01.18.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Ubuntu-dedicated hardware company System 76 has today announced the launch of two new laptops.
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Martha Lane Fox is promising £98 computers to tempt the last remaining digital refuseniks in UK to get online.
The machines, refurbed by Remploy, will come complete with telephone support, monitor, mouse and Linux software.
Lane Fox, David Cameron’s Digital Champion, told the Financial Times (subscription link): “Motivation and inspiration are still two of the biggest barriers [to using the internet], but clearly perception of price is another big deal for people. A good price point is certainly part of what helps people get online.”
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The UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox is launching a new scheme under which Brits with no internet access will be able to purchase a refurbished Linux-based PC for £98.
The PC will come with a Linux operating system, a flat-screen monitor and telephone support along with a warranty, The Financial Times reports. The scheme is part of Lane Fox’s Race Online 2012 campaign which aims to bring every Brit online by the end of 2012.
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Kernel Space
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I expect things to get better, at least on the 4313, as the open source driver finishes the cleanup and integration that it is going through now, and is incorporated in more common distributions. I hope it will be in the upcoming Debian 6.0 release, as that will then get it into a lot of other derivative releases, as it is already in Mint Debian and SimplyMEPIS 11. It should also be a part of a standard kernel release (perhaps 2.6.38?), which will then get it into the distributions which track the latest kernels.
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Graphics Stack
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The Nouveau (and PathScale) developers working on reverse-engineering the NVIDIA Linux binary driver in turn to write a free software driver with 2D/3D acceleration for all of NVIDIA’s graphics processors, have another accomplishment under their belt today. They’ve now merged the NVC0 (a.k.a. “Fermi”) acceleration support into the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver.
Landing into the Linux 2.6.37 kernel DRM was initial mode-setting support for GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” graphics cards, but it went without any actual acceleration support. With the Linux 2.6.38 kernel there is now initial open-source acceleration support for NVIDIA Fermi GPUs, so the DDX driver bits have now been merged into the mainline xf86-video-nouveau display driver.
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I recently bought a Dell laptop (Vostro 3300) and directly installed Fedora 14 on it. Everything worked out of the box, I just needed to install Broadcom wireless driver.
But, I was wrong! The laptop come with a Nvidia card, and checking the output of lspci, I found an Intel VGA card too. So I start reading why I have a Nvidia and an Intel cards in my laptop to find the new cool technology : Optimus graphics from Nvidia…
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This work, plus improvements going into the various Gallium3D and classic Mesa drivers along with state trackers, etc will eventually be released as Mesa 7.11 in a few months time.
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Just one month ago an independent developer began working on VIA TTM/GEM support for the VIA kernel DRM driver along with VIA kernel mode-setting support, even while VIA’s open-source Linux strategy is dead. Just a few weeks later, James Simmons’ VIA TTM/GEM memory management patches are now ready.
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Applications
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The Pencil Project is definitely not for everyone, I must say. If you have no intention whatsoever designing anything ever, then you probably don’t need it. But if you want to step up your presentation skills or design quality a notch, this is a very good tool for the task.
Pencil lets you create simple, effective, powerful mockups that demonstrate your ideas in a professional, elegant manner, far superior to classic PowerPoint presentations and shoddy hand-drawn designs or the diarrhea of verbose that people use instead of visual aids. Rather than trying to make other people envision your vision, you let their imagination rest and give them a colorful, classy tour full of snappy, stylish, refreshing images. And you stand out from the crowd, as simple as that.
It is also possible that Pencil could save you money in the long run, since you would need less help from marketing and design teams or third-party companies to do the job for you, and you may even end up with better products, since you would enjoy better exposure and more direct experience in design. All in all, Pencil is free and effective. Use it.
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DisPlex. This application will provide functionality for those that wan an appindicator to replace the older (but fantastic) fusion-icon.
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By the way I talk and write about PDFs and tools for working with them, some people think I’m in love with the format.
I’m not. For a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here.
PDF files are a necessary … well, not-so-good in my personal and professional lives. In a number of cases, I have to even though there are better alternatives for delivering documents.
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Proprietary
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Opera is one of those companies which is leading innovation in the Web Browser segment. Sadly, despite being one of the strongest proponents of Open Standards on the Web, Opera’s own development model is proprietary. We approached Shwetank Dixit, Web Evangelist, Opera to understand Opera’s inclination towards open source.
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Opera stands much more for Open Standards, and we have championed open web standards right from the start. Standards affect everyone, whether they are open source, open core, or closed source. Thats why we think its essential that people support open standards, and we take a lot of effort to support open standards. Opera is part of various standards bodies like the IETF, W3C, etc (In fact, we have one of the largest contingents amongst all companies when it comes to employees committed to doing standards work in the W3C). All opera technologies like Opera Unite applications, Widgets and Extensions are based on open web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript rather than proprietary ones. All this is to ensure a free and open web built on open web standards.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages.
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Logical Volume Management (LVM) is a disk management option that every major Linux distribution includes. Whether you need to set up storage pools or just need to dynamically create partitions, LVM is probably what you are looking for.
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Games
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Lutris is a gaming platform similar to DJL and PlayOnLinux aiming to support as many games as possible for the GNU/Linux operating system. Itlutris logo takes care of running the game by setting up the best environement in order to provide the most enjoyable gaming experience.The program is currently usable but only has a fraction of the planned features.
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Gaslamp Games have announced a new 2D RPG called Dungeons of Dreadmor, scheduled for release in April this year.
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A user named Black Mage decided to port Arx Fatalis to OpenGL and started a thread on our forums. Everybody interested in working on the game is welcome to join. Currently the developer is interested in getting the code to compile at all.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Amarok 2.4 features support for the third generation iPod Touch, the option to have Amarok write statistics and album covers back to the files directly, as well as a completely re-written collection scanner that better detects compilations. A mass-tagging user interface using the MusicBrainz open content music database is now included that allows users to update their songs with accurate information, as is transcoding support – the developers note that transcoding will be expanded to media devices in a future release.
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Every new version of digiKam features its own unique splash screen. But you don’t have to wait for the next digiKam release to get a new splash screen. Here are a few ready-to-go designs created by yours truly. To learn how to replace the default splash screen in digiKam, take a look at the Replace digiKam’s Default Splash Screen article.
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GNOME Desktop
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After a very, very, very long time I can finally announce another Foresight Linux release! We have gone through a lot of changes and it took us a while to rebuild our developer/maintainer/user base, but here we are! The goal is to go back to having a rolling release schedule and keep bringing the latest and greatest mix of GNOME and applications!
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WebuUpd8 reader Anurag sent us a very interesting tip: you can run any part of Unity 2D (Qt) under the classic GNOME desktop. To use the Unity panel or launcher without the whole Unity Qt, you firstly have to install Unity Qt (2D).
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In the same way you can run the “unity-qt-panel”, either as stand-alone or togheter with the “unity-qt-launcher”. To fix the double titlebar for maximized windows you can use Window Applets – select the option to remove the titlebar for maximized windows.
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GNOME Commander is file manager aimed at people who want a fast and efficient file manager. GNOME Commander can currently perform most common file operations, and will detect changes to files caused by other programs and update its views without the need for the user to manually reload. The program also supports Copy and Paste, DND and MIME.
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Xfce
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After a pre-releases came in November and then another in December, Xfce 4.8 has been officially released today.
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The latest version of lightweight desktop environment XFCE has been released, adding support for remote shares browsing, a rewritten desktop panel, and improved settings/file transfer dialogs.
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Aside from the features implemented in Xfce, the 4.8 development cycle brought us a bunch of other goodies. For the first time we had a serious release strategy formed after the “Xfce Release and Development Model” developed at the Ubuntu Desktop Summit in May 2009. A new web application made release management a lot easier. We worked hard on improving the situation of Xfce translators which led us to setting up our own Transifex server. Something else you will hopefully notice is that our server and mirroring infrastructure has been improved so that our servers hopefully will not suddenly surrender shortly after this release announcement.
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XfceXfce is a wonderful mid-sized desktop environment for those that want some customization without excessive system overhead. Xfce began life in 1996 as a simple clone of CDE, but has since progressed along side contemporaries such as KDE and GNOME. Some might even think of Xfce as a compromise between the highly customizable KDE and the higher performing GNOME. It was very popular in lighter Linux distributions for a time, and is still commonly included as an alternative choice. For a while an easy one- (or two-) click installer was available that downloaded the individual packages, compiled them, and installed Xfce for you. But no more. Today the developers released version 4.8 with some new goodies and a bit of an updated look, but with no convenient installer.
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Reviews
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Zorin OS is, according to the project’s website, an easy-to-use, fast operating system which attempts to be useful straight out of the box. The distro appears to be targeting people who have, up to this point, been using Windows and the project makes much of its ability to ape the Windows GUI and run Windows applications through WINE. The project offers us the Core edition of their OS for free and charges a small fee for their premium editions. Zorin’s website includes a news section, a page for frequently asked questions, a support forum and on-line store. All of this is well laid out, navigation is easy and I found the design appealing. The Core edition of Zorin OS 4 is downloadable as a DVD image and weighs in at 1.17 GB.
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In conclusion, while the rough start makes me think Zorin isn’t a good choice for computer novices, it may be good for Linux novices who were formally Windows power users. The system is set up to appeal to that crowd and, for someone who wants a large collection of software available and doesn’t get scared off easily, I think Zorin is a good option.
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Winner is – Slackware! This is really more tongue in cheek. I’ve been using slackware as my primary machine for the last four months and like a clock, you set it and let it run.
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MoonOS is an interesting alternative to generic Ubuntu, and to other Ubuntu derivatives such as Linux Mint. This release has some positive things for existing MoonOS users. However, I don’t see anything here that’s likely to grab users from other distros. There is not real standout feature that might possibly attract people and get them to switch to MoonOS 4.
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Red Hat Family
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Following the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Innosoft Gulf, the leading Certified Red Hat Training Partner and Oracle Approved Education Center (OAEC) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), is pleased to offer a seminar to the public about the new features of Red Hat Enteprise Linux (RHEL 6).
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Though Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 may have just been released in November, RHEL 5 still has a lot left in the tank: Red Hat just announced version 5.6 of the platform with a host of new bug and security fixes.
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Red Hat Enterprise 6 (aka Santiago) was released Nov. 10, 2010 — 3.5 years after the first release of RHEL 5 and 7 months after RHEL 5.5. It will be supported to at least some extent for another 10 years (until Nov. 30, 2020), which is a pretty impressive life cycle, especially compared to the 5-year support of Ubuntu’s LTS releases. It’s just one confirmation of the intended market for RHEL6, which is clear throughout the release specs.
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Debian Family
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I hope I’ve inspired you to try this interesting new distribution – I’m certainly hoping to keep it on my netbook in the long term.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As part of our planning for Natty+1, we’ll need to find some space on the CD for Qt libraries, and we will evaluate applications developed with Qt for inclusion on the CD and default install of Ubuntu.
Ease of use, and effective integration, are key values in our user experience. We care that the applications we choose are harmonious with one another and the system as a whole. Historically, that has meant that we’ve given very strong preference to applications written using Gtk, because a certain amount of harmony comes by default from the use of the same developer toolkit. That said, with OpenOffice and Firefox having been there from the start, Gtk is clearly not an absolute requirement. What I’m arguing now is that it’s the values which are important, and the toolkit is only a means to that end. We should evaluate apps on the basis of how well they meet the requirement, not prejudice them on the basis of technical choices made by the developer.
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Displex (indicator-displex) is an application that provides similar functionality as “fusion-icon”, but using an Ubuntu appindicator. It can be used to control Compiz, Emerald and the Gnome Display Manager.
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When you look back at the history of Ubuntu through the years, you will see that, Ubuntu Unity is *the* most significant change ever happened to Ubuntu. Ubuntu Unity is a really interesting idea with limitless possibilities. Now, here are some innovative user created Ubuntu Unity UI mockups/ideas you might find interesting.
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The Ubuntu “server team” and Canonical are in inquisitive lot, they want to ask the community just exactly how it is using the Ubuntu Server Edition — and in what kinds of organisations, scenarios, environments and/or deployments — hence the Ubuntu Server Edition was born and is now in its third year.
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Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat was released on October 10th, 2010, and it really is the best Ubuntu release to date. Everything was made to be super easy for regular users, and advanced Linux enthusiasts still can take advantage of all that it can offer. A lot of functions have been completely automated (the screen type and resolution settings, for example) and most of them also got graphical menus for easier configuration.
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Many of us with the opportunity will have met up with logging via a Citrix server. With that in mind, I set to getting an ICA client going on my main Ubuntu box at home. There is information scattered about the web in the form of question on the Ubuntu forum and a step-by-step guide by Liberian Geek. To summarise the process that I followed here, you have to download a copy of the Citrix Receiver installer for Linux from the company’s website.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is Issue #219 for the week January 04- 17, 2011 and is available here.
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Phones
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Android
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Here is what I like:
* Android 2.3 (first and currently the only phone to have this)
* 16GB Internal Memory
* 4″ Display
* 1 GHZ Processor
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Sub-notebooks
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OLPC CTO Edward J. McNierney gives us an overview of the ARM Marvell Armada 610 version of OLPC XO Laptop, XO 1.75, to be released soon, being optimized now in Taiwan, it provides for a sub 2 Watt One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop. One Laptop Per Child created the Netbook market, now they will push the PC/Laptop industry towards ARM support for lower power consumption and lower prices through increased industry competition and optimized SoC designs. The $100 Laptop is nearer. Marvell’s 610 is now one of the ARM SoC platforms that is now powerful enough to power a full desktop/laptop system.
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While Intel says that it has nothing to fear from Arm chips, it seems that the One Laptop Top Per Child project might disagree. The OLPC group, which aims to bring cheap laptops to kids in developing countries has been experimenting with the RM Marvell Armada 610 chip.
OLPC CTO Edward J. McNierney showed Arm devices how the chip went faster than the Intel equivalent. The chip provides for a sub 2 Watt One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop with much more back for its buck.
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Although both of these projects are far-fetched and unlikely to enter the market anytime soon, we have something up our sleeves — Yet another Indian laptop! The new laptop, eBerry, is the richer cousin of the $10 laptop.
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Tablets
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Blogger Robert Pogson — also an educator — has “spent years teaching students not to touch the screen of the monitor,” so “I am not sure I will ever be ready for a touchscreen,” he told Linux Girl.
“I could hook monitor, keyboard and mouse up to one,” he pointed out. “I have a bunch of thin clients, a notebook and a terminal server in my home.”
Still, “I doubt I will be buying any new device for a year or so,” Pogson concluded. “If I were to buy something with touch it might be a smartphone, just because I love ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY) and GNU/Linux running on ARM.”
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Regardless of what I think, the rumor-mill is going full-speed ahead that, on February 9th, HP will be showing off new smartphones, tablets and maybe even netbooks running webOS. Some folks, like James Kendrick, think that this news would be the cat’s meow. “Of all the product categories HP is considering for webOS, the tablet has me excited as I believe the OS is so fitting for the tablet form that it can take the competition by storm.” Really? Much as I like the idea of Android on tablets, once Google clears up exactly what it’s doing for programmers with Android for different platforms, I can’t see anyone storming Apple’s iPad anytime soon.
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We recently completed our 2010 national survey of open source in the UK academic sector (the full report is currently being finalised). This post examines the extent to which suppliers to, and staff of, UK universities and colleges contribute to open source as a matter of course. This kind of engagement is important since it realises the maximum benefits of open source software.
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Events
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When ForgeRock (where I work) got started, some companies who had been promised an open source IDM by a vendor who then reneged on the promise asked if we’d join them building one. After about nine months collaborative work, the result was the OpenIDM project, for which ForgeRock announced support back in October.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Yesterday, the ninth Firefox 4.0 beta was released. One of the major new features in Firefox 4.0 is hardware acceleration for anything from canvas drawing to video rendering. Sadly, this feature won’t make its way to the Linux version of Firefox 4.0. The reason? X’ drivers are “disastrously buggy”. Update: Benoit Jacob informed my via email that there’s some important nuance: hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver).
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As part of our university outreach programme, a few Mozilla people and volunteers went to Boston last week to give a series of lectures on web technologies for games development.
During the week we covered topics like WebGL for 3D development, basics of JavaScript, debugging and performance, canvas development, offline development and local storage and multimedia on the web. We’ll make these slides available in the comments to this blog post.
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Last week we reported on Mozilla Firefox developers having issues with Linux GPU drivers to the point that the Firefox 4.0 Linux build will not have GPU acceleration enabled by default, but it can be found for Mac OS X and Windows users. Fortunately, to fix the situation, there’s now some open-source Mesa/X developers looking into these problems of Firefox GPU acceleration.
Mozilla’s Benoit Jacob wrote to the Mesa mailing list about the WebGL conformance tests to fix bugs in Mesa’s OpenGL implementation. “The goal of this email is to discuss steps towards whitelisting Xorg OpenGL drivers for WebGL rendering, and more generally for all OpenGL-based features, in Firefox. Although I’m only directly concerned with Firefox, this really applies equally well to all browsers implementing WebGL.”
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Mozilla has the finish line for Firefox 4 in sight: Beta 9 was just released and the first builds of Beta 10 have been posted to the company’s FTP server. There are just over 100 blocking bugs left and there isn’t much that will change until the final release will be available sometime in February or March. Time to check how fast this new browser is. The first article of this series focuses on JavaScript performance.
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The latest release has hardware acceleration, which is great news if you are a Windows user but pants if you prefer the penguin. It even works on Windows XP and Mac OS X
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5. Mozilla: I like the fact that Mozilla is an non-profit organization with an aim to keep the net as open as possible in a time when net freedoms are under attack. Although I have nothing against them, I don’t like the idea of being locked into using Apple’s Safari or Google’s Chrome – I think both companies already have enough influence over my online time as it is!
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Offering a developer tool overview of the Firefox 4 Beta, and noting that developers will benefit from support for HTML5, WebM and HD video, 3D graphic rendering with WebGL, hardware acceleration and the Mozilla Audio API for sound, Chris Blizzard – Mozilla’s director of product platform management – termed the latest beta as a “huge pile of awesome.”
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Oracle
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Paulo José posted some very interesting LibreOffice UI mockups at DeviantArt for which he says the main inspiration was the Blender UI…
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If you find issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org’s bug tracking system IssueTracker.
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Funding
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To that end today OpenGamma is a new kind of financial startup, based in London, which has an open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Today it’s completed a $6 million Series B round of equity financing led by FirstMark Capital, a New York-based VC. Accel Partners joins the round as a return investor. OpenGamma previously had a Series A round of $6m from Accel Partners.
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As proudly reported in the developer blog for the programming language, Scala creator Martin Odersky will soon be able to double the size of his team. Over the next five years the group of developers working at Switzerland’s EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) will be receiving €2.3 million from the European Research Council. The goal is to overcome the challenges of parallel programming, which is becoming increasingly important as multi-core and multi-processor systems become more widespread.
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BSD
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Ken Smith has announced the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RC2. This is the second iteration of Release Candidates which will lead to 8.2-RELEASE.
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Openness/Sharing
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Fedora and beyond
Former Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields discusses working in the open source community, pointing out how and where he thinks the same principles could be used in other communities and organizations. »Read the article
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Programming
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The article Why You Can’t Hire Great Perl Programmers addressed the core Perl community. We need to encourage Perl dabblers to improve their skills and to join the community.
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So I’ve played around with Python, and then with PHP, and now Perl. All three can be used for object-oriented programming.
A while ago, when I was trying to learn more PHP, I started to feel the lack of knowledge about its OOP aspect. Having started out with K&R’s book on C, procedural logic has always made sense to me: What was this object thing?
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The Linux kernel community has its own set of rules regarding various things, such as coding style, communication, and so on. Many of the leading developers in the Linux kernel community have little time, so it is best to follow these rules to make the whole process as smooth as possible.
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Standards/Consortia
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With Google’s announcement that it’s dropping H.264 support in Chrome in favor of WebM, it’s time to start looking at the format. Here’s a look at how to get the best WebM quality.
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Google announced last week that it is axing support for the H.264 video codec from its Chrome browser. (Only the one it distributes for desktops, at the moment; but it’s not clear whether the Android browser includes an H.264 codec. We’ll come to it.)
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One way to look at the impact that Google’s open source Chrome browser is having is to consider the ripple effect that the company created with its recent blog post on web video standards and browsing. We covered the post and its implications here, and Microsoft–with its market share-leading Internet Explorer browser–served up a response dripping with sarcasm, here. Now, Google is delivering some specifics about its actual intent.
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So, one of the concerns cited about WebM is its possible vulnerability to patents from entities other than Google. Yes, we have rock solid patent grants from Google covering the WebM spec, but it’s possible other people have patents which cover functions you would need to implement in order to implement the WebM specification. So, the argument goes, you can’t rely on the royalty-free-ness of WebM.
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A Canadian-born lover of books and prominent science fiction author, Cory Doctorow is a champion of the cause of freedom of access to knowledge. When asked to do an interview with School Libraries Canada, he replied, “Generally, I’m not doing any interviews right now as I struggle with an imminent book deadline. However, given the nature of the publication, I feel duty-bound to do something with you, if we can make it happen….” He made it happen, and in the interview he reveals a few of the reasons for his commitment to positive social action, his deep-rooted attachment to school libraries, and his sense of common-cause with the library community in general.
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Security
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Conducted on behalf of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a study has found that a cyberwar conducted solely via the internet between states is very improbable. The authors believe that most crucial systems are simply too well protected. While attacks on systems such as the one involving Stuxnet can be successful, they have to be carefully targeted and limited – and the effects have to be calculated exactly.
The study finds that the term “cyberwar” is now “overhyped” as it is used for all kinds of things, including activities that used to fall under the category of espionage or sabotage. Indeed, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks related to WikiLeaks have also been called cyberwar even though they only constituted blockades.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Now the Tunisian government, however, most certainly viewed the Social Networking Platform as a threat. Here’s a post from last July by technically knowledgeable Tunisian citizen documenting how the Government was collecting social networking platform credentials of it’s citizens. At the time, this would be appear to have been some type of an official DNS cache poisoning/Phishing attack. The Tunisian Internet Agency(ATI) is the upstream provider for all Tunisian ISPs. Certainly, then, from a technical standpoint, it would have been feasible. However, the blogger notes that the attacks occurred only intermittently so as to not arouse too much suspicion.
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The collapse of the trial of the Ratcliffe coal protesters earlier this month has drawn new attention to police infiltration of protest movements.
However, the controversy sparked by the exposure of undercover cop Mark Kennedy has been building for several years. While police have charged that environmental direct action represents a new and growing threat to public order, environmentalists have claimed the threat is being hyped to justify the growth of a labyrinthine and unaccountable intelligence structure under the control of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
It is illuminating to re-examine the chronology of those debates in the light of what we now know about the activities of Kennedy and other police agents, thanks to a long running investigation by Guardian journalists such as Paul Lewis and Rob Evans.
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US-based web hosting company GoDaddy demanded the removal of a controversial article concerning a top CIA operative in Pakistan, leading to the source of a story that went global being taken offline.
At the start of the month, GoDaddy demanded that “PakNationalists” removed an article that discussed a potential court case against Jonathan Banks, the CIA’s former Islamabad station chief who was accused of being responsible for allegedly illegal drone attacks on parts of Pakistan.
The article, which was removed but can be seen from the Google cache, was called “CIA Station Chief In Islamabad Sued For Murder And Terrorism.”
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks “changes everything”. So says Christian Caryl in the latest New York Review of Books, as the media, technology and foreign policy worlds ponder the effect of the industrial dumping of US government cables. For several years American analysts in particular have been trying to make sense of the information free-for-all facilitated by the internet. Julian Assange’s perhaps inadvertent contribution is to have brought a previously arcane debate into the forefront of global politics.
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Finance
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A Swiss whistleblower has handed documents, which he claims contain details of widescale tax evasion, to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in London this morning.
The documents are said to contain details of wealthy individuals and organisations from the US, Europe and Asia who are using the secretive nature of the Swiss banking system’s offshore Cayman Islands accounts to avoid paying tax in their native countries.
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“British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London”, said the Observer yesterday, stating, “Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, ‘approximately 40 politicians’.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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If you’ve watched any political coverage since 1992, you know what happened: CBS’s experiment failed. This week, as Congress’s 112th session begins, the shrinking sound bite stands as a rare enemy of Republicans and Democrats alike. Whether running for president of the United States or for city council, politicians can count on seeing their words broken into ever smaller and more fragmentary bits. You might debate whom to blame — asked about nine-second sound bites, one TV executive replied, “the politicians started it” — but you can’t dispute the trend. In recent presidential elections, the average TV sound bite has dropped to a tick under eight seconds. A shorter, dumber, and shriller political discourse, it seems, has become another hazard of modern life.
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The question of whether political parties should receive roughly $2 for every vote they garner from the Canadian public is being raised again in the news and political discourse lately. The Conservatives are in favor of getting rid of the subsidy, while the opposition parties are in favor of keeping it.
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That said, the Conservatives have resorted to a smear campaign at the expense of Ignatieff (and to a lesser degree Layton) and it can only mean one thing: Remember what your mother told you in high school?
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Last week, California’s Supreme Court reached a controversial 5-2 decision in People v. Diaz (PDF), holding that police officers may lawfully search mobile phones found on arrested individuals’ persons without first obtaining a search warrant. The court reasoned that mobile phones, like cigarette packs and wallets, fall under the search incident to arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
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In a move that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users, third party application developers are now able to access your home address and mobile phone number.
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He then posted many of these photos to his victims’ Facebook pages.
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It is clear that the Chinese government is not happy about the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. However, it is beyond normal people’s imagination that the propaganda machine would turn its resentment into the censorship of the terms “award” and “prize”.
According to the latest general notice from the Central Propaganda Bureau regarding news and propaganda in 2011, all news and commercial websites should not initiate any kind of nation-wide selection (listings and awards) of news, people or events. The background of this notice is related to a series of events last year:
Firstly, Chinese political dissident Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
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Confirmation that the Hungarian Internet is at risk comes has been submitted to the European Parliament, by a security organisation which monitors for breaches of free speech in the new East European democracies.
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Tor 0.2.1.29 continues our recent code security audit work. The main fix resolves a remote heap overflow vulnerability that can allow remote code execution. Other fixes address a variety of assert and crash bugs, most of which we think are hard to exploit remotely.
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Judgment provides boost for press freedom following marathon legal battle by Daily Mirror over privacy ruling
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Nokia’s struggle to compete against Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), and drive more sales of its own smartphones, hit a new low today, as the Finnish company said it would be discontinuing its free, bundled music service, Comes With Music, in 27 of the 33 markets where it has operated since 2008, after low subscriber takeup in several markets.
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When the Internet was first made available to the public, Canada quickly became a world leader. When Bell and Rogers entered the High Speed Internet market, they offered Canadians top speeds, and low prices for unlimited access. (They did such a good job that they killed off all the competition.)
Cheap and fast access is why Canadians so whole heartedly became early Internet adopters. And that’s why Canadians are currently some of the most Internet savvy and Internet connected people in the world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Boing Boing has been on the receiving end of one or two stupid legal threats in our day but this one from the firm of Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh takes the cake, the little cake topper, the frosting and all the candles, as well as the box and the cake-stand and the ornamental forks.
Back in July, I posted about the research on the academic advantage some people with autism exhibit. In the comments, someone else used the word “scam” in a message board post.
Here’s where it gets good. The legal eagles at Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh represent an (apparently extremely touchy) company called Academic Advantage and they apparently earn their keep by using alerts or searches for “Academic Advantage scam” to see who’s badmouthing good old AA, and then they fire off a legal threat and demand that the content be removed from the Internet posthaste.
[...]
And to the lawyers at Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh (whose motto is “Experienced Attorneys. Proven Results.” and who boast of degrees from Harvard, NYU and UCLA): shame on you. What would your parents say if they could see you squandering your top legal educations with this kind of careless, sloppy inanity?
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Copyrights
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Google have reportedly filed a paper with the New York District Court in support of MP3tunes.com in its ongoing legal battle with EMI, joining The Electronic Frontiers Foundation who had previously filed an Amici curiae brief in support of the company and its founder Michael Robertson. MP3tunes provides an online music “locker” service where users can store their music and access it from computers and mobile devices. MP3tunes also operates a music search engine called Sideload where users can find music tracks on other sites and then put them in their locker. EMI says the service makes mass copyright infringement easy by letting users upload music they didn’t buy and providing links to online songs that users can then “sideload” into their library and EMI claims that digital locker service such as MP3tunes infringes copyright unless licensed by rights holders . Robertson unsurprisingly argues that EMI’s position is an incorrect interpretation of copyright law saying that MP3tunes is shielded from liability by the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – because it doesn’t encourage copyright infringement and promptly removes infringing content when notified but EMI.
