Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• The flexibility of Linux

  I’ll admit, I’m somewhat interested in Google’s Chromebook concept. The Chromebook is Google’s spin on the “netbook”. Announced in May last year, Chromebook goes on sale in mid-June.

  The Chromebook runs Google’s Chrome OS, which is based on Gentoo Linux. While Linux has appeared on netbooks in the past (and were the only option on the very first netbooks) this is another example of the flexibility of Linux. You can use Linux as a base for almost any computing platform – it’s small, fast, and supports a variety of hardware.

• I shall build it and I shall call it gregBook

  Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I’m still annoyed … had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold). But that is a digression. It turns out that the cause was related to something I had installed that was related to the system. This little problem has been solved, but it brings up another issue, which has also been addressed on the blog Linux in Exile. This is what I wanted to talk about.

• Linux vs Other Operating Systems : 7 common myths busted

  Myth 1: Linux is just for geeks

  Linux is for everyone. While Linux based distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora are developed with the non-technical user in mind, Slackware and others appeal to the more geeky ones. Believe it or not, installing Ubuntu is actually easier than a Windows installation , and using it requires no special skills.

  Myth 2 : Linux can’t handle Excel, Word, Powerpoint

  Linux can handle all the major file formats when it comes to documents as it comes with a powerful opensource Office suite called Openoffice.org (soon to be replaced by Libreoffice). So, apart from doing all the spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing out of the box, Linux can do tasks like publishing, image editing using only free and open source applications.

• Google’s Chromium OS on the Desktop

  That didn’t take long. A manufacturer plans to release a small desktop PC with Chromium OS in July. It’s Xi3 and their modular PC. One of the modules will be a Chromium OS…

• Kernel Space

  • Help me come up with good questions for Linus at LinuxCon Japan 2011

    My previous plea for help worked out very well. The resulting video of the talk can be seen here, with one of the highlights being the phrase, “It is cheaper to work upstream in the kernel” from Dirk Hohndel who works at Intel. There’s a summary of the talk on lwn.net over here if you don’t want to sit through the whole video.

• Applications

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Use GNU Screen

    • How to Convert Videos in Linux with Arista

    • VBoxHeadless – Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.0 On A Headless Ubuntu 11.04 Server

    • How To Install A (Canon) Printer On Debian And Debian-Like Systems

    • INX : Command line and console Linux Live CD

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • The Ubuntu GNOME Remix — an ISO is imminent

      I hoped Ubuntu would do the right thing and start an official derivative featuring the GNOME 3 environment. That has not happened.

      But there is a new project, the Ubuntu GNOME Remix, offering a PPA today and an ISO install image at some point in the near future.

      The project aims for a Canonical endorsement, as seen on its “about” page:

• Distributions

  • Review: Zenwalk 7.0

    So what’s the verdict? It certainly is relatively user-friendly, and much more so than Slackware. It’s stable, and it definitely minimizes package redundancy. That said, it isn’t as fast as advertised, and the French and Japanese issues were annoying, considering that I thought I was downloading an English live medium (and I thought there would be different live media for different languages). Those are minor issues, though, and while I wouldn’t recommend it for a newbie, I would recommend it for anyone who wants the stability of Slackware without the hassle. Zenwalk isn’t the only kid in town, though; other Slackware-based user-friendly distributions with Xfce include Wolvix, Salix OS, and Vector Linux, so please do check those out too. You can the download Zenwalk install CD from here or the live CD from here.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Skype Ubuntu Messaging Menu / NotifyOSD Integration

        • Ubuntu Sound Gallery could make finding and installing sound themes easy

          Have you ever installed a sound theme in Ubuntu? No? Well you wouldn’t be alone. Finding extra sound themes for Ubuntu is a task and half in and of itself, and that’s before the rather archaic installation process.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Modders Make Android Work the Way You Want

        CyanogenMod is one of the biggest hacks to ever hit the Android mobile platform.

        It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices.

        Essentially, CyanogenMod is a tricked-out version of the software you’re already running on your Android phone.

        Every Android-powered device comes running a version of the operating system, from 1.5 (Cupcake) all the way up to 3.1 (Honeycomb).

      • The Android Tablet Ecosystem Is In Need of Major Changes

        Huang made very clear that he thinks Android tablets have to come in at lower price points, emphasizing Wi-Fi over 3G for connections. Meanwhile, there are also strong concerns being voiced over the marketing of Android tablets, or rather, the lack of any unified marketing for them.

        That hasn’t stopped powerful new players from entering the Android tablet space, though. Dell has announced plans for an Android tablet, among several other hardware makers.

      • Google Deodorizes Sniffable Android Security Flaw

      • The Android Empire Rules the Smartphone World

        The Android platform tops the list in sales of smartphone operating systems for the first quarter of 2011, according to a report by market researcher Gartner (NYSE: IT).

        Total smartphone sales accounted for 23.6 percent of global handset units overall, and various phones sporting Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android OS took 36 percent of that market. They sold more than 36.3 million units in the quarter. Next in line was Symbian, taking 27.4 percent of the market share. Following were Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS platform with 16.8 percent and Research In Motion’s (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry platform at 12.9 percent.

Free Software/Open Source

• Weekend Project: Pre-Loading Maps for Open Source Navigation Apps

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Firefox 5 Beta now out – that was fast!

    • Mozilla follows Chrome with add-on to hide navigation bar

      As we showed you yesterday, recent prerelease builds of Chrome 13 have an experimental new user interface option that allows users to hide the navigation bar. But Google isn’t the only browser vendor trying to shed toolbar pixels. Mozilla Labs has published an add-on that brings a similarly svelte design to the Firefox Web browser.

Leftovers

• Microsoft Fog lets users down again.

• Brain scans show Apple fans really are religious about Apple.. The use of any non free software is an act of blind faith and brand loyalty is irrational.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Forchlorfenuron alters mammalian septin assembly, organization, and dynamics. This compound is commonly used to increase fruit size, so buy organic until the long term effects are better known.

  • AMA publishes report on health effects of cell phone use.

  • The TSA’s secret “tests” of the X-ray body scanners were phony. They did not test a real scanner, and they kept important details of the test secret.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • US Citizens, please protest giving presidents the ability to launch military attacks at will.

• Cablegate

  • When the UK evicted the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, it promised to maintain their buildings and plantations. It ignored that promise, reflecting its intention to stop them from ever returning home. A Wikileaks cable shows that the UK intended its marine conservation zone as an additional obstacle to their return.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima 1 reactor core completely melted and is still an uncontrolled release. . Reliable prior estimates weeks ago were that radioactive iodine and cesium were roughly 50 to 70 of what came from Chernobyl.

    Nobody really knows where all the water is going, but it can’t be anywhere good.

  • Fukushima will be an uncontrolled release for at least six months, but people doubt the honesty of Tokyo Electric.

  • EU agencies have issued warnings to women and children over lower count levels but the US EPA raises acceptable levels and halts rain and milk monitoring [2]

    “I really am horrified,” said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s quite staggering and it seems to be part of the pattern of the EPA trying to make sure that there are no measurements that could cause people to be concerned.”

  • UK plans to build nuclear reactors underestimate the availability of tidal power generators and overestimate its future costs.

  • The US will continue to subsidize big oil.

  • Coal Ash Index – mountains of unregulated toxic waste threaten lives, natural resources and property.

  • Toxic FEMA Trailers find their way to Alabama Tornado Victims – from one global warming disaster to another.

• Finance

  • A Senate committee has laid out the evidence against big US banks. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

  • New York State is investigating big banks for their roll in the housing bubble.

  • Matt Taibbi — ‘Wall Street a threat to America’

  • Goldman Traders Tried to Manipulate Derivatives Market in ’07, Report Says

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) mortgage traders tried to manipulate prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in May 2007 for their own benefit, according to a U.S. Senate report.

    Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.

  • The People Versus Goldman Sachs

    Apparently, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi will not rest until some Goldman Sachs executives are behind bars. He will not rest until the tarnished company’s reputation lies in tatters on the floor. These goals are admirable. Give Taibbi an ‘A’ for effort. Unfortunately, these noble goals, as much as we might hope for their fulfillment, are unachievable.

  • A New Wall Street Investigation: Is the Hammer Finally Coming Down?

    Got a chance to meet Josh Rosner (co-author, with Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson, of the new book Reckless Endangerment) last night during an appearance on Eliot Spitzer’s In the Arena. We were brought in to talk about the new investigation of the banks that apparently is being launched by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which looks like it might be the first for-real attempt at a prosecution of the systemic corruption that led to the financial crisis.

    Schneiderman’s probe, news of which came out yesterday in this piece by Morgenson, reportedly targets the banks’ mortgage securitization process during the bubble years. Morgenson reported that Schneiderman is focused on at least three companies: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and old friend Goldman, Sachs.

• Civil Rights

  • Wisconsin Firefighters and Police now on chopping block while rich political campaign contributors isolate and reward themselves with bonuses.

  • Hautala report on access to documents

    Hautala’s draft report on public access to documents for the years 2009-2010 has been published. The report concerns implementation of the regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 on public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.

    Lisbon Treaty introduced a new constitutional framework of EU institutional transparency by establishing a firm fundamental right of access to documents of EU institutions. Now the Regulation does not only cover the Parliament, the Council and the Commission, but also all other EU institutions and agencies.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Google stops digitizing old newspapers under pressure from publishers who want to sit on them. [2] The rich and powerful would prefer we forget the lies they told in the past. Every local library should offer this service. PJ adds:

      shame on the newspapers for ruining everything. … Look what these newspapers want to charge you to read an article that didn’t cost even half that if anything at all at the time. … $2.95 to read one single article. Imagine you are some not exactly rich researcher and you are trying to find out what happened to write a book. You can’t afford to do it. … $359.95 for a year’s pass to read anything for 90 days. They call it Pay-per-View. And Google did the digitization for them.

    • The stupidity of our copyright laws is finally laid bare

      Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys’ representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron’s first party conference as leader. Given that, it’s only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • New Linux Laptop from ERACC – Self-Review

    The user ordered a serial Express Card for use to control some hardware that needs a serial connection. He said the serial control is not something that is a critical need, just desirable. This needs to work from within the Windows 7 Professional VirtualBox virtual machine. The serial express card is working just fine from Linux. I connected a MultiTech 56k MultiModem to the serial port and used minicom to send AT commands to the modem. I was able to control the modem from minicom. Unfortunately I could not get Windows 7 in the VirtualBox virtual machine to use the serial port. I tried every permutation of serial configuration over a period of about two days and never got Windows 7 to “see” the serial port. The client is going to keep the Express Card so we can keep trying to get it working with remote support. This is in the “iffy” section because it may work in the future even if it is not working now.

    The good. Everything else I was able to test works. The sound is working. The wireless NIC connected to our wireless router and pulled an IP address from the wireless router after I entered the WPA2 security information. The wired NIC, when connected to our LAN switch, pulled an IP address from our Linux internet gateway. The DVDRW drive is working to read and write DVDRW discs. USB ports are working. The external headphone and microphone jacks work. I do not have any eSATA hardware, so could not test the eSATA port. As already reported above, the Express Card port works. Even the 1.3 Megapixel Web Camera works. I started Kopete and ran the video configuration to test this.

  • Linux Desktop vs. The Rise of Tablet Computers and Smartphones

    There of course, is no problem with competition. However, with the rise in the consumption of smartphones and tablet computers, the importance of desktop is slowly waning. Linux on the other hand, is just starting out on its quest for world domination. Will Linux be able to match these new and ‘viral’ trends in technology? Or, will it go down as an operating system that was never meant for normal users? If you ask me, I think Linux has a fair chance of beating the hell out of these tablets and smartphones. Here’s my side of the argument:

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 208 – Mint for Pillow?

    This time on Linux Outlaws: More PSN troubles, Microsoft buys Skype, more controversial stuff from Shuttleworth, Miguel de Icaza tries to save Mono, Google adopts Arduino and much, much more…

  • KDEMU Swidish Meatballs with Krammeberry Sauce

    In this episode: Prince Guillermo A. Amaral (gamaral) Duke Paul Adams (padams) Kevin Krammer (krake) Kevin Ottens (dr_ervin)

• Kernel Space

  • Using Kernel Linux 2.6.39

    As soon as the new stable kernel has been released by Linus Torvalds, i downloaded them and install it on my workstation few days ago. It was a nice release, and one thing i would like to test is the new EXT 4 SMP scalability and also further performance improvements after they removed the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) and many other patches from the kernel developers. At that time, i didn’t install it on my desktop first, since i’m not really sure whether the current NVidia driver already supported this new kernel or not.

