has ordered Virginia’s attorney general to back away from threats of suing a privacy advocate who publishes Social Security numbers of elected officials on the internet.

• White House Seeks Easier FBI Access To Internet Records, Blocks Oversight Attempt… Just As FBI Caught Cheating On Exam To Stop Abuse

  Oh, and just to make this all more comically depressing, just as I finished reading both of these stories, I saw a story about a new investigation into reports that FBI agents were caught cheating on an exam, which was designed to get them to stop abusing surveillance tools. Yes, you read that right. After all the reports of abuse of surveillance tools, the FBI set up a series of tests to train FBI agents how to properly go about surveillance without breaking the law… and a bunch of FBI agents allegedly cheated on the test that’s supposed to stop them from “cheating” on the law. And, not just a few. From the quotes, it sounds like this cheating was “widespread.” But, of course, it might not matter, since the requirements for surveillance are being lowered, oversight is being blocked, and apparently the White House is willing to retroactively “legalize” any illegal surveillance anyway.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Broadband speed – the facts

  You may have read this morning about Ofcom’s report on broadband speeds. We thought it would be helpful to set out why speeds vary and what you can expect from an ISP like TalkTalk.

• Ofcom Slams ISPs For Misleading Broadband Speeds

  In its latest delve into the state of the nation’s broadband provision, the regulator praised infrastructure providers for a 25 percent increase in the speed of the average actual fixed-line residential connection. The average connection was advertised to have a speed of up to 10Mbps in May 2010, compared to 8 percent in April 2009.

• Ofcom Faces Backlash For Broadband Criticism

Intellectual Monopolies

• Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation: Evidence from the Human Genome

  This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed light on this question, I analyze the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, and estimate the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes. Celera’s IP applied to genes sequenced first by Celera, and was removed when the public effort re-sequenced those genes.

• What IP is really about

  From my spam folder:

  You could be sitting on a potential gold mine!

  It’s right under your nose, in the form of intellectual property created by you & your lab. Don’t let your invention representing millions in potential revenue sit idle simply because you aren’t aware IP & patent protection laws and other key aspects of moving innovations from your lab to the market..

• Copyrights

  • Copy Fight

    In a recent Wired.com article, Gibson was certainly candid about the money-making potential of his approach. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues,” he said.

    But in my phone conversation with him, he also characterized his approach as the best way to discourage infringing activity. “There are these folks out there who say, ‘Oh, they should send out a takedown letter.’ But people have been sending takedown letters for over a decade now and it’s had little or no effect on infringements. Infringements continue to grow.”

  • British Library Worries That Copyright May Be Hindering Research

    Michael Geist points us to the news that The British Library has apparently come out with a new report entitled Driving UK Research — Is copyright a help or a hindrance? The paper brings together 13 different researchers to all share their opinions, and the general consensus appears to be that copyright today is a serious problem in need of reform (and, no, the “Digital Economy Act” in the UK didn’t help at all).

  • Dear Warner Bros., It’s Not ‘Word Of Mouth’ If You Have To Pay People To Promote Your Movies

    There was an amusing post this week at TheWrap.com discussing how the various Hollywood movie studios are confused about the basics of social media and Twitter. You may remember (or, maybe not), back in 2003, when Hollywood suddenly started blaming text messaging for certain movies failing, because some kids would go to a movie, realize it sucks, and quickly warn their friends to stay away. Of course, Hollywood blamed text messaging, instead of the fact that they made a crappy movie, and couldn’t rely on their old methods of squeezing a ton of money out of people before word got around. In the age of Twitter, of course, this has only increased, so the studios started blaming Twitter, calling it “the Twitter Effect” and proceeding to freak out about it.

  • Our Rotting Video-Game Heritage

    Diverse technologies, missing or secret documentation, and hostile copyright laws threaten video-game preservation.

  • Perfect 10 Loses Again, As Court Says DMCA Notices Need To Be Properly Filed

    Just last week we were talking about Perfect 10′s lawsuit against Google in Canada, where we noted that in Perfect 10′s own bragging press release, it effectively admits that its takedown filings were not properly filed. They admit that they just sent images to Google saying that it owned the images, without telling Google where they were actually located to take down. This was the same charge that Rapidshare recently made against Perfect 10, noting that the company seemed to purposely not want companies to take down their images, so that it could sue.

