12.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin [cq] has ordered government agencies there to open-source software by 2015, according to translated documents.
Putin’s order, signed this month, follows news reports from October saying the Russian government was planning to drop Microsoft products in favor of a national open-source operating system based on Linux.
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Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, signed a government order for the transition of federal executive bodies and agencies of the federal budget to use free software between 2011 – 2015.
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There are not many download accelerators for Linux that integrate well with web browsers and have support for downloading links right from the browser. Command line tools like Axel download accelerator and Aria2 are available for Linux but then you have to download links by copy/pasting them into terminal or in a GUI for it.
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Desktop
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In a little-known approach to saving money, the Dysart Unified School District has switched about 3,000 of its computers from the Microsoft Windows operating system to Linux.
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Same old story. Budget cuts. PCs growing old. GNU/Linux gives them new life and the school district saved $100K in a year. If that is mainstream, imagine the motivation a school like mine without any budget for IT has to switch…
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Further, M$ calls “office workers” demanding and needing better performance. If that were true they would already be using thin clients because with files already cached in the RAM of a powerful server there is no waiting for I/O. Office workers are the least demanding users of PCs that I know. They think IT is just fine if the machine boots quickly and keep ahead of typing. That has been true since P3 and thin clients are more powerful than that these days.
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However, the Ubuntu distribution installed on my netbook in about 10 minutes and installed all the necessary drivers. Well, almost all of them. I couldn’t get my Wi-Fi card to work with Ubuntu, but a quick Google search led me to the solution. In under an hour, then, I had an operating system that up and running. In other words, you don’t have to be a software engineer or someone with a ton of time on his hands to install this and get it to work well. Linux has come a long way, indeed.
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Jason Detzel of Maplewood converted a nine-year-old Windows laptop to Linux after upgrading its RAM (random access memory) to 1 gigabyte.
“I’m blown away how fast this system runs,” Detzel said. “If I stick with Web browsing, e-mail and downloading pictures, this PC will last for several more years.”
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It’s the libertarian’s choice. But Linux needs to stop competing with ‘free’.
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Buying a PC from any large manufacturer/retailer without a copy of Windows pre-installed is difficult. You have some companies that refuse to sell a machine if you want Windows removed, then there are others that will remove it and reduce the price. Dell offers certain confirgurations without Windows installed, but it’s not clear from the website, and has to be requested either offline or over Live Chat.
Harish Pillay found this out by actually trying to buy a Dell laptop with Ubuntu installed. He had actually done this before, purchasing a Dell Vostro V13-N series laptop with Ubuntu. However, this time the N-series was nowhere to be seen and a Live Chat was required to get a Windows-less laptop.
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Ballnux
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Kernel Space
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We’re now free of the Big Kernel Lock (in many configurations – it’s a config option that will hide other not-yet-compatible options when used) and I have been running systems BKL-free for some time now. Arnd Bergman and others have done an excellent job to rid us of this last vestige of truly ancient non-scalable Linux and unless you need a V4L (Video-4-Linux – TV tuner, webcam etc) device, you can probably run BKL-free today too. It is hoped that V4L will be fixed soon, maybe in time for 2.6.37. You probably won’t notice a huge performance benefit of running without the BKL unless you happen to have something more high end than a desktop, but it’s still pretty cool to know that you could get higher performance if only you could afford to have a system with dozens of CPUs to take advantage of it.
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With Iveland Alpha 5 arriving earlier today and more information beginning to be released about OpenBenchmarking.org for its February debut with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0, many have become more curious about what this project entails. Last week I posted a few very small screenshots of OpenBenchmarking.org in its current form. I also have already said OpenBenchmarking.org will become bigger than Phoronix itself, so here are a few statistics right now.
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Graphics Stack
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Next week Intel is set to roll out their much-anticipated “Sandy Bridge” CPUs during the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. With these 32nm, LGA-1155 next-generation Intel Core processors will also come the Intel P67 Chipset on a whole selection of new motherboards at launch like the ECS P67H2-A2 and ASRock P67 Pro3. How well though will Intel’s newest hardware play with Linux?
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Applications
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This list is compiled based on user feedback and functionalities. If you are looking for a torrent client which is less resource hungry, gives top speed, has lots of speed then rtorrent is the one you are looking for. If you are a newbie and dont want to play with configurations then deluge is the best bet. If you are obsessed with good looks are doesnt have a freesoftware ideology to guide you the vuze suites you. If you are looking for a truly light weight GUI then you have to check out bittornado.
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CloudSN (Cloud Services Notifications) is an application you can use to display notifications when you have new emails (POP3 and IMAP), new Identi.ca messages, Google Reader unread items or it can watch any RSS feed for changes (which means you can use it for Facebook too). For a complete review, see our previous post on CloudSN.
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Proprietary
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Opera 11 shipped Dec. 16 with new extensions, tab stacking and visual navigation aids that put the web browser on a competitive footing with Microsoft’s IE. The features add productivity and conveninece to the Opera experience and could be compelling advantages for web users who need quick access to many different web pages at the flick of a wrist.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In this article, we explore various gaming options available for Tux-lovers.
A common misconception is that gaming and open source can never seem to gel together. Linux users are desktop publishers, programmers and many other things, but mostly hardly gamers. The myth remains that the scene in the open-source diaspora is bleak when it comes to gaming.
Well, it’s high time we broke the myth. This so-called bleak scene has been showing some signs of improvement of late, so it seemed logical to check out the progress of the FOSS world in the gaming sector.
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The open-source first person shooter World of Padman is now at version 1.5! Additional features include a new game type, new maps, new player models, a new weapon, and new powerups.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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“Thriving on the success of the popular Amarok 1.4, Clementine tries to provide a reminiscent user experience and on par acoustics to the Amarok 1.4.x user base”.
The Kde 4.x and QT 4 desktop changed the way people used the PC. Touted to revolutionist the PC experience, KDE 4 desktop brought some drastic changes. To cope up with the KDE development Amarok team tried to follow the same bandwagon and audited the ever loved Amarok 1.4 to a newly refurbished Amarok 2. Some hated it, while some loved it. However the mixed bag review was much to the downside of Amarok.
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YaRock is a new Qt4 music player designed to provide a nice overview of your music by allowing you to browse your music collection based on the album cover art. We love YaRock here at WebUpd8, especially for it’s simplicity and the nice cover art overview it provides, as well as the ability to fetch albums cover art from Last.fm.
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A new major release is around the corner and it’s time for all of you to help with KDE release parties around the globe. This is a guest blog by my Google Code-in student Sasu.
It’s been over four months now from previous major release by KDE and it’s time for a new one. 4.6 is about to be released on 26th of January and it is party time again! Release parties are very fun and educational for visitors. If your party has represented KDE well you can even get new local KDE community members.
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The Indian KDE community will organize its first conference at Bengaluru in March 2011. The 5 day event will bring together KDE contributors, Qt developers, users and FOSS enthusiasts.
We realise that there are not many KDE/Qt related events that are accessible to Indians. FOSS conferences or meetings are an excellent way to show people the technology first hand and ways to contribute to it. We not only dazzle them with the world of KDE, but show them first hand how simple it is to get involved and make a difference. This is our motivation for conducting this event.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A long anticipated 64-bit version of PCLOS was reported to be in development this past November. And as 2010 draws to a close, some wonder what its current status is. Bill Reynolds, not known for long-winded conversations or laying out rigid development schedules, has given a bit of an update.
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Red Hat Family
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Currently, Red Hat has a 75% to 80% share of the Linux market and Gartner predicts that at least 80% of all commercial software solutions will soon be based on open source.
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Fedora
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Yeah. Yesterday I was so annoyed by my computer that I burned a cd with Fedora and installed it. I also had a 1,5TB disk waiting to be inserted, combining that made the switch pretty easy.
For the last couple years, I ran KDE from trunk from svn. That meant that I only had a need for a basic Linux OS. Debian was fine for that. Combined with Equives I could still use some distro packages while compiling most of it myself. But there were problems. Mostly these were caused by my own lazyness in configuring the right stuff in the right way.
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So up to now, big compliments to the Fedora team. Nice job, and that needs to be said too sometimes!
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“A new Linux powered tablet is on it’s way!” writes Andrew Sykes, publisher of the China-based gadget site Gizchina, with more enthusiasm than grammatical precision.
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More information has surfaced on the new Ubuntu-powered tablet device we wrote about last week.
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In the last Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.8, I made a mistake. If you disabled the “Use Separated Sources” in the preferences in Ubuntu Tweak, all your Launchpad PPA sources may be “lost”(In fact, they’ve been moved to the separated file).
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Ubuntu One a syncing service that Canonical bundles with Ubuntu. I think it’s great that it’s bundled with the OS, but it doesn’t feel like it’s being extended to its full potential (or even most of it). Recognize that I’m talking about the syncing service alone, as opposed to syncing+music store+[insert new feature here].
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Flavours and Variants
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AriOS is the successor of mFatOS, an Ubuntu remaster we talked about a while back. AriOS 2.0 was released today and it’s based on Ubuntu 10.10 – the new version tries to replicate Unity but as opposed to Unity, it’s customizable thanks to Avant Window Navigator. In AriOS, everything works out of the box and most popular applications are installed by default which I’m sure those with a limited Internet connection will appreciate.
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# The Community Website is now running on its own in our Canadian server in Toronto.
# We lost our development and testing server in London.
# A second Cloud Server was allocated to host our public archive (which was previously in London).
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I did download and install LibreOffice 3.3-rc2 this morning and it worked like a charm.
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Unless GNOME developers can pull a last minute rabbit out of their collective hat, a mixed response for GNOME 3.0 seems inevitable. Even then, a fork to continue development of GNOME 2.0 is probable. A strongly hostile reaction may weaken GNOME’s dominant position on the desktop, increasing the popularity of KDE or opening the way for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.
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This feels like a no-brainer at this point, but Android is clearly going to continue on its upward path throughout 2011. Holding nearly a quarter of the smartphone market in October, it’s widely expected to become the number-one mobile operating platform in the world in the next few years; I predict that will happen sooner rather than later, possibly even by the end of next year.
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The Apache Foundation also had a busy year, with Hadoop taking most of the spotlight. The open-source map/reduce implementation was the most popular project at Apache in 2010, whether you’re measuring by code contributions, sub-projects or discussion lists.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox developer Mozilla has revealed this week that a database containing usernames and password hashes belonging to thousands of users of addons.mozilla.org had been posted publicly by accident.
44,000 user IDs and password hashes were revealed in the accidental disclosure. Mozilla’s security team has already contacted all those potentially affected via email.
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So you’re looking for a really easy way to integrate Thunderbird in the Ubuntu Messaging Menu? You can try a package I’ve recently came across (called “xul-ext-indicator”) that is available in a PPA, which adds Thunderbird to the Messaging Menu and provides quick access to your contacts, compose a new mail and unread emails. Using this package, you’ll also get NotifyOSD notifications when new mail arrives.
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Two weeks ago, we released SUMO 2.4, completing a year-long project to replace the SUMO platform!
SUMO 2.4 moved the last bits of functionality into Kitsune, our Django-based platform. These include user features like login/logout, registration, and profiles.
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Databases
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Education
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Funding
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BSD
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27 December: The first Release Candidate builds for the FreeBSD-7.4/8.2 release cycles are now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures can be downloaded from most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. Please see the official announcement for further details about these releases.
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Project Releases
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The Yorba folks have released a new version of Shotwell. You can snag it here.
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Programming
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In terms of tools and servers, 2010 was a year of plenty for Java users.
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Recently, there have been reports in the news that an unauthorized third party viewed and modified ettercap forums database (hosted on our Project web service). Among other things, this exposed hashed values of ettercap forum user passwords. (In other words, if you have an ettercap account/password and you’re using the same password other places, such as your SourceForge account, it would be in your best interest to change them. And not do that anymore.)
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While looking for existing C coding standards I discovered that the GNU and Linux projects officially suggest very different styles. Inside the Linux kernel documentation, Linus Torvalds goes so far as to mock GNU coding standards:
First off, I’d suggest printing out a copy of the GNU coding standards, and NOT read it. Burn them, it’s a great symbolic gesture.
At this point I wanted to understand the difference between the coding styles of established open source projects.
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Who wouldn’t agree that our society is capitalistic, based on competition and selfishness? As it happens, however, huge areas of our lives are also based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return (principles that have little or nothing to do with competition, selfishness, or scarcity economics). Think of the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.
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The original web headline for this article – More than 3m UK children have no internet access at home, warns charity – conflated two figures: 1m children are without computers and 2m are without internet access. This has been corrected.
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So familiar are we with its presence in English legal and media life that we perhaps take the existence of defamation law for granted.
In practical terms, the law of defamation provides the means by which legal action can be taken (or threatened) in respect of statements which are unwelcome to the claimant, regardless of any public interest in those statements being made.
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The internet is already considered so important in Finland, Spain and Estonia that access is a legal right. And the list of online possibilities keeps on growing. In 2010, the launch of Apple’s iPad and other touchscreen computers made surfing more fun and intuitive, while several smartphone operating systems, especially Google’s Android, took off, extending the mobile net’s reach.
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Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa has been charged with blackmail for allegedly paying a man to falsely accuse another pastor of sexual assault. Ssempa is notorious in Uganda and around the world for his anti-LGBT sentiments and past efforts.
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Science
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On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.
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Transfer junkies may be excited for USB 3.0, but Intel’s Light Peak solution promises up to double the speeds of that standard. We’re talking data rates of up to 10 gigabits per second, fast enough to transfer a full 1080p digital copy of No Country for Old Men (about 4GB) in less than 4 seconds (normally a two-hour process). But that’s not all Light Peak can do. To learn more about this exciting technology, we spoke with Victor Krutul, director of the I/O optical team at Intel and a former head Light Peak engineer.
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A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.
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Tipster Jb pointed us at a video of a rather startling project: Printing a complete musical instrument. In this case, MIT Media Lab researcher Amit Zoran attempted to print an entire and working flute in one operation.
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Prokaryotes are all about efficiency and refinement, while eukaryotes are all about flamboyant experimentation by chance, not design.
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Health/Nutrition
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Patients could die because staffing levels in the NHS are being reduced to dangerously low levels, the leader of Britain’s 400,000 nurses has warned.
The quality of care received by patients in hospitals is also bound to worsen as tens of thousands of posts are cut, says Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.
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The government is offering free nicotine patches to smokers in England planning to quit in the new year.
A week’s free trial of the patches – part of the NHS Stop Smoking Quit Kit – will be available at many chemists for the first time from 1 January.
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Security
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Earlier today Boris posted a piece here on The Next Web (half) joking that the only way left to deal with spam email is to kill spammers. However, maybe it isn’t such a problem after all.
Figures from the Cisco IronPort SenderBase Security Network state that spam has seen a sharp decline since the summer, dropping by more than a half.
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Slackware has updated pidgin (denial of service).
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.
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A 29-year-old Iranian student activist is facing execution tomorrow unless an international campaign launched by human rights groups can persuade authorities to quash his conviction.
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The book makes very depressing reading, and not because it details gruesome atrocities. On the contrary, the editors made it a point not to include incidents of exceptional brutality committed by sadists, which can be found in every army unit in Israel and throughout the world. Rather, they wanted to throw light on the grey routine of the occupation.
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One morning, when the storm started shaking the treetops and the dogs howled in terror because of the thunders and the flashes of lightning, fifty children of different ages went out to school in the city of Lod, Israel. During the day most of them worked diligently on their studies, hoping the storm would abate so they could go back safely to the home where they were born and raised. To the sound of the bell announcing the end of the day they all set off running back home. The tempest intensified, and with it the will to find oneself in the warmth of one’s home; in the warmth of the seven homes of their extended family – the Abu Eid family.
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The Transportation Security Administration did not like a series of Youtube videos posted by an airline pilot, which highlighted the ineptness of its security procedures.
So they dispatched a team of federal and local agents to his Northern California home to intimidate him.
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Car insurance rates have always been based on risk, and risk has usually been measured by the number of miles driven. So drivers often underreport the miles they travel to keep their rates low — at the expense of other drivers.
But a form of insurance that requires electronic verification of miles driven, in return for a discount, is gaining popularity. These so-called pay-as-you-drive policies — miles are often tracked through a GPS system in the car — are now offered in more than half of the states and are spreading, albeit slowly, despite privacy concerns.
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The three independent federal watchdogs created by the Conservative government operate largely behind the closed doors of their own offices and, after one was exposed this fall for having done little in three years, critics are asking questions about the effectiveness of the other two.
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According to the post on Boing Boing that references an AOL news investigation, even when an expert endorses the TSA’s scanners they are careful to preface their support with some warnings: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated.
You may or may not be in favor of the radiation that comes from the Transportation Sex-crime Administration’s scanners, but I think most people would agree that a malfunctioning machine that beams your vital organs with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is bad thing.
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Cablegate
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Say what you will about Julian Assange, but the guy’s smart as a whip. In an interview with MSNBC yesterday, the WIkiLeaks captain eloquently and vehemently defended his First Amendment rights, while decrying the U.S. media’s “digital McCarthyism,” entailing a call for his assassination.
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Japanese Whaling Vessel Collision With Sea Sheperd Boat –
New Zealand’s Perspective
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By his own admission, Wired Magazine Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen is withholding a large majority of chat logs that could prove WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did or did not conspire with the US soldier accused of leaking a cache of diplomatic cables.
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There will be no more Wired renewals from this household so long as Wired continues to shill for the state versus Bradley Manning.
A complete reversal, a public apology and a substantial financial contribution to the Bradley Manning Support Network might get that subscription back in play.
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THOSE INCITING MURDER UPON JULIAN ASSANGE AND/OR MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY.
We, among many law abiding citizens of the world deplore and condemn, as applicable, your utterances and writings calling for the extra judicial ie unlawful: kidnapping/assassination/murder/physical harm of Julian Assange, his supporters, Wikileaks workers or members of Assange’s family.
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For more than six months, Wired’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source. In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.
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From Wikileaks: Two Wikileaks-related senior human rights activists have been assassinated. We ask for your assistance.
On Thursday afternoon March 5, Oscar Kamau Kingara, director of the Kenyan based Oscar legal aid Foundation, and its programme coordinator, John Paul Oulo, were shot at close range in their car less than a mile from President Kibaki’s residence. The two were on their way to a meeting at the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights.
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I view the Espionage Act of 1917 as a lifelong nemesis. My parents were charged, tried and ultimately executed after being indicted for Conspiracy to Commit Espionage under that act.
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Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950 a few weeks after the Korean War began. He was executed, along with his wife, Ethel, on June 19, 1953, a few weeks before it ended. The charge against the Rosenbergs was vague – “Conspiracy to Commit Espionage.” But they really were tried and sentenced for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the USSR. Their co-defendant Morton Sobell also was convicted and received a 30-year prison sentence.
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The contentious whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks has ruffled so many feathers that it’s been shut down not just in the countries we think of as repressive, but in those we like to think are open. Because of that, mirror sites have proliferated. But accompanying the mirrors are clones. Clone sites reproduce access to some or all of the material available on the home site or serve a similar function as WikiLeaks but independently of that group. All of them add value by focusing on a specific concern or geography.
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“A breakthrough in journalism research,” the director of the National Library of Israel, Oren Weinberg, called the institution’s project to scan and upload to the Internet hundreds of thousands of pages from Jewish newspapers from the 19th century to the present.
Historical Jewish Press, whose official launch was on Monday, is a joint initiative of the national library and Tel Aviv University “that will give researchers, teachers, students and the general public rapid, easy and unprecedented access to periodicals,” Weinberg said.
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The task was made all the more challenging by the fact that most of those conflicting stories were being told by one person, the principle source for almost all media stories regarding Bradley Manning: the recently institutionalized hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned his alleged chat logs with Manning over to authorities.
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El Pais only news outlet still publishing daily WikiLeaks stories based on cables. Question remains for others: Why?
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In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish “251,287 leaked United States embassy cables,” as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released.
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The response has been absolutely amazing to the call we put out last night for transcription help. So far we have:
* CBC Radio Interview, transcribed by SteveNS AND nedits
* Glenn Greenwald Interviews Lamo Pt. 1, transcribed by bmull
* Glenn Greenwald Interviews Lamo Pt. 2, transcribed by calamar
* Adrian Lamo at The Next HOPE Informants panel, Pt. 1 of 5, transcribed by LC
* John Draper interviews Lamo at The Next Hope, pt. 1 of 4, transcribed by nedits and KF
* John Draper interviews Lamo at The Next Hope, pt. 1 of 4, transcribed by Michele in PDX
* LocalFrequencies Extended audio, transcribed by Duncan
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Japan seeks to improve energy security by drilling for frozen methane but environmentalists fear a leak of the greenhouse gas, which is 21 times as damaging as carbon dioxide
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Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the media and many organisations have pursued as separate narratives the issues of climate, biodiversity and sustainable development. One of the changes this year, at a UN level, has been recognition that this does not make sense.
Without protecting and enhancing biodiversity in forests and other systems we are losing our biggest ally. These living systems can lock away carbon at a fraction of the price that technical solutions for carbon storage could only do at huge cost and by expending even more energy.
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Climate change is affecting the cultivation of Assam tea, with rising temperatures reducing yields and altering the distinctive flavour of India’s most popular drink, researchers say.
High hills and abundant rainfall make the north-eastern state of Assam an ideal place to grow tea, with 850 gardens over 320,000 hectares (593,000 acres) producing the majority of the country’s harvest. But in the last 60 years, rainfall has fallen by more than a fifth and minimum temperature has risen by a degree to 19.5C.
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As Scotland has endured its second extreme cold weather event of the winter it is hard to accept that overall the climate is warming. But the evidence is that despite human doubts, the natural world north of the border is responding to an increase in average temperatures.
Flying insects, particularly noticeable ones like butterflies, are the first to take advantage of more favourable conditions and colonise new areas. Perhaps the most dramatic expansion is that of the orange tip. Thirty years ago it would have been rare to see one in Scotland but now the species is common as far north as Easter Ross and Sutherland. Only Caithness, Orkney and Shetland have yet to report sightings.
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With as few as 3200 tigers in the wilds of the world as many as thirteen tiger-range countries met in November 2010 in Tiger Summit in St. Petersburg in an effort to save the species. They committed around $300 million during the next five years towards doubling the current world population of the species by 2022. Hosted by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, governments concerned capped a year-long political process with new funding to support the plan, known as the Global Tiger Recovery Programme
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“The war on climate science and scientists that’s going on now makes the Bush Administration look moderate,” we said to Science for their December 17 news article “Climatologists Feel the Heat As Science Meets Politics.” Bush can’t be rehabilitated on climate change, but during the past two years the global warming denial machine has launched a nihilistic war on climate science and climate scientists that makes Bush officials seem tactically subtle and rhetorically nuanced in comparison.
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Finance
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Alabama Republican Spencer Bachus, the incoming chairman of the House banking committee, suggested Congress and federal regulators should play a subservient role with banks.
“In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks,” Bachus told The Birmingham News in an interview.
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Slashdot points us to a recent story about a guy who lost his lawsuit against a bank, over a variation on a classic Nigerian email scam. The scam is one we’ve discussed many times in the past: somehow the victim gets a big check, which they’re expected to deposit in a bank. After the check “clears,” the victim/recipient is supposed to transfer a large chunk of that money to the scammer, on the belief that they get to keep whatever is left over. What really happens is a few days after the check “clears,” the bank finds out it’s fraudulent, and tries to void the transaction. But, by then, the victim has already transferred out a big chunk of money (and the scammer has already taken all that cash out of the bank and disappeared) — leaving the victim footing the bill, with the bank expecting them to come up with the missing cash.
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Canada’s economy faces subdued growth in the new year as an initial strong rebound from the recession shifts into a more sluggish expansion, a prominent business group says.
In its outlook for 2011, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce said “more prudent spending” by Canadians is a factor in the country’s slowing economic growth. Gross domestic product expanded by 2.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2010 and only one per cent in the third quarter.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Last month RapidShare discovered that they had been reported by the MPAA and RIAA to the US Government for being one of the world’s “most notorious pirate markets”. Now, on the heels of reports that the entertainment industries spent a small fortune lobbying for domain seizures in the last quarter, RapidShare has hired a Washington based lobbying firm to represent its interests in the US and to start correcting misconceptions.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The last time American leaders were this ecstatic about the power of information was at the end of the Cold War, when illicit fax machines and photocopiers and the work of broadcasters like Radio Free Europe were presumed to have been a leading cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. (In 1990, Albert Wohlstetter—the ur-technocrat who was one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove—told an audience of perplexed eastern Europeans that “the fax shall make you free.”) Today, most historians reject such views as reductionist, but they are still extremely popular among US politicians (probably because celebrating smuggled technology allows them to celebrate the politicians who made the smuggling possible—particularly Ronald Reagan). Such Cold War thinking showed in Clinton’s speech: “Virtual walls,” she said, are “cropping up in place of visible walls,” and viral videos and blogging are “becoming the samizdat of our day.”
But not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are.
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If you want to remain anonymous on the Web, then Tor is a very good solution. Our identity is governed by the IP we use, which your ISP knows, and which can be shared with the authorities if requested.
To get around that identification and tracking problem, Tor offers a solution by routing your requests through multiple servers. All your ISP, or anyone else looking will see is a repeated request to a non-descript Tor server rather than the actual destination you are heading to.
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A few days ago, we reported on the defeat of web censorship in Spain where ISPs would be mandated to block websites if the government ordered them to block them over copyright infringement. The law was brought forth due to US industry threats, lobbying and pressure. Now, news is surfacing that the defeat won’t be enough to deter site blocking in Spain.
There was no shortage of Spanish celebration when site blocking was defeated. Spanish copyright observers noted the celebrations on Spanish sites that a law the Spanish people fought so hard to defeat was finally shot down. For many Spanish, the Sinde Bill represented one of the very symbols of foreign industry intervention on the domestic marketplace and the very country itself. It’s no surprise many in Spain were happy to see foreign interference defeated by a vote.
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It’s been a hell of a year for consumer privacy, or the lack thereof. From Facebook leaking personally identifiable information to advertisers, to data brokers harvesting reams of user information on social nets, to Google’s Wi-Fi slurping, 2010 may be remembered as the year the privacy chickens came home to roost — and quickly got roasted.
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As we also expected, IP rightsholders and global policy-makers have realized that Three Strikes automatic disconnection laws and policies are a short-term measure, and are now focusing their efforts on Internet intermediary obligations to block webpages.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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There is an assumption that consumers are unsuspecting in what they’re buying, that somehow they don’t know that a video game bought for £5 from a flea market on a domestically burned DVD with the name scribbled in marker pen and maybe a cheap inkjet photocopy of the cover badly sliced to fit is not in fact the real deal. They know it’s a copy. They see the difference in being able to play a DRM free version of a video game for £5 is a vast difference from buying a DRM infested version of the same thing for £40+. This is not what I’d call “counterfeit” as it’s obvious to both buyer and seller that it’s not legit. Counterfeit is about passing something off as legit when it’s not.