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Thousands of Canadians have spoken out many times on copyright reform, but it is important to do so once more. Bill C-32 is a better bill than its predecessors and with some tinkering would be a bill worth supporting.
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After weeks of public protests on- and offline the Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigned and escaped the country last Friday. Today, the head of the transitional government, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, announced his new cabinet members which include a familiar name. Slim Amamou, the Pirate Party member and freedom of speech activist who was arrested just a few days ago, is now the (deputy minister) State Secretary of Youth and Sports.
From SiCKO: How Liberals Respond to Their “Enemies”
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.17.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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In something not too far off from where he said the Linux desktop will be dead if Keith Packard got his way in merging graphics drivers back into the X Server, his new blog post is entitled “This way, the free software desktop is never going to make it.”
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Applications
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Weather Indicator is an Ubuntu appindicator that displays the current weather. Its development stopped a while back and the PPA was removed but Vadim Rutkovsky brought Weather Indicator back to life – for the past two weeks he’s been fixing bugs for the old Weather Indicator and also, he has created a new PPA for easy installation.
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The indicator-weather project has kicked back into life this week – meaning none of us need to go without ‘weather-info-at-a-glance’ on our desktop panel come Ubuntu 11.04.
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Proprietary
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Ralph Hauwert has been posting on twitter about work he’s done on getting WebM decoding to work in Flash by compiling the libvpx source code using Adobe’s Alchemy technology.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Starry Hope Uploader is a simple, easy to use Facebook batch uploader. To use it, all you have to do is drag and drop some photos to the uploader drag-n-drop area, select the album (or create a new one) and click “upload”. In the preferences window you’ll also find an option to upload high resolution photos. For now, these are all the features but expect more in future releases!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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After six months of development, I’m proud to announce the release of the Muon Suite, version 1.1.0. The main focus of this release has been to add additional package management utilities to help further round out the package management experience. More specifically, Muon Suite 1.1.0 introduces the Muon Update Notifier, Update Manager, and Software Center.
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GNOME Desktop
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Window Applets is a package that comes with two Gnome panel applets: Window Title and Window Buttons which are controls for windows that are placed on the Panel instead of the window. They provide a clever way to increase vertical screen space. See THIS screenshot to understand what this is about.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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To me it seems very weird, though. All that replacing and porting over and over again (UNR port to EFL, later a rewrite of UNR as Unity for Clutter/Mutter, then porting Unity from Vala/Mutter to C++/Compiz and now from Clutter to Qt with whatever window manager) makes me wonder if there are people in charge at Canonical who don’t change their mind every few months…
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The Ubuntu X developers are getting ready to push the Mesa 7.10 graphics library and X.Org Server 1.10 into the Natty Narwhal repository for Ubuntu 11.04. Due to API/ABI breakage, this also results in new driver builds going into Natty, and for a period of time at least where the ATI Catalyst driver will no longer be compatible with the xorg-server (though the NVIDIA binary driver should properly support Linux 2.6.37 and xorg-server 1.10 right now).
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Most of the key features for Ubuntu 11.04 are now in the Firmware Test Suite, so now seems an appropriate time to mention them.
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Flavours and Variants
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In this Screencast I show you howto clean up your system (cleanup apts cache, webbrowser cache and remove orphaned packages).
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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here is a new video, which shows you, how easy it is to open video or pdf files from the connected USB device…
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TwimGo is a application that has been going from strength to strength over the last few months and Now it has been rewritten using Qt and QML.
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Android
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The Unigine Engine, which is developed by the Linux-friendly Unigine Corp and is known as providing the most advanced and demanding OpenGL Linux game engine at this time, has been ported to run on tablet computers and smart-phones running Google’s Android operating system. Wow.
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Tablets
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Microsoft makes much of its money by selling software licences in bulk; specifically most of its profits are generated by software sales, with a large proportion of that being OS licences in massive quantities. But in the current tablet market there seems little opportunity for charging for an OS. Apple’s pricing certainly has a premium, but that is accounted for by the brand; the Android tablet market is highly competitive on both price and design innovation, as will be the desktop Linux tablet market, while RIM will sell to RIM users with, maybe, a slight premium based on their unique proposition.
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The volunteer developers behind Apache Tomcat have released version 7.0.6 of the open-source Java servlet container.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The latest Firefox 4 Beta is available to test the cool features and improvements in the next version of Firefox. As we continue to refine features and performance in Firefox 4 Beta, this release includes faster start-up time, bookmarking and makes complex animations smoother.
Firefox 4 Beta is built for the way people use the Web today, offering more control over the browsing experience. It introduces a fresh new look and features like App Tabs and Panorama to make it easier and more efficient to navigate the Web. Firefox 4 Beta also includes performance enhancements to make everything faster from start-up time to page-load speed and the performance of Web applications and games. Firefox Sync is integrated into the browser with Firefox 4 Beta, giving you access to your Awesome Bar history, bookmarks, open tabs and passwords across computers and smartphones.
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Mozilla Firefox 4.0 will feature GPU hardware acceleration using OpenGL (or Direct2D/Direct3D under Microsoft Windows) acceleration for WebGL content and even HTML5. This support is there for Windows and Mac OS X, but for Firefox 4.0 the Linux support has been disabled and WebGL is also blacklisted for most drivers. Why? It’s the problematic GPU drivers, of course.
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Due to the work done on Firefox support, it wasn’t long before Thunderbird would follow…
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CMS
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WordPress 3.0, the most recent self-hosted version of the world’s most popular blogging platform WordPress has surpassed 30 million downloads today, crossing the barrier earlier this morning.
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Openness/Sharing
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People throughout the world are gathering at more than 450 events in 120 countries to celebrate Wikipedia’s 10th birthday. I’m amazed and thrilled and humbled by the significant support Wikipedia has in every corner of the world. When I started Wikipedia a decade ago, I never imagined that everyday people in places like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Bolivia, Ethiopia and Algeria would come together to celebrate Wikipedia in such an extraordinary way.
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Wikimedia India Chapter, an independent organisation that will support and promote Wikimedia, a collaborative project of Wikipedia, the world’s free online encyclopaedia, has been formally established here.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Internet’s leading standards body – the Internet Engineering Task Force – turns 25 on Jan. 16.
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There has been a lot of discussion regarding this week’s announcement of upcoming changes to HTML video codec support in Chrome. The future of web video is an important topic, we welcome the debate, and want to address some of the questions raised.
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The Wall Street Journal dislikes Europe as much because of what it accomplishes as for its inefficiencies. America mumbles about improving infrastructure, Europe invests in it massively and redevelops infrastructure to transcend (and remove as sources of discord) national and regional boundaries. America turns to off-shore drilling to ensure energy security, Europe turns to energy efficiency. America talks about being a land of opportunity, Europe ensures equal access to education, housing, and health, the real basis for meritocracy. The US bails out banks, Europe bails out entire countries so as not to abandon the security of multi-national community.
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Health/Nutrition
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Scientists have produced genetically modified chickens that appear to prevent the spread of avian influenza. Though the chickens can themselves become infected with flu viruses such as H5N1, say the researchers, they cannot pass on the virus to any other birds with which they come into contact.
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Security
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The news about computer attacks are becoming more frequent and the threat of cyberwar hover over the claims of various countries, among which include Iran and South Korea, who recently complained about these practices.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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“God, I hate the liberal media,” Durgin said Monday during his highly rated afternoon show on WHP580. “It’s like, if you don’t follow Obama and believe in Obama’s policies, then you are a potential terrorist.”
In talking about The New York Times, often seen as queen of the left by conservatives, Durgin added, “Somebody ought to burn that paper down. Just go to New York and blow that sucker right out of the water.”
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Mary Fallin was sworn in Monday as Oklahoma’s first female governor, but in reciting the oath of office she really didn’t promise to “support, obey and defend the Constitution.”
At an outdoors ceremony in bone-chilling and teeth-chattering cold, Fallin told Oklahoma Chief Justice Steven W. Taylor that she would “support, obey and offend” the U.S. and state constitutions.
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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced on Friday her department is canceling a $3 billion program to erect a problem-plagued, high-tech, virtual fence along the U.S. border with Mexico.
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Some residents tell 9NEWS NOW that the increased police patrols following the murder spike in Prince George’s County has led to some questionable activity.
“The yanked me out of the car, put a knee on my back, and checked my rectum several times,” said a 20 year old man who did not want to use his name.
Police said cavity searches are never allowed in public and with 16 officers present, as alleged, it is “very unlikely” an officer violated that policy. Still, police encourage the young man to file a complaint with the civilian oversight panel. A spokesperson told 9NEWS NOW police are “committed to constitutional policing.”
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A TEACHER falsely accused of groping four schoolgirls has fought a seven-year battle to clear his name after being subjected to what he calls a “witch-hunt”.
Science teacher Robert King, 45, was acquitted of sexually assaulting four girls by a jury – but was still sacked by Handsworth Grange Community Sports College and has been effectively barred from teaching ever since.
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Following the mass shooting in Arizona, elected officials have put forth new proposals to curb violence by preventing guns from falling into the wrong hands. One of those proposals called on Congress to at last approve a director for the federal agency responsible for regulating the gun industry and cracking down on gun crime.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—better known as the ATF—has gone without a permanent director for four years. The Obama administration, while stating its commitment to doing “all that we can” to stop the flow of U.S. weapons to Mexican drug cartels, waited more than a year and half to even nominate a director—and when a nominee was named, the National Rifle Association was quick to oppose the nomination. The administration re-nominated Andrew Traver last week.
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Cablegate
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Is it possible that Iran’s blustering president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, long thought to be a leading force behind some of Iran’s most hard-line and repressive policies, is actually a reformer whose attempts to liberalize, secularize, and even “Persianize” Iran have been repeatedly stymied by the country’s more conservative factions? That is the surprising impression one gets reading the latest WikiLeaks revelations, which portray Ahmadinejad as open to making concessions on Iran’s nuclear program and far more accommodating to Iranians’ demands for greater freedoms than anyone would have thought. Two episodes in particular deserve special scrutiny not only for what they reveal about Ahmadinejad but for the light they shed on the question of who really calls the shots in Iran.
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Beginning this afternoon, shortly after (former) president Ben Ali fled Tunisia, I started getting calls about the effect of social media on the Tunisian uprising. I answered a few questions, mostly deferring reporters to friends in Tunisia for their side of the story, and then settled in for the night…only to find rantings and ravings about Tunisia’s “Twitter revolution” and “WikiLeaks revolution” blowing up the airwaves.
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A debate has been raging on the role social media—especially Facebook and Twitter— played in the apparently successful uprising in Tunisia. Most of the discussion seems to be centered around the use of the term “Twitter Revolution.”
Ethan Zuckerman responds that “the Internet can take some credit for toppling Tunisia’s government, but not all of it.” When you read Ethan Zuckerman’s great piece –and he is, along with Jillian C. York—among the few people participating in this debate who were in touch with Tunisian dissidents on the ground not just through this crisis but over the years, it becomes clear that being able to disseminate information using social media was key in multiple respects…
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Events in Tunisia have led to it being called the ‘First Wikileaks Revolution’.
Although there has long been opposition to the corrupt rule of President Ben Ali, protests gathered pace when US embassy cables were published by Wikileaks.
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Raise your hand if, before the street protests started, you had focussed very much—or at all—on what the WikiLeaks cables had to say about Tunisia. Does any one person know enough about all of the countries mentioned in the cables to say for sure how significant they are? Unless someone does, it is rash to keep talking about how they add texture but “no great revelations.”
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First of all I would like to say that I am sorry for the repression and the people who have died in Tunisia but excited about the unexpected overthrow of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by its own people.
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Ukrainian activists cover their mouths with US flags during a rally in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in front of the Swedish embassy to Ukraine in Kiev on December 22 2010.
[...]
In some ways WikiLeaks is a traditional investigative news operation. It gets its information from a source and the journalists decide what they will publish. It needs a platform, an audience and revenue just like any other newsroom. It can also be sued, censored or attacked. But because it is trying to operate online outside of normal national jurisdictions it is harder to hold to account. It can use mirror sites and multiple servers to avoid physical restraint.
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BoingBoing has a quick post up today claiming that “Registering death threats as domain names is the hot new thing in psychopathic anti-Wikileaks action!”
According to vivantleakers.org — a new site created to track “cyber-bullying domain names of wikileaks associates” — multiple death-threat domain names have been registered going after Wikileaks director Julian Assange. Killjulianassange.com and julianassangemustdie.com are recently registered examples, although they have no content on them at this time.
Go Daddy, the site which registered both killjulianassange.com and julianassangemustdie.com said there is nothing that can be done about either site while they are contentless. Go Daddy registers a domain name every .8 seconds — any domain name can be registered and there is no human intervention.
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Following the request by Rep. Peter King that the Treasury Department list Wikileaks and Julian Assange on various terrorist/organized crime lists, which would prohibit US companies from dealing with them, the Treasury Department has, quite reasonably, said it will not do that.
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But I bet she could locate South Africa and The Iraq and the Asian Countries on a map. Anyway, I demand video and a remix, STAT.
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Scenes from the January 15 event in San Francisco titled “A Media Intervention for Wikileaks” (http://goo.gl/lh8RM). The speaker is conscientious objector Justin Kauker.
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Istanbul, Turkey:Wonderful video of Anonymous in Istanbul.
Sydney, Australia: More than a thousand in attendance. Here are some Photos. In addition, there is a video of the Pirate Party’s own Rodney Serkowski speaking: Video. (Stick around for the written message from Phillip Adams–you won’t regret it!)
Our own JLo, who was on the scene, has now covered the Sydney protest, and provided a gallery of photographs from the event.
Vancouver, Canada: The number of protesters was much lower than in Sydney, but rest assured that their passion made up for their numbers. Read about it!
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Libyan President Moammar Gaddaffi said he was pained by events in Tunisia surrounding the overthrow of former president Zine al-Abedine ben Ali, Libyan television reported Sunday.
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WikiLeaks has finally made good on a months-old pledge to contribute financially to the defense of 23-year-old Bradley Manning, according to a group raising money for the imprisoned Army private suspected of providing WikiLeaks its most important U.S. releases.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The European Commission is preparing an infringement procedure against Sweden, after it allowed a cull of 20 wolves by 6,747 hunters on Saturday (15 January), in defiance of a request by Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik.
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BP has signed a joint venture with Russian energy firm Rosneft to exploit potentially huge deposits of oil and gas in Russia’s Arctic shelf.
The “strategic global alliance” will see the firms exchange expertise in exploring the region.
As part of the deal Rosneft will take 5% of BP’s shares in exchange for approximately 9.5% of Rosneft’s shares.
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The Arctic is to become the “new environmental battleground”, campaigners warned yesterday after BP announced plans to drill in one of the last great unspoilt wildernesses on earth.
Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) have vowed to confront BP’s American boss, Bob Dudley, over the agreement with the Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft to explore the Kara Sea, north of Siberia. The British energy firm was branded the world’s “environmental villain number one” by Friends of the Earth (FoE) yesterday in response to its move to exploit potential oil reserves in the remote waters.
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In the United States there is, and has been for a while, a movement to close the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The Agency does add some costs to businesses. However it lowers costs to the general population.
Consider Tetra-Ethyl Lead. Banning it’s use in gasoline caused extra costs to the oil companies, COSTS THAT THEY PASSED ALONG TO THEIR CUSTOMERS. In other words, they recouped the costs. At the same time removal of Tetra-Ethyl Lead from gasoline, caused a drop in environmental lead poisoning, especially in communities along highways.
One of the symptoms of Tetra-Ethyl Lead poisoning is a lack of judgement caused by neurological impairment. About five years after the ban of the use of Tetra-Ethyl Lead in gasoline fuel, there was an apparently unconnected drop in crime rates. The drop continued until about 25 years after the ban came into place, at which point the crime rate leveled out, at a new, far lower level.
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Increasingly, Democrats, liberals and progressives are coming to understand that the Koch brothers, a secretive right-wing billionaire family that pours limitless money into virtually every destructive anti-democratic initiative affecting tens of millions of Americans, are “Public Enemy Number One.”
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Friday’s Hannity on Fox News featured a discussion by the Great American Panel about high gas prices, which host Sean Hannity claimed are “now gonna go up to three, four, five dollars a gallon again.” The panel ruefully noted that Arab sheiks possess great amounts of oil, and pointed out a recent statement by Kuwait’s oil minister that he believes the market can withstand $100-per-barrel oil. After noting that Kuwait is a country that “would not exist [but] for us,” Hannity angrily offered his remedy…
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Finance
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The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.
British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.
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Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.fd
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When Bainbridges, a firm of auctioneers in West Ruislip, Middlesex, made international headlines last year for the £53m sale of an imperial Qianlong vase to an anonymous Chinese buyer, many assumed that it was an isolated – albeit glorious – coup for Britain’s suburban art market.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Chinese art collectors are now buying antiques in UK auction houses at an unprecedented rate, transforming trade across the country as millionaires trawl low-profile stocks for stunning treasures. Regional sellers, who used to strive to reach an annual turnover of a few million pounds and hardly ever sold anything for more than £1m, have never seen anything like it, as single items go under the hammer for as much as auction houses once made in a whole year. Ivan Macquisten, editor of the industry weekly Antiques Trade Gazette, told the Observer the “staggering amounts of money” were a “phenomenon”.
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Incoming Obama chief of staff Bill Daley was formerly a board member for Third Way, a pro-Too Big To Fail think tank that exists solely to perpetuate the corporate-welfare guzzling policies that landed America in this horrible recession, so you know that the group’s ideas will carry weight in the Obama White House.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Facebook is basically AOL with a different layout and all the same retro problems.
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An American mother who told police her 13-month-old son drowned in the bathtub while she was playing a game on Facebook was charged on Friday with child abuse resulting in death.
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News Corporation executives have been considering how to draw a line under the News of the World phone-hacking affair as the Rupert Murdoch-controlled publisher of the tabloid – via its News Group Newspapers subsidiary – braces itself for further celebrity lawsuits in the coming weeks.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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…goes to the arguments made by Sony’s lawyers in a complaint and motion for a TRO in a recently-filed civil case: Sony Sues PS3 Hackers. The argument: You’re guilty of felony computer hacking crimes if you access your own computer in a way that violates a contractual restriction found in the fine print of the licensing restriction of the product imposed by the manufacturer.
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In what might be the first of many, French Internet Service Provider Orange has been caught throttling traffic to one of the world’s biggest direct download websites, Megaupload.
The site, which also operates Megavideo, states that Orange, which is owned by France Telecom, is preventing its users from accessing its downloading and video streaming service freely and says that it can prove it.
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So, here’s a guide several people have been asking me to write. Let’s just put a big fat disclaimer above it first: I’m just writing this because I think all internet traffic should be considered equal, and I find it downright wrong for an ISP to prioritize certain connections or deny access to an arbitrary number of sites because they can be used for copyright infringement. Take care of our internet roads and crossings, and leave it to the end user’s responsability to pick the destinations.
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These details are important, but the noise about them only makes the omission more startling: the failure in America to tackle the underlying lack of competition in the provision of internet access
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There has been an ongoing effort made to convince consumers that bandwidth consumption is expensive.
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Most of the Kindle owners I know love their gadgets, but I always wonder how they’ll feel about them if they decide to switch devices and can’t bring their books — dozens? hundreds? thousands? — with them because of Amazon’s use of DRM.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Tonight I’m picking on my old friend Barry Sookman again. Yes, I’m being sarcastic. Barry doesn’t like me, because I catch his mistakes, and it appears that he thinks that I shouldn’t do that. Hell, I wouldn’t do that, if he didn’t screw up so often.
And now he’s done it again. I was nice. When I caught the mistake, I posted a note telling him about it. Now, 24 hours later, he hasn’t done anything to fix the problem. He hasn’t even sent me a note saying he was going to look into the issue.
So I’m going to tell the world about it. Barry won’t be happy, but since when have I ever cared about whether Barry is happy?
Spooftimes is one of the funniest sites on the internet. With a site name like Spooftimes and article titles like Local man in war of attrition over toilet roll with flatmate even a lawyer with no sense of humor should be able to tell that anything posted there isn’t serious. But not Barry. In his Computer and Internet Law Updates for 2011-01-13 column, Barry included one of their spoofs as true.
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A few weeks back, we wrote about the anti-piracy propaganda campaign that NYC has been running, paid for by taxpayer dollars, which spreads typical MPAA FUD, and concludes with the line: “There’s no such thing as a free movie.” However, in looking over the campaign, I just realized that the videos are hosted on YouTube… for free. In other words, while NYC and its Hollywood friends are claiming that if you get something for free, it must be illegal, they’re making use of free online services themselves. Without YouTube, they’d have to pay for the hosting, bandwidth, streaming software, etc. themselves. But this way, they get it for free.
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This week, Japanese police have been carrying out raids all over the country against individuals alleged to have uploaded copyright works to the Internet. In total, 18 people were arrested for sharing movies, anime, music, games and software.
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Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN managed to pull one of the largest warez scene topsites offline yesterday. The servers of Swan, formerly known as ATS, were unplugged by their hosting provider WorldStream. The provider acted based on evidence provided by BREIN, and also handed over the servers to this private outfit. The police were not involved in the takedown, but instead it was the result of information allegedly provided to BREIN by a rogue member.
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TorLock, a torrent site that claims to be virtually free of ‘fake torrents’, is offering $1 to users for every fake file that they can find. The offer was put in place by the site’s owner since he’s confident that the site’s collection of 140,738 torrents is as clean as it gets. However, the Indian anti-piracy outfit Aiplex Software is determined to put an end to the offer, claiming it is highly illegal.
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Beginning Tuesday, computers accessing the Internet in residence halls will automatically be scanned for file-sharing programs.
The Network Access Control service will scan for file sharing programs such as BitTorrent and LimeWire. If the service detects a file-sharing program, a pop-up message will notify him of the dangers of illegal sharing and ways to securely use the program.
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Thousands of file sharers have been sued in recent months for downloading movies like The Hurt Locker and Avatar XXX. U.S. rights holders model these lawsuits after similar litigation in Germany, where P2P piracy has led to hundreds of thousands of cases in recent years. The goal of this type of persecution isn’t so much to stop piracy, but to profit from it — and new statistics from Germany show that the strategy could be working, with P2P litigation becoming a multimillion dollar business.
Motorola Droid X: Unboxing and First Boot
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It seems as if most UNIX and Linux users honestly believe that they are secure from day one of installation/purchase. This is simply not true. Any network connected system stands the risk of attack, and beyond that any data transfer from an outside source to a non-network machine is also a risk. Beyond that, there are always exploits than can be done from the physical location. Preventing these attacks is not always easy or convenient, but in an increasingly risky metaverse-like world it is necessary. After all, your entire existence is verified through a computer database somewhere.
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What does an organization’s anti-harassment policy — or lack of one — say about it? Is a policy as meaningless as a mission statement, or does the willingness to have one reflect an organization’s values and how it operates? How an organization answers such questions can directly effect on how it is perceived, as well as its ability to operate, as a recent semi-public discussion about Linux Fund clearly shows.
Linux Fund is a non-profit organization set up to distribute funds to free and open source software projects and events, chiefly through an affinity credit card program. A few years after it was founded in 1999, the organization became dormant. In 2005, Linux.com staff member Jay Lyman reported that funds were still being collected, and shortly afterwards, Linux Fund was reorganized by an entirely new group of directors.
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Desktop
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Once most PCs in an organization run thin clients, it is much easier to migrate to GNU/Linux. If the protocol is RDP, they can just switch the server to run GNU/Linux and XRDP and they are on their way. Searches for “xrdp” are hot in Russia, Taiwan and Europe. Coincidence? I think not.
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Applications
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Shotwell is specific to Linux but is among the best tools for managing an ever-growing collection of photos. Shotwell is now the default photo editor on Linux releases such as Ubuntu, a testament to its popularity. Although Shotwell is designed for managing photos it also includes a growing range of editing tools from reducing red-eye to altering saturation levels. Although originally designed to manage photographs Shotwell is quickly evolving to be a lot more than that. The most recent release includes support for most popular video formats, including the ability to upload these to online services such as YouTube and the like. Shotwell is designed to run under the Gnome desktop on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Lutris is a new gaming platform for Linux that aims at providing easy game installation, configuration and launching system for games. It is different from other services like PlayOnLinux as it integrates a large number of games from a number of different systems that includes console emulators also.
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Good news everyone! Arx Fatalis, an awesome first-person RPG from 2003′s source code was recently released under the GPL.
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Lutris is a new gaming platform for Linux that aims at providing easy game installation, configuration and launching system for games. It is different from other services like PlayOnLinux as it integrates a large number of games from a number of different systems that includes console emulators also.
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Warlock’s Gauntlet is a top down shooter game for Linux inspired by classic Gauntlet game series. The game is an Open-Source community project, created by users from gamedev.pl – a polish game development site known as Warsztat (the Workshop) and is available entirely for free – the code is open source and the assets are licensed CC.
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Desktop Environments
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Awhile back I did a posting about useful/interesting Gnome Panel Applets. Of the late I’ve been featuring the Enlightenment desktop more and more so I figured it was only fitting that I do a post highlighting some of my favorite Enlightenment Modules.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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It’s been a busy end of year for the Amarok developers, as the seasons bring the chilling winds of winter for some and the searing suns of the summer to others. Most of the big development branches have been merged, and a lot of new features were implemented. A major version is always a big step forward and it is with pride that we are here to bring you the release of Amarok 2.4, codename: Slipstream.
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These packages also include kdepim 4.4.9 and other goodies. Please read his blog for the installation instructions as they are very detailed so it doesn’t make much sence to copy/paste them here.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the beta release of KDE SC 4.6. I lamented the regression that seemed to have occurred with kwin performance on my intel based graphics chip, whilst the performance on my NVIDIA based box had improved markedly.
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GNOME Desktop
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As founder Mark Shuttleworth puts it, this is “the most significant change ever” for Ubuntu – a statement whose portent is reflected by the Unity story being the third hit when you search for ‘most significant change ever’ on Google.
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Just take this minimally-stunning ‘Conky orange’ theme by GNOME-look user hardball.
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Suppose that you have been using GNU/Linux for a number of months now. You had previously been using Windows or Mac OS X, but heard about the freedom, openness, and performance inherent to open source operating systems. More likely than not, you picked up an Ubuntu live CD (or one of numerous other new-user friendly distributions) and gave it a test run. If your case is anything like mine was, you found that this operating system ran faster off of a CD than your current operating system ran while installed! So you decided to install this “Linux” thing and worked through whatever bugs or trouble you may have encountered. That was it, you were sold!
[...]
After installing and using Arch Linux, you are guaranteed to have learned a lot about how your operating system works and what you can do to make it work exactly the way you want it to work.
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This ends my list of Linux distros and BSD operating systems chosen according to the zodiac. I took the info on each OS from Distrowatch and the info on the zodiac signs from different sources online. So, next time you hear of a friend having trouble picking a distro, tell him/her to look at the stars! ^__^
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I think it really depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want a lot of flashbang in your desktop environment? Then perhaps going with a distro using KDE is a good approach. Something simpler and more straight forward with less option-overload? Consider GNOME or one of the other lightweight desktop options out there.
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Red Hat Family
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To help make what would be a family decision, Szulik brought along his 9-year-old son Brendan. Szulik then left the boy alone to interview Young.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you are completely clueless about Linux, let Ubuntu Tweak be for a while. If you’re a hardcore user, you definitely do not need a frontend for your customizations. However, if you belong to a majority of intermediate users, Ubuntu Tweak is a very handy tool.
It works as advertised, it’s fairly simple to navigate and use. The risks are relatively low, although a determined person will be able to inflict damage. Overall, Ubuntu Tweak can improve your Ubuntu desktop experience, especially if you use the tool with moderation, allowing time between tweaks and changes.
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The slick Unity 2D we told you about yesterday has now got a PPA for Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04 users to test.
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A few new features/options for Unity landed in the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha recently.
