Posted in News Roundup at 2:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I might have found the right answer in the Navisurfer II. It is a full-blown Linux-based computer, with touchscreen monitor and 3G HSDPA modem all built in. Oh, and as the name implies, it also has a built-in GPS receiver with the Navit navigation system.
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Though I probably don’t need another credit card, this one’s a little different. Instead of racking up points for me, my new MasterCard sends a portion of each and every purchase I make directly to The Linux Fund — supporting projects…
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I thought you’d be interested to know what’s been happening in the litigation against Sony filed by customers upset that Sony took away the OtherOS capability on their PlayStation3′s. Sony Computer Entertainment America, or SCEA, filed a motion to dismiss [PDF] the lawsuit.
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Desktop
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The misconception that one OS acts just like another makes me crazy. It’s like me going from a Toyota Prius to a sixteen wheeler “big rig” and expecting it to handle exactly the same.
The fact of the matter is that the Linux desktop has no singular way of presenting itself. That’s the power behind Linux on the desktop. It can be customized for different needs and distributions, while relying on a variety of desktop and software packages to make it work a certain way.
Windows, on the other hand, has a “here it is” approach that works well enough for its intended audience.
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Server
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After nearly a year of futzing around, Dell and Canonical are tag-teaming to sell and support a mix of Dell servers and Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud hypervisors and management tools to customers who want to build private or public clouds that are clones of Amazon’s EC2 service.
Back in March 2010, when Dell took a bunch of its servers that were custom-designed for hyperscale data centers by its Data Center Solutions unit and mainstreamed them as the PowerEdge-C servers, it said that its cloud strategy involved selling half-rack and full-rack configurations running Joyent’s cloud management tools, and added that it was partnering with a bunch of third parties to stand up hardware/software combinations on those machines.
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Applications
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A port scanner is a utility which probes a server or host to verify if the virtual ports of a system are open or closed. Ports allow different applications on the same computer to share network resources simultaneously.
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This article overviews five image viewers available for Ubuntu and also includes at the end a list of another five ones which either are no longer maintained or are based on older libraries (KDE3 for example).
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Instructionals/Technical
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You can emulate different vintage photo effects in GIMP, but usually this is a rather laborious and time-consuming process that requires some editing chops. Fortunately, the Film Imitation Lab (FIL) script lets you turn plain snaps into eye-popping vintage photos with a minimum of effort.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce
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Although often classed as light-weight, Xfce qualifies as a medium weight amongst the Linux front ends. It’s heavier than, say, LXDE or Window Maker but it uses less resources than KDE or Gnome. However, it is a desktop environment rather than simply a window manager, and as such, it comes with a set of associated utilities.
Actually obtaining and installing Xfce 4.8 proved to be a bit of an adventure in itself. At the time of writing, the Xfce devs haven’t released any binaries, instead leaving this to the distributions themselves and other third parties. When I looked, all I could find was an Ubuntu 10.10 PPA that was 64 bit only. Compiling from source is daunting as it involves downloading and unpacking a collection of tar files and then building them in a special order. In the end, I installed a beta of Zenwalk, an Xfce orientated distribution. Take into account that I am therefore not basing my observations on plain, stock Xfce 4.8.
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Linux is a free and open source operating system. However, Linux (and other open source operating system) can use and load device drivers without publicly available source code. These are vendor-compiled binary drivers without any source code and known as Binary Blobs.
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New Releases
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Superb Mini Server version 1.5.6 released (Linux kernel 2.6.35.11)
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Debian Family
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Did Debian have a contest to redesign its graphics and it wasn’t made public? Did a third grader win that contest? Oh, the hallowed Debian developers must have had a fashion faux pas moment when deciding on a new look because this one makes me think it was designed for children or by children. It’s a good thing that once you’ve installed the operating system, you can change that horrid desktop background to something less kitchy. Other than the graphical goofs, Debian 6 is Debian and that’s a good thing.
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But how does their 6.0 release measure up? My first reaction to Debian’s latest was one of disappointment. The graphical installer feels like it’s about ten years behind the other big-name distributions, the issue with the package manager giving up when it couldn’t find the installation DVD struck me as something which shouldn’t have made it through testing. Most of my first day was a series of these sorts of little issues which I’d expect from beta software, not from a distro that had been in feature freeze for months. And that’s why this review is appearing two weeks after the official release, because after such a poor start I wanted to give the distro a chance to win me over. After a few days Debian’s virtues did shine through. For instance, the project’s implementation of GNOME is very light, putting the usually heavy desktop environment about on par with the mid-weight Xfce. The system is fast and responsive, boot times are quick and the presented software is stable without being terribly out of date. Apart from the early quirks with the package managers, adding and removing software went smoothly.
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For the rest of us, the Debian of 2011 makes a nice, stable alternative to Ubuntu, even if it does perhaps lack a little of the shine that has endeared Ubuntu to the masses.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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And I went back into my past entries and found a couple of reviews of previous Ubuntu alpha releases that … actually were functional, and Ubuntu Natty at this point in time running a desktop window manager (is that what it is?), Unity, that is untried, barely tested and not terribly functional does not bode well for a release in under three months time.
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Phones
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Android
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We’ve just gotten word from AndroidCentral that the Moto Xoom won’t be shipping with Flash 10.1 preinstalled.
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Generally speaking, crawlers are used to find and bring in the content that interests you. Often the reason is that you want to make that information searchable by indexing it. The use case and context for crawling can vary greatly depending on the task at hand. For example the most popular web search engines, like Google and Yahoo, deploy a web crawler that primarily finds content that is publicly available via the web. The main challenge for such a generic web crawler is obviously scalability. The crawler architecture needs to be efficient because the amount of content to crawl is enormous and growing all the time at ever increasing speeds. Another example, of a completely different kind of use case, is a price comparison site where users are presented with products and their price information from various online shops.
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A colleague had sent her the file, but apparently this colleague was using a different version of Microsoft Office. When she tried to open the file, an important table was missing in the document.
I told her that I hadn’t used Microsoft software in more than a decade, but she insisted that I have a look at her file.
So I opened her file in Abiword, without a problem, and to her surprise the table appeared exactly in the right place of the document. Consequently, she urged me to give her a copy of Abiword, which I gladly did.
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For some time now, I have been meaning to write a series of blog posts setting forth my views on best practices in forming and governing open source foundations. Why? Because despite the increasing reliance of just about every part of our modern world (government, finance, defense, and so on) on open source software (OSS) and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), there has been very little written on the subject.
That means that neither a community nor a corporation has much to refer to in creating the kind of governance structure most likely to ensure that the intentions of the founders are carried out, that the rights of contributors are respected, and that the code upon which end users will rely is properly maintained into the future.
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I started pondering what qualities would define an open source city a few months ago when my friend Tom Rabon mentioned it to me one day. I was curious how the city I live in, Raleigh, NC, could attract other open source companies and be the world’s hub for open source and a leader in open government. How could Raleigh be the open source capital of the world, similar to what Silicon Valley is to technology and Paris is to romance?
I think the answer can be found in both the government and the people. First, our government has to be willing to embrace the open source way of doing things. They need to be transparent in their handling of business and foster citizen participation. Citizens need to be willing to participate and contribute their time and knowledge. Both need to embrace rapid prototyping to explore new ideas and innovative solutions.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In the open-source movement, the forking of a project is often a contentious matter, and can lead to the demise or mothballing of the applications that spawn from the original software. In many ways, it’s a “nuclear option” as developers choose their allegiances and take their skills with them. Often, the result is the loss of momentum as well as mindshare for all the spawned projects. But it’s not an inevitable one: the January release of LibreOffice 3.3 shows that sometimes forking can lead to a positive outcome.
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Another item to address with respect to the application itself are the fonts. This is a good chance to introduce non-Linux users to some of the great fonts that are out there. I think that Libre Office should use the Liberation Fonts for its default values.
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The Java* track at FOSDEM 2011 started off on the right foot by dealing with the state of the OpenJDK head on – both politically and technically – with a talk from Oracle’s Mark Reinhold. There were quite a few speakers at Java DevJam and lots of Java tech over the two days, but this talk was needed to start to clear the air, hindsight suggests.
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Education
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In just 2 days students from total 31 Colleges came forward to show that they have FOSS presence in their colleges and listed their name.
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BSD
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Project Releases
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Oracle released VirtualBox 4.0.4, a maintenance release of VirtualBox 4.0. that come to improves stability and fixes regressions.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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In this article we are looking at how Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD scale across multiple cores. Benchmarked are CentOS 5.5, Fedora 14, PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1, and OpenIndiana b148 as we see how the performance differs when running on one, two, three, four, and six cores, plus when Intel Hyper Threading is enabled.