  • Graphics Stack

    • A Tiny Wayland Compositor Emulates Four Displays

      One of the Clutter tool-kit developers has announced a tiny Wayland compositor that was written and it provides support for multiple display emulation. This Wayland compositor is capable of emulating four displays and for now basically serves as a technical example.

    • Bumbleebee brings NVIDIA Optimus graphics switching to Linux

      NVIDIA’s Optimus technology allows laptops with the latest Intel chips and NVIDIA graphics cards to automatically switch between Intel’s integrated graphics and NVIDIA’s higher performance graphics depending on what programs you’re running. This allows you to get better battery life when you don’t need bleeding edge graphics, while giving you the ability to play high performance video games without rebooting your computer to manually switch graphics cards.

• Applications

  • A gray area: darkstat

    I don’t know if I should really call darkstat a console program or not. For what I saw, there was very little that it did at the console, with most of the attention going to its web-style output.

  • New Version for Xnoise Brings Tags Editing and Subtitles
    Support

    New version for lightweight music player Xnoise brings tag editing and subtitles support for video playback.

  • Recommended Linux productivity software

    Hopefully, some of you may find the compilation useful. If nothing else, it gives you an insight into how I think and work, which might not be that bad of a model for emulating, after all. More importantly, though, it exposes a wealth of resources, including tutorials and reviews, which could help you get around your Linux.

  • Proprietary

    • Ninite automates installation of Windows, Linux apps

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • #Re-Add The Weather Indicator To Ubuntu 11.04′s Panel

    • Create a New Shell With Two sh-bangs?

    • DocFetcher : Simplifying searches

    • Another gray area: Ascii Sector

    • wget with username and password: access password protected sites

  • Games/Proprietary’

    • 0 A.D. Alpha 5 Released!

      The awesome folks over at Wildfire have let loose 0 A.D. Alpha 5 codenamed Edetania

    • 4 Proprietary game from Ubuntu software center

      Usually i never open Ubuntu software center, i use aptitude or apt-get, casually the other day i opened it and i noticed that in the what’s new area there were some proprietary games.

    • The Fatal Error of Depending on ‘Proprietary’ Software

      Rather than sticking to the UK, about which I know little except for some history and my ancestors escape from the place 150 years ago, consider the world. It is hard to find numbers about one country but M$ files these wonderful summaries about the world…

    • Counterstrike : Condition Zero on Fedora !

      It’s been a really really long time since I played on my system last. Actually, it’s been a very long time since I played a PC game at all. I used to be an avid gamer a few years back, and Counterstrike and Age of Empires were my favourites.

    • Invasion of the Blobs

      Phil Hassey author of the Galcon Fusion games has releases his Ludum Dare Game Jam competition entry, which is free to download on the following platforms Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and IOS.

• Desktop Environments

  • Revisiting the tabbed desktop

    One of the things I had time to try, but didn’t have time to write about, was a revisit to someone else’s idea. I do that quite often, now that I think about it.

    This time it was urukrama’s tabbed desktop from a couple of years ago. Things like that tend to roll around in my mind, and then bubble up after a while.

  • Where ends the Workspace and where begins the Application?

    When we look at the thread, we can distinguish three groups of people participating:

    1. Users – they either like or dislike the behavior
    2. Application developers – they consider the behavior as a bug which breaks their application. They want the behavior either weakened or disabled by default
    3. Workspace developers – they consider the behavior as a feature provided by the workspace. It is not a bug that the window can be dragged. No application gets broken by it; in the worst case it’s an annoying, but very consistent behavior.

  • Desktop Summit Team Unveils Exciting Program of Talks

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Open Governance Roles and Responsibilities

      Last week, in my blog on the Maturity Level List and in the previous week’s Maturity Levels, I left some indications of what would be expected of a maintainer of a portion of the Qt codebase. In this blog I’d like to explain a bit more what’s expected of people working via the Qt Open Governance, what roles will exist and what responsibilities will each have.

    • Activity config UI for Contour and Active

      this short video shows the new ui for the configuration of an activity: right now you can configure the activity name and wallpaper, probably more options to come (even tough it will remain as simple as possible). It is accessed by a button on the activity switcher weel or from the activity itself (if the used Plasma containment provides a config button)

    • Meet the Gang!

      In between demoing his comic art and joining in the discussions during the meeting, an artist’s hands are never idle! So Animtim prepared this little collection of Krita hackers and artists… Only he himself is missing! So meet the gang, rendered by the Sketch brush!

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva Application Manager – New look & feel

      Another screencast preview of the new Mandriva Application Manager (the name may be changed to Mandriva Package Manager or else, once we plan to have a web version, more focused on applications) has been published at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHKDpl8UKMQ . It maintains some features from the original design but is more native oriented. One of the main difference is that now instead of Get,

    • Mageia Linux Overview (rc) [flash]

    • Mageia RC1 is released! “Mandriva Fork”

    • Final release approaching now: RC available for last tests

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • Fedora Greeters

        I’ve been watching the Ubuntu “power users” group set up with enormous interest. Although Ubuntu has aimed squarely at being easy to use, I’ve never seen it as being particularly unfriendly toward power users, and the idea of needing a specific area in which people can talk about power user issues seems somewhat odd. However – judging from the activity, it seems to have hit a real nerve. Whether or not it is a good idea in the long term remains to be seen: I’m firmly of the opinion that splitting communities into factions is a bad idea, so how they will overcome that in time will be a challenge, but clearly it’s meeting a real need.

        [...] the need for Fedora to be open and welcoming is more important now than ever.

  • Debian Family

    • Stepping Outside the Repository

      Package management and the repositories of software in distributions like Debian GNU/Linux are one of the great features of GNU/Linux. For most individuals and organizations, installing and updating packages from the repositories will be the best way to manage IT. Most of the work is done by the package managers and the end-user can do periodic or instant updates according to his needs.

    • Love of Money is the Root of all Evil

      The state of MA, whose IT is run by that other OS even fell prey to this thing and, for weeks, account information and access to accounts was given to a band of thieves. The malware hid itself and used multiple APIs of that other OS to infect PCs on the LAN and every USB drive inserted. Isn’t it time for this nonsense to end? Use Debian GNU/Linux and take control of your PC.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Psensor 0.6.2.8 Released, The Best Way to Display System Temperatures in Unity

          Psensor 0.6.2.8 has been released and is now available in its unstable repository. Psensor is a graphical temperature monitoring tool for Linux. Psensor has already been added to Ubuntu 11.10 archives so it will be available to download from software center in Oneiric.

        • Evolution 3.0 in Ubuntu 11.04

          With the great GNOME 3 PPA for Ubuntu, you get most of the GNOME3 desktop.

        • Meet Unico, The New GTK3 Theme Engine in Ubuntu 11.10

          Gnome 3 stack is steadily landing into Oneiric. Work is also being done to port default themes Ambiance and Radiance to GTK3.

          Light themes in Oneiric will most likely use Unico theme engine and not Murrine as some style guidelines for GTK3 themes have changed. Unico was actively developed in past but the work stopped as the new overlay scrollbars in Natty took precedence. Unico engine is already present in Official Ubuntu 11.04 repositories but that should be only meant for testing purposes as it is far from being finished. However, the development has resumed now.

        • Data From Canonical…

          “We will pre-load well over 10 million PCs with Ubuntu this year and we are more than doubling users every year in India and China.”

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Will Mint be the new Ubuntu?

            I’ve been sick. Or, as our British-speaking readers might say, I’ve been ill. Just about as ill as you can be and still manage to drag yourself in to work. Congestion, fever, sore throat, ugly disgusting gunk ejected in huge heaving coughing fits. Lost my voice, too, more or less. Not completely, but enough that I sound like a bullfrog. Ill.

            This is to explain the stasis.

            But to break the stasis, I bring you soaring praise of Linux Mint 10.

            As regular readers may remember, I switched my laptop to Mint 10 two weeks ago. The more I use it, the happier I am with it. It has been absolutely rock stable, no interface glitches whatsoever. It boots fast, it looks great (although part of that is my doing, from tweaking the fonts and themes and adding Docky and such). I’ve grown fond of the Mint menu and am starting to prefer it over the default Gnome menu. Applications look great and come up fast. KDE apps work and look fine too. It never crashes, never locks up. Nothing breaks it. Even the shutdown splash – traditionally a crapshoot in Ubuntu-based distros since they adopted Plymouth – works consistently.

            It just works.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • T-Mobile plans huge summer Android splash, according to leaked roadmap

        T-Mobile has an aggressive lineup of predominantly Android-based smartphones planned for this summer, starting with the 4.3-inch HTC Sensation 4G on Jun 8, followed later by a slider version of the MyTouch 4G, according to a leaked roadmap. Meanwhile, Android continued to make gains in the latest Millennial Media and Gartner studies, with Gartner pegging Android’s global 1Q smartphone share at a dominating 36 percent.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Dell’s 10.1-inch Streak Pro tablet breaks cover

      Dell is set to roll out its long-rumored, 10.1-inch Streak Pro tablet in June with Android 3.0, according to an industry report. The business-focused tablet is said to run on an Nvidia Tegra 2, and offers dual cameras and up to a 64GB solid state drive (SSD).

Free Software/Open Source

• Read-only nation: can Open Source change the British way?

  We asked if open-source software had a part to play in increasing technological innovation in the UK. It seems that for a nation with such a great engineering heritage, we have too easily passed the tech leadership flag over to the US and to the emerging economies.

  Steve George from Canonical speculated that open-source software could inspire more people to engage with technology, and that the UK’s firmly closed-source infrastructure could be stifling innovation, making us less competitive on the global stage.

  And then you, the beloved readers of El Reg, joined the fray.

  Most people seem to agree that the UK could be doing better. Oliver Jones offers the following: “In computing terms, I have long thought of the UK as being a ‘read-only’ nation. They love shiny Apple products and Sony PlayStations, but have zero interest in learning how to make something better.

• Open-source platforms benefit developer and user

  As a software developer for federal agencies, our company might have reason to be afraid of a new trend — giving away software products for free. Sounds like a losing business model, doesn’t it?

  But, in fact, we think it’s a great idea for government and our company.

  How government benefits…

• Events

  • 2011 FOSDEM & Embedded Linux Conference videos published

    The team at embedded Linux site Free Electrons have published videos from this year’s Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) and Embedded Linux Conference (ELC). The eleventh annual FOSDEM event took place on 5 and 6 February in Brussels, Belgium, and the Embedded Linux Conference was held on 13 and 14 April at the Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco.

  • Solutions Linux & LinuxTag 2011

    I was traveling last week to attend two events: Solutions Linux in Paris and LinuxTag in Berlin. It was a bit unfortunate that they happened during the same week, as they conflicted for two days — which means I missed some days for both events. And on top of that, the Ubuntu Developer Summit was also last week, which resulted in some people missing the events…

    Compared to last year, both events had a quite visible difference in terms of number of visitors. I’m not exactly sure why this is so; it could be because there were conflicts with other events, or also because they moved to first half of May, which is different from previous years.

    What was most amazing, however, was to be present at booths just one month after the GNOME 3.0 release. For both events, we had tons of GNOME 3 PromoDVDs (kindly offered on behalf of the openSUSE project) to give away, and that was a big success: I think we gave around 600 of them at Solutions Linux and probably a similar amount, if not more, at LinuxTag (Tobias would know better than me here).

  • Gentoo LinuxTag 2011 and static gallery generators 2011-05-21

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 5 Beta Is Here, What’s New?

      So what’s new in Firefox 5? The release notes mention support for CSS animations as the only new technology included in the release.

    • The Next-Generation Browser: No URL Bar

      Being able to type the address of a website is one of the most essential features we expect from web browsers today. Yet it is the URL bar and its purpose that is now being reconsidered by both Google as well as Mozilla for Chrome and Firefox. The next major revision of web browsers will include options to hide the URL bar. Further down the road, it is inevitable that the URL bar will become what it is supposed to be: A tool – not more and not less.

    • What’s Inside Mozilla’s Firefox 5 Beta?

      Mozilla has released the first Firefox beta under its new rapid-release model: a program designed to ensure more frequent updates to the browser at the expense of huge, sweeping changes between new Firefox versions.

      Case in point—the company just sent Firefox 5 from the newly designed Aurora development channel to the public-facing Beta channel. That means that it’s available for public consumption and feedback. However, the list of new features might seem a bit scant at first, especially if one takes into account the historical jumps that have previously occurred between Firefox version numbers.

      “The shift to a rapid release development cycle delivers cutting edge Firefox features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster,” reads the blog post announcing the Firefox 5 beta release.

• CMS

  • Chris Rock using Drupal

    A lot of the recent “scores” I’ve listed on this site have been from serious institutions: ING, Investor.gov, The U.S. Small Business Administration, and The World Economic Forum.