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Earlier this year, we wrote about Kevin Kelly’s fascinating look at the movie industries of India, Nigeria and China, which represent the three largest film industries in the world. Yes, all three are larger than the US. And all three are places known for extremely widespread “piracy.” Given that Hollywood insists that “piracy” kills the movie industry, it certainly seemed worth noting that these three countries had hugely thriving movie industries despite (or perhaps because of) widespread infringement.
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Copyrights
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Reading through the details of the “ad campaign,” we’re not surprised to see the driving force behind it is our old friend, Rick Cotton, the General Counsel at NBC Universal, who often seems to have no shame in saying stuff that makes absolutely no sense concerning movie piracy. Cotton, most famously, is the guy who once made a filing with the FCC where he tried to claim that movie piracy was killing the American corn farmer. This ignored two rather important points: (1) people who watch unauthorized copies of movies can also eat popcorn and (2) corn — one of the most subsidized crops in the US — continues to grow as a market. Oh yeah, speaking of growing markets, have we mentioned how the movie industry keeps breaking records at the box office, despite all of this file sharing.
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There’s absolutely nothing surprising at all about the following, but Christian Engstrom (one of the two European Parliament Members from The Pirate Party*) highlights yet another leaked State Department cable that shows that many of the copyright enforcement efforts of the Swedish government were in response to a six point checklist given to the Swedish government by the US Embassy (English translation from the original Swedish — though at the end of the Swedish post the original cable is available in English). The six point check list passed on by the embassy was almost certainly originally from US industry lobbyists. There’s nothing in this that is even remotely surprising (and hints of this had already leaked previously).
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A comprehensive article published last week on Il Venerdì, a weekly magazine of the Italian daily la Repubblica, is focused on various international authors whose works are now entering the public domain and the upcoming publications of many new translations (in Italian). Under the title “Copyright expired, everybody free. 2011 will be the year of Gatsby and Margarita” (full pdf here), Brunella Schisa explains that right after the 1st January 2011 deadline — also known as Public Domain Day — several Italian publishers will launch new translations of such masterpieces as “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov and Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s best novels (“The Great Gatsby”, “Tender Is the Night”).
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SinkDeep alerts us to the news that a bunch of DJs are upset after discovering that SoundCloud took down a bunch of the mixes they had hosted on the service. If you’re not familiar with SoundCloud, in the last few years, it has become one of the most popular tools for musicians and DJs to host their music. It offers a really nice toolset for anyone looking to promote their music online (and for others to build apps on top of it). SoundCloud has also been a pretty big supporter of open culture, supporting things like Creative Commons along the way.
I contacted SoundCloud to find out what was going on, and the response was pretty much as I expected. Due to the nature of the copyright world we live in today, the company recently implemented a fingerprinting-type technology, similar to those used by YouTube (ContentID) and MySpace (Audible Magic), which lets copyright holders designate their own works, and which SoundCloud then automatically blocks. While the original link above “blames” SoundCloud for becoming a “walled garden,” that’s not really fair nor accurate. The real problem is the nature of our copyright laws today, that assume infringement over fair use. As we’ve discussed before, copyright law is effectively broken when it sets up fair use as a defense, rather than a proactive right. Fair use should be seen as the default until proven otherwise, if fair use is really (as is claimed) designed to be a pressure valve on copyright law to allow free speech.
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What crime do you have to commit where you live to be forbidden use of electricity (not just disconnected)? To be forbidden use of a phone? To be forbidden to walk on the streets? To have your family punished along with you? Yes, the lack of due process in these bad laws promoted covertly by USTR is an enormous worry, but much more of a concern is its calculation that the infringement of a copyright justifies the removal of the main conduit of social engagement from a citizen. Removal of basic rights is a matter of criminal not civil law so moves to make “internet bans” easy are an unacceptable expansion into criminal law for something that was never even meant to affect ordinary citizens in civil law.
This is not a matter for a “voluntary code of conduct” either. As use of the Internet becomes more complex and more fundamental, it’s becoming clear that groups like the Internet Watch Foundation – a group set up by ISPs so they wouldn’t be regulated over every politician’s excuse for bad legislation, “protecting children” – is harmful to us all, cracking small nuts with pile drivers and lacking transparency and accountability. Development of a voluntary code of conduct so citizens rights can be repeatably infringed in support of media business models is as unacceptable as a hard law because it still agrees that citizen access to the internet is worth less than media business models. On the contrary, if we need new laws at all, they should be to prevent businesses from terminating service without a court order.
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Taking a closer look at the Stockholm 09-141 cable, we find that the United States was the driving force behind the IPRED legislation, that it was the driving force behind threats to Swedish ISPs in 2008, and that it is currently the driving force behind the so-called “step two of the data retention”, which was presented by the Justice Minister last Thursday. This legislation will give police at-will access to all and any collected records under Data Retention in the proposed Police Methods Report (polismetodutredningen, PMU). Ordinarily, prison sentences of more than two years would have been required to collect IP addresses, but the PMU changes this before the Data Retention is even in place.
[...]
The United States Government is driving the creation of a Big Brother state in Sweden, including draconian data retention measures, in order to have it combat simple and everyday petty copyright infringements on behalf of American interests.
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ACTA
you need to get off facebook
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.28.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The fact that Putin has signed the order for this project could be critical: there have been several previous plans for moving parts of the Russian government to using free software, notably in the educational sector, but in practice they have mostly failed to materialise because there has been insufficient political weight behind them. But if Putin says: “make it so”, I suspect that a lot of people will jump pretty fast to make sure that it *is* so. And once that happens, other plans to roll out free software might well suddenly look rather more attractive.
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Well another year is drawing to a close, and that means it’s time to begin taking stock of all that has passed in 2010.
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Most improved award
Without a doubt, this award must go to the KDE desktop environment. When KDE 4.0 was released it looked like it was going bomb miserably. It was slow, buggy, and far from ready for public consumption. But 2010 saw more improvement in KDE 4 than it seemed in the whole of software. And because of that epic push towards stability and usability, KDE has finally been able to stand back up in the front lines with the likes of GNOME.
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No longer are we being held down by proprietary software companies, “big media” or those who support this way of doing things. An unregulated (for the most part) Internet along with plenty of the free software available with open source friendly licensing means that anyone with something to say can express themselves and share it with the world.
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I was at a Linux Meetup a couple of months ago and I ran into another former employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (“They are everywhere, everywhere!”) named Larry Camilli. We started talking and somehow the conversation came around to a program called “AXE” (vaX Archictecture Exerciser). Larry looked at me with a strange look on his face and said “That was my program! That is what I did for Digital!” Larry went on to say that few people he met, even those who worked for Digital, knew about the AXE (or its equivalent for the MicroVAX, the “MAX”) program. I replied that I worked in an operating system group, so we often delt with new CPUs, and we knew the *AXE programs and their capabilities very well.
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This powerful app lets you control a cloud-based desktop PC running Fedora Linux with 2GB of storage, the OpenOffice Suite, Firefox, Dropbox, and many other open-source programs.
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Desktop
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I have received a quotation for the Dell Vostro V13 and here are the numbers:
a) S$887.15 for the N-series
b) S$1045.79 for the same machine with ‘doze.
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Ballnux
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Samsung is on the verge of realising its 10 million unit sales hopes for its flagship Android powered mobile handset the Samsung Galaxy S, new figures have revealed.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month we delivered our annual performance look at NVIDIA’s 2010 Linux graphics drivers and now the tables have turned to do our annual examination of the ATI/AMD Catalyst graphics drivers for the Radeon graphics processors. This was certainly an interesting year — both good and bad — for AMD with their Catalyst Linux driver.
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AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you’ve been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.
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Applications
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Indicator-Virtualbox offers a quick way to launch virtual machines via the desktop panel.
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DesktopNova helps you to auto change backgrounds after an adjustable time from multiple files and folders you can add it to different profiles.
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The “installer” — which really just adds a line or so to your .bashrc file for ease of startup — is adjustable on several points, so you can change the location and name of your journal, if you want.
And beyond that, it relies only on bash and your editor and the amount of space you have available on your drive. How you use the results, and how you arrange your diary are up to you.
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Instructionals/Technical
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It’s a testament to how far Linux has come that users today don’t typically have to use the command line if they don’t want to. Such is the quality of the graphical user interfaces in many modern Linux distributions that there’s simply no need, in general.
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Games
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Popular Linux game Nexuiz was forked into a new game Xonotic earlier this year as there was some disagreement between Nexuiz developers and community. Now Xonotic developers have released first preview version playable on Linux, Windows and Mac.
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The Linux winner for my desktop was arrived at in an unlikely manner. Puppy garned a slice of my hard drive because it is such an amazing little distro and such a small foot print. As much as I wanted VectorLinux on my laptop, I could not get VectorLinux to multi boot with more than Windows.
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Red Hat Family
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The former CEO of Raleigh-based software firm Red Hat Inc. is suing his family’s financial advisers, saying they misused $60 million.
Matthew Szulik (ZOO-lik) and his family filed the federal lawsuit in North Carolina against TAG Virgin Islands Inc.
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Former Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, his wife, father and other family members have filed a federal suit against a St. Thomas-based investment advisory firm, claiming the family lost $60 million in high risk and illiquid investments they did not approve.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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KNOPPIX 6.4.3 has been released bringing several updated packages along with the usual bug fixes. This is also the first release to bring support for the open-source nouveau driver for Nvidia video cards. KMS is now also included in the kernel shipped with the latest KNOPPIX release.
“The current version has been completely updated from Debian ‘Lenny’, ‘Testing’ and ‘Unstable’ and uses Linux kernel 2.6.36.1, X.Org 7.5 for supporting current computer hardware,” the release notes of KNOPPIX 6.4.3 read.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’m on holiday for the next week, yeah! I’ve started filling some of my free time by resurrecting Photobomb (again). There have been some technical improvements to the APIs I’ve been using, and also, I’ve learned some ways to do a few things better. I’m hoping that by spending a few hours a day, I can pretty much complete Photobomb by the end of this week, and then work on getting it into Universe for Natty.
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Despite some premature reports on the net, Canonical isn’t moving to a rolling release schedule for Ubuntu. However, the organisation is open to making some changes to the way that some software packages are updated. It’s seems likely that a mechanism that supports the adding of up to date application packages outside of the normal software repository updates is probably on the cards, and I’d say that it’s about time.
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Flavours and Variants
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In an attempt to gain some stability and speed in my life without having a different distro on my desktop and netbook, I’ve decided to install XUbuntu on both. XUbuntu is community driven and based on XFCE, thus no need to worry about Unity vs GNOME. However after installing XUbuntu on my desktop, I came across a strange issue. When ever I attempted to sudo inside of the gui, it would fail. However, it would work at the command line level.
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The only number we got from Amazon is that on its peak day, it shipped nine million Kindles. That’s 29% more than its top day in 2009.
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Phones
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Android
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Starting with Android, here are our favorite apps of 2010, in no particular order.
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In a follow-up post last week, Ext4 developer Ted T’so commented on the transition and offered some further clarification regarding concerns about fsync data loss issues, which he says pose minimal risk on Android due to the higher level of quality assurance testing.
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2010 has been a fantastic year on the Business channel here at opensource.com.
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Code is everywhere, and it is more and more likely to be open source from the bottom to the top of the stack. Ruby, Python, Perl, JavaScript, and PHP dominate the list of top languages at GitHub. This code, in turn, runs on open source libraries that sit on Linux. Although proprietary coding tools and extensions continue to proliferate, the core is increasingly fully open source.
This domination is pushing into other areas. Open source content management systems like web.py, phpBB, CakePHP, Lift, Drupal, Joomla, and probably hundreds of other open source CMS frameworks are packaging up most of the information you read today. It is rare to find a website that depends on just Apache to deliver the content.
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Web Browsers
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Cue the new browser war. Maybe it will help fix all of the annoying problems and sloppiness you encounter when using browsers.
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Mozilla
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According to data of Circle.am Armenian ranking system, website visitors, who are registered on Circle.am, mostly use Firefox (41.05%) browser, as well as Chrome (27.36%). Safari rounds out the top five browsers in Armenia – 0.29%, while the share of other browsers makes – 0.25%.
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CMS
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Drupal 7 Module Development has been published by Packt, just in time for the release of Drupal 7. This book provides in-depth coverage of key elements of Drupal 7 and is designed for professional developers. Every chapter provides fully functional code samples illustrating the APIs and strategies discussed in the chapter. With this foundation, developers can quickly build sophisticated tools on their own by making use of the strategies and techniques exemplified in this book.
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Education
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Here’s a little summary again of what I found noteworthy in the field of Free Software in education in the last few months of this year in no particular order:
* After Sam Tuke informed the edu-eu mailinglist about (k)mando recently, it was quickly put into a debian paket by Georges Khaznadar from OFSET. I’m still looking for people who have actually used that software.
* I stumbled on a blog post in kde-edu planet that describes how to report a bug. I think this touches an important point. When we encourage educational institutions to use Free Software, we should not forget to teach them how to contribute and make them part of the community.
[...]
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The best thing about Linux training in education is that there are already people doing it. There are establishments up and down the UK that have decided to include Linux on their syllabus and make a concerted effort to provide their students with the choice.
So if you’re a parent frustrated with the lack of options for your child, or you’re maybe a student who wants to learn Linux skills from the outset, there are places to go and people to speak to. They may be able to help you make the difference. But even if you can’t influence the training regime at your local establishment, Linux can still play a part.
Unlike in schools, Linux and open source software isn’t badly served by professional training. It’s this kind of training that pits Linux against Microsoft’s certification, and it’s the kind that prepares IT people for the real tasks they face while dealing with Linux systems.
The Linux Professional Institute, for example, has been dishing out qualifications for over 10 years, and its LPI certification levels have become something of a standard for Linux system administrators.
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Project Releases
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I am proud to announce that I’ve released the latest version of Cobbler. This version includes several fixes. The biggest one being a fix for broken SNIPPETS on Fedora 14 due to a change in Cheetah.
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Openness/Sharing
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Christmas Day may have passed but if you’re still feeling generous (or just have unwanted gifts to get rid of), Gift A Stranger could help you scratch that generous itch in style.
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First reported by All Facebook, Donette Warren from Andover, Minnesota used Facebook to find a kidney donor for her 10-year-old sick daughter. The little girl, named Vivica Loyd, was born with six holes in her heart and has had five strokes and over forty surgeries, according to kare11.com.
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Standards/Consortia
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One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of “Free and Open Standard” is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of the term has been decided by Digistan. The term “Open Standard” has become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.
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Police have started offering virtual online money to encourage Internet users to report clues in criminal cases.
Police hope the hunt for suspects can be sped up by harnessing the growing population of Internet users in China.
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From San Francisco Superior Court small claims court to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Balsam, based in San Francisco, has filed many lawsuits, including dozens before he graduated law school in 2008, against e-mail marketers he says violate anti-spamming laws.
His many victories are mere rain drops in the ocean considering that Cisco Systems Inc. estimates that there are 200 billion spam messages circulating a day, accounting for 90 percent of all e-mail.
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The arrest and detention of Algeria’s most prominent anti-corruption campaigner last month attracted wide media attention inside the country, but it received little or no attention internationally in the English-language media.
The reporting silence may be due to linguistic barriers: much of the relevant documentation is in French and Arabic. Perhaps reporting on Algeria’s opaque political system is not seen as newsworthy (no matter the international relevance), or maybe there is simply a lack of interest in the plight of anti-corruption activists outside the developed world.
There is now widespread recognition that pervasive corruption is a violation of basic human rights and a severe impediment to development.
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Health/Nutrition
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Two weeks ago, I broke the news of a new FDA report that estimated for the first time the amount of antibiotics sold in the United States every year for use in agriculture: 28.8 million pounds.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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While Vice President Dick Cheney and other prominent conservatives have faulted President Barack Obama for slacking in the war on terror, two top Bush administration intelligence officials are arguing that the White House has been just as tough – if not tougher.
“The new administration has been as aggressive, if not more aggressive, in pursing these issues because they’re real,” former National Intelligence Director and retired Navy Vice Admiral Michael McConnell said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“You commend them for that?” host Candy Crowley asked.
“I do commend them for that,” McConnell said.
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Speaking today on CNN’s State of the Union, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted that the administration views its own decision to hold detainees permanently without trial “regrettable.”
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I heard last night from a reader who shares the physicist’s skepticism of the TSA but challenges his explanation of the underlying science. After the jump, because they’re so long, are this second reader’s message, and then a response from the original physics professor.
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Cablegate
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It looks like Wikileaks is making people think for once
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Remember when countries all over the world were free to choose whether or not they adopted genetically modified organisms (GMOs)? Well, if the U.S. State Department (who is controlled by big agriculture) has its way, the whole world will be pimping GMOs before long.
Yet another important Wikileaks revelation, this time involving the world’s food supply, has been swept under the rug by the establishment media. Thankfully Rodale News has the guts to report on the issue and bring some much needed attention to it.
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“I greatly appreciate everyone’s support and well wishes during this time. I am also thankful for everything that has been done to aid in my defense. I ask that everyone takes the time to remember those who are separated from their loved ones at this time due to deployment and important missions. Specifically, I am thinking of those that I deployed with and have not seen for the last seven months, and of the staff here at the Quantico Confinement Facility who will be spending their Christmas without their family.”
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Finance
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Crimes committed by the big banks helped crash our economy — and WikiLeaks is saying that a whistle-blower has sent them enough evidence to take down Bank of America. So now the big banks are fighting back by trying to get the government to muzzle future whistle-blowers.
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On Monday, Bank of America’s web site suffered sporadic downtimes, apparently as a result of DDoS attacks–the same kind of attacks that also plagued Visa, Master Card and Paypal, each of which also recently halted its financial services to Wikileaks.
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The infographic summarizing our research for The Future of Money project is now complete! Thanks to Patrizia Kommerell for the design work, and Gabriel Shalom & Jay Cousins for concept work. You can check out Pati’s post and download the infographic in A1 or A4 size PDF over at emergence.cc.
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The bankers’ trade association has written to Cambridge University asking for the MPhil thesis of one of our research students, Omar Choudary, to be taken offline. They complain it contains too much detail of our No-PIN attack on Chip-and-PIN and thus “breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure”; they also complain about Omar’s post on the subject to this blog.
Needless to say, we’re not very impressed by this, and I made this clear in my response to the bankers. (I am embarrassed to see I accidentally left Mike Bond off the list of authors of the No-PIN vulnerability. Sorry, Mike!) There is one piece of Christmas cheer, though: the No-PIN attack no longer works against Barclays’ cards at a Barclays merchant. So at least they’ve started to fix the bug – even if it’s taken them a year. We’ll check and report on other banks later.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ICM poll that questioned more than 2,000 people found that 44% were opposed to the deal, with just 5% supporting it
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The increased accumulation and consolidation of corporate power is a threat to our democracy. And nowhere is this more evident than in our media.
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At the joint European Parliament and European Commission net neutrality summit in Brussels on 11 November there was a clear political message – that interference with Internet traffic is permissible as long as companies tell their consumers that it is happening.
The Commission will “wait and see” if such interferences cause problems for the market and will consider taking action if this is the case. In a whole day of discussions, the fundamental rights aspects of the interference by private companies with citizens’ communications were only questioned by Jeremie Zimmermann from La Quadrature du Net and Jan Albrecht MEP (Greens/EFA, Germany).
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We’re still looking at the actual rules, which were released publicly several days after the ratifying vote, and we’ll comment more when we’ve completed our review. But from what we’ve gleaned from FCC statements, and despite some rumors otherwise, the FCC’s current theory for jurisdiction seems to be somewhat new. On the other hand, the substantive principles laid out in the final rules appear to be largely the same as those discussed by policymakers and other stakeholders throughout the year, and which we have repeatedly warned about for their loopholes and exemptions. We’ve also warned about the Trojan horse we may find on our hands if the FCC’s authority to regulate is approved in the courts.
We’ll be watching to see what 2011 holds; it seems likely that the new Congress will have something to say as well.
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Audible now has an Android app, yeah!
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It is impossible to be entirely devoid of influence, it is in our nature to imitate. This is how children learn to speak, form a sense of moral responsibility, and develop their interpretations of societal norms; by copying their elders. Litigating against imitation shares the futility of attempts to outlaw sex.
Copyright laws have never stopped copying, they’ve just distorted our culture to favour that which can be legally reproduced. For example, while Oasis did not infringe the copyright of the The Beatles, they copied just about everything that was legally copyable about them, with healthy profits. Yet if they had sampled even a brief section of any one of their songs, they would have needed to clear it and pay large royalties. I would argue with anyone who claimed the insipid dirge of Oasis was more relevant to nineties music than the inventiveness of hip-hop (a genre built on sampling), yet we have a system that levies financial penalties against the latter rather than the former.
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Copyrights
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Net neutrality and linking depend on each other.
But if Hollywood and Big Music get their way, net neutrality will be dead, and the links which bind the World Wide Web will be broken.
The entertainment cartels are using the claim that linking equals publishing to have sites closed down without any kind of due process, and with the Obama administration looking on with approval.
The internet isn’t a new communications phenomenon: it’s a shining new communications paradigm. Some of the brightest people on the planet have created this amazing network linking music, art, different cultures, information, ideas, data.
Now, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music; and, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures want it torn down, using file sharing as the wrecking ball.
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Las Vegas newspaper copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is disputing arguments that one of its lawsuits should be dismissed on fair use and other grounds.
Righthaven, a partnership between Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson and an affiliate of newspaper chain owner Stephens Media LLC, since March has filed at least 192 copyright infringement lawsuits against website operators.
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A Parliamentary Standing Committee recommendation that music composers and lyricists are to get an equal share of all revenues that flow from the commercialisation of film music has stirred a hornet’s nest.
Bollywood producers are now threatening to strike against this provision and apprehend that if this provision converts to law, they will be forced to shut down! As we debate the pros and cons of this historical provision, we need to ask ourselves a fundamental question. What is the “law” really about? Isn’t it about fairness? About justice?
[...]
Copyright is about creativity..indeed, it aims to foster the creativity of the content creator, and not line up the pockets of the funder/packager at the cost of the content creator. To my mind, even a 50% split seems unduly skewed in favour of someone who merely pumps in the moolah. However, the standing committee decided, in its infinite wisdom, that if film music were to be exploited in any other form other than as part of the “film”, the proceeds of such exploitation were to be split equally between the lyricist, music composer and the film producer. In other words, a 50:50 split of the profits between the content creator and the content funder/packager. Seems like more than a fair provision to me. In fact, similar provisions ought to be transposed to other contexts such as book publishing, where authors are often at the receiving end of a paltry single digit royalty sharing percentage!
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DMCA takedown notices are sent in large numbers to dozens of organizations on the Internet every month. The ChillingEffects clearing house has been receiving copies of these from some of the Internet’s biggest players including Google, Yahoo, Digg and more recently Twitter. It will come as no surprise that the music and movie industries are some of the biggest complainers, but there are also some unexpected entrants.
GLENN GREENWALD vs FRAN TOWNSEND WIKILEAKS DEBATE
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.27.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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According to tech blog GigaOM, the team behind the popular media player VLC will release a VLC Android app in “a matter of weeks”. This follows from the release of a dedicated VLC iPad app in September of this year, with iPhone support arriving in October.
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K3b
K3b is a powerful, feature-complete burning application for KDE 4 which comes with support for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO images, Blu-ray discs, audio CDs, creating ISO images. K3b supports multisession mode, features on-screen display, sound notifications, it can copy from one device to another, allows to rip audio CDs using the transcode utility, rip Video CDs or DVDs or create eMoviX projects.
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Remember that awesome ‘flip style’ clock screenlet theme we mentioned earlier last week? Well it’s since been souped up, made themeable and capable of displaying even more information.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Today was a long, long day; due to some security issues with pcsc-lite, ccid and opensc, I had to kink out a few more issues with pcsc-lite, not only because I had to workaround upstream’s decisions that focused on fixing the issues with binary distributions (read: Debian), but also because the previous stable was 1.6.1, and the micro release after that (1.6.2) broke API enough to require patching a few reverse dependencies to work out properly.
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Wine
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There’s a new –optin commandline option that will tells winetricks to phone home after each run with info about which verbs really get used. Please consider using this, it will help future winetricks development. (You only have to give that option once, it sticks. You can turn it off with the –optout option, or by removing ~/.cache/winetricks.)
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Games
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The Humble Indie Bundle #2 is now over. Thanks everyone for your overwhelming support! The bundle has broken all of our expectations once again: the total payments exceeded $1.8 million! We should have more detailed statistics soon.
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I had the honor to interview Norbert Varga from Digital Arrow who are now developing their cRPG game named “Dilogus – The Winds of War”.
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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but paying for everything make Jack rather poor. Here’s a look at the most popular places to score free games online for some cheap end-of-year fun.
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The cost of buying each of these games separately would be around 85$.
What does all of this have to do with Linux Gamers being willing to purchase their video games?
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Desktop Environments
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It is not uncommon to find dialogs which contains tabs, which themselves contain groups, which contain other groups. That’s quite a lot of borders… Not only does it look crowded, it also eats valuable content space. There are a few easy tricks you can use to avoid this issue.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This is a technical post, with a small video for entertainment.
Today, a major change to the oxygen code was committed to SVN, so that the style now derives from QCommonStyle as opposed to KStyle in the past. This is the first (and most difficult) step towards writing a fork of the oxygen widget style that would depend on Qt only, and not on KDE, so that one could, for instance, use oxygen natively on Windows (TM) for all Qt applications. Additionally, this change also results in better performances in painting widgets, and a more maintainable code.
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I don’t normally comment on other people’s software… but… a little while ago, opensuse was wondering whether KDE apps would work with these Gnome Shell requirements. Last time I checked, their “Activities” sounded like virtual desktops, but now they’ve returned to an application-based shell. This in sharp contrast to Plasma Desktop’s increasingly Activity-oriented workspace.
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Here are a few submissions we got from a very proactive Google Code-In student!
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And the GRAND winner is …
You haven’t seen it listed above, but it would feature under the glorious title of best all-arounder. And that would have to be Linux Mint. While it did underperform in the spring, the autumn release is just splendid. It’s a perfect 10 for the tenth release.
[...]
I’ve missed many names, I know. For example, Debian or Sabayon. They are also very worthy contenders. But you can’t have them all. Ultimately, it comes down to a few choice selections.