To do this comparison the Intel Core i7 970 “Gulftown” processor was used, which boasts six physical cores plus Hyper Threading. With the ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard, from the BIOS the number of enabled cores can be adjusted as well as toggling Hyper Threading. CentOS, Fedora, PC-BSD, and OpenIndiana were tested in their stock OS configurations, aside from building GCC 4.5.1 on each of these operating systems to have a similar compiler across platforms.
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Standards/Consortia
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Shortly after its release, I explained why the .WWF file format isn’t a really green and smart idea.
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If you don’t know what HTML5 is or how crucial it is to the whole future of the Internet ecosystem, you need to check out our previous article featuring 15 incredible HTML5 demos showcasing prowess of HTML5 over Adobe Flash. Here is another nice and interesting HTML5 experiment that generates a DNA structure on the fly.
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Science
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Over at the Department of Defense, they’ve got lots of robots. Most of them aren’t scary and glamorous like the lethal Drones you read about all the time. Perhaps the most useful land-based bot is the Tanglefoot, a short, roving critter that sneaks up on Improvised Explosive Devices, then graciously allows itself to be blown up for its trouble. Then there’s the Autonomous Platform Demonstrator (APD) a nimble, 9.3-ton, unmanned ground vehicle that can turn on a dime and accelerate to a top speed of 50mph.
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Law Enforcement
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According to the Chicago Tribune, a wrongful death lawsuit filed Monday alleges that a woman was driving and updating her Facebook status when she hit a 70-year-old man who had stepped out of his car. CNET hasn’t yet been able to get a copy of the lawsuit, but we have confirmed its existence with the Cook County Circuit Court and double-checked party information.
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The WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team has learned that Baltimore police and transportation officials are trying to correct a problem with about 2,000 red light camera citations that may bear the signature of a police officer who is dead.
The I-Team learned that the citations were issued over the past few months.
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If you want to be on TV, don’t go to Los Angeles or New York. Come to Chicago, where your wish is certain to be fulfilled. In fact, you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to, thanks to the nation’s most extensive network of police surveillance cameras. Anytime you walk out your door, you may find an audience.
This is one of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s proudest achievements, but the estimated 10,000 devices now in operation are not enough for him. He once expressed his intention to keep adding cameras until there is one “on every street corner in Chicago.”
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When cameras are used, common-sense restrictions should apply. The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois recommends that police show probable cause that someone has committed a crime before they use facial-recognition software or conduct nonstop video tracking of an individual. Another proposal is to delete images after seven days unless there is reason to think they document a crime.
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Security
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They also provide API’s (SDK’s) in PHP and Perl, as well as Ruby and Java, which means it is very compatible with your Linux server.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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According to independent estimates a total of 118 CIA drone attacks on Pakistan killed only two terrorists on the US ‘most-wanted’ list.
The CIA spent over $1 million per drone attack. The high cost and high number of attacks proved quite fruitless given the result – two highly sought terrorists killed.
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In other words, the NYT knew about Davis’ work for the CIA (and Blackwater) but concealed it because the U.S. Government told it to. Now that The Guardian and other foreign papers reported it, the U.S. Government gave permission to the NYT to report this, so now that they have government license, they do so — only after it’s already been reported by other newspapers which don’t take orders from the U.S. Government.
It’s one thing for a newspaper to withhold information because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives. But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public statements that were misleading in the extreme — Obama’s calling Davis “our diplomat in Pakistan” — while the NYT deliberately concealed facts undermining those government claims because government officials told them to do so. That’s called being an active enabler of government propaganda. While working for the CIA doesn’t preclude holding “diplomatic immunity,” it’s certainly relevant to the dispute between the two countries and the picture being painted by Obama officials. Moreover, since there is no declared war in Pakistan, this incident — as the NYT puts it today — “inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. ” That alone makes Davis’ work not just newsworthy, but crucial.
Worse still, the NYT has repeatedly disseminated U.S. Government claims — and even offered its own misleading descriptions –without bothering to include these highly relevant facts. See, for instance, its February 12 report (“The State Department has repeatedly said that he is protected by diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention and must be released immediately”); this February 8 article (referring to “the mystery about what Mr. Davis was doing with this inventory of gadgets”; noting “the Pakistani press, dwelling on the items in Mr. Davis’s possession and his various identity cards, has been filled with speculation about his specific duties, which American officials would not discuss”; and claiming: “Mr. Davis’s jobs have been loosely defined by American officials as ‘security’ or ‘technical,’ though his duties were known only to his immediate superiors”); and this February 15 report (passing on the demands of Obama and Sen. John Kerry for Davis’ release as a “diplomat” without mentioning his CIA work). They’re inserting into their stories misleading government claims, and condescendingly summarizing Pakistani “speculation” about Davis’ work, all while knowing the truth but not reporting it.
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So desperate has been the US effort to get the US government killer Raymond Davis sprung from police custody in Lahore, Pakistan following his execution-style slaughter of two Pakistani intelligence operatives in broad daylight in a crowded commercial area, that the government trotted out President Obama to declare that Pakistan was violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by holding “our diplomat,” whom he insisted had only been defending himself, and should in any case be entitled to absolute immunity.
Now both the Guardian newspaper in the UK over the weekend, and the Associated Press today are reporting that sources in both the Pakistani and American governments are confirming that Davis works for the CIA. The AP is even reporting that he is a “CIA security contractor,” which is something less and a little more amorphous than a CIA employee, and that means he has no claim on diplomatic immunity whatever, and that raises the added question of who he actually is and who he actually works for. But more on that later.
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In an outrageously ill-timed visit, British Prime Minister David Cameron arrived in Cairo to meet with the new military ruler, General Tantawi – the defense minister and head of the ruling military council – on a mission to sell arms.
Yes, Cameron actually flew to Cairo to see if Egypt’s armed forces, sans a president, might be willing to buy weapons from the UK.
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Video has been posted on YouTube of what CNN is told are six badly burned bodies of Libyan soldiers in open body bags.
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Reuters, on the violent crackdown against anti-government demonstrators in Libya: “Military aircraft fired live ammunition at crowds of anti-government protesters in Tripoli, Al Jazeera television said on Monday.”
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Libyan warplanes were bombing indiscriminately across Tripoli on Monday, a resident of the Libyan capital told al Jazeera television in a live broadcast.
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What do you do when your friend is blind drunk, slurring, staggering and boisterous as they fumble for their car keys? Do you cheer them on, slap them on their back and hand them another shot of whiskey? Of course not, no matter how much they may protest. And when it comes to America’s friendship with Israel, what is true for the ethics of bars holds true for international politics as well.
Israel is America’s obnoxious drunk friend. And for over half a century, America has been Israel’s bartender and enabler: each year dumping billions of dollars in military aid that is used to oppress Palestinians, handing out bribe money to Arab tyrants in exchange for the suppression of their people’s outrage and, most importantly, protecting Israel from the UN Security Council despite repeated, flagrant violations of international law. On Friday, America did it again by vetoing a Security Council resolution that would have declared Israel’s settlements illegal… all other members of the council, longstanding friends of Israel included, had voted in favor of the reprimand.
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More power to him! Except Rumsfeld, of course, only posted the information that he wanted to flow freely. The other stuff—like his callous attempts to keep John Walker Lindh from getting speedy trial, his effort to whitewash the Pentagon’s detainee policy, and the friendly op-eds he tried to plant in newspapers—he left out. Luckily, we were able to get a hold of some of the papers from his days as defense secretary that Rumsfeld reviewed and deliberately withheld from the archive.
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“I don’t really care what happens to Walker at this stage.” Here is Rumsfeld in January 2002 arguing that John Walker Lindh, an American citizen who had been wounded in battle and captured in Afghanistan three months before, should be sent to Guantanamo Bay instead of handed over to the Justice Department for a civilian trial—even though the military had concluded he couldn’t provide any more intelligence and wanted to get rid of him. “[T]he military doesn’t want him anymore,” Rumsfeld wrote. “We could put him in Guantanamo Bay until we are absolutely sure we are not going to get anymore information about him or from him.” A few hours later, in another memo, Rumsfeld acknowledged that Lindh should eventually go to the Justice Department, but said he still wanted to hold on to him a little longer and couldn’t understand why everyone wanted Lindh to get a speedy trial: “I am curious to know what the rush is.”
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Yemeni riot police shot dead a protester and injured five others when they opened fire on a march of thousands of demonstrators in the capital Sanaa today.
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Some 2,000 demonstrators again challenged the ban on protests in Algiers on Saturday. “On a marre de ce pouvoir” (we have had enough of this government!), they cried. An older man in the crowd told me, “What we want is a change of the system not a change in the system.”
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Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is confronting the most serious challenge to his 42-year rule as leader of Libya by unleashing his army on unarmed protesters.
Unlike the rulers of neighbouring Egypt, Gaddafi has refused to countenance the politics of disobedience, despite growing international condemnation, and the death toll of demonstrators nearing 100.
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But now it has spread all over the Arab world. To Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen. Jordan, Libya, even Morocco. And to non-Arab, non-Sunni Iran, too.