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As usual, here is a video with the latest Unity (build as of January 15th, 2011), showing these latest changes…
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The Ubuntu X developers are getting ready to push the Mesa 7.10 graphics library and X.Org Server 1.10 into the Natty Narwhal repository for Ubuntu 11.04. Due to API/ABI breakage, this also results in new driver builds going into Natty, and for a period of time at least where the ATI Catalyst driver will no longer be compatible with the xorg-server (though the NVIDIA binary driver should properly support Linux 2.6.37 and xorg-server 1.10 right now).
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This is a rounded, enterprise-aimed solution and its price tag mirrors this: £104.21 per desktop and £202.11 per server. Plus VAT (sales tax). In total I’d have to spend £1102.75 per year for six computers! For a one-man operation to small businesses or just somebody who wants to manage their home machines, this sort of price seems like a bit of a joke.
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Buffalo Technology announced a web-accessible “Buffalo CloudStor” networked-attached storage (NAS) device for home users with up to 2TB of storage, based on Cloud Engines’ Linux-driven Pogoplug device. The company also announced a new series of “TeraStation Pro” NAS devices for small businesses that can scale from 4TB up to 24TB and run on a dual-core Intel Atom D510 processor.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Being a Linux user, I’ve gotten used to having absolute control over my system, a system that’s created for hacking and experimenting, one that gives u power in the real sense of the word. I found all these and more in Maemo.
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The view I actually hold now is that Nokia has a device that Apple will never match. Yes. Apple will never produce a device to match Nokia’s N900 running the legendary Maemo OS. It’s not that Apple can’t produce the hardware or software, it’s that it’d be against their business strategy.
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Sub-notebooks
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Despite eWeek and others touting the idea that the netbook is dead, I hold that netbooks will survive and thrive in 2011. The reasons are many:
* A physical keyboard can be better than a touch keyboard: tactile feedback matters. That’s why we still teach “touch” typing.
* You can add touch to a netbook.
* Tablets with slide-out keyboards are here. Are they netbooks version 2?
* A netbook with GNU/Linux + ARM beats that other OS any day.
* Prices of netbooks are still falling.
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XOOM makes iPad look like a toy as the Linux-powered device has a bigger screen, dual core processor, the newest operating system, faster network and two cameras.
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Events
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linux.conf.au, a conferences for free and open source software, is being held in Brisbane, was running the risk of cancellation due to one of the worst floods of all time.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Yesterday, Mozilla released the ninth beta of Firefox 4. It has a lot of improvements both in the UI and performance.
[...]
Maybe Wayland could be the answer?
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The majority of add-ons is currently not compatible with Firefox 4.
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When I’ve read yesterday that a Qt version of Firefox is now available, I decided to try it. After all, the screenshots on that website didn’t look so bad, right?
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Simply put, this freedom from licensing requirements is what makes the Web great. We, the community of people who make the Web what it is, should not be so quick to toss that all important foundation aside just because some hardware or OS vendors think it’s the easy or most profitable path.
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Oracle
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Project Releases
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Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is made easy to use and has nice and clean GUI.
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Google has updated the contracts for its Google Apps suite so that they no longer make allowances for scheduled maintenance, and that any downtime – no matter how small – will be counted and applied to the customer’s agreement.
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On the first day of CES, I dropped by the Qualcomm booth looking for ARM-based smartbooks to try out. As I poked and prodded the Lenovo Skylight, I pulled out my Nexus One and dropped it on top of the unit for a size reference so that we could snap picture of it. As I stood there looking at the phone laying on top of the smartbook and contemplating the fact that both of these (Android-based) devices had 1GHz, ARM-based Snapdragon processors in them, I glanced across the booth and spotted an ARM-based game console sitting right next to the ARM-based iRex Iliad e-reader. And then there was the portable media player (PMP) positioned not far away… then it really sunk in: smartphone, netbook, e-reader, PMP, game console—all popular consumer electronic categories with real computing needs and a huge audience, and all on ARM right now.
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Health/Nutrition
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The sad story of Nataline Sarkisian is pivotal in Wendell Potter’s new book, Deadly Spin, because it was the event that transformed Potter from corporate flak to a human being with a heart. Potter worked as Cigna’s highly-paid vice president of public relations, and after living through the Sarkisian PR nightmare, he decided that he no longer had the intestinal fortitude to remain an advocate for America’s uniquely cruel system of doling out health care funding.
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Rite Aid not only knows cigarettes cause heart disease, but has taken steps to inoculate itself against legal claims arising from that fact. Drug store chains, like Rite Aid, Walgreens and others that sell cigarettes, sign indemnification agreements with tobacco companies to protect against lawsuits that could arise from knowing selling cigarettes, a product that, when used as intended, kills the user.
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Insurers helped finance the “government takeover” fear-mongering campaign not because they wanted the law repealed but because they hoped it would enable the GOP to regain at least one chamber of Congress. They fare much better when Republicans are in control. They also are not too worried about the challenges to the law’s constitutionality because insurers had a hand in writing the individual mandate provision to ensure that it could ultimately withstand a court challenge.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Major gunbattles erupted outside the palace of Tunisia’s deposed president, in the center of the capital, in front of the main opposition party headquarters and elsewhere on Sunday as authorities struggled to restore order and the world waited to see if the North African nation would continue its first steps away from autocratic rule.
Police arrested dozens of people, including the top presidential security chief, as tensions appeared to mount between Tunisians buoyant over Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s departure and loyalists in danger of losing major perks.
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Non-religious soldiers say the test’s spiritual component asks questions written predominantly for soldiers who believe in God, leading atheists and other non-believers to score poorly and be forced to take remedial courses which employ religious imagery to “train” troops up to a satisfactory level of spirituality.
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Global crude oil production in 2010 has been benefiting from two factors. One, the financial collapse and reduced global oil demand of 2008-2009 reduced pressure on supply, and allowed for projects to come on stream. Second, 2010 average oil prices were the second highest ever, at $79.48 per barrel. That particular price is just high enough for the world to fight decline, from existing fields. However, as you can see in the chart, with only two more months of data yet to come through on 2010 it’s a near certainty that–for a fifth year in a row–global oil production will come in below the peak year of 2005.
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Finance
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As if states did not have enough on their plates getting their shaky finances in order, a new bill is coming due — from the federal government, which will charge them $1.3 billion in interest this fall on the billions they have borrowed from Washington to pay unemployment benefits during the downturn.
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States that already have raided their reserve funds, relied on borrowing or accounting gimmicks, and imposed deep cuts on schools, parks and public transit systems no longer can protect key services in the face of another round of multibillion dollar deficits.
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STELLAR credit and steady income will go a long way in helping borrowers secure a home mortgage, but they may not be enough when it comes to buying or refinancing in certain condominium buildings.
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WHEN investors file complaints against their brokers, the matters are almost always heard by an arbitration panel rather than by a judge or jury. Arbitration forums like those run by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority typically adjudicate cases more quickly than the courts and less expensively, because costs associated with discovery and extensive legal filings are minimized if not eliminated.
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Well, it turns out that Table 9 in the 1945 report (pdf) shows high and low estimates of the population distribution looking forward as far as 2000, which we can compare with the actual population distribution in 2000.
What you can see right away is that the SSA expected a much smaller population than we actually ended up with — the baby boom and immigration weren’t anticipated. But they also expected a somewhat older population than we actually got: their “low” estimate put the ratio of seniors to adults under 65 at 20.8%, almost the same as the actual 21.1%, while the “high” estimate put the ratio at 29.1%. That is, in 1945 the Trustees thought that America would probably be a grayer, older country by 2000 than it actually ended up being.
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Yet another crisis is upon this burdened city, among the most impoverished and crime-ridden in the country.
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While Cardinal closed more loans in December than any other month, Clineburg can attest to an overall lull in demand for credit. He suspects that some small businesses are still trying to regain their footing.
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Fox on 15th went Utopian on its readers today, ridiculing the suggestion by James Galbraith to temporarily lower the age at which workers can receive full Social Security benefits to 62. The plan, which also was put forward in a bill by Representative Dennis Kucinich, would pull some number of older workers out of the labor force and thereby create more jobs for unemployed younger workers.
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But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.
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In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.
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To great fanfare, this week Goldman Sachs unveiled the report of its Business Standards Committee, which makes recommendations regarding changes for the internal structure of what is currently the 5th largest bank holding company in the United States. Some of the recommended changes are long overdue – particularly as they address perceived conflicts of interest between Goldman and its clients.
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To great fanfare, this week Goldman Sachs introduced the report of its business standards committee, which makes recommendations regarding changes to the internal structure of what is currently the fifth-largest bank-holding company in the United States. Some recommended changes are long overdue – particularly as they address perceived conflicts of interest between Goldman and its clients.
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Goldman, Sachs & Co.’s release of its 67-page report of its business standards committee on proposed internal changes in practice has been met with skepticism — with one exception. The Wall Street Journal Wednesday chose to interpret it as a sign that investment banking is making a comeback at the firm. The report “showed how Goldman is trying to reassert the traditional primacy of deal making while playing down the firm’s recent reliance on trading. One of the bigger reasons why: Trading caused most of the turmoil, suspicion and reputational damage suffered by Goldman since the financial crisis erupted.”
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Yet another person appears to have flipped out, and attracted the government’s attention, this time luckily without any actual casualties. Curiously the target of the latest FBI arrest is not some insane gun toting troglodyte, but a 20 year Wall Street veteran: Vincent McCrudden of Alnbri Management. Presumably the reason for the arrest is that the commodities trader had threatened to kill 47 members of the SEC, CFTC and Finra in a post on his website.
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A short-term focus on shareholder gains has substantially increased the velocity of stock market trading. In the past 25 years, holding periods for stocks have fallen from eight years to six months. CEOs focusing on meeting the demands of short-term investors have led to the destruction of many once-great companies, including General Motors, Sears and Enron. This culminated in the 2008 global financial meltdown, when over-leveraged financial institutions collapsed as they tried to maximize short-term value.
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Everything I am reading these days on financial issues points to some serious reckoning soon to come, especially because of — as the folks at Third Way are calling it — foreclosure-gate. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in the Ibanez case, along with a growing body of cases where the banks and/or their servicers have been ruled against in foreclosure cases, and even the banks’ lawyers are being castigated in court by judges for bringing in made-up paperwork, is causing a growing sense of panic among the biggest banks that hold the most mortgages. Spokespeople for the banks are talking bravely, trying to dismiss the situation as some minor paperwork errors, but everyone who has been paying attention to the situation fears that there are really big consequences afoot.
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Martin Luther King Jr. was working hard to get people to Washington, DC. But when he told an audience, “We are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect…. We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago,” the year was not 1963, and his issue was not segregation. Instead, it was 1968, five years after his “I Have a Dream” speech, and now the issue was joblessness and economic deprivation. King was publicizing a new mass mobilization led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a drive known as the Poor People’s Campaign.
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HSBC has released a fanciful report this week that forecasts a trebling of world economic growth between now and the year 2050. It’s a reminder that most in the global financial community, informed by neo-classical economics or Abundance Economics, do not understand limits to the system.
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The headline out of California this week is that second-time-around Governor Jerry Brown has delivered a tough-love budget, one designed to make everyone equally miserable.
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BofA doesn’t just want you to know that their CEO Brian Moynihan doesn’t suck, they want you to know that their top staff does not suck either. The bank has started buying damaging domain names for a long list of executives, prompting many to wonder: just what have those executives been up to over there at BofA?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Jesse Kelly, a former Marine, Iraq war veteran and Gabrielle Giffords’ Republican opponent in last November’s election, ran a campaign that used gun imagery as its main eye-catching visual. Several of Kelly’s campaign ads show him brandishing an M-16 automatic rifle with the slogan, “Send a Warrior to Congress.” A print ad for one of his fundraising events reads, “Sat., 6/12/10, 10:00 AM – Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” Kelly’s spokesman, John Ellinwood, naivley claims he doesn’t see any connection between promoting fundraisers featuring weapons and the public shootings in Tucson.
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The same PR Society Assembly delegate who verbally assaulted this reporter and threatened physical harm while I was standing in front of the Washington Hilton Oct. 16, 2010, has sent me a letter saying he might “beat you to a pulp.”
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O’Dwyer also reports other harassment while attempting to attend the conference, like getting an anonymous letter in which the writer threatened to beat him “to a pulp,” and being set upon by a flash-mob while he was conducting an interview. O’Dwyer has criticized PRSA for withholding transcripts of their organizational assemblies over the last five years, concealing the names of their delegates and refusing to make available a PDF version of their members’ directory. O’Dwyer has also exposed techniques now in wide use by big PR firms that violate PR ethics, like working through front groups and creating and disseminating fake news.
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But on December 22, 2010, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ruled that claims that the bracelets improve strength, balance and flexibility “were not supported by any credible scientific evidence,” and made Power Balance admit that it engaged in “misleading and deceptive conduct in breach of 2.52 of the Trade Practices Act of 1974.”
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Skirting the line between truth, fiction and a bitch slap from the advertising regulator – the ongoing Power Balance bracelets scenario is a great case study in finely crafted messaging, of the art of spin, and discipline in damage-control PR.
Power Balance of Orange County, California, may or may not make a band that makes you stronger and more flexible, but it certainly is a fine example of consistency power and messaging flexibility.
Let’s backtrack a bit. Power Balance is the makers of R500+ rubber bracelets with a hologram inset, “are designed to work with your body’s natural energy field” to increase strength, balance and flexibility.
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“Bottled water company Fiji Water has pulled out of Fiji after the government imposed a tax of 15 Fiji cents per liter on the water, up from just one-third of a cent per liter. While Fiji Water’s announcement may be posturing at this point in protest of the tax, the closure should be permanent. Fiji Water exports bottled water to the U.S., which enjoys clean and safe water from the tap, while half of Fijians lack access to safe water. There is something wrong with this picture.
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Call it smart advertising — or bad boundaries. You may have noticed a spike in the number of TV commercials designed to look and feel like whatever show you’re watching. They’re called podbusters, DVR busters or interstitial ads, and they’re designed to remove viewers’ fingers from the fast-forward button during blocks — or “pods” — of ads.
The advent of TiVo and similar devices can be thanked for the rise of the podbusters. About 40 percent of households have DVRs — meaning 40 percent of households can easily zip past commercials. Think of podbusters as speed bumps for ads.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A few years back, we wrote about how indie iPhone app developer Hottrix had sued beer giant Coors for making a competing beer app. Hottrix, of course, makes various gimmicky apps that make your iPhone look like it is full of some sort of liquid that “drains out” as you tilt the device to make it look like you’re “drinking” from the phone. They’re pretty silly, but some people have liked them and were actually willing to give Hottrix money for them. One of Hottrix’s apps was iBeer. Coors created their own beer drinking app, called iPint, and offered it for free. That’s when Hottrix sued. I can’t find any information on what happened to that lawsuit. After it was filed nothing much seems to have happened. Perhaps it was settled out of court?
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01.15.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It finally happened. I managed to get my hands on a superseded workstation that had been replaced by a newer model. This workstation also had a brother of the same model in which the motherboard had failed. So I did what any good Borg would do and mashed the two together to make one monster, multi-cpu, fat ram beastie. The only thing left to do was install Linux on it.
[...]
Lo and behold! Everything worked! Of course due to some different hardware some files had to be tweaked but that was a minor task compared to installing from scratch and having to set up everything again.
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Granted, since running Linux, I’ve learned more about my computer, its hardware, and the way the OS works. But this would be the same if I ran Windows or Mac.
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None the less, I was confident that I could build a working machine from an 11 year old 600MHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM.
I started by downloading the latest Debian Squeeze Beta from here.
I should say here that even though it’s officially a Testing release, it is , I have found, more stable than many final distributions.
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Desktop
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Most lawyers are managing most processes online or in standard office applications. In fact, when you get on a different operating system like Mac OS X or Ubuntu, you will find FireFox and suddenly experience a feeling of familiarity. With most of your daily work online, transitioning from Internet Explorer to FireFox or Chrome will take no time at all to adjust to and you can immediately proceed with business as usual.
As for office applications, Oracle’s freely downloadable OpenOffice 3.2 (comes installed on Ubuntu) is compatible with Microsoft Office files and comes with a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation creator (compatible with MS PowerPoint), and OpenOffice Draw, a more functional desktop publishing tool than Microsoft Publisher (not compatible with MS Publisher formats). OpenOffice is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, so you could download it on your Windows computer before committing to it on a Linux installation. We actually switched to OpenOffice four years ago and have not looked back, with only a few of our computers still running Microsoft Office. [3]
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Server
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There’s nothing surprising about that. The fastest of fast computers have long used Linux In the latest TOP 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, 459 of the Top 500 supercomputers were running Linux.
Watson is made up of ten racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running Linux, and has 15Terabytes of RAM; 2,880 3.55GHz POWER7 processor cores and operates at 80 Teraflops. You’re not going to find one of these at your local Best Buy.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode, Brainstorms, FUD and Media Players
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Kernel Space
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This document describes what steps chip vendors need to take to successfully upstream their code into the mainline Linux kernel.
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Daniel Poelzleithner has announced to the Linux kernel world his new project named ulatencyd. The focus of ulatencyd is to provide a script-able daemon to dynamically adjust Linux scheduling parameters and other aspects of the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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In testing of OpenBenchmarking.org and preparations for the release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland at the end of February from SCALE, a lot of benchmarks have been happening to test the various analytical features and other new capabilities of this open benchmarking platform. In fact, it is really an overwhelming amount of benchmarks; the power capacity in my office is maxed out as benchmark after benchmark and system after system there is all sorts of test scenarios being looked upon. The benchmarks coming out on Phoronix.com over the past two months have just been barely scratching the surface of what has been going into the OpenBenchmarking.org system. Recently a lot of OpenCL compute benchmarks were pumped in, and since we have only published a few OpenCL Linux benchmarks — OpenCL on Linux vs. Mac OS X and OpenCL NVIDIA vs. ATI on Linux — here’s some more in this article.
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Applications
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Totem’s Youtube playback to enter dark ages
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I’m going to borrow an idea for a post from persea, who suggested taking a look at the running weight of several browsers — specifically text-only browsers — for a comparison.
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A Debian package maintainer:
* Tracks upstream development, and ensures new releases of software are packaged and uploaded in a timely manner
* Work with distribution users and other maintainers to identify bugs and integration issues
* Ensure bugs and feature requests against upstream software are reported upstream, and bugs fixed upstream are propagated to the distribution packages
* Fix any packaging related issues, and maintain any distribution-specific patches which have not (yet) been accepted or released upstream
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I only hope that it continues to be a viable application and is updated and improved as time goes by
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Why is it that the U.S. Government always releases a slew of RFPs just before Thanksgiving? I’ve been swamped working on proposals since the third week of November, but we got the last one submitted just before Christmas so it’s back to normal (or what passes for normal around here) for a while.
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In the last post, I blogged about setting up a guitar amp/effect processor in Arch Linux. In the comments, some readers mentioned an open source alternative to Guitar Rig named Rakarrack. Since we are all advocates and lovers of FOSS software I thought that it deserves a separate post and our dear readers would get a kick out of using this open source effect processing software.
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FileZilla is a full-featured FTP client with an easy-to-use GUI. It is written in C++ and uses the wxWidgets library.
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Proprietary
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We once labeled it no more than ‘Banshee with ads’, but Moovida core media player has really come on in leaps and bounds since then.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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This information is lost if source is not provided.
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I had this mental image of your character cowering behind an upturned table while an unseen monster is rummaging through the room, smashing doors, throwing objects up in the air and making scary noises. Amnesia is that game!
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Desktop Environments
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There are a TON of things that happen when you install an OS, but you only see the graphical parts of it, the “graphical user interface” or GUI. Obviously, if that’s the main thing your seeing, its fairly important to you on every level. Linux however, took this whole concept a step further, and established several “flavors” of GUI for your desktop on your Linux OS. Wikipedia describes a desktop environment as just that: A Desktop Environment (DE) commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface (GUI) derived from the desktop metaphor that is seen on most modern personal computers.
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The tool activates in two ways: Firstly, it handles any signals that would cause compiz to die and spews all information in that case. It then uses some neat tricks the kernel team taught me to re-flag the signal again without our handler installed so that apport can catch it and grab the output we just spewed out. Secondly, if you hit some weird issue (like incorrect menu stacking, or something similar) you can just hit Control-Super-Shift-? and compiz will also begin spewing as much information as possible and feed that to apport so you can just file a bug directly.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Me and Colin and Tomas are having a Burns supper at my place in Edinburgh to celebrate 4.6, let me know if you want to come
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I like the icon, but I am sure that more could be done with it.
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Taking after what great work Amarok has done over the years, it has come to my attention the different changes that Amarok has gone through. Now, with their current version 2.3.1 I am left wondering about what more could be done with the graphical interface. Amarok has wonderful technologies underneath as a music player. Amarok is also neatly connected to KDE widgets that display information for just about anything.
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A little over a year ago, an article was published on the Dot titled ‘Repositioning the KDE Brand’. The article publicized the outcome of a process within KDE to make sense of the relationship between the community and its products, and to reach a durable solution regarding the terms that should be used to refer to both.
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Once again I used Bugzilla to get some statistics on how many bugs are opened, closed in KWin during the last development cycle (statistics are from Final Tagging 4.5 till today). Overall 437 new bugs have been reported and 425 bugs have been “closed”. Many thanks again to the bug day – without it the numbers would look worse. So this means that each day 2.4 bugs are reported. Assuming that we spent 10 minutes on each bug (in general Thomas Lübking and I are reading and responding to each bug comment), we spent 8 days just on bug managing. That sounds reasonable, but is very bad as it’s time spent managing and not fixing the bugs. This can be seen in the table below.
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GNOME Desktop
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“Does Natty’s Unity require proprietary graphics card drivers?” was a question posted on AskUbuntu and who better to answer this question then Mark Suttleworth himself (who apparently is quite an active AskUbuntu user)? Mark answered that there will be a a 2D implementation of Unity, available in 11.04 as an option and posted a link to further info and screenshots but unfortunately the link cannot be accessed anymore.
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This a nice collection of themes for Gnome
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There were a few periods where the submission form was broken and your entry may not have been submitted. If you would like to confirm we have received your entry, please email Paul Cutler to inquire. We apologize for the inconvenience.
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* GNOME:Ayatana will have a small Artwork Package by the Community, I’m currently contacting Kmurat to check if he can change the licence on this artwork piece (with over 20.000 downloads on gnome-art) so I can use it for distribution. Currently it’s licensed as CC BY-NC-ND, in which the NC can be probably a problem. Let’s wait a couple of days and see… Either way for those who asked for the source of this wallpaper, click on the image above.
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When I started writing The Board, I was quite pragmatic about the appearance of the app. I used my limited Gimp and Inkscape skills to produce the UI theme images and grabbed some free background images from internet.
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If you have a really ancient Gentoo install that needs to be updated to this decade, or you managed to horribly break things, or you want a lesson in Python programming, or you want a vServer running Gentoo, or you want to play a game of chess, or … well, if in doubt just ask, we’ll most likely do it. Conventional or unconventional, as long as no law is broken and no damsel in distress left hanging it can be arranged.
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Here are some of the best Linux distributions (in no particular order) specially made for securing computer networks…
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The first was a blog post by an Emery Fletcher which paints Ubuntu as the be-all and end-all of Linux implementation. While I am eternally grateful for Ubuntu’s efforts in promoting Linux in the general public (even if it is to the point of putting itself first and FOSS second, but I digress) and while the blog presents an interesting point about Linux implementation, it’s hard to determine whether this blog item suffers from anything more than mere myopia.
Current versions of Debian, OpenSUSE and Fedora are all as user-friendly as the current version of Ubuntu, but that does not enter into the equation in this blog. That’s unfortunate, too, because what both Fedora and OpenSUSE — with its new Studio spin — have done consistently with each upgrade have been remarkable. Mr. Fletcher may be lacking some perspective — think about where Ubuntu would be without the contributions to kernel development (warning: that link is a PDF file, courtesy of the Linux Foundation) and desktop development without the three distros mentioned at the beginning of the previous sentence — a harrowingly depressing thought, indeed.
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Reviews
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The answer is simple…consult with the stars! Use the zodiac to choose the distro that best fits your sign!
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New Releases
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Patrick Verner announced a couple of days ago, on January 12th, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 5.9 Linux distribution for partitioning tasks. The new release is just a maintenance version that updates two programs and fixes various booting issues.
The new Parted Magic 5.9 has been released just three weeks after Parted Magic 5.8 was announced on December 28th. It fixes an important booting issue with the for the DVD/CD version. It also fixes some issues with the Save Session function.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva announces the release Mandriva Pulse 2 version 1.3.0 which had been in beta since March 2010.
Mandriva Pulse 2 is a solution for the management of workstations, mobile computers and servers, designed to help users manage their information systems, notably in heterogenous environments.
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Red Hat Family
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As you probably know (if you are interested in the Enterprise Linux market), Red Hat released earlier today 5.6 . So automatically some CentOS QA team members started to discuss about that in the appropriate IRC channel. As CentOS 6.0 isn’t (yet) released nor ready, the discussion was about putting 5.6 build & release as priority number one or not.
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And then there’s Red Hat, king of the Linux and open-source crowd. It’s also sitting at a fortuitous moment in software history, when the industry is shifting to the cloud, which is essentially an open-source phenomenon in terms of its composition.
In fact, Red Hat has become so essential to enterprise infrastructure, that even competitors like Salesforce build on Red Hat technologies.
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Used for more than a year in a number of desktop distributions, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, Ext4 offers a number of advantages, such as more efficient storage with the use of extents, faster checks of file systems than in Ext3, more robust journaling and support for large file systems.
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Fedora and Derivatives
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After 5 days of hard work, finally an iso is avialable for blag i686. I’ll upload the x86_64 version later today.
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Quite a while ago, I wrote about the dead-simple process for setting up a microphone with Fedora’s PulseAudio sound system. That was part 2 in a series that was meant to discuss creating a better podcast. At the time, I meant to follow up with a piece on how to do some audio sweetening to make your recording sound better to your listeners. Unfortunately, life and work got in the way, and I didn’t get to part 3 — so here it is, hopefully better late than never.
Thanks to John Poelstra for inspiring me to write this. We had a nice conversation about audio the other day, and I figured it would be worthwhile to capture some of what we spoke about, but also to explain better some of the concepts I tried to pass on to John but perhaps didn’t do it well.
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Fedora Board members have been working for quite some time to etch their vision and long-term goals for the Fedora project in stone. A Vision statement came together last year, but more specific goals were still desired. Well, after a lot of discussion some long-term goals have been proposed.
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Debian Family
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I made some changes as to how packages from the Debian Mozilla team that can’t yet be distributed in the Debian archives are distributed to users.
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Novice Nights are Debian-NYC’s meetings for everyone. If you would like to install Debian, come on by. If you would like help with configuring or making Debian do what you need, we can do that too. If you want to hang out with Debianistas to pick up tips and tricks, come on by. We can also provide some help with other derivatives of Debian, such as Ubuntu.
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The first release candidate of the installer for Debian Squeeze was released on January 12. Many fixes are included in this release of the installer, along with new improvements: better OS and partition detection, new supported hardware, etc.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Back in October there was the very controversial news that Canonical would be replacing the GNOME Shell with their own Unity project as the default desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and going forward. The original version and specification for Ubuntu Unity (and as found in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook) required 3D acceleration and would use Compiz as its compositing window manager. For those without the necessary graphics drivers to support the functionality, Canonical’s plan for Ubuntu was to have it fall-back to the traditional GNOME desktop and inform the user of their sad graphics support. However, now Canonical’s developing a 2D version of Unity for such scenarios.
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I’ve tried Unity Qt in VirtualBox and I must say I am impressed: it’s not identical to Unity 3D but it’s A LOT faster! Further more, because Unity 2D seems to have more elements from Ubuntu 10.10 then 11.04 (even though some new stuff from 11.04 is there), it already has Dash (the application launcher / file browser) – something that’s currently missing in Unity 3D in Ubuntu 11.04.
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Summary of part 6
A. External monitor with NVidia
B. Printers
C. Useful Ubuntu and Linux links
D. Ubuntu branding
E. Final thoughts
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In what is probably a long over due move: Ubuntu is putting together a developer portal. This portal includes the basics of making applications on Ubuntu, everything from which IDEs to use to publishing your applications in the software centre is covered.
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This was tweeted by Matthew Paul Thomas, who works for Canonical as an interface designer for Ubuntu. But until I hear it from Shuttleworth or as an official announcement, I will continue to support Orgasmic Okapi.