Year 2010 has been very cool when it comes to Linux. Tons of great stuff, a torrent of disappointments, lots of in-fighting and forking. In this raging sea of storm and change, you will find a number of excellent distributions that should make a significant impact on how you use and enjoy the computer.
Perhaps Ubuntu looks the best, perhaps openSUSE is the reliable workhorse, perhaps Pardus is most user friendly, perhaps nothing beats Puppy when it comes to using your distro anywhere you go. But at the end of the day, when you combine everything into one equation, there’s no doubt about the winner. It’s Linux Mint.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Find in this post some screenshots from this new update release.
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Red Hat Family
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Evolven Software, Inc., the pioneer of Granular Configuration Automation solutions, today announced their support for Linux Red Hat. Evolven will enable customers to achieve greater visibility into the granular configuration information of Red Hat’s application infrastructure which can affect the availability and performance of IT environments where Red Hat is running.
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Linux distributions tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are those, like Ubuntu and Fedora, that are aimed mostly at enthusiasts and others happy to teeter on the bleeding edge of technology. The other group consists of more stable, commercially supported software, designed for those after less excitement, and includes products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). New releases are a rarity in this category, so when a major new product like RHEL 6 comes along it’s a big event, and one worthy of close attention.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Now all the features under “Compiz Settings” can be function well under Natty: Workspace Edge Settings, Desktop Effects and Menu Effects.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu Studio has been updated and is now based on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). Ubuntu Studio is tailored to meet the requirements of creative applications that involve audio, video, or graphics processing. It makes it easy for new users to get up to speed on GNU/Linux multi-media software, and makes less well-known applications readily available. This version has been pre-loaded with various multimedia software packages, such as Gimp, Cinepaint, Ardour, Blender, and JACK-Daemon.
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The Debian based Linux Mint Edition (LMDE) is now available for download.
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Phones
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But beyond big, established app retailers like Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market, will these rivals be able to find developers willing to custom tailor software for their systems? And will enough consumers bother thumbing through their catalogs?
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Trinity Audio Group is now selling a MeeGo Linux-based tablet bundled with version 5.0 of its Transmission audio platform for musicians. The $700 Indamixx 2 offers a 10.1-inch touchscreen, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM and 260GB of storage, plus the Renoise tracking and sampling application, according to the company.
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Trinity Audio Group and creative director Ronald Stewart have pushed the idea of a mobile music tablet since around 2005. I first saw what they were working on in the summer of 2006, as they readied a dedicated mobile DAW. But, at least from my vantage point, it’s really taken until now for some of the available hardware and software to evolve to the point that it could deliver on what they wanted to do. Products based first on Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) platforms and netbooks, while usable and more mobile than a laptop, required various tradeoffs. Linux software provided some significant power, but wasn’t yet an optimized experience for mobile use. I noted some of the promise, and shortcomings, in a review in late 2008 for Keyboard of Indamixx’s original Samsung hardware. (Keep in mind, this is all before anyone had heard of the iPad.)
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The Archos 5 Internet Tablet runs Google Android, has a 5 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display and an 800MHz ARM-based processor. Out of the box it can handle a wide range of audio and video formats, and with a little work, you can even install the Google Android Market on it. But the Archos 5 is stuck with Android 1.6 for now, and it’s not clear of Archos will ever update the software to let you run newer versions of the operating system since the company is now pushing a new line of “generation 8″ tablets running Android 2.2.
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Android
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A PlayStation app is coming to the iPhone “very soon”, Sony has announced.
The Official PlayStation App will let you check out your PlayStation Network trophies and keep tabs on your friends’ games and online status. There’ll be a news feed too and you’ll be able to view the PlayStation Blog.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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I have been experiencing problems with Firefox’s built-in session restore which was configured to load the tabs from the last browsing session automatically on the next startup to allow me to continue working exactly where I stopped the last time.
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It is a valid question. Iceweasel/Firefox is fantastic software, but when compared to some of the newer WebKit based browsers, it begins to look somewhat stale. This lack of freshness is often compounded on Debian systems where the Iceweasel packages can lag some way behind Mozilla’s official Firefox releases.
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Databases
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Here at Recorded Future we use Ubuntu (running on Amazon EC2), but so far we have not explored Ubuntu Upstart that much. During the holidays I made an effort to get acquainted with Upstart and to implement proper MySQL start and stop with it.
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CMS
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An RC comes after the beta period and before final release. That means we think we’re done. We currently have no known issues or bugs to squash. But with tens of millions of users, a variety of configurations, and thousands of plugins, it’s possible we’ve missed something. So if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.1 yet, now is the time! Please though, not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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“We would like to see the European Commission back up its public rhetoric regarding free software, open standards and interoperability with its own actions,” it said. “This would require DIGIT to rethink some procurement practices in order to open up public software procurement to competition.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Hackulous, the community dedicated to the cracking of Apple DRM and the indexing of unprotected software for iPhone, iPod and iPad, has announced some interesting innovations. As well as having cracking software for the yet-to-be-released Mac App Store already up their sleeve, they also have an intriguing “reverse BitTorrent” system for jailbroken devices which will increase cracked app availability on the Internet.
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You see, in trying everything—audiobooks, POD, limited editions—I’ve discovered the thing that captures the public’s interest is also the thing that makes the most money is also the thing that has the least logistics: super-premium limited editions. Over and over again, when I describe With a Little Help to people, they fixate on the limited editions. I’ve had dozens of e-mails from people practically begging to buy the $275 editions I’m doing—and I stand to make $50,000 or more from them.
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Programming
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Every so often Lance tweets about some science policy report. My natural tendency, like any good techie, is to keep my distance from such reports. I do recognize that they serve an important social function (like dentists or lawyers) but personally I would want to have as little as possible to do with them.
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Standards/Consortia
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For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free and open standard according to this definition. Here is a short writeup of what I have been able to gather so far. I brought up the topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list in July 2009, for those that want to see some background information. According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.
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Microsoft has unveiled an online sandbox where developers can experiment with unfinished web standards you won’t find in its Internet Explorer browser.
After years of cold shouldering the web standards movement, Redmond has taken a very different approach with Internet Explorer 9, now available in beta. And with the introduction of its new sandbox, the company hopes to convince you that its promotion of web standards is more prudent than the approach favored by its rivals.
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NEXT MONTH many European Union members may be regretting their system of a rotating presidency. That’s because the gavel will be handed to Hungary, whose populist and power-hungry government has just adopted a media law more suited to an authoritarian regime than to a Western democracy.
The right-wing Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban won 53 percent of the popular vote in an election this year but gained 66 percent of the seats in parliament – enough to change the constitution. It proceeded to take over or attack the authority of every institution it did not control, including the presidency, the Supreme Court and the state audit office; the central bank is now under its assault.
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Parents, the next time you fret that your child is wasting too much time playing video games, consider new research suggesting that video gaming may have real-world benefits for your child’s developing brain.
Daphne Bavelier is professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. She studies young people playing action video games. Having now conducted more than 20 studies on the topic, Bavelier says, “It turns out that action video games are far from mindless.”
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Despite the film’s tidy ending, the Winklevosses’ litigation is marching on.
That’s because the twin brothers have asked for a remarkable series of “do-overs” since signing the settlement agreement in February 2008, surrounded by their lawyers. First, they complained that the settlement wasn’t fair, because they were duped into believing that the Facebook stock was worth more than it actually was. Then, they got into a battle with the lawyers who won the settlement for them, from the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Hedges, alleging the firm had engaged in malpractice. (That dispute ended up in arbitration, which was resolved in September, with the Quinn Emanuel firm collecting the full fee it asked for, reportedly $13 million.)
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Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.’s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.
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Despite Vice President Biden’s recent squabbling with Republican senators over the meaning of Christmas, he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell do agree on something. They both say WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has published thousands of confidential Pentagon and State Department documents on his group’s website, is “a high-tech terrorist.”
But assuming that President Obama is not ready to drop a bomb on Assange, punishing him for disseminating military records and diplomatic cables will require specifying what crime he committed under U.S. law. That won’t be easy, unless the Justice Department is prepared to criminalize something journalists do every day: divulge information that the government wants to keep secret.
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When bad weather forced a London-bound Virgin flight to reroute from Heathrow Airport to Stansted, passengers had to wait three hours on the tarmac before they could disembark. A select group did, however, get to leave the plane after about an hour. No, they weren’t disabled, sick or parents with small, noisy children. The group making an early exit consisted of once-popular singer Madonna and her entourage of about 15 people.
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I couldn’t quite believe that, as that Florida Times-Union editorial I linked to earlier suggests, Rep. Corrine Brown had threatened a libel suit against a newspaper columnist for the sort of criticism most politicians face.
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How high are international data roaming rates? I have direct evidence from two providers: an Italian provider TIM charges about $10 per megabyte; a U.S. provider T-mobile charges $15 per megabyte. The typical business user uses receives about 15 megabytes per day of email. My smartphone uses about four times this. By way of contrast, you can buy a SIM from Vodafone UK with 30 megabytes of data for about $30. Wifi at the airport or a hotel runs about $10-$60 per day. Over-the-air prices charged to local customers is much lower: TIM charges $25 per month for 5 gigabytes of data, of which probably about 2 gigs is actually used, so the effective rate is about $0.0125 per megabyte. T-mobile in the US charges a similar amount for similar service.,
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The US Senate today voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) [advocacy websites] on Friday dropped a lawsuit [notice of dismissal, PDF] challenging the US government’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) licensing scheme after the government changed the policy. The groups announced in August that they would pursue a legal challenge [JURIST report] to the scheme despite being issued a license to represent Anwar al-Awlaqi [NYT profile; JURIST news archive], a US citizen who was labeled an SDGT in July.
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In Reason magazine, Radley Balko takes an in-depth look at all the places in the USA where it’s nominally illegal to record the police, and all the people who’ve faced fines or prison for recording law enforcement officers breaking the law with illegal beatings and harassment.
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Last week, the Senate refused to approve the DREAM Act, a bill that would have offered a path to citizenship for children brought into the country illegally if they attend college or serve in the military. Opponents stated that no immigration reform will happen without first “securing” the 1,951 mile U.S. border with Mexico. America’s current approach to border security is wasteful and ineffective, and “securing the border” will never be achieved until we redefine our approach to, and definition of, border security. With many in Washington expressing concern about fiscal responsibility, reigning in the billions wasted annually on current border security policies should really be a priority. But America’s xenophobic preoccupation with an “invasion” by brown-skinned “illegals” may keep us pursuing an expensive and unreasonable approach to border security.
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Edward L. Bernays, Chiquita, and the CIA-backed Guatemalan Coup
Chiquita’s most famous act of interference with Central American politics is its role in toppling Guatemala’s left-leaning government in 1954. For the first half of the 20th century, Chiquita poured investment capital into Guatemala, buying the country’s productive land and controlling shares in its railroad, electric utility, and telegraph industries; as a result, the Guatemalan government was subservient to Chiquita’s interests, exempting the company from internal taxation and guaranteeing workers earned no more than fifty cents per day. At the time of the 1944 Guatemalan revolution, Chiquita was the country’s number one landowner, employer, and exporter.
In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected with 65% of the vote, and Chiquita perceived his agrarian land reforms as a threat to their corporate interests. Chiquita, with the help of the father of modern public relations, Edward L. Bernays, waged a propaganda war and managed to convince the American public and politicians that Arbenz was secretly a dangerous communist who could not be allowed to remain in power. With McCarthy-era hysteria in full swing, President Eisenhower secretly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the democratically elected Arbenz in a 1954 covert operation.
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Cablegate
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Legislation — privacy, anti-terrorist, national security, copyright, ACTA, SHIELD, Digital Agenda
Probably the first and if carefully watched, most visible issue will be the legislation.
After the national security fiasco that resulted in Cablegate most governments around the globe (with the US at its front) will be hard-pressed to “do something about it”. Because neither police, nor court, nor governement can (or rather should) operate against the law and current law does not direcly criminalise WikiLeaks, they will have to change the law.
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Revelations in WikiLeaks cables that senior civil servants are pushing the United States government’s agenda rather than acting in New Zealand’s interests are disturbing, Green MP Keith Locke says.
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“Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism’’, he alleged. The lawyer of the two women who have accused Mr Assange of sexual misconduct hit back saying that he was spreading “false rumours’’ to smear his clients. He denied allegations made by Mr Assange’s legal team that they were CIA “pawns’’ and pointed out that, on the contrary, they were “supporters of WikiLeaks’’.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Bolivia may have been the only country to speak out against these failures, but several negotiators told us privately that they support us. Anyone who has seen the science on climate change knows that the Cancún agreement was irresponsible.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs’ new bonus scheme should give shareholders and regulators cause for a little celebration this Christmas.
The Wall Street firm is to link top bankers’ compensation to a wide range of financial measures, in a formal break with the industry tradition of crudely paying out a slice of revenues.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., weighing 2010 pay packages for a year that could rank as Wall Street’s second best, said it may grant bonuses that depend on future earnings, in addition to stock performance.
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I’m convinced that the best way to track the mood of Stanford University is to keep an eye on your News Feed. And there’s one thing in particular that keeps popping up on mine- a prestigious program for which dozens of my friends have applied, and to which a lucky few have been accepted. I’m talking, of course, about Teach for America, the educational service corps that places fresh-faced graduates in troubled urban and rural classrooms across the U.S. The program’s rise has been meteoric: it currently boasts 8,200 corps members and claims to have reached 3 million students since it was founded in 1990. Its popularity at Stanford is no mere trick of my News Feed. The Daily recently reported that TFA and similar organizations “have witnessed a surge in applications from Stanford” in recent years.
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But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.
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Steven Antin’s new movie, Burlesque (PG-13), features about twenty different brands of products, including gratuitous use of R.J. Reynolds’ Camel cigarettes. Other films that have showcased cigarettes this year include the Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (rated PG, which features Newport cigarettes), and For Colored Girls (rated R, by Lionsgate, which features Marlboros).
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Media Matters uncovered another internal email sent out by Fox News’ Washington, D.C. Managing Editor Bill Sammon which ordered Fox Network journalists to slant coverage of the climate change issue by “refrain[ing] from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo is inflammatory because the increase in global annual average temperatures over the last 50 years is a well-established fact.
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The editorial was prompted by the leak of an internal Fox News memo ordering its “reporters” to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo was sent by Bill Sammon, Fox News’ Washington managing editor, in 2009 and released by Media Matters last week.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Government plans to block internet pornography at source, amid concerns about the “premature sexualisation” of children, have prompted a fierce backlash from digital rights campaigners. The proposals have also highlighted how the debate around children and sexual material is increasingly shaped by religious conservatives.
One of the organisations quoted extensively over the last few days is Safermedia, a pressure group campaigning to “reduce the harmful effects of the media on our children, families and society”.
Safermedia, formerly known as Mediamarch, supports the “porn lock” proposals and its spokespeople claim academic research substantiates their view that sexual imagery harms children’s mental health. But their moral stance is an explicitly Christian one – the group’s co-founder Miranda Suit is an organiser for the Christian People’s Alliance, and its website cites Saint Paul’s epistles to the Philippians and the Ephesians as inspiration for the campaign.
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Another day and even more evidence that Homeland Security’s decision to have its Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group seize a bunch of domain names without any warning or adversarial hearing was a colossal screw up. We haven’t heard too much about the sites seized concerning trademark infringement, but there were five that were the focus of copyright infringement — including a bunch of hiphop blogs (which were regularly used by artists and record labels alike to promote their songs) and a search engine. Last week, we went through a partial affidavit from a newly minted ICE agent named Andrew Reynolds, which showed numerous technological and legal errors in explaining why the domain of the search engine, Torrent Finder, was seized. Yesterday, we wrote about how some of the “evidence” used against the blogs included songs sent by the labels for promotional purposes.
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A federal judge on Tuesday awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their counsel $2.5 million for the costs litigating the case for more than four years.
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Human rights groups and campaigners are being hit hard by huge web attacks launched by those opposed to their views, finds research.
Many web-based campaigning groups are being knocked offline for weeks by the attacks, it found.
The researchers expect the tempo of attacks to increase as the tools and techniques become more widespread.
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Computer attacks launched against sites run by human rights and dissident media groups threaten to knock free speech off the Web, a new report warned this week.
The study conducted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society showed that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks frequently knocked such sites offline.
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“This is beyond opinion … beyond commentary. He wanted to threaten and intimidate these judges” by trying to incite an audience made up of dangerous extremists, she said. The judges testified they feared for their lives, she said.
Turner maintained the posting was nothing more than protected political speech.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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On Tuesday FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave AT&T a decision that was gift-wrapped for the holiday season. By a 3-to-2 vote, the FCC passed a rule that, in the chairman’s words, “protects Internet freedom.”
If only that were true.
After a year of promises to deliver on President Obama’s pledge to protect Net Neutrality, this chairman has pushed through a rule that favors the very industry his FCC is supposed to regulate, leaving Internet users with few protections and putting the future of the open Internet in peril.
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Look for shortly to appear what I’m calling the Trojan App, a hybrid mobile application that doesn’t exist yet but certainly will within hours or days of the new rules going into effect. The Trojan App is a legitimate mobile application that performs multiple functions, at least one of which is to circumvent the new wireless rules.
Here’s what I mean. Maybe you saw the story a couple of days ago about technology being brought to market that would enable mobile phone companies to charge Facebook users by the page for access. Under the new rules a mobile carrier can do that, no problem. But because that mobile network offers its own voice service (they all do) under the new rules they can’t similarly restrict Skype or Google Voice or any of the dozens or hundreds of Voice-over-IP third-party services out there. So what’s to keep Skype or Google or Yahoo or iChat or MrVoIP from offering a mobile version of its service that includes a free gateway to Facebook?
Nothing.
These are perfectly legitimate applications that are protected from throttling by virtue of their competing with a core service of the ISP, yet in this instance they will have gained a secondary function of acting as a Virtual Private Network link to an otherwise-regulated service like Facebook.
It’s a digital loophole.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In a decision as remarkable for its amusement value as for its value as a precedent in law, the General Court has ordered the Commission to pay Systran liquidated damages of over €12 million
Between 22 December 1997 and 15 March 2002, Systran Luxembourg adapted, under the name EC-Systran Unix, its Systran-Unix machine translation software to the specific needs of the EU Commission.
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The New York Times lead editorial today is entitled China and Intellectual Property link here. It is a familiar litany of complaints about their theft of U S “property” with no suggestion that there might be another side to the question.
If we were in China’s position, still poor and backward in so many areas, we too would try our hardest to skate around the obstacles to using the latest innovations. Innovation is the key to rapid development and national material progress. We ourselves have violated the IP of other countries when we were behind and trying to develop. Of course, that was before we had fully developed the mythology of IP as “property” and that copying without paying was robbery.
[...]
The present IP system in the US is marred by its harmful and excessively long term, by its grossly ambiguous and generous definition of what constitutes innovation, by the capture of the system by big business which dearly loves its monopolies, and by a legal system that grows fat on litigation.
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Copyrights
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Perfect 10, the porn website that bills itself as displaying “the world’s most beautiful natural women,” claims that disclosing its copyright takedown notices is a little too revealing.
The copyright-infringement allegations are part of Perfect 10’s ongoing lawsuit against Google, a suit with a tortured procedural history. In 2007, a federal appeals court rendered a far-reaching decision, saying search engines like Google were not infringing copyrights by displaying thumbnails and hyperlinking to Perfect 10’s perfect babes.
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Mike’s recent post about OK Go is just crying out for some Mimi & Eunice cartoons.
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BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is fighting the permanent injunction issued by the District Court of California last summer in their case against the MPAA. isoHunt contests the imposition of a site-wide keyword filter based on a list of movie industry keywords. By doing so, the search engine also makes a case for the public’s ‘freedom of search’, not just on BitTorrent, but on the Internet in general.
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Righthaven, the Las Vegas copyright troll formed this spring, has moved beyond lawsuits over newspaper articles and begun targeting websites for the unauthorized reposting of images. First up, more than a dozen infringement lawsuits concerning the so-called Vdara “death ray.”
Frost over the World – Julian Assange
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In the larger world of IT, I see many things happening in 2011, almost all of them are huge positives. ARM will advance on all fronts as will GNU/Linux. I see thin clients moving along smartly. Many will use the expensive VDI systems but many will revel in the efficiency of an old-fashioned virtual terminal provided by the x-window system of GNU/Linux. If GNU/Linux evolves away from X, there surely will be some suitable networked display to permit the thinnest of thin clients to operate. There are moves to eliminate the VGA adaptor but I cannot see that being universal. There are just too many VGA monitors out there with years of life left. Changing the connector is one way to make thin clients obsolete but they are a quick-to-market product and can adapt. I see an end to up-selling. It delayed innovation but has not stopped it. Small cheap computers will soon be everywhere.
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People come up with all of these reasons to explain why they don’t use Linux. But really they are not reasons at all but simply excuses for laziness. You might even think that with all the tripe that is trotted out that most people don’t have the intelligence to be able to use Linux.
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Ballnux
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Samsung is on the verge of realising its 10 million unit sales hopes for its flagship Android powered mobile handset the Samsung Galaxy S, new figures have revealed.
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I’m no huge fan of UI overlays, but even I have to admit that HTC’s Sense is getting better and better. With features like HTCSense.com and even an e-books store, there’s no arguing that it’s become more than just an Android skin – in Europe, at least.
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Kernel Space
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The GRUB bootloader is widely used to get Linux (and other) systems running. Its flexibility and configurability make it a logical choice for many types of computers, as does its “just works” factor: your editor cannot be the only one to smile when he realizes how long it has been since the last “I forgot to run LILO and my new kernel won’t boot” episode. One of GRUB’s nice features is its ability to understand filesystem structures and find bootable kernels on the fly. So the addition of support for another filesystem type would not normally be a noteworthy event. When that filesystem is ZFS, though, people will pay attention.
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Applications
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Most modern computers are powerful enough to run entire operating systems within your main operating systems, which means virtual machines are more commonplace today than ever. Here’s a look at the five most popular virtual machine applications.
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First and foremost, as we first reported back in early November, Shotwell has gained video support. Users can now import them straight from their digital cameras, tag them and add them to events.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.10 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for notification balloons in system tray.
– Obsolete AudioIO sound driver removed.
– More work on ActiveX support.
– Various MSI fixes.
– Preloader now used for 64-bit too.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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Games
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There are often reports regarding concerns about computer games having negative effects on children and adults, with the fear that these games can lead to violent behaviour and addiction. However, studies by leading researchers have shown that there are many positive attributes to playing computer games, some of which we have alluded to in our earlier articles. Computer games can help players to improve their cognitive skills, enhance creativity, deepen language and maths skills, and help people to think on their feet and outside the box, the latter referring to novel, creative and smart thinking. However, above all these things, games offer pure, unadulterated fun.
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Dofus is a massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) for Linux with thousands of players across the world playing it everyday. The game is quite popular and have one of the fastest growing online community.
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While not nearly as much money as successful triple-A commercial game titles, this is a huge success for indie game developers. The $1.8M came in from 232,845 sales. The average Linux user was paying $13.76 USD per game bundle while Windows users came in at just $6.67.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Packages for the release of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6 RC 1 are available for Kubuntu 10.10 and Natty.
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GNOME Desktop
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As you can see, it’s not perfect. The icon is still on the bottom left, the menu is still floating. I’ve made all of the changes necessary to get the GNOME theme working again. I’ve also refactored it so that it loads nicely from SystemPreferences, which the previous version didn’t do.
Once I get the final details worked out, you should be able to run your GNUstep applications alongside GNOME applications without any problems and without them sticking out like a sore thumb.
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I find it amazing that in 2011 the advantages of GNU/Linux package management systems are considered an innovation by “mainstream” IT folks. APT and RPM have been providing such features for more than a decade. I started using GNU/Linux with Caldera eDesktop in 2000. Then “the store” was a single CD. Soon distros were using 3 or 4 CDs of software. Now Debian lists 53 CDs in the set. The CDs are rarely used these days. They are more a unit of measure of the size of the app store. Folks mostly do some default installation and add packages from the store to customize it. The package management system installs requested packages and all dependencies automatically from web servers.
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Red Hat Family
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Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB) research analysts increased their price target for shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from $40.00 to $48.00 in a research note issued to investors on Wednesday. They currently have a “hold” rating on the company.
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Fedora
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So if you care about the future of Fedora’s participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), for the love of all that you hold dear and then some beyond that, please read on.
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All in all, having used Fedora 14 since it was released I can happily recommend it.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When Ayatana was founded, a comprehensive design team was hired by Canonical. The team came from a variety of backgrounds: many came from brand, graphic design, product development, interaction design and other walks of life.
The term ‘melting pot of personalities’ is an understatement, and many were new to open source and still taking it all in, but all were enthused and inspired by the idea of great design infused with strong community.
The first project to come out of the team was called Notify OSD and provided a new approach to notification bubbles, which we were all too familiar with in Ubuntu. For years we had seen these boring yellow square bubbles appear in the top-right of the Gnome desktop when an application needed to tell you something.
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There is a discussion going on @ Ayatana mailing list regarding the merge of Me Menu (the applet that displays your name, used to set your status) and Messaging Menu (Chat, Email, etc.) and mockups have already started to be posted:
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We are pleased to announce that the next Ubuntu User Days event is scheduled to take place from Saturday January 29th 2011, 09:45 UTC until Sunday January 30th 2011, 03:00 UTC. To quote the wiki page, “User Days was created to be a set of courses offered during a one day period to teach the beginning or intermediate Ubuntu user the basics to get them started with Ubuntu”. Logs from the last Ubuntu User Days event are also available for anyone who might be interested.
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Oracle released VirtualBox 4.0 yesterday.
Amongst other major changes [1] one the most noticeable improvement is that they fixed Unity/Compiz crashes in Natty. This means that we can now run Unity in a VM and the performances are pretty good.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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First of all, I think there is a huge difference in American and European assumptions and perspectives, and a big question is whether the rest of the world will end up looking more like Europe or America vis-a-vis two key areas: cost of data plans, and whether phones become much more application centric.
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Ryan Paul, Open Source Editor
My Christmas wish for 2011 is a truly competitive and open MeeGo-based phone from a major vendor. Although Linux has gained considerable traction in the mobile and embedded market, most of the available devices are locked down or have insular software stacks that don’t allow the user to take advantage of the platform’s true underlying power.
MeeGo has the potential to be a game changer because it is closely aligned with the upstream technology ecosystem and gives application developers significantly more flexibility, including a rich, high-performance native toolkit. It could bring much-needed competition to the Linux smartphone space by offering a strong alternative to Google’s excellent Android platform.