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Five years after Britain deployed forces to Helmand province in Afghanistan it is becoming clear that British and US policies in the country are not helping but setting back development prospects.
Although more children now go to school and health services have improved, it is remarkable how little Afghanistan has progressed, given that it is the world’s most aid-dependent country, with 90% of its budget financed by donors. One in five children die before the age of five and one in eight women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
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Yesterday, 15 Feb, Baraqqi said: ‘ My hope and expectation is that we’re going to continue to see the people of Iran have the courage to be able to express their yearning for greater freedoms and a more representative government, understanding that America cannot ultimately dictate what happens inside of Iran any more than it could inside of Egypt … What’s been different is the Iranian government’s response, which is to shoot people and beat people and arrest people … Each country is different, each country has its own traditions, and America can’t dictate what happens in these societies ‘ [1]
I live in Iran and I can see how Iranians feel anger at Obama. I feel anger too, and now I should try to control my own anger.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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First minister Alex Salmond crowed that the Scottish fish-farming industry may need to double salmon production to satisfy Chinese demand. The announcement a few days later that China was halting the import of Norwegian farmed salmon (China’s retaliation, according to the Norwegian press, for the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo) lays Scottish government open to the charge that it is in effect supporting repression.
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Poverty, repression, decades of injustice and mass unemployment have all been cited as causes of the political convulsions in the Middle East and north Africa these last weeks. But a less recognised reason for the turmoil in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and now Iran has been rising food prices, directly linked to a growing regional water crisis.
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Of course, “everyone knows” that OPEC is sitting on lots of oil. However, as has been discussed here, at The Oil Drum, and elsewhere it remains decidedly unclear whether Saudi Arabia can indeed turn on extra taps at will. But the problems for world supply of oil do not merely end with production capacity. Even if OPEC is indeed sitting on 1-3 mbpd of spare capacity, it’s not clear for how long they can both increase production, and export that production to the world. Not only has Saudi Arabia’s production not increased in the past five years, but, Saudi is increasingly using its own oil for its own population. The result? Flat, to declining exports of oil from Saudi Arabia.
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Finance
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This story about Scott Walker and Biddy Martin’s efforts to dismantle the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To complete the corporatization of the public’s university is an important piece of what is happening both in Madison and nationwide. This story must be told before it is too late to save the university that belongs to the people of Wisconsin, and while democratic momentum is still on our side at the University, in Madison, and in the state of Wisconsin. Although seemingly specific to the UW, this is a case study about the future of public college education nationwide.
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Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, in a February 20, 2011 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, exposed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s disingenuousness in linking restrictions on collective bargaining to a need to cut the state’s budget. Wisconsin’s unionized workers have declared they are ready to start contributing to their pensions and health care to help resolve the state’s budget problems, Granholm pointed out
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Even though the fight in Wisconsin is not really about the budget — a crisis manufactured by Governor Walker’s tax cuts and funny numbers — and not about government employees refusing to make sacrifices (for weeks they have said they will agree to concessions), the scapegoating of public servants as the 21st century’s welfare queens is particularly unfair given that they are compensated less than public sector employees.
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And just who is the likely recipient of no-bid state sales of publicly-owned heating, cooling and power facilities? That would most likely be companies controlled by the brothers David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries, and big financial supporters of Governor Scott Walker. The Koch brothers have also funded groups that are attempting to create a crisis atmosphere over the state’s budget, leading up to the attempt to pass this bill that could result in the low-cost transfer of state assets to their company.
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There are many questions raised by the connections between Governor Walker and the Koch brothers and their company and this emergency “Budget Repair” bill. The likely handing of state assets to the Koch brothers at a low price raises even more.
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Richard Kirk, 22, and from the Sherwood area of Nottingham, raided the PayPal accounts of 303 eBay users, transferring the money to accounts under his control. He used the stolen funds to buy a variety of goods, including laptops and bars of gold bullion.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The only countervailing force on the left came from the public employee union American Federation of State, County, and Municipal, Employees (AFSCME), who spent $87.5 million in 2010, a relatively small number when compared to the numerous and coordinated corporate-funded interest groups on the right. As we wrote before last November’s election, unlike the right-wing groups funded by a small number of large, secret donations, “the vast majority of labor union funding comes from member dues, which are applied towards advocacy for member interests … when an ad ends with “brought to you by AFSCME,” viewers know what is motivating the message — the interests of the union and its employees. … In contrast, the innocuously-named conservative groups give no indication whatsoever about what is motivating the advertisement.”
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The AP’s headlines overall emphasize heavily the GOP’s point of view, although some of the stories are fairer than others. Three of the stories in this time frame involving the Wisconsin or national budget, however, feature only the GOP’s talking points, while none feature only union or Democratic talking points. So who is writing the AP’s headlines these days, and why are the AP’s editors putting stories on the wire for papers across the country that quote talking points interviews by only one political party in some instances, as with the Ryan and Palin pieces? Especially with online services like Yahoo’s, listing only the AP stories as the entry point for readers, the AP’s headlines need to be better and in this case not look like they were written by one political party or to favor one side. (The AP, unlike CMD, does not acknowledge having a point of view regarding unions or the corporate agenda as part of its coverage.)
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Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Reason Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute have all been openly hostile toward public sector unions. For those who still doubt that what is happening in Wisconsin is part of a coordinated, national attack on unions, on February 18, the executive director of the Wisconsin Public Workers Union sent a message to Governor Walker’s office saying the union agreed to the cuts in pensions and benefits Walker seeks in his “budget repair” bill. The governor’s response? No, not good enough. He is still holding out for nothing less than an end to collective bargaining rights for public unions. Why are the Koch brothers so keen on Wisconsin?
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The Americans for Prosperity group, a Tea Party group that is a Koch Brothers front, has put up a website and petition called www.standwithwalker.com. The website attacks all collective bargaining – not just for public employees’ unions. Americans for Prosperity is also organizing a rally tomorrow in Wisconsin to support Gov. Walker.
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Censorship
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The controversial French journalist Éric Zemmour has been found guilty of incitement to racial hatred after telling a TV chatshow that drug dealers were mostly “blacks and Arabs”.
The Paris trial sparked a fierce debate over freedom of speech and the extent of France’s racism problem, which is poisoning the republican ideal that all citizens are equal regardless of colour.
Zemmour, a well-known media commentator and columnist for Le Figaro, prides himself on his outspoken defiance of what he deems political correct, woolly liberals.
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A company called “Javelin Marketing,” which in turn operates a business called “Prospect Match” that generates and sells insurance leads, recently tried to suppress criticism of its business practices on several pages of Insurance Forums web site by threatening to sue the host of the forum. Trying to get around the forum’s section 230 immunity, Javelin’s lawyer, a self-proclaimed Internet law specialist named Richard Newman, included claims for “false advertising” and “trade libel” under section 43(a) of the Lanham Act. Newman compounded his error by threatening to sue for copyright infringement if the operator of Insurance Forums posted his demand letter. That demand letter is posted here.
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District 65 claims racially tinged clip from board meeting violates copyright rules
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So let’s back up. What’s this all about? The 21-year-old Emory posted a video of himself on YouTube singing a sexually explicit song to elementary school students. Before you take the side of law enforcement, it’s not as raunchy and inappropriate as it sounds. The video was only edited to make it appear as if young children were in the classroom, even though they weren’t. Emory posted two disclaimers on the video that elementary school students were not exposed to the explicit lyrics.
If Emory is charged with the count of manufacturing child sexual abusive material he is facing, he could spend 20 years in prison for what he says was just a joke. Muskegon County Prosecutor Tony Tague said Michigan law ‘provides penalty’ for those who actually manufacture child sexual abusive material ‘but also has a provision for those who make it appear that the children were actually abused.’
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Civil Rights
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In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state in the union to guarantee collective bargaining rights for public employees by enacting a law that protects municipal workers from being fired or otherwise discriminated against for engaging in union-related activities. That law was further strengthened in 1963 to give either the union or the employer the right to call in a “fact finder” to help resolve bargaining disputes. In 1965, Wisconsin’s state employees won a limited right to bargain collectively, and those rights were further broadened over the next six years.
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“This census is a monumental waste of time and money. A large number of the questions duplicate data already held by the authorities on databases such as the electoral register, school records, tax returns and GP information.
“It also makes the entirely hollow but nevertheless bullying threat of fines of £1,000 for non-compliance.
“Back in 2001, 3 million people refused to comply. Given that there were fewer than 100 prosecutions for not filling the census in, it’s clear that non-compliance comes pretty much entirely without repercussions.
“Last time, 390,000 people declared their religion as Jedi. There’s no reason to think people will take the census any more seriously this year”.
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They are:
* David Vitter
* Jeff Sessions
* James Risch
* Mitch McConnell
* Jon Kyl
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The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up the cause of a Maryland man who was forced to cough up his Facebook password during a job interview with the Department of Corrections in that state.