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Yet another bug fixed release is coming, but it is for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty only. If you don’t use Natty, you can just ignore it.
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Proving from this information, half of the voters still find issues with critical pieces of hardware – graphics cards, wireless cards, printers, and scanners. We shouldn’t be focusing our efforts on making the desktop look nice when you can’t even effectively use the desktop because of hardware support fallacies.
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“Does Natty’s Unity require proprietary graphics card drivers?” was a question posted on AskUbuntu and who better to answer this question then Mark Suttleworth himself (who apparently is quite an active AskUbuntu user)? Mark answered that there will be a a 2D implementation of Unity, available in 11.04 as an option and posted a link to further info and screenshots but unfortunately the link cannot be accessed anymore.
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Flavours and Variants
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We first looked at Linux Mint Debian Edition when it was released in September of last year. Just before Christmas, the Mint team released a new spin of the Debian Edition with features from Linux Mint 10 that’s better than ever.
The first release of LMDE was a bit of an experiment. I think the Mint team wanted to see how much interest there was in a Debian-based release rather than Ubuntu-based. Answer? A lot. Or at least enough to merit a second take.
[...]
For Linux enthusiasts who like Debian but feel it could use a few additional touches, LMDE10 is exceptional.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Eugeniy Meshcheryakov has released an E-Book Reader optimized for Nokia N900 with support for EPUB file format. The reader has library functionality, e-books on the device are automatically discovered using Maemo services.
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Now think about hooking this up to your TV, connecting it via BT remote, perhaps even an IR remote since it does have an IR app and IR receiver. BAM – pocketable media centre. This would be soooo great on a MeeGo phone or any MeeGo tablet.
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Android
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Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show was indisputably dominated by tablets. Almost a year since Apple redefined portable computing with its iPad, competitors launched attempts to cut the Cupertino company’s lead. Taken together, the announcements at CES provide a much clearer picture of the likely evolution of the tablet market in 2011 and provide consumers a few tips on what to look for and when to buy.
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Tablets
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Linux already works on ARM, and virtually every other architecture. Linux was designed for architecture portability and because it’s open, companies like Intel and IBM can work on optimizing the code for their platforms. This is one reason there is so much cross-architecture support.
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Ability to install the software you want based on GNU/Linux in order to run Qt, C++ and HTML applications (See the developer documentation and forums)
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A Canadian startup called mySpark Technologies is creating an Android tablet that sports a dual-core 1Ghz processor, and it’s aimed at educational institutions.
The tablet slated to launch mid 2011, was solely designed with students and teachers in mind, and it will integrate with campus stores and libraries allowing students to download content and digital textbooks. Hopefully, at a dramatically discounted price.
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When you look at the wide range of tablets announced at CES, you have to try to break it down by differentiators. The first category is existing tablets running Android 2.2. This would include the Samsung Galaxy, which will soon have both a WiFi-only and a 4G-LTE model available. Then there is a group of devices that will release in the near future with Android 3.0. On the low end of the scale are any number of low-cost devices aimed at the price conscious consumer.
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Besides, as previously noted, we do not dispute that the open source distributor approach will survive, or suggest that Red Hat will be the last man standing. But we do question whether any other vendors will achieve or better the scale achieved by Red Hat.
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Public administrations should use the savings they realise by their use of generic free and open source applications, to pay for development of specialised IT solutions. “These resources could be used to pay for highly specialised tasks that are too special to attract the attention of the open source community. It will encourage the software companies that operate in this sector.”
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Events
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Check out my post from last year, giving SELF an awesome review. This is an awesome conference and I encourage everyone who is able to attend and/or speak to reserve a room as soon as further details are posted: http://www.redshirtlinux.com/?p=31
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 now has WebGL enabled by default. Based on the original 3-D Canvas work by Vladimir Vukićević, this is being widely implemented in browsers. The WebGL spec is on the short path to a 1.0 release and we’re very excited to see this be used in the wild.
Want a demo? Try the amazing Flight of the Navigator where we combine WebGL with a number of other technologies in Firefox 4 — HTML5 video, the Audio API, all remixed with live data from the web.
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The latest Firefox 4 Beta is available to test the cool features and improvements in the next version of Firefox. As we continue to refine features and performance in Firefox 4 Beta, this release includes faster start-up time, bookmarking and makes complex animations smoother.
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Databases
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Latest version of Apache’s open source distributed database can pack two billion columns into a row, which could be useful to big data cloud computing projects
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Oracle
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Given time, the code bases may diverge, but at present, they are so close that there isn’t any substanial difference.
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While Oracle had already released Oracle Open Office 3.3 in mid-December, the OpenOffice.org developers have only just issued the ninth release candidate for OpenOffice.org 3.3.0, the next major release of the Oracle owned open source office suite. According to the OpenOffice.org Wiki, this release candidate is expected to be the final development preview before the final version arrives. However, a final release date has yet to be confirmed.
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The OpenOffice.org process has been changed into a continuous process which allows to provide l10n turnarounds cycles at every milestone. This process was presented at the OOoConf In Budapest: http://www.ooocon.org/index.php/ooocon/2010/paper/view/207 and is the outcome of Gregor Hartmann, Ivo Hinkelmann and Rafaella Braconi working on the so called “Continuous L10n” project.
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CMS
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Some people love Facebook, others hate it, and many have a little of both. It can be a great way to keep in contact with old friends and relatives, but it’s also a great way for third parties to harvest loads of free data that may not be used the way you want. Plenty of social sites have popped up over the years in the hopes of dethroning Facebook, but not many have had the goods, or really provided much that would entice a user to switch.
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Education
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The school relies on a text-to-speech program that allows teachers to scan a book and create audio files for students to listen to and take notes on. WordQ, SpeakQ, and Kurzweil Educational Systems’ Kurzweil 3000 lack open source licenses. However, Oracle’s free and open source OpenOffice.org provides word prediction, one of the features provided by the proprietary alternative, WordQ.
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Funding
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When the figures for Q3 showed venture capital funding for open source software-related vendors declined 38% in the third quarter I all-but abandoned my prediction that venture funding in 2010 would match the levels seen in 2009.
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BSD
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Recently I contacted lead developers of different FreeBSD based projects and asked them about their development plans and ideas for 2011. Yesterday we looked at PC-BSD, let’s now see what the pfSense developers have in store.
As most of you will be aware, pfSense is a free, open source customised version of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution.
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The FreeBSD Foundation has requested proposals for potential funding. If you have any ideas how you can FreeBSD can be improved in 2011, why not submit you idea. In case you have no ideas but don’t mind getting paid for FreeBSD Development, have a look at the FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Government
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The results are in for U.S. agencies’ use of open source, thanks to a scorecard released today by Open Source for America. The Departments of Defense and Energy had the highest scores, largely due to the fact that they have “published agency-created software code as open source and provide clear guidance identifying open source as a permitted procurement option.”
The survey of the federal departments included questions regarding public budgets, use of social media, and open source technologies practices. The Executive Summary states, “[t]he use of open formats, open source software, and open standards enables the government to make data freely available to the public for a variety of purposes, as well as to create programs that are more efficient and consumer-driven.”
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Ever since its inception, Open Source for America (OSFA) has had lofty goals and has been backed by some very heavy hitting people. Red Hat, Jaspersoft, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, The Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin and many other companies and people back the organization, which is primarily aimed at encouraging the use of open source software at the U.S. Federal level. Now, the folks behind Open Source for America have published a Federal Open Technology Report Card that “evaluates key indicators of open government and open technologies developed through online crowd sourcing and refined metrics outlined by the OSFA leadership committee.” The report card includes questions and responses regarding public budgets, use of social media, and open source technology practices.
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Openness/Sharing
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The European Commission just launched a new consulation on its disastrously dogmatic report on IPRED, a directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, adopted by the EU in 2004. The report — whose logic is similar to ACTA — is based on an analysis of the application of IPRED. It calls for the massive filtering of the Internet to tackle file-sharing: according to the Commission, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should “cooperate” in the war against sharing to avoid the threat of litigation.
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Open Data
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Judging by the phrasing of that, it seems that the government hasn’t yet learned that open data is not an end itself, or something that can be bolted on to traditional government. It is actually part of a wider move towards a more transparent, collaborative form of democracy – and that implies seeking input from anyone interested before making major decisions. That’s particularly important for a body that calls itself the Public Data Corporation: we need to know just how open, and just how public it will really be.
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A couple of days ago, there was a brief announcement from the UK Government of plans for a new Public Data Corporation, which would “bring together Government bodies and data into one organisation”.
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Open Hardware
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Without a doubt, Laser Projectors are a great way to project large, bright images on any surface you can imagine. With a high enough quality projector and software package, excellent images and visualizations can be displayed in real time. [marcan], of the openkinect project, decided that there were not any open source laser projection packages out there that suited his wants or needs, so logically he decided to write his own. Because home-made laser projectors often use the audio out port of a PC, building the framework on top of the JACK unix sound software to control the hardware made perfect sense. OpenLase includes plugins for audio visualizations, 2D and 3D gaming, as well as converting video streams into laser format in real time.
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Programming
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Increasingly, software developers are turning to a new approach for rapidly building robust database applications without programming — application generators. Today’s business environment demands managers find ways to do more with less, and application generation allows for building applications quickly and efficiently.
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It’s difficult to find great developers in almost any language, unless your language community is so small that it’s self-selecting against people just in it for a paycheck. (Even in that case, the truly great developers who know Haskell or Smalltalk or Common Lisp tend not to be in want of work for long.)
In another sense, it’s difficult to hire great Perl developers because it’s so very easy to become a mediocre Perl developer. Despite the repeated myth that Perl 5 is difficult to learn, it’s not. It’s shockingly easy to learn just enough Perl 5 to build a working system. If you remember the mid to late ’90s at all, think back to all of the tiny little form scripts that you could FTP into a cgi-bin directory. Most weren’t worth using, due to various limitations, but real people learned just enough Perl 5 to write them.
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Standards/Consortia
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On Tuesday Google announced that it would be withdrawing support for the video standard h.264 from its Chrome browser in two months’ time. Back in June 2009 we covered the contortions that Google had gone through to use the open source video codec FFmpeg in Chrome to decode embedded videos without risking the wrath of the the owners of that standard, the MPEG LA h.264 patent pool. Essentially Google used FFmpeg but did not acquire a licence from the patent pool for FFmpeg itself, but instead for its Chrome browser. This was a cunning move but at the time it annoyed some around the open web standards community who felt – with some justification – that Google’s move was something of an ‘I’m alright Jack’ statement to the rest of them. Representatives of the Mozilla project who produce Firefox scalded Google on public lists, as reported in that previous post.
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The European Union says its member states must do more to digitize Europe’s cultural heritage and not simply leave that work to the private sector. To do otherwise, suggests a recently commissioned report, could steer Europe away from a digital Renaissance and “into a digital dark age.”
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A company by the name of eBook Technologies has recently become part of the internet monster known as Google. ebook Technologies is aimed towards supplying “intelligent” reading devices and licenses technologies that enable publishing to be completely automated as well as control over content distribution.
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Last month I visited Moscow to help chair the country’s first English speaking technology conference (TechCrunch Moscow) and was pleasantly surprised to discover a very self-contained and self-sufficient industry.
The US technology giants, such as Google and Facebook, have a presence in the country, but unlike the majority of territories they have entered around the world, they have failed to dominate; Russian companies reign across search, social networking, digital media and email services.
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News from Tunisia looks good. For better or worse, many of us will be pondering the role that the Internet played or didn’t play in the events of the Jasmine Revolution. Below are some preliminary reflections, which, if you know me well, are likely to change by the end of next week!
One thing to keep in mind is that revolutions will continue and Twitter won’t go away anytime soon. So, it’s reasonable to assume that there WILL be some new-media activity for any social or political turmoil. But correlation, as well all know, doesn’t always mean causation.
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Even yesterday, it would have been too much to say that blogger, tweeters, Facebook users, Anonymous, and Wikileaks had “brought down” the Tunisian government, but with today’s news that the country’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has fled the country, it becomes a more plausible claim to make.
Of course there was more to such demonstrations than some new technology. An individual act of desperation set off the last month of rioting, as a college-educated young man set himself on fire after police confiscated his unlicensed fruit and vegetable cart. Tunisia’s high unemployment rate, rampant corruption, and rising food prices added to the anger at Ben Ali’s 20+ year rule.
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Knowing that I wanted to do more to help people in the developing world, I took Karl up on his challenge immediately—lending $100 to a group of women in Bolivia who wanted to start small businesses selling groceries.
And I felt remarkable.
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Science
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Do you see a bright ’star’ in the south to southwest sky at early evening on these January evenings? You’re really seeing a planet, Jupiter.
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Having difficulty getting your message across? Try an uglier font.
Perhaps because people learn better when it’s a struggle to do so, content written in difficult-to-read fonts is more readily remembered than content rendered in visually pleasing fonts, a group of researchers has found.
Their seemingly counter-intuitive findings could interest computer user-interface specialists wishing to maximize the impact of their designs.
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Security
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Johannesburg installed hundreds of networked traffic lights on its streets. The lights use a cellular modem and a SIM card to communicate.
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Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev (right) has gone missing since August last year and we have some troubling information that suggests he may have been harmed in his native Bulgaria.
Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A terrorist bomb is likely to be relatively small — possibly only a fraction of the Hiroshima bomb’s explosive power — and likely exploded at ground level. This means that the area totally destroyed by the explosion is likely to be much smaller than the area exposed to lesser damage or to fallout radiation (this nuclear weapons effects calculator from the Federation of Atomic Scientists will let you see the effect of different sized bombs burst at different heights). Because of this, Homeland Security people in the Obama Administration have been encouraging a duck-and-cover approach, followed by advice to “shelter in place” against fallout rather than trying to evacuate the area.
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Cablegate
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Tunisians didn’t need any more reasons to protest when they took to the streets these past weeks — food prices were rising, corruption was rampant, and unemployment was staggering. But we might also count Tunisia as the first time that WikiLeaks pushed people over the brink. These protests are also about the country’s utter lack of freedom of expression — including when it comes to WikiLeaks.
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Due to the lack of response from the confinement facility, the defense, pursuant to the provisions of Rule for Courts-Martial (R.C.M.) 305(g), filed a request earlier today with the Garrison Commander to direct the release of PFC Bradley Manning from pretrial confinement. This request is based upon the fact that the confinement conditions currently being endured by PFC Manning are more rigorous than necessary to guarantee his presence at trial, and that the concerns raised by the government at the time of pretrial confinement are no longer applicable. Further steps to address PFC Manning’s confinement conditions will be taken, if necessary.
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Iran, Geert Wilders and the joint strike fighter are among the subjects covered in some 3,000 diplomatic cables from US officials in The Hague to Washington, the NRC reports on Friday.
The NRC and RTL news were given access to the cables – part of the 250,000 cable Wikileaks collection – by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten using a back door route.
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EFF staff activist Rainey Reitman will be talking about the rights of online publishers and the perils of censorship during an outdoor rally for Wikileaks. This event is part of the global days of action called for by Wikileaks activists. There will be outdoor art projects as well as speakers.
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Peter King, Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, wants WikiLeaks placed on the Treasury Department’s blacklist in order to “strangle (its) viability,” by threatening, if not strangling, the viability of any person or company that dares to engage in any economic transaction with WikiLeaks or Assange. Conducting business, or providing any economic assistance to a blacklisted entity, even unknowingly, no matter how trivial, is a violation of federal law, for which you too may be blacklisted, losing access to all your property and interests in the U.S. (I’ve written previously about the blacklists here and here.)
King is especially incensed that an American publisher, Knopf, has entered into a book deal with Assange (who is reportedly receiving over a million dollars for his memoir); and if he is now blacklisted, you could conceivably break the law merely by buying his book, or contributing to a WikiLeaks defense fund. In other words, King is not simply targeting Assange and Wikileaks; he is targeting all of us — every American citizen and company. In his view, even a paying consumer of information and ideas from WIkiLeaks or Assange is collaborating in terrorism.
[...]
Blacklisting is enabled by a network of federal statutes and executive orders, which requires study to begin to understand. (I doubt many members of Congress can explain it.) Complicated, obscure, and arbitrary, with an incredibly wide reach, this is a legal regime practically designed to be abused. It represents the politicization of law, for which both parties are responsible; and it’s a lot more tyrannical than health care reform.
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The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Obama administration has vetoed one of the biggest coal projects in the US in a historic decision against the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it was revoking the permit granted to the Spruce Number One mine in West Virginia, which would have involved blasting the tops off mountains over more than 2,200 acres, because it would inflict “unacceptable” damage to surrounding valleys and streams.
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Previous attempts to clone the mammoth have failed because nuclei in the cells were too badly damaged by ice crystals. But in 2008, Japanese scientists succeeded in cloning a mouse from cells which had been frozen for 16 years, raising hopes for the resurrection of the mammoth.
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Police in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, have arrested two indigenous leaders for possession of ‘seditious materials’.
The offices of the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (SADIA) were raided and its secretary, Nicholas Mujah, arrested along with two others, while indigenous lawyer Abun Sui Anyit was arrested at a Sarawak airport last Thursday. The two men were held separately and questioned, then released on bail. Abun Sui Anyit was called for further questioning by police yesterday.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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That this House expresses its deep concern about the Government’s proposal, contained within the Strategic Defence and Security Review, to develop an interception modernisation programme; notes that such a programme would include a proposal to store every email, webpage visit and telephone call made in the UK for an unspecified period; further notes that the Home Office has previously estimated that sucha database would cost in the region of 2 billion to develop; believes that the development of an interception modernisation programme raises serious privacy, data storage and access concerns; and calls on the Government to issue a full public consultation on its proposals as soon as possible.
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Fast forward to 2011, and the world is vastly more centralized than it ever was. Almost everyone’s most intimate conversations are held by four companies. And one company knows basically everything about everyone under 25.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The discussion about Net Neutrality continues to heat up. Over at LifeHacker, they asked “What Would You Miss Most if the Net Wasn’t Neutral Anymore?” One user responded with a comment that compared Cable TV to the Internet. Either I failed to understand his sarcasm, or he’s totally missing the point.
Until recently, your cable company was just a transporter of someone else’s data — the TV networks. You paid extra for extra channels, which is fine with me, as your cable company is then paying the TV producers for the content. If paying my ISP meant all sites were then free to access, that might even be fine. But it won’t be, I’ll still be paying Netflix and my ISP.
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Sony is in the news right now. It has taken several security researchers to court, after they released code circumventing the company’s digital rights management (DRM) technology. Unfortunately for Sony, this problem could have largely been avoided had it learned from Microsoft’s lessons.
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These were the reactions I got:
1. My girlfriend wasn’t even able to open it, because the MIME-type wasn’t known in her Vista installation.
2. I p*ssed off a very expensive consultant at work who ordered me to send a printable version or I’d have to look for another assignment.
3. A colleague of mine who prints virtually everything sent it to another nerd colleague of mine who returned a printable version of the document using my “cracking” pages.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Says that Google is “probably hosts the world’s largest index of pirated content” and yet the site is “non-rogue,” and that we don’t blame Microsoft because people use its OS to transfer and “consume pirated content on a massive scale every day.”
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We’ve pointed out numerous problems with anti-circumvention rules, which make it infringement to break pretty much any attempt at circumventing any type of content protection measures (even if not to infringe on the copyright). Sometimes courts realize how silly this is, such as a ruling from a few years ago in Europe, which noted that it’s silly to consider such anti-circumvention rules reasonable if the technical protection measures are not considered “effective.” In other words, if your protection scheme is laughable, it’s silly to make it infringement to get around it. Apparently not all the courts in Europe have gotten this message yet. An anonymous reader points us to a case from a few months back in Germany, in which the court said that deep linking to content that had ridiculously weak measures to block deep-linking is still infringing (that link is a not so great Google translation of the original German — though, the submitter gave a more complete explanation).
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Last month we delivered our first benchmarks of the Amazon EC2 Cloud, but those initial tests were limited to just a few of their cloud computing instances due to failures with the Ubuntu EC2 operating system on their other compute instances. Earlier this month we then showed how the Amazon EC2 Micro was comparable to a Nokia N900 and Intel Atom, but now we have a more exhaustive comparison complete of all major Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud types.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe while Android overtakes iPhone in the US, and TransGaming transforms Cedega into the GameTree Developer Program. Discover our new section and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
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Ballnux
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We recently received a tip from someone who claims to work internally at T-Mobile. The information in the tip has just confirmed everything we have ever thought about Samsung, OTA’s and new devices.
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Kernel Space
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Daniel Poelzleithner has announced to the Linux kernel world his new project named ulatencyd. The focus of ulatencyd is to provide a script-able daemon to dynamically adjust Linux scheduling parameters and other aspects of the Linux kernel.
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Applications
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The GIMP dev team has made some clarification on the current state of GIMP 2.8 and also commented on the future of the GIMP project and its aims.
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Puddletag is an awesome mp3tag-like audio tag editor for Linux about which we’ve talked about last week.
Puddletag comes with Ubuntu .deb files but it doesn’t have a PPA for easy updates so thanks Mrbig2000 and RobJN’s suggestion, I’ve created a PPA.
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I delayed a bit ReSiStance development during last months because we had a lot of work in Igalia’s WebKit team. But I managed to find some time during Xmass to advance some work and to review a couple of pending patches. The most important ones were by far, the Google Reader support ones.
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Y PPA Manager is a GUI tool to add, remove, purge, list and search for Launchpad PPAs.
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In last month’s article we talked about how this free software graphics program missed its anticipated release date and one of the core developers, Martin Nordholts, said it was about a month and a half away still if it’s just a single developer working on the release full-time. Martin said the key item missing from GIMP 2.8 was the single-window interface mode and that there were less than three dedicated developers working on this critical free software project.
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With the number of bugs being filed on compiz recently and the fact that doing the triaging for all of them is a *little* bit overwhelming, David Barth, the DX Team Lead and Didier Roche who is our packaging master spoke the other day about ways to handle the flood of bugs in compiz 0.9 for unity, I decided to write a little tool for compiz which spews as much internal state information as possible – everything about OpenGL, the paint state, the exact state of every X window, the exact X11 state, etc etc to try and find bugs or things that don’t look right without having to have access to your particular machine. That tool will land tomorrow morning (US Time, since I’m in Dallas with the rest of the DX and Platform team).
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Good news for all the Orta fans: a new version of this beautiful theme has been released today with a new Nautilus Elementary style (configurable from the Orta Settings Manager) as well as many bug fixes.
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Pandora radio is a personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites. You can create custom web radio stations and listen free – available only in the US.
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Instructionals/Technical
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gThumb is an image viewer / photo manager for GNOME. It includes options to edit photos, transfer photos from digital cameras, upload photos to websites such as Facebook, PicasaWeb, Photobucket, or Flickr and so on.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.
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Vincent Untz has announced the first GNOME release of 2011, which is one of the final development snapshots leading up to the long-awaited release of GNOME 3.0.
GNOME 2.91.5 is today’s development release after the 2.91.4 release was previously skipped from making it out there due to blocking bugs during a collision with the holidays.
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Xfce
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REMnux is a lightweight Linux distribution for assisting malware analysts in reverse-engineering malicious software.
REMnux is designed for running services that are useful to emulate within an isolated laboratory environment when performing behavioral malware analysis.
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Reviews
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For a straightforward, lightweight, command-line based Linux — whether a server, an older desktop or laptop, or if you just want to learn the Linux command-line better — it’s hard to beat Arch Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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Today Red Hat has released RHEL5.6 after a beta period of ~2 months. There is no official announcement (yet), so the release highlights are unknown. Probably they are the same like the beta version.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Installer team has announced the Debian Installer 6.0 Release Candidate 1 release. Read about all the changes and improvements at their announcement.
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This release candidate includes the new SpaceFun artwork for Squeeze. You can preview this artwork on the wiki page and watch a video of it in action.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Google recently-announced an online science fair for 13-18 year-olds, tasked with finding the next ‘Sergey Brin’.
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Canonical underlined its focus on attracting partners and commercial software developers to the Ubuntu platform when it announced the creation of a “developer relations advocate” position. Here’s the scoop, and what it says about Ubuntu and Canonical in the long term.
The announcement, posted on Canonical’s website by vice president of business development Steve George, describes the role of the developer relations advocate as “evangelizing the platform and assisting developers as they develop software for Ubuntu.”
George also emphasized third-party commercial code, rather than contributions to Ubuntu itself, as the main point of interest for the new position: “Our focus is on commercial software developers since we believe that it’s important to create a sustainable ecosystem around the platform.”
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Ladies and gents, I’m pleased to announce the next Ubuntu Translations videocast tomorrow from Dallas, Texas, where this week we are holding the Canonical Platform Rally for the next version of Ubuntu, the Natty Narwhal.
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Ubuntu Software Centre developer Michael Vogt and designer Matthew Paul Thomas tour ratings and reviews in Ubuntu 11.04 in this latest instalment of ‘Ubuntu developer diaries’.
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That’s what we want the Ubuntu desktops in Natty to feel like. We’re changing things a little bit for the coming release too. We’ll still feature some fantastic photography sourced from our Flickr group but this time we’re reserving at least 3 places for non photographic wallpapers, so things that are rendered or drawn.
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Ubuntu 11.04 is to ship with ‘at least 3′ non-photographic wallpapers, a move many designers within the community have been longing for.
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This is all good. However, the issue is not restricted to our Ubuntu developers. We should not forget that, in the wider opensource community, many developers do not have access to the Canonical, or any other, design team or to anyone with solid design training. They are the developers who work on their own free time and produce amazing software. They have to wing design. Many wish they could access such skills to help beautify and enhance the user experience of their products. These contributors deserve our support.
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Flavours and Variants
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Elementary project refined Linux desktop like no other. And now, the much anticipated Elementary OS codenamed Jupiter is all set to have its first ever official release. The official tagline goes like this – “Its gonna be huge”. Considering the sheer amount of changes and improvements Elementary OS is going to bring with it, the release of “Jupiter” is going to be huge indeed!
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At the end of last year, to demonstrate my company’s swiftBoot service, I put together a rather impressive demo. Using a Renesas MS7724 development board I was able to achieve a one second cold Linux boot to a Qt application. Here’s the demo…
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The XDA developers are too quick to bring these hacks. Here they wo with another one. Stroughtonsmith named hacker has successfully ported MeeGo operating system on Google Nexus S smartphone. The developer used rootfs images on the internal memory to boot Meego on Nexus S without flashing the phone.
For those who are unaware of this, MeeGo is an open source Linux based operating system designed to target mobile devices, notebooks, tablets, embedded systems etc. MeeGo was aimed to merge the features and work of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin.
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Several days ago, I bought my new cellphone, which is an Android device. It is Moto Quench XT502, only available for China Mainland. But you can find out XT5 is the same with XT502. As we know, All the cellphones need to be modified something as Chinese edition. Google Services have to be removed in China and added some localized applications due to the relationship between government and Google.
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Android
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At least on Millenial’s network, however, Android is getting a lot of attention from advertisers. Android ad requests grew 141% from Q3 to Q4 of 2010 while Apple requests grew 12% and RIM requests grew 60%. Android apps also dominated, accounting for 55% of revenue from application platforms.
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Tablets
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What a lot of tablets. Around 80 were launched, almost all of them running Android. Motorola wowed the show by announcing its 10-inch (1280×800) Xoom, which will run Android 3.0 (aka “Honeycomb”). You couldn’t actually see it running Honeycomb, though; all the stand had was a sort of video demonstration running on the device. Battery life? Price? Ship date? “Competitive”, “competitive” and “aiming for Q1″.
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We are pleased to open-source another piece of infrastructure software developed at LinkedIn, Kafka, a persistent, efficient, distributed message queue. Kafka is primarily intended for tracking various activity events generated on LinkedIn’s website, such as pageviews, keywords typed in a search query, ads presented, etc. Those activity events are critical for monitoring user engagement as well as improving relevancy in various other products. Each day, a substantially large number of such events are generated. Therefore, we need a solution that’s scalable and incurs low overhead.
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But Tindall says it really wasn’t a hard choice. “Some of the better products for ecommerce are open source,” he said. “When you work at a company like Microsoft, it’s all about scale and that played into my decision of what software to use – how could I drive scale without a huge infrastructure? And one of the great things is how well these programs work with search engine optimization.