Although MeeGo has considerable potential, the platform is still a work in progress and none of the major hardware companies behind it have been able to bring all the pieces together into a compelling product yet. I’m hoping that 2011 is the year that Nokia or one of the other major MeeGo stakeholders will finally deliver MeeGo on a desirable handset.
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Android
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If you are an Android user and you forgot to send Christmas Greetings to your friends and associates because you don’t have access to your PC, Hakuna Matata.
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Fun never stops at Google. The Android ‘maker’ recently sent seven payloads into the near space from Ione California. These payloads carried 7 Nexus S phones. Google says in a blog that they wanted “an opportunity to collect some interesting data about the sensors in Nexus S – GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer.”
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It’s a shame there aren’t any video streaming programs on that list. If you use Linux and are familiar with Netflix then odds are you are aware of (what at this point feels like an age old argument) the issue of getting Netflix’s instant stream functional on your Linux system. In case you are not aware of this dilemma, in short:
It does not work
You see, even with all of the FOSS projects Netflix supports they choose to use the DRM ridden Silverlight plugin to stream video over the Internet. This prevents the streaming service from functioning on FOS operating systems (Linux, BSD, ect.) at this current point in time. Why the lack of support? Some will say Linux has a small market share so is not worth the extra time it takes to support the platform.
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According to the Eclipse committer statistics of the Eclipse Dash project, SAP is now the 4th largest corporate contributor to Eclipse projects based on the number of active committers.
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The v0.4 released in January 2010 was the first version when darktable, a digital photography workflow tool for Linux, became actually usable for daily use. With basic catalog management features, advanced editing tools and, above all, HDR precision darktable is rapidly becoming important part of Linux powered photographers’s workflow.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced the release of the first beta for version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Changes in MPL 2.0 include the removal of the “Original Software” and “Initial Developer” concepts, improved globalisation with the removal of many US-specific terms and concepts, better compatibility with other licences, as well as updated patent language that’s more in line with other major open source licences.
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As the FTC eyes consumer privacy issues and investigates an online “Do Not Track” option, it seems as though web browsers are responding in kind, offering their own solutions to better protect Internet users’ data. For its part, IE9 says it will offer “Tracking Protection” via the browser.
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Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 4 beta 8, a new pre-release milestone build of the open source Web browser. Beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices.
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Databases
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Project Releases
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With the release of Drupal 7.0 RC 3, expected to be the final release candidate, the stage is set for the arrival of Drupal 7, the next major release of the most popular open source content management system. The team has announced January 5 as the release date of Drupal 7.
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Oracle has announced the availability of VM VirtualBox 4.0. Acquired through Sun, VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop computers to run multiple guest operating systems simultaneously, allowing users to get the most flexibility and utilization out of their PCs, and supports a variety of host operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Oracle Solaris.
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Government
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Maude is a cabinet minister in the government of the United Kingdom.
“In December, the local government in the Canadian province of Quebec were the latest to announce a preference for open source. According to treasury board president Michelle Courchesne, free and open source software must satisfy three criteria: Does it meet our needs? Is it a quality product? Is the cost favourable?”
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Openness/Sharing
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3) How does Project REALISE leverage principles of the open source way?
REALISE will build on the growing awareness and interest in open source development, including assistive technologies, by:
* Developing an online community with trust in an open development culture
* Identifying relevant projects and people
* Engaging users to help define the problem
* Connecting parties interested in collaboration
* Building the solutions
* Identifying potential revenue streams
* Managing the collaboration and any intellectual property
* Engaging external parties in education and research
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It finally hit me the other day just why the open source way seems so much more elegantly designed (and less wasteful) to me than what I’ll call “the crowdsourcing way.”
1. Typical projects run the open source way have many contributors and many beneficiaries.
2. Typical projects run the crowdsourcing way have many contributors and few beneficiaries.
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Congratulations to Ukrainian Wikipedia on reaching 250,000 articles! The milestone article was officially created on Tuesday, December 21 at 8:45pm, Kyiv Time by user Anatoliy-024. Anatoily-024, a Wikipedian since 2008, has created 206 articles and made 6,000 edits to the Ukranian Wikipedia making this user the 110th most active contributor to this language Wikipedia.
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Programming
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DockBarX 0.42 is of course available in the WebUpd8 PPA for Karmic, Lucid, Maverick and Natty.
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Standards/Consortia/Web
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The new Firefox 4 Beta is here, and comes with WebGL activated by default. You can download this new beta here: http://firefox.com/beta.
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A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County District Court last week.
Jurors – well, potential jurors – staged a revolt.
They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they weren’t about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana. Never mind that the defendant in question also faced a felony charge of criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.
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Pat Robertson, the televangelist who once ran for president, said on his show “The 700 Club” that he thought marijuana should be legalized.
Yep, the Christian conservative preacher who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of punishing America for its abortion policy is now on the side of the marijuana lobby.
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I will soon publish the code (GPLv3-licensed), but in a more scientific society more code would have already been out there for others to collaborate and build upon the work of others.
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This blog is going to be very interesting to readers who feel that being a customer of Bell Canada Enterprises is a lot like flushing your hard earned money down the toilet.
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Skype is the process of recovering from a major outage that left users across the world unable to log into the VoIP service on Wednesday.
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How a star came from the East and was of East and how Ballmer was vexed by ARM
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What do Canada’s Wayne Crookes, the Big 4′s RIAA, Hollywood’s MPAA and brand new ICE agent Andrew Reynolds have in common? They all claim linking is the same as publishing. Crookes is using it to demand Canada’s Supreme Court effectively shut down the net in Canada.
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Science
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The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy released the long-awaited Memorandum on Scientific Integrity today.
If fully implemented by federal agencies and departments, the directive could help protect government scientists from pressure by special interests, and would ensure that the government can make fully informed decisions about public health and the environment.
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Health/Nutrition
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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a stunning exposé on a publicly-traded company called Life Partners Holdings. Are you ready for this? Life Partners creeps around asking the unemployed, the elderly and the sick (especially people with HIV/AIDS) to sell them their life insurance policies for cash. Then they bundle these policies into securities and sell them to vultures — oh, I am sorry, “investors.” Then the “investors” sit around and wait for people to die — the sooner the better for the purchasers of these death bonds. The future of this industry “looks bright,” chirps National Underwriters.
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St Joseph’s in Phoenix no longer affiliated to church as bishop also excommunicates doctor who allowed procedure
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The U.S. Congress approved legislation today to help rescuers and clean-up crews suffering from illnesses linked to the wreckage caused by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City.
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WikiLeaked cables released over the weekend revealed more about the US’ role as a global bully, trying to thrust unpopular genetically modified (GM) crops onto cautious governments and their citizens. In a 2007 cable from Craig Stapleton, then US Ambassador to France, he encouraged the US government to “reinforce our negotiating position with the EU on agricultural biotechnology by publishing a retaliation list.” A list, he added, that “causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility.”
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A West Australian organic farmer is in limbo, awaiting state government test results and facing genetic manipulation giant Monsanto’s legal wrath. Steve Marsh’s organic farm has been decertified over GM canola contamination from a neighbour’s farm.
Monsanto revealed today that it would give legal support to the GM grower if Mr Marsh sought redress for his losses through the courts.
“For years we called for Farmer Protection laws because GM contamination was inevitable once the Gene Technology Regulator issued unrestricted and unconditional commercial licences,” says Gene Ethics Executive Director, Bob Phelps.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Sir Paul Stephenson, the chief of London’s police force, has floated the idea of banning protest marches altogether, although he admits that it might be hard to do this because protesters might be so frustrated by a ban on marching that they become unruly. Interestingly, he doesn’t disqualify the idea on the grounds that protest marches are a legitimate form of political discourse.
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Victoria Borwick encourages protesters at anti-student fees demonstration to make complaints against Metropolitan police after ‘ghastly’ incident
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So when they see government acting in what appears to them an unethical manner, what do you expect them to do?
They protest.
And when the police act in what appear to them an unethical manner, they get even more upset. Even the Police Watchdog has called a video of Police actions ‘appalling.’
You teach them ethics, and then expect them to ignore it when you treat them in what they consider an unethical manner?
David Cameron and Nick Clegg have just given the next election to Labour. The kids won’t forget.
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Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit says it knows the names of all three police officers involved in an alleged assault during last summer’s G20 summit — but without independent witnesses it can only lay charges against one officer.
Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani, attended the SIU office on Wednesday morning accompanied by legal counsel, and was served with a summons and had the charge of assault with a weapon explained to him.
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The verdict in the case of Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak, charged with illegal assembly for his participation in a January 2008 Critical Mass ride against the siege on Gaza, will be handed down on December 27, 2010 at 10:00 at the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court. If convicted, Pollak is expected to be sentenced to three to six months in prison. A conviction in this case will activate an older three month suspended sentence, imposed on Pollak in a previous trial for protesting the construction of the Separation Barrier.
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According to the new thinking, an easier way to defeat the enemy was by attacking its rationale. In this context, “rationale” stands for whatever enables the enemy to operate as a coherent entity which works to achieve certain goals. Even with the enemy’s fighting force largely intact, without a rationale, it cannot pose a serious threat. Fighters can engage in random violence, but they no longer work together to achieve a purpose your own side considers undesirable.
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A Palestinian boy died Friday afternoon after Israeli gunboats opened fire on his fishing boat and flipped it over off the coast of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
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The Obama administration, ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer first reported, is about to issue an executive order that gives shape, contour and future life to indefinite detention for Guantánamo detainees. The order will provide for the continual detention of several dozen detainees – who will have access lawyers in order to periodically contest their detention.
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Many experts are skeptical that the TSA’s new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you’re comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.
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The Supreme Court of Canada knocked down a legal roadblock on Thursday and paved the way for a class-action lawsuit over military veterans’ pensions.
Military mechanic Dennis Manuge filed the suit on behalf of about 6,500 injured veterans and it was certified by the Federal Court. But that certification was later rejected by the Federal Court of Appeal.
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A growing body of psychological literature suggests that suicide bombers aren’t ideologues who are so committed to their cause that they’re willing to die for it — rather, they are suicidally depressed people who use the excuse of dying for a cause to psych themselves up to commit the deed, and as a loophole for committing suicide without committing a sin.
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The Wall Street Journal notes that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg “said the tree symbolizes the city and country’s resilience. … It was discovered in the rubble in October 2001 with snapped roots and a blackened trunk. The (pear) tree measured about eight feet high when it was taken to a Parks Department nursery in the Bronx to be nursed back to health. It now stands about 30 feet high.”
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Ho ho ho: Tennessee anti-terrorist official gave the ACLU of Tennessee a hell of a Christmas present: according to them, the ACLU belongs on a map of terrorism events and other suspicious activity: “Equating a group’s attempts to protect religious freedom in Tennessee with suspicious activity related to terrorism is outrageous.
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Cablegate
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The potential United Nations investigation should therefore provide a gleam of hope to all of the other political prisoners in the US being held without trial and in solitary confinement.
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So far every known piece of evidence against Bradley Manning comes from one source, Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was institutionalized by the police three weeks before he alleges Manning contacted him and confessed to turning over materials to Wikileaks.
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The conditions of Bradley Manning’s confinement became a top issue in the press last week as bloggers traded blows with US officials over allegations that Manning endures inhumane treatment at the Quantico, VA detainment facility. In the midst of this rush by the Defense Department to contextualize Manning’s confinement, I traveled to see the man himself at the Marine Corps detainment facility in Quantico, VA.
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Wikileaks isn’t the only site struggling to stay up these days because service providers are pulling their support. It appears that at least one person who wants to provide mirror access to Wikileaks documents is having the same trouble.
Recently we heard from a user who mirrored the Cablegate documents on his website. His hosting provider SiteGround suspended his account, claiming that he “severely” violated the SiteGround Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy. SiteGround explained that it had gotten a complaint from an upstream provider, SoftLayer, and had taken action “in order to prevent any further issues caused by the illegal activity.”
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gave an interview with msnbc’s Cenk Uygur today.
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Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a “dissent tax” on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one’s ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a “quasi-public sphere,” where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent.
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The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.
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Uncovering the true scale of the WikiLeaks-inspired Anonymous cyber attacks, they were not as bad as we were led to believe, writes Technology Correspondent Benjamin Cohen.
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When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called my cellphone on a Friday afternoon in November, I could barely hear him. The conversation, held amid the usual tumult of Rome’s airport on a weekend, was strangely short. Assange talked slowly, making sure to pronounce each word carefully, his deep, almost baritone voice, reducing itself almost to a whisper at the end of each sentence. A few moments before the conversation, I had noticed how the Italian police seemed particularly interested in the little luggage that I was carrying, and that as the phone had rung, they were examining the cloth that I had used to wipe the screen of my iPad. Were they looking for drugs, or explosives, or both?
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been named “Man of the Year” by French newspaper Le Monde.
The newspaper is one of five publications to cooperate with the whistleblowing website on its its latest release of leaked documents.
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There’s a lot of people using the word “traitor” in conjunction with Pte Bradley Manning, and “anti-American” in conjunction with both Wikileaks and it’s public face and founder Jullian Assange. This post is about whether that’s fair or not; it’s about the motivations of whistleblowers.
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I wrote a book to teach kids and beginners computer programming by making games entitled, “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python”. After a few months of distributing it online for free, I began to use the print-on-demand service at CreateSpace.com (owned by Amazon.com) to self-publish the book. I continue to make the book available for free online ( at http://inventwithpython.com ), but it was nice to receive a form of compensation I could buy burritos with.
[...]
But this is why it is up to us to make defending freedom of speech one of its business interests. Amazon’s own claims that it pulled WikiLeaks for violation of its Terms of Services and not due to political pressure are equally lame and preposterous. We must vote with our voices and our pocketbooks, and I hope to set an example for others with my actions.
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But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime. The sort of information that a news organization can be prosecuted for publishing is limited to: nuclear secrets (Atomic Energy Act), the identities of covert agents (Intelligence Identities Protection Act), and certain forms of communications intelligence (Section 798 of the Espionage Act).
Perhaps lamenting that the U.S. does not have an Official Secrets Act like the United Kingdom, right wing columnists have consistently misinterpreted these Acts, or have cited other provisions of our espionage laws which almost surely do not apply to Wikileaks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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I was here in the desert to investigate a tip-off I’d had that BP had a near-disaster at its Caspian offshore rig that was extraordinarily similar to the Deepwater Horizon blow-out. But BP covered it up.
What I didn’t know was that WikiLeaks was about to release a State Department memo which referred to a small piece of this BP game. Rather than go to Azerbaijan to check the facts, the Wiki newspapers called BP in London for comment.
That put BP on high alert and my sources in high danger.
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Take Climate Change. I know a lot of people who don’t believe that humans can have any effect upon climate. Others think that there’s still question about the issue. It’s not that they are stupid. It’s that there are a lot of people with a vested interest in fooling the general public, mostly because if could hurt their profits.
Over year ago I wrote Astroturf in the Climate Change discussion, which covered how industry has been using fake organizations to fool the general public. Things have only gotten worse since. So I thought it was time to visit the topic again.
[...]
Seriously. British Petroleum helped to write the Climate Legislation adopted by the European Union. The changes that BP asked for will help their profits, by passing the costs for BP’s actions onto the taxpayers of the EU. Wasn’t that nice of them?
And then we’ve got our friends at Wikileaks, who have released a cables covering United States embassy actions to block substantive Climate Change action at Cancun. Curiously those actions seem to benefit the powerful United States energy industry. It’s a rather unusual government conspiracy that benefits those who are complaining about it.
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There is a strong Asterix vibe to the annual cork oak harvest of the Alentejo in Portugal. Deep into one of the 350 remaining cork oak forests (in my case Herdade dos Fidalgos, near Lisbon) sometime between June and August you’ll suddenly come across a team of about 20 men, ranging in ages from 16 to 70, striking huge twisted trees with axes. Then, with a sensitivity you would not associate with an axe, they prise the juicy bark from the tree and it is levered from the trunk in great, satisfying pieces. From the base, right up to the beginning of the branches, it is peeled away to reveal the oak’s red, nude surface underneath.
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NASA reported that it was the hottest ‘meteorological year’ [December to November] on record and likely to be the hottest calendar year.
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And if you haven’t seen that article that’s spreading across the Internet faster than the methane it describes in the Gulf, let me summarize. The media blackout in the Gulf has mostly prevented the news from spreading, but Terrence Aym (the author of the article) wants everyone to know the truth. A massive undersea methane bubble has been disturbed by the Gulf oil spill. Add in a cracked ocean floor and elevated seabed, and you have the recipe for Instant Doomsday, which will be ready for delivery within the next six months or so.
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Various conservative Christian leaders have united with the Cornwall Alliance for the release of a shocking new 12-part DVD series, “Resisting The Green Dragon,” that attempts to debase and discredit the environmental movement by portraying it as “one of the greatest deceptions of our day” that is “seducing your children” and “striving to put America and the world under its destructive control.”
The hyperbolic accusations spewed throughout the video give it the appearance of a ridiculous parody, calling environmentalism “deadly,” a “cult” and a “spiritual deception.” Unfortunately, the comical PSA is anything but a joke.
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Finance
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At first glance, Guo Yilei looks like a Chinese success story. Born to a poor peasant family in China’s remote Gansu province, he’s now a 26-year-old computer programmer in the Big Cabbage (as some call Beijing nowadays). By Chinese standards he makes decent money, more than $70 a week. When he has work, that is. It can take months to find the next job. And meanwhile, he’s living in Tangjialing, a reeking slum on the city’s edge where he and his girlfriend rent a 100-square-foot studio apartment for $90 a month. “When I was at school, I believed in the saying, ‘Knowledge can help you turn over a new leaf,’” says Guo. “But since I’ve started working, I only half-believe it.”
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Two years before the financial crisis hit, Merrill Lynch confronted a serious problem. No one, not even the bank’s own traders, wanted to buy the supposedly safe portions of the mortgage-backed securities Merrill was creating.
Bank executives came up with a fix that had short-term benefits and long-term consequences. They formed a new group within Merrill, which took on the bank’s money-losing securities. But how to get the group to accept deals that were otherwise unprofitable? They paid them. The division creating the securities passed portions of their bonuses to the new group, according to two former Merrill executives with detailed knowledge of the arrangement.
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Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing Website WikiLeaks.
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Although there are many (too many to list) superb categories in which the United States is undeniably “exceptional,” there are several important categories where we lag behind the world.
By “lag behind,” we don’t mean the U.S. simply falls a bit short of the leaders; we mean the U.S. is not even on the same page. And by “the world,” we’re not referring to countries like Sweden, Norway, Germany and Switzerland; we’re referring to places like Latvia, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, Pakistan and Haiti.
Dr. Jody Heymann is director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy, chairwoman of the Project on Global Working Families, and adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Recently, Dr. Heymann and her team put together some statistics comparing America with the rest of the world.
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A huge new port along the Rio coast highlights the Chinese drive into South America, writes Tom Phillips. Investments will guarantee China access to soy, oil and other resources.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Fischer, who also wants to get rid of the “curse” that is the grizzly bear…
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They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Yesterday, following on his ruling this Spring that the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of an Islamic charity’s lawyers in 2004 violated federal surveillance law, Judge Vaughn Walker in the Northern District of California federal court issued his final order in the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama. The order granted the plaintiffs an award of $2.5 million in money damages and well-earned attorneys’ fees for the government’s violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the same law underlying many of the claims in EFF’s ongoing lawsuits against the NSA’s mass surveillance program, Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA. As one of the plaintiffs said of the ruling to the Associated Press, “the system worked.”
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We are now ready to propose an alpha version of Privacy Icons that takes into account the feedback and participation we’ve received along the way. We’ve simplified the core set dramatically and tightened up the language. While the icons don’t touch on all topics, we do think they significantly move the discussion on privacy, as well as the general level of literacy about privacy, forward. We do not want to let perfection or devotion to taxonomy get in the way of the good.
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The Register doesn’t take this terribly seriously, because it’s convinced that Vaizey is too shrewd to get dragged into the filtering mess that afflicted the Australian government. Maybe he is, but suppose he finds himself unable to hold back the tide of backbench wrath towards the evil Internet, with its WikiLeaks and porn and all. The implicit logic of the approach would fit neatly with everything we’ve seen so far. First of all, the objective is self-evidently ‘good’ — to protect children from pornography. Secondly, we’re not being illiberal — if you want to allow porn all you have to do is to register that fact with your ISP. What could be fairer than that?
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With all the attempts by corporations to distance themselves from Wikileaks — often claiming dubious legal issues or terms of use violations that don’t seem to really exist — the EFF is pointing out that one of the (many, many) Wikileaks mirror sites was told by his hosting company he had to remove it or he’d lose his account.
[...]
Taking down a site because it might possibly be subject to a DDoS attack in the future? How does that make sense? We were confused enough when EveryDNS claimed that getting hit by a DDoS violated its terms of service, but its even more confusing to think that the remote possibility that at some date in the future you might get hit by a DDoS is a terms of service violation.
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From EFF, a disturbing story about a customer of SiteGround, an ISP, who had his account suspended and was forced to remove a mirror of the Wikileaks Cablegate archive because SoftLayer, the ISP that provides SiteGround with its bandwidth, objected. Imagine a future in which your ability to host a website depends on not upsetting your ISP, its upstream provider, the provider upstream of that, and so on, all the way up to some giant tier-one telco like AT&T.
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Some airlines’ behaviour towards passengers during the snow-disrupted Christmas getaway was ‘unacceptable’, according to a regulator.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) found a number of cases when airlines had failed to meet their obligations to passengers during the disruption.
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At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we’re going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting.
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What do an online donation to the International Red Cross, a bank transfer to family members living in Vietnam, and a payment sent through PayPal for an expensive rug in Turkey have in common? The government wants to know about them. And, if new rules proposed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, go into effect, the government will — along with your name, address, bank account number, and other sensitive financial information.
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Unfortunately, since then, things only got worse. Radley Balko has the full details on what the case was all about, and it seems like a clear case of the government abusing its powers to stifle the speech of someone they found to be annoying. And, unfortunately, it’s worked. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case and so the harassment succeeded. You should read the full details, but the short version is that Reynolds was a very vocal activist on the issue of pain relief. When Assistant US Attorney Tanya Treadway indicted a doctor and his wife, supposedly for over-prescribing painkillers, Reynolds organized protests which apparently succeeded in getting a fair amount of attention.
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Tags:Maoist|Dr Binayak Sen|Christian Medical College
Dr Binayak Sen is a 58-year-old paediatrician and public health physician with a 25-year record of providing health care to the adivasi people of Chhattisgarh.
Binayak sen is a graduate of Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore. One of the top students of his batch, Binayak completed his post graduation in paediatrics in the early 1970s. For most of the years since then, he has devoted his life to health care in poor communities.
[...]
Binayak was among the first to draw public attention to widespread human rights violations in the wake of the Salwa Judum. An all-India team investigated and published a report on Salwa Judum in November 2005.
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A smooth, creaseless type-written sheet of paper might prove to be the decisive piece of evidence in the trial of celebrated doctor and activist Binayak Sen. ‘Article 37′ (A-37) is an unsigned letter urging Dr. Sen to send a fact-finding mission to probe alleged police atrocities in Chhattisgarh in his capacity as the State president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.
The prosecution insists that the document proves Dr. Sen was in direct correspondence with the banned CPI (Maoist). The defence believes that the letter is the clearest indication that the Chhattisgarh police fabricated evidence to frame Dr. Sen.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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An email, allegedly sent by WWF International director of corporate relations Maria Boulos to WWF Germany executive marketing officer Dirk Reinsberg on 10 December, warned that the campaign was “misleading”.
According to the contents of Boulos email, WWF Germany launched “a global product” (the WWF file format) “on a global website”, without advising WWF International of its intentions.
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The driver does not just disable printing it also adds an extra page to the end of the document. They say it’s there “just to inform the receiver”, but I don’t buy it. Marketing, that’s what it is really all about. Every time you make and spread a .WWF file, you are making publicity for the WWF. Bottomline.
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“A Guide to The Open Internet” is a wonderful InfoGraphic that does a masterful job of visually explaining the importance of Net Neutrality, by contrasting the Internet of the present with The Ghost of the Internet Yet to Come. Anyone who doesn’t understand the issue should definitely take a look.
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The Federal Communications Commission is releasing the details of its new net neutrality Order in stages. Although the FCC’s new ban on “unreasonable discrimination” for wired ISPs allows certain kinds of traffic discrimination (not all bits need be equal), the agency made clear after today’s meeting that “paid prioritization” deals with Internet companies are unlikely to be allowed. Critics had worried that the new Order would only affect outright website blocking, leaving paid prioritization untouched (or even implicitly sanctioned).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The IP subcommittee was around for ages, when it was under the control of those who represented the industry. When a reformer is finally in position to be put in charge, the subcommittee is killed and its duties are handed over to the larger committee (controlled by someone who represents the industry). Then, as soon as the reformer is out, the subcommittee comes back? Congress at it’s most shameful: a pretty clear indication that Congressional decisions on intellectual property are driven by the industry. This is how regulatory capture works.
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Copyrights
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Yesterday, we reported on the RIAAs efforts to get Mastercard to cut off payments to MegaUpload. Today, we have received an exclusive response from MegaUpload on this news.
Blocking so-called “rogue websites” isn’t necessarily in the law books in the US yet, but things are heating up between the RIAA, MPAA and several websites they accuse of facilitating copyright infringement. Some of these sites, it turns out, are cyberlockers – websites that host large files for their users and allows for many to download those files as a side bonus of saving some companies bandwidth costs. Some note the recent strategy of pressuring payment methods to cut off funding from websites they accuse of duping consumers into paying for pirated content as a more recent change in strategy in the organizations strategy to fight piracy.
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This augurs well for leave to appeal also being granted in the CMEC K-12 case, in which the application was filed a few weeks later.
If the Supreme Court proceeds in its usual prompt manner, we will likely have a judgment in the CMEC K-12 leave application in late January or February.
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If there ever were a group that should be embracing new business models and encouraging the music industry to look forward instead of back, you would think it would be A2IM — the American Association of Independent Music. After all, they don’t have the same legacy issues facing the big four record labels represented by the RIAA. Instead, they can be more creative and willing to experiment with what works well. In fact, over the years, we’ve noted some really cool and unique experiments done by lots of truly creative and innovative indie labels — including many who are members of A2IM (and even some represented on A2IM’s board).
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Just as in many other copyright troll shakedowns, Righthaven relies on the threat of enormous copyright statutory damages (up to $150,000) to scare defendants, often individual bloggers operating non-commercial websites, into a quick settlements. They also threaten to seize the domain names, a threat without basis in law. Even if a blogger has meritorious defenses, the costs of defending can often be overwhelming – unless they blogger has pro bono counsel to help even the odds.