According to an ACLU letter sent to the Maryland Department of Corrections, the organization requires that new applicants and those applying for recertifications give the government “their social media account usernames and personal passwords for use in employee background checks.”
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If you are a parent of a teenager, ask yourself a simple question. Would you allow your son or daughter to lock you out of his or her bedroom? Even though you own the house, your teen’s door is always closed . . .and you never get to come in.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Calpers (D-DE) introduce a revised version of their cybersecurity bill this week, entitled the “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act,” which they say prohibits any possibility of an Internet ‘kill switch” — they swear.
Like the original bill, which was introduced last month, this version is intended to establish an office within the Executive branch that will handle the “coordination” of governmental responses to a “catastrophic” cyber attack against the United States infrastructure, according to a statement by Sen. Collins.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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“Duff Beer” is the trademark for the beer favored by “Homer Simpson.” Just as “Homer” is a fictional character, “Duff Beer” is a fictional trademark. But does that mean that “Duff Beer” isn’t protectable – that anyone may use the mark for anything? Fordham law student Benjamin Arrow tackles this question in Real-Life Protection for Fictional Trademarks in the latest issue of the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. By the way, the “Duff Beer” question is not hypothetical. “Duff Beer” was used, without authorization, by a brewery in Australia; and Twentieth Century Fox did sue, successfully.
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Copyrights
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Startup ReDigi will be opening “the world’s first online marketplace to legally recycle, buy and sell, used digital music files” this summer. On the ReDigi Marketplace, music “owners” can “manage their music libraries by selling their unwanted digital music, or purchasing the music they do want, at drastically discounted prices”.
VLC: A slight misunderstanding…
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google at 12:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Together with new partners like Nokia, Microsoft is trying to ensure that Internet video and the smartphones market are as toxic as possible for Linux
A FEW days ago we wrote about Microsoft banning open source licences. After some damage control (very much anticipated) it is said that Microsoft excludes licences which are against software patents:
Specifically banned are the GPLv3, Affero GPLv3 and LGPLv3. Any code that is released under the equivalents of these three licences is also not allowed in the Marketplace.
Unsurprisingly, the Microsoft booster Peter Bright adds an attack on the GPL. If it’s bad for Microsoft, then it’s bad for Peter too. They are in the same team.
Meanwhile, it is suspected that Microsoft wants Nokia’s patents (maybe it wishes to ‘pull a CPTN’ on Nokia, just like it did on Novell). The deal may be about more than just Vista Phony 7 [1, 2, 3, 4], which cannot do anything but harm to Nokia. What an appalling deal that was. To quote some bits from that deal’s statements, “Nokia’s history of innovation in the hardware space, global hardware scale, strong history of intellectual property creation and navigation assets are second to none…”
Combined with this article, it sure seems like Nokia has malicious plans that involve patents, with Microsoft on the side. “There are other mobile ecosystems,” the article says. “We will disrupt them.”
Disrupt, eh? Elop also said: “I am not a Trojan horse.”
It is ‘[s]ad when you have to say something like, “I am not a Trojan horse,”‘ claims Groklaw. ‘It’s sort of like Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”‘ Microsoft booster Matt Rosoff [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] based his analysis on this report (the source and focus of such an article is Elop boosting Vista Phony 7) when he showed that Elop sold all his Microsoft shares. The Microsoft camp is quick to jump to Microsoft’s rescue and hide evidence of entryism. What the boosters won’t show is that Elop buys Nokia shares only well after he crashed the stock, as more of a symbolic gesture. Chris Ziegler from Engadget spoke to Elop. “He seems to say MeeGo is the Nokia future,” Groklaw points out, surprised. “See what you think he means in this video interview.”
“The FSF should be commended for the work that it does to protect software freedom from software patents.”In relation to another article (“IBM’s post-Jeopardy Watson plans”) Groklaw asked: “Could you ask it who is behind all the legal attacks on Linux? What? Too simple?”
Let us remember Nokia’s lobbying for MPEG-LA*, which is attacking VP8, if not yet by actions then by words, as documented by the FSF-funded swpat.org. The FSF itself has just called for a Boycott of any company that signs onto the MPEG-LA patent pool. The FSF’s statement says: “we’re asking everyone who values a web free of restrictions and threats like this — and especially everyone who values the publication of audio and video files on the web — to sign a pledge that they will boycott any and all companies who sign onto this patent pool.”
Andreas K. Foerster (AKF) added the suggestion that the FSF “should also ask companies with patents that read on vp8 (if there are any) to set a good precedent and set them free!”
The FSF should be commended for the work that it does to protect software freedom from software patents. In a very recent debate on the subject (the FSF was there) it is said that software patent proponents won — a “win” that Satipera says simply means that “lawyers and patent trolls defend their living”:
Software is not just ones and zeros or math, they said. The binary code is representative of the underlying electrical impulses being used to run a computer device, and that control is just as important and unique as the device itself. Both parties had agreed that new forms of hardware were patentable.
A Web site which to a large degree is steered by Microsoft people (TalkStandards) keeps exploring ways of harming Free software using laws, e.g. how to put patents inside standards so as to poison everything for Free/open source software. Roberto Galoppini says that they now organise a forum to push these ideas under the fake umbrella of ‘standards’:
EU Standardization – From Formalism to Pragmatism? – Talkstandards.com will host an online open forum to discuss the recent EU policy developments related to Standardization.
It won’t be fair and balanced. It will be all tilted, based on the known convictions of the source. Speaking of convictions, Glyn Moody mocks this new advocacy of patents in relation to “Web M” [sic]. Apple is no better by the way as it also attacks/snubs WebM and the same goes for ODF. This new article from Cult of Mac is not just pro-software patents; there is OOXML in the bragging/rave image:
Now Apple has been awarded a software patent for a new OS X feature that could be an integral part of their future remote computing plans: it describes a way for users to secure vital files in a virtual ‘safe deposit box’ which would then encrypt them and possibly even upload them to the cloud.
Apple was not the first to implement such a thing. But Apple loves patents because they create bogus scarcity. Without such a scarcity, Linux and Android win easily, aided by open standards.
Microsoft mobbyists not only mock patents-free and possibly DRM-free formats like VP8 (or WebM) but they also bring a lot of attention to Oracle’s case against Google [1, 2, 3], probably because it can put a tax on a leading Linux-based platform named Android. Alas, Google may have found a workaround:
Re-examinations can actually take three or four years, and even longer, Daniels said in an interview Friday. “There have been re-exams in there for 10 years.”
Meanwhile, the re-examination process could potentially cause a substantial delay to the actual trial, as Google could ask the judge to issue a stay while the USPTO does its work, according to Daniels.
Over in France, Microsoft has been greasing up top politicians, so it recently saw Android copyright tax introduced (not applying to Windows for truly bizarre reasoning). The French president, Sarkozy (Sarko for short), was having a good time with Microsoft executives last week (yes, yet again, as he has been spending years with them). Here is an Ogg version of the video where Sarko is legitimising the Microsoft bully by giving him a medal.
Direct link as Ogg or Flash
In our new episode of TechBytes we made some fun of that by mentioning the medal’s relation to Napoleon, who sank vessels. Here we have another receiver whose main contribution is the sinking of rivals, using patents for example. Sarko should be ashamed for this. His friendship with people like Bill Gates and his vacationing in the house of a Microsoft executive also help explain why he lobbied for OOXML in France, even though he is not a technical person. █
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* It’s said to be the case because Nokia profits from it. It is also worth noting that the person from Nokia who opposed Ogg had come from Microsoft (he did contract work with them).
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02.21.11
Posted in Intellectual Monopoly, Novell, Patents at 12:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Shopping for monopolies
Summary: Novell has just received yet more software patents and the situation inside the USPTO keeps getting worse as scope of monopolies expands
The CPTN transaction is a case of Novell passing patent monopolies to Microsoft. CPTN remains a barrier even if Novell chooses to pretend this barrier does not exist and for more background on the subject see:
According to this new roundup from Utah, Novell carries on filing patent applications and receiving some (even while the company sells them to some shell). Here are three of the latest:
Method and apparatus for controlling access to portal content from outside, Patent No. 7,890,639, invented by Shawn Matthew Holmstead, of Lehi; Olin Sayre Atkinson, of Orem; Dale Allen Lowry, of Springville; and Christopher Jean Seiler, of Pleasant Grove; assigned to Novell Inc., of Provo.
[...]
Receiver nonrepudiation, Patent No. 7,890,757, invented by Gosukonda Naga Venkata Satva Sudhakar, of Bangalore, India; assigned to Novell Inc., of Provo.
Heterogeneous normalization of data characteristics, Patent No. 7,890,938, invented by Nathan Blaine Jensen, of Spanish Fork; Stephen R. Carter, of Spanish Fork; William Street, of Orem; Michel Shane Simpson, of American Fork; William D. Peterson, of Provo; and Scott Alan Isaacson, of Woodland Hills; assigned to Novell Inc., of Provo.