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Events
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In addition to announcing its event schedule, the Linux Foundation is also opening its Call for Presentations for all of the 2011 events and being offered are special promotions to book their registration for LinuxCon North America and Europe early. Also The Linux Foundation is offering a special promotional discounted registration fee of $200 USD is for the first 50 people who register for each event. The Linux Foundation encourages interested people to register now as those special discounts and promotions will go quickly.
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The Linux Foundation has published its 2011 event schedule and confirmed that its premier Linux conference, LinuxCon, is coming to Europe this year. LinuxCon Europe will take place from the 26th to the 28th of October in Prague, Czech Republic. Amanda McPherson, Linux Foundation VP of Marketing and Developer Programs said “As we approach the 20th anniversary of Linux and the operating system experiences increasing adoption throughout Europe, it is only fitting that we host LinuxCon where Linux originally took root”.
The Foundation has also announced the Call for Presentations for its entire 2011 event line-up – this includes its LinuxCon conferences in North America, Japan, Brazil and Europe, as well as other events focusing on embedded Linux in both North America and Europe. Following the announcement in October of last year that the Linux Foundation and the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) would be merged, the Foundation will organise and host the Embedded Linux Conferences (ELC) in North America and Europe.
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The Europen edition of the Open Database Camp 2011 will take place in Sardinia, hosted by the Sardinia Technology Park, a local scientific and business institution with international links.
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Web Browsers
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Good news today for open Web proponents: Google has announced it be pushing WebM and Theora for the HTML5 video element in Chrome as well as the open source Chromium project. Potentially bad news for the majority of the Web, which is going to have to ride out a years-long standards format war. Again.
Here’s the scoop so far in a nutshell. Once upon a time, the HTML5 video element was going to specify what format(s) should be supported by the browser, and the leading contender was Theora. Then that changed to a comment that it would be “helpful” if browser vendors could all support the same codecs, but “no known codecs… satisfy all the current players.” Here “players” refers to the vendors participating in the spec.
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A large number of commentors on the Google blog said that the move was unjustified “because H.264 is now free”. This is a complex topic that it’s hard to explain concisely. But as I said last August, H.264 is not the kind of Free that matters. The MPEG-LA patent consortium taxes the H.264 standard so that the patent holders don’t have to get their hands dirty or be identified as information highwaymen, and their fee waiver delivers some flexibility to some people.
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You might not think that’s a big deal considering that IE is still by a fairly large margin the most-used browser overall. But as long as we’ve been keeping track of stats for TechCrunch, it has never been the top browser here. In fact, it has been number four for quite some time. And it’s normally about five percentage points behind number three: Safari. So for it to surge to number one is a real oddity.
So what happened?
One word: AOL.
We’ve written about this before; being on AOL’s homepage can lead to a massive surge in traffic depending on where you’re featured. And if we’ve learned one thing from our new parent, it’s that its users love IE. I mean, really love IE. Digging further into the data, almost all of them were using IE (with nearly none using Chrome).
Read into that what you will. The aging giant, etc. But clearly much of the rest of the web is going the other way.
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If open source projects like WebM and Mozilla – and the open Web – are the big winners here, the loser is clearly the H.264 codec that Google is no longer supporting in Chrome. Until now, H.264 has been the undisputed standard for video on the Web – and off it: it’s widely used in many video consumer devices.
In fact, it’s so widely used that Google’s move might seem quixotic. Even though WebM and Theora codecs are freely available, while H.264 requires a licence (free for some but not all uses), surely most content developers and hardware manufacturers will remain locked in to H.264 just by virtue of its overwhelming market share?
Well, that might have been a persuasive argument a year, or even six months ago, but things are moving rapidly in this area. Chief among the developments are the rise of Firefox and – in particular – Google’s own Chrome. As I noted last week, Firefox now holds a major chunk of the brower market, particularly in Europe, while Chrome is growing very rapidly there and elsewhere. Put their market share together and you have a very strong argument for Web sites to offer content using the WebM technology that both will be favouring.
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And to conclude, my favorite of the commentary. Simon Phipps tells everyone to relax, calling “this bold move…another step towards an end to the Flash monopoly on rich media” (Google and H.264 – Far From Hypocritical).
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Mozilla
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Thanks to all who entered the Mozilla Labs Game On 2010 competition – submissions are now closed. Come back Wednesday, January 12th to see the entries and vote for the community favorite!
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Back in November, Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team together launched the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. While we set out to discover creative visual answers to the open question, “How do people use Firefox,” we really didn’t know what level of participation to expect from the Mozilla and data analysis communities. In fact, we were overwhelmed by both the number and quality of submissions – so much so that we had to give ourselves an extra few days to thoroughly review them all!
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The goal of this challenge is to create a unique design that captures the essence of Firefox 4. The winning design will be printed as the official Firefox 4 launch t-shirt, a limited edition item featured in the Mozilla store and distributed to thousands of fans and contributors around the world. It will also be highlighted across key web properties like mozilla.com, the Creative Collective homepage, the Mozilla blog, our Facebook page, and more.
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Yesterday I went to London’s Old Street to talk about HTML5 and the web at the Mozilla Labs Gaming Special. Here are the slides, the audio and my extensive notes of what I had to say.
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Mozilla is pleased to announce support for IndexedDB in the upcoming Firefox 4 Beta 9 and recent trunk nightlies. IndexedDB allows web apps to store large amounts of data on your local system (with your explicit permission, of course) for fast offline retrieval at a later time. We’re hoping that webmail, TV listings, and online purchase history will one day be as convenient to access offline as they are online.
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We built the Game On Gallery so that people who use the Web everyday can access and enjoy your games. Starting today, registered users of the Game On website can vote on their choice for the winner of the Community Choice prize category. Over the next couple weeks, our expert judges will be selecting winners for the other prize categories. Winners will be announced the first week of February.
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Firefox 4 is nearly ready for release, a recent post on Mozilla’s developer mailing list suggests.
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The ninth beta version of Firefox, due imminently, is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer.
“IndexedDB allows Web apps to store large amounts of data on your local system (with your explicit permission, of course) for fast offline retrieval at a later time. We’re hoping that Web mail, TV listings, and online purchase history will one day be as convenient to access offline as they are online,” Ben Turner, who develops IndexedDB for Mozilla’s browser, said yesterday in a blog post.
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But it’s fast. Very fast. It’s more stable (I’m one of those idiots who likes having a hundred tabs open at once…) It’s nice.
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Oracle
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Andrew Bayer just posted a blog post on Hudson-labs.org with a proposal for renaming the Hudson project to “Jenkins”. Since Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of and lead contributor to the Hudson project, is part of CloudBees, and I’ve helped Andrew and Kohsuke bounce ideas, I wanted to share some more context and thoughts.
Each and every Open Source project has its own DNA, its own philosophy that gets established over time. Born in 2004, Hudson has had plenty of time to find its cruising altitude. Yet, after Kohsuke left ORCL, ORCL decided they didn’t necessarily liked the way the project was handled and asked for some changes to take place.
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Education
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When we talk about geometry, the vast majority of us are actually talking about what mathematicians now call, more precisely, Euclidean geometry. And why do they call it Euclidean geometry? Because the Greek mathematician Euclid laid out its foundations in a manuscript about 2400 years ago, and mathematicians have been nodding their heads in agreement ever since.
Euclid’s Elements made its way from Alexandria to Athens, to Rome, to Baghdad, back to Europe, and around the globe. In days gone by, one could not be considered properly educated without having studied Euclid. Until the 20th Century, Elements was the second most printed book in the world, ahead of Shakespeare and behind only the Bible. It is said that country lawyer Abe Lincoln carried a copy from town to town so that he could study its proofs by candlelight. Einstein called it “the holy little geometry book”.
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Project Releases
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The Document Foundation is happy to announce the third release candidate of LibreOffice 3.3. This release candidate is not intended for production use! The final release of LibreOffice 3.3, for production use, will be available soon.
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Government
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Open Source for America (OSFA), an organization of technology industry leaders, non-government associations, and academic and research institutions promoting the use of open source technologies in the U.S. federal government, today published the results of a study measuring openness in government.
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Openness/Sharing
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Benjamin Nowack’s review at BNODE of Named Entity Extraction APIs by Zemanta and OpenCalais.
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Open Data
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Chapters 2 and 3 summarize the importance of data in the modern society and some recent developments on the Open Data front in Europe. Chapter 4 explains why raw PSI should be open, while Chapter 5 shows the potential of such data with a few real world examples from several (mostly EU) countries. Chapter 6 looks at some dangers that should not be ignored when promoting Open Data and Chapter 7 proposes some general practices to follow for getting the most out of them.
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Programming
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Wow, I just managed to combine three of my favourite things in a single title! Recently, I’ve been getting further into home brewing, with a book I received as a Christmas present (Home Brewed Beers and Stouts, by C.J.J. Berry). Since I’d never actually measured the Alcohol By Volume (ABV) of my beer I decided to write some Python code to automate the process. The simple modules I came up with work from the command line and also on Android phones via SL4A, which makes them very useful when doing quick measurements.
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Standards/Consortia
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OpenDoc Society, the global association that promotes best practices for office applications, today announced that The Document Foundation has become an organizational member. The Document Foundation joins other companies, Open Source communities, public sector organizations and not-for-profits that are already members organizations of OpenDoc Society, such as Cap Gemini, Google, IBM, CWI and the Netherlands Department of Defense. OpenDoc Society brings together individuals and organizations with a stake or interest in the openness and future of documents, to learn from each other and share knowledge and best practices about core technologies, available tools, policy issues, transition strategies, legal aspects and of course the latest innovations.
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Solace for world leaders trying to enforce painful austerity measures: At least you’re not running Romania.
Angry witches are using cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government who are forcing them to pay taxes. Also in the eye of the taxman are fortune tellers, who should have seen it coming.
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Augmented Reality is a concept that has a lot of potential in the coming years. In particular, technologies like Layar could prove to be very useful as the GPS accuracy and the underlying dataset continue to get more accurate.
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Evgeny Morozov’s new book, The Net Delusion, is an important contribution; its publication has been widely welcomed as an important correction to cyber-utopianism, and greeted with laudatory reviews. I found myself agreeing with the majority of its arguments.
But I write here neither to praise nor bury the book, but to engage it critically. Morozov challenges the intellectual laziness that characterizes so many analyses of the Internet’s impact, which do tend to be on the utopian side. That is well, but just as cyber-utopianism is fashionable in some circles, it’s equally fashionable in others to pooh-pooh the fundamentally transformative impact of the Internet, denying it any great world-historical importance. To some intellectuals, the mundanity of human sociality exposed through the Internet deserves to be mocked, and people’s sincere attempts to express their identity and convictions through online methods are derided as meaningless “slactivism.”
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The anonymous author alleged that the project was hopelessly corrupt and out of control and had been for years. The writer, who claimed to have been employed on the project, went on to name three people he alleged were responsible for that corruption.
The commenter accused a consultant, Mark Mazer, of being “the most crooked person on the team,” and said consultant Scott Berger was building a home in Florida at city expense.
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Most web workers have probably heard that “the Internet is running out of addresses.” In response, The Internet Society, together with such major players as Facebook, has announced World IPv6 Day. What will this mean for web workers, businesses and individuals?
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Settling a 20-year legal battle between teaching hospitals and the federal tax collector and saving the Treasury some $700 million a year in future revenue, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that medical students who have become doctors in training as residents are not students under federal tax law, and thus are subject to federal taxes to cover Social Security and Medicare (so-called FICA taxes). The decision, however, will mean that the taxes are due only on residents’ stipends paid after April 1, 2005. Earlier payments are being refunded by the Treasury’s own choice (see this news release). Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the decision.
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It has become common wisdom that retail stores that carry physical media – CDs, books, movies in particular – are, to use the scientific term, “toast”.
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A device coming from a Rhode Island company this spring promises to shake the publishing industry in the same way CD burners shook the music industry and forever changed copyright laws in the early 1990s.
ION Audio’s Book Saver looks like a miniature overhead projector combined with a cradle and can scan a 200-page novel in less than 15 minutes.
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When AOL bought TechCrunch last September, the first question on everyone’s lips was, “How long could Mike Arrington possibly last as an AOL employee?”
Yesterday, four months after the deal, we may have begun to learn the answer to that question. On Tuesday evening, for no apparent reason, Arrington threw public punches at AOL’s crown-jewel technology blog, Engadget, and Engadget’s editor, Joshua Topolsky.
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The man said he wounded the fox with a shot by a double-barrel gun and tried to finish off the animal with a blow by the gun’s butt. But the fox, which attempted to fight back, hit the trigger with a paw, causing the gun to fire.
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Science
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And the the elderly and disabled will walk again! Thanks to robots of course, specifically a system called “Hybrid Assistive Limb”, shortened to HAL and created by Japanese company Cyberdyne. The powered robot exoskeleton moves in response to nerve signals in a human’s legs. Users only need to “think” and the robot legs will move for them. Think of the legs like an incredibly advanced Segway that is actually sensing your nervous system. The HAL suit is available to hospitals and clinics in Japan to rent for about $1,500 per month.
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Earlier this week we took a look back at 2010 and offered our projections for the coming year in personal genomics. Topic #1, just as it was last year: the $1,000 genome.
In hindsight, it might have been ill-advised to offer predictions about the near-term future of genome sequencing during the same week in which one of the year’s major industry conferences (the JP Morgan annual Healthcare Conference) is taking place.
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Two researchers may have found a way to greatly reduce traffic bottlenecks that could take place in ad hoc networks. Such work may be essential for the future development of sensor networks, they say.
Keren Censor-Hillel, a postdoctoral research student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Hadas Shachnai, an associate professor of computer science at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, presented their work last week at the 2011 Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, held by the Association of Computing Machinery and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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Edsac, the UK’s first fully operational general-purpose computer, is to be recreated at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
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Health/Nutrition
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Women should “get thin or die trying,” and you can “never start too young.” It is better for a girl to “risk [her] life dieting than be sub-par by being a plus-size.” Remember: “Hunger hurts but starving works.” When an ultra-wealthy but forgotten former British reality show Big Brother contestant called Kenneth Tong started Tweeting these sentiments — and worse — a fortnight ago, a Twitter-storm broke. Everyone from Rihanna to Gordon Ramsay told their followers he was a dangerous fool, but Tong gathered tens of thousands of young girls who followed him. He became the most discussed subject on Twitter in the world for three days. His message? “The words lunch, breakfast, and dinner should now mean nothing to you, you have eaten enough for a lifetime. Stop. You are disgusting.”
Then Tong claimed it was all a hoax — just an hour after I interviewed him. In our long discussion he passionately defended every word he had said, but when I told him that his arguments could kill young girls and expose him to serious legal liability, he visibly began to panic. When I spoke to him on the phone later in the day, after his ‘revelation’, he said “it was dangerous ground we were treading on, I can see that now” and begged me not to publish his comments. So I don’t believe it was a hoax at all — but that he was finally scared off by the legal implications of what he was saying and doing. You can judge for yourself.
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Imagine it is 1912, but that the Titanic is fitted with an underwater radar system. Imagine that it senses an iceberg so large that even the captain can understand that by the law of conservation of momentum, the ship will be stopped in its path. Should the captain use the radar information to inform the decision to alter course, or should the captain ignore it because radar is merely an invention of science therefore prone to exaggeration and false findings?
The New Yorker Magazine has just published an immensely popular article titled “The Truth Wears Off — Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” The article reports several examples of scientific findings that appeared to be significant when first published, but when tested over time, demonstrate weaker and weaker results. Zyprexa is a second-generation anti-depressant that showed great promise in clinical trials in the nineteen-nineties. By 2001, Zyprexa earned more revenue than Prozac, and it remains Eli Lilly’s top-selling drug.
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It’s remarkable that SBS isn’t even bigger than it is. When the public sector net debt is about £950bn, why don’t most NHS trusts pay their staff through the SBS shared services model? Why don’t many more trusts give SBS their back-office processing work?
Steria says that SBS will save the NHS £224m over 10 years. It should be more, a point made by John Neilson, SBS’s managing director.
[...]
Media controversy as NHS work is carried out in India
But the media has raised questions about whether any NHS work that involves medical records or appointments should be handled in India, where legislation covering data protection is not as it is in the UK.
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Europe
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MEPs from the European Parliament’s liberal ALDE group have called for the venue of a meeting to be changed from Budapest to Brussels, as a sign of protest against a controversial media law recently adopted in Hungary, the country holding the rotating EU presidency.
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We were therefore disappointed to see that the Commission insists that a non-binding, “soft” “WIPO Recommendation” would be the best sort of international legal instrument to provide for the transfer of accessible books between countries.
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Security
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At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Last November, Roth had already caused a stir when he used Amazon’s EC2 to launch an attack on SHA-1 hashes. Amazon had added “Cluster GPU Instances”, an option for fast calculations, last November and even before that, EC2 had already been used for cracking passwords.
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Gawker is phasing out the use of email-address-and-password login in favour of more modern OAuth authentication and the use of anonymous one-off accounts.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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New York Rep. Peter King, chairman of House Homeland Security Committee, will introduce a bill to ban carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress and federal judges. The measure will also apply to carrying weapons near the president or vice president.
King announced the measure at a press conference today with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who heads a gun control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and who is backing the bill. King’s move may indicate there may be gaining momentum for some sort of gun-control measures in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
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The squad rushed in after a force helicopter picked up a ‘hotspot’ on Pam Hardcastle’s property, thinking it betrayed a lighting system used to grow the drug.
But all they found was a heater for Simon and Kenny, the pets of Ms Hardcastle’s ten-year-old son, Jack.
‘When I opened it up and they saw the guinea pigs, they didn’t say anything,’ said the 42-year-old primary school worker.
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We don’t buy this justification easily. We prod and poke until we get to the truth. So why when it comes to our own harassment and humiliating experiences in the name of “security” do we accept it and shut up?
As female journalists working in this region we constantly find ourselves putting clothes on to please Hamas and taking them off to please the Israelis.
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So, according to Sarah Palin, violent rhetoric plays no role in inspiring violent acts — but criticism of violent acts incites “hatred and violence.”
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Amnesty International has condemned an Israeli military appeal court’s decision to extend the prison sentence of a Palestinian non-violent activist, convicted over his involvement in organizing protests in the occupied West Bank.
Abdallah Abu Rahma, head of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in, had his sentence extended from 12 months to 16 months by the Israeli Military Court of Appeals at Ofer in the West Bank on Tuesday, after the prosecution argued that his initial sentence was too lenient.
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Cuba is currently faced with a crucial dilemma: either it updates, revises and reconstructs its economic model or it runs the risk of succumbing to the combined pressures created by its own errors and the aggression of the US embargo. The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as all of those in Africa and Asia, cannot remain indifferent towards this situation or limit themselves to contemplating how the revolution delivered this decisive battle without any assistance other than their own strength.
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On January 10 one of the most dangerous terrorists in recent history will go on trial in a small courtroom in El Paso, Texas. This is not the venue the Obama administration has finally selected to prosecute the perpetrators of 9/11; it is where the reputed godfather of Cuban exile violence, Luis Posada Carriles, may finally face a modicum of accountability for his many crimes.
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A cross-border kerfuffle over a popular chocolate treat nearly cost a Winnipeg woman a $300 fine and saddled her with a bureaucratic headache.
Lind Bird was recently stopped at the U.S. border and selected for a random search of her vehicle. She was warned she could have faced a fine after the customs official found — and seized — her $2 Kinder Surprise egg as illegal contraband.
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A year ago, the protracted wrangling in Congress over the re-authorization of several expiring provisions of the PATRIOT ACT made plenty of headlines. Most observers expected the sunsetting powers to be extended, but civil libertarians hoped serious and sorely needed reforms might be part of the package. The House and Senate Judiciary Committees held multiple hearings on the topic, and an array of competing reform and reauthorization bills (PDF) were proposed, adding extra safeguards (of varying stringency) to the greatly expanded surveillance powers Congress had approved in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
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But even with that said, to pretend that guns are somehow “safe” because they kill fewer people than cars only indicates that the debate has ceased to be a debate; instead it’s reached the religious level, where idees fixes have completely taken over the minds of adherents and detractors alike, and cannot be budged without the most enormous effort of will. To ask gun adherents to imagine an America without the Second Amendment is like asking a Christian to imagine a world without their imaginary God. From what I’ve seen, there’s a relatively large overlap there. Which ought to give pause for thought. Dogma is dangerous wherever it’s found.
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More than three years after police in West Bloomfield arrested a man and accused him of raping his autistic daughter, the township’s insurance carrier has agreed to pay his family and attorney $1.8 million to settle a wrongful-arrest suit.
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It is an acknowledged trend of modern-day life that young people want to be older, even as it is an undeniable trend that older people want to become younger.
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Over the last few days we have seen some of the bravest people facing down some of the worst.
Armed with nothing more than a revolutionary heart and hopes of a better future they gathered and protested as government forces aimed their weapons and fired live rounds in to the crowds.
But the ammunition and the underlying threats of arrest and torture meant absolutely nothing to the masses – for they had simply lost their fear.
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Cablegate
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Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic MP, writer, artist, activist and former Wikileaks collaborator, spoke to the Globe and Mail’s editorial board on Tuesday. She is in Toronto to kick off the 2011 Samara/Massey journalism seminars. (Samara is a charitable organization that studies citizen engagement with Canadian democracy.)
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It’s not news that WikiLeaks and some of its supporters often find themselves in the hot seat. The website deals in publishing documents and videos that have embarrassed politicians and countries around the world. Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir was an active volunteer for WikiLeaks, and played a central role in publishing the “Collateral Murder” video. Last week she learned that prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by WikiLeaks were doing a little anti-secrecy lobbying of their own.
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Julian Assange’s lawyers will argue he faces the threat of the death penalty in the United States if he is handed over to Swedish authorities following next month’s extradition hearing.
Mr Assange’s legal team released a skeleton report of their case for the February 7-8 extradition hearing in London following Mr Assange’s brief court appearance on Tuesday morning.
In it, Mr Assange’s legal team said it expected the Swedes to “bow to US pressure and/or rely naively on diplomatic assurances from the USA that Mr Assange would not be mistreated.”
Swedish prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Mr Assange following accusations of sexual offences against two women in Sweden during a trip last August.
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A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users’ account details.
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An influential group of European politicians is protesting the U.S. government’s attempt to pry WikiLeaks-related information out of Twitter, saying that EU privacy rules may have been violated.
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On 9 January 2011, the defense filed a demand for speedy trial with the Government. PFC Manning has been in pretrial confinement since 29 May 2010. Since 12 July 2010, the case has been on Government requested excludable delay under R.C.M. 707(c). This delay request by the Government was approved by the court-martial convening authority.
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WikiLeaks will step up its publication schedule of secret documents, founder Julian Assange announced Tuesday, promising more revelations based on the group’s stash of confidential U.S. embassy cables and other leaks.
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In addition, the database also has a separate section devoted entirely to the compilation and classification of all relevant “WikiLeaks” documents, updated and sorted as they are released.
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It will publish documents that will embarrass the Chinese government, according to a supporter of the whistle-blowing website.
Gavin McFadyen, a London-based television producer who has collaborated with WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, said yesterday critics of the website were wrong to say it was obsessed with embarrassing the US government rather than exposing more repressive regimes.
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I recently put the proposition, to a senior frontbencher in Federal Parliament, that the WikiLeaks horse had bolted, and that shutting down Julian Assange could not reverse a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards the citizens and away from the institutions that govern them.
His response was: ”The Catholic Church shut down Galileo for a hundred years. I think we can shut down Julian Assange.”
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I now find myself in the uncomfortable position, as a fairly unreconstructed conservative, of being in furious agreement with the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young. I make no judgment on the merits of the Swedish extradition proceedings that Assange is defending in London. I do regret that this unquestionably gutsy Queenslander is being required to take on the entire global ”establishment” with one hand tied behind his back.
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Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder,” Richardson wrote. He added: “WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.”
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The contents of these files are unknown, but, according to Assange, “They speak more of the same truth to power.” It is not just government that should be worried about the content of these files, however. “There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and News Corp,” he says.
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Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher, Tor developer, and volunteer with Wikileaks, reported today on his Twitter feed that he was detained, searched, and questioned by the US Customs and Border Patrol agents at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 10, upon re-entering the US after a vacation in Iceland.
[...]
• It’s very frustrating that I have to put so much consideration into talking about the kind of harassment that I am subjected to in airports.
• I was detained, searched, and CPB did attempt to question me about the nature of my vacation upon landing in Seattle.
• The CPB specifically wanted laptops and cell phones and were visibly unhappy when they discovered nothing of the sort.
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The whole Wikileaks saga has revealed both strengths and weaknesses. The most obvious choke point is that governments were able to exert political pressure on domain hosts to force them to find a pretext to throw Wikileaks off their servers and so Assange and his colleagues had to play a game of cat and mouse, relocating Wikileaks on different servers. The countervailing strength was and is that they could do this but there is always the danger that the plots will dry up, so to speak, and this whistle-blowing website will run out of hosting space as the American Government pressurises companies and countries to deny it refuge. However, it is a matter of record that it has over five hundred mirrors and closing them all down would be a big task.
[...]
What the Wikileaks story is really about is a clash of world views, about how we handle and process information and who controls it. The political establishments are like Europe before the Reformation and the invention of printing, like businesses trying to impose an outmoded model on top of technologies which threaten to overwhelm them.
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Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early supporter of WikiLeaks, said that despite having had a falling out with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his role in the organization, she is willing to “stand up and stick my neck out for him” and defend the document-leaking entity against attacks by the U.S. government and others, because doing so is her duty. “We must all stand behind WikiLeaks and defend freedom of information and freedom of speech,” Jónsdóttir said in a presentation at the University of Toronto on Tuesday night, in which she also called on media outlets to support the organization. Jónsdóttir also said “even if they chop the head off WikiLeaks, a thousand more heads will come out.”
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WikiLeaks today condemned calls from the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security to “strangle the viability” of WikiLeaks by placing the publisher and its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, on a US “enemies list” normally reserved for terrorists and dictators.
Placement on the US “Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List” would criminalize US companies who deal with WikiLeaks or its editor. “The U.S. government simply cannot continue its ineffective piecemeal approach of responding in the aftermath of Wikileaks’ damage,” King wrote in a letter to the Secretary of the US Treasury, Geithner. “The U.S. government should be making every effort to strangle the viability of Assange’s organization.”
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Yet despite a small market and low profits for the meat, the government of Norway has not shown any willingness to let go of whaling.
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A legal defense fund for the US soldier suspected of leaking secret US documents to WikiLeaks said Thursday it has received a 15,000 dollars contribution from the website.
US Army private Bradley Manning, 23, has been held in a military brig in Virginia since July on suspicion of leaking secret US military documents and State Department cables to WikiLeaks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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I have previously written about The rise of anti-science cyber bullying and the role played by Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano — who believes climate scientists should be publicly beaten:
I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.
Morano has never repudiated those remarks and he’s been widely criticized, including by British journalist Leo Hickman (see “UK Guardian slams Morano for cyber-bullying and for urging violence against climate scientists“).
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It’s a tie: Last year equaled 2005 as the warmest year on record, government climate experts reported Wednesday.
The average worldwide temperature was 0.62 degrees Celsius above normal last year. That’s the same as six years ago, the National Climatic Data Center announced.
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In Borneo’s majestic rain forest, trees are being felled to meet western demand for wood products. The resulting floods are devastating villages, livelihoods and food supplies and further threatening rare species, Tracy McVeigh reports.
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Finance
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Europe has a comprehensive plan to respond to the crisis and to speed up Europe’s economic growth. It now needs to focus its efforts in a coordinated manner and with an eye on priorities. That is what the Commission is presenting today. The Annual Growth Survey charts a clear direction on where Europe should be heading in the next year, with ten pressing actions focussed on macro-economic stability and fiscal consolidation, structural reforms and growth-enhancing measures. The Annual Growth Survey is the start of the first “European Semester” which changes the way governments shape their economic and fiscal policies. Once agreed by the European Council, Member states will reflect these recommendations in both their policies and national budgets. For the first time ever, Member States and Commission will therefore jointly discuss macro-economic stability, structural reforms and boosting growth measures in a comprehensive way.
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Cu această ocazie, cele două părți vor semna un Memorandum de înțelegere care va permite cooperarea consolidată și schimburi de experiență în sectorul TIC, date fiind capacităţile şi oportunităţile României și Chinei în acest domeniu. On this occasion, the two sides will sign a Memorandum of Understanding that will enable closer cooperation and exchanges of experience in the ICT sector, given the capabilities and opportunities for Romania and China in this field.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday that the economy gained only 103,000 new jobs in December–not enough to keep up with population growth–but the rate of unemployment (U.3) fell from 9.8% to 9.4%. If you are confused by the report, you are among the many.