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Perfect 10 is a company that, for a brief period of time, apparently published a rather expensive porn magazine. Since then, it seems to have served a single purpose: to file ridiculous copyright lawsuits that it almost always loses, but which have helped to define case law concerning copyright issues. Various Perfect 10 decisions are frequently cited in copyright lawsuits — for example, its multiple losses concerning claims that search engines showing thumbnails infringe on copyrights. Earlier this year, Rapidshare filed a very entertaining countersuit against Perfect 10, which goes into great detail suggesting that the company serves little purpose other than being something of a copyright troll. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to not use tools provided to take down infringing content, and to alert internet service providers of potential infringement in ways that are almost impossible for them to do anything about. For example, it’s famous for filing deficient DMCA notices that do not properly indicate where the specific content is located.
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ACTA
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Although the current excitement over the gradual release of the Wikileaks documents is justified in that it concerns what is undoubtedly an important development for the future of the Internet, it has rather overshadowed another area where crucial decisions are being made: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In fact, ACTA finally seems to be nearing the end of its slow and painful crawl through the secret negotiation process that only recently we have been allowed glimpses of. And the more we learn, the more troublesome it is.
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But it was a lie of omission. De Gucht has now admitted that some countries may have to change their local laws to comply with ACTA, but tried to defend the earlier statements by saying since there are no uniform EU rules on penal enforcement for IP, it was technically correct that no changes were required to the EU-wide rules.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Viva Voce
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
12.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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‘The Source’ (formerly known as Radio Shack) appear to have hit upon a rather unique way of selling their Windows 7 running Toshiba laptops to the public judging by a recent flyer…
Show them running what looks like an Ubuntu wallpaper.
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Like I said, something like that is so common that maybe I don’t need a picture after all. Personally I’ve seen BSODs and error messages in airports and restaurants, even in doctor’s offices or factories.
The first of the two things that ran through my mind on the bus last night, as people openly wondered
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Are your friends convinced that they should be paying for their operating systems because Linux sounds too complicated or because they think it won’t do what they want it to?
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Spruce up your Christmas season with The Perfect Tree, a cheerful holiday offering from Anawiki Games! Based on the classic Christmas tale of the same name, the game tells the story of a lonely little pine tree and the player’s efforts to help it become the perfect Christmas tree.
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So my question is, why have all these differences sprung up? For example, the Skype site shows different RPMs for Fedora and openSUSE. (Then again, it shows different DEBs for Debian and Ubuntu as well.) Why can’t the maintainers of these distributions pare away the differences as much as possible to maintain inter-distribution compatibility? Wouldn’t this just make everyone’s life easier?
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It was a dark and stormy night.
The biting wind drove needles of ice into my face as I looked at my Android phone one more time to get a fix on my location. The residential streets of Framingham were winding and far different from the clean grids of my Midwestern home. In the icy wind I’m sure a squinted my way past a street sign somewhere, and though my GPS could tell me where I was, I couldn’t make sense of which direction to go yet.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: We take a look back at our favourite news stories, discoveries, dares and ballots from the previous 23 episodes and ask you to choose your biggest Linux-related events from 2010.
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In this special episode, Fab reviews Gran Turismo on the PS3. Merry Christmas!
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Kernel Space
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The kernel now includes some components for supporting operation as a Xen host (Dom0). Switching into and out of sleep mode should be accelerated by the use of LZO compression. Following years of work, almost all parts of the kernel are now able to run without using the big kernel lock (BKL).
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In early November we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs on an early Linux 2.6.37 kernel as our latest round of tests comparing these two leading Linux file-systems. There were some changes in the Linux disk performance with these file-systems using the latest Linux kernel code, but overall it was not too interesting. However, as the Linux 2.6.37 kernel does introduce a new mount option for Btrfs, the space_cache option, we decided to explore its performance in today’s article.
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Graphics Stack
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Viewsonic provided a patch to Nvidia’s reference Tegra code to support their gtablet today. Which is progress!
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Applications
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Foobnix is very powerfull music player with CUE, last.fm, 3000+ radios, tabs, free online music playing, hotkeys, tray icons, easy navigation, user friendly.
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Both Octave and QtOctave are in the *Ubuntu and Fedora repositories, so they only take a moment to install.
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recordMyDesktop – This is a powerful command-line screencasting application which uses open formats to save the obtaining video (Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio). recordMyDesktop also provides GTK and Qt frontends, for both GNOME and KDE (the Qt version is not included in Ubuntu’s repositories, but it can be downloaded from SourceForge).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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There’s the release of Wine 1.3.10 on this Christmas Eve for those with extra time to test the newest Wine over the holidays. Wine 1.3.10 has a number of changes worth checking out.
Wine 1.3.10 changes include support for notification balloons in the system tray, the obsolete AudioIO sound driver has been dropped, there’s more work on Wine ActiveX support, various MSI installer fixes, and the pre-loader is now used for 64-bit too. There’s also translation updates and various bug-fixes.
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Another month, another Winetricks.
Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today. new verbs icodecs, msnasn1, opensymbol, wmi, xmllite; removed obsolete verbs audioio, dcom98, eadm, urlmon
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Games
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All-in-all, Hedgewars is great. It succeeds in recreating that special feeling you had when playing the original Worms game, and it does it actually better. Great configurability, nice sounds and great music, both single player and online playing support, these are its strong points. Give it a try if you haven’t already!
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The GNU/Linux friendly visual novels developers, Winter Wolves and Tycoon Games (which are run by the same man), are offering a 50% discount on all of their games until 31st December 2010 EST !
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That’s the right direction, and I really hope that 2011 will be remembered as the “Gaming on Linux” year.
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That’s where Undercover UXO, a new game for the XO laptop, can help. With a $77,788 grant from the U.S. State Department and in collaboration with Golden West Humanitarian Foundation, Corey Bohil is developing Undercover UXO to teach children in war-torn countries to spot and avoid the warning signs of land mines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO)
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But the new path that the 0 A.D. team is endeavoring to forge is one to watch closely, as it may open up fascinating new opportunities for VARs on a totally novel front.
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Puppy Games just told us that they will release the source code for Revenge of the Titans if the Humble Indie Bundle reaches $1.75 million! We’re already well past $1.5 million with two days to go, so this should be within reach.
This announcement is special because Revenge of the Titans is a brand-new game, released mere days ago after years of development. This may seem like a reckless leap of faith to some. What if people stop buying it once it’s open-source? What if piracy runs rampant? What if people start selling reskinned clones?
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In March of this year Nexuiz was forked as Xonotic following some disagreements among the Nexuiz developers and other contributors following the announcement of the Nexuiz commercial game. Since that point not too many details have emerged on Xonotic aside from it being said this new game would be a lot different. Well, the wait for finally seeing what’s in store for Xonotic is now over. Maik Merten, the former Nexuiz co-leader, has written to us informing us they have just released Xonotic 0.1 Preview.
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The long awaited Sabayon Christmas Gaming DVD is available for hours of enjoyment. Sabayon is a Gentoo-based binary distribution that’s easy-to-use and comes complete with browser plugins, hardware drivers, and multimedia codecs that enhance usability. It has a large repository of additional software and their own package management solution with graphical interface. Updates come so fast and furious that it could almost be considered a rolling release distro. Now all that goodness comes wrapped up in a shiny new gaming package.
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Yesterday I reviewed AssaultCube, a realistic shooter game based upon the Cube engine, so today it’s time to have a look at Sauerbraten, another game in the series of games based on this engine. The version which I’m going to talk about is the latest available at the moment, “Justice Edition”.
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Desktop Environments
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The window manager is the most important part of the Linux desktop environment. It defines how your windows look, how they behave, how applications are launched, and how they’re closed. In many cases, window managers have evolved into complete desktop environments, helping with file management, configuration editing and computer management.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest:
* Start of a Plasma-based “Welcome Screen” for applications
* Support for searching events and todos by date/range in the Events Plasma Runner, and the start of a first Plasmoid (“BusyWidget”) written in QML
* More work on KMail Mobile, including a change to make it start twice as fast
* Start of work to give Okteta a mobile interface
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The KMyMoney Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KMyMoney version 4.5.2. This is a bugfix version from the 4.5 series and a Christmas present of the developers to the community.
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Right before Christmas, KDE has published the first candidate for the upcoming release of KDE Platform, Plasma and Applications 4.6. The focus at this stage is on fixing bugs and completing translations and artwork. As such, the rework of the Oxygen icon set is nearing completion, many bugs reported by testers in recent weeks have been fixed and stabilization is still in full swing.
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GNOME Desktop
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Today I’m officially joining the GNOME Old Farts Club. I thought it would be a good time to make the first release of The Board. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Board 0.1.0! I wanted to do this a few weeks ago but with so many moving parts in our platform it was actually a bit hard to reach a point where all dependencies were actually working fine together. So, what is this release about?
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I was testing Mandriva ONE 2010.2 and, sure enough, my other partitions could not be accessed in Dolphin (it reported the same error message when trying to mount them). I believe this is done to prevent damage to the primary OS in the computer, be it Linux or Windows.
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Red Hat Family
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Doff your chapeau for leading Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which just uncorked another tremendous quarter. Its 21% sales growth, to $236 million, beat analyst estimates by 4%, but that wasn’t good enough to light a fire under Red Hat’s shares. Earnings only met the consensus target exactly, at $0.20 per share.
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Even in better times, the idea of landing the headquarters of a high-flying tech company with more than a billion in cash would be enough to tantalize even the most seasoned developer.
Factor in current market conditions, and the fact that almost nothing new is getting built, and you can understand the intense interest in Red Hat’s search for 300,000 square feet of office space.
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At first glance, Red Hat Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems are partnering up to jointly promote open source cloud solutions. But take a closer look and TalkinCloud wonders if Red Hat and Eucalyptus are partnering up to compete more effectively against the RackSpace OpenStack cloud effort.
GigaOm does a great job describing a potentially intense showdown between OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Here’s why VARs, MSPs and cloud services providers should care: Traditional cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure are proprietary platforms, meaning that it’s difficult to move customer applications from one public cloud to the next.
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Fedora
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Even though I’m on vacation, I had some fun catching up with some geeky Fedora work, like handling bugs and package maintenance over the last few days.
[...]
I’m still hung up on needing some additional and more complicated Python pieces, like querying the volume level of a source or sink so I can introduce a VU-meter like control as part of the interface changes. But in the meantime, I’ve started to get much better and faster at implementing ideas in PyGTK. I’m not sure my coding style is as good as it should be, but my understanding of concepts has gotten fairly good, so I can translate PyGTK API docs into the ability to do something. I gave a couple conference speeches over the past year on PyGTK that I hoped would give other people in similar shoes — people who can write scripts but aren’t familiar with GUI programming — a primer that allows them to “cross the bridge” into exciting new territory.
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Debian Family
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What a better time than Christmas to bring all the best from 2010 into an updated release of Linux Mint Debian.
* All Mint 10 features
* 64-bit support
* Performance boost (using cgroup, the notorious “4 lines of code better than 200″ in user-space)
* Installer improvements (multiple HDDs, grub install on partitions, swap allocation, btrfs support)
* Better fonts (Using Ubuntu’s libcairo, fontconfig and Ubuntu Font Family) and language support (ttf-wqy-microhei, ttf-sazanami-mincho, ttf-sazanami-gothic installed by default)
* Better connectivity and hardware support (pppoe, pppoeconf, gnome-ppp, pppconfig, libgl1-mesa-dri, libgl1-mesa-glx, libgl1-mesa-dev, mesa-utils installed by default)
* Better sound support (addressing conflicts between Pulse Audio and Flash)
* Updated software and packages
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There is a discussion going on @ Ayatana mailing list regarding the merge of Me Menu (the applet that displays your name, used to set your status) and Messaging Menu (Chat, Email, etc.) and mockups have already started to be posted:
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Nothing is open until your OS is open. And, this is why I work on Ubuntu.
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Giz-China has acquired screenshots of an upcoming Ubuntu Netbook 10.10-powered, 10-inch tablet from an unspecified manufacturer. Aside from a few hardware specs, the details surrounding the mystery tablet are rather slim, providing no indication of a targeted release window or cost. That said, the device may get a formal showing next month at CES 2011 if it’s actually legit.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint community brings Linux Mint 10 features and new enhancments to the new release Linux Mint Debian 201012 based on Debian 6 Squeeze along with many up todate packages. so in this post we will take a quick screenshots tour for LMDE 201012.
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Phones
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Global sales of handsets topped 1.35-1.45 billion units in 2010, with smartphones reaching 270-280 million units for a penetration rate of 20%, according data released by market research firms. For 2011, sales of smartphones will increase to 400-420 million units, accounting for 25-27% of total handset sales of 1.45-1.55 billion units projected for the year. Smartphone sales will increase 40-50% versus just 10% for the overall handset market in 2011.
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Tablets
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Giz-China has revealed some images of an Ubuntu powered multitouch tablet by an unknown manufacturer showing off the Unity interface.
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Amid an enterprise environment that is now more receptive to utility computing and focused on service-based contracts, open source software adoption has grown over the past two years and entered the IT mainstream.
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Are companies really willing to spend thousands of dollars per year just ‘renting’ a licence for one or two copies of MATLAB, which keeps nagging them for it assumes they are so-called ‘pirates’ (and the BSA comes knocking to ensure there are up-to-date licensing instances)? The answer is usually “no”, but users of MATLAB may not know that software already exists to offer them an alternative, just as Firefox helps replace Internet Explorer and also outperform it in many technical ways.
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Closed source software means that Microsoft owns the software, and prevents any kind of unauthorized use of the software, which means that when you find a bug, performing a “workaround” for the bug is at Microsoft’s whimsey. Why would anyone want closed source software? By definition, the software writers have no interest in using their own software. Rather, they have every interest in being an roadblock to fixing bugs. Unless Bill Gates is watching them, they really have no reason to focus on the customer.
I have a Windows horror story. Windows DRM won’t let me uninstall it. Because the software is in an opaque box, I might as well be a flint-weilding neanderthal for all my ability to correct the uninstall process. Now I have to reinstall windows, the walk of shame. The only workaround is to destroy every software on my PC.
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Find a nice holiday picture on the Internet (make sure it is freely licensed, perhaps by Creative Commons) and use GIMP, Inkscape or some other freely available software to make a greeting card out of it. Put your own sentiments down on the card, telling the person why you like them, and how you would like to spend some more time with them this coming year. Make a little “coupon” as an offer to do a certain number of hours of “computer work” for them and put the “coupon” in the card.
I do some of this “computer work” every year when I visit my family in Pennsylvania. Some of them would be considered “power users” and some would be considered “powerless users” (and some actually considered “Luddites”), but none of them have the training and experience that I have. So I help them fix small problems, upgrade their software, do a backup of their software and even help them evaluate new purchases (and even advise them when new purchases would not do much for them).
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Why buy the cow when the milk is free? While commercial software is usually worth the cost, free is better. And of the open source applications that abound throughout the world, many are as good or better than their for-pay counterparts. The “free-as-in-beer” philosophy that gave rise to Linux often also applies to apps written for the platform, with programs like KOffice giving Microsoft Office a run for its money.
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If 2010 was the year that taught open source “how to disappear completely,” 2011 will be the year we’re reminded that “anyone can play guitar”…or open source. At present, open source is de rigueur with the underdog class, those vendors seeking to challenge incumbents like Apple and Oracle.
But open source will take center stage with industry leaders in 2011, as it already has in the mobile battlefield with Google’s Android, much to Apple’s chagrin. It’s not just about using open source to gain market share. It’s also a matter of using open source to keep regulators at bay. As Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco rightly points out, open source saved mobile telecom operators from net neutrality regulations. The FCC decided that “meaningful recent moves toward openness” largely obviated the need for more regulation. That’s a message that even the stodgiest of proprietary players will want to mimic.
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But it turns out that this 150-page report from the Spanish CENATIC Foundation offers the best country-by-country analysis of the growth of open source around the world that’s currently available. Whether intended as such or not (it’s aimed principally at Spanish businesses), it forms an invaluable consolidated description of who’s been doing what where – complete with online links to referenced material.
As such, I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the larger and longer-term trends in the world of open source should download it [.pdf] – it’s free – peruse it (although maybe not over the holidays) and keep it for future reference.
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The battle lines for the mobile marketplace have been drawn, and the battle of the titans – Google, Apple, Microsoft — has begun. While the generals amass their troops, what have we here in the corner? A bunch of doodlers, cartoonists, storytellers, and other amateurs. Surely, this ragtag group won’t have any effect on the outcome of the battle–or will they?
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Google is to release as open source the developer tools WindowBuilder Pro and CodePro Profiler, both of which were acquired as part of its takeover of Instantiations. The code for the two tools is to be donated to the Eclipse Foundation. At the time of the takeover there was much speculation that the Eclipse-based tools could become Eclipse projects – this speculation has now proven to be correct. Other products which Google has made available free of charge since September, include GWT Designer, WindowTester Pro and CodePro AnalytiX, retain their proprietary status.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 will not include a ‘do not track’ privacy option to block targeted advertising, according to the web browser’s maker Mozilla.
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For Mozilla’s next browser version, let’s hope eight is enough. The independent software foundation has just released Beta 8 of the heavily overhauled new version of Firefox. Firefox 4 sports a trimmed-down user interface (as has been the trend started with Google Chrome and followed by Opera and IE9 beta). The browser also makes some significant internal changes, with a new add-in system, a faster JavaScript engine, and lots more HTML5 compatibility.
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Mozilla has pushed out a series of privacy icons that tell web surfers how their online data might be used depending on what site they’ve visited.
The open source browser maker’s user interface design guru, Aza Raskin, who announced just last week that he was leaving Mozilla in January, released an alpha version of the icons yesterday.
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CMS
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We are proud to present to you the third (and likely final) release candidate of Drupal 7.0. Big news since last time!
1. We’re back down to 0 critical issues again!
2. We’ve announced a January 5 release date for Drupal 7!
3. There are release parties being thrown worldwide on January 7. Please set one up in your town! (tips)
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BSD
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During this time of the year I expect to be bombarded with marketing messages aimed at getting me to open my wallet. Considering the FreeBSD Foundation’s own financial needs, I understand and tolerate the pledge drives and postal mail pleas from charities.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In the first article, operations manager at the FSF, John Sullivan talks about how the lending problem is an artificial scarcity in the digital age.
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Project Releases
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The GnuCash development team has announced the arrival of version 2.4.0 of its free accounting software for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. According to a mailing list post by developer Phil Longstaff, the latest stable release replaces the GtkHTML-based HTML engine used to display reports and graphs with WebKit, the engine used by Google’s Chrome web browser and Safari – while the WebKit-based renderer is preferred, the current GtkHTML engine can still be used.
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Government
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The crisis room at the European Union’s Directorate-General for External Relations has published several open source data mining tools, meant to provide real-time support for early warning and crisis response.
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Government policies that promote and encourage the use of open source software, and public administration using this type of software, are the two most important factors that explain the differences between geographic region’s uptake of open source.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia/Web
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The newest browsers boast huge performance improvements, but how much do you trust benchmarks trotted out to prove those claims? Do they reflect the real uses to which developers will put HTML 5 and JavaScript? We’ve extracted several benchmarks from our existing programs to measure actual versus theoretical performance.
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I’m not bragging when I note this, because who would? All I’m saying is, I’m a writer, I sit in front of my computer all day, I keep Twitter running in the Tweetie app, and I participate actively and avidly in the service. A person like me can pile up 4000 tweets in a matter of a couple of years as he goes about the business of earning a living. And the thing about those tweets is, you miss them when they go, like nieces and nephews. So when my tweetstream got mysteriously truncated to a measly 147 entries a week or so ago, I practiced due diligence. I tweeted Twitter’s Support account and posted a comment to its user forum, and sat back and waited for the absent posts to be restored. And waited. And waited. And waited. I’m still waiting.
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For the past several years at this time, Fox News has made certain that Christmas is the time of year for all good Americans to shun everyone who isn’t Christian. From Sarah Palin to Glenn Beck to Neil Cavuto, the call to reject such inclusive greetings as “Happy Holidays” is heard throughout the Fox News village.
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Health/Nutrition
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Fighting fraud committed against public health care programs is a top priority for the Obama Administration. On May 20, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the creation of a new interagency task force, the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), to increase coordination and optimize criminal and civil enforcement. These efforts not only protect the Medicare Trust Fund for seniors and the Medicaid program for the country’s neediest citizens, they also result in higher quality health care at a more reasonable price.
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Except over a glass of ruby Tannat wine or a sizzling tenderloin, most people pay little mind to Uruguay. But just mention this demure South American nation to the tobacco industry and watch the smoke billow. A long-burning row between the government in Montevideo and cigarette maker Philip Morris is slowly turning into the mother of asymmetric battles.
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Maya Parham loves McDonald’s. But not because of the food. According to a lawsuit filed in California last week the fast food giant is using Barbie, Shrek, Strawberry Shortcake and a galaxy of other toy and cartoon characters to lure in the six-year-old. Now Maya’s mother, Monet, wants it to stop.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Today, the Daily Mail publishes for the first time the legal document which could trigger a full coroner’s inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly.
The document, formally known as a memorial was written by group of campaigning doctors who have been trying to secure an inquest since 2004.
It lists the sequence of events which led up to Dr Kelly’s death and the legal reasons they believe an inquest ought to be held.
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Danish police have been ordered to pay tens of thousands of pounds compensation to hundreds of climate protesters, after a court ruling today. The unprecedented ruling coincides with the release of an audio recording from the policing of a protest outside the UN climate talks in Copenhagen last December, which allegedly shows Danish police ordering officers to beat activists and journalists.
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Six of Kenya’s most powerful men, including the son of founding president Jomo Kenyatta, two cabinet ministers, the head of the civil service and a former police chief, have been formally accused by the international criminal court of committing “massive crimes” during the 2007 election crisis.
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TSA checkpoints at airports are at the front lines of preventing terrorism. When you go through security, you expect to be scanned and searched. And you expect TSA to prevent contraband from getting on planes, but as we’ve learned, that doesn’t always happen.
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The police tactic of “kettling” to confine protesters during public demonstrations, such as those in London last week, is to be challenged at the High Court.
Leading the challenge is Bethany Shiner, daughter of a high-profile human rights lawyer, who was kettled during tuition fee protests last week.
Ms Shiner is launching proceedings against the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police after being detained on Thursday in Trafalgar Square.
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The anaesthetist from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, who gave medical assistance to the protesters, said that officers forced demonstrators into such a tight “kettle” on Westminster Bridge that they were in danger of being seriously crushed or pushed into the freezing River Thames.
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The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.
The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.
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Cablegate
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The case of the Afghanistan war logs and the hounding of Julian Assange prove that there’s never been greater need to speak truth to power than today.
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This legal instrument has been controversial since it was introduced in 2003, creating everyday injustices; but rarely has anyone outside the small group of lawyers that handles cases really cared. Now followers of the WikiLeaks story wonder how Assange could be extradited with so few questions asked. Why, for example, can our prisons detain someone (Assange is currently on remand in Wandsworth prison) for an offence under Swedish law that does not exist in British law? And how can a judge agree to an extradition without having seen enough evidence to make out a prima facie case?
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WikiLeaks will release top secret American files concerning Israel in the next six months, its founder Julian Assange disclosed yesterday.
In an excusive interview with Al Jazeera, Assange said only a meagre number of files related to Israel had been published so far, because the newspapers in the West that were given exclusive rights to publish the secret documents were reluctant to publish many sensitive information about Israel.
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On Friday a 24-year-old navy medic faces a decision that could lead him to military prison after becoming one of the few conscientious objectors in the Royal Navy since the second world war. That man is my husband, Michael Lyons. He joined the navy in 2005 at 18, as a medical assistant submariner. He chose the medic path because he wanted to help people. In 2008 Michael was promoted to the role of leading medical assistant, and has been very proud of his service to his country for the past five years.
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However, in July this year Michael learned 76,000 military documents had been leaked on the internet and published in analysed form in various newspapers. These documents detailed the military’s under-reporting of civilian casualties caused by Nato troops, both in the air and on the ground. Examples included the convoy of US marines apparently driving down a six-mile stretch of highway firing at everyone they saw: 19 unarmed civilians were killed and a further 50 wounded. Closer to home there were the allegations that Royal Marines had shot innocent drivers and motorcyclists on eight separate occasions over a six-month period, and that Ghurkhas had called in an air strike on a family compound, leaving seven innocents dead. These were just some of the reports.
I remember the day I asked Michael how he felt going to Afghanistan, considering the publication of these reports. Upset by what he had read, he said he didn’t believe we were over there for the greater good. He went on to tell me he wouldn’t be able to live with himself knowing he had been a part of that. He said: “I can’t have that on my conscience.”
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In their latest attempt to find legitimate grounds for charging Julian Assange with a crime, US federal prosecutors have landed on the idea of charging him as a conspirator through a plea bargain that has been offered to Pfc. Bradley Manning. The plea bargain would have Manning name Julian Assange as a fellow conspirator to the leaks, which include the now infamous Collateral Murder video of April 2007.
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The Dalai Lama told US diplomats last year that the international community should focus on climate change rather than politics in Tibet because environmental problems were more urgent, secret American cables reveal.
The exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader told Timothy Roemer, the US ambassador to India, that the “political agenda should be sidelined for five to 10 years and the international community should shift its focus to climate change on the Tibetan plateau” during a meeting in Delhi last August.
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“Was it worth it?” That was what Julian Assange was asked, through his mother, by an Australian TV channel last week as he sat in Wandsworth jail. It was, perhaps, a not unexpected question for someone who had found himself in solitary confinement, facing extradition to Sweden and the United States and death threats from conservative American politicians.
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American diplomats made up a story that Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, in an attempt to discredit the film which painted an unflattering picture of the US healthcare system, the film-maker said today.
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Assange makes the point forcefully that he is a journalist speaking out to examine and check the power of government and his speach should be protected. He also comments on Manning’s detention without trial in conditions that could be considered torture.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In a perfectly enlightened, technologically advanced world, computer software could be used to analyze existing data and determine what happened on the Deepwater Horizon just before it exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. In that world, all relevant parties with access to such data would be ready and willing to offer it up.
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Meteorologists have already warned Europeans that in decades to come, the record temperatures of 2003 will seem mild. Cities – urban heat islands on average 5C and sometimes 10C hotter than the surrounding countryside – will become increasingly dangerous: no place for the elderly, the poor, the sick, the very young, or anybody without access to cool fresh water and air-conditioned buildings.