    But don’t think for a moment that Drupal’s losing any ground in other areas. I was in NYC recently, the mecca of the media and entertainment industry, and Drupal is about to get really big there — that’s food for another blog post that I’m planning to write.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Should Microsoft Be Losing Sleep Over Chrome OS?

  Over at ZDNet, in fact, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols went so far as to suggest that Google’s new devices are “a Windows killer,” and his sentiment has been widely echoed throughout the blogosphere.

• Desktop Linux: the final frontier

  Depending on who you talk to, 40 to 75 per cent of the world’s web servers are Linux-based. That is some serious market penetration. But even in organisations running Linux on their servers the operating system is on just 20 per cent of desktops.

  Despite its success in the back office, Linux has not yet made such an impact on the desktop. Does it matter?

  Unsurprisingly, Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice-president of OEM services, thinks it does. And, he argues, in the form of Ubuntu at least Linux is making it on the desktop – “just in different locales and at different speeds”.

• Wyse announces affordable Linux-based thin client for cloud deployments

• Linux thin client taps new Marvell ARM SoC

  Wyse Technology announced a Linux thin client based on Marvell’s new 1GHz PXA510 system-on-chip (SoC), with support for Citrix Receiver, VMware View Open Client, Wyse TCX and VDA, and Microsoft’s RDP (remote desktop protocol) 7. The Wyse T50 offers 1GB RAM, 1GB flash, DVI-I with a dual-display option, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, and support for 720p video within a browser.

• Desktop

  • Linutop announces its fourth generation of Linux Nettop

    inutop have provided for several years now some very attractive and ultra compact linux Nettops, and last week the company introduced its fourth generation devices the Linutop4 which fits in just 18.2×20.1×3.6cm and just 936g!
    The Linutop4 is powered by an Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz CPU comes with 1GB of RAM expandable up to 2GB, 2GB of internal flash memory, Gigabit Ethernet VGA, DVI and five USB 2.0 ports.
    The Linutop runs on Linuop OS 4.0, an optimized version of Ubuntu made to work flawlessly on such device.

• Kernel Space

  • [Linux libre 2.6.39]

    20 Mai 2011::
    Linux libre kernel 2.6.39 pour Debian Squeeze est maintenant disponnible.
    Vous pouvez le récupérer directement ici.

  • GL rolls out Linux drivers and APIs for telecom cards

    GL Communications announced Linux support in the form of drivers and APIs for its universal T1 E1 and OC-3/12 STM-1/4 cards. All functions of the hardware are accessible through the API, and many software-based functions are available to ease complex application development. The Linux toolkit consists of C and C++ header files, a 32 bit shared library, and examples of custom applications. The API supports gcc/g++ 4.4.1 and openSUSE Linux 11.2 kernel 2.6.31.

  • Graphics Stack

    • NVIDIA Gets Happy, Puts Out Two New Blobs

      NVIDIA has put out two new proprietary Linux driver updates. One of the drivers is a pre-release in the 270.xx series that largely is after bug-fixing, but the second driver is more interesting as it’s the first (development) NVIDIA Linux driver release in the 275.xx series. The NVIDIA 275.09 beta driver brings new features.

• Applications

  • Here Comes deviantArt Plug-in For Ubuntu

  • GIMP 2.6 review

    Championed by Linux users everywhere, GIMP is an entirely free-to-use image editing program.

  • The Unarchiver: Finally A Free Software Tool To Extract RARv3 Archives

    We finally have a free software tool to extract RARv3 archives on Linux. The news comes from a post on the Free Software Foundation (thanks to Peter Slavek who sent us the tip!) blog which presents a new tool that can extract archives in many different formats, including RARv3.

  • MPD + NCMPC = Music Nirvana For Command Line Folks

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Fedora 14 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

    • Howto Turn on Num lock automatically every time you restart you computer

    • The Cure For Your Flash Problems In Kubuntu Lies In Flash-Aid

    • How to : Install Ubuntu onto software RAID0

    • How to Get Rid of “Unlock Keyring” Message in Linux after You Changed Login Password

    • HOWTO : Bug fix for BackTrack 5

    • Running Fedora on the Galaxy S

    • How to Recover Data and Partitions for Free with TestDisk

  • Games

    • The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle Reviewed

      Personally, I think this is the best bundle so far, but my taste does lean toward combat, so this is definitely biased. In fact, I fully understand why this bundle earned less than the other two; it offers a very singular type of games. The fighting genre may simply not appeal to everyone.

      That said, the Frozenbyte bundle offers the most complete games of them all. This is partially evident by huge downloads, approx. 1GB per game. But the binary filesize is just an indication. You truly get complete, fully featured, in-depth games you can play for hours and hours on end. The gameplay is meticulously crafted, with a careful attention to little details. There’s a professional feel to the products, especially the Shadowgrounds family and Trine, the shining star of this bundle. Jack Claw and Splot are just prototypes, so it’s too early to tell, but judging from other games, they are going to be a blast.

    • 18 of the Best Free Up-and-Coming Linux Games (Part 3 of 3)

      Now, let’s scrutinize the 6 games at hand. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, providing screenshots of the game in action, a full description of the game, with an in-depth analysis of the features of the game, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME and KDE 2011 Desktop Summit programme published

    The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards have published the programme for this year’s Desktop Summit. Following the opening keynote, attendees can visit one of four different rooms, each with a variety of tracks including community, applications, platforms, tablets, development and accessibility & help.

    The 2011 event will take place over the course of a week from 6 to 12 August at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany; it is open to developers, community members and users alike. The joint conference is supported locally by the Berlin Senate and the TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH, and is expected to bring together more than one thousand core contributors, open source leaders and representatives from government, education and corporate environments.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Gnome a new OS or just taking advantages of some systemd features?

      The Gnome project is making a lot of noise in the Internet these days, because it seems like they are planning to become a whole new Linux distribution, or maybe we are just not fully understanding things.

    • What’s Coming Up For GNOME 3.2?

      Last week marked the end of the feature proposal for GNOME 3.2, for the first major update to the GNOME3 desktop. The GNOME 3.2 release schedule has the final release set for the end of September. In this article is a list of some of the features that were brought up for GNOME 3.2.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Five Linux Distributions Get a Fresh Boost

      Between the launch of a new Linux kernel update and the news that open source has achieved mainstream business use at last, it’s been an exciting week in the world of open source software.

  • Red Hat Family

    • With RHEL 6.1, Red Hat’s Partnerships And Cloud-based Goals Beckon

      Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its enterprise Linux offering: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 (RHEL 6.1), with many new features focused on businesses and organizations. RHEL 6.1 offers improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, in addition to support for upcoming system hardware. It also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining application compatibility and OEM/ISV certifications. In Red Hat’s quarterly and annual reports one fact that often goes unnoticed is that the company’s barnstorming success is largely based on renewal of support and service subscriptions at every increasing prices, and that is largely due to the loyalty that many organizations have toward RHEL. The new release stands to continue that trend, and could win some brand new customers.

    • Will Red Hat come back to haunt the Open Virtualization Alliance?

    • Fedora

      • Fedora at Agora’s Open Source / Free Software conference

        I asked if, as disgruntled as I am, I still go and talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference and the feedback convinced me to go. As the local Fedora community is extremely weak these days, I wasn’t able to summon a team (we were on hostile grounds, with Microsoft as the main sponsor of the event), so I joined Ceata.

      • Fedora 15 Boosts Linux Security

        As the starting point for many IT perimeter defense architectures, the firewall is a critical piece of security technology. In the upcoming, Fedora 15 Linux distribution release, a new dynamic firewall technology will help to improve the critical cornerstone technology for server and desktop users.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian GNU/Linux – Repositories and WiFi Firmware

      As I mentioned in my previous post about Debian GNU/Linux 6.0, with this release they now have Live CD ISO images. This is a very convenient way to try out Debian and see if it is going to work on your hardware; if it does, there is also an installer on the Live CD desktop. Very convenient.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 10 Things That Make Ubuntu The Best Alternative Operating System

          In recent years, Ubuntu Linux has become increasingly popular as a replacement for Windows. Ubuntu is an operating system which features a number of advantages that make it an appealing alternative for everyday users. Here are 10 reasons why Ubuntu beats Windows hands down.

        • Ubuntu Kitchen Sink: A Control Center For Power Users

          He does make it clear that it’s not replicating the Control Center model which is targeted at end-users. Jono is targeting at power users and his idea of Kitchen Sink is something similar to GConf.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: an OS for your mum

          The world is a big place, and it seems of no coincidence that Canonical’s offices sit 27 floors up in the Millbank Tower with a 360 degree view of it right in the middle of London. Canonical is the parent company of the most popular distribution of the free, open-source computer operating system known as Linux and if there’s one thing between them and their broad horizons, it’s Windows.

          Since 2004 Ubuntu has offered users another way when it comes to their PCs but with that way one of unfamiliar applications, no hotline support and less compatability then one might get with Mircosoft, it’s been a way largely ignored by the mainstream computer owner. According to Canonical, however, with the launch of the latest version, Ubuntu 11.04, all of that is about to change.

        • Interview with Matthew East

          Matthew East is a name which often appears in my inbox every few days, I thought it a good idea to learn more about this Ubuntu Community Council member and his role in the community.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) Features

          The following article will present to Ubuntu fans all over the world, a few interesting features and facts for the next version of Ubuntu OS, the Ubuntu 11.10, dubbed Oneiric Ocelot.

        • Python plans for Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04

          Last week, I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, Hungary. These semi-annual events are open to everyone, and hundreds of people participate both in person and remotely. Budapest’s was called UDS-O, where the ‘O’ stands for Oneiric Ocelot, the code name for Ubuntu 11.10, which will be released in October 2011. This is where we did the majority of planning for what changes, new features, and other developments you’ll find in the next version of Ubuntu. UDS-P will be held at the end of the year in Orlando, Florida and will cover the as yet unnamed 12.04 release, which will be a Long Term Support release.

        • Rocking The LoCo Community In Oneiric

          I have long been a firm believer that the Ubuntu LoCo Community is one of the strongest elements of Ubuntu. The LoCo community are our eyes, ears, mouths, and hearts in taking Ubuntu to the masses. If we are going to reach out to 200million users, we are absolutely going to need to have the LoCo Community on-board as a well oiled machine. Fortunately, some great work is going on to achieve this.

        • Add Ubuntu One style dark toolbars to all apps in Ubuntu

          It has been two weeks to the day since I shared my enthusiasm for DeviantArtist SimplyGreat’s ‘UbuntuOne style Nautilus-Elementary theme’.

        • Netbook Launcher now Available for Natty!

          Hey guys, you might remember that a few days ago I was asked to build the lucid netbook launcher functionality for maverick; enough people asked me for a natty version that I wanted to make sure you guys got access to the clutter based netbook-launcher too. So here you go!

        • Video: The Future of OpenStack and Why Ubuntu Linux has come first.

          I’ve been following the open source OpenStack cloud effort since it was first announced in June of 2010. I mean come on, how many times does a tech journalist like me get to interview NASA about enterprise open source tech?

          Over the course of the last year, I’ve seen OpenStack grow from its NASA/Rackspace base, into becoming the most influential open source cloud project on Earth. I’ve seen IT vendors big and small including Cisco, Dell, Brocade, Citrix and Canonical all align behind the OpenStack vision.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 201104 Xfce

            Linux Mint 201104 Xfce is a great fit for users on slower or older hardware that craves Debian with all of the Linux Mint tools and goodies. It’s also an excellent choice for those who are minimalists and prefer a lightweight but fully functional desktop environment. Both kinds of users should get many hours of enjoyment and productivity from this distribution.

            But what about Ubuntu users who dislike Unity? I’m sure there are some out there who are still searching for an alternative distribution. I’m happy to say that Linux Mint 201104 Xfce is great for you guys too. In fact, once you get used to Xfce you may find that going back to GNOME or KDE is simply unnecessary unless you crave eye-candy and a bit of bloat in your desktop environment.

            [...]

            Rating: 4.5/5

          • Kubuntu 11.10 Mobile Devices Sneak Peak

            As mentioned in the general sneak peak, Kubuntu 11.10 will have a strong focus on mobile devices. Since I did not go into details yet, let me make up for this by presenting all the more interesting changes in the area of mobile device support.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The March Towards Choice in Consumer IT

    The current battle-ground is the tablet PC but, being mobile, ARM and Android/Linux are doing well. No one is being fired for choosing ARM+Android/Linux. Retailers are delivering them to consumers. Businesses are rapidly taking them up. No one really cares that they are not Wintel in large part. OEMs are making smart phones that dock and become a new computing platform capable of most of the tasks which any PC can do. This permits ARM+Android/Linux to invade the Wintel stronghold through the open gates of portability, low-power, tons of applications available on-line, simple/easy user interfaces and more than enough power and performance for most users.