In truth, what fell was not the number of unemployed people but the number of unemployed people who are actively looking for work. Those who have become discouraged and have ceased looking for work are not considered to be in the work force and are not counted as unemployed in the U.3 measure. The unemployment rate fell because discouraged workers increased, not because employment rose.
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In my opinion, the oligarchs and their minions give themselves far too much credit for their success. It may be true that they are clever, industrious, and hard-working, but so too are con men, embezzlers, and a goodly number of thieves and other criminals. Is it clever and industrious to appropriate for oneself (by force, intimidation, bribery, or manipulation), resources that are by nature the birthright of all (“the commons”), or to use one’s “insider” position to abuse a public trust? Far too many fortunes have been made that way.
The Atlantic article concludes “The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this.”
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Murdoch
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The BBC have just revealed that Ofcom thinks there are big problems with Murdoch’s BSkyB power grab. Their report says the Competition Commission needs to be involved.
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News Corp. is seriously considering hanging a “For Sale” sign on its MySpace social networking real estate, the beleaguered company’s CEO confirmed on Wednesday.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is to implement internet pornography filters in Indonesia after being threatened with a blackout for its 2 million users in the country.
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The European Internet Services Providers Association (EuroISPA) has called on the European Parliament to consider permanently removing internet based child sexual abuse content at source, which would be instead of forcing EU and UK ISPs into merely filtering out (blocking) such material. The latter would only provide a merely cosmetic appearance of having done something useful and is easily circumvented.
EuroISPA believes that removing abuse material at source is the “only” effective “technical measure” that can actually work. It proceeds to state that the alternative use of blocking still allows the content to remain online and available for use by those who present a real danger to children.
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One of China’s most prominent human rights activists, Gao Zhisheng, has told of his torture by police during more than a year in secret detention.
The lawyer told the Associated Press he was stripped naked, beaten and pistol-whipped until he feared for his life.
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The European Parliament is currently at a crucial stage in the discussions on the European Commission’s proposals on web blocking. The MEP in charge, Roberta Angelilli, has presented her draft report, other parliamentarians have until 20 January to propose other amendments and an “orientation vote” which will informally set Parliament policy on issues of general agreement will take place on 3 February.
Despite the fact that the original proposal was made by the Commission in March 2009, the level of debate has not developed to any great extent after almost two years of discussion. The fact that the Commission failed to provide any evidence from countries that already block websites has not had any positive impact whatsoever. The fact that blocking is increasingly irrelevant due to the use of P2P and hacked servers instead of static “blockable” websites or the fact that blocking will give criminals immediate warning that they have been detected are of no particular importance in the debate. Indeed, even the actual purpose of blocking – accidental access, deliberate access or something else – is not an issue which has been discussed in any detail.
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Civil unrest in Tunisia prompted by government censorship of internet access and freedom of expression continues to spiral out of control this week as the nation’s officials find even more ways to stifle citizens’ pleas for support. Now, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) has begun rallying support from American technology companies to aid Tunisian residents in making their voices heard.
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Another day, another antipiracy study (or “study”) from a self-interested party. What’s new? This time, one of the named targets is fighting back, alleging “defamation” and reserving the right to sue the study’s authors.
The study comes from MarkMonitor, a company in the business of selling its brand protection services to companies concerned about intellectual property theft and counterfeiting online. The study is tough to take seriously, since it really just amounts to assembling a list of 100 websites and then grabbing traffic data on them from Alexa.
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The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast of the unedited version of the song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits on CHOZ-FM (OZ FM, Newfoundland). The CBSC concluded that the presence of the word “faggot” in the song contravened the Human Rights Clauses of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code.
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A senior French official has called for a new report on online terrorism and pedophilia. French Internet advocates dismissed renewed demands for regulation, pointing to critiques of controversial anti-piracy law.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I don’t know whether the company really holds its customers in that sort of disdain, even though I’ve seen plenty of evidence over the years that it can do. It could just be industry-defining massive stupidity, matched with rancid greed. But I know how it feels – and I know that T-Mobile has done itself a great deal of damage. Could I recommend anyone move to T-Mobile? I could at the beginning of the week. I can’t now.
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A terrible new service plan from MetroPCS — the fifth-largest mobile phone carrier — is the latest round in the phone industry’s war against Net Neutrality.
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Some major back-pedalling over at T-Mobile in the UK this afternoon, and a major win for its customers. The company has said that its new policy, reducing all fair usage data caps to 500 megabytes, will now only apply to new and upgrading customers, not existing subscribers. When T-Mobile had originally announced the changes on Monday, it said it “affects everyone.” But over the last few days, that policy resulted in an avalanche of angry comments on sites like Twitter and threats of a mass exodus of users.
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The giant Internet Service Providers such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon seek to:
1. Abolish the flat service fee. This means that you will pay for the amount of time you spend on the Net and the amount of data you download. For example, you will be charged for downloading a video from You Tube. If you don’t have much money to spend, you will have less access to information than a person who has more money.
2. Make website operators pay for bandwidth. This means that companies with deep pockets like Fox and MSNBC will connect quickly whereas small website operators who can’t afford the high costs will operate “in the slow lane.” The Net result will be an Internet that will become much like cable TV. You will get only the information that the big media companies (and their governmental affiliates) want you to get. You will get a lot less, and you will pay a lot more for less.
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That’s from George Hotz, aka Geohot, here.He’s been hit by corporate MAFIAA mobster Sony.
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Geohot has updated his site again telling people that Sony has filed lawsuits against both him and the fail0verflow german team for jailbreaking PS 3 and allowing packages to be installed.
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Think again! You’re not actually buying something. You’re licensing the use of an ebook. You can’t buy a licence. You pay a fee, they share some of their rights with you. This is a massive, massive difference between the physical books sold today, and ebooks. An ebook is not your property, it remains, at all times, Amazon’s property.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Lawyers representing Jeff Koons, the pop artist known for remixing common objects and other peoples’ art, have demanded that San Francisco’s Park Life stop selling book-ends that look like balloon dogs. Koons’s lawyers argue that since Koons once produced a set of iconic statues of balloon dogs, all representations of balloon dogs are henceforth Koons’s exclusive purview, and anyone who makes or sells a balloon dog infringes on Koons’s copyright.
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Microsoft has said that it has asked US officials to block Apple’s attempt to trademark the words “App Store”.
Apple submitted an application for the phrase – used for its iPhone, iPad and Macintosh download services – in 2008.
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Copyrights
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In terms of visitor traffic Cyberlockers have taken over the file-sharing lead from BitTorrent sites. This trend has been developing over the last few years and has accelerated in recent months to a position where the number of one-click hosting sites that are larger than The Pirate Bay in terms of traffic has grown to five. All signs indicate that file-storage services are becoming the new sharing standard.
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We’ve talked in the past about how there are all sorts of ways that bands and musicians can react to the fact that their music has leaked out into the world (and, yes, it will leak out). There’s a range of strategies from calling your fans “thieves” and getting angry, all the way to a much more fan-friendly approach. Time and and time again it appears that taking the fan-friendly approach seems work much better. The latest example of a band taking a much more fan friendly approach is Eisley, who had one of their new songs debut on a podcast, and people got so into it that they cut it out of the podcast recording and even started playing it on the radio. Rather than freak out about it, the band was happy about it.
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Since late last year there have been rumblings that China would soon carry out another crackdown on piracy. During the last week reports suggested that the country’s actions were mainly in the physical domain but now, alongside reports that 4,000 people have been arrested, it seems China is conducting both a music and video piracy purge. More than 200 sites are under orders to remove music and some of the country’s leading video sites are deleting illicit content and cuddling up to Hollywood.
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Didn’t we predict that the government’s new intellectual property review would see a replay of all the entrenched dogma that was flung in Digital Britain’s direction?
The UK music industry was on Wednesday due to discuss what view it should submit to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills’ (BIS) review of “how the intellectual property system can better drive growth and innovation”, commissioned from Professor Ian Hargreaves in November, MusicWeek reports…
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A court in Israel found that taking CC-licensed pictures from Flickr and publishing them in a book violated the copyright in each and every picture separately. (Source: www.law.co.il, including a link to the decision in Hebrew).
The facts are trivial: Plaintiffs, amateur photographers, uploaded their pictures to Flickr under a CC attribution, non-commercial, no-derivative license. Defendant, a commercial publisher, published the pictures both in a physical format (a book) and some of them also on its website.
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The BSA’s numbers are even more ridiculous than the IPI’s and have been debunked over and over again. Even the company that put together the numbers for the BSA had admitted that the BSA clearly exaggerates what they mean. For example, the BSA still insists on using a 1:1 unauthorized copy = lost sale argument, which anyone with an ounce of common sense knows is laughable.
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Open access is about making copies of publicly-funded research available freely online. This stems from the belief that (a) having paid for it, the public has a right to see it and (b) a general view that access to knowledge should not be restricted to those that can pay for it (not least because it is precisely those that *cannot* pay who need it most).
Against that background, and of the growing success of open access in bringing knowledge to the developing countries, this is disgusting:
/blockquote>
From 4 January Elsevier Journals withdrew access in Bangladesh to 1610 of its publications, including the Lancet stable of journals, which had been available through the World Health Organization’s Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme. HINARI was set up in 2002 to enable not for profit institutions in developing countries to gain access online to more than 7000 biomedical and health titles either free or at very low cost.
Springer has withdrawn 588 of its journals from the programme in Bangladesh and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins 299 journals. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Animal Science have withdrawn access to, respectively, two and three of their journals.
[...]
I do wonder how the well-paid fat-cats running these huge publishing conglomerates (disclosure: I once worked for part of Reed-Elsevier, so I have some experience of these things) look at themselves in the mirror after making decisions like this.
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Last year, we pointed out that Steven Tepp, who worked at the US Copyright Office at the time, and was heavily involved in pushing for ACTA (and downplaying the legitimate concerns of ACTA critics), jumped ship to the private US Chamber of Commerce, which has been one of the stronger supporters of such bad laws. The Chamber of Commerce, which is basically a lobbying organization for some of the world’s biggest businesses, has a history of making up absolutely ridiculous claims about intellectual property, so it’s really not a surprise that it would hire Tepp, who did the same thing from within the government.
[...]
As for the actual report that Tepp was commenting on, it doesn’t actually say what Tepp says it says. You can read the details of the report (pdf) here. It’s almost laughably weak in its methodology. Nowhere does it support any of Tepp’s claims — and you would think that a journalist wouldn’t quote a biased commenter making claims that have nothing to do with the report in question. Specifically, the MarkMonitor report simply looked at some sites that are used for infringement, then assumed that they were used entirely for infringing purposes, and then used Alexa ratings (perhaps the least credible measuring system out there) and simply added up all visits, and seemed to suggest that this was all for infringement. When it came to pharmaceuticals, the researchers did not appear to make much of an attempt to determine which offerings were really gray market importers of generic drugs, as opposed to counterfeits. Instead, it just made some assumptions based on the sites themselves.
Tuxguitar on Gentoo Linux
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
01.13.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The biggest thing Intel brought to the CES table this year was undeniably its Sandy Bridge processor, but the electronics manufacturer also introduced a new way to play with Legos. Using an Intel Core i7 processor and Gentoo Linux, Intel programmers are bringing the digital world of toys into the physical one.
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InfoWorld has put together a Linux IQ test to see just how learned you are vis-à-vis the free-and-open-source operating system that makes the world go ’round. (You do know that Android is based on Linux, right?) Let’s see how well you do!
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Server
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The new system runs a Linux-based matching engine, understood to be developed around Red Hat software. In November the exchange hired 81 additional open source staff to cope with the changes to the system, which operates in a C++ environment. It replaces a Microsoft .Net system, built by Accenture.
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Kernel Space
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For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that the kernel mode-setting page-flipping for the ATI Radeon DRM kernel module has been merged into the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and the respective bits have been set in the xf86-video-ati DDX, we’re in the process of running new open-source ATI graphics benchmarks under Linux. Our initial results (included in this article) show these latest improvements to cause some major performance boosts for the open-source ATI driver as it nears the level of performance of the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Brian Joseph, CEO at Zarafa, explains: “In 2010 we have experienced that many Scalix partners changed to Zarafa. And now we see many Scalix customers checking non-Linux-alternatives because they do not trust the Scalix roadmap promises anymore. We have decided to help these customers to continue to use Linux”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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There are many good reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution – it enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable and stable income. That can be used to plan support for contributors and events that help speed up development of KDE software, enhance our promotion efforts and help grow our community. However, our contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds and their reasons for contributing are likely to be just as diverse. We caught up with our 125th supporting member, Paul Eggleton to ask him why he Joined the Game.
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Reviews
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You’ll find far less hand-holding on the Arch Forums than some of the other distro’s forums, and for good reason. Arch has one of the most informative, user-friendly wiki’s out there. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT ask a question in the forums or on IRC without searching the wiki and the forums first. If you can’t find a solution by searching, include all appropriate log files and as much information as possible in your request. Look at some of the current posts marked “Solved” in the Arch Forums for examples.
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New Releases
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This version fixes some booting issues and Save Session for CD/DVD. There were a few bugs fixed in the new direct ISO booting feature. Super Grub Disk(1/2) has been updated to .9799 and 1.98s1. Some other minor issues…
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13 Jan 2011. New release, new bugs 
I have discovered that the functionality implemented in pelican_config is not working on v2.3. For most people, this is no problem. For those of you who would like to user permanent storage, use the older method – there’s a prompt at boot time. For pelican_config users, mount your $PELHOME by hand.
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We are pleased to announce the Alpine 2.1.4 release.
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Superb Mini Server version 1.5.5 released (Linux kernel 2.6.35.7)
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL).
After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn’t a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren’t in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update.
Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users.
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Phones
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Android
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Android has surged past iOS in ad impressions on Millennial’s ad network for the first time, breaking a two-month tie that suggested a possible lull in the growth of Google’s mobile platform. Android now represents 46 percent of ad impressions in December, compared to 32 percent for iOS after the two OSes were tied at 38 percent in November. Millennial said Android has also widened its lead in ad revenue from applications with 55 percent compared to 39 percent for iOS.
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Google will announce Android 2.4 “Ice Cream” in May, adding fuel to the theory that version 3.0 will fork Android, say reports. Meanwhile, Samsung is rumored to be prepping a “Vibrant 4G” phone for T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network featuring 21Mbps downloads, Samsung and IBM are teaming up on mobile R&D, and the Google Goggles app gets a marketing-focused upgrade, says eWEEK.
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The vast majority of the tablets, however, use the Linux-based Android. At BetaNews, Joe Wilcox quotes a Caris & Co estimate at the start of the show stating that some 69 tablets were expected to be shown or announced. CNET, meanwhile, says the number was more like 75.
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At CES last week, MIPS Technologies, demonstrated a number of MIPS-based Android mobile devices, including two smartphones and several tablets. MIPS also announced that Chinese semiconductor firm Ingenic — whose MIPS-based processors power Velocity’s Cruz Android tablets, has licensed the MIPS32 architecture to develop one of the new Android smartphones — while an Action Semiconductor MIPS SoC powers the other.
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Samsung Electronics has shown off a Google TV-based Blu-ray player and companion box at CES, due to ship later this year. Meanwhile, Vizio unveiled two HDTVs running the Android- and Intel Atom-based Google TV stack, including a 56-inch model.
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Verizon Wireless capped off a week of Android-based smartphone introductions with two new 4G LTE-ready, 4.3-inch models: HTC’s ThunderBolt and LG’s Revolution. The phones will compete on Verizon with Motorola’s similarly 4.3-inch Droid Bionic, announced earlier this week, which ups the ante with a dual-core, Nvidia Tegra-2 processor.
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Around mid-2010, Jonnalagadda started HasGeek, a firm that works for the open source community, and helps support it. He explains: “We have a lot of good software developers in India. They may contribute to open source. But very few Indian projects are able to make it big and retain the lead.”
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One almost starts to question whether open source has been so heavily influenced by its commercial cousins that the true open source maverick will be left struggling to find a voice. So is there still a place for the OSS ‘garage band’ software start up?
Yes – of course there is. But how can we be sure?
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Events
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The Brisbane river was expected to peak today, and the post notes: “We should know the full extent of the floods around this time and will continually keep people updated via the web and social networking sites.”
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A decision on whether to go ahead with the 12th Australian national Linux conference, which is scheduled to be held in Brisbane from January 24 to 29, will be made on Monday, January 17.
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Web Browsers
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We’ve made the point many times that one open source browsers–with Firefox and Chrome leading the way–are setting the pace in browser innovation, but as open source browsers run neck-and-neck, and still compete with Internet Explorer, are we in danger of seeing fragmented standards? On The Chromium Blog this week, Google officials wrote that they are putting more muscle behind the VP8 open source video codec, and that future versions of Chrome will support the WebM Project and Ogg Theora codecs. The upshot: Google is moving steadily away from supporting H.264 video, and that may eventually have a big impact on web publishers and device manufacturers.
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We built RedMonk Analytics to track developer behaviors, and what it is telling us at present is that Firefox and IE both are losing share amongst developer populations to Chrome. Chrome is highly performant, but also benefiting from significant marketing investment (e.g. billboards, site sponsorships) and related product development (e.g. Chrome Web Store). The conclusion from this data is that Chrome will eclipse Firefox from a marketshare standpoint (speaking specifically of developers, not the wider market where Firefox is sustainably ahead), likely within a quarter.
But having tested the 4.0 version of Firefox for several weeks, it’s clear that Mozilla’s browser is responding to the evolutionary threat. Firefox 4.0 is faster and less stale from a user interface perspective, but more importantly differentiated via features like Panorama.
The 4.0 release is unlikely to be sufficient in preventing Chrome from assuming the top spot among developer browser usage, but it is likely to arrest the free fall. Expect Chrome and Firefox to be heavily competitive in 2011.
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1. Virtual appliances become a stepping stone to the cloud: Software vendors eager to offer on-demand application services find a simple solution that doesn’t require the time and expense of re-architecting applications. Enter virtual appliances, which are already being used by software vendors like VMware, IBM and SAP. The need for simpler deployment and the demand for cloud-based options are driving major ISV interest in virtual appliances, which are optimized, pre-configured virtual workloads. In 2011, 25 major ISVs will use virtual appliances as a fast and painless way to meet the demand for cloud-based application delivery (SaaS), and Linux will be a key enabler of this approach.
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Databases
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Oracle has ended MySQL support for several operating systems that either reached the end-of-life or were not in popular demand.
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Healthcare
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A company, EHR Live, has updated the interface to provide a more visually appealing interface that makes OpenEMR marketable in today’s marketplace.
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Funding
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PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-op are the named investors in this round. PHP Fog is the brainchild of veteran developer Lucas Carlson, who was the lead engineer for music-on-demand service Mog and wrote Ruby Cookbook for O’Reilly Media. A PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance.
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Project Releases
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Because Joomla is offered under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0, it requires no hardware investments and no initial spending on software. Ozimek said it also will work with a wide variety of SQL and even noSQL databases, including mySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, so “it can be the glue for Web services.”
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Government
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Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin has paved the way for organizations all over the world by initiating a cost cut. Putin has ordered his federal decision makers to phase out proprietary software-Windows-and adopt free solutions-Linux-by 2015.
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Licensing
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But he was not prepared for the storm that erupted once this news was posted on Slashdot, referencing a post by an open source developer, Philip Paradis. A respondent to the post on Paradis’ blog pointed out some lines of code which were believed to be from the original mtr and which, could, therefore mean that Manac was violating the GPL.
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Standards/Consortia
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This is a 66% growth in HTML5 video user support since December of 2009. With the expected release of Internet Explorer 9 in the near future, 2011 could see a major increase in websites adopting HTML5 video as their primary playback method.
Of browsers that support HTML5 video, Mozilla’s Firefox is the clear leader, with Google’s Chrome in second place. Much of the growth in HTML5 video support can be attributed to Chrome’s success in stealing market share from Internet Explore over the last year.
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Government lawyers had argued there was no discrimination because those same services are provided in other formats, such as on the phone, in person or by mail.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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In the Israel of 2011, it’s no longer legitimate to belong to the left. It’s illegitimate to campaign for human rights or to oppose the occupation or to investigate war crimes. Such actions earn Israelis a mark of shame. A land-stealing settler is a Zionist; a warmongering right-winger is a patriot; an inciting rabbi is a spiritual leader; a racist who expels foreigners is a loyal citizen. Only the leftist is a traitor.
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During the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
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At least 11 people have died in new clashes with security forces in Tunisia after four weeks of unrest, it was reported today. The interior ministry said eight people were killed over the weekend in the western towns of Thala and Kasserine. Rioting against joblessness and other social ills has scarred many cities in the country since 17 December, when a 26-year-old graduate set himself on fire when police confiscated his fruits and vegetables for selling without a permit.Mobs have since attacked public buildings and the local office of the party of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
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When Alina happened upon a group of men—too many to count—raping a girl in the squalid Port-au-Prince camp where she and other quake victims lived, she couldn’t just stand there. Maybe it was because she has three daughters of her own; maybe it was some altruistic instinct. And the 58-year-old was successful, in a way, in that when she tried to intervene, the men decided to rape her instead, hitting her ribs with a gun, threatening to shoot her, firing shots in the air to keep other people from getting ideas of making trouble as they kept her on the ground and forced themselves inside her until she felt something tear, as they saw that she was bleeding and decided to go on, and on, and on. When it was over, Alina lay on the ground hemorrhaging and aching, alone. The men were gone, but no one dared to help her for fear of being killed.
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Cablegate
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The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker’s online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks.
Revelations that the U.S. Justice Department obtained a court order to examine data held by Twitter Inc. on Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who sits on the country’s Foreign Affairs Committee, immediately caused consternation in the tiny North Atlantic nation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in North Yorkshire.
He had come alone on 12 August 2003, in the middle of a heatwave, for a gathering of environmental activists known as Earth First.
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A police officer who for seven years lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations, has quit the Met, telling his friends that what he did was wrong.
PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, infiltrated dozens of protest groups including anti-racist campaigners and anarchists, a Guardian investigation reveals.
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Six environmental activists who faced charges of trying to take over a power station called today for an inquiry into the role of an undercover police officer, who is accused of helping to plan and pay for the invasion.
The trial of the six, who denied conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, collapsed today, after details began to emerge about the role played by PC Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer.
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On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid at Iona school in Nottingham, which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today.
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Along with many others, I was sickened when I discovered that the man I knew as a fellow activist, Mark Kennedy, was in fact an undercover police officer who had been spying on us since 2003. Yet my feelings were nothing compared with those who were close to him. The betrayal and loss they are feeling is a real grief – the equivalent of someone you love dying. I went through this myself a few years ago when one of my best friends, Martin Hogbin, was exposed as a BAE spy. I denied the facts for a long time simply because the truth was too difficult. I still miss my friend, miss the good times, miss him seeing my son grow up; I don’t think this feeling will ever go away.
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The huge quantities of methane gas that bubbled out of BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico were eaten up almost entirely by undersea microbes by the end of August, a new study reports today.
Other scientists cautioned that much oil remained on the ocean floor, where it has penetrated deep into the sediment, as well as in fragile marshlands. Oil is still turning up in tar balls on beaches and in fishermen’s nets.
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The commission also concludes that the government’s efforts to prevent disasters like this were inadequate. “As this narrative suggests, the Macondo blowout was the product of several individual missteps and oversights by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, which government regulators lacked the authority, the necessary resources, and the technical expertise to prevent,” it states.
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Glaciers in the European Alps could shrink by 75% by the end of the century, according to new research into the expected impact of global warming.
The study, published in the journal Nature: Geoscience, concludes that, globally, mountain glaciers and ice caps are projected to lose 15-27% of their volume by 2100, although the extent of the damage varies widely. The analysis suggests glaciers in the Alps and New Zealand will shrink by more than 70% but shrinkage is predicted to reach about 10% in Greenland and high-mountain Asia.
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By the time he left office, President George W. Bush wasn’t exactly known as a friend of endangered wildlife. Over eight years, his administration protected 62 species of domestic animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act. By contrast, Bill Clinton had declared 522 species endangered during his two terms. (See chart below.) On average, Bush added eight new species to the list annually, the slowest pace of any president since Richard Nixon signed the ESA into law in 1973.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The CRTC last week quietly proposed a significant change to the rules on false or misleading news broadcasts on radio or television. The law currently provides that a broadcast licensee “shall not broadcast any false or misleading news.” The CRTC is proposing to amend the law with respect to television and radio by lowering the standard to “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.” In other words, it would perfectly permissible for a broadcaster to air false or misleading news, provided that it not endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.
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The deadline for interventions into the forthcoming CRTC hearing on the Bell – CTV merger passed earlier this week with hundreds of submissions from across the country. Many cultural groups focused solely on the proposed benefits package associated with the transaction (e.g. Directors Guild of Canada, Alberta Motion Pictures Industry Association, the Documentary Organization of Canada) but there are many others rallying to support the deal.
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Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has a lot on his plate: He’s mayor of America’s largest city, owner of one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing news organizations and patron of a $1.75 billion charitable foundation. Critics have repeatedly accused him of blurring the lines between those roles. Is he doing it again with Bloomberg View, his new opinion operation?
David Shipley and Jamie Rubin, the co-executive editors of the new service, will technically be employees of Bloomberg LP, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be necessarily be working in the financial-news-and-data giant’s offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. At least part of the time, they’ll be based in the Upper East Side offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, located on Madison Avenue and 78th Street
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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New legislation currently under consideration by the Hungarian Parliament is the latest government initiative that poses a threat to press freedom, according to Freedom House. Among other things, the measure would impose fines on private media organizations for “unbalanced” news coverage.
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Amid the mock-gothic gilt and stained glass of Hungary’s elaborate parliament on the banks of the Danube, Viktor Orbán oozed charm, humour, and resolve. “I won. We won,” he bragged. “We democrats won our battle.”
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But a lack of evil and stupidity does not eliminate short-sightedness,
foolishness, and priorities run dangerously amok.
The path to Internet-enabled perdition, like the spiritual path to
another well-known rhetorical locale very much to be avoided, can be
paved with seemingly good intentions nonetheless.
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If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan’s religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.
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Perhaps it is not the American Muslim community that harbors growing numbers of people threatening the core principles of our country. Perhaps such threats can more readily be found in certain dark corners of the hearing rooms of the House of Representatives. If we take constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties (that is the Bill of Rights) to be among the core pillars of the American way of life, then how should we judge Peter King’s intent and actions? Are they radical or not? And if they are, then we should all join with those American Muslims who are raising their voices against King and his machinations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Yesterday I tweeted a request for folks to help me compile a list of all the things that are geoblocked in Canada. within minutes, #BlockedUpNorth became a Trending Topic- one of the top ten Twitter conversation topics in Canada. I was genuinely shocked by how aware Canadians are about geoblocking- and how angry!
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A US professor of computer science is prodding electronics giant Sony with the stupid stick by hosting a copy of the PS3′s private key on his univeristy’s web servers.
Professor David S Touretzky, who specialises in robotics and has been known to try to replicate the spacial awareness of rats in his spare time, has poked his head above the parapet as Sony’s lumbering legal team grinds into action in an attempt to stop people spilling its secrets.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Later this year, the court will hear at least one case that examines the scope of the Copyright Act’s fair dealing provision. At issue is whether “research” within fair dealing can be extended to song previews that are made available on sites like iTunes where a consumer can freely listen to roughly 30 seconds of a song.
The Copyright Board of Canada ruled in 2007 that a broad and liberal interpretation of fair dealing meant that it could be included since the preview was effectively consumer research on whether to purchase the song. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the Copyright Board’s interpretation last May, opening the door to many other consumer research possibilities under the current fair dealing provision.
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Back in August we debunked the administration’s Korea FTA stats, but the Obama administration has continued to tout these bogus figures. Regarding the alleged $11 billion rise in exports, the crux of the issue is that the factsheet is quoting the wrong section of the USITC report (the administration is citing Table 2.2 on page 2-8 of the report). The USITC study predicts that U.S. exports will increase by only about $4.8-5.3 billion, as Table 2.3 on page 2-14 of the report indicates. In addition, the study predicts that U.S. imports will increase by $5.1-5.7 billion due to the Korea FTA. This large increase in imports completely wipes out the benefits of the increase in exports and turns the predicted effect into a net negative.