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But perhaps my surprise at this intimate connection between campaign cash and events just shows me up as a naive limey, and is not surprising at all to those of you in the US.
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Governments in Cancun have chosen hope over fear and put the world on a difficult but now possible-to-navigate path to a global deal to stop dangerous climate change.
“Cancun may have saved the process but it did not yet save the climate,” said Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio. “Some called the process dead but governments have shown that they can cooperate and can move forward to achieve a global deal.”
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Governments are gambling recklessly with human lives by wilfully underestimating the depth of the emission cuts they must makein the next 40 years, a new study has found.
Governments have so far based their calculations for cutting emissions on only a 50:50 chance of holding temperature rises to 2C, the point that many scientists consider to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change which, once passed, will leave millions exposed to drought, hunger and flooding. This constitutes an unacceptable risk, says the report from Friends of the Earth.
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California regulators yesterday approved the first system in the United States to give polluting companies such as utilities and refineries financial incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases.
The Air Resources Board voted 9-1 to pass the key piece of California’s 2006 climate law – called AB32 – with the hope that other states will follow the lead of the world’s eighth largest economy. State officials are also discussing plans to link the new system with similar schemes that are underway or being planned in Canada, Europe and Asia.
California is launching into a “historic adventure,” said Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the state’s air quality board.
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Finance
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Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole says a source at AIB told him the bonuses were “a looting of the bank by management before the government became involved in the institution”.
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If the Irish MEPs felt reassured on the issue of corporation tax following their meeting with Commissioner Ollie Rehn, the same cannot be said of their experience with other MEPs at the European Parliament this week.
Indeed there was a distinct hostility in the air when members of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee signed a written declaration calling for the imposition of a standard 25 per cent corporate tax rate across all member states.
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Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation’s wealth and the wellbeing of its citizens.
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Moody’s, S&P’s, Fitch: they are unelected, unaccountable and have hugely inflated powers. We must curb them
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Tehran predicts unrest as ILNA news agency reports price of petrol rising fourfold and electricity almost threefold
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Stung by fury on the streets, criticism within his own party and rising poverty, the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, addressed an emergency session of his socialist MPs yesterday as parliament prepared to debate one of the toughest budgets in the near-bankrupt nation’s modern history.
Amid mounting hostility over austerity measures that last week sparked some of the ugliest scenes of violence since the eruption of Europe’s debt-crisis in Athens, he appealed for calm in navigating what he has increasingly come to call a “state of war”.
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Protesters against corporate tax avoidance carried out their biggest day of action to date by targeting businesses in 55 towns and cities across the UK.
In Brighton, activists dressed as Santa Claus glued themselves to structures inside department store BHS to prevent themselves from being ejected.
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Giveaway for the super-rich is ‘indefensible’ says Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott
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Leading accountancy firm Ernst & Young is facing legal action for its alleged role in “window dressing” the accounts of Lehman Brothers as it careered toward collapse.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences.
In the Wikileaks punch-up the commoners appear to have the upper hand. But it’s just one battle. There’s a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning.
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Only 28 people work in ALEC’s dark, quiet headquarters in Washington, D.C. And Michael Bowman, senior director of policy, explains that the little-known organization’s staff is not the ones writing the bills. The real authors are the group’s members — a mix of state legislators and some of the biggest corporations in the country.
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With that money, the 28 people in the ALEC offices throw three annual conferences. The companies get to sit around a table and write “model bills” with the state legislators, who then take them home to their states.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The FISA Amendments Act allows the government to engage in mass acquisition of U.S. citizens’ and residents’ international communications with virtually no restrictions.
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Leading US art foundations are threatening to withdraw support from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in protest at what they see as blatant censorship in the decision to remove a video from an exhibition on sexuality in portraiture.
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Sotoudeh, 45, has been kept in solitary confinement since her arrest in September. She is charged with “propaganda against the regime” and “acting against national security”. Her supporters describe the charges as bogus and unsubstantial.
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A Catholic hospital saved the life of a young mother of four. The woman was pregnant and suffered from life-threatening pulmonary hypertension, which caused her heart to begin to fail. Doctors determined that she would almost definitely die if she did not end the pregnancy immediately, and the woman agreed to terminate. Surgeons and physicians acted quickly and saved her life.
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Palestinian feminist Asma Al-Ghoul arrived to our meeting at a Gaza coffee shop sporting blue jeans and a T-shirt—in stark contrast to the Islamic headscarves and tent-like dresses worn by the vast majority of Gazan women.
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Many worry about the decline of liberalism. But liberalism is strongest when it feels pressured from the left, while no left can be robust without its own ideas and analysis, distinct from those of liberals. As long as leftwing intellectuals put most of their energy into figuring out what the Democrats should do, rather than figuring out what a 21st-century left should stand for, none of us will get very far.
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The mural, depicting serried ranks of coffins draped not with the Stars and Stripes but with the dollar bill, was duly created in early December. At first, all was well. Blu even stayed at the home of MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch. When Deitch went off to attend to the arduous business of the Miami Art Fair, Blu got down to the messy process of painting. Luckily, pictures were taken as he picked away at the detail of the coffins, and they soon surfaced on a variety of street art blogs.
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Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera’s serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.
This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.
Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD’s which clandestinely installed a rootkit onto PC’s that provided administrative-level access to the users’ computer. The copy-protected music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying prevent consumers from making multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally, the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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One of the tactics of cyberwarfare has become persuading credit-card/payment businesses to block transfers to organizations being attacked. Recently we saw that tactic applied to WikiLeaks. Now it is a file-sharing site, MegaUpload. The RIAA has branded MegaUploads a “rogue website” even though 70% of Fortune 500 companies use MegaUpload as a file distribution service.
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ACTA
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The Guardian has posted two Wikileaks cables that focus on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The first is from Italy in November 2008. It provides a useful reminder that the U.S. at one time hoped to conclude the ACTA negotiations by the end of 2008 (and the George Bush term).
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12.23.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The omission of Android from the mainline Linux kernel sparked heated debate through much of 2010.
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Certainly the biggest effect of widespread Linux adoption would be that today’s Windows-dominated monoculture would disappear, replaced instead by a diversity of Linux distributions.
That, in turn, would make life very difficult for malware creators. Sure, they may begin focusing their efforts on Linux rather than Windows, but instead of having one, huge, slow-moving easy target, it would be a matter of trying to kill 100 birds with one stone.
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Beside necessity, people are also seeing that smart-phones and other mobile PCs are quite useful. That means older PCs which have similar capability are also useful. The facts that XP is deprecated and “7″ won’t run on old PCs means that GNU/Linux will be seen as a way to extend the life of PCs. I see that every day getting better performance from old PCs with GNU/Linux than with XP.
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With rumors that Microsoft will announce a Windows operating system designed specifically for ARM-based platforms at CES 2011, plus the fact that Intel has been working aggressively on its Linux-based MeeGo system, sources from notebook players believe that the issues are an indication that the two giants’ influence on PC vendors and makers will become weaker in 2011 as the two do not have strong control over the tablet PC market, while they are having difficulty entering the smartphone industry and may face declining market share in the PC market.s
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Wintel may be able to hold a few niches like business and USA but the rest of the world will dramatically change in 2011, limited only by production capacity and not monopoly.
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Desktop
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Systems get into the “Certified” list (once they pass the test criteria) for different reasons. One of them is because at Canonical we work with manufacturers to make sure that Ubuntu is pre-install with their hardware. Hence, you can go to a shop and buy a laptop with Ubuntu in it. But, what happens when you want to upgrade you laptop to the latest Ubuntu version?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this chock-full holiday episode: Lots of WikiLeaks updates, OpenBSD backdoored by the FBI, news on Novell’s patent sale, Matt Asay leaves Canonical, Fedora Design Team trouble, some Microsoft and Oracle watch and much more…
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Applications
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It’s cmus, just to break the suspense. I first tried it almost exactly a year ago, and dismissed it for personal use just because I don’t really care for applications that “manage” my music.
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Kids are exposed early to computers nowadays, and those who carry the geek gene soon show their true colors. What are some good tools and approaches to nurture their interests? I have not seen anything better than GCompris for the younger children,” blogger Robert Pogson suggested. “Once they have learned a few uses for a mouse, they are good for many hours of entertainment.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Unfortunately, there are significant problems with Fedora 14 when using the broadcom-wl driver and the bcm4312 WiFi adapter, causing it to hang the entire system soon after booting every time. Ugh. So, I uninstalled the broadcom-wl driver… rebooted… and the fonts were back to looking too large!?!?!? Wow, so it really was installing the Broadcom driver that had “fixed” that? Well, I’m either a huge skeptic or a slow learner, because I still didn’t really believe that. So this evening I have repeated the whole thing again, and it’s true. Install the broadcom-wl driver, and the fonts look ok, but the system hangs. Remove that driver, and the fonts look too large, but the system doesn’t hang. Ugh. I hate this kind of problem.
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Games
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* Exciting solitaire action with a soccer theme
* Take control of your choice of teams in an international-style tournament
* Find bonus cards to play fun mini-games
* Build up your excitement – and your score – with passing streaks
* Each tournament is different!
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Desktop Environments
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In case you haven’t noticed I’ve had a bit of an obsession with the Enlightenment desktop of the late. Even though this desktop is fantastic there are currently not very many distributions that utilize it. Today I would like to take the time to mention those that offer a version with my favorite desktop.
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Linux is too hard. Linux is too different. Linux doesn’t have this or that program. Linux is not compatible with x or y or z. Linux is blah blah blah….
People come up with all of these reasons to explain why they don’t use Linux. But really they are not reasons at all but simply excuses for laziness. You might even think that with all the tripe that is trotted out that most people don’t have the intelligence to be able to use Linux.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Last week the students continued to work on our Handbook, and the tasks are progressing very nicely. Now that the Handbook tasks are almost finished, they are lending a hand for our next “Amarok Insider” (past issues available at http://amarok.kde.org/Insider). It’s inspiring to work with these students, some of whom are very young, and yet are so smart, and work so hard. They have started hanging out in the #amarok and #rokymotion channel more, and getting to know some of our developers and helpful testers and users. I’ve set 39 tasks so far, and 25 are already completed! And most of my open tasks are claimed, so we’re doing very well.
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GNOME Desktop
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[T]hese are just mockups which don’t show the exact functionality of the new overlay statusbar.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last we heard from Mageia they had chosen their logo and set up infrastructure, teams, and roadmap. Now they are beginning to get into the nuts and bolts of organizing the packaging process. And as you know, packages are the distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Rumors about the possibility of Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) moving its headquarters have persisted throughout 2010 and may be resolved next year, if talk on the street is correct.
Talk of moving the Linux software developer to the West Coast has been one rumor that former executives confirmed earlier this year never ceased to be discussed within the company.
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Debian Family
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I would really like to see a Desktop oriented branch of Debian, and please do not tell me that I can use Ubuntu, because that is not Debian, maybe we can think about Linux Mint Debian Edition, but if Debian does not offer a real Desktop oriented release, all those based on Debian, have two options, in my option:
1. Patch the packages like Ubuntu, to offer an up to date and stable release (Ubuntu is based on Sid)
2. Offer an almost vanilla Debian more or less like Mint Debian Edition, but this approach will have the problem that when testing is frozen, the distribution based on Testing will be frozen too.
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I’m 27 years old. I grew up in Ariana in northern Tunisia, but have been living in Paris, France, since 2002.
I’m a PhD Student at the PPS laboratory where I study synchronous concurrent process calculi.
I became interested in Debian when I saw one of my colleagues, Samuel Mimram (first sponsor and advocate) trying to resolve #440469, which is a bug reported against a program I wrote. We have never been able to resolve it but my intent to contribute was born there. Since then, I started to maintain some packages and help where I can.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Don’t expect Unity and Wayland to be the last of what looks to be a year of massive overhaul for Ubuntu.
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During the the 6th edition of the National Conference on Open Source Software in Tunisia our LoCo team scheduled a meeting with Mark. This meeting was an occasion for Tunisian LoCo members and Tunisian FOSS community members to meet Mark and discuss, during one hour, about the LoCo team activity, Ubuntu development, Unity, etc…
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Nevertheless, my experience among not only vendors, but also investors and particularly large enterprise end users, is that open source is typically atop the list of priorities, strategies and options.
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We’ve updated last year’s Monster List of Open Source Downloads – getting rid of the projects that are no longer active and adding the projects that were featured on Datamation for the first time this year. The result is a sprawling list of 715 noteworthy tools from the open source community.
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Yahoo! is a big user of Apache and Linux.
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NoMachine always had an awkward relationship with FLOSS. They provided no-cost trials and FLOSS clients but kept the “server” non-free.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 is getting really close. Help us finished it faster by using the latest betas and giving feedback.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Julien Ridoux and Darryl Veitch at the University of Melbourne have been awarded a grant to implement support of feed-forward clock synchronization algorithms.
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The first beta release of PC-BSD 8.2 is released, a user-friendly desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. The Version 8.2 contains a onumber of enhancements and improvements. Some of the notable changes are: added ability to select file system type and to encrypt partitions during installation; added ability to change hostname from installer; numerous fixes and improvements to NetworkManager, including 3G support and ability to enable/disable the lagg interface.
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Project Releases
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The Document Foundation is happy to announce the second release candidate of LibreOffice 3.3. This release comes with lots of improvements and bugfixes, and a very substantial reduction in size for the Windows installer. As usual, be warned that this is beta quality software – nevertheless, we ask you to play with it – we very much welcome your feedback and testing!
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You can see the sprawling, Italian-style palace on the Black Sea in satellite photos. There’s a fitness spa, a hideaway “tea house,” a concert amphitheater and a pad for three helicopters. It’s still under construction, but already the cost is said to total more than $1 billion.
And most amazing of all, according to a Russian whistleblower named Sergey Kolesnikov, it was predominantly paid for with money donated by Russian businessmen for the use of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The funds have come “mainly through a combination of corruption, bribery and theft,” charges Kolesnikov, a businessman who until November 2009 worked for one of the companies he alleges was investing money for Putin.
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Security
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Anti-spam organisation Spamhaus has recovered from a denial of service attack over the weekend.
Initially though, Spamhaus may have been attacked in response to its warning that a WikiLeaks mirror called WikiLeaks.info was being hosted by a Russian bullet-proof hosting outfit, called Webalta, that also played home to phishing, carding and malware sites. Spamhaus advised users to use a safer mirror, WikilLeaks.ch, instead. Trend Micro harboured similar concerns over WikiLeaks.info’s association with Webalta and its reseller Heihachi.net, described by Trend as a “safe haven for criminals and fraudsters”.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Cameras without wireless networking capabilities are the least attractive option. If they are destroyed or confiscated in the field, you probably have lost the damning video you just recorded, including any footage documenting how your camera was confiscated or destroyed. But provided you can hold on to your machine, digital video recorders today are inexpensive, small, and practical. The most popular easy-to-use brand right now is the Flip Video line of cameras, which start at $149. Even the cheapest Flips fit in your pocket, power up in about three seconds, and feature one-button recording. They include a built-in USB port and instant formatting for hosting sites such as LiveLeak and YouTube.
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Cablegate
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At Firedoglake, David House writes a lengthy and detailed report from visits with Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been in military detention for months for being the presumed source of Wikileaks’ most damning US government leaks. He has not yet been convicted of a crime. Manning’s lawyer and others have written about his detention conditions as “extreme” and amounting to cruel and inhumane treatment. The sleep deprivation, movement deprivation, solitary confinement, and other elements of his current condition amount to torture, by widely accepted definitions.
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So far every piece of evidence against Bradley Manning comes from one source, Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was institutionalized by the police three weeks before he alleges Manning contacted him and confessed he turned over materials to Wikileaks.
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Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army private accused of leaking classified information to Wikileaks, has been held in the brig at Quantico Marine Corp Base for five months in inhumane conditions, with severe restrictions on his ability to exercise, communicate, or even sleep. Manning has not been convicted of any crime. Nor is there a date certain for any court hearing.
The conditions of Bradley Manning’s confinement became a top issue in the press last week as bloggers traded blows with US officials over allegations that Manning endures inhumane treatment at the Quantico, VA detainment facility. In the midst of this rush by the Defense Department to contextualize Manning’s confinement, I traveled to see the man himself at the Marine Corps detainment facility in Quantico, VA.
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In U.S. elite media, the main revelation of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables is that the U.S. government conducts its foreign policy in a largely admirable fashion.
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The purpose of this survey is to measure an individual soldier’s competency in four areas, Emotional, Social, Family and Spiritual. Justin is an atheist, as well as a highly dedicated soldier, but according to the SFT, he is “unfit” to serve specifically because he is a non-believer.
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Finance
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Sorry, have been out of the loop for a few days, and missed the last round about that Republican primer on how to read the upcoming FCIC report. Four things.
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There needs to be a regulatory response to this, for both the integrity of our courts as well as for the economy. If you’d like to express yourself on this issue, please check out this petition at Stop Servicer Scams.
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More troubled homeowners are dropping out of the Obama administration’s main foreclosure-relief program, which has been widely criticized for failing to help more people keep their homes.
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It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. The country has suffered through a terrible crash in home prices, yet buying a house remains an iffy proposition in many markets.
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When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.
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Major stock indexes were flat Wednesday after a report showed that the U.S. economy did not grow as fast as previously thought in the three months ending in September.
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I wonder if you could go to a Bank CEO’s home, break into his house, and throw out all of his personal possessions — family heirlooms, photos, awards — then claim a paperwork error.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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One of the most unsettling experiences of the last decade has been watching Western democracies sleepwalking into a national security nightmare. Each incremental step towards total surveillance follows the same script. It goes like this: first, a new security ‘threat’ is uncovered, revealed or hypothesised; then a technical ’solution’ to the new threat is proposed, trialled (sometimes) and then implemented — usually at formidable cost to the public; finally, the new ’solution’ proves inadequate. But instead of investigating whether it might have been misguided in the first place, a new, even more intrusive, ’solution’ is proposed and implemented.
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UNESCO is holding an ‘International Symposium on Freedom of Expression‘ on 26 January 2011, with the support of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO. One panel session will focus on freedom of expression on the Internet, and we also expect that our UNESCO publication, entitled ‘Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression‘, will be launched. A penultimate draft of the manuscript is online at SSRN, but a print version will be available by the date of the symposium.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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In the fallout of the controversial net neutrality order approved by the FCC today, they extend what at least on the surface appears to be an olive branch towards openness: the Open Internet Apps Challenge on challenge.gov.
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For years, we’ve been pointing out that while the concept of net neutrality is important, any attempt by the government to put it into law would inevitably involve lobbyists twisting it to be quite favorable to the telcos and others.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Although the current excitement over the gradual release of the Wikileaks documents is justified in that it concerns what is undoubtedly an important development for the future of the Internet, it has rather overshadowed another area where crucial decisions are being made: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In fact, ACTA finally seems to be nearing the end of its slow and painful crawl through the secret negotiation process that only recently we have been allowed glimpses of. And the more we learn, the more troublesome it is.
WikiRebels – The Documentary (2/4)
WikiRebels – The Documentary (3/4)
WikiRebels – The Documentary (4/4)
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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One interesting observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the framerate than RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
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Kernel Space
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There’s a lot of hubbub recently about removing the big kernel lock completely in Linux 2.6.37. That is it’s now possible to compile a configuration without any BKL use. There is still some code depending on the BKL,
but it can be compiled out. But is that a big deal?
First some background: Linux 2.0 was originally ported to SMP the complete kernel ran under a single lock, to preserve the same semantics for kernel code as on uni-processor kernels. This was known as the big kernel lock.
Then over time more and more code was moved out of the lock (see chapter 6 in LK09 Scalability paper for more details)
In Linux 2.6 kernels very few subsystems actually still rely on the BKL. And most code that uses it is not time critical.
The biggest (moderately critical) users were a few file systems like reiserfs and NFS. The kernel lockf()/F_SETFL file locking subsystem was also still using the BKL. And the biggest user (in terms of amount of code) were the ioctl callbacks in drivers. While there are a lot of them (most drivers have ioctls) the number of cycles spent in them tends
to be rather minimal. Usually ioctls are just used for initialization and other comparatively rare jobs.
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Graphics Stack
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For anyone that happens to be on holiday this week (or just have excess time otherwise), there is another lively and polarized discussion that’s been taking place for the past several days on the DRI mailing list. What does it involve if it’s not about developer disagreements amongst themselves? Embedded GPU driver support on Linux, of course. This mailing list thread just reaffirms how the situation is a great big mess.
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Applications
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Avian 0.4 is a portable virtual machine (VM) that utilizes subsets of Java’s features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Warsow 0.6 delivers on a number of new game maps, improvements to existing maps for improved visuals and other restyling, brand new weapon models for a more unified and modern appearance, a new game type, and new music. The new game type is Capture The Flag – Tactics.
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Those interested in participating or learning more can visit HumbleBundle.com. At the time of posting, the HIB #2 has brought in $1,329,427 USD from 181,543 sales. The average Windows user is paying just $6.16 USD for this collection of indie games while the Linux user on average is paying more than double that, at $13.49.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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What is nice about Wingpanel is that it saves real-estate without compromising the functionality of the indicators.
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Due out today is the latest GNOME 3.0 development snapshot, GNOME 2.91.4, and because of that in recent days there’s been a slew of GNOME package check-ins. Landing yesterday was GTK+ 2.91.7, the latest version of the GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit that plays one of the most important roles on the GNOME desktop. While it’s getting late in the release cycle and this GNOME tool-kit has already delivered lots of new features, the changes keep rolling.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Work is now focused on documentation: the Mageia packaging policies and laying out the mentoring process of new packagers.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As many of you will know, we have been working hard in the Ubuntu world to ensure that the transition to Unity is not only smooth and painless, but also provides the best possible user experience. To do this the DX team, Ayatana community, desktop team, and my team have been working closely to ensure we are not only getting plenty of testing for Unity, but helping to ensure the community is an open and accessible as possible.
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When you think open source, chances are you think software. You may not know that there are open-source fonts as well. Today, Google and Ubuntu have released a new free, open font to the Web: the Ubuntu Font Family.
[...]
To add the Ubuntu Font Family to your pages go to the Google Font Directory Select “Ubuntu” and insert the two lines of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code provided as instructed into your page The full font source code can be downloaded from the Ubuntu font page.
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In case you’ve missed out, smspillaz has started working fulltime at Canonical on working on Compiz.
Sam’s been shuffling getting things fixed in the code and needs a bit of help, so I asked him to put together a list of things Compiz could use help with.
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Flavours and Variants
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Every now and again, educators ask me where they can get more fonts for Edubuntu. We include great desktop publishing software (scribus-ng, inkscape, gimp, etc) in Edubuntu, but our default font selection is rather dry and uninspiring. A few weeks back I looked whether there are some nice fonts in the Ubuntu archive that we could include. I figured that even if there’s one or two good ones available that we could ship, then it would at least be some improvement. The results were quite surprising, there are a wealth of fonts available in the archives.
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Google has asked a number of TV and set-top box makers to delay plans to release new Google TV products at the beginning of next year. According to a New York Times report, Google plans to revamp the software due to its “lukewarm reception” and decidedly ho-hum reviews.
The Google TV concept seemed promising, in particular the application of search to tie together the various sources of content—broadcast, cable, satellite, online—and bypassing many of the frustrating listing guides. However, many networks have so far blocked Google TV access to their online content. Additionally, the push to include full access to the Web required a keyboard and mouse for navigation, resulting in some awkward and bulky remotes.
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Phones
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Android
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Based on the feedbacks we’ve been getting and from observations and interactions within the community, we see that there is a mounting demand of Android developers. And we are sure that there are capable and experienced devs or people with the aptitude to become one in the community. What seems to be missing here is an effective forum to bridge the demand and supply side.
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The hits or thereabouts keep on coming from mobile publisher Gameloft, which has today uploaded an edited highlights showreel of TEN out-and-forthcoming Android games it should have on sale by the end of December.
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Last month the Financial Times reported that HTC was planning to open their own app store and recent job postings on the company’s web site seem to confirm that it could happen sooner rather than later. The initial report said that HTC’s app store team would include a small number of staff based in Taiwan, but HTC has now several job openings on their U.S. site which are targeted at e-commerce.
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From 1998 to 2002, a gentleman by the name of Erich Specht ran a company called “Android Data.” Android Data went bankrupt in 2002, and Erich hasn’t used the name since. However, when he heard of Google’s use of the “Android” name, he put together a website to “prove” that Google had infringed on his trademark. Shortly after, he sued Google, Android Inc., and the Open Handset Alliance for infringing on the name for $94 million.
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A reference implementation of a fully open translation environment is available to integrate the OpenTM2 CAT system with the free Joomla CMS and the equally free GlobalSight translation management system by Welocalize.
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I keep seeing people contrasting “free/open source software” with “commercial software”. This is a really bad contrast, as in my experience almost all open source software is commercial. It’s just commercial in a different way.
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The CENATIC Foundation, a public foundation based in Spain, has announced the release of a report on “the international status of open source software 2010.”
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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From all of us on the Game On team, Happy Holidays! To celebrate the season, we’ve pulled together a hefty list of prizes for you.
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A few minutes ago, we released version 2.1 of Firefox Input.
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We are excited to release the newest Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo. The beta is now available in the Android Market, which you can find by opening the Market application on your phone and searching for “Mozilla Firefox.” The Maemo builds are available for download here . This beta release is not feature or performance complete, but with the help and feedback from our community of testers we’re building an amazing browser. (Note: To ensure smooth updates, we ask existing beta users on Android to please uninstall previous Firefox betas before installing this release.)
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It’s been quite the journey for the Firefox (originally Fennec) Mobile Browser for Android. It has been in beta and available for direct download from Mozilla for a few months now, but, to make things easier, it is now available in the Android Market along with some improvements.
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Oracle
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Oracle’s VM VirtualBox virtualization software just went into beta two weeks ago, but since then they have put out four beta releases. Now though Oracle is already ready to announce the official release of VM VirtualBox 4.0.
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BSD
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The lead developer of the OpenBSD operating system says that he believes that a government contracting firm that contributed code to his project “was probably contracted to write backdoors,” which would grant secret access to encrypted communications.
Posting to an OpenBSD discussion list Tuesday, Theo de Raadt said that while he now believes that a company called Netsec may have been involved in backdoors, he doesn’t think that any of this software made it into the OpenBSD code base.
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Theo de Raadt has summarized what is known, so far, about the allegation that OpenBSD’s IPSEC stack had a backdoor inserted into it by contractors at the behest of the US FBI. Some code auditing has been done, and found some problems, but no “smoking gun” has been found.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In the first article, operations manager at the FSF, John Sullivan talks about how the lending problem is an artificial scarcity in the digital age.