Will any of these be sold to an entity that is hostile towards Linux, such as the Microsoft-led CPTN? Will AttachMSFT decide to sell them at a later date? And if so, to whom? Their neighbours from Microsoft? Novell ought to know the trouble which is caused by patent trolls; after all, according to this report, Novell is still among the victims:
Lodsys is a Texas limited liability company with its principal place of business in Marshall.
The defendants are Brother International Corp., Canon U.S.A. Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hulu, Lenovo (United States) Inc., Lexmark International Inc., Motorola Mobility Inc., Novell Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Samsung Electronics America Inc., Samsung Telecommunications America and Trend Micro Inc.
According to this other new report, nanotechnology patents also spread:
According to the report, as of March 2010, 6,000 patents for nanotechnologies had been awarded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office alone. The US government was the “largest patent patron for 2008,” with research and development funded by the Department of Energy, Air Force, National Institutes of Health, Army, Department of Defense, Food and Drug Administration, and National Cancer Institute.
Patents on nanotechnologies may make some people rich, but they will not promote innovation. Quite conversely, patents will impede future work on nanotechnology because barriers are never intended to somehow create even more incentives to innovate. “David Plouffe Gives Preliminary Response Concerning Obstacles To Innovation” says this new post:
The problem is that his suggestions for patent reform do not fix the system, and in some cases make it much worse. In fact, I pointed to numerous studies and research in my response that explained this.
The patent system is harming one field at the time. Patent lawyers allow this to happen and even lobby for it because this is profitable and the same applies to large companies that have a lot of monopolies. What Novell is doing is selfish and detrimental to innovation. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Patents at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell pretends that all is fine and dandy as it prepares to pass its patents to Microsoft and all other assets to AttachMSFT; the reality is more complex than that
AS Novell’s last month is approaching its end, Web sites keep debating and analysing the state Novell is in. Jon Oltsik argues that “Attachmate may be a wild card here with NetIQ and Novell.” He almost assumes that the takeover is complete, despite the fact that according to a press release, “Brower Piven Announces Class Action Lawsuit in Connection With Acquisition of Novell, Inc. by Attachmate Corp.” [1, 2]. To quote further:
Brower Piven announced that a class action lawsuit has been commenced in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on behalf of all shareholders of Novell, Inc. for breaches of fiduciary duty to current shareholders and other violations of state law by Novell’s Board of Directors relating to the proposed acquisition of Novell by Attachmate Corp. and Longview Software Acquisition Corp. The complaint alleges that on November 22, 2010, the companies announced that they had entered into a definitive merger agreement for Novell to be acquired by Attachmate in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion. According to the complaint, under the terms of the agreement, Novell stockholders will receive $6.10 in cash for each share of Novell common stock. The complaint alleges that Novell’s Board of Directors was motivated by a desire to accelerate the vesting of their otherwise illiquid stock options and to receive significant change-of-control payments, and therefore agreed to an unfair price, the $6.10 offer price represents only a 9% premium and analyst targets have been as high as $7 per share. The complaint alleges that the proposed acquisition is also unfair because as part of the merger agreement, Novell’s Board of Directors agreed to certain onerous and preclusive deal protection devices that operate conjunctively to make the proposed transaction a fait accompli and ensure that no competing offers will emerge for the Company.
There is more text about it in [1, 2]. This resembles the press release and adds little or no clarify. We could find not a single proper article about it. In any case, there are several legal actions resulting from Novell’s prospective agreement and a lot more will be determined or finalised in March. This article too is an example of several that are mentioning the AttachMSFT buyout as a fact, despite lawsuits which need to be withdrawn or settled. Novell is now saying that the shareholders approve an AttachMSFT deal. This one report quotes the SEC filing:
According to an 8K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, shareholders representing 68.1 percent of the 352.8 million outstanding shares of Novell showed up for the special meeting or signed proxies, and of these, 97.5 per cent voted for the takeover. Shareholders with an aggregate of 3.3 million shares were against the deal, and those behind 2.7 million shares abstained from voting.
It all started with a press release from Novell [1, 2], but it is not entirely clear if all other lawsuits were taken into consideration also. We have found some more coverage, such as “Novell shareholders approve sale to Attachmate”; “Novell shareholders agree to Attachmate buyout”; Novell says majority of shareholders vote to adopt Attachmate’s $2.15B buyout bid; “Novell investors approve takeover by Attachmate”; “Shareholders Okay Attachmate’s Novell Takeover”; “Novell Shareholders Approve Attachmate Deal”; “Novell stockholders approve merger with Attachmate”; “Shareholders OK Novell sale to Attachmate” and “Attachmate Merger Gets Novell Stockholders’ Blessing”. To quote another report:
Attachmate will spend $2.2 billion in cash, or $6.10 per share, for Waltham, Mass.-based Novell, which has been beset by financial problems for several years.
Has AttachMSFT managed to get that loan it needs? Additionally, CPTN remains a barrier, but Novell seems to be ignoring it. See:
As expected, Groklaw had the better coverage (compared to the corporate press) and it mentioned the situation with regards to CPTN:
Anyway, most of the shareholders approved it, or 66%, but the US Department of Justice and the German antitrust regulatory body still have to give their approval of the patent deal. As the press release puts it, “The patent sale to CPTN remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of closing conditions, including receipt of antitrust approval in the United States and Germany.” Those investigations are still going on. Novell says it’s “in the process of gathering information to respond” to the DOJ’s second request, so this isn’t going to close overnight, I gather.
The sale of Novell is not (yet) guaranteed. Microsoft is trying to exploit Novell for the only Novell ‘assets’ (monopolies) Microsoft has use for. It’s similar to what Microsoft did with Nokia [1, 2, 3, 4]. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Last summer we delivered the news that a native ZFS file-system implementation for Linux was coming by an Indian company known as KQ Infotech where they leveraged the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories ZFS Linux code, finished it off in some areas, and took care of the POSIX support. This ZFS Linux module was eventually released to a group of beta testers — us included — and we ran some ZFS Linux benchmarks back in November using the latest beta code. Since that point, however, KQ Infotech has made their ZFS Linux port publicly available and earlier this month they declared this work as stable via its general availability release. We have decided to benchmark this latest ZFS Linux code to see where the performance now stands against the EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems.
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While it was not long ago that QEMU 0.13 was released, QEMU version 0.14 is now available with more improvements to this open-source processor emulator.
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Applications
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I don’t know how many of you know this, but DockBarX has a cool feature that allows you to trigger the Compiz Scale plugin when clicking on a window group. This is the effect used in Unity that you’ve seen in many videos – well, it this was available in DockBarX for a long time.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Wine 1.3.14 was released on Friday and it offers up a variety of fixes for the Wine 1.3 development series.
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Games
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For this article I have selected five games that I had never heard of, but from the first glance i’ve took to them they seem very promising; and I apologies with the developer of them, some are probably already well known and widespread in the community.
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Desktop Environments
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Fluxbox 1.3 has arrived! A long long long time is over, and we finally decided to make a release.
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Once of the best things about FOSS is the amount of customization it allows for!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I recently mentored some students during the Google Code In project. Now the preparations for Google Summer of Code have begun. Unfortunately I am not a hacker, I am a promo guy and I can’t mentor here. Nevertheless I have some ideas for GSoC and I hope to scratch somebodies itch so she or he will mentor that idea.
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ArchBang is a spin, or custom install media, based on Arch Linux and is inspired by CrunchBang, which is currently based on Debian stable. As such both are using the Openbox window manager, and ArchBang seems to follow closely looks wise and in choice of applications if you compare it with screenshots here. Even the Openbox menu is matched closely. Basically, it tries to be to Arch what CrunchBang is to Debian, but as it follows the Arch rolling release model it is a lot more up to date. For instance the current kernel in Crunchbang is 2.6.32 due to being based on stable, whereas the latest ArchBang release features the 2.6.37 kernel, as would any updated installed version.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A lot of people have asked similar questions, when joining and wanting to contribute to the Ubuntu Community. If this sounds like you, you’re in luck!
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An update to Software Center in Ubuntu Natty brought a couple of changes to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ feature, including the ability to mark a review inappropriate, disability to review an app if it isn’t installed, and many more.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Android
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A lot of you have been very adamant in telling us that you don’t want to see a split in the Android OS, well some of the good guys in the Android dev community are giving you your wish. Honeycomb has been ported for use on the HTC Droid Incredible, HTC Evo 4G, and HTC Desire HD. Unfortunately, this is still a very early alpha, and is sluggish and buggy, but it certainly looks promising.
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I mean Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona, which I’m just back from.
Oh. My. God. I’ve never seen anything like it. Four days, 49,000 mobile-biz people, a city where you start your after-dinner drinks ’round midnight. The Android presence was said by all to have been a marketing triumph, but I’m still not sure what that means. I met a couple of my heroes.