  • ACTA

    • From Wellington to Lucerne: Tracking the Major ACTA Changes

      While the parties have not formally disclosed it, the immediate ACTA schedule now appears to include discussions between the U.S. and the EU next month in Washington followed by a full round of talks (Round Ten) in Japan in September. Some have criticized the exclusion of the remaining ACTA countries in the August discussions, but as I posted earlier, the ACTA text has really come down to a U.S. vs. EU document with the remaining countries picking a side. The sticking point in Washington will undoubtedly be scope of the treaty, with the EU pushing for inclusion of geographical indications and the U.S. making it clear they are willing to cave on almost anything that does not involve changes to domestic law. Geographical indications would require change, however, which is what led to my post speculating about the possibility of an ACTA without Europe.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Warning: Five Things to Know Before Switching to Linux

1. It Isn’t Windows

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

Desktop

• Ubuntu Linux could do well betting less on Dell

  What I’d suggest the likes of Ubuntu and others do is to work very closely with niche hardware manufacturers like ZaReason and System76. Canonical I know is working with them, but I think they should pay more attention to nurturing the relationship. They could devote the time they give to Dell to these OEMs.

• Dell Marketing – Psychotic? Schizophrenic? Bullied? Confused?

• Preview Release of Userful’s Linux Multiseat 2010 Suite Hits the Channel

  Canadian Linux developer Userful Corp. has announced a preview release of its Userful Linux MultiSeat 2010 classroom software. The software is built off the latest version of the company’s flagship Userful Multiplier.

Server

• Pervasip’s VoX Communications Surpasses 20,000 Voice over Internet Lines

  …exceeded 20,000 VoIP lines on its award winning Voice over Internet Linux-based sever clusters.

Google

• Interview: Chris DiBona, Google

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

Kernel Space

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

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

  The key word is PARALLEL.

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

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

Applications

• Blam, a simple feed reader for GNOME

• Instructionals

  • Battery may be broken

  • A requested Linux theming tutorial

  • Fix Compiz Slowness For Proprietary ATI Drivers In Ubuntu

  • Log Effectively Using Custom Perl Logger Module

  • How To Extract data from .deb file in Linux

  • How to View bash shell history and Change bash history file size in Ubuntu

  • Build / Install VirtualBox (vbox) Guest Additions For Ubuntu Lucid / Fedora 13

  • How to: Mount usb device in Linux command line

  • [HOWTO] Recover an application that was removed due to update in Ubuntu and other Debian based systems

  • Change Login window theme in Ubuntu 9.10/10.04 and higher

  • Learning by doing: Writing your own traceroute in 8 easy steps

  • Linux Professional Institute Launches Enterprise-level “Virtualization” Exam

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-07-28

    This week on a *Cloud Based** episode of KDEMU we have Frank Karlitschek, OpenDesktop.org big cheese, OwnCloud master mind.

  • Plasma in KDE’s Wikis

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

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Census report released

  • New GNOME Shell Mockup Looks Good – But Is It Better?

    I tested GNOME Shell way back when it was very new and was not impressed by it then. I tested it again last month and still did not like it. This mockup looks good, no doubt, but it still feels unusable to me and it seems they have not resolved the workflow issue which many have been pointing out since Shell became available.

• Xfce

  • Ristretto lightweight picture-viewer for the Xfce desktop environment and the Xfce Goodies Project.

    The Xfce Project itself provides a lightweight desktop environment, which includes only the core compoments required for a desktop environment, like a window manager, a file manager, a session manager, a panel and a few utilities. Additional software packages and plugins to existing software, like the panel or the file manager, are provided by the Xfce Goodies Project.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • AUSTRUMI 2.1.6

  • Salix Live 13.0.1

    As part of our commitment to long time support, Salix Live 13.0.1 is now available for download.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Deltacloud Joins Apache Software Foundation

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

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Events in LATAM a Big Draw for Participants