  • Phones

    • MeeGo 1.2 Released

      If you have looked at any of the previous MeeGo/Moblin releases, you’ll recognize this as being pretty much the same home screen. I haven’t compared them side-by-side, but this one actually does look a little nicer to me, or perhaps I should say a little less objectionable. It still has the same symbols across the top, several of which I still don’t get the visual association with their content. Maybe they have just improved the color scheme a bit, or touched up the overall graphics. Anyway, I have looked at each of the pages in the MeeGo desktop previously, so I’ll just hit a couple of the better ones this time.

    • MeeGo Linux 1.2 core software now available

    • Android

      • Honeycomb Has Hidden Gingerbread Interface!

        This is one of the reasons Google is holding the Honeycomb code to discourage vendors from putting it on smartphones and create a bad experience for users.

      • Android Honeycomb has hidden Gingerbread interface, enabled by higher LCD density

        Google’s already indicated that tablets and smartphones won’t be sharing the same Android build until Ice Cream Sandwich in Q4, though interestingly enough, it turns out that the tablet-friendly Honeycomb actually has Gingerbread’s interface quietly tucked underneath. According to modder Graffix0214, all you need for making the jump is one simple tweak in a system file: assuming you already have root access, use your preferred method –

      • Multi-Touch Technology Supports Android OS

        Stantum, a leading developer of multi-touch technology, announced today that its patented Interpolated Voltage Sensing Matrix (IVSM) technology now supports Google’s Android operating system. IVSM technology’s native compatibility with Android’s multi-touch framework is being showcased on a demonstration kit in Stantum’s booth (#1354) at the SID Display Week exhibition in Los Angeles.

      • Modders Make Android Work the Way You Want

        It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices.

      • Geniatech launches a TV with Android on board!

        A few years ago , your smart phone was running a proprietary OS, your TV was nothing more than a crap box to recieve local channels and only your computer came with your choice of software. There was no common thread connecting these three worlds. But the situation has altogether changed with the arrival of Android.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Chromebooks – has the future arrived?

      It seems like an age ago since Google first announced ChromeOS and certainly there’s been a lot written about it, including a fair bit in this magazine. Now that the launch of Chromebook models from two manufacturers is imminent, it might be worth reminding ourselves of some of the issues around a “Cloud-based OS” generally, and this one in particular.

    • Will you buy the Google Chromebook?

    • OLPC Will Remain a Non-Profit

      The story in today’s Boston Business Journal about One Laptop per Child requires certain clarification:

      1. OLPC will continue as a non-profit organization in order to carry out its traditional role advocating for 1:1 computing in developing countries as a means to provide a modern education to children.

      2. OLPC will continue as a non-profit organization in its activities to arrange and manage laptop deployments around the world.

      3. OLPC continues to believe that non-profit status enables it to more effectively communicate on the issues of children and education without the possible taint of commercial self-interest.

Free Software/Open Source

• OSI open reformation begins in earnest

  The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is creating a process for wider participation through working groups and new affiliate programmes which will influence its thinking on its future mission. The programme was unveiled at last week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco by OSI board member Simon Phipps. The plans are the result of the OSI’s planning for reformation announced in March.

  On returning to the UK, Phipps talked to The H about the plan. He explained that previous efforts to set a future mission for the organisation had not been effective. “Agreeing a mission in advance is too hard” said Phipps, as he explained how the OSI was now planning how to evolve the organisation. Historically the OSI, a non-profit corporation with a small board, set out to educate the world about open source. It has also managed a definition of what open source is, and given its blessing to licences which comply with that definition. Now, says Phipps, it is time to take on the second part of the OSI’s 1999 mission statement: “to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community”.

• Open standards and a smart energy grid: Interview with Green Energy Corp

• Events

  • El software libre en la ética y en la práctica

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • 10 Cool and Useful Google Chrome Tricks You Must Know

    • Why I dumped Debian Squeeze’s Chromium for the Chrome browser from Google’s repository

      I’ve always been an advocate for using the packages supplied by the distribution/project you happen to be running as an OS. Rarely do I go outside the “official” repositories for something shinier and newer. That’s changing, and swapping the Chromium browser in Debian Squeeze for the Google Chrome browser directly from Google is my latest shift in this direction.

      Why did I do it? Well, I’ve had more than a few incompatibility problems with the Version 6.0.472.63 of Chromium that is in the Debian Squeeze repositories, which won’t be updated for anything but bug fixes for the life of Debian’s stable release.

• SaaS

  • Oracle: Quit messin’ and marry Hadoop!

  • IBM launches Hadoop-based analytics software, big data services

    IBM said Friday that it will invest $100 million on research for analytics and big data projects and expanded its portfolio accordingly. The company also launched Hadoop-based services.

    Hadoop is open source technology that’s used to analyze unstructured data. Both Yahoo and Google are heavy Hadoop proponents.

• Databases

  • Should You Move Your MySQL Database to the Cloud?

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • OO.o, TDF and CLAs

    Yesterday I read LWN’s (paywalled but accessible from here) interview with Mark Shuttleworth, where he is quoted as saying that the formation of The Document Foundation (TDF) and its launch of LibreOffice “led Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off 100 employees.” Mark says this in the context of his new campaign as an apologist for Contribution Licensing Agreements, about which I have written extensively.

• Education

  • The Free Technology Academy comes to Greece

    The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is an advanced virtual campus with various course modules, which can be followed entirely on-line and seeks to educate and promote the adoption of Free Software and other Free Technologies. I explained in detail what the FTA is last year. This week the Association of Greek Users and Friends of Free/Open Source Software has joined the FTA’s International Associate Partner Network.

• Business

  • Interactive Ideas grows by third

    Distributor Interactive Ideas has held up a 32 per cent spike in annual sales as further evidence of the strength of the open-source market.

• Project Releases

  • vc-dwim-1.5 released [stable]

• Programming

  • The Bizarre Cathedral – 98

  • JavaScript: Now powerful enough to run Linux

Leftovers

• How a law firm tested “phantom” AT&T smartphone data use

  New attention is being paid to a class action lawsuit against AT&T. The suit claims that the company’s billing system records data use up to three times the actual use, including “phantom” charges that occur when the phone is not in use. AT&T says the issue is just a misunderstanding about how data is used and billed.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • European Commission aims to ban plastic shopping bags

    In their infinite wisdom, the European Union risked further alienating people in Britain last night by calling for a ban on plastic shopping bags. The move, designed to benefit the environment, will mean imposing an expensive tax on shopping bags or banning them altogether.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Harold Camping’s Global Apocalypse PR Campaign

    The world is scheduled to end on May 21, 2011. At least that’s the hysteria being spread by Harold Camping, the 89 year-old fundamentalist Christian radio preacher and president of Family Radio, Inc., based in Oakland, California.

• Censorship

  • EU And China Harmonize Their Approach On Censorship

    Many copyright system defenders insist that the two situations are entirely different. In their minds, intermediary liability concerning copyright infringement is “good” because it’s stopping illegal behavior. But that’s the exact same argument made by the Chinese government. It’s stopping people from speaking out, because that form of speaking out is illegal and can cause great harm. The similarities between the EU proposal and the China proposal at the very least suggest that China is learning that mimicking Western claims concerning copyright law will always give it good cover for censoring at home.

• Privacy

  • Fury as Milton Keynes Council publish personal information on website by accident

    The residents of Middleton have been apoplectic this week after Milton Keynes Council accidently published the results of a residents’ survey on its website, including the addresses and phone numbers of 50 of the respondents. The data breach occurred last week and lasted for 18 hours before the error was noticed and removed.

  • Zuckerberg: Kids under 13 should be allowed on Facebook

    Zuckerberg said he wants younger kids to be allowed on social networking sites like Facebook. Currently, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) mandates that websites that collect information about users (like Facebook does) aren’t allowed to sign on anyone under the age of 13. But Zuckerberg is determined to change this.

• Civil Rights

  • DNA Databases – A Challenge to the Law

    Today the Supreme Court gave a long-awaited ruling on the subject of DNA databases and the ability of the police to store DNA samples of innocent people indefinitely. In a majority judgment (with two of the seven judges disagreeing) the Court ruled that the police practices were unlawful. Due to changes in the law being discussed by Parliament the judges did not go as far as ordering the police to change their practices within a certain time-frame or awarding compensation. It was, however, suggested that if changes were not made soon, further cases could be brought which were likely to succeed.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Hargreaves and the Future of Pirate Policies

    Unfortunately the review has not presented the kinds of radical shifts and reforms that we hoped for. It deals with some of the peripheral issues — albeit fairly well, and in a way that we support — but it still leaves the core, vitally important and urgent problems we face unaddressed.

  • Trademarks

    • Thunderbolt trademark rights will be transferred from Apple to Intel

      Though Apple originally filed for ownership of the “Thunderbolt” trademark associated with its new high-speed data port, the rights will be transferred to Intel, the company with which it cooperatively developed the new standard.

    • Apple rebuts Amazon’s stance that ‘app store’ is a generic term

      “Apple denies that the mark APP STORE is generic and, on that basis, denies that the Amazon Appstore for Android service is an ‘app store,’” the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant said in a document filed Thursday in an Oakland federal court. “Apple further denies that defendants [Amazon] have the right to use APP STORE as a trademark in connection with Amazon’s mobile software download service for Android devices.”

  • Copyrights

    • Does Eric Schmidt speak for Google on copyright?

      Smart, strategic, and frequently inscrutable, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s comments must often be closely analyzed. Sometimes they’re discounted as regrettable, off-the-cuff remarks. Other times, his statements are a window into what is really going on inside his company.

      On Wednesday, Schmidt shocked big media conglomerates, federal lawmakers, and apparently even executives within his own company when he told reporters in London that Google would defy U.S. government attempts to remove sites from the Web that are accused of trafficking in pirated goods. Schmidt, who was at Google’s helm during an unprecedented decade-long run of online-advertising success, was referring to a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last week called Protect IP.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Screwing the end user and seeing how far you get

  Linux today is a far more appealing solution than Microsoft Windows [...]

  Apparently Microsoft was ” protecting” me from having my movie watched on two screens at the same time, but frankly it should have allowed me to switch to the one large LCD. Instead, even running just the one large screen showed a black box where my movie should have been.

  I was later told this was part of the new protections enabled in the operating system to ensure DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was addressed.

• Linux job portal launched: LinuxCareer.com

  As a demand for Linux-related jobs has jumped unexpectedly high in the last couple of years, LinuxCareer.com as a new Linux related job portal attempts to compensate for this sudden surge in demand for Linux skilled professionals and will surely accommodate both employers and job seekers. LinuxCareer.com is not affiliated with any local or international company, nor is it a recruitment or employment agency and it is specialising only in Linux based careers and closely related Information Technology fields.

  LinuxCareer.com offers tools such as application tracking, job alerts, login and syncing resumes with facebook.com and linkedin.com accounts as well as screening questionnaires for employers and resume uploads for job seekers.

• Desktop

  • HP Pavillion dm1-3105ez

    The final problem, and in general the biggest problem, is the one I wrote about two weeks ago, when I was preparing this system for my class. This is the Windows 7 installation which insists on scribbling on the MBR when I have GRUB installed. I never did figure out how or why it is doing that, or how to stop it. In the end I had to take the advice offered by Moley and a couple of others, and set the system up to multi-boot with the Windows bootloader. Ugh. What a nasty, ugly bunch of garbage. Gosh, I know, this is only 2011 and it is asking a lot for Microsoft to have something that is a bit more appealing than what they developed over 15 years ago for Windows NT, but honestly… a text-only, white font on a black background… oh, please. Anyway, setting that up to multi-boot Win7 or openSuSE, and then using my normal Legacy GRUB configuration to further multi-boot the various other Linux distributions I have installed at least works, and it has stopped the system from self-corrupting. I can’t even tell you how many times I reinstalled Windows and various Linux distributions while trying to get something else – anything else – to work. Bleah.

• Server

  • Wanted: A Virtual Machine OS

• Kernel Space

  • Linux Kernel 2.6.39 Officially Released

    We are proud to announce today, May 19th, the immediate release of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 2.6.39.

    Among the new features included in Linux kernel 2.6.39 we can mention new drivers for high-end AMD graphics cards, ipsets to simplify firewall maintenance and implementation, improved EXT4 file system, new drivers for better hardware support, and lots of bug fixes.

    “So it’s delayed a few days, and I really was struggling with the decision of whether I wanted to cut a final release at all: it could easily have made more sense to just do an -rc8.”