The $10-11 billion figure that the administration is citing is merely the change in the U.S. bilateral exports to Korea itself, which tells only part of the story. As the USITC study acknowledges, bilateral tariff reductions induce significant “trade diversion” effects, which means that implementation of the Korea FTA will “rob” from the volume of U.S. exports that currently go to third countries and shift those exports to Korea, leading to little net increase in U.S. exports. The diversion occurs because many exporters of U.S. goods will stop exporting their goods to other countries like Germany and instead start exporting to Korea, just because the tariff that they face for exporting to Korea is lower than the tariff that they face when trying to export elsewhere. The shift in the destination of exports alone does not increase U.S. economic output or employment. Only net export gains matter for American workers.
Wikipedia
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With the biggest “partner” of Wintel criticizing the developments of the mother-ship, how long can the Wintel monopoly last? Intel will find that GNU/Linux runs well on Intel as on ARM and Intel will find it profitable to be partner of GNU/Linux. It’s all good.
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The Spanish Ministry of the Interior has expressed its regret that an international crackdown on IT masterminds inside the violent Basque separatist group ETA was dubbed “Operation Linux”.
Apparently, penguin-loving outfits are complaining that the antiterrorist operation sullies their good name.
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Server
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Dubbed the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), it will be available from Dell this week as the Dell Canonical UEC Solution. We hope that it does not mean that the servers will be all wet.
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Mark Shuttleworth, the ever gracious founder of Ubuntu, stopped by Dell this morning to talk to various folks about various subjects. I was able to grab some time with him between meetings and get his thoughts on a few topics.
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Shuttleworth said that he is encouraged to see standardization taking place in the cloud computing space, and clearly remains positive about both OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Clearly, Shuttleworth also likes the idea of open cloud standards.
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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit (Server version is supported, desktop version will also work but not supported by Zimbra.) This tutorial uses Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop System.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe while Android overtakes iPhone in the US, and TransGaming transforms Cedega into the GameTree Developer Program. Discover our new section and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Some “older” Linux distributions don’t even recognize it. And it’s not that new, I understand. In both OpenBSD and FreeBSD I have to “conjure” it to life by setting the media type. Otherwise it stays dark.
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Applications
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In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.
Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.
We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it’s working out of box as expected for everybody.
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One key area of frustration for newcomers to the Linux OS is using document scanners. Most hardware makers do not provide Linux drivers on discs that accompany their scanner models. So Linux users have to struggle to find solutions on distro-specific help forums.
Linux does not support the TWAIN-compatible drivers popular in the Windows world. So the trick in obtaining scanning success is to use a scanner device that is compatible with Xsane, a scanner interface that uses the Scanner Access Now Easy driver.
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Few weeks ago we did show you apt-fast, a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. Thanks to sourceslist Team , apt-fast got an interface named 1blink-updater to simply install apt-fast, to integrate it with Synaptic and to perform updates.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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New winetricks 20110105: improved download error recovery, added first-run optin dialog. New winetricks 20110105-alpha: menu divided into categories, added 35 games.
Another month, another Winetricks – or, rather, two new Winetricks.
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Bordeaux entered the Wine services market in early 2008 and gained a foothold through its strength in marketing, branding and the technology expertise of a limited partnership with Wine-Reviews Inc.
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Games
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Hexen: Edge of Chaos is a new game that is based on popular game Doom 3. Developed by fans of the Hexen series the game is a hack ‘n’ slash game inspired the original Hexen game.
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Ubuntu Gamer reader ‘Cliff’ hit up our tip form to let us know about a game called H-Craft Championship, a sci-fi racer developed by indie developers Irrgheist.
H-Craft is a futuristic hovercraft racing game which sees players compete in championships to level up and unlock new vehicles to race with.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I know that some people bemoan the fact that these precious Linux jewels are now available for Windows users. They think that it lessens the need for people to move to Linux. However, I think that Linux is still a better OS for most people.
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While digiKam doesn’t allow you to publish photos directly to a WordPress blog, you can work around this limitation. Enable the Post by Email feature on your WordPress blog, and you can use the SendImages Kipi plugin in digiKam to email photos directly to your blog.
To make this workaround work, you have to prepare your WordPress blog first. If you host your blog on WordPress.com, navigate to Dashboard | My Blogs and press the Enable button to activate the Post by Email feature. This will automatically generate a unique email address where you send your photos.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will keep its corporate headquarters in Wake County and add more than 500 jobs in the next five years, officials said Monday.
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Red Hat Inc. has decided to keep its trademark fedora hanging in North Carolina, declining the overtures of other states Monday as it announced it will build its next corporate headquarters in the Raleigh area and create more than 500 new jobs over the next decade.
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Fedora
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I was initially a KDE user, but for a long time, I’ve been using GNOME on Ubuntu. This is because there has always been some serious bug or the other in KDE, ever since the team overhauled the desktop. I have waited with eager anticipation for a bug-free KDE and a distro that would serve it in a nice package, but have had no luck. Even when KDE became usable again with version 4.3, no distro did it right. But when Fedora released version 14 on 2nd November, I had an uncanny feeling that this would be the distro I was waiting for. Yes, it was!
However, what bowled me over first was not KDE—it was the new Fedora website. Never have I seen such an outstanding presentation of free and open source software, or of an operating system, done so meticulously.
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Debian Family
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I did a full review earlier of Linux Mint Debian Edition and loved it. Now there’s an update to it and I couldn’t resist doing a quick look. If you aren’t familiar with the Debian version of Linux Mint, you’re in for a real treat. LMDE has quickly become my favorite Linux distribution. It’s a great blend of Debian and Linux Mint.
[...]
As I noted above, I really enjoy Linux Mint Debian Edition. It really has become my distro of choice, for now. It combines the power of Debian with all of the Linux Mint tools & features. Of course, I will still continue to distrohop because you never know when another distro could tickle your fancy just a bit more.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I can recommend Ubuntu. But I cannot recommend Gentoo. Why? Because all of this trouble and downtime was caused by an update. An update that Portage did at some point earlier. It was part of a whole system update. If the system had never been rebooted, I would still not know it. I would have no clue that the thing would not have booted up in the event of a power failure or whatever.
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And that’s the problem. Linux was created by geeks, grown and nurtured by geeks, and unless something is done fairly soon to change the presentation and the image, it will remain a system for geeks. The only one doing very much about that at this moment is Mark Shuttleworth, who has invested his fortune, his time, and his vision to create SOMETHING that can present a real challenge to the Windows hegemony.
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And Canonical’s emphasis on customization is an important point. So far, much of the hype surrounding the cloud has centered on the efficiency, ease of deployment and accessibility of cloud-based machines, with relatively little attention afforded to the extent to which users can customize software running in the cloud. cloud-init’s chief selling point, meanwhile, is the customizability it guarantees for Ubuntu-based cloud images.
In this sense, Canonical’s strategy for the cloud seems to stand out in unique ways. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, but this is a topic to watch closely as the cloud develops.
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Ubuntu Control Center is a nice simple application to sort things out easily and intuitively in Ubuntu. It is originally inspired from Mandriva Control Center and aims to centralize and organize the main configuration tools available in Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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In my quest to make Linux Mint 10 by sole operating system, I needed to bring over two contact lists into Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the default email software installed with Mint 10. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird on my Windows 7 system and I found that I like T-bird very much. I exported both of my contact lists from Outlook 2007 and T-Bird and copied the files over as .csv format. Before importing the files, I opened both and trimmed down the majority of fields, since I just wanted the names and email addresses of my contacts. The import went well and after merging both contact lists, I had the names and email addresses I needed.
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MoonOS, an Ubuntu based Linux distro, recently hit version 4, codenamed “Neake”. This last release certainly marks a turning point for MoonOS, for it includes several drastic changes that set it appart from previous releases and even from other Linux distributions.
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I’ve had a couple of encounters with #! before, starting with this review of version 9.04.01 and including this review of version 10 “Statler” Openbox (Alpha 2). I was pleasantly surprised by the features and minimalistic beauty of version 9.04.01, and I was later slightly let down by the relative lack of polish and removal of some features in version 10 (Alpha 2). Now, the #! developers have come out with a (actually, two) post-alpha release(s) of version 10 “Statler”.
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Barry Kauler, the father of Puppy Linux, announced earlier today, January 6th, the immediate availability of Puppy Linux 5.2, a major version that is compatible with the popular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system.
Puppy Linux 5.2 features lots of updated and improved applications, the new Quickset dialog to easily setup your system (language/locale and keyboard settings, timezone, video resolution), Browser Installer, Browser-Default, Quickpet, improved Puppy Package Manager, and a lot more for you to discover.
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Phones
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Android
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Yes, Apple’s iPhone is popular, and yes it looks like Verizon is finally going to release an iPhone, but Android phones have turned out to be even more popular.
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Well, now we know. You can’t sell software using the General Public License (GPL) on the Apple App Store& because it conflicts with its Terms of Service (ToS) . The popular VLC media player, was the first major GPLed software to be pulled from Apple’s App Store, it won’t be the last. But, what about Google’s Android Market? I asked the experts and they tell me that, in general, GPL developers can offer their wares on Android.
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In year 2007 The Open Handset Alliance was formed, which includes Google and other 33 companies. The aim of The Open Handset Alliance is to bring innovation into mobile devices and thus giving consumers a much better user experience.
At the same time, mobile application developers are given an opportunity to freely participate in Android application development using alliance’s Android Software Development Kit ( SDK ) which is released through Google’s developer website. Developers are therefore, free to develop any Android application they see fit and are free to market it to all Android mobile phone owners. This article will consist of four main sections:
1. Installation of Eclipse IDE, Oracle Java JRE, Android SDK and Android Developer Tool (ADT) a special Eclipse plug-in
2. Setting up Eclipse IDE with Android SDK and Android Developer Tool
3. Writing a simple Android Application: “Hello Android”
4. Testing Android application using Android Virtual Device
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Honeycomb, Android 3.0, is the star of CES so far.
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The GTVHacker dev team has won a cash bounty for being the first to successfully root and enable third-party application support on a Google TV device before Google – Google will reportedly be bringing support for Android applications to the platform some time later this year. According to developer Howard Harte, who originally announced the bounty at the end of November last year, the GTVHacker team used a hardware hack, adding serial console support to the UART1 header on the Logitech Revue, to enable root and install third-party apps on Google TV.
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Cisco Systems unveiled a suite of Linux-based “Videoscape” IPTV hardware and software that blends TV and web content a la Google TV. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless plans to ship 4G LTE versions of Cisco’s Android-based, enterprise-focused Cius tablet and Linux-based ISR routers.
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Tablets
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Not that tablets makers will have an easy ride. As the plethora of models on display show, for every Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, Dell Streak 7 and Asus Eee Pad Slider, there are countless no-name offerings. Of these a fair few are poor, some good, but all run the same operating system with the same UI, sport the same ports, and have the same basic look.
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Intel’s Oak Trail platform consists of a Lincroft-based processor and Whitney Point chipset, targeting mainly tablet PCs and netbooks and is able to support any operating systems available on the market including Android.
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Dell announced a seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet called the Streak 7, featuring a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, dual cameras, and compatibility with T-Mobile’s 4G-like HSPA+ network. The company also announced an unlocked, GSM-ready “Dell Venue” smartphone that runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, with a 4.1-inch AMOLED display and eight-megapixel camera.
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While the United States seemed to move from a possible OpenID login to more of a “secure” intranet approach, Russia has moved from commercial software to open source. The two moves may not seem to have much in common, but they do. Control.
Under the banner of security, the U.S. has announced the creation of a “verified” ID program that looks for all the world like a walled, or at least fenced, section of the Internet. Russia has moved to open source not out of a philosophical belief in free software, but out of fear of American software hegemony.
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Events
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Australia’s annual Linux.conf.au conference in Brisbane will go off as scheduled, despite massive floods bearing down on the Queensland, Australia city, according to the conference’s website today.
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Web Browsers
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Google on Tuesday said that it plans to drop support for the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser and to embrace WebM, the video codec that it acquired in 2009 and released last year as open source software.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 is nearly ready for showtime, according to a recent post on Mozilla’s mailing list.
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Programming
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There is one thing PHP desperately needs — an easy to use built-in web server. Every semester, as I face a new room full of hopeful newbies, I deal with one of the major pain points of PHP development — that PHP is worthless without a web server. I end up spending valuable time talking about Apache, when I should be talking about PHP.
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I use Subversion in my day job as a technical writer for a software company. I use Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) and connect to the subversion repository via the shell. This is pretty much how the book was written, so all of the commands and tasks really fit my personal situation. Not only that, but the level of complexity (or lack thereof, if you’re a total subversion guru) is right at my level.
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We are excited to announce that ActiveState is the proud recipient of an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award! Komodo IDE has been named Best Python IDE, coming out on top against nine other Python IDEs tested. Komodo specifically got top points for ease of installation, documentation and ease of use–things that we pride ourselves on as well.
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AMD starting to develop display processors to support ARM architectures is correct in terms of marketability and market potential, but its pace is too slow compared with Nvidia’s success with Tegra 2, according to Taiwan-based notebook makers.
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Indecision by Haiti’s government and international donors’ single-minded pursuit of their own goals have crippled progress in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, a highly critical Oxfam report says.
“This has been a year of indecision and it has put Haiti’s recovery on hold,” said Roland Van Hauwermeiren, country director for the aid agency in Haiti.
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The Obama administration said Friday it could support throwing out the disputed results of Haiti’s first-round presidential election if that step is proposed by a panel of experts examining the vote.
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The international response to the earthquake that struck Haiti nearly a year ago was immediate and massive. The devastation was massive as well: The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured more than 300,000, destroyed more than 250,000 homes and displaced more than 1.5 million people, 1 million of whom are still living in makeshift shelters in hundreds of camps.
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The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled [PDF] that Novell under the 1995 APA transferred to Santa Cruz “only the UNIXWARE product business and the portion of the UNIX source-code business that Novell retained following the Licensing Agreement — which did not include the UNIX trademark”, which went to X/Open.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Christina Taylor Green’s life has been ripped away from her. Her family and community will be devastated by the loss of this beautiful nine year old child. They need the opportunity to grieve in peace.
There is nothing stopping protesters from holding their own public memorial service, or rally. Then it would be an appropriate public thing.
Protesting at a private funeral can do is to further harm the people who are already harmed, exploiting the tragedy. Some people seek to do that. Even though it harms the public good.
Human society allows government the facility to enact laws so that it can support the public good. And sometimes it happens that governments do just that.
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We are still being fed “The Governments version of the TRUTH” about incidents in Iraq. Sadly today’s “Media Mafia” seems to be content to let Big Brother control the flow of information.
A full one-third of women veterans report rape or attempted rape during their time in the military. The investigation into these incidents are often more like a cover-up story than a fully transparent investigation. A good example of the cloaked “government truth” type of investigation is illustrated by what happened in Pfc LaVena Johnson’s case.
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I have just come back to France this Wednesday afternoon 22 December after being expelled in the middle of the night by the Israeli government, after being interrogated for 30 hours, detained and an attempt to forcefully ship me into planes, before I was able to meet with a female lawyer and warn the French Consulate.
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Nick Clegg today promised to end virtual house arrest, contained in the current anti-terror control orders regime, but for the first time admitted that the government will retain restrictions for a small group of terror suspects who cannot be prosecuted in the British courts.
The former Labour home secretary John Reid, a supporter of control orders, said it was clear the deputy prime minister was backing off from plans to abolish the central thrust of the measures.
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Israel is sliding down a slippery slope. A country that imprisons its Jonathan Pollaks will end up with jails filled with ‘opponents of the regime.’
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Cablegate
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Throughout 2010 whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were making headlines with the release of classified documents. Both the leaks and the controversy surrounding Assange have been covered extensively by the media.
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I am writing to request that you undertake an immediate review to determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in accordance with Section 210 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). In addition, I urge you to work with the Swedish government to determine the means by which Mr. Julian Assange can be brought to justice for his actions while recognizing and respecting Swedish sovereign law.
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Since WikiLeaks released the US embassy cables on 28 November 2009 it has come under pressure on several fronts, from DDoS attacks to frozen bank accounts. We list the companies, politicians and organisations making life difficult for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange
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WikiLeaks: Swedish government ‘hid’ anti-terror operations with America from Parliament by Andrew Hough, and Christopher Hope in the Telegraph.
The Swedish government asked American officials to keep intelligence-gathering “informal” to help avoid Parliamentary scrutiny, American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show.
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In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange’s negligence has caused “hypertension”, “depression” and “living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke” as a result of living “in fear of being on the brink of another nucliar [sic] WAR”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig, ablaze 50 miles off Louisiana last week, is spilling an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil a day in what may be the US worst environmental disaster. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP
BP is more likely to escape the potentially ruinous charge of gross negligence, according to City analysts, after a powerful US commission blamed “systemic” causes for the Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Barack Obama’s national commission released part of its final report into the disaster last night on Wednesday night. The report, to be published next week, could influence several other parallel investigations into the spill that are yet to finish.
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Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.
Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.
The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would “guarantee security in the seas” – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.
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Dirty Business, the new documentary from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, began its nationwide screening tour last night in Berkeley, California, with the aim of debunking the myth of “clean coal” and kick-starting a debate on the future of energy in the US.
The film shows scarred mountains, abandoned family homes on remote hillsides, water courses toxic with sludge, respiratory fatalities and children whose growth has been stunted by pollution as some of the side effects of coal extraction and the power stations that burn it. And, of course, it shows the effect of coal combustion on global temperatures.
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Gasoline prices are rising, averaging 41 cents higher a gallon than last year, so once again we are hearing the familiar refrain that this means we need to drill more.
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A federal judge’s decision today to allow a state agency to move forward with a plan to open a Texas dump to radioactive waste from at least 36 states is bad news for Texans.
After a lengthy hearing, Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas voided a Dec. 30 temporary restraining order issued by a state court in Austin. That order would have kept the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission (TLLRWDCC) from voting Tuesday on a plan to allow a low-level waste dump near Andrews Texas to take radioactive waste from 36 or more states.
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Finance
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I believe that economic theory is merely a construct of “man” (not woman) and that there are alternative views of economics (all purporting to be an answer to something or other) but these concerns are not necessarily mutally exclusive. Man makes the theory; man makes the rules that govern the theory; and man changes the rules as he sees fit. Economics is not scientifically based in the way that the theory of evolution is. If it were (scientifically based) it would take into account the economic value of a woman who stays home and looks after her children. In fact, a good economy would pay that woman a living wage.
I do not think it matters if the average person like me thinks that if the deficit is huge that future generations will have to pay more taxes or that my check to pay my health care taxes is actually torn up by the government when they receive it. In fact, I get a great deal of satisfaction thinking that I am paying my health care expenses through the earnings from my own labor and by paying my taxes. I am also, incidentally, helping society as a whole as my tax dollars will assist those less well off to receive health care too. It is my commitment as a citizen of my country.
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Higher unemployment and foreclosure rates, especially in South Atlantic and Mountain states, raised the nation’s economic stress in November, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis.
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Federal prosecutors portrayed a California financial research firm as an incubator for insider trading as an eighth person connected to the company pleaded guilty Tuesday to securities fraud charges.
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Big banks and other financial players are gearing up for new regulations in the next few weeks on the “Volcker rule” that are designed to curb “proprietary trading” by banks using their own cash without depriving the financial system of needed capital.
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In recent months, as Goldman has fended off widespread accusations that it has become the leading example of the gambling culture permeating Wall Street — placing bets for its own profit rather than engaging in old-fashioned banking services — the company has insisted that trading made up no more than one-tenth of its revenues.
During a conference call last year, the firm’s chief financial officer, David Viniar, described the company’s private trades as comprising “10-ish type of percent” of its total revenues.
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The rich treated themselves like royalty this holiday season. That spun the holidays into gold for Tiffany & Co. and other high-end retailers.
Wealthier shoppers traded up to more expensive gold and diamond jewelry from silver charms. Designer clothing and purses were back.
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Barack Obama has begun a major overhaul of his inner circle, lending the White House a more business-friendly face with the appointment of an outsider banker, William Daley, as his chief of staff.
Daley continues the heavy Chicago bent of Obama’s White House. He is the son of the late Richard Daley, who was mayor of Chicago for two decades, and brother of the even longer-serving outgoing current mayor of Chicago, also Richard.
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Unlike bankers, US labour unions had nothing to do with the economic crisis – yet they’re the ones now being scapegoated
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Today, with unemployment in almost the double digits and foreclosure unabated, President Obama decided that America needed more of the same. The President announced the appointment of JPMorgan Executive William M. Daley as White House Chief of Staff, replacing Rahm Emanuel. Tomorrow, news reports indicate that he will announce that Goldman Sachs adviser Gene B. Sperling will be appointed head of the National Economic Council, replacing Larry Summers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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If you get arrested in California, better hope there are no incriminating texts or e-mails or sensitive data stored on your phone.
On Monday, the California Supreme Court ruled that police in that state can search the contents of an arrested person’s cell phone.
Citing U.S. Supreme Court precedents, the ruling contends that “The loss of privacy upon arrest extends beyond the arrestee’s body to include ‘personal property … immediately associated with the person of the arrestee’ at the time of arrest.”
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Seeing her frail figure, looking much older than her 38 years, one wonders “Why is she doing this?” This is a lost battle, because the state is stronger than she is. She could be India’s Aung San Suu Ki – but because India is a “democracy”, not a dictatorship, hers will never be an international cause célèbre. Irom Sharmila lives in Manipur, in the north-east, and has been on a fast-unto-death for the past decade as a protest against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. AFSPA was imposed in Manipur decades ago as a bulwark against insurgency.
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Venezuelan lawmakers on Monday imposed broadcast-type regulations on the Internet, barring some types of online messages under measures that opponents say are a threat to freedom speech.
President Hugo Chavez’s allies in the National Assembly approved the revised “Social Responsibility Law,” which extends rules for broadcast media to the Internet.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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It seems that Sony executives either hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, or simply discounted them as another easily-corrected security hole, as they had not released any type of statement regarding the discovery until today.
After reading the statement that Sony provided to Edge Magazine, it appears that it is more likely the latter scenario.
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It looks like Sony has found its much-needed solution to the recent breaking of the DRM key in its PlayStation 3 console, and it’s not very technical: the company has filed suit against those responsible for highlighting its security ineptitude.
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We have seen a lot of wasted energy in the legal system over the years but Sony takes the cake. They are suing folks who revealed Sony’s utterly inept use of encryption to lock down the PlayStation3. They also sought an injunction blocking release/distribution of the encryption key that was found by reverse engineering. On the farm, we called that closing the gate after the horse had left.
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This apparently allows unauthorised parties to decompile, modify and renew the signature of the PS3′s firmware. It allegedly also allows any type of software to be signed for non-modified PS3 consoles, which causes this software to be recognised as legal and enables it to be played back on such consoles. The first PS3 games that were copied illegally, based on the hack, have allegedly already appeared and are circulating. The motion says that this has caused SCEA considerable economic damage and loss, although no figure was stipulated.
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Also known as GeoHot, George Hotz, familiar to many from his iPhone and Playstation 3 hacks, has released source code for a piece of software which can allegedly be used to sign homebrew programs so that they will run on Sony’s Playstation 3. The code is reported to run under the current PS3 firmware version, version 3.55, modified using jailbreak software (direct download), also released by Hotz.
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So maybe that is the only, real reason why “Save as WWF” is so touchy: the people they are trying to dismiss as one handful of software-obsessed nerds only gave even more reasons why this whole campaign was a bad idea from the start. Let’s just admit it and go on (but using, of course, Free Software to reduce the environmental impact of computing!).
“Jailbroken” PS3 3.55 with Homebrew
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.12.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this special episode, Dan reviews Linux Mint 10 and CyanogenMod 6.1 in detail.
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This episode is mostly about Linux and competition. We look at our challenge and the winning image and we have a look at the challenge at gimpusers.com. There you have to design a new splash screen for GIMP.
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Kernel Space
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For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors.
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Graphics Stack
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While VIA defenestrated its open-source Linux graphics driver strategy, there has been some recent work under-way on providing a GEM/TTM + KMS driver for VIA’s integrated graphics processors by the community. In particular, this work is being done by James Simmons, the former Google Summer of Code student developer who was working on 3Dfx kernel mode-setting support a few months back.
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With the Linux 2.6.38 kernel DRM update having been pulled into the mainline tree last night by Linus Torvalds, AMD’s Alex Deucher pushed the page-flipping support from the DDX X.Org driver side into the mainline xf86-video-ati tree.
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Applications
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Aside from providing some of the most promising applications available for the Linux desktop (“Linux iLife” anyone?) they are also incredibly hard workers; barely a month has passed since the release of Shotwell 0.8 yet today sees the release of Shotwell 0.8.1.
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I started working on a chapter for the Ubuntu Developers’ Manual. The chapter will be on how to use media in your apps. That chapter will cover:
* Playing a system sound
* Showing an picture
* Playing a sound file
* Playing a video
* Playing from a web cam
* Composing media
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Proprietary
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Highlights:
* Fresh batch of mail improvements
* Experimental changes to the crash logger on Mac (more)
* Changed how Opera is detected during widget start-up on Mac (more)
* Slow DNS responses due to IPv6 fixed on Linux/FreeBSD (more)
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Mathieu Weschler has toiled away for the last two years on his opus, The Trashmaster — a feature-length film created entirely in GTA IV about a rogue garbageman who’s looking to take out the human trash.
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Ville Heijari, Bird Whisperer, Rovio Mobile Ltd. told Muktware, “Ubuntu is another one of the platforms we are investigating, but we don’t have any details regarding any development on Ubuntu yet.”
So, sadly we may not see Angry Birds on Ubuntu any soon. But, we do wish to see Angry Birds on the world’s third most popular operating system. Let’s think of economics. If the game is paid, will you buy it? What other games do you want to see on Ubuntu?
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Zero Ballistics is a 3D tank shooter, a mix of FPS and “tank” (if that’s a genre) that is actually rather addictive, although unrealistic.
[...]
Overall the game is pretty damn fun for a quick thrill, everything comes together rather nicely and presuming you can find others to play with, I’m sure some strategies would emerge.
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I could off course suggest the more then comparable Unigine engine, but then I would be passing the MacOS users.
There are many FOSS tools like Ogre3D, but I’m not a programmer to say what suites for their game.
Yet, there is a lot to expect this year from Winter Wolves Games, I wish them a fruitful year with lots of new titles !
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Be aware that some of the software may be unstable on Windows, but chances are good that you might find yourself quite comfortable in using some of these applications.
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There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE.
You can’t blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.
Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.
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Perhaps the best part of all, of course, is that–as with most Linux distributions–there’s no commitment involved in trying it out. Particularly if you have old hardware lying around, it will be worth your while to take Puppy Linux for a tour.
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I have been waiting for this day for so long! Great to see it finally happen! Thank you to everyone who has donated and may our path to world domination continue.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Initial release of Mandriva fork Mageia is still on track for release later this month. Numerous preparations continue behind the scenes to facilitate this highly anticipated release.
A previous report of an earlier packagers’ meeting outlined some of the procedures and personnel in place and still needed to begin the process of building Mageia software. Hardware and temporary hosting was secured and the build system was being implemented. In a more recent blog posting, Mageia representatives stated that “packaging tasks have been launched.” While the build system isn’t fully operational, the first 40 packages are expected in the coming days as letters describing the SVN upload process, which is ready, have been sent. Mentors are being paired with new developers who did not previously have an account so they can begin their work as well.
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Red Hat Family
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On January 7, the Administration issued a succinct, clear message to Executive Branch IT leaders: Don’t discriminate between proprietary and open source solutions when it currently spends almost $80 billion dollars to buy information technology (IT). In fact, in its message on Technology Neutrality, it goes even further, urging agencies to “analyze alternatives that include proprietary, open source, and mixed source technologies. This allows the Government to pursue the best strategy to meet its particular needs.”
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Editors’ rating:
8.2 out of 10
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Sadly I never kept that original e-mail, but I tried to replicate it from memory for Canonical’s 5th birthday:
Dear Friend,
How are you and your family hope fine?
I am Mark SHUTTLEWORTH, from the great country of SOUTH AFRICA.
Due to good fortune mine in business, I have come into money of the sum $575,000,000 (US).
I would like to with you discuss BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction.
Pleased to discuss by phone at your earliest convenience.