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

    • No video for you

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

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 9 KDE Edition Released

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

Devices/Embedded

• 32-core processor module claimed to rival 128-core SoC

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

• Hackable home media system features touchscreen controller

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

• IP-STB DVR transcodes video to and from mobile devices

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

• Lantronix releases EDS1100 and EDS2100 Linux SDK

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

• Sony Not To Drop Reader Price

  All these e-Readers are powered by Linux, except for the iPad which runs on Apple’s proprietary iOS which does have some open source components.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google CEO: Android could be a cash cow (worth $10 billion)

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

    • Secure phone builds on HTC Desire, while G1 bites the dust

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

    • Meet Andy: Android’s History In A Nutshell

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

    • Why Android Will Win the Mobile Platform War

      How would I answer? Like this: The iPhone can be pretty, that’s for sure, but it can’t hold a candle to Android’s allure.

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

• Sub-notebooks

  • Freescale Smartbook

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

• Tablets

  • Olive Pad VT100 brings a voice-capable, 7-inch Android tablet to India’s airwaves

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

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

  • Kmart Android tablets and the GPL

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

  • Nicholas Negroponte Welcomes India’s $35 Tablet for Education

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

Enhancements to Open Source Java Content Management System Aimed at Enterprise

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

2010 Open Source Awards

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

5 Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux

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

Convirture manages open source Xen, KVM virtualization and the private cloud

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

Now Available: Open Source Software in Enterprise Application Infrastructure Market

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

Events

• The Key To An Open Source Social Network Is Still People

  At last week’s OSCON conference, the big topic on the minds of open sourcers was whether or not an open source social networking offering can break down the walled gardens of popular services such as Facebook, and win. The conversation already prompted our post “Why Does FOSS Development Lag the Innovation Curve?” Despite some fist-pumping at the conference, though, there isn’t any clear open source platform that appears to have a chance of toppling the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world at this point. And the problem is people.

• Upcoming Open Source Webinars: GWOS, SpringSource, Subversion

• AstriCon Speakers Line Up to Discuss Future of Asterisk®, IPv6, SIP Security and More

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 beta 2 arrives as open source browser use grows

    Many observers laud the project’s efforts to overhaul the user interface and address performance gaps in Firefox in an effort to become more competitive against the other big open soure browser — Google Chrome.

  • Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 Drops Next Week

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

SaaS

• Open source faces hurdles in the cloud

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

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

• Facebook, Done the Open Source Way

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

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

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

Security

• Open source hack aids mobile phone snooping

  GSM encryption was first cracked at the tail end of 2009 and now a hacker has released more open source GSM hacking tools.

• Qualys Releases BlindElephant as an Open Source Tool for Web Application Fingerprinting

  Qualys, Inc., the leading provider of on demand IT security risk and compliance management solutions, today released BlindElephant, a fast, accurate open source web application fingerprinting engine that identifies application and plugin versions via static files.

• ‘Digital fingerprints’ could help catch virus creators

  The tool is available at no cost as open source software, giving users full access to the source code in the hope of speeding the maturity of the technology. “We’re hoping this is something that will be adopted by the security community,” Hoglund said.

• Digital fingerprints could give away the authors of viruses and malware

• Open Source javasnoop hacks Java?

  Security researcher Arshan Dabirsjaghi (pic left) now has a new tool out that will enable users to ‘hack’ Java.

  Licensed under the GPLv3 open source license and available at Google Code – Javasnoop is all about testing Java to see if it can be hacked – or so Dabirsjaghi explained in his Black Hat talk today.

• IMSI Catcher Gets Open Source Boost

  The GSM technology uses an encryption method that protects the calls from being snooped. The same has been cracked in the month of December, 2009 and this makes GSM mobile phone conversation vulnerable to eavesdropping. If a person has the appropriate hardware, there are many good open source GSM cracking software like “Kraken” that can do the rest of the job.

• Securing Flash with open source Blitzableiter

• Security firm Sourcefire gaining financial strength

  Sourcefire, a 10-year-old firm specializing in intrusion detection and prevention, Thursday announced increased year-over-year second quarter revenue and earnings and predicted an even better third quarter.