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The man, the legend: a main developer of the BeOS. Did the App Server, Interface Kit, Application Kit. These days, Benoit Schillings does something else entirely: he’s currently the chief technology officer at Myriad, where he and his team is working on Alien Dalvik. Now that I know he’s the one leading this team, I know for sure we’ve got something special here.
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A few weeks ago an app that lets you download and play Flash games on Android phones even when you don’t have an internet connection handy hit the streets. It’s called Flash Game Player, and while it doesn’t provide a perfect gaming experience, it did have a few things going for it, including the ability to create custom on-screen buttons for each game to emulate the experience of playing in on a computer with a full QWERTY keyboard.
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When it comes to phones, differentiation has been a hallmark of the Android operating system. Everyone from HTC and Motorola to Samsung have put their unique spin on the OS, with varying degrees of success. But differentiation also has a dark side. The ability for Google’s partners to customize its software has caused a backlash among consumers who have had to wait months for the latest version of Android to become available for their phones—if it comes at all. The Android ecosystem is apparently so fragmented that one colleague wrote with a straight face this week that the OS had jumped the shark (yes, the same OS being activated on 300,000 devices per day).
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Setting up an institutional repository (IR) can be a daunting task. There are many software packages out there, some commercial, some open source, all of which offer different features and functionality. This article will provide some thoughts about one of these software packages: Eprints. Eprints is open-source, and the software is easy to modify. This presents clear advantages for institutions will smaller budgets and that have programmers on staff.
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Events
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Fortunately CeBIT has an affiliate “Hannover Fairs USA”, and they offered a turn-key booth scenario at a reasonable price that allowed Linux International to have a presence, and to investigate what other things could be done at CeBIT in following years. CeBIT also had other “country pavilions” to make it easier for foreign companies to exhibit.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome has been steadily gaining in the browser market share since its launch 2 years ago. It’s not without its flaws but it definitely falls in the “kinda cool” category. Its simplicity and minimalistic, yet feature-rich, interface caused a lot of users to ditch their old and trusted browser in favor of this new tool.
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Mozilla
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Recently I’ve been working on a Firefox extension, and needed a way to test the code. While testing code is always important, it is particularly important for dynamic languages where code that hasn’t been run is more likely to be buggy.
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It’s slow progress over at Mozilla with regards to Firefox 4 beta. The next beta, which will be the twelfth, has been delayed.
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In the gaming world it’s quite typical for a developer to tell the media they will ship “when it’s ready”, but another delay over at the Mozilla campus has pushed the Firefox 4 release out at least another month, and will likely pit the new browser up against some stiff competition from Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome 10 by the time it’s released. According to Christian Legnittom, Manager of Firefox releases, the final planned beta probably won’t ship for several more days while they try to iron out at least five major bugs on their “hard” blocker list.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Google’s decision this week to ask the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to re-examine a number of the Oracle patents at issue in the companies’ ongoing intellectual-property case could have a significant effect on how the dispute plays out.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Electronic rights activist, Eben Moglen, Executive Director of the New York-based Software Freedom Law Center, made an impassioned stand for the importance of free software, not just in the context of computers, but for political freedom and the future of a free society.
“Software is what the 21st century is made of,” said Moglen to a packed lecture hall at the Université libre de Bruxelles campus, “What steel was to the economy of the 20th century, what steel was to the power of the 20th century, what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. It is the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made, and, when I speak of everything else, I mean of course freedom, as well as tyranny, as well as business as usual, as well as spying on everybody for free all the time.”
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Licensing
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Both Apple and Microsoft have blocked the distribution of copylefted Free Software through their App Store and Windows Phone Marketplace respectively. Though there’s no indication or reason to believe this might happen with Google’s Android Market, I wrote their Open Source Programs Manager, Chris DiBona, asking him about the possibility.
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Openness/Sharing
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This week brings us another open movie milestone: a 4k release of Sintel! This super-high definition version (4096 x 1744 pixels) is being hosted by the fine people at xiph.org. As mentioned in the article, there will be some screenings, though you can also download the files yourself. Be aware however that the files are very large.
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An aide to International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda stamped her automated signature on a bureaucratic memo in 2009 because she was travelling and scribbled the word “not” on it to signify she was rejecting the advice from her bureaucrats, the Conservative government says.
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It’s been a rough few months for Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginny.
First, in October, Ginny left a bizarre, early morning phone message for Anita Hill asking her to apologize for the sexual harassment accusations she leveled at Thomas 20 years ago. Then, in January, the good government group Common Cause revealed that Thomas claimed “none” for “spousal noninvestment income” on a disclosure form during years where his wife pulled in six figures working for two conservative organizations, the Heritage Foundation and Liberty Central. Having a wife who worked for a group that opposed healthcare reform raised the question of whether Thomas should recuse himself in future cases on the law’s constitutionality. (74 House Democrats think so and they sent Thomas a letter saying as much).
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When Scalia and Thomas went to the Kochs’ events, they left behind the appearance of impropriety for the real thing
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One of the great works of American political literature is Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, first published in 1906. From A-Z, Bierce offered about a thousand irreverent definitions of political, legal, and cultural terms, getting much closer to the truth of what the words really mean than the formal definitions you’ll find in Webster’s. For example, consider this stinger: “LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.”
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Perhaps the problem is that most of the news industry employers fit this bill, so getting paid work in an honest environment is next to impossible. If that’s the case, then perhaps it’s time for journalists to rise up to save their own industry, and demand to be able to report facts as accurately as they can before the label “journalist” loses all credibility.
People are often accused of unfairly labelling all journalists and politicians as scumbags. The problem is that many of them are, and the handful who are not don’t speak out about it in their chosen profession. They refuse to tackle the issue, to try and do some good and get it addressed for the better. Of course this is about keeping their job, anyone who rocks the apple cart is marked as a troublemaker and soon finds themselves ignored at work, then dismissed under some dubious grounds followed by being marked as a pariah in their industry meaning that no other company will employ them.
The alternative is that they stay slient, knowing the rancid nature of their industry, and colluding to keep that train on the tracks. They are part of the problem, all the while their readers increasingly see the problem and the solution; avoid traditional journalists, they can’t be trusted.
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The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations.
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How many times do we complain that some political party or politicians are trying to introduce some laws covering technology that are completely unworkable and show the people promoting and suggesting them are completely clueless on what they’re talking about? They get their aggregated knowledge from advisers, who all come from special interests with their own agenda, and never let facts or reality get in the way.
It does not help when the political system favours loyalty to the leader over competence. Where politicians only experienced in fooling the electorate are suddenly deemed fit to be put in charge of the nations education service. They may only be there for a year while the nations children see no new benefits and the politician decides to rearrange the deck chairs just for the sake of short term self interest in showing that they are in fact “doing something”. Often this is detrimental, and accumulating and compounding long term problems, which is the opposite of what they’re supposed to be getting paid to do.
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The six-year-old climbed out of the car and the crowd swept forward to see him. His grandfather picked him up, hugged him tight and wept.
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Yesterday, a judge sentenced the former CEO of an El Paso charity to 10 years in prison and $65 million in restitution for corruption and embezzlement involving the federal government’s biggest jobs program for the disabled.
The sentence is the result of a federal probe launched after a 2006 investigation by reporters Les Zaitz, Jeff Kosseff, Byan Denson and photographer Faith Cathcart at The (Portland) Oregonian. Examining charities that hired the disabled nationwide, they found non-profit executives were cashing in huge paychecks while their disabled workers made pennies an hour.
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Science
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A recently published paper describes some fantastic fossil finds from China that date to the earliest era of multicellular life. The fossil deposits date from the Ediacaran, a period in which the first multicellular life was evident. Most of the Ediacaran fossils we’re aware of come from a bizarre and extinct group called the rangeomorphs (PDF), The new fossils appear to be even older than the rangeomorphs, but include forms that could be mistaken for modern algae.
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The manner by which humans retain and retrieve information is an area widely explored and as of yet not completely understood.
The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillian connections. This amounts to quite a large storage capacity.
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Health/Nutrition
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Problems caused by smoking and obesity leave Akst dumbfounded. ”More than 400,000 Americans die from smoking cigarettes every year. Hundreds of thousands more die from obesity and its implications – diabetes, high blood pressure and so on.
”It’s absolutely astounding. To put that number in perspective: the number of Americans who die every year from smoking cigarettes exceeds the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II.”
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When narcotics officers appeared at a Castro home shortly after 7 a.m. on Jan. 11, they had permission from a judge to search for “proceeds” from an illegal marijuana grow.