In the second, Benjamin Mako Hill — a member of the FSF’s board of directors — confronts the fact that free software is sometimes not as high quality or featureful as proprietary alternatives and that most free software projects aren’t particularly collaborative.
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Lending and borrowing are not desirable activities. They are things we do when we have to, when there isn’t enough of something to go around. Not to say that lending something like a book to a friend is without benefits beyond access to the material; it can create a shared experience that makes for good conversation, or provide an excuse to see each other.
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Licensing
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Free Software licenses are designed to ensure that the source code cannot be taken proprietary, and to attempt to maintain the user’s freedom to do whatever they want. The General Public License (GPL) is the most common Free Software license. It was recently updated to Version 3 to cover situations that didn’t exist when Version 2 was written.
A common complaint is that Free Software licenses are communistic, which they aren’t. They are communalistic, in the same tradition as a North American school or church raising.
The GPL is considered restrictive by a lot of organizations which would like to use software that uses it as a license. For one example, I was told that if the Linux Kernel moved to GPL V3 it would kill the use of the Linux Kernel in mobile phones. When I asked why they didn’t just switch to one of the BSD kernels like Apple did, the response was that the Linux Kernel was more suitable.
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Openness/Sharing
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One of the most important values at Creative Commons is the usability of our tools. We strive to make all of our tools human-readable, often bridging dissonant vocabularies and frameworks to ensure our tools are compatible and understandable the world over. The challenge of localization is balancing legally sound terminology with culturally palatable translations. Sometimes the terms in which lawyers and courts communicate are unfamiliar or alienating to users outside of the legal profession. Moreover, even within the legal field, there can be a range of opinions about which terms are most appropriate.
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Humour
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Science
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In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse.
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IN THE age-old war between cats and dogs, canines might just have struck the killer blow. A border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of 1022 items – more than any other animal. She can also categorise them according to function and shape, something children learn to do around the age of 3.
Chaser follows in the footsteps of Rico, who trained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Rico had a “vocabulary” of 200 words and could identify new objects in a group of familiar objects by a process of elimination, according to a study published in 2004.
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It’s been a busy year in research on recent human ancestry. Back in the spring, scientists completed a draft of the Neanderthal genome, which provided clear evidence that these now-extinct humans left some of their genes behind by interbreeding with some human ancestors. A bit earlier in the year, DNA sequencing revealed an even larger surprise: there seems to have been another population of premodern humans present in Asia that were genetically distinct from modern humans and Neanderthals. Now, the team behind both of these discoveries is back with a draft genome of this population that suggests it was genetically distinct from both humans and Neanderthals, and a single tooth that suggests it was physically distinct. And that it also interbred with the ancestors of a modern human population.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”
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The G20 protester whose violent arrest was caught on video and caused controversy when no officers were initially held responsible said he’s glad a police officer has been charged.
But protester Adam Nobody and his lawyers called on Toronto’s police chief on Tuesday to help identify other officers who were involved in the case.
Toronto police Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani was charged Tuesday with assault with a weapon in the takedown of Nobody at the Ontario legislature during the June summit.
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In December 1917 British imperial troops occupied Jerusalem, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule. Earlier that year, the British Empire also took control of Baghdad, and was advancing across the middle east. In Asia and the West, the British government spread the message that they were bringing a new age of national freedom to the Arabs. Unfortunately for Whitehall, however, the newly installed Bolsheviks in Russia had their own message to tell the world. A couple of weeks before General Allenby, the chief of British forces in Palestine, made his official entrance on foot through the Jaffa Gate of the old city of Jerusalem, the Bolsheviks published the secret agreements that they had just discovered in the Russian archives.
This was the first major leak of international diplomatic documents, the scale of which has never been surpassed. If Julian Assange and his associates had access to the inner sanctum of the White House and the Pentagon, they might get close to documentation that was of similar significance. Pride of place amongst the material published by the Russians was a plan by the British and French governments in 1916 to carve up the middle east between themselves after the war.
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The strange, suppressed story of Byron Sonne, the G-20 security hacker who has been held, unconvicted, for 6 months and counting.
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The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.
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Wikipedia lists 16 belligerent groups and 68 major organization as terrorist groups in India, which include: nine in the northeast (Seven Sisters), four in the center & the east (including Maoist/Naxalites), seventeen in the west (Sikh separatist groups), and 38 in the northwest (Kashmir).
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There is a lesson in the laying of charges Tuesday against a police officer in connection with the beating of a G20 protester: we don’t have to acquiesce when the authorities circle the wagons.
Many allegations of police misconduct were made following the G20 summit in Toronto last June, where more than 1,000 people were arrested, most of them without charge. But in the immediate aftermath of the summit, officialdom excused and even lauded the police overreaction. Toronto City Council passed a motion commending “the outstanding work” of the police. Then councilor — now mayor — Rob Ford went further and said “our police were too nice.” The Toronto Police Services Board, which is supposed to exercise civilian oversight over the force, issued a press release thanking the police for “the manner in which they conducted themselves.”
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After nearly six months, several videos and a showdown between Toronto’s police chief and a provincial watchdog that played out in front of the national media, an officer has been charged with beating a man during the G20 demonstrations.
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Cablegate
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The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.
The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.
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Spain last night killed a controversial anti-P2P bill that would have made it easier to shut down websites that link to infringing content. The move was a blow to the ruling Socialist government, but it may be of even bigger concern to the US, which pushed, threatened, and cajoled Spain to clamp down on downloading. And Wikileaks can take a share of the credit for the defeat.
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The Spanish House of Representatives has rejected a new copyright law that would have made the nation’s file-sharing sites and services illegal. Some of the leaked #cablegate cables affirmed what many had suspected: the law had been pushed by the US government on behalf of the Hollywood studios. Local activists told me that they believed the legislation would pass despite broad national condemnation; however, El Pais accelerated its schedule in oder to release the relevant cables before the House voted — and it seems that this did the trick.
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Several of them related to WikiLeaks, whose founder Julian Assange, has said he has major revelations that may cause the head of a large U.S. bank to resign. There has been widespread speculation, drawing on earlier comments made by Assange, that Bank of America is Assange’s target.
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McDonald’s tried to delay the US government’s implementation of a free-trade agreement in order to put pressure on El Salvador to appoint neutral judges in a $24m (£15.5m) lawsuit it was fighting in the country. The revelation of the McDonald’s strategy to ensure a fair hearing for a long-running legal battle against a former franchisee comes from a leaked US embassy cable dated 15 February 2006.
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5:15 Don’t know what to make of this—the French may be claiming something that, in fact, was not true (the usual problem with these cables)—but Mondoweiss calls this a “smoking gun” showing US secretly backed Israeli settlement growth even as Obama denied that.
5:05 The Guardian in its usual late-afternoon move with half dozen stories on new cables with wild range: from UK training death squads in Bangladesh and Halliburton involved with “mafia” in Iraq to Anna Nicole Smith in the Bahamas, a vetoed memorial to a Pope, and “burger giant” McDonald’s getting US aid in lawsuit. The death squad story will be huge in UK—story notes that even the US would not help because of their “extra-judicial killings.” We did provide “human rights” advice….
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A Wikileaks volunteer points to this as the source of that reference: a report of Wikileaks writers in Kenya having been killed in 2009. I cannot yet confirm the content of the article, but I’m updating the blog to note that this is what Assange was referring to.
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David House, a personal friend of Manning, visited him in the brig over the weekend, and plans to blog about the conditions on Firedoglake.
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ASSANGE: Well, I have been a member of the Australian press union for many years. I co-authored my first book when I was 25 and have been involved in setting up the — the very fabric of the Internet in Australia since 1993 as a publisher.
So quite interesting that this is something that is being raised.
It’s — it’s actually a quite deliberate attempt to split off our organization from the First Amendment protections that are afforded to all publishers.
You know, as time has gone by and our journalism has increased, I’ve been pushed up into senior management, into a position where I manage other journalists. I now even am in a — in a position where I’m managing the interrelations between “The Guardian,” “Spiegel,” “The New York Times,” “Al Jazeera” and so on, which were used in — in our last production.
So, yes, unfortunately, I don’t write that much anymore, because I’m busy being editor-in-chief, coordinating the actions of other journalists. But a quite deliberate attempt to split us off in the mind of the public from those “good” traditions of the United States, protecting the rights of the press to publish, to split us off from the support of the press in the United States, the support of journalists.
Some of those journalists have fallen for that.
And why?
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Already the birds are chirping (they’re not tweeting anymore) about WikiLeaks and its Cablegate affair, how it came to be, how it got blocked, how it got filtered, DDoS’ed, removed from Amazon’s cloud service, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, how its founder became wanted by the Interpol and arrested for sex crimes, how a 16-year old boy was arrested for DDoS’ing etc. etc., so I won’t bother you with this. Also I am not really interested much in what the cables say and whether they should have leaked or not.
No, this post is about what I think we have to watch out after Cablegate.
In all honesty, I think that traditional media and the general public will get bored with WikiLeaks and forget about it in about a months’ time. That is unless WikiLeaks has some pretty well-planned and well-timed tricks up his sleeve (which still may be the case).
[...]
And let us not forget that ACTA is still hanging above our heads. This is not the time to get sidetracked. In fact, we should fight harder to stop ACTA! Chances are that governments might try to pass it as soon as it can in the wrong fate it would prevent future such affairs.
We need to remember that this problem was not triggered by Cablegate, it merely put it in the limelight.
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This afternoon, several of our readers questioned our decision to close the comment thread on Jaron Lanier’s post about WikiLeaks, “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy.” The discussion transformed into an extended Twitter conversation with some of my favorite writers, professors, and readers about the ethics and strategy of that decision. I’d like to walk through my thinking with you all here.
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What the Wikileaks cables show is precisely that those sanctioned “secretive spheres” are not currently accountable to the civilian sphere. They show all the shady deals made in backrooms, the outright lies told to the public to keep us quiet, the connivance with big business to ensure that profit comes before ethics.
Lanier’s logic seems to be that everything’s fine and the revelations of Wikileaks will only mess things up. And until Wikileaks’ revelations, people might have gone along with that analysis, since that was the story that governments were feeding us. But in the wake of Wikileaks, that is simply not a tenable position: as the words of diplomats delineate time and again, everything is not fine, and the social pact of accepting those “secretive spheres” in return for a responsible use of the advantage they bring has been broken.
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It seems that with every new story about the plight of Julian Assanage, we are introduced to another member of the WikiLeaks leader’s legal team. Let’s remake the acquaintance of these accomplished attorneys before he hires another one and we lose track again.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a broad coalition of advocacy organizations sent an open letter to U.S. lawmakers today, calling on government officials to respect freedom of expression in the debate over the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.
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If average soldiers were to operate under this assumption, moreover, political and military elites would be forced to take the time to actually hide any truly sensitive documents from the view of hundreds of thousands of people, as they should have been doing from day one.
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President Dmitry Medvedev said the documents published by WikiLeaks don’t hurt Russia’s interests and that the Russian authorities don’t care what’s being discussed in diplomatic circles.
“When people communicate, they sometimes use very harsh language and if such a leak had happened from our Foreign Ministry or secrete services, many of our partners, including Americans, would have got an emotional charge after reading ‘kind words’ about themselves,” Medvedev said during a meeting with students in Mumbai today.
WikiLeaks was condemned by the U.S. government for posting thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic and military documents. Assange was released from a London prison on bail on Dec. 16. He turned himself in to British authorities Dec. 7 after Sweden issued a warrant for his extradition on counts of sexual molestation and rape.
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While official channels want us to focus on Julian Assange, the real meat of Wikileaks is not the leader but the leaks. And news from Spain suggests we should be learning from those leaks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Britons might have to get used to power blackouts and disrupted travel plans as the country struggles to cope with the long-term effects of climate change, a report for the government has warned.
Consumers will have to learn they cannot expect cheap heating and lighting and to go where or when they want as floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels threaten the UK’s road, rail, water and energy networks, it says.
If that warning was not sombre enough in a month when air, rail and road travel has been badly hit by the weather, mighty storms and changes in wind direction could threaten some of the country’s busiest ports and airports. That would mean the abandonment of coastal docks and increasing pressure for the building of new runways throughout southern Britain.
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Finance
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Update: The interviewer claims that Assange never personally said Bank of America was a target, and that the news was falsely reported by AFP.
Update: Everyone has suspected it, but it was never officially confirmed by Julian Assange: Bank of America is the bank he has tons of documents on.
He made the comments in his Times of London interview, but that interview was behind a paywall, so nobody really noticed the news
Now we can stop presuming that it’s the bank. Now it’s just a question of what he has, and whether it’s as damaging as he thinks it is.
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Buried in that Times of London article you didn’t read because it was behind a paywall was confirmation by Julian Assange that Wikileaks will release a very large cache of documents about Bank of America, to be released in early 2011.
“We don’t want the bank to suffer unless it’s called for,” Assange told The Times. “But if its management is operating in a responsive way there will be resignations,” he said, without giving details about the material.
Oh, and,
Assange compared WikiLeaks’ “persecution” to that endured by Jews in the US in the 1950s.
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The NYT reports on a growing phenomenon of wrongful foreclosure by US banks on homeowners who are caught up on their mortgage payments — and on homeowners who have no mortgage at all. In some cases, homeowners return from vacation to discover their locks changed and their every earthly possession sent to the dump (one woman lost her dead husband’s ashes when her bank burgled her ski chalet).
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Rupert Murdoch’s close links to the Conservative party were thrown into the spotlight today after it emerged that the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, held a private meeting with the tycoon’s son, James, at which no civil servants were present.
The meeting took place on 28 June, shortly after News Corp said it had made an offer to buy the 61% of BSkyB it does not already own.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Who is Ms Suit?
Well, intrepid reader Sugar The Pill sent us a link to this page which shows Ms Suit previously stood as a candidate for the Christian People’s Alliance.
Want to know more? Here are her views:
We must not forget the influence of the media: it needs much stronger regulation so that our young people are not constantly conditioned by violent films, video games and lyrics; pornography must be outlawed so that it cannot undermine marriage and the dignity of women and encourage sex crime. All schools should teach Christian values.
In 2000 co-founded Mediamarch, a peaceful protest group “seeking stronger obscenity laws and restoration of basic decency to all media”.
And now she has co-founded Safer Media, which has come out nowhere to be extensively quoted everywhere by the media. This is the BBC’s idea of balance.
Compare that to the other side of the debate, the Open Rights Group, which has thousands of supporters and years of experience in evidence based campaigning.
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It seems that UK airport bosses are not content with keeping passengers in the dark as to when they will ever leave the ground. Angry passengers who’d rather be swilling their eggnog in foreign climes have told El Reg that British Airports Authority (BAA) staff are stopping passengers stranded at Heathrow – and other airports – from filming the ensuing chaos on their mobiles.
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Yes, if you share a a few songs you love with others, you may get fined millions of dollars, but if you’re the US government, and you violate the 4th Amendment by spying on people without a warrant, you get fined $100 per day. And only for the two people who were able to bring a lawsuit because you screwed up and sent them the details of how you wiretapped them without a warrant. For everyone else who was wiretapped (or is still being wiretapped) without a warrant, you’re out of luck, unless the government makes the same mistake with you, and then you go through years of trials to get $100 per day of wiretapping for your troubles.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Republicans and their house organ, Fox News, talk about Tuesday’s vote as a “plan to regulate the Internet,” and they’re half-right. They mouth platitudes about freedom and liberty. They end up with a free-fire zone for corporations — an oligopoly of content and services for captive consumers.
But they’re right to be wary of regulation, because we’ve seen the corrosive effect of regulation in so many other arenas already. The FCC is already a captive of telecom companies in its traditional operations. Why would anyone expect this to be any different when it comes to the Internet? And the law of unintended consequences tells us that any regulations would be sure to have effects we can’t foresee today. That’s the issue the network-neutrality advocates also usually fail to address.
What wasn’t on the table in the FCC’s deliberations was actual competition. Unlike many other countries, the United States doesn’t require Internet providers to share their lines and networks. By “share” I don’t mean “give away” — this is essentially about renting capacity to other companies that want to be ISPs. That’s how the Internet got so big so fast in the first place: Phone companies were not allowed to prevent other ISPs from offering service on phone lines, but now they’re allowed to prevent similar competition, and the market is a stifling oligopoly as a result.
If you think the Internet should be an enhanced form of cable television, you should be happy where we’re heading. If you think it should be the messy and complex result of what innovators want to create, and what customers at the networks’ edges want to do with the creations, you should worry.
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Net Neutrality is a concept like ‘transparency’ — something that most people are vaguely in favour of without realising what it really means. One consequence of this is that they are not motivated to defend it when it’s threatened: it’s hard to fight for something that you only vaguely understand. And yet, in principle, it’s not that complicated. Dan Gillmor articulates net neutrality as “the notion that end users (you and me) should decide what content and services we want without interference from the ISPs”. In other words, they provide the pipes (for which they get paid) and leave us free to choose what we want to pull down through them.
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The telcoms are already feeding from both ends of the trough.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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One of the popular myths we always hear about content-based business models these days is that “but people just want stuff for free.” This has been debunked so many times, it’s silly, but it’s worth debunking again. One of the easiest ways to debunk it is to show examples of people being more than happy to pay, even if the content at the core of what they’re paying for is available for free. We saw this, a few years back, when Trent Reznor sold out of his $300 “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition Package” of the Ghosts I-IV album, even though all of the tracks were available as a free download under a Creative Common license. To some extent, we saw this ourselves, when we offered our own CwF+RtB packages, and the more expensive packages outsold the cheaper ones.
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Copyrights
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We’ve discussed in the past how Spain actually has somewhat more reasonable copyright laws than other parts of the world. It says that personal, non-commercial copying is not against the law and also says that third parties should not be liable for copyright infringement done by their users. This seems perfectly reasonable but, of course, Hollywood hates it.
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In summary, farming theory suggests that anytime you rely on a single crop (monoculture) over a long enough period of time, you can expect something really awful to come along that will ruin you. Why? Because of the common genetic code that results when you have a single crop in a single location for so long. What inevitably happens is that there is a change in the environment: disease, new wildlife, slight or great variances in the temperature or amount of sunlight, etc. And because your crops are all essentially the same, they’re all affected. So, instead, the theory suggests that you should always have multiple crops in production. That way, if something comes along that wipes out all of your rice crops, you still have your corn and wheat. Multiple streams of income, so that there is no single point of failure.
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A movie interests association has just announced an interesting new strategy. Having previously focused on having The Pirate Bay blocked in their home country, ACAPOR – which recently had its emails leaked by Operation Payback – says it will now make legal history by reporting unprecedented numbers of file-sharers to the authorities. Their aim? To have the law for infringements made less severe.
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Copycense points us to an editorial in the Harvard Crimson apparently supporting the MPAA’s new demands to universities that they need to police their local networks to stop students from file sharing. The editorial has tons of problems — starting with the fact that it ignores that the MPAA lied to get the law passed in the first place. But the editorial has much more serious problems, and makes you wonder what they’re teaching students at Harvard these days.
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Following last month’s failed attempt by ACS:Law to have default judgments handed down to 8 individuals accused of illegal file-sharing, the company’s allegations have again been heard in court. Detailing a case where ACS failed to get the defendant’s name right, a judge has now rounded up all of the company’s outstanding cases for a hearing next month. Things are about to get interesting.
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Two weeks ago, MasterCard felt the wrath of Anonymous Operation Payback-style DDoS attacks after refusing to process payments that were intended to fund WikiLeaks, the website which began leaking confidential US diplomatic cables last month. Now, the company is preparing to head down another controversial path by pledging to deny transactions which support websites that host pirated movies, music, games, or other copyrighted content.
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Carl Lundstrom, often tagged as the financier to The Pirate Bay, has “formally appealed to the Swedish Supreme Court against the denial of the party’s previous appeal in late November”, says Deutches Welle.
“In an interview with Sveriges Radio’s P3 news program, Lundstrom’s attorney, Per E Samuelsson, said that his client does not accept the sentence of four months of jail time for himself, and a collective fine for him and the three other defendants of 46 million Swedish kronor (5.1 million euros)”, says the story.
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ACTA
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For the past past months Commissioner Karel De Gucht cheated the Members of the European Parliament about the lack of competence of the European Union to negotiate ACTA criminal measures, and overplayed the known fact in Plenary that there is no related Acquis existing. Many Members of Parliament trust De Gucht’s promises made that ACTA fully complies with the Acquis. Compliance with the Acquis was an argument for MEPs like German Daniel Caspary to support the controversial Treaty.
Wikileaks – The Movie (“The social leak”)
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We have seen plenty of hacks for AirPlay that extend the service and allow it to operate on things that Apple never really intended. Last month AirPlay was hacked to run on all iDevices for sending video.
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Server
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Today, December 20th, Ubuntu is running 4,840 instances on EC2, followed by CentOS, with 1,250, Fedora with 313; Oracle with 80; and Red Hat with a mere 73 instances. That’s a grand total of 1,716 for the Red Hat family, which means that Ubuntu is doing more than twice as well as all the Red Hat variants put together.
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As said in the introduction, benchmarks from other Linux distributions / AMIs will be forthcoming in the new year along with results from other, more powerful EC2 compute instances. We also invite your feedback on other cloud computing benchmarks you would like to see.
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The Times maintains an interactive news department to serve website readers with graphs, charts and other enhanced content. Over time, the department has built up a cloud software stack to serve these projects, Koski said. Typically, the department’s projects are written using the Ruby on Rails framework, with the data stored on a MySQL database running on Amazon’s RDB (Relational Database Service). The Web apps themselves are run on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).
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Red Hat on Tuesday delivered strong third quarter results as it continued to ride along with the server and data center upgrade cycle.
The company reported fiscal third quarter earnings of $26 million, or 13 cents a share, on revenue of $235.6 million, up 21 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 20 cents a share. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 20 cents a share on revenue of $227.3 million.
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Linux software developer Red Hat Inc. said Tuesday that its third-quarter net income rose 59 percent thanks to demand for virtual computer systems and so-called cloud computing services, in which applications and data are housed on distant servers.
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Business software maker Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) reported higher quarterly profit, echoing optimism about the technology spending climate shown by bigger industry companies last week.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Bradley and Karen welcome special co-presenter and guest, Aaron Williamson, to discuss the OpenBSD email regarding purported FBI backdoors. In the main segment, they discuss the amicus brief filed by SFLC (where Aaron and Karen work) in the Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB USA Supreme Court case.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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PhotoFilmStrip 1.4.0 was released yesterday, bringing (some of these features were already available in the unstable version like you can read in our PhotoFilmStrip review) a new user interface, customizable aspect ratio (16:9, 4:3 und 3:2), copy and paste for motion positions, Flash-Video renderer, a new transition (roll), better audio support, keyboard shortcuts and more.
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No-one goes out of their way to lose their laptop let alone have it stolen. Usually in these situations there is a slim chance of getting you laptop back – providing it has your address scrawled on the back like a label in the back of a 5th graders’ coat.
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The second beta of the Muon Package Management Suite (as well as its supporting library LibQApt) version 1.1 is now available. The focus of this release is to fix bugs found during the testing of the first beta, as well as UI tweaks to the new Muon Software Center. Packages for K/Ubuntu 10.10 are available from the QApt PPA. (Of interest are the muon and muon-installer packages)
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GCstar Collections Manager stores details on each item and can be tailored for additional information such as location or to whom you lent it. It lets you search and filter your collection by many criteria.
Tellico specializes in tracking eclectic collections such as your books, videos, music, liquor inventory and anything else. It comes loaded with many default templates for cataloging books, bibliographies, videos, music, video games, coins, stamps, trading cards, comic books and more.
Kabikaboo is a simple tree-branch note organizer. At first blush, including it with the other two picks this week might seem to be a stretch. Designed initially as an aid in tracking notes for writing things like novels, it is a tree-based note pad. This makes it ideal to plan a book or any other complex project involving structured notes or organized outlines.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For the next three days you can donate any amount you wish and receive each of the following DRM free, cross platform games:
* Braid
* Cortex Command
* Machinarium
* Osmos
* Revenge of the Titans
The cost of buying each of these games separately would be around 85$.
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Christmas is approaching and the crazy sales are starting. How can a humble bundle stay relevant?
Well, I heard you guys liked bundles so I decided to put a bundle in your bundle.
All six Humble Indie Bundle #1 games are now included on your download page.
Enjoy!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Ok, it’s been over three weeks since when I got my windows-free laptop. During this time, I’ve ran KUbuntu 10.10 with KDE 4.5.? for about a week, then I moved to KDE trunk as usual and now it’s time to share my two cents (and personal random thoughts and rants) about this laptop 
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GNOME Desktop
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Last week, Cosimo Cecchi, Nautilus hacker extraordinaire, sent a message to the Nautilus list setting out a plan for 3.0. Before I get onto that, I want to give a shout out to Cosimo. He’s a total hero when it comes to Nautilus: not only does he take care of a much of the (substantial) maintenance work that is required, but he also takes UX really seriously and has been working hard to get the Nautilus UI into better shape. The next release is already going to be really nice thanks to his efforts. Thanks for your hard work, Cosimo!
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Slackware is the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and it brings with it, alongside its famous rock-solid stability, a couple of quirks and anachronisms. For example, it is one of the few distributions that provides no form of dependency management; users need to install all dependent packages manually.
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The Unity project, not to confuse with the desktop environment, has had their first full release in July 2010 and have recently updated with a second point release.
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If you have been exploring the world of Linux for any amount of time then odds are you have come across the website Distro Watch at some point or another.
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Puppy Linux is the smallest release on this list.
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New Releases
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Marking nearly 10 years of Openwall GNU/*/Linux, the Openwall Project developers have released version 3.0 of Openwall. Openwall GNU/*/Linux, also known as Owl for short, is a small, security-enhanced distribution of Linux aimed at servers, appliances and virtual appliances.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva was holding a contest for desktop background wallpapers to include in its next release, Mandriva 2010.2. This morning the winners were announced.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) stayed on pace Tuesday in its march toward becoming a $1 billion a year revenue producer, reporting third-quarter revenues of $235.6 million.
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The question is whether RHEL6 is the right answer for your business. The cheapest subscriptions from Red Hat cost $349 a year for “self-support,” and about $800 a year for a “standard” server subscription with Web-only support and a two-day response window.
The prices go up from there, and if you want a premium support package for a heftier machine (4-sockets, or CPUs) with unlimited virtual machines, it’s going to set your business back nearly $4,000. Note that this is Red Hat’s SMB pricing, its regular pricing is a bit higher for the higher-end products — but oddly its low-end pricing is the same.