Oracle

• Oracle and HP make a deal for Solaris on ProLiants

  The inscrutable plan of Oracle for Solaris 10 on x64 servers became more… scrutable this morning. The company announced that Dell and Hewlett-Packard would be certifying and reselling Oracle’s Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems, as well as its Oracle VM implementation of the Xen hypervisor on their respective PowerEdge and ProLiant servers.

• HP, Dell To Resell Oracle’s Solaris, Linux, And Virtualization Platforms

  HP and Dell plan to certify and resell Oracle’s Solaris, Linux, and virtualization platforms on their x86-based servers, giving Oracle a chance to expand its operating system and virtualization business even as its own server sales continue to fall.

• Dell, HP to resell Oracle’s operating systems

CMS

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

• The Rise of the Web CMS

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

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

Education

• 4 More Tips for Open Source in K-12

  Open source isn’t just about cost savings. As with any technology deployment in education, it’s about rolling out the right tool to accomplish a goal, whether it be enhancing classroom teaching and learning or streamlining the operations that support education.

• Unique Linux Distro Geared Up To Impact Higher Education

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

Funding

• Open-source Lustre gets supercomputing nod

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

• Open source HPC file system gets startup

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

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

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

Project Releases

• Open-Source Software to Manage Colorspace Issues in Visual Effects and Animation

  OpenColorIO, a new open-source release by Sony Pictures Imageworks, hopes to address this critical issue.

Government

• No need to debate on open source definition: Tifatul

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

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

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

• Tifatul causes new stir in Twitter

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

• Shift to Open Source Could Save Trillions, Govt Claims

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

  [...]

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

• Lockheed releases open-source social networking tool

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

• Lockheed Martin Debuts Open-Source Eureka Streams

• 5 lessons for win-win open source projects

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

• Who had the first government open source policy?

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

Openness/Sharing

• Towards a Commons Taxonomy

  Here’s one such attempt:

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

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

  Five Commons Presentations

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

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

• Open Hardware

  • Frankencamera Programmable Open-source Camera Debuts

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

Programming

• Python development – the golden rules

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

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

  Do one thing well
  The UNIX Philosophy certainly applies here.

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

  [...]

• The PHP Content Management/Framework Upgrades in ExpressionEngine 2

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

Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant in The Social Web

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

It’s our duty to delve into the Wikileaks debate

I HAVE written a great deal in this column about “open source software”, a term coined by technologist Christine Peterson in 1998 to describe software that was openly developed and freely modifiable. “Open source”, though, has an older meaning in a different context.

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

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

Is WikiLeaks More Than Just a High-Tech Brown Envelope? Yes

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

New Benefits for Linux Foundation Members

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

Hardware

• For ARM, It’s Server Side Up

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

• The end of Wintel

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

• SoC has dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores

  Operating system support was not detailed for the SPEAr1310, and we noted mention of only Linux for the SPEAr300, 310, 320, and 600 SoCs. However, earlier SPEAr offerings were also said to support Windows CE.

Security/Aggression

• DNSSEC is Here. Now What?

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

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

• Millions of Home Routers at Risk

Environment/Wildlife

• Geoengineering: the risks and rewards of tackling climate change

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

Finance

• Goldman Sachs: No More “Sh**ty” Deals

  Goldman Sachs might still be able to sell a bad mortgage-backed security, but there’ll be no more “sh**ty” deals.

• Diversions: Goldman Sachs says no more s***** expletives in emails

  1. 34,000 Goldman Sachs employees are now banned from using an array of curse words on email. Under the new directive, typing out “s—— deal”–the phrase used to describe a now infamous mortgage deal that came up at a Capitol Hill hearing in April–is no longer allowed.

• Goldman Sachs Bans the Phrase “Shitty Deal”; Making Shitty Deals Still O.K.

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

• Goldman Sachs bans employees from using swear words in e-mails, texts and instant messages

  The troubled Wall Street titan told its employees that they can’t use swear words — even ones with asterisks — in their emails, text messages or instant messages, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

• Two Goldman Lawsuits on Abacus Placed on Hold

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

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

• Volatility Trade Buffett Embraced Backfires for Wall Street Hedge Experts

  A bullish stock market trade embraced by the smartest money is backfiring. And that has investors wondering if what Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. know about derivatives is obsolete.