  • Linux 2.6.39 Debuts with Improved Performance

    The rapid release cycle of the Linux kernel shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

    Linux founder Linus Torvalds this week released the new Linux 2.6.39 kernel, barely three months after the 2.6.38 kernel came out. The 2.6.39 kernel is the third major kernel release so far in 2011.

    The 2.6.38 kernel release cycle included seven release candidates and Torvalds noted in a mailing list posting that he had debated whether or not to issue another candidate to provide more testing time.

    “I really was struggling with the decision of whether I wanted to cut a final release at all: it could easily have made more sense to just do an -rc8,” Torvalds wrote.

  • Linux 2.6.39 assists firewalls, speeds up Ext4

  • Graphics Stack

    • Open-Source AMD Fusion Driver Stabilizes

      With the very latest open-source Linux driver code for the AMD Fusion E-350, the support is finally stable and comparable to that of other recent Radeon HD graphics processors with the open-source driver stack.

• Applications

  • deviantArt Plugins Released!

  • Five benefits of command line tools

    It was relatively common in the 1990s to hear that the command line’s days were numbered. Both claims of its obsolescence and rumors of its impending demise were greatly exaggerated.

  • 5 Skype alternatives for Linux users

    While many people use Skype for its free voice over IP (VoIP) services, Linux users have a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, Skype will run on some versions of Linux, but it doesn’t run on all of them, and the Linux version (2.2-beta) lags far behind the Windows version (Skype 5.3). That’s three major generations behind. Need I say more?

    Much as I dislike Microsoft’s recent purchase of Skype and even though I think Skype’s technology is held together by bailing wire and duct tape, maybe Skype will become better for Linux with Microsoft. After all, it couldn’t be much worse!

  • Finding gPodder podcast software on Ubuntu

    What I love about Linux in general, and Ubuntu in particular, is that if you want some software, you can normally find it, install and use it within minutes.

    A case in point is my search for podcast software. I typed podcast software ubuntu into Google, second item down is gPodder, fire up the Synaptic package manager, quick search for gPodder, mark, apply, job done.

  • Turpial, microblogging client from South America

    # Microblogging client for Twitter and Identi.ca, it’s not possible (at the moment) to use 2 accounts in the same windows, so to see both microblogging provider (or 2 twitter accounts) you need to run 2 instances of Turpial.

  • gprename – Complete batch renamer for Linux

  • Conky

    A few years ago, when I was evaluating one of the lightweight distros — I think it was Damn Small Linux — I was delighted to see that it placed a CPU-and-memory monitor on the desktop. When you’re using a box with 64 MB or 128 MB of RAM, that’s vital information; and the tool that displays that information must be lightweight itself. But when I wanted to install it on Debian, all I could remember was that it had a five letter name beginning with “C”.

  • Proprietary

    • DNASTAR announces release of SeqMan NGen Linux Software

      DNASTAR® announced the release of SeqMan NGen software for the Linux operating system today. This powerful DNA sequence assembly tool is now available on Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How To Install TweetDeck, Adobe AIR On Ubuntu 64 bit

    • Using nl to Number Lines

    • Zip Password Recovery With FCrackZip

    • Install and configure GNOME Do in Ubuntu Unity

    • Hint: How to force autohinting on Fedora 15

    • openSUSE 11.4 – How to install Nvidia drivers manually

    • Manage Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Launcher Quicklist using unity-launcher-editor

    • A few things you might not know about RHEL-6.1+ yum

    • Ftrace Favorites Cheat Sheet – Fun Commands to Try with Ftrace

    • How to Install Programs in Ubuntu in the Command-Line

    • iotop: Per Process I/O Usage

    • Go home

    • Sage: Tips and Tricks

    • Python 3: Building a Wiki Application

  • Games

    • Top Games for Linux!

      Alien Arena is a free first person shooter. It has a 1950′s science fiction atmosphere. You can play online deathmatch or play single player mode against bots. The game engine is open source but other content is proprietary. There are over 50 maps that you can choose from and 9 different weapons. If you are playing online you can choose from deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, deathball, team core assault and cattle prod. There are also powerups to collect. The game features nice graphics and fast gameplay. Check out a video of the game here. To download the game go to their website.

    • Minecraft 1.6 Next Week!

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Plasma Components

      I’m here to talk about my GSoC project (\m/), the plasma components. As you may know, QML is a declarative language to build rich interfaces introduced in Qt 4.7 by providing simple primitives. As it is a powerful way to develop interfaces and it’s the future of UI development for Qt was necessary to make the plasma support it.

    • KDE Commit Digest for 15 May 2011

    • How to Install Plasmoids In Kubuntu (KDE)

      I have just started using Kubuntu a week ago. Being a new user of the KDE desktop, I admit that I am have difficulty getting used to its terms. One of the thing I am always confuse is the difference between plasmoids and widgets. The two terms are used interchangeably and it took some googling to discover that plasmoids are actually widgets.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME change proposal: much smoke, no fire

      erhaps it’s the fact that GNOME has undertaken meaningless change in the past, justifying it through the use of buzzwords, and ended up with a morass that really does not find favour with too many users.

      Perhaps it’s the fact that the GNOME developers still have the attitude that they are building things for themselves and the rest of the world can use it as it is or else take a walk.

      Whatever it is, when there is talk of change in GNOME, people sit up and get agitated. But this time, someone has bitten off a lot more than they can chew, suffered from indigestion and then passed a lot of misinformation around.

      Let’s get specific. The OMG!Ubuntu site, a site for Ubuntu fanbois, published a little article a few days ago, titled “GNOME to drop support for BSD, Solaris, Unix?”

      This was based on a post to Reddit. The OMG Ubuntu employee who wrote the post for the site, Joey Sneddon, did not bother to read the email that began the discussion that led to this amazing claim.

    • Unity 2D to enter GNOME:Ayatana soon…

      In the past days I’ve been packaging and fixing some issues on Unity 2D for inclusion on the GNOME:Ayatana repository in the openSUSE Build Service.

      This gave me an excellent opportunity to test a few components share by both, Unity and Unity 2D, which is the case of ‘unity-place-applications’ and ‘unity-place-files’, both using Zeitgeist which is already in Factory for the upcoming openSUSE 12.1. We thank the integration of this packages to Federico Quintero. Thanks Fred.

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat intros PaaS for open source developers

      RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat, Inc., open source solution provider has recently announced the availability of OpenShift, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developers who build on open source.

    • The rise and fall of CentOS

      If it weren’t for RedHat Linux, I might not have ever found PostgreSQL. In early 2001, I was running the tech side of a company with an ISP component to it. After starting with RedHat 4.2 in 1997, we’d standardized all the servers by then on RedHat 7.0, refusing to upgrade from its 2.2 kernel even when new versions with 2.4 appeared. (We needed VPN Masquerade and it didn’t work on those crazy bleeding edge 2.4 kernels) Into the business came a new product that needed a database embedded into it. As a former Progress DBA of some reknown (seriously!), I got the job of figuring out which to use. After poking around at the open-source database options that were a simple rpm install away, I found PostgreSQL 7.0. It seemed completely sensible for a small but important database. BerkleyDB was too simple for the queries I wanted to write, MySQL 3.23 was frighteningly loose with its data to me, and I was still pissed at Oracle for killing off my previous database career–even if I had wanted to budget for it. I got a copy of Bruce’s PostgreSQL book, hot off the presses, built an app with RedHat 7.0 plus PostgreSQL 7.0 plus Perl-DBI, and the database part of it worked great.

      [...]

      I’m writing this as my first Scientific Linux install executes, and I have my first SL6 work for a customer also fed up with waiting on CentOS6 to start on when it’s finished. CentOS isn’t the first group to run an open-source development project without what I’d consider a really open development community, they’re just the latest to show how dangerous that is.

    • Put on your new Red Hat Linux

      RHEL 6.1 features optimized KVM virtualization, new hardware support, improved operational efficiency, and high availability (HA) improvements. It also includes improved development and monitoring tools such as an updated Eclipse development environment includes enhanced breakpoint and code generation for C/C++ and Java.

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Screenshots

    • Open Virtualization Alliance Aims to Spread the KVM Gospel

      BMC Software, Eucalyptus, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE have partnered to create the Open Virtualization Alliance to promote the adoption of open virtualization technologies such as KVM. What does it mean for you, the VAR? Simply put: exposure.

      VARs working with any of the open virtualization standards no doubt have run up against customers who are either wary about open source technology, or just simply don’t know about the potential. Promoting awareness about technology is a good way to spread it, and that’s what the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) plans on doing.

    • Open Virtualization Alliance launched

    • Fedora

      • Design team imageboard test server and WE NEED Fedora 16 theme artists!

        Yesterday with some help from smooge and nb, I set up a Danbooru-style image board to test out, and I am hoping that Fedora artists and designers might play with it and see if it’d be a useful resource. It’s an application called Shimmie.

        What is an imageboard? It’s a bulletin board or forum type of website that focuses much more heavily on images rather than text. You can read more about them in Wikipedia’s article. Traditionally they are used for ‘found’ images, and I don’t know if they are used much by folks who are generating original artwork, but it seems as if they would be a useful tool for collaborative image production, as they would keep discussion focused on visuals.

        [...]

        Some folks understandably believe art and design are stuffs enshrouded in a mysterious haze of incense smoke without much logic or reason involved. I get it. I’ve been there too, and I think it’s easy to feel that way – discussions about art works sometimes get a bad reputation for being anywhere from fussy, to bizarre, to completely pointless.

      • Fedora project switching to new contributor agreement

        Fedora is in the process of retiring our old “Individual Contributor
        License Agreement”…

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Revisited: SimplyMEPIS 11.0

        After I installed SimplyMEPIS 11.0 and restarted the virtual machine, I was greeted by a session almost identical to the live session, which is only to be expected. The big thing that I wanted to make sure here was whether installing packages would work given that it didn’t in the live session due to weird settings, and thankfully, it did work. And that’s where my time with SimplyMEPIS 11.0 ended.

        [...]

        I don’t think SimplyMEPIS is a good distribution for users who are new to Linux, though that is its target audience.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Looking at 11.04 Natty/Unity – Good or bad?

          This review has been written over the period of a few days and one of the successes of Unity for me was that my wife immediately felt comfortable with it. My initial reservations have melted away with the realization that a different way of working can, until accustomed to, be a frightening place. Now that I’ve settled with Unity over the last few days, I will be keeping 11.04 on my main rig, I had intended to return to Sabayon, but now that I’ve got accustomed to Unity, there really is no reason for me to switch back at the present time.

          [...]

          This review has been written over the period of a few days and one of the successes of Unity for me was that my wife immediately felt comfortable with it. My initial reservations have melted away with the realization that a different way of working can, until accustomed to, be a frightening place. Now that I’ve settled with Unity over the last few days, I will be keeping 11.04 on my main rig, I had intended to return to Sabayon, but now that I’ve got accustomed to Unity, there really is no reason for me to switch back at the present time.

        • Building The Kitchen Sink

          If you look at Unity, some of it’s customization potential is exposed in the Unity user interface itself, but much of it is hidden (so as to provide a sleek and uncluttered experience for end-users), but you can still access this functionality under the covers. Tools such as Simple CCSM, and more recently Gunity and Confity are providing tools to access these lower-level configuration options. Of course, this is exactly the kind of awesome that power users love! Trouble is…there is one problem…

        • Top 6 Ubuntu 11.04 Themes to Make Natty Narwhal Look a Lot More Attractive

          We have already featured a series of articles dealing with various aspects of the brand new Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal starting with the thorough review of Ubuntu 11.04. Now its time for some extensive customization of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal’s look and feel through a bunch of cool looking themes. Following is a collection of some of my favorite GTK themes for Ubuntu 11.04/GNOME 2.0 based desktops. Take a look.

        • The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu Studio 11.04

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Xubuntu 11.04 Review / Thoughts

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • MeeGo 1.2 Released

      The dedicated MeeGo team has announced the release of MeeGo 1.2.

      MeeGo is a promising mobile operating system which can run on a number of devices including smartphones, MIDs, Tablets, Netbooks and In-Vehicle systems.

      The latest release gives device vendors and developers yet another GNU/Linux based operating system to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom and ARMv7 architectures.

    • MeeGo 1.2 Release

    • Android

      • 50 Must-Have Android Apps

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • ChromeVox: Google’s Built-In Spoken Feedback For Chrome OS

Free Software/Open Source

• OSI set to expand open source mission

  The Open Source Initiative (OSI), defender of the open-source faith, will soon expand its reach, embracing representatives from other open-source groups and the world of business.

• ✈ Speaking at OSBC

  If you’re at the Open Source Business Conference, OSBC, in San Francisco today and tomorrow, you have three opportunities to hear me speak (or three sessions to scrupulously avoid, depending on your taste). They are:

  * Why You Need an Open Cloud Platform to Build a SaaS, Monday 11:40-12:30
  On this large panel, I’ll be commenting on the fact that there’s no way you can guarantee that you’ll not be locked in with a cloud solution today. Just as with other software solutions where your software freedoms are threatened, that doesn’t mean avoid them blindly, but it’s important to look for suppliers who actively protect the four freedoms in addition to promoting data freedom. This is also a context where community sentinels may be useful.

• Events

  • Things I wrote down during OSBC 2011

  • Third day at Solutions Linux 2011

    Solutions Linux 2011 is now over ! The last day was again full of various meetings, including a very interesting one with Charles Schulz (The Document Foundation) where I learnt a lot around LibreOffice future that I can not disclose or maybe later on. And I lead the System Administration track, which was extremely successfull this year with more than 130 people in the room !! I’m glad to see that the new model of free conferences is allowig the event to have more attendees.

  • Open Collaboration Services Next Sprint

    Over the weekend of May 14th and 15th, the Open Collaboration Services Next sprint took place at the Physics Institute of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Seven experienced developers participated in this event–some of them coming directly from Linux Tag–in order to meet face to face, create new bonds, and discuss current and future issues around Open Collaboration Services.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle make JRockit Java VM free of charge

    Following Oracle’s announcement that it plans to unify the two Java Virtual Machines it owns, Hotspot and JRockit, into a single virtual machine, Oracle has now made the JRockit virtual machine available for no charge for “development and internal production use”. The blog announcement by Henrik Ståhl, the JRockit product manager, notes that the developers are currently taking ideas and features from JRockit and porting them over to OpenJDK, but now Oracle wants to converge the licensing of the two virtual machines ahead of the actual converged virtual machine. While the current JRockit implementation will remain proprietary, the move is designed to to simplify the progress to a single JVM by getting more feedback on any regressions between the future converged JVM and the current JRockit.

• Business

  • Openbravo Offers Point-of-Sale (POS) Module for Open Source ERP

    The new POS Retail Module extends Openbravo ERP by integrating POS and store management capabilities.

    Openbravo has announced a new commercial offering that extends its web-based open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The new POS Retail Module, based on Openbravo’s popular POS open source project, delivers integrated Point-of-Sale and store management capabilities to the Openbravo ERP solution.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • 2010 Free Software Awards announced

    This year, it was given to Rob Savoye. Savoye is a long-time free software hacker, who has worked on GNU and other free software for over 20 years. He has contributed to dozens of projects including GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, multiple major GNU/Linux distributions, and One Laptop Per Child. Savoye has led the effort to produce a free software Flash player, Gnash. This work has enabled free software users to avoid dependency on a pervasive piece of proprietary software. Rob is also CTO and founder of Open Media Now, a nonprofit dedicated to producing a freely licensed media infrastructure.

  • Work on a free software GPRS/EDGE stack!

    GPRS is a technology used by mobile phones to transmit data. If you have internet access on your cellphone, it’s likely that you are using GPRS.

• Public Services/Government

  • Lessons learned from Munich’s migration to Linux

    At the moment, 6200 desktops have been migrated and they intend to have a total of 8500 Linux desktops by the end of the year.

  • DOD Releases Open Source Development Guide

    “Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify, or upgrade that rifle,” they wrote in the document.

• Licensing

  • Clarification on Android, its (Lack of) Copyleft-ness, and GPL Enforcement

    I’m grateful to Brian Proffitt for clarifying some of these confusions about Android licensing. In particular, I’m glad I’m not the only one who has cleared up the confusions that Edward J. Naughton keeps spreading regarding the GPL.

    I noted that Naughton even commented on Proffitt’s article; the comments spreads even more confusion about the GPL. In particular, Naughton claims that most BusyBox GPL violations are on unmodified versions of BusyBox. That’s just absolutely false, if for no other reason that a binary is a modified version of the source code in the first place, and nearly all BusyBox GPL violations involve a binary-only version distributed without any source (nor an offer therefor).

    [...]

    Of course, Naughton hasn’t contacted me because he isn’t really interested in software freedom. He’s interested in getting press for himself, and writing vague reports about Android copyrights and licensing is a way to get lots of press. I put out now a public call to anyone who believes they haven’t received source code that they were required to get under GPL or LGPL to get in touch with me and I’ll try to help, or at the very least put you in touch with a copyright holder who can help do some enforcement with you. I don’t, however, expect to see a message in my inbox from Naughton any time soon, nor do I expect him to actually write about the wide-spread GPL violations related to Android/Linux that Matthew Garrett has been finding. Garrett’s findings are the real story about Android/Linux compliance, but it’s presumably not headline-getting enough for Naughton to even care.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Socrata unveils the new data.gov, opening vault on government data

      At the Technology Alliance annual luncheon in Seattle earlier this month, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra explained how the open government movement was “collapsing a lot of the complexity” that had previously made federal, state and local collaboration difficult. In particular, Chopra called out the efforts of Seattle startup Socrata, which is helping bring transparency to government information through data.gov. And now Socrata has introduced a new data.gov Web site designed to help government agencies publish and distribute data in new ways, including interactive charts, maps and lists.

      Socrata wants to make access to government data as easy to filter, sort and analyze as a pair of loafers on Zappos.com.

      “It is now as easy to analyze data as it is to buy a pair of shoes or a TV online,” according to an introductory video describing the new data.gov service.

• Programming

  • Google Summer of Code: Where are the students?

    We accepted 1,115 students from 68 countries. The ten countries with the highest number of accepted students are represented in the pie chart below.

Leftovers

• Alternative DNS services: pro and contra

• Winklevoss twins taking Facebook case to Supreme Court

  Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, along with partner Divya Narendra, have one last card to play in their legal battle with Facebook.

  The twins’ attorneys announced yesterday that they intend to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the high court to hear their case against Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

  The petition stems from a settlement the Winklevosses and Narendra signed with the world’s largest social network in 2008 after claiming Zuckerberg stole their idea for a social-networking site they called ConnectU. At that time, they were awarded $65 million from Facebook and Zuckerberg in exchange for dropping all further litigation against the site.

• Security

  • PSN hacked again, 2 days after coming back online

  • Warning: Why You Should Always Update Your Software

    Over the years I’ve had many conversations with IT Managers on why they should be regularly running system updates. Sometimes they would take my advice but typically it just fell on deaf ears. This was usually due to complacency and the it will never happen to me attitude.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Got Health Insurance? Pray You Won’t Get Purged

    Along with “rescinding” (cancelling) the policies of individuals who become seriously ill, purging small businesses that employ workers who get sick is a tried-and-true way of meeting Wall Street’s expectations.
    All it takes is one illness or accident among employees at a small business to prompt an insurance company to hike the next year’s premiums so high that the employer has to cut benefits … purging of less-profitable accounts through intentionally unrealistic rate increases helps explain why the number of small businesses offering coverage to their employees has been declining for several years and why the number of Americans without coverage reached a record high of nearly 51 million last year.

  • Journalist arrested at IT security conference

    A FAIRFAX journalist was arrested by Queensland Police yesterday after an article he wrote about vulnerabilities in Facebook’s privacy controls was published on smh.com.au.

    He was later released without charge but police retained custody of his iPad.

    Ben Grubb, the deputy technology editor of the Herald website, was attending an IT security conference at a resort on the Gold Coast where a security expert, Christian Heinrich, demonstrated how he had gained access to the privacy-protected Facebook photos of the wife of the HackLabs director, Chris Gatford.

  • New laws to widen ASIO spy powers

    ASIO will be able to engage in industrial and economic espionage as well as spy on groups such as WikiLeaks on behalf of Australia’s two foreign spy outfits, under one of the most significant widening of its powers in a decade.

    According to the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, the changes are being made to allow ASIO to work better with Australia’s two overseas spy agencies, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Defence Signals Directorate.

    But legal experts and the Greens have expressed concerns that the changes are not needed and fundamentally change the way Australia’s main domestic spy outfit operates.

• Cablegate

  • 2011-05-19 WikiLeaks: Bulgarian Nationalist under US Diplomatic Fire

    Diplomatic cables of the US embassy in Sofia have been revealed on WikiLeaks and provided to the project for investigative journalism www.bivol.bg, bringing out new details about the way Bulgaria’s far-right, nationalist Ataka party and its leader, Volen Siderov, are viewed by American diplomats.

    The text in English has also been published at the Balkanleaks site, an analogue of the notorious whistle-blowing WikiLeaks.

  • Dawn Presents WikiLeaks’ Pakistan Papers

  • Putting together The Pakistan Papers

    It was the beginning of the last week of April when I received a call from the Editor Dawn asking me to come in for a meeting. “There`s a project I think you might be interested in working on but we can`t discuss it over the phone.” Intrigued, I went in for the meeting the next day and learnt what I and the project team would willingly give up our waking hours and days off for the next month or so.

  • Russia sabotaged Iran nuclear programme: report

    Then Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the sabotage of Iran’s nuclear programme in 2006, according to WikiLeaks documents published by Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on Thursday.

    The leaked documents, which were not immediately available on either the Yediot or Wikileaks websites, purportedly detail talks between the head of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission and then-US ambassador to Israel Richard Jones.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Poisoned in the Gulf

    The series looked at the reports of health problems among cleanup workers and coastal residents, and it examined how the current regulatory system failed to prevent harmful exposures. … the energy industry’s impact on community health in the Gulf, the political power wielded by oil companies and other industry interests to thwart regulatory reform, and how the emerging health crisis has turned ordinary citizens into grassroots activists.

  • President Obama used his weekly radio address this past Saturday to to promote a persistent myth about expanded offshore drilling: that it would bring down prices at the gas pump.

  • The US EPA has a disturbing tendency to raise exposure limits after disasters. They did this after Deepwater Horizon so they could declare the seafood safe to eat.

  • The facts of Big Oil’s tax loopholes and windfall profits

  • Republicans want to move oil drilling lawsuits to a court full of judges with close ties to oil companies.

    When it is not busy ordering high school cheerleaders to pay $45,000 because they sued the school district that required them to cheer for their alleged rapist, the Fifth Circuit’s judges have cozied up tightly with the oil industry.

  • Koch Industries’ Toxic Gifts to Wisconsin

    [in three years], Koch Industries’ facilities emitted over 5.4 million pounds of toxic discharges into Wisconsin’s air and water. Of these discharges, nearly 100,000 pounds were of substances known or suspected to cause cancer. Michael Ash, an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coauthor of the “Toxic 100 Air Polluters,” says the numbers indicate that Koch Industries is a “major polluter” in Wisconsin.

  • Housing in North America: Peak Oil’s Primary Victim

    Of the many asset classes to be victimized by the end of cheap energy, residential real estate is perhaps the most vulnerable. A call option on future wage growth, and, leveraged to our liquid-fuel based transport system, housing in North America is currently making its way back to the stable, but barely appreciating asset it once was. However, having started this journey only recently there is still a long way to go. A long way in price that is, for housing to fall.

    The housing crash is currently in the midst of its next leg down. In similar fashion to those who missed the initial crash, the past year has seen a number of observers calling for a bottom. One of my favorite calls came last year from Karl Case in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. In A Dream House for All, Mr Case made the following argument: because house prices had fallen so much already, housing was now more affordable. But of course that wasn’t true at all. Not then, and not now.

• Finance

  • To Eat and Survive in LA: On Track for a Million Food Stamp Users

    Los Angeles County food stamp users are now on track to reach the 1,000,000 mark by later this year. After the California housing market cracked in 2006, and leading into the financial crisis of 2007-2008, LA County food stamp recipients were registering at the 625,000 level in the Spring of 2008. March 2011 shows that 967,301 persons are now in the program in LA County.

  • Conflicts of Interest in LBOs — a Case Study

    Adding to the intrigue, in an earlier round of bidding, Vestar Capital Partners, a PE firm with loads of experience in the canned food business, made the highest offer. In the second round, Barclays paired Vestar with KKR, in violation of the “no teaming” provisions of earlier agreements the firms had entered into with Del Monte, and had them submit a joint bid. Problem was, Barclays didn’t let the Del Monte board know it had taken this step, leading the board to believe that Vestar had dropped out. Vice Chancellor Laster found that this shady business alone “materially reduced the prospect of price competition for Del Monte”.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Google Looking for Dislike Button on Facebook

    Facebook’s recent admission that it hired a public relations firm to spread the word about privacy issues at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has left both companies looking foolish.

    A Facebook spokesman confirmed that Facebook hired public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller to “encourage” media outlets to write anti-Google stories, specifically urging them to look in to claims that Google is invading people’s privacy.

    Facebook gave two reasons for why it decided to play the Richard Nixon role in this modern version of Watergate: The Musical. First, Facebook believes that Google is engaging in some social networking practices that are violating the privacy of its users. Second, Facebook dislikes (to say it mildly) that Google is trying to use Facebook’s data in its own, competing social-networking service.

• Censorship

  • Chairman Schmidt says “Protect IP” bill would be a disaster and Google will fight it.

  • Jewish community granted injunction blocking all anti-Semitic Google search suggestions

  • Baidu, China sued in U.S. for Internet censorship

    Baidu Inc was sued on Wednesday by eight New York residents who accused China’s biggest search engine of conspiring with the country’s government to censor pro-democracy speech.

    The lawsuit claims violations of the U.S. Constitution and according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer is the first of its type.

    It was filed more than a year after Google Inc declared it would no longer censor search results in China, and rerouted Internet users to its Hong Kong website.

• Privacy

  • The Wall Street Journal notices that Facebook tracks you, like it or not.

    [the "Like" and "tweet" buttons notify] Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don’t click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal. – Wall St. Journal

  • Google takes on deep packet inspecting ISPs Perhaps they were alarmed when Mediacom inserted their own ads onto Google and others. This won’t protect users from malicious features in Windows. Via Google

    With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience.

  • Facebook executive takes heat in hearing on privacy

    A leading senator, angry that Facebook Inc. failed to stop millions of preteens from using its social networking site, accused co-founder Mark Zuckerberg of lacking “social values” and being more concerned with building the company than with children’s privacy.

• Civil Rights

  • Simon Phipps open washes fog computing. He considers avoidance of non free software “extreme” but a single malicious feature on your computer is complete compromise of privacy and security. His outlook on fog computing has a similar mistake. The only way to be able to rehost your service with all changes is to host it yourself.

    Ultimately, your best protection is to be able to rehost your service elsewhere. This is where traditional views of software freedom become important. If the whole solution is open source, if there are no dependencies on meta-control points outside your control and if the existing data can be exported live and whole, you have the ultimate protection for your freedoms.

  • Bill Would Require Court Order For Cops To Read Emails

    There are some issues that advocacy groups and big companies have come to agree on, and one is the main federal wiretapping law is in serious need of an update. Now it looks like the update may actually be coming. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced a bill today that would update the law known as the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, or ECPA.

    The main problem with the ECPA is that it’s been interpreted by courts to allow cops to snoop on email without a warrant. That development has been disturbing to public interest groups, but has also begun to bother large corporations that the government has begun to treat as an easy source for evidence, even without a court order.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Everyone: join the protests against Sarkozy’s attempt to destroy Internet freedom in Europe.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Publishers delude themselves and insult the public at World Copyright Conference.

      The organisers really seem to have included everyone, just as they say: “All stakeholders involved in creative industries – creation, licensing, usage, collective management, legislation and dissemination of intellectual property and creative content.” Well, everyone except one: The Public….This huge and insulting asymmetry is perhaps the perfect symbol of all that is wrong with industries based around copyright today: they sincerely believe that the “respect” involved is all one-way… This conference, then, is the perfect expression of an industry talking to itself, reinforcing its own prejudices and delusions, and unwilling to accept that the world has changed utterly

    • RIAA wants to make it easier to harass competitors.

      the recording industry is pushing California’s lawmakers to approve legislation that would allow warrantless searches of companies that press copies of compact discs and DVDs. The Recording Industry Assn. of America, in effect, wants to give law enforcement officials the power to enter manufacturing plants without notice or court orders to check that discs are legitimate and carry legally required identification marks.

    • Copyright troll, Righthaven, slapped with class action counter claim.

    • Yale opens up image library, starts with 250,000 free images

      Yale is making high-resolution images from its cultural collections available on a free, open access basis. They’ve started by uploading 250,000 images, with lots more to follow. The collection includes “a small limestone stela with hieroglyphic inscription from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, a Mozart sonata in the composer’s own hand from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a 15th-century Javanese gold kris handle from the Indo-Pacific collection of Yale University Art Gallery and a watercolor by William Blake.”

    • Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free

    • Announcing the Public Knowledge “Copyright School” Video Challenge!

      In an attempt to educate its users about copyright law, YouTube has debuted “Copyright School,” a video that explains why videos are removed from YouTube. While “Copyright School” does a great job of telling you what you can’t do with copyrighted content, it does a very poor job of telling you what you can do with copyrighted content–namely, remix, reuse and repurpose it without permission from the rightsholder as allowed under the doctirine of fair use.

    • Righthaven hit with class-action counterclaim

      One of the website operators accused of copyright infringement by Righthaven LLC has retaliated, hitting the Las Vegas company with a class-action counterclaim seeking to represent defendants in all 57 Righthaven cases in Colorado.

      While the counterclaim mentions all 275 Righthaven lawsuits, it covers only those filed in Colorado.

      It charges defendants in all the Righthaven lawsuits “are victims of extortion litigation by Righthaven, which has made such extortion litigation a part of its, if not its entire, business model.”

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • FLOSS Weekly 166: Compiz

    Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Dan Lynch

    Compiz the compositing window management system for X11.

  • Don’t miss our IRC session on Friday

    Just a quick note for those who didn’t listen to the last podcast recording (naughty, naughty): on Friday 20th of May, at 15:00 British Summer Time, the team behind Linux Format magazine and TuxRadar will be on IRC for chat japes galore.

• Kernel Space

  • What’s new in Linux 2.6.39

    The latest Linux kernel offers drivers for AMD’s current high-end graphics chips and ipsets that simplify firewall implementation and maintenance. The Ext4 file system and the block layer are now said to work faster and offer improved scalability. Hundreds of new or improved drivers enhance the kernel’s hardware support.

  • Graphics Stack

    • When Open-Source Graphics Drivers Break

      This morning I wrote about the troublesome experience of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Ubuntu 11.04 as the packages found in the Natty repository are outdated and contain only the initial “SNB” support. In the mainline upstream code, Sandy Bridge is supported much better, offers faster performance, and possesses other new features (e.g. VA-API encode), except in the past week the Intel SNB Linux code temporarily broke hard.

    • Whoops, Intel SNB Is Borked At The Last Minute In Linux 2.6.39

      This morning after writing Intel Sandy Bridge On Ubuntu 11.04 Is Still Troubling, I proceeded to build the latest Mesa / Linux kernel / libdrm / DDX Git stack to see where the latest Intel SNB code is at and how it’s running for the popular Core i5 2500K processor. Before leaving three weeks ago, everything was running great, but to much surprise, this morning it was a broken mess. Intel just regressed hard in their Sandy Bridge support for the about-to-be-released Linux 2.6.39 kernel. Whoops!

• Applications

  • Eveinstaller- A Great tool that let you install software, add repositories with a simple click| Ubuntu & LinuxMint

    Eveinstaller is great tool similar to Ubuntu Tweak, it lets you install the basic applications in Ubuntu 11.04 and LinuxMint with a simple click, also using this tools, you can add Medibuntu, getdeb , Playdeb repositories , or install elementary theme, Mint theme…, for Desktop, install also with a simple click Gnome3, Unity 2D, Unity 3D and more.

  • Midori 0.3.6 brings welcome fixes, small speed bump

    Midori’s handling of CSS fonts and shadow rendering are improved – important when viewing OMG! Ubuntu!, for example. The browser user agent string – these are unique identifiers that help a web page detect browser version so it can, if needed, adjust the page accordingly – have been tweaked so that pages like Facebook no longer think Midori is a mobile browser.

  • Silly Programs

    Those of us who have been using Linux for a long time all know the joy of silly programs like xeyes. One of my favorites, however, is good old xsnow. Whether you love the cold weather or live in Florida and like to ski on occasion, xsnow will add some winter fun to your desktop. The xsnow program has been around forever and is surely available for your distribution.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to : Change the hostname on Fedora 15

    • HOWTO : Octoshape on Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop

    • How To Make GNOME Shell (GNOME 3) Work In VirtualBox

    • Discover Rootkits With Unhide

    • Successfully migrated to OpenRC

    • How to install and convert fonts on Linux

    • Enable Restart X server (Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace) in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    • Install libstdc++.so.5 on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    • How To Backup Your Files Using Deja Dup [Ubuntu] Part-1

    • systemd for Developers I

    • Book Review: Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery by Allan Brito

    • pfSense FAQs

    • shinken 0.6 on gentoo

      recently i had problems with the deployment of an experimental ‘shinken‘ [1], a monitoring tool, on gentoo. most of the installation was ‘straightforward’. but i had a problem with livestatus in combination to ‘thruk‘ [2].

  • Wine

    • CODEWEAVERS MARKS 15TH BIRTHDAY BY REVEALING BIRTHER VIDEO

      CodeWeavers, Inc., which provides the celebrated CrossOver software enabling Mac and Linux users to run Windows software on their computers without the need of a Microsoft license, this week marks its 15th birthday by releasing its birther video and offering its new CrossOver Bundle product at a price that corresponds with the day of the month.

    • CrossOver Platinum Edition is now available

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Razing the Bazaar

      Currently in GNOME there is some tension as we move into the post 3.0 world about the scope and direction of the project.

    • Systemd in GNOME, PackageKit and what GNOME as an OS really means

      A recent proposal be PulseAudio and systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering to add systemd raised concerns that GNOME might drop support for non-Linux platforms.

    • GNOME OS!

• Distributions

  • Bad Chakras of DarkDuck

  • Adventures in Chakra Linux

    What is my general feeling of Chakra Linux? Honestly, I expected more from famous and long-existing distributive. More in terms of included software. More stability. Just more… Yes, there are couple of nice findings in Chakra which make this system almost unique (at least among those which I saw), but they are not so important for me to think about switching to Chakra Linux.

  • Slacking the South African Way: Meeting Kongoni GNU/Linux!

    I had been wanting to try some Slackware based distro for some time. Why? If you say you like Linux and haven’t tried Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux alive (yes! Ubuntu is NOT the oldest, for the record! :P), you are missing your roots. Not enough reason, you say? Well, let me add that Slackware must have its magic touch if it has been able to stand the test of time since 1993. Yes, kids; Slackware may be older than some of you; then learn from the experienced and become better!

    [...]

    In general terms, Kongoni looks like a good distro. I liked it in spite that it does not come with any office suite.

  • Zenwalk 7: Shall We DANCE?

    My only problem was now to boot Zenwalk. I tried several solutions I found online, but none of them made GRUB stand up and invite Zenwalk to the dancing floor. So, I resorted to Mandriva Control Center. I opened the boot manager and tried to add the entry manually. Again, I was not sure of what I was doing, but I had to give it a try. I added a new Linux entry cutting and pasting info for tag, append, and image from lilo.config. Then, I clicked “advanced” and changed network profile to “default” and copy/pasted the info for initrd.

  • New Releases

    • BackTrack 5 Released – The Most Advanced Linux Security Distribution & LiveCD

      We have of course been following BackTrack since the very early days, way back in 2006 when it was just known as BackTrack – A merger between WHAX and Auditor. They’ve come a long way and BackTrack is now a very polished and well rounded security distro, most of the others have dropped off the map leaving BackTrack as the giant in the security LiveCD space.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • First Stable Release Of Mageia In 13 Days: RC Available

      The Mageia project has announced the availability of last development release of Mageia. This is believed to be the last release candidate opening the windows for the fist stable release of the GNU/Linux-based operating system.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat releases Enterprise Linux 6.1

      CORPORATE LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 with numerous security updates and patches.

      Red Hat released its popular RHEL 6 distribution back in November 2010 and typically the firm operates on a six month update schedule for current release tracks. So it is no big surprise that Red Hat has announced RHEL 6.1 in May, which brings out patches and security fixes and, according to Red Hat, maintains application compatibility and certification.

    • Red Hat Delivers Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1

    • Winning: Q&A with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO

      When Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said in 2008 he planned to get the company to $1bn in annual sales by 2011, up from $500m at the time, there were those who scoffed. But as the open source vendor just closed its fourth quarter with sales of $244.8m, up 25%, it’s almost certain he will achieve his ambition, even if the firm’s first billion-dollar year will actually be its fiscal 2012, not 2011. Who’s counting?

      As Whitehurst said at the time of the recent earnings announcement: “With record bookings and billings in the fourth quarter, we are on a run rate to become the first pure-play open source company to achieve a billion dollars in revenues next fiscal year, a milestone achievement for Red Hat and the open source community.”

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical’s Launchpad Streamlines Translation of Ubuntu

          If you’re a native English speaker like me, you may not think very often about what it takes to make software available in a language you understand. For the rest of the world, however, translation is a big deal — especially in the open source ecosystem, where few projects have the resources to pay professional translators. Luckily, recent changes in Launchpad have made it easier for developers to integrate translations into Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters more than you might think.

          In the open source world, where programmers dot the planet, English tends to serve as a lingua franca among the people writing the code. This practice may work well enough for developers who need to communicate with one another, but it’s not a solution for users who cannot or prefer not to use their software in a language that is not their native tongue.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Release Schedule Published

          While we have had an early Ubuntu 11.10 release schedule (along with one for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) going back to last May, the official release schedule for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Oncelot” is now available.

          The official Ubuntu 11.10 release schedule is available from the Ubuntu Wiki with the various release dates.

        • Unity-2D on Ubuntu 10.10

          I have tried and tested Ubuntu 11.04 during its development cycle and also after the final release and I really liked Unity 2D. It was the first shell that I did not felt the need for major customization.

        • Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager – Unity is too simple

          Some may even laugh at the fact that even the Ubuntu community find Unity too simple, although let us be very clear about what is too simple about Unity. It is the usability and functionality that is too simple.

• Devices/Embedded

  • MP3 player success with Rockbox

    Some of you who have been following this blog for a while may remember my post from 2009 where I was lamenting my lack of decent Linux-friendly MP3 player options out there to replace my aging Archos device.

    Well, I still haven’t found one. However, thanks to Rockbox and a used device I bought from a friend, I have a stopgap that will hopefully last me until the portable music player electronics market sorts itself out.

  • Another Reason to Love Linux

    Computers have long been a rather expensive luxury for those who could afford them. Desktops have drastically fallen in price, but with a cost of roughly $300.00 for a modest machine the price is still nothing to laugh at. Laptops have fallen in price as well, but $500.00 is still a lot of money. Worldwide, our economies are not in the best shape. Along with coffee, people tighten their technology budget. It’s a natural reaction. Food, water, gasoline, car maintenance, and home maintenance are far more important in the survival sense. The tightening of that budget may negatively impact children who are interested in technology. It’s also rather obvious that there are parts of the world that are not quite as well off as others. Luckily, their are some very bright, very clever people in the world. It just so happens that a few of them love technology and Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK based charity that has found a solution to this problem.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • DROID X2 Comes To Verizon Wireless

        Verizon and Motorola have announced the second-generation Android-powered DROID X2, designed for the consumer who does everything on their smartphone.

        The DROID X2, boasts Verizon Wireless’ first dual-core 1GHz processor for fast webpage loading and Adobe Flash Player.

      • Google I/O: The Android Story

        Of the companies that court developers, it’s difficult to conceive of one that’s more generous with hardware than Google. Just as they once handed out free handsets to stimulate Android application development, Google, as expected issued free Samsung tablets to all five thousand attendees of their annual developer conference. Then they handed out free Verizon LTE mifi devices with three months of free service. And a few weeks from now, they’ll be shipping out free Chromebooks as well.

        Whether you believe this largesse is good form or bad on Google’s part – and opinons vary on the subject – it’s a strategy that has shown results for them in the past. Last April, there were 38,000 applications in the Android Market. At present, there are over 200,000. The free hardware creates longer term issues with expectations, as attendees have obviously come to expect free kit. But in the short term, it’s clear that seeding the market in this fashion is likely to produce the desired effect: more applications.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Dell Releases Chromium OS for the Mini 10v

      Today, Dell’s Technology Strategist, Doug Anson announced that a Chromium OS build for the Mini 10v netbook is available for download from their website.

      Chromium OS is the open source version of Google’s Chrome OS. Like Chrome OS, it is a minimalist operating system with just a browser – Chromium browser. Chrome OS and Chromium OS are quite similar to each other except for a few things like verified boot.

    • Joe Wilcox Goes To Bat for Chrome OS

      just because they don’t do everything the same way that a brand new PC running that other OS will do?

    • Evaluating Chromebook: Treats and Risks

      Chromebook is built for internet-freaks who spend most of their time on the web so that they can experience the web, truly and completely without having to worry about ordinary computer headaches. Google Chromebook is based on ChromeOS, a web-based Operating System entirely relying on cloud computing. The revolutionary Chromebooks seek to completely transform our current (somewhat inflexible) computing habits, in an exciting new way. Nevertheless there are some risks and apprehensions associated with this new paradigm of computing.

Free Software/Open Source

• Events

  • GObject Introspection Hackfest in Berlin

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Google Chrome 13.0 Drops Support for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

      The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (May 17th) the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development version for the upcoming Google Chrome 13 web browser, for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.

  • Mozilla

    • Update: Mozilla Preps For Firefox 5 Beta Launch Day

      Update: May 17 was widely believed to be the launch day of Firefox 5 Beta. However, it turns out that Mozilla did not plan yesterday as the launch day, but as the day for the source code merge. The merge apparently happened, but the public release is still hiding in Mozilla’s FTP servers.

• CMS

  • HTML5 in Drupal 8

    HTML5 is about to rock our world. There are books written about why that is the case, but simply put, it can provide a much better user experience on both desktop and mobile devices, and could lead to a convergence between native applications and the mobile web.

• Business

  • Open Source Software Is Now a Norm in Businesses

    We’ve already seen mounting evidence that the numerous benefits of open source software are making a big impression on businesses far and wide, and this week saw the release of yet more data corroborating that fact.

  • Open source WCM needs more than geek appeal to succeed in the enterprise

    I just spent a few days at CMS Expo, a conference full of WCM open sourcers which I enjoyed very much. But I had a message for them during my keynote which I would like to share here as well: Open source web content management needs to change if it wants to maintain relevance in the enterprise in the next five years.

    While this is more a call-to-action than a prediction, it seems to fly directly in the face of predictions by many industry voices, all of which tend to indicate a rise in the popularity of open source WCM in the enterprise. In fact, these points do not conflict, but allow me to explain.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU SIP Witch 1.0 released for peer-to-peer next gen VoIP

    May 14, 2011 (Bayonne, NJ). We are distributing today a 1.0 release of the GNU SIP protocol provisioning and peer-to-peer call server, GNU SIP Witch. GNU SIP Witch is developed within GNU Telephony and has been selected for use in the GNU Free Call project. This will provide a stable release that we will support for existing applications while we actively develop GNU Free Call services.

    GNU SIP Witch is available as part of the GNU project. Stable releases will also power a web site later this summer to provide initial worldwide secure calling services for free directly to the general public for use in conjunction with any ZRTP enabled standards compliant softphone applications and SIP devices. GNU SIP Witch can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone or in conjunction with existing VoIP infrastructure, for private institutions and national governments.

  • The curse of G-before-N

    Personally, I blame Richard Stallman. It’s an affliction that affects geeks on our side of the proverbial aisle: The “G” factor, where a normally silent letter gets pressed into phonetic service, well, for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s there (and from an engineering standpoint, why would it be there if it wasn’t going to be used?), and secondly, because we’re used to the fact that GNU and GNOME have the “g” — how can I put this? — unsilent, and we’ve been trained, or brainwashed, into putting the “g” in there where it doesn’t belong.

    It’s bad enough the little guys in the garden are guh-nomes — even after the recent movie “Guh-nomeo and Juliet” — but there are other places where this arises.

• Project Releases

  • VirtualBox 4.0.8 Released With GNOME Shell Support (For Fedora 15 And Ubuntu 11.04)

• Licensing

  • The GNU GPL and the American Dream

    When I was in grade school, right here in the United States of America, I was taught that our country was the “land of opportunity”. My teachers told me that my country was special, because anyone with a good idea and a drive to do good work could make a living, and be successful too. They called it the “American Dream”.

    What was the cornerstone to the “American Dream”? It was equality — everyone had the same chance in our society to choose their own way. I could have any career I wanted, and if I worked hard, I would be successful.

Leftovers

• Security

  • Not so fast: Sony’s PlayStation Network hacked again [Updated]

• Finance

  • Goldman No Longer Laps the Field

    Goldman Sachs has lost its luster. The firm earned a best-in-class reputation for its history of profitability and navigating upheaval. But it seems less assured lately. In fact, Goldman is in danger of looking downright average.

  • It’s Getting Harder To Defend Goldman Sachs

    After reading Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule the World by William D. Cohan, I can no longer defend Goldman Sachs and the status quo on Wall Street.

    As Congress and the media were debating the controversial and populist-tinged Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation bill, my first inclination was to defend Wall Street and traders overall. I didn’t like Dodd-Frank’s Volcker Rule, which divests proprietary trading and alternative investments (hedge funds and private equity) from Wall Street (commercial) banks. I believed the bill was similar to reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act separating investment banking and trading from commercial banking.

    I argued that banks need trading profits — where the main profits have been the last decade — to offset losses on lending, especially during a recession. But now I agree with Chairman Volcker. We can’t be certain Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein and other sleuths won’t steal client inside information to front run, compete, and trade against their clients and the public’s interests. The Chinese Wall is the biggest myth and lie on Wall Street.

  • Raj Gupta Was Merely Trying to Fulfill His Destiny As a Billionaire Eagle

    Recently convicted hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam might have been right about Rajat Gupta, the esteemed financier who allegedly fed Galleon inside information from the Goldman Sachs board. During the trial, the jury heard a wiretap of Rajaratnam saying that the reason Gupta left Goldman’s board for a gig at a private equity company was because:

  • Goldman Sachs in danger of looking average

    Goldman Sachs has lost its luster. The firm earned a best-in-class reputation for its history of profitability and navigating upheaval. But it seems less assured lately. In fact, Goldman is in danger of looking downright average.

    It’s not the first time. Goldman has been sent reeling by shocks from Penn Central’s bankruptcy in 1970 to Russia’s default in 1998. But the Goldman advantage comes from an ability not only to climb off the canvas but to thrive in the face of adversity.

  • Will the Banks Finally Have to Answer?

    At long last, there may be a serious investigation into the mortgage mess — the kind that results in clarity as well as big fines and maybe even accountability.

    Gretchen Morgenson reported in The Times on Tuesday that Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, wants to discuss mortgage operations during the housing bubble with executives of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He has also requested documents and information from the banks, examined material given to his predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, and studied issues raised in lawsuits against the banks.

  • Feds, NYS probing banks over mortgage crisis

    The day of reckoning is fast approaching for the nation’s biggest banks.

    Several high-profile investigations, including one by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and another by the Justice Department, could hit banks with massive penalties for their role in the mortgage meltdown.

    Sources told The Post that Schneiderman will launch an investigation in the next few weeks into Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, along with other financial players down the road.

  • Goldman Sachs partner diaspora leaves a changed firm behind

    Could it be that some of the management missteps that dogged Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) through the financial crisis resulted from the firm’s long but awkward transition from a private partnership to a publically traded company? After going public, the partnership culture slowly diminished even as the transparency demands on Goldman Sachs and all public companies increased.

  • Levin sees ‘real hope’ of fresh Goldman probe

    Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate investigative subcommittee, said there was “real hope” law enforcement authorities would act on his panel’s report accusing Goldman Sachs of misleading investors and Congress.

  • Journalists spar over Goldman Sachs’ potential criminal activity

    Matt Taibbi argues forcefully in Rolling Stone this month that, following indicting Senate hearings, executives at Goldman Sachs deserve to go on criminal trial for their part in the financial crisis.

  • MATT TAIBBI: Goldman Sachs Executives Lied To Their Customers And Congress

    Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer who labeled Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” in one of the defining stories of the financial collapse, has written another article on the Wall Street firm.

    This one is potentially more devastating.

    Taibbi argues that Goldman Sachs executives lied when they testified in front of Congress in the aftermath of the crisis. Unlike other commentators who grouse about how Wall Street execs should be tossed in jail, Taibbi actually provides specifics. He takes quotes from some of the Goldman execs who testified, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein and CFO David Viniar, and then juxtaposes them with what he believes to be the truth at the time.

  • Goldman planning to bankroll new hedge funds

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is seeking money to bankroll fledgling hedge funds, its second attempt since 2008 to break into a business now dominated by Blackstone Group LP, according to three people with knowledge of the plan.

  • Wall Street turns on Wall Street, finally

    In a break with Wall Street tradition, the Rochedale Securities research analyst issued a very rare sell rating last week — on Goldman Sachs, no less.

    Analysts live or die by their access to corporate managements, and corporate managements, like the army in Catch-22, want to be liked. And they like to have their analysts embedded. Like journalists covering a war by traveling with the U.S. army, the analyst at the CEO’s table gets a ringside seat on the corporate story. And also like the reporter, the analyst only gets to see what his hosts want to show him.

• Censorship

  • Oppose PROTECT-IP Act: U.S. Government Wants To Censor Search Engines And Browsers

    UPDATE: Great news. We