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There’s always a sense of finally when a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is released. We always know what’s coming in the new OS, and generally we know when it’ll be available, but we’re still working with rapidly aging packages on the previous version and drumming our fingers for the next release.
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Revenues rose at an impressive rate for open source experts Red Hat in the last three months.
The company reported its third quarter results today, showing revenues of $235.6 million (£152.4 million), up by 21 per cent from the same period last year.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu font family has been added to the Google Font Directory, allowing web developers the world over to use the font on their site.
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I’ve been finding it difficult to balance my work on the GNOME and Ubuntu documentation recently. Apart from the usual lack of time, the increasingly divergent directions of the two projects have seemed difficult to reconcile in the help we provide. Ubuntu has always customised GNOME, but with the recent announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will default to Unity rather than the new GNOME shell, I think we may have lost a great deal of the practical documentation compatibility between the two. This is a shame, because the differences between shells are really only superficial. Unfortunately, details matter in user help.
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We all know about Unity, the project that is changing the way we interact with our computer by bringing a consistent user experience and a solid, elegant design for desktop and netbook users.
We want to make sure Unity is for everyone, and one of the key aspects to make it possible is that it is available in everyone’s language.
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Elephants and readers with a good memory may remember an ‘ambient boot splash’ proposal we featured at the end of October.
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First off, my apologies for such a late showing of this review. I always take notes as I test a new distro and I was going to write this review using my handy-dandy Android app, so I took my little paper and stuck it in a pocket..somewhere. I finally located it today, which is the reason for my tardiness. Now that my groveling is complete, awayyyy we go!
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Flavours and Variants
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Pinguy OS is undoubtedly the best Ubuntu derivative I have used and I won’t mind rating it even above Linux Mint. I would prefer a much lighter version of Pinguy OS though. So, next time when a wannabe Linux user comes to me asking for a good Linux desktop that just works, Pinguy OS will be my first choice.
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Phones
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Android
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“Nexus S has been rooted, let the madness commence!” proclaims Engadget. “This is only possible because Android’s security is crap and it’s exploited easily to gain root priviledges [sic]” adds a commenter.
You’ll have to excuse me if I strongly disagree.
The Nexus S, like the Nexus One before it, is designed to allow enthusiasts to install custom operating systems. Allowing your own boot image on a pure Nexus S is as simple as running fastboot oem unlock. It should be no surprise that modifying the operating system can give you root access to your phone. Hopefully that’s just the beginning of the changes you might make.
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Still haven’t found that last minute gadget goodie? Stuff a stocking with one of Sprint’s Android smartphones. From AndroidTapp.com’s top 2010 smartphone pick HTC EVO 4G to Sprint ID packing Samsung Transform, we’ve listed last minute holiday deals.
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In a statement on the official Android developer blog, Google security engineer Nick Kralevich highlighted the relative openness of Google’s new Nexus S smartphone, confirming that it provides a simple and easy way to unlock the bootloader for the purpose of installing third-party firmware—much like its predecessor, the Nexus One.
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Tablets
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EDUCATION HARDWARE MAKER Kno has started shipping its single-screen and dual-screen 14.1-inch touchscreen Linux-based tablets.
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The CENATIC Foundation, in keeping with its objective of raising awareness about open source technologies, regularly releases research reports that study the different aspects of open source software.
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Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, suggested to me that Oracle has still to develop a coherent free software policy, but the decisions made by individual corporate units have caused shockwaves throughout FOSS in the last year — everything from a campaign to prevent Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL by Monty Widenius to the forking of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org (see below). Such reactions leave little doubt that the community lacks confidence in Oracle as a steward for its FOSS acquisitions.
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Events
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Open Source Business Intelligence Intro – This webinar illustrates the state of the art of Open Source BI and provides an overview of the main solutions available for DWH and BI suites.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox is due to release an eighth Firefox 4 beta. Not to be confused with a fourth Firefox 8 beta.
The latest test version of Firefox 4 – due for an official debut next year – was scheduled to go live on Tuesday. Mozilla hasn’t added any new tools, but according to the release notes, the open sourcers have polished a few things, including the browser’s Sync service, which synchronizes bookmarks, history, and other setting across multiple devices; its WebGL 3D rendering tech; and its add-ons manager.
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Hard on the heels of Microsoft’s decision to offer “do not track” functionality in its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser comes word that Mozilla is planning a similar move for its Firefox 4.
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In March of this year we kicked up a process to update the Mozilla Public License. We recently released the first beta of the MPL 2.0 and we believe that this beta is now feature complete, meaning that it addresses all major known issues. Of course if there are policy changes that come up and need to be made we will address them. We’ve kept both OSI and the FSF appraised of our efforts. We’ll be submitting the final versions for approval, and we believe that the MPL 2.0 meets all requirements for approval of these organizations.
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Google
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Google will open source two of the Java Eclipse coding tools it acquired with its purchase of Java-obsessed outfit Instantiations.
Less than five months after paying an undisclosed sum for Instantiations, Mountain View has announced that it will donate the source code and IP for Instantiations’ WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler tools to the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation. According to Google, the code and IP is worth more than $5m.
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Google has launched an official YouTube channel for its Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). According to Google Open Source Team member Ellen Ko, the new channel is aimed at organizing videos related to Google and other open source projects in a single place.
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Databases
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The winner was HBase, the open source distributed database modeled after Google’s proprietary BigTable platform. Facebook was already using MySQL for message storage, the open source Cassandra platform for inbox search, and the proprietary Haystack platform for storing photos. But in the company’s mind, HBase was better equipped to handle a new-age messaging system that would seek to seamlessly juggle email, chat, and SMS as well as traditional on-site Facebook messages.
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For the curious: the MariaDB project has posted a draft trademark policy. They try hard to cover all the bases.
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We wanted to make something that should work well, both for open source and commercial usage (and yes, I know that in some cases these are one and the same), which is not very common with many other trademark policies. My belief is that by having a very liberal trademark policy we will create a bigger ecosystem around MariaDB which will help all of us.
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Oracle
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Checking that nothing (or almost nothing) needs to be rebuild is faster. On a sample system (Notebook with Core2Duo, 2 GHz) on Windows XP (anti virus software installed), rechecking that nothing needs to be done for module sw takes 7 sec with a warm cache. On the same machine build.pl/dmake took 210 sec with the same “full” header dependencies.
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CMS
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Drupal 7 has been a multi-year effort on behalf of over 1,000 contributors. Since February 2008, we’ve manged to make enormous improvements; it is a true metamorphosis for designers, developers, and administrators.
The last months we’ve seen Drupal 7 getting steadily closer to its release and critical issues dealt with one by one. Release management is not always easy, and I’ve always based my decisions part on data, and part on my “gut”. Both are indicating that it is time to release Drupal 7. It is important to all of us in the Drupal community.
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I feel the same way about Drupal 7. Seeing Drupal 7 getting steadily closer to its release, is like watching a cocoon grow into a butterfly: the inevitable results are going to be spectacular. Release management and fixing bugs is hard work, the work of a determined caterpillar. However, I think Drupal 7 will be quite a metamorphosis relative to Drupal 6. Not only will it look different, it will function differently — making users and developers feel like Drupal spouted wings.
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BSD
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In further developments, de Raadt said yesterday that Angelos had worked on the cypto stack in question for four years when accepting a contract at NETSEC. Angelos “wrote the crypto layer that permits our ipsec stack to hand-off requests to the drivers that Jason worked on. That crypto layer ontained the half-assed insecure idea of half-IV that the US govt was pushing at that time. Soon after his contract was over this was ripped out.”
de Raadt further said, “I believe that NETSEC was probably contracted to write backdoors as alleged.
If those were written, I don’t believe they made it into our tree. They might have been deployed as their own product.
If such NETSEC projects exists, I don’t know if Jason, Angelos or others knew or participated in such NETSEC projects.”
[...]
Audits and overall basic cleanup of code continues.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It feels like every day this past year, we woke to news of an assault on our freedoms engineered through software: companies pilfering from our free software commons, device manufacturers remotely deleting ebooks behind readers’ backs, Big Media hatching new schemes for digital restrictions and spying, and governments around the world conspiring to expand and coordinate their digital subjugation of citizens.
The word “community” gets bandied about, but in these times, it really is important that we build professional and social solidarity around a core set of ideals. It’s critical that we hang together, both to advance our positive ideas for a better world and to stop those trying to turn software against its users.
From its beginnings, free software has been about community.
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Project Releases
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OpenDJ is a new LDAPv3 compliant directory service, developed for the Java platform, providing a high performance, highly available and secure store for the identities managed by enterprises. Its easy installation process, combined with the power of the Java platform makes of OpenDJ the simplest and fastest directory server to deploy and manage.
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Government
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Openness/Sharing
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As we come to the end of this year’s fundraising campaign, I asked the organizers to let me write you to tell you about an extraordinary birthday present that Creative Commons received on its 8th birthday last Thursday.
You probably know that for the past two years, Creative Commons has been incredibly fortunate to have the pro bono leadership of our CEO, Joi Ito. Joi is a successful internet investor. He has been at the birth of companies such as Moveable Type, Technorati and Twitter. For the past 7 years, he’s also been a key leader on our board. But by far his most important contribution began two years ago when my own commitments made it necessary for me to step down as CEO. With the organization in a pinch, he volunteered to take the lead, again, as a volunteer.
Everyone recognized at the time that this sort of sacrifice could only be temporary. Yet from the time he stepped up, my biggest fear was that when he could no longer make this sacrifice, we would have no one comparable to tap. Last Thursday, I was proven wrong.
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So what does that have to do with video delivery? For starters, we’re seeing a similar reluctance to give consumers easy access to shows. What’s worse is that the video industry is even more ripe for monetization than the record industry of 1999. Media convergence devices and software such as Boxee (Linux-based), GoogleTV (also Linux-based), and others are attempting to bring together all video content on the web in one device.
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INDIA IS STILL PLANNING to develop its own proprietary operating system (OS) rather than use “bugged” Western systems.
[...]
“Second part is software. Most of us use commercial software available in the country. We have got Windows and some use Linux. These software packages are likely to be bugged.”
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Yahoo! just posted a statement on the official blog of Delicious, the popular social bookmarking service it was reported yesterday to be in the process of closing down. The blog is hard to reach due to traffic, so we’ve posted the full text below.
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Bloomberg’s operation, Bloomberg Government, which will have 150 journalists and analysts on staff by the end of 2011 and a complete staff of 300, will charge $5,700 per user. The Bloomberg Government unit joins a Bloomberg News bureau of 175 journalists. Politico Pro intends to charge on a sliding scale, the New York Times reports—”$1,495 to $2,500 a year for the first topic and $1,000 for each subsequent topic.” The Times was silent on whether the Politico Pro subscription would include a sluice box, pan, and dry washer. Meanwhile, one of the granddaddies of high-price policy journalism, Atlantic Media’s National Journal, has used buyouts to dismantle and rebuild itself into a Web and print harvester of free and premium Beltway news across its brands—NationalJournal.com, National Journal Daily, National Journal, National Journal Hotline, and more. Meanwhile, CQ Roll Call, owned by the Economist people, keeps on keeping on with its own lucrative Chinese menu of data services and publications for observers of official Washington.
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Science
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An international group of researchers has figured out how to encode information within the spin of an electron, a technique that may one day lead to smaller, faster memory for computers.
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Security
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But I’ve had a published email address for more than a decade. It’s pretty much the only email address I use (more on this later), and yes, I get a lot of spam there. But I’m not convinced that keeping an email address secret is anything but a fool’s errand.
The main reason to keep one’s email address secret is to hide from the spambots – those nefarious snafflers of unguarded email addresses that act as input for all the unsolicited email that unscrupulous huxters and scammers firehose over our inboxes.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A Toronto police constable accused of assaulting G20 protester Adam Nobody has become the first and only officer charged in connection with allegations of excessive force at the June summit.
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The Special Investigations Unit has issued an announcement that “Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani has this morning been charged with assault with a weapon” in connection with the arrest of protester Adam Nobody during the G20.
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The G20 protester whose violent arrest was caught on video and caused controversy when no officers were initially held responsible said he’s glad a police officer has been charged.
But protester Adam Nobody and his lawyers called on Toronto’s police chief on Tuesday to help identify other officers who were involved in the case.
Toronto police Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani was charged Tuesday with assault with a weapon in the takedown of Nobody at the Ontario legislature during the June summit.
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The CIA rendition of cleric Abu Omar in 2003 turned into a headache for Washington when a Milan court indicted the agents involved. Secret dispatches now show how the US threatened the Italian government in an attempt to influence the case. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was apparently happy to help.
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This is all important. Being able to record the police is one of the best ways to ensure that the police are held accountable for their actions. Privacy has to be viewed in the context of relative power. For example, the government has a lot more power than the people. So privacy for the government increases their power and increases the power imbalance between government and the people; it decreases liberty. Forced openness in government — open government laws, Freedom of Information Act filings, the recording of police officers and other government officials, WikiLeaks — reduces the power imbalance between government and the people, and increases liberty.
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Moving to crack down on gun smugglers, the federal agency that monitors weapons sales is asking the White House for emergency authority to require that dealers near the Mexican border report multiple purchases of high powered rifles.
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Cablegate
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Whether or not Wikileaks turns out to be a watershed in politics, there’s another question of more immediate interest to the open source world: can the latter learn a key lesson from the measures taken against the Wikileaks operation?
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In an interview with CNET, attorney Claes Borgström said, “I’m getting e-mails where people ask me how much the U.S. administration pays me to pursue this case.”
He denies any connection, emphasizing that his clients are two ordinary Swedish women who have no motive to interfere with WikiLeaks document-sharing activities, which have increasingly irked the U.S. government. “In fact, both my clients are supporters of WikiLeaks,” he said.
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Speaking from the mansion in south east England that he is forced to stay at under the terms of his bail (or “Hi-tech house arrest”, as he described it in the interview), Assange discussed what WikiLeaks had achieved and how he sees himself. It appears he views himself as a martyr and is still perfectly happy with himself and the actions he’s taken following his recent jail time.
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Please take action TODAY to speak out against the intolerable conditions of Brad’s imprisonment. A press release we sent out today detailing some of those conditions and pointing to other reporting on the topic follows.
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2:25 Hypocrisy Alert: Sarah Palin in new op-ed for USA Today hits Iran by citing cables leaked by man she has attacked strongly — Julian Assange. Goes on and on about it in key opening paragraph. Two weeks ago she wrote on Facebook that he should be hunted down like Osame bin Laden, adding: “He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” Today: Hey, Julian, baby, thanks for the cables on Iran!
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Am I the only one angry that the current administration of the University of Calgary doesn’t think Tom Flanagan has done anything wrong?
In case you missed it, Tom Flanagan, formerly a mentor/adviser to our sitting Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, currently a Political Science professor at the University of Calgary, broke the law while on the CBC news program “Power and Politics with Evan Solomon” when he “counsel[ed] other persons to commit offences.” The indictable offence he advocated was the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
[...]
Tom Flanagan was a chief of staff and policy adviser for the Prime Minister of Canada.
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The Nation’s Greg Mitchell, who’s been blogging obsessively on WikiLeaks, points out that Sarah Palin is now citing revelations from the leaked cache of State Dept. cables just weeks after condemning Julian Assange.
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Later, in response to a question of whether he sees himself as a “messianic” figure, Assange replies with what’s sure to become a widely quoted line: “Everyone would like to be a messianic figure without dying.”
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The Guardian has posted two Wikileaks cables that focus on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The first is from Italy in November 2008. It provides a useful reminder that the U.S. at one time hoped to conclude the ACTA negotiations by the end of 2008 (and the George Bush term).
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Doug: The whole idea of Wikileaks is terrific. They’ve become one of the most important watchdog organizations on the planet, helping to expose a lot of government action for what it really is.
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Military courts have consistently asserted Article 13 protection broadly to protect servicemembers awaiting trial. Illegal pretrial punishment can take many forms. The most common examples are unreasonable or harassing restraint that creates an appearance that the servicemember is guilty and onerous pretrial confinement conditions. Article 13 provides that pretrial confinement should not be “more rigorous than the circumstances require to insure” the servicemember’s presence at court. “Conditions that are sufficiently egregious may give rise to a permissive inference that an accused is being punished. . . .” United States v. King, 61 M.J. 225, 227-28 (C.A.A.F. 2005); see also United States v. Crawford, 62 M.J. 411 (C.A.A.F. 2006). Arbitrary or purposeless conditions also can be considered to raise an inference of punishment. King, 61 M.J. at 227-28 (citing United States v. James, 28 M.J. 214, 216 (C.M.A. 1989)).
A defense motion for Article 13 credit is generally made before pleas are entered. As such, the first time this issue can be raised is once the case is referred to a court-martial. The issue of whether there is a violation of Article 13 is litigated in a pretrial motion hearing. At this hearing, the defense may call witness and the accused may testify concerning the nature of the pretrial confinement conditions. The defense carries the burden by a preponderance of the evidence to show a violation of Article 13.
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On Twitter I see random messages making broad statements about men re the rape charges against Julian Assange. I think we’re going into dangerous territory, and there’s a good chance we’re being manipulated, and before it goes too far, I want to try to moderate it, and talk about what we know and what we don’t know. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
1. As far as I know there aren’t any charges against Julian Assange, in Sweden or elsewhere. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
2. What I’ve read in the Guardian about the charges sound to me like he might not be a very nice person. But where I come from, that is not a crime — nor is it in Sweden, which seems like a fair country. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
3. Rape is awful. But I think it’s almost as awful to falsely accuse someone of rape, because that’s going to radically change an innocent person’s life, for the worse. And it’s so easy to do, it’s one person’s word against another’s. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
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According to a report today in Norway’s top business publication, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has managed to get a hold of the entire “Cablegate” database of some 250,000 diplomatic cables—Wikileaks has not granted any news organization this access, and has instead been providing access to relatively small batches, one at a time (what the Herald Sun calls “drip-feeding”). How did Aftonbladet get access? They won’t say, and Wikileaks won’t either, but one guess could involve the database being stored on a server within Norway.
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Love him or hate him, Julian Assange has become the (rather handsome, if a bit pasty) face of the global movement for government and corporate transparency. Through WikiLeaks, Assange has, arguably, helped release more classified information than the rest of the entire world press combined. Assange says this reveals the “perilous state of the rest of the media” and rightly asks how a team as small as his could accomplish such a feat in just four years of existence. WikiLeaks has hit all the bases – the media, governments, and corporations are all scrambling to address the consequences of the leaks. Beyond the damage control and the dirty tricks, a radical and fundamental shift in the balance of power is underway. Let’s just say that folks aren’t calling Assange an anarchist for nothing. But what is the rationale behind WikiLeaks, its methods, its goals? Don’t expect an answer from the media. The reasons behind the project have long been overlooked by the mainstream press, captivated as it is with its own sensationalistic ‘hit pieces’ on Assange month after month and its alarmist or just plain misguided attempts to explain how and why WikiLeaks presumes to “open governments” as only it can.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The weather we get in UK winters, for example, is strongly linked to the contrasting pressure between the Icelandic low and the Azores high. When there’s a big pressure difference the winds come in from the south-west, bringing mild damp weather from the Atlantic. When there’s a smaller gradient, air is often able to flow down from the Arctic. High pressure in the icy north last winter, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, blocked the usual pattern and “allowed cold air from the Arctic to penetrate all the way into Europe, eastern China, and Washington DC”. Nasa reports that the same thing is happening this winter.
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Finance
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Bonus season is fast approaching on Wall Street, but this year the talk does not center just on multimillion-dollar paydays. It’s about a new club that no one wants to join: the Zeros.
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Perrenial warrior against naked short selling and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has amended a previously filed lawsuit against Goldma Sachs and Merrill Lynch to include charges under New Jersey RICO laws.
The original lawsuit, filed in the California superior court in San Francisco, alleged that Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit engaged in a “massive, illegal stock market manipulation scheme” that involved so-called naked short-selling.
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I have an opinion about CNBC. I believe this network comes to the aid of Goldman Sachs, other major Wall Street firms, and the insider trading syndicate. I believe that this company has an interest in luring retail investors into the investment trap that is the stock market. This is purely my opinion, but there are some tell tale signs that my opinion may be true. No one is accusing CNBC of taking money from Goldman Sachs. No one is accusing Jim Cramer, or CNBC editor John Carney (formerly of Clusterstock), or Erin Burnett of taking money from the TBTF banksters or anyone else directly.
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PR/Murdoch
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The European Commission’s antitrust investigators say competition would not be weakened if News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) buys the 60.9 percent of UK satcaster and telco BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) it doesn’t already own (case notes).
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Business Secretary Vince Cable will stay in cabinet despite “declaring war” on Rupert Murdoch, says Downing Street.
But he will be stripped of his powers to rule on Mr Murdoch’s bid to take control of BSkyB, which will be handed to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Downing Street said David Cameron believed Mr Cable’s comments about Mr Murdoch were “totally unacceptable and inappropriate”.
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As can be seen from the table, as of September 2010, Venezuelan state TV channels had just a 5.4 percent audience share. Of the other 94.6 percent of the audience, 61.4 percent were watching privately owned television channels, and 33.1 percent were watching paid TV.
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Vince Cable’s career was hanging in the balance today after it was revealed that the business secretary told two undercover reporters he had “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch and said: “I think we are going to win.”
His Labour shadow, John Denham, said the business secretary’s comments, which referred to his intervention on public interest grounds in News Corporation’s bid for full control of BSkyB, should raise “grave doubts” for the prime minister, David Cameron, over Cable’s integrity and judgment.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The bill abolishing the National Identity Scheme is expected to gain royal assent later today.
The Home Office said that it expected the identity documents bill would be passed into law on 21 December. As a result, existing ID cards will be invalid for use in a month’s time.
Home office minister Damian Green said the bill’s passing will also allow work to begin on the secure destruction of the National Identity Register. “Photographs, fingerprints and personal information that were submitted as part of the application process for an ID card will be destroyed within two months,” he wrote in an article for Guardian.co.uk.
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A Japanese woman is suing Google for displaying images of underwear hanging on her washing line on its Street View function.
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# Privacy is the lifecycle of secrets once you have chosen to share them. Anonymity is where an act is publicly known but the actor is not.
# Privacy is the duty to respect the data that has been disclosed to you. Anonymity is the right not to disclose the data in the first place.
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The use of mobile management tools can help, as they can disable cameras and so forth on several popular devices. The catch is that the devices have to be actually managed — a person who brings in a personal device and never accesses the corporate network won’t ever get managed by IT’s mobile management tool. Plus, even for managed devices, the tools today aren’t sophisticated enough to, say, disallow use of the camera within the employer facilities but allow it elsewhere, to prevent only problematic photo-taking.
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Looks like we hit the nail on the head with this one. As we recounted just last month in the post “Location, Location, Location”, location privacy was a huge issue this year both in the courts and in Congress. It’s also been a big focus of our work here at EFF, where we brought home two major court victories that strengthened your rights against location tracking by the government, whether through your cell phone or a GPS device attached to your car.
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On January 1st, Hungary will take over the Presidency of the EU Council. On the same day, a controversial new law will come into force that even the OSCE’s media freedom representative has openly criticised – arguing in a recent report that “regulating online media is not only technologically impossible but it exerts a chilling, self-censoring effect on free expression.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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How high are international data roaming rates? I have direct evidence from two providers: an Italian provider TIM charges about $10 per megabyte; a U.S. provider T-mobile charges $15 per megabyte. The typical business user uses receives about 15 megabytes per day of email. My smartphone uses about four times this. By way of contrast, you can buy a SIM from Vodafone UK with 30 megabytes of data for about $30. Wifi at the airport or a hotel runs about $10-$60 per day. Over-the-air prices charged to local customers is much lower: TIM charges $25 per month for 5 gigabytes of data, of which probably about 2 gigs is actually used, so the effective rate is about $0.0125 per megabyte. T-mobile in the US charges a similar amount for similar service.,
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Late Monday, a majority of the FCC’s commissioners indicated that they’re going to vote with Chairman Julius Genachowski for a toothless Net Neutrality rule.
According to all reports, the rule, which will be voted on during tomorrow’s FCC meeting, falls drastically short of earlier pledges by President Obama and the FCC Chairman to protect the free and open Internet.
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I have always loved humor and laughter. As a young engineer I got an impulse to start a Dial-a-Joke in the San Jose/San Francisco area. I was aware of such humor services in other countries, such as Australia. This idea came from my belief in laughter. I could scarcely believe that I was the first person to create such a simple service in my region. Why was I the first? This was 1972 and it was illegal in the U.S. to use your own telephone. It was illegal in the U.S. to use your own answering machine. Hence it also virtually impossible to buy or own such devices. We had a monopoly phone system in our country then.
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Now, we obviously love Android, and there’s no doubt that Google’s OS has been part of some wonderfully furious competition in the mobile space recently. But we’re not sure any of that has anything to do with net neutrality — it doesn’t matter how open your OS is when you’re stuck with a filtered and throttled connection, and it’s a pretty huge stretch to think Android’s openness (however you want to define it) has anything to do with network access itself.
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THE IRONICALLY TITLED LAND OF THE FREE today will decide if people and companies with money should have better and faster access to the worldwide web.
Giant Internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon want to offer better access to corporations that can afford to pay for it. Standing in their way is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has the power to issue regulations to protect net neutrality.
Like we mentioned yesterday, unfortunately for the US the FCC has been keen to listen attentively to corporate interests, and draft regulations written by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski suggest that the telecoms and ISPs will win almost all they wanted.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A funny thing happens as a Congressional session comes to a close. Priorities, whether political or policy, rocket to the surface. It becomes a war of attrition, of who can keep things ‘out of sight, out of mind’ before people get tired and want to go home.
But, there are always numerous pieces of legislation that don’t get much love either way. The problem is, although they technically “go away” for now, the ideas behind them aren’t dead.
One we could easily miss is this year’s “Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Act.” Its focus? Bringing copyrights to fashion design. This legislation (S.3728) has been around in some form or another since 2006.
Now, I never thought I would be writing about fashion and government on opensource.com, or anywhere else, but here we are. Planet Money brought this whole issue to my attention in a short, but worthwhile piece.
Clearly, clothing and accessories, however utilitarian or avant garde, aren’t software. But, their design is still a creative endeavor, and likewise one that borrows heavily from previous works.
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The Government has asked businesses how it can help them to make more use of intellectual property (IP) assets. It has also published details of the review it will hold into IP growth.
It said that it wanted to focus particularly on the use of IP by small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) and what it could do to help them to derive greater benefit from creative or inventive work.
The Intellectual Property Office, part of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), has published the call for evidence to support its review into IP growth.
My Blackberry Is Not Working! – The One Ronnie, Preview – BBC One
Credit: TinyOgg
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