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A describes Italian Agriculture
Minister Alemanno’s latest gambit to effectively ban biotech
crop cultivation in Italy by pushing through an extremely
restrictive coexistence decree-law. Given the likely
negative consequences of this proposal, not least upon U.S.
seed exports to Italy, Ambassador Sembler raised strong
objections to Alemanno’s approach in separate meetings this
week with Foreign Minister Frattini (Nov. 10), with PM
Berlusconi’s top advisor, Prime Ministry Under Secretary
Gianni Letta, and with the Prime Minister directly in a phone
call from Letta’s office (Nov. 11). Letta and the PM
assurred the Ambassador that, either at the technical level
or the political level, the draft Alemanno decree-law would
be blocked.
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Security
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With open sourced software, you can easily say to someone “Firefox 2 is no longer supported, you need to remove it and install the latest Firefox 3.6″ they don’t have to let money factor into the decision. “Microsoft Office Word XP isn’t being patched to prevent X exploit, you’ll have to go get Microsoft Office 2010″ involves forking over a LOT of cash, and often has the cascade effect of “not supported in this version of Windows, you need to go buy the new version of Windows too” which can cascade down the various applications you use. Proprietary software companies use the EOL (End Of Life) abandoning support as a stick to push people into forking over more cash for new versions of their software, the last thing they want is to give up that stick.
Again, those who can’t afford to splash out for Microsoft Office 2010 are left with an unpatched Microsoft Office XP, either knowing or not knowing that the exploit is being increasingly used by people who will seek to harm them and their data. Constantly changing proprietary file formats are another stick used to force people to splash the cash for little to no benefit, where a version of .doc won’t open in another version of Microsoft Office Word.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Following our story about two of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons treating America as their playground a magazine reports that Saif has been shooting up parts of Europe recently too, along with some intriguing playmates.
British magazine The Spectator is set to report tomorrow that Saif went on a shooting trip with Peter Mandelson (who has about a million government titles but is pretty much the power behind British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) and Cherie Blair (wife of former PM Tony) at the Rothschild estate in Buckinghamshire. He brought his own guns in, through the airport.
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One witness says snipers opened fire from rooftops. Two others say gunmen in vehicles with photos of Gadhafi sped through, opening fire and running people over. The witnesses reported seeing casualties, but the number could not be confirmed.
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First, Libya blocked news sites and Facebook. Then, beginning Friday night, according to Arbor Networks, a network security and Internet monitoring company, announced that Libya had cut itself off from the Internet. Hours later the Libyan dictator’s solders started slaughtering protesters. As of Sunday afternoon, U.S. Eastern time the death toll was above 200 in the city of Benghazi alone.
Welcome to 2011. While dictators in the most repressive regimes, such as North Korea and Cuba, have long kept Internet contact to the world to a bare minimum, less restrictive dictatorships, such as Egypt and Libya left the doors to the Internet cracked open to the public. Now, though, realizing that they could no longer hide their abuses from a world a Twitter tweet away, the new model autocracies, such as Libya and Bahrain have realized that they need to cut their Internet links before bringing out the guns.
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Snipers shot protesters, artillery and helicopter gunships were used against crowds of demonstrators, and thugs armed with hammers and swords attacked families in their homes as the Libyan regime sought to crush the uprising.
“Dozens were killed … We are in the midst of a massacre here,” a witness told Reuters. The man said he helped take victims to hospital in Benghazi.
Libyan Muslim leaders told security forces to stop killing civilians, responding to a spiralling death toll from unrest which threatens veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi’s authority.
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In light of the ongoing battle of citizens against corrupt and unjust regimes throughout the Arab world (more on Wikipedia), protestors have been increasingly reliant on social media websites to rally their numbers and organize their meets.
Over the past two days, protests have flared up considerably in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain resulting in mass casualties at the hands of government security. We now have reports from friends of NeoSmart Technologies in Tripoli, Libya (stay safe, guys! Please!) that the government has ordered ISPs to block access to most websites. Currently, most websites are unavailable and internet access is, by and large, being blocked.
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As we all know by now, there is unrest in the Middle East. You can read about the latest news from worldwide journalists located in all of the countries. The stories are amazing to read and watch. From an Internet perspective, the AFP is reporting that access to Facebook was cut earlier today in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. The AFP notes, “From early evening it was impossible to access the popular Facebook site, and connections to other sites were either very slow or not possible, they said. The state of Internet connections in the rest of the country was not known.”
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At least 15 mourners reportedly killed in eastern city of Benghazi, as anti-government protests continue unabated.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists called on authorities today in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya to cease their attempts to prevent media from reporting on anti-government demonstrations. Bahraini authorities used live ammunition–including fire from a helicopter–against peaceful protesters and journalists, according to news reports. Pro-government thugs attacked at least two journalists in Yemen, and the Libyan government appeared to be shutting down Facebook, Twitter, and Al-Jazeera’s website as a means of silencing reporting on protests.
“Security forces firing on journalists from a helicopter is a dangerous escalation in Bahrain’s attempt to censor media coverage of the political turmoil,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “The authorities must cease all hostile acts against journalists immediately and allow the press to work freely and securely. “
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Anonymous is at it again. The controversial hacker collective made headlines two weeks ago when it broke into the email accounts of computer security firm HBGary. The hackers released a number of documents, including some that revealed the firm was plotting to destroy Wikileaks, in part by targeting journalists such as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.
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We, the collective super-consciousness known as ANONYMOUS – the Voice of Free Speech & the Advocate of the People – have long heard you issue your venomous statements of hatred, and we have witnessed your flagrant and absurd displays of inimitable bigotry and intolerant fanaticism. We have always regarded you and your ilk as an assembly of graceless sociopaths and maniacal chauvinists & religious zealots, however benign, who act out for the sake of attention & in the name of religion.
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Anonymous, a notorious collective of unnamed Internet activists, has put the Westboro Baptist Church on notice. Tuesday, the group Anonymous released an open letter to Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). The letter is nothing short of an ultimatum: a cease and desist order against the Westboro Baptist Church.
The letter states “Rather than allowing the deceased some degree of peace and respect, you (WBC) instead choose to torment, harass, and assault those who grieve.” After chastising the WBC for “preaching your benighted gospel of hatred” and deploying “tactics and methods of intimidation and mental & emotional abuse,” Anonymous makes it clear that the church will soon be a target of attack.
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Thousands of Moroccans in cities across the country demonstrated in favor of political reform on February 20, 2011, Human Rights Watch said today. Mostly peaceful demonstrations and marches took place in towns and villages largely without interference from police, who in some areas were barely in evidence.
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Hundreds of protesters inspired by unrest around the Arab world took to the streets of the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya on Sunday and at least 48 people were injured.
A police official said security forces fired in the air when demonstrators chanting against corruption tried to approach the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, where clashes on Thursday killed two people and wounded dozens.
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Skittish domestic security officials responded with a mass show of force across China on Sunday after anonymous calls for protesters to stage a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” went out over social media and microblogging outlets.
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Jittery Chinese authorities staged a show of force to squelch a mysterious online call for a “Jasmine Revolution,” with hundreds of onlookers but only a handful of people actively joining protests inspired by pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping the Middle East.
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Police in China showed up in force in several major cities after an online call for a “jasmine revolution”.
Calls for people to protest and shout “we want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness”, were circulated on Chinese microblog sites.
The message was first posted on a US-based Chinese-language website.
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That was the first and last time that Omar spoke to an American government official, as far as is known. Before September 11th, some of his deputies had occasionally spoken with U.S. diplomats, but afterward the United States rejected direct talks with Taliban leaders, on the ground that they were as much to blame for terrorism as Al Qaeda was. Last year, however, as the U.S.-led Afghan ground war passed its ninth anniversary, and Mullah Omar remained in hiding, presumably in Pakistan, a small number of officials in the Obama Administration—among them the late Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—argued that it was time to try talking to the Taliban again.
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Clashes in Yemen turn deadly and Algerian police push crowds out of May 1 Square. Maryam Ishani reporting.
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Few things help unite disparate peoples and disparate struggles like hard times. The Egyptians recently conquered one major hurdle and are now moving onto the next challenge. Wisconsin’s unionized laborers, however, who are currently fighting state Republicans to keep their collective bargaining rights, have just begun their fight.
Here, a young man in Egypt today shows his solidarity with his Wisconsin comrades, reminding us all that our problems, like our supporters, are often universal. “One world, one pain.”
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The Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof on the withdrawal of security forces from Pearl Square and Bahrain’s democratic future.
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People are being urged to boycott next month’s UK’s census because the US arms manufacturer responsible for Trident is involved in gathering the information.
Protesters say they are willing to break the law and face a £1,000 fine and a criminal record by refusing to fill in the 32-page questionnaire. Resistance to the decennial census is growing as a coalition of anti-war groups, pacifists, religious organisations and digital activists begin raising public awareness about the role of Lockheed Martin, America’s largest arms manufacturer.
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It seems that a member of Ottawa’s finest was of the view that whipping his children was the fatherly way to enforce compliance. One child was lashed so severely on one occasion that he couldn’t walk. His ex-wife finally called police after his assault on the toddler, which left “large red whip marks.”