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Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon discuss Unity, the new desktop environment for Ubuntu with David Barth, one of the key developers behind the interface on everyone’s lips.
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Nor is Unity a complete departure from GNOME. As Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon emphasizes, “Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME.” If anything, Shuttleworth insists, Unity is part of the diversity that “makes GNOME stronger.” Users will even be able to select another GNOME-based interface if they prefer.
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3 months after the successful launch as permanent Q&A site in our new Ubuntu design, we have reached the 6000 question threshold. Those 6000 questions have been asked and answered to 91% almost 14000 answers by 8600 users. 60000 votes have been cast for the questions and answers.
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Flavours and Variants
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The first release of elementary OS – a new Ubuntu-based operating from the elementary-project – has been made available for pre-order ahead of its March release date.
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Given that ZaReason already offers a variety of different Linux distributions — including the big names like Fedora and Ubuntu — as OS options, it’s not too surprising to see Trisquel added to the lineup. What is worth noting, however, is that Ubuntu-based Trisquel stands out as a brand of Linux whose main mission is to remain 100 percent free of “binary blobs” and other bits of proprietary software that most mainstream Linux distributions use, often because they’re essential for supporting certain hardware.
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wattOS R3 has been released. The lightweight Linux distro is now based on the latest Ubuntu 10.10 and also comes with updated packages for most of its core applications.
Some changes include a new lightweight music player, foobnix, and a new photo editor, Fotoxx. The usual selection of LXDE, OpenBox and PCManFM continues to be the basis of wattOS.
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Phones
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The world will see one billion mobile broadband subscribers this year, doubling from the 500 million mobile web users in 2010, according to Ericsson, a provider of global telecom equipment. An increasing rate of smartphone adoption is the key driver, although connected laptops, tablets, USB data sticks and mobile hotspots will also add to the mobile subscriber numbers to a lesser extent. By the end of 2011, Ericsson estimates 400 million mobile broadband subscribers will be from the Asia-Pacific region, while Western Europe and North America will follow with 200 million each.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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While we’ve seen MeeGo running on devices such as the Nokia N900, we haven’t had a play with it on a netbook – until now. Here it’s running on an MSI unit.
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Here is one brilliant application created by Dany-69. You can download it from the Maemo.Org. It’s called MaeModder and basically one can modify a whole bunch of things on your N900 with very little effort. In a way Dany-69 has made modding your N900 a lot less stressful because beforehand one would need to run a lot of scripts via the x-terminal window. There will still be a lot of people who prefer to run scripts (myself included), but this application makes life a lot easier.
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This slate would be the first MeeGo/Android dual boot and dual core tablet and that it can also boot with Winodws 7.
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Other analysts have pointed out that, now that AT&T has lost its exclusive, they’ll certainly be promoting Android phones more.
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Android
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The list of sensors and gizmos and odds and ends inside of mobile devices keeps growing, and the latest addition might have you scratching your head in terms of usefulness. It looks like Android 2.3 and higher supports a hardware barometer, and the Motorola Xoom tablet with Honeycomb (3.0) features one inside. The use isn’t immediately clear, but let’s speculate.
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Android 3.0 is not just another version of Android like the recently released Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”. Instead, Android 3.0 codenamed “Honeycomb” is built from scratch to suit the needs of devices with bigger screen sizes, tablets to be specific(in the current context). Google officially previewed Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. And from the initial looks of it, Android 3.0 powered tablets are going to be spectacular. Here is nice little video preview of Android 3.0.
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Google didn’t have a booth of its own at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year in Las Vegas, but signs of the search giant’s broad reach were apparent throughout the event. It seems as if practically every major consumer electronics company has adopted Google’s Android mobile operating system in some capacity.
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F4A 1.3 is now avaiable for download, with two significant updated (unrEVOked 3.32 and AlphaRev 1.8), plus some other under-the-hood tweaks.
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Sub-notebooks
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The XO-3 will have a larger screen when it comes out in 2012, and will shave off another significant fraction of power – possibly up to another full Watt.
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People outside the free software movement frequently ask about the practical advantages of free software. It is a curious question.
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These are numbered for reference and not for priority.
1. Charles Smutz recently announced his Ruminate IDS, whose goal is to “demonstrate the feasibility and value of flexible and scalable analysis of objects transferred through the network.” Charles is also author of the Vortex prohect, a “a near real time IDS and network surveillance engine for TCP stream data.”
2. Doug Burks just released a new version of SecurityOnion, an Ubuntu-based live CD to facilitate network security monitoring. You’ll find many of the tools on this list in SO and I expect those missing will be included at some point!
3. Over at Berkeley, development of the Bro IDS project is kicking into high gear with Seth Hall’s new role as a full-time developer. We miss you Seth!
[...]
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During the ‘Integration’ phase, source code and assets from various contributors are integrated into a deployable build which is then tested as a single unit. Issues are logged, fixed, and retested, all in the open source platform. The ‘Implementation and Improvement’ phase closes the loop and provides feedback to the entire lifecycle.
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Web Browsers
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Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
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How I rank ‘em
From best to worst, this is how I rank the above browsers:
1. Google Chrome (actually Chromium)
2. Konqueror
3. Firefox
4. Arora
5. Opera
6. Lynx
7. Midori
8. NetSurf
9. Dooble
10. Epiphany
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Mozilla
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As Firefox 4 Beta 9 enters the freeze phase, Mozilla is posting the first nightly builds of Firefox 4 Beta 10 , which is expected to be the final beta of the new browser.
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SaaS
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More seriously though, I’ve been growing increasingly alarmed by stories like this: the US government subpoenaing Twitter (and reportedly Gmail and Facebook) users over their support of Wikileaks. The casual use of subpoenas, including against foreign citizens is worrying enough – the New York Times says over 50,000 “national security letters” are sent each year – but even more concerning is the fact that often these subpoenas are sealed, preventing the companies from notifying the users they affect.
It used to be that if the US government wanted access to documents or letters in my possession they’d have to subpoena me directly. As a foreign citizen there are all sorts of ways I could fight the request – and it was at least my choice whether to do so. As someone living in the US I also had the whole weight of the 4th Amendment on my side. Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands. And unless, as happened with Twitter, the company storing my data decides to fight for openness on my behalf, there’s every possibility that I won’t even hear about the request until it’s too late. That’s just not how things should work in a free society.
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Oracle
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Since the java.net migration problems, Oracle and representatives from the Hudson community have been involved in talks on the future of the project in a number of areas. The Hudson representatives have been myself, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, and Sacha Labourey (CEO of CloudBees and Kohsuke’s boss), who was brought in to help provide experience with discussions on a corporate/executive level which neither Kohsuke nor I have, with Alan Harder and R. Tyler Croy advising on the side.
[..]
First, we rename the project – the choice for a new name is Jenkins, which we think evokes the same sort of English butler feel as Hudson. We’ve already registered domains, Twitter users, etc for the new name, and have done our best to verify that there are no existing trademarks which would conflict with it. Kohsuke will be registering the trademark for Jenkins in his name, with the intent of transferring ownership of the trademark to the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy once the Jenkins project has been admitted to it (which, I should add, is very much our plan, hopefully in their next round of new projects in a few months – we’ve already had preliminary contacts with SFC). We still invite Oracle to remain involved with the project, on equal terms with all other contributors, and hope they’ll take us up on this invitation.
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Over the next few months I saw the community start to grow at a decent pace. The first opensolaris books (OpenSolaris Bible and Pro Opensolaris) were published, Solaris internals was updated to take Solaris 10 and opensolaris into account and every major trade magazine was writing something about opensolaris. Additionally, our local OpenSolaris users group was starting to grow in size, and I was beginning to make a number of good friends in the community. All of these things got me crazy excited about the opensolaris community, and I wanted to jump in and start helping out any way I could.
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Education
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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on a workshop by the Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder (VREP) programme. VREP is an educational initiative to teach high school students how to use virtual reality.
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Business
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This looks like a really foolish move by Salesforce. If we have learned anything in the last 15 years, it is that having an enthusiastic, vibrant community behind a product brings all kinds of benefits in terms of feedback, bug-fixing, marketing and so on. To throw that away, as Salesforce seems to be doing, is shortsighted and retrogressive – even Microsoft is moving to embrace free software and its communities.
It also tends to confirm my suspicion that Salesforce is not actually a modern software company, despite its claim to be in the currently-trendy category of “enterprise cloud computing company”. It’s more of an old-style, closed-source, command-and-control outfit that happens to deliver its wares over the Internet. I’d be interested to know if it supports/contributes to any open source at all – I can’t think of or find anything (anyone else know?)
I suspect that in the light of the company’s recent indifference towards its community, culminating in this sale and the abandonment of the free software version altogether, Dimdim will become a by-word for how not to build a sustainable business around open source. At least they chose a good name…
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BSD
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As you all know, PC-BSD is a free, open-source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD, focusing on ease-of-use and and double-click package installation (PBI). The PC-BSD project is now part of iXsystems, a company that builds storage solutions, pre-configured servers, and customised servers utilizing open source hardware and software.
Today Kris Moore, the project’s founder, announced PC-BSD 8.2RC1 and with regards to his plans for 2011 he writes:
“For 8.2, it is mainly a release to include the latest FreeBSD 8.2 / KDE 4.5.4. Also some
bug fixes are present for advanced partitioning, letting the user select between MBR/GPT,
and easily toggle between UFS+S/ZFS.
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The PC-BSD Team has announced the availability of the first Release Candidate for PC-BSD 8.2.
Version 8.2-RC1 contains a number of enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes in response to previous 8.2 testing snapshots. Some of the notable changes are:
* Updated to FreeBSD 8.2-RC1
* Fixed issue detecting the proper video card driver
* Fixed some crashes when adding new users / groups
* Added /sbin/nologin as a shell choice in the user manager
* Let created users have a homedir of /nonexistant via the GUI
* Fix customizing desktop languages when using a () in the description
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Project Releases
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The Mule team is very pleased to announce the general availability of Mule ESB 3.1. This release packs a lot of new shiny awesomeness.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Cassandra v0.7, the highly-scalable, second generation Open Source distributed database.
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Programming
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Sometime later today some very exciting new code is going to show up in the e4 git repository at Eclipse. “Orion” is a brand new adventure for Eclipse, and one which we hope will interest and excite a whole new community: web developers.
Orion is not a set of Java plug-ins which run in the existing Java IDE. It is browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the web, in the web. Tools are written in JavaScript and run in the browser. Unlike other attempts at creating browser-based development tools, this is not an IDE running in a single tab. Links work and can be shared. You can open a file in a new tab. Great care has been taken to provide a web experience for development.
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Standards/Consortia
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HTML5 needs spokespeople to work. There are a lot of people out there who took on this role, and here at Mozilla we thought it is a good idea to introduce some of them to you with a series of interviews and short videos. The format is simple – we send the experts 10 questions to answer and then do a quick video interview to let them introduce themselves and ask for more detail on some of their answers.
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The following chart shows the percentage of documents on the web that are in OOXML format, as a percentage of all MS Office documents. Note carefully the scale of the chart. It is peaking at less than 3%. So 97+% of the Microsoft Office documents on the web today are in the legacy binary formats, even four years after Office 2007 was released.
[...]
Of course, for any given organization these numbers may vary. Some are 100% on the XML formats. Some are 0% on them. If you look at just “gov” internet domains, the percentage today is only 0.7%. If you look at only “edu” domains, the number is 4.5%. No doubt, within organizations, non-public work documents might have a different distribution. But clearly the large number of existing legacy binary documents on government web sites alone is sufficient to prove my point. DOC is not going away.
I call “FUD” on this one.
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Funded by the Research Information Network (RIN), the aim of this project is to investigate the extent to which Web 2.0 tools represent useful means of communicating, sharing and disseminating research ideas and outputs for researchers across different disciplines, with a view to exploring implications for the future of scholarly communications.
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Leaders of the opposition National Liberal Party (PNL) and Conservative Party (PC) Crin Antonescu and Daniel Constantin respectively on Monday will sign a protocol by which the two parties set up the Centre-Right Alliance (ACD), which they might register in court that very day.
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Over the weekend many news organizations reported, erroneously, that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was dead. These reports don’t seem to have originated on Twitter. But many spread there — and now they’re occasioning a round of head-scratching over how to handle retractions and corrections in this new communications format.
[...]
This might be a useful tactic to curtail the spread of bad info. But it still flattens the record a bit, since the original message’s timestamp (and possibly other contextual data) would vanish.
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We asked readers last week whether what influential bloggers said was true—that Google was losing the war against search result spam. Your response? More than three quarters found Google prone to spam, with one-third tagging the decline as significant.
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I saw this link pop up on Twitter today. Now, Syed is a great guy, and he works hard to make money and to teach others how to make money, but sometimes, even he is wrong.
To start with, go to WPBeginner.com and read his article. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Did you see it? He’s talking about creating a viral campaign. A viral campaign is not created. It takes off on its own. It is like an infection that hops from person to person. So every article you read about creating viral campaigns is automatically wrong. What they are talking about is a fungal campaign.
What is a fungal campaign, you may ask. A fungal campaign is based around trying to create an infection, the way that rubbing your wet athlete’s foot infected toes on my wet feet is your attempt to infect me. Commonly, a fungal campaign will use youth-oriented imagery, fonts, and graphics. It will go to great pains to try to conceal its pushy character, but as you can read in the article, the idea behind it is that friend A will inadvertently help push friend B, who will inadvertently help push friend C. In the article, the topic is the Facebook “like” button and its privacy-invading feature of telling one’s “friends” where you clicked the button.
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Science
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At the same time, as we’ve written previously, the goal is not inexpensive genomics, but personal genomics. What matters is not how much it costs to generate a genome sequence (i.e., raw data), but what you can do with that genome once you have it. Thus, genomics is only personal once both the data and the interpretation are individually tailored.
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Health/Nutrition
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Plastic surgery may look pretty good to us who are unbeautiful. Maybe plastic surgery is a conduit to a pleasant, superficial life. But what lies behind the dark doors of that profession?
There is no undo button on plastic surgery. If you get an operation you might have some scars. If you try to undo the operation you might look the same as you started only with two operations worth of scars.
That’s looking at it from your perspective. Perhaps there’s an undo button from the surgeon’s perspective. There just might be but it’s macabre. I don’t believe I’m the first to think of this. I believe many surgeons have thought of what I’m going to relay. And the human species being what it is, it’s even probable that some surgeon has acted on the idea.
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This is a big win for law enforcement and the prison industry. Look for even more restrictive cold medicine laws in the future.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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‘Much of the delay in concluding asylum and other immigration cases stems from poor quality decision-making when the application is initially considered,’ says Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee whose latest report on the UK Border Agency’s work is published today.
Two cheers for Vaz and the HASC! It might be three if only they were clearer and more forceful in their criticism of an agency whose deficiencies are systemic and rooted in a culture characterised by denial and deceit.
The automatic disbelief that greets asylum seekers from their first moment of arrival, coupled with a shocking disregard for human rights, compounded by the lack of legal services that might check official incompetence have created a Kafkaesque nightmare for vulnerable people who come to these shores seeking sanctuary.
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Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy has rejected reports in the weekend press that she had “led calls” for the DNA testing of the entire 1-million-resident-strong Bristol area.
A reporter on the Sunday Express, where the story originated, also wrote that McCarthy had said that men should be singled out for testing.
Click here to find out more!
This resulted in a barrage of online criticism, with questions raised about the practicality of such a measure, its impact on civil liberties, as well its target. Yesterday, Avon and Somerset police told El Reg that they were not considering such measures at this moment in time.
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UPDATE: I just got an email from some fellow Dems I work with who are wondering if this was satire. I have no idea. If it is, then it shows as big a lapse in judgment as the Palin Facebook page comment that I posted here.
I put this out on Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth a post, too. Please run over and read all of it, but essentially, it’s a remarkable post about the speed with which only certain comments were deleted from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:
A commenter posted the following at 18:12:
“It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”
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Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more — presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.
[...]
Terrorists have been stopped since 2001 and plots prevented, but always by other means. After the Nigerian “underwear bomber” of Christmas Day 2009 was foiled, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed “the system worked” — but the bomber was caught by a passenger, not the feds. Richard Reid, the 2001 shoe bomber, was undone by an alert stewardess who smelled something funny. The 2006 Heathrow Airport plot was uncovered by an intelligence tip. Al Qaeda’s recent attempt to explode cargo planes was caught by a human intelligence source, not an X-ray machine. Yet the TSA responds to these events by placing restrictions on shoes, liquids, and now perhaps printer cartridges.
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It is ironic that a major anti-secrecy reform was thwarted by a single senator’s secret “hold” just before Congress adjourned in December. Perhaps some good will come of this double-edged attack on the public’s right to know — if it sparks reform.
The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act — which would have offered expanded protection for federal employees against retaliation for reporting waste, fraud and abuse — had passed unanimously, first in the Senate and then a week later, on Dec. 22, in the House. The White House had made an unrestrained effort to deliver on this campaign pledge. It was supported by more than 400 organizations of all political stripes, with 80 million members. The National Taxpayers Union announced that support for the act would receive the highest priority on its legislative scorecard. Republicans had just changed the political landscape with election victories based on a mantra of cracking down against deficits, fraud, waste and abuse — the point of whistle-blower laws. Congress was poised to give the taxpayers a major legislative Christmas present.
So what happened?
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After the lame duck session of Congress ended a few days before Christmas, watchdog groups were disappointed to learn that a bill expanding protections for government whistleblowers died in the Senate.
The bill was a product of a 12-year lobbying effort and had bipartisan support. An earlier form of it had passed the Senate unanimously, and it passed in the House after undergoing some changes. When the bill went back to the Senate for a final vote, a lone senator put an anonymous hold on the bill, effectively killing it. Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project explains how the manuever worked…
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Cablegate
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The private sector has now jumped on board with respect to using the term “responsible disclosure”. Media and US officials attacked wikkileaks for the lack of “responsible disclosure” when the site started releasing US diplomatic cables.
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The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes.
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“WikiLeaks: treat incitement seriously or expect more Gabrielle Gifford killing sprees.”
Wikileaks today offered sympathy and condolences to the victims of the Tucson shooting together with best wishes for the recovery of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords, a democrat from Arizona’s 8th district, was the target of a shooting spree at a Jan 8 political event in which six others were killed.
Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, leading the investigation into the Gifford shooting, said that “vitriolic rhetoric” intended to “inflame the public on a daily basis … has [an] impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.” Dupnik also observed that officials and media personalities engaging in violent rhetoric “have to consider that they have some responsibility when incidents like this occur and may occur in the future.”
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Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of providing documents to WikiLeaks, can’t reasonably complain that the military has him in custody. But the conditions under which he is being held at the Marine detention center at Quantico, Va., are so harsh as to suggest he is being punished for conduct of which he hasn’t been convicted.
Manning has been charged with unlawfully downloading classified information and transmitting it “with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States.” He has been incarcerated at Quantico for five months and has yet to receive the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing.
[...]
Some see Manning as a whistle-blower who deserves leniency for exposing official duplicity; others believe that, like anyone who engages in civil disobedience, Manning, if guilty, should accept punishment for his actions. But regardless of one’s view of his alleged conduct, the conditions under which he is being held are indefensible.
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Robertson said Assange’s legal team is collecting evidence from further witnesses in Sweden, but the judge said the Swedish authorities are likely to take the view that the extradition warrant will stand nevertheless.
Media interest in Assange remained as journalists from around the world filled 100 seats in the court and an annex connected by video link. High profile supporters of Assange who turned up today included Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan and Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
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An ex-WikiLeaks volunteer has hired American lawyers to oppose the U.S. government’s efforts to obtain the contents of her Twitter account, CNET has learned.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who helped with WikiLeaks’ release of a classified U.S. military video, is being represented by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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The disturbed young woman who registered the julianassangemustdie.com domain name is Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) acording to her Twitter Profile:
Frazzled mom, alternative health doc, conservative libertarian blogger, columnist, podcaster, radio host, iPhone & Mac lover, fantasy reading geek, #TCOT”
As a mother myself, I have difficulty understanding a mind set that would allow a mother to advocate killing anyone. Is this not also a criminal offense?
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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at “real risk” of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.
In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange’s legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition”, “where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is feeling pretty optimistic this afternoon. His Fish Fight campaign has scored a major victory the day before the first TV programme highlighting it is broadcast; Tesco has announced plans to switch to 100% pole and line caught fish for its own brand canned tuna.
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Critics of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas often say that the acronym ICCAT might better stand for the “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.” At its most recent meeting, ICCAT lived up to that derisive nickname by setting 2011 catch levels for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) at basically the same levels as 2010 — 12,900 tons, down from 13,500 – despite the pleas of conservation scientists and the bluefin’s place on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered or critically endangered species (Western stock and Eastern stock).
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From the Sunshine Coast 150km north of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, an extraordinary week of drenching rains refuses to let up. Thunder and lightning buffet me as I write at 4:30pm on Tuesday January 11. It has been like this all day. The unthinkable is happening.
Unprecedented and fatal flash floods at Toowoomba on the top of the mountain range west of Brisbane is like the first domino for what is unfolding. Then came Grantham and the death toll this morning was officially 9 drowned and 66 missing. But “the missing” is hard statistic to deal with since the weather and the water levels prohibited attempts at discovery all day.
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Go further upstream and you will find this frightening sight. Huge areas covering several mountains have been drilled to prospect minerals here. I hope I am wrong but this is most likely the Qulong Copper Deposit, which was reported by the China Geological Survey in 2009 to contain at least 9 million tonnes of copper, plus molybdenum and silver. The Gyama mine, by comparison, has proven reserves of 2.2 million tonnes of copper. According to the International Mining, February 2010 issue (page 40): “In copper, the most famous deposit is Qulong, according to Chen Renyi and Xue Yingxi of the China Geological Survey. They say “With proved reserves of nearly 9 Mt, Qulong will soon be the largest copper deposit in China, and the perspective reserves are over 14-18 Mt.””
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Tim was almost certainly talking about the Oyu Tolgoi mine, or “Turquoise Hill,” a copper and gold ore deposit in Southern Mongolia that’s larger than the state of Florida. Oyu Tolgoi is the world’s largest mining exploration project, a joint venture between a Canadian company named Ivanhoe and the Mongolian government, with significant financing from Chilean mining giant Rio Tinto. Together, they plan to invest $5 billion into operations in the next few years, making Oyu Tolgoi the largest foreign investment in Mongolian history. Over the forecast 65-year lifespan of the mine, its revenues are expected to become a third of Mongolia’s gross domestic product. It’s a big deal, and the discovery of it and a wealth of untapped deposits of coal, gold, silver, tin, uranium, and “rare earth minerals” used in most of today’s advanced electronics has mining-industry shills proclaiming Mongolia the next “Saudi Arabia of insert-name-of-precious-metal-here.”
Despite projections that the mining boom is expected to triple or quadruple the size of Mongolia’s economy in the next five years, times are tough for most Mongolians, and the relationship between the country’s great natural resources and the wealth of its people is still to be determined. The United Nations estimates that 27 percent of Mongolia’s urban population lives below the poverty line. In rural areas, nearly fifty percent of people live in poverty. During the past decade, a series of unusually severe zuds – storms that turn winter snow cover into solid ice, causing the mass starvation of livestock – has had a devastating effect on a country where a quarter of the people make their living (or attempt to make their living) raising livestock.
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Pollution machine Koch Industries is taking to court to defend its reputation as a cesspool of global warming denial. Brad Johnson has the bizarre story.
The right-wing carbon industry giant, owned by Tea Party billionaires David and Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit in Utah to punish anonymous pranksters who claimed on the company’s behalf that it was discontinuing funding to climate denial front groups.
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Finance
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The Great Depression hit Vancouver like a hammer. The city already suffered chronic high unemployment owing to the seasonal nature of BC’s resource-based economy, and even in the supposedly prosperous 1920s, Vancouver was known as a “Mecca for the unemployed.” After the economic collapse, people who couldn’t find work at home drifted to Terminal City in unprecedented numbers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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* This is a fact-checking operation, not an opinion-checking operation. We are interested only in verifiable facts, though on occasion we may examine the roots of political rhetoric.
* · We will focus our attention and resources on the issues that are most important to voters. We cannot nitpick every detail of every speech.
* · We will stick to the facts of the issue under examination and are unmoved by ad hominem attacks. The identity or political ties of the person or organization making a charge is irrelevant: all that matters is whether their facts are accurate or inaccurate.
* · We will adopt a “reasonable man” standard for reaching conclusions. We do not demand 100 percent proof.
* · We will strive to be dispassionate and non-partisan, drawing attention to inaccurate statements on both left and right.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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When Stephen Harper and his Conservatives first took the reins of government in 2006, it was on an “explicit promise to reform the Access to Information Act dramatically”, says the Canadian Press.
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As I wrote to the Hungarian authorities in my letter of 23 December, the recently adopted Hungarian Media Act raises specific concerns regarding its compliance with the EU Audiovisual and Media Services (AVMS) Directive and, more generally, regarding the respect for the fundamental media freedoms such as freedom of expression and media pluralism.
Since then, the Commission has been active. I went to Budapest already last Thursday to discuss with the competent minister. The Commission President raised the Media law with Prime Minister Orban the following day.
A large number of commentators have alleged that the Hungarian Media Law risks jeopardizing fundamental rights in a number of ways:
* by requiring registration of all media, including online media such as forums, blogs and so on;
* by requiring all media to engage in balanced coverage of national and European events;
* by making the Media Authority subject to political control through the appointment process.
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Schöpflin believes there was no real overhaul in Hungarian politics after the fall of Communism in 1989, and said Fidesz had a “once-in-a-generation – perhaps once-in-a-century – opportunity to recast the entire system of political, social and economic governance”.
[...]
He accused the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), in power from 1994-1998 and 2002-2010, of governing as though the one-party rule of the communist days still existed.
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Internet blocking is a form of unacceptable censorship, and I believe it will do far more harm than good. Censorship inevitably does. But it’s a thorny issue, particularly when it comes done to some heinous perpetrators. It may seem like a good idea, but blocking a domain does not pull the plug, it simply turns out the light.
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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed emergency legislation Tuesday that bars protests within 300 feet of a funeral and within an hour from its beginning or end.
Earlier in the day, the state legislature passed the measure, which targets a Kansas church whose members announced they plan to picket the funerals of the victims of Saturday’s shootings in Tucson.
“Such despicable acts of emotional terrorism will not be tolerated in the State of Arizona,” Brewer said in a statement announcing she had signed the bill. “This legislation will assure that the victims of Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson will be laid to rest in peace with the full dignity and respect that they deserve.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus, calls overage fees an “economic disincentive for internet use” since the charges levied by Bell Canada are “many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.”
Last May, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave Bell Canada, Canada’s largest telephone and telecommunications company, the green light to proceed with the “economic Internet traffic management practice (ITMP),” i.e. consumption-based billing, and there’s a growing consensus that the plan has nothing to do with recovering costs from excessive usage, and rather everything to do with disincentivizing Internet usage.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Record labels finally will have to face an antitrust lawsuit that dates back to the early days of digital music, thanks to a Supreme Court order today. The high court declined to hear an appeal from the four major recorded music labels, asking the high court to throw out a lawsuit that claims the labels broke antitrust laws when they set a “wholesale price floor” of about 70 cents per track for two digital music stores that they created almost a decade ago, Pressplay and MusicNet.
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RapidShare, the file-hosting giant, recently hired a Washington lobbying firm to combat legislative attempts to place penalties on companies that don’t adequately protect domestic copyright. This is its first attempt at adding U.S. legislative muscle to its ongoing copyright fights – which most recently included Atari’s failed bid to combat RapidShare in a German court.
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The dispute concerns something called “pending lists” maintained privately by the major labels. Since 1988, it has become increasingly common for the labels to simply issue CDs (often compilation albums) without actually locking down the copyright permission and pay arrangements with the music’s creators. Instead, the music is offered for sale, the labels collect the money, and they put the songwriters on the “pending list” to clear up the details later.
But in many cases, there was no “later.” The pending lists have climbed to around CAN$50 million in money that was due to artists but never paid out, something that the musicians describe as a “systematic ‘exploit now, pay later, if at all’ approach.”
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Those interested might also be interested these blogs about studies on online copyright enforcement vs data protection/privacy in UK, Netherlands and Poland and in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden.
Bill O’Reilly Enraged Over Giffords & Right Wing Rhetoric Ties
Credit: TinyOgg
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