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

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• 90% of web snoop document censored to stop ‘premature unnecessary debate’

  Government censors docs for web plan

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

• Are CIA and Google teaming up?

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

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

• Google Teams Up With CIA, Invests in Analytics Firm

• Google, CIA Back a Startup that Predicts the Future

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

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

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

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

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website

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

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• 10 reasons why your kids should be using Linux

  In this article, I will give you 10 good reasons why you should do just this. In the end, you can decide for yourself whether they’re reason enough to migrate those young users away from other operating systems.

• Remember the year of the Linux desktop?

  For me the year of the Linux desktop was 2005. I started around 12/1998 and found distributions that I tried at the time still a bit rough and sometimes crash-prone, not really much better than Windows ’95. The real problem though was my ISA Winmodem. I never managed to get it to work and was too cheap to buy an external one which would have solved the problem. That was my decision and I cannot blame Linux for it. Then W2K came along and worked well for many years after applying some registry hacks and tightening of security. It got a bit long in the tooth by 2003, but it took until 2005 for Ethernet broadband to arrive at my household. I decided to give Linux another look shortly after and haven’t looked back since – VectorLinux, Debian Sarge, Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10). I was able to do everything I wanted and more. I would never have bothered to learn Vim on Windows although it is available. I would never have got into the capabilities of networking tools as much, or into protocols, NAS and file servers (due to not wanting to purchase Windows server licenses).

Applications

• GLX-Dock 2.2 Enters Beta With Greater Usefulness

  The first beta release of GLX-Dock 2.2 is now available for those looking to add a Mac OS X-like dock to their Linux desktop. The GLX-Dock 2.2 release is focusing upon improving four core areas of this open-source application dock: being unobtrusive yet useful and simple while also introducing a new panel view.

• Linux-based Hard Drive Data Recovery Tools

  Thankfully, there are tons of available Linux-based rescue tools that can get the job done quickly and easily.

• Games

  • 211 free Wine-compatible Games in one download

    How does the thought of 211 completely free wine-compatible games available in one download, complete with slick launcher and per-game info, sound to you?

  • Alien Arena (latest release date July 29, 2010)

    Do you like fast paced deathmatch? How about rich, colorful, arcadelike atmospheres? How about…retro Sci Fi? Then you’re going to love what Alien Arena has in store for you! This game combines some of the very best aspects of such games as Quake III and Unreal Tournament and wraps them up with a retro alien theme, while adding tons of original ideas to make the game quite unique.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4.5 Screenshot Tour

    KDE 4.5 is coming out in August but I simply couldn’t wait to try it out a few days before the release. Hence, I got my hands on the Release Candidate v2 via kubuntu-beta ppa.Apart from some dazzling eye candy,KDE4 has matured a lot when it comes to stability.Here’s a screenshot tour and review of KDE 4.5 RC2 (click on each image to enlarge).

    1)The Desktop : As compared to the earlier KDE versions,the desktop looks more attractive with the Blur effect enabled.Also the system tray icons blend in with the theme.

    2)System Settings : The system settings menu has undergone a bit of shuffling along with some new additions.

Distributions

• Sabayon 5.3 LXDE Screenshots

  I recently tried the new Sabayon 5.3 LXDE release and found it to be lightweight yet still hold up Sabayon’s feature packed, out-of-the-box way of doing things. The Sabayon 5.3 LXDE flavor is ideal for users who have lower hardware specs or prefer the speed of the lighter environment. Built on top of Sabayon “SpinBase” ISO images, this is said to be only a preview of upcoming spinoffs of the Sabayon project.

• SystemRescueCD

  Yet another recovery OS has been updated this month. SystemRescueCD 1.5.8 is a minor update (the 2nd release in 3 weeks) to provide new standard kernels (2.6.32.16), alternative kernels (2.6.34.1) and a new version of the gparted package.

• Red Hat Family

  • Friday Five: Red Hat’s Max McLaren

    Max McLaren has for the past five years been pushing the cause of open source software in Australia in his role as general manager of Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand. But he hasn’t always been — he used to work just as hard for proprietary software as a Lotus Notes stalwart. Max is this week’s guest on the Friday Five.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • My Motivation for Doing Opensource

      When I was the maintainer for the Linux Test Project , while my initial reason for doing it was because my employer requested me to, the reason why I stuck with it for so long (even when my job and employer changed) was because I knew people needed it. It felt good to know that I was helping to improve the “reliability, robustness, and stability of Linux”…it felt good to know that I was helping Red Hat, Novell, Terrasoft, and God knows how many other distros test their releases…it felt good to know I was helping IBM, Intel, HP, and loads of other technology companies test their hardware against Linux…it simply felt good. Hell, I even created the infamous crash test tux logo over a weekend because I thought it would give the project more of an identity…which lead to shirts being printed…banners being made…and me sitting for hours in a 2 person booth in the “dot org” pavilion at too many Linux World Expos to mention. As a project, we were always happy to receive testcases, bug fixes, and improvements from our users and others looking to help, and not once did I ever point the finger at someone using the test suite to improve their for-sale product and say, “you’re not giving enough!”….because I wasn’t doing the work for that reason. Now I’ll admit not participating as much as I should since passing on maintainership, but it’s not because I switched jobs, companies, or career paths…it’s because I got married, bought a house, and had 2 kids…and even got a dog…so

    • Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions

      I think the GNOME Census report is excellent, and it provides some excellent visibility into contributions in GNOME, but it only takes into account upstream contributions to GNOME itself. What the report doesn’t take into account are upstream contributions that are built on the GNOME platform but (a) not part of official GNOME modules, and (b) hosted and developed elsewhere, such as Launchpad. As such, while the report is accurate for showing code and contributions accepted into GNOME, there are also many projects built on GNOME technology that are not taken into account due to non-inclusion in GNOME modules or being developed outside of GNOME infrastructure.

    • What’s new in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

      Compiz
      There are minor changes in default set of animations for Compiz which makes the desktop experience better.

      Since Maverick is still undergoing heavy development, certain elements might be changed. I will keep you updated about the changes.

    • Ubuntu 10.04: A Second Look

      After I review an operating system or Linux distribution, it’s always fun to go back and try out the product again, with all updates, and see how it’s improved. Ubuntu 10.04 was something I thought was pretty decent, but not decent enough to steal me away from Arch. However, I know others that are Ubuntu users and my wife is a big fan as well, so I still continued to have exposure to it even after having reviewed it. Here are my thoughts on Ubuntu 10.04 and how it stands today.

Devices/Embedded

• Android

  • uTorrent Web Now Available on iPad and Android

    After adding support for the iPhone last month, BitTorrent Inc. has now made the remote access ‘Web’ feature of its uTorrent Falcon client compatible with the iPad and Android devices. uTorrent users can now remotely control their downloads from wherever they are on their favorite mobile device.

  • Android wallpaper app that takes your data was downloaded by millions

    That means that apps that seem good but are really stealing your personal information are a big risk at a time when mobile apps are exploding on smartphones, said John Hering, chief executive, and Kevin MaHaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, in their talk at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today.

Could open source tools make Facebook the next AOL?

Open-source social, or “open social,” networking services are not new. StatusNet has been running an open source implementation of its Twitter-like microblogging service for several years, called Indenti.ca. But no open-source service has gained Facebook- or Twitter-proportioned success.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• RMS AMA

  1. corevette: If you could have one proprietary package/software released as Free Software, which would it be and why?

  RMS: I have not made an effort to study the possible candidates, since unless a genie offers me a wish of that kind, the results wouldn’t enable me do anything constructive. Thus, I can only respond based on the few proprietary programs I happen by chance to know about.

  Of the programs I know of, I think freeing Autocad would give the biggest boost to the free software community. It is used in a wide range of activities, and our CAD software lags quite a bit,

Openness/Sharing

• $20 Wikipedia Reader Uses 8-Bit Computing Power

  In all, it can hold the equivalent of 5,000 books, including an offline version of Wikipedia, and requires no internet connection. The Reader will cost $20 when 10,000 or more of it are manufactured. Without that kind of volume, the each Reader will cost about $35.

Programming

• Announce: Rakudo Star – a useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

  On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to announce the July 2010 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

Security/Aggression

• WikiLeaks Secret Records Dump Stays in Legal Clear: Ann Woolner

  With his prematurely white hair and his Australia-tinged English, 39-year-old Julian Assange has become the face and voice of what is surely the most massive leak of U.S. classified documents in history.

  His online organization, WikiLeaks, devotes itself to government and corporate whistle-blowers and the documents they offer. It stands as a buffer between them and whomever had the secrets being bared, whether documents on Cayman Islands bank accounts, video showing Americans firing on civilians in Baghdad or Sarah Palin’s e-mail.

• Wikileaks war logs revelations will be far-reaching, say MPs

  The portrait of a chaotic and failing war revealed in the secret military files casts serious doubts on the government’s policy in Afghanistan and its plans to withdraw British troops by 2015, politicians said today.

• Wikileaks: Q&A with Jacob Appelbaum on “The Afghan War Diaries”

  Jacob Appelbaum: The 15,000 documents are part of the set of Afghanistan documents. They are being redacted for harm-minimizing purposes as requested by our source, and will be made available as is applicable with respect to the relevant security concerns.

Environment

• Met Office report: global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable’

  A new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has provided the “greatest evidence we have ever had” that the world is warming.

• Global warming signs unmistakable: report

  A new report by 300 scientists has flagged the past decade as the hottest on record and compiled 10 “unmistakable” indicators that the world is getting warmer.

  But the scientists mostly stayed away from discussions about the cause.

• Rising sea temperatures linked to decline in food chain

  Sea temperatures are rising, but what effect that might have is up for discussion.

  A study published in Nature today finds a strong link between higher sea surface temperatures and a major decline in phytoplankton or ocean algae, which forms the base of the marine food chain.

• Climate check-up ‘screams world is warming’

  A report on the world’s climate has confirmed that 2009 was one of Australia’s hottest years on record and provides more evidence of global warming.

  Three hundred scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association compiled the report, which the association’s data centre chief Deke Arndt says paints a compelling picture.

  [...]

  The list of last year’s extreme weather events includes a flood in Brazil that left 376,000 people homeless, heavy rainfall in England that damaged 1,500 properties and three intense heat waves in Australia, one of them coinciding with the Victorian bushfires that killed 173 people.

• Tata to sue Greenpeace over turtle game

  Greenpeace India launched the game at the start of June, the latest step in its seven-year campaign against Dhamra port, which is due to open this summer at Bhadrak in Orissa, a state on India’s eastern coast. The environmental group alleges that the development will endanger local turtles. Turtle Vs. Tata, which is still live online and has been played by nearly 25,000 people, places a turtle in the role of Pac-Man battling against Tata logos in the place of ghosts.

• Hackers shut down EU carbon-trading website

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Uruguay bows to pressure over anti-smoking law amendments

  Tobacco giant Philip Morris accused of corporate bullying following government’s decision to water down legislation

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

  The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

• China jails writer for 15 years for ‘endangering state security’

  Human rights groups have attacked the heavy sentence a Chinese court has imposed on a Uighur writer who posted critical articles online and spoke to foreign journalists after last year’s riots in Xinjiang.

• CNN anchors attack the scourge of anonymity

  CNN’s Kyra Phillips and John Roberts spent a good five minutes yesterday expressing serious concern over what they called “the dark side” of the Internet: the plague of “anonymous bloggers” who are “a bunch of cowards” for not putting their names on what they say, and who use this anonymity to spread “conspiracy,” “lunacy,” “extremism” and false accusations (video below). The segment included excerpts from an interview with Andrew Keene, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, who explained that the Real Media must serve as “gatekeepers” to safeguard the public against the dangers of anonymity on the Internet. Roberts demanded that bloggers should “have the courage at the very least to put your name on it,” while Phillips announced: “something is going to have to be done legally. . . . these people have to be held accountable, they’re a bunch of cowards.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Sometimes It’s OK To Steal My Games

  Sometimes
  This blog post is about the bright side of software piracy. It’s about the times when not only is it OK to steal my games, but, in fact, I get something out of it. Perhaps an unusual topic for a blog post from a game developer.

  [...]

  Because, when I’m being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I’m the one being ripped off.