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A State Department cable released by WikiLeaks has bolstered the contention that former FBI agent Robert Levinson has been held in Iran after vanishing on March 9, 2007, while working as a private investigator on Kish Island, a popular tourist resort in the Persian Gulf.
The diplomatic document cites an informant who told American officials he spent time in a secret jail operated by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards. There, the political prisoner saw the words “B. LEVINSON” written on the frame of his cell, beneath three lines of English which he assumed to be a “plea for help.”
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Mousavi has understood that the people would abandon him and his group if they want to be more stupid. This a good sing and shows the real power of the people. Mousavi could act as a catalyst for revolution and real change. The people could accept his apologies, but should show him and his group that they could not accept any further stupid acts. Apparently Mousavi has learned his lesson of 14 Feb, and we could give him one more chance.
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Cablegate
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FOR the first time since World War II, Japan is establishing a secret foreign intelligence service to spy on China and North Korea and gather information to prevent terrorist attacks.
The spy unit has been created under the wing of Japan’s peak intelligence agency, the Cabinet Information and Research Office, or Naicho. It is modelled on Western intelligence services such as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s MI6 and the CIA.
The existence of the new Japanese espionage capability is revealed publicly in a leaked US diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to The Age. Japanese military and naval intelligence, together with the infamous secret police, the Kempeitai, ran extensive spy networks throughout east and south-east Asia up to the end of World War II.
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According to the cable, the ANC’s Gauteng spokesman Dumisa Ntuli told a US diplomat that crippling divisions were plaguing the ruling party, the City Press newspaper reported on Sunday. The newspaper obtained the cable through the whistleblower website Wikileaks..
Ntuli, who has denied discussing internal ANC issues with the US embassy, did not mince his words about the party, according to the cable, which is dated October 29, 2009.
He reportedly said the party was deeply divided not only between supporters of Zuma and former president Thabo Mbeki, but “along multiple other lines”, City Press reported.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Recycling old computer equipment is the only real option, but only around 10-15% of old computers are being recycled. The rest are either being stored in homes, garages, expensive office space or even worse being dumped in landfill sites.
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A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.
The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.
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The natural beauty and unique species of the Grand Canyon are “in the crosshairs” because of renewed interest in the region’s uranium reserves. That is the warning from critics of the mines, ahead of the release of a government report on Friday on the potential impact of fresh mining.
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Just before 2 a.m. on February 19, the war on climate science showed its grip on the U.S. House of Representatives as it voted to eliminate U.S. funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Republican majority, on a mostly party-line vote of 244-179, went on record as essentially saying that it no longer wishes to have the IPCC prepare its comprehensive international climate science assessments. Transcript of floor debate follows.
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Proposals to raise Europe’s ambitions on tackling climate change have been strongly boosted by a new analysis showing tougher action on greenhouse gases is “cost-effective” and already achievable in practice.
Europe’s existing targets will be easily surpassed on current policies, according to the analysis. This means that taking on a higher target now is more efficient in the longer term.
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We should consume less of the fish at the top of the food chain and more of their prey to rebalance the marine ecosystem, says fisheries scientist
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In a new report released yesterday, NRDC and several partner groups demonstrate that tar sands oil is more difficult and dangerous to transport than conventional crude. Known as DilBit, short for diluted bitumen, it’s thick as peanut butter and more acidic, highly corrosive, and abrasive. Yet the NRDC report says that pipeline developers and operators are using the same designs, operating practices, and materials to transport DilBit that work for conventional crude.
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Finance
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The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
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2012 offers our movement a tremendous opportunity. Our nation is beset with crippling debt, an out of control federal government, and a foreign policy that weakens our national defense and isolates us from the world.
But with hard work and determination, we can change course and turn our country back toward Liberty and all of its rewards.
Quite frankly, we need to elect a President in 2012 who will do a lot less: less meddling in the economy, less spending, less warrantless ransacking, less bailing out of Wall Street, less inflating, and less foreign aid and overseas intervention.
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Taxpayers have covered $434 million in legal fees for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and their highly-paid executives since the federal government took over the wounded housing giants in September 2008, according to data (PDF) provided to Mother Jones by a congressional source.
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Censorship
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Paul Levy alerts us to yet another case of companies looking to abuse the legal process to shut down negative reviews and opinions. In this case, amazingly, someone involved in the company even seems to admit this in writing to the site being threatened. The situation involves a company called Javelin Marketing, but which is doing business as ProspectMatch.com — a company that supposedly sells leads. Over at InsuranceForums.net, a site run by Melnet Media, there are a few different threads where multiple people give negative reviews of ProspectMatch, which the Javelin Marketing/ProspectMatch folks weren’t very happy about.
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Hungarian Media Law – commission amendments – web-based media are still required to register, under threat of a fine for non-compliance.
The European Commission struck an eleventh hour deal with Hungary whilst the Commissioner herself was in the air between Milan and Brussels, and only minutes before a vote in the European Parliament criticising the Hungarian government’s media law. Commissioner Neelie Kroes, still a little breathless it seems, after rushing from the airport, told the Parliament that she would not shy away from defending media pluralism.
Nevertheless, it seems the Commission’s strong stance has weakened since Mrs Kroes first wrote to the Hungarian government in December. And after Mrs Kroes’ dash from the airport, the European Parliament failed to vote on its Resolutions – apparently after some confusion as to what it should do.
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Privacy
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We’re holding a Tor hackfest on Saturday, February 19th. The bulk of the Tor developers are in town and coming to this event. Unlike last time when snow kept 75% of them outside the US.
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Just in case the full import of today’s story gets overlooked… a single piece of devastating evidence in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has emerged.
The central point of the story is in the headline, Phone hacker ‘passed information to several News of the World journalists’.
That’s ‘journalists’ plural.
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Civil Rights
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World-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses several domestic issues in the United States, including the protests in defense of public sector employees and unions in Wisconsin, how the U.S. deification of former President Ronald Reagan resembles North Korea, and the crackdown on political activists with anti-terror laws and FBI raids.
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Recalls in the Works: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that Wisconsin Democrats and labor leaders are plotting recall elections for several Republican senators as soon as lawmakers push through Gov. Scott Walker’s budget plan to curb collective bargaining rights and require public employees to chip in part of their salary toward their health care and pension costs. “Those are options people are looking at,” said Marty Beil, director of the largest state employees union. Even more emphatic was Rich Abelson, executive director of AFSCME Council 48, which represents county and city employees in the Milwaukee area. “This is not a Plan B,” Abelson said Friday night. “This is going forward irrespective of how the vote turns out. Oh, yeah, we are going to make a full-court press.” Among the targets, Sen. Alberta Darling, a River Hills republican.
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As the United States tries to build its case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, prosecutors are seeking Twitter messages sent by supposed WikiLeaks supporters — and possibly message information from Facebook, Skype and Google.
At stake in the legal fight — beyond placing criminal responsibility for thousands of classified U.S. documents being posted on the Internet — is how much privacy Twitter and other social network users can expect or whether such messages are considered private at all.
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There was a mass Twitter closing spree on identi.ca started by Reality the other day and it made me think about whether Twitter really is useful or not.
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Hillary Clinton called for the U.S. to promote Internet freedoms earlier this week and introduced a $25 million fund for technology companies that might help with the task. The New America Foundation has already applied for a grant under the program, which includes a $3.5 million proposal, of which $500,000 will be funded by the New America Foundation itself. The mission? To build the technology stack for a distributed, open-source telecommunications system.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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DRM
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GeoHot has updated his blog with a new post. The young hacker is asking for Media’s help. We have not seen him asking for it before. George Hotz wants to make his position more stronger in the Lawsuit against Sony.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Volokh Conspiracy’s David Post shreds the Authors Guild editorial in this week’s NYT. In it, Scott Turow and James Shapiro argue that America should introduce COICA, an official censorship law that blocks websites that large companies from the entertainment industry don’t like. It’s alarming to see authors arguing in favor of censorship, but the argument put forward in the editorial, “Would the Bard have Survived the Web?” is also profoundly ignorant account of how Shakespeare wrote his works…
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When a New York City restaurant owner decided to advertise the airing of a 2008 Presidential debate he carefully chose a picture of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and one of Joe Biden and posted them on his business website, two-years later he was sued.
Writers, bloggers and website owners beware – using a picture what appears to be “an official” photograph may not be so official and could be protected by copyright infringement laws, according to the War Room at Salon.com.
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Swedish courts may be slowly coming to their senses regarding noncommercial violations of the copyright monopoly. In a verdict yesterday, a 26-year-old in Uppsala, Sweden was sentenced to pay a €200 fine for actively sharing 44 copyrighted works in classic filesharing.
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Quite simply, we believe in copying and in civil liberties. Some people brand us pirates for that. Well, then we are pirates, and we stand tall and proud about it.
Hillary Clinton interrupted by protester heckler 15.02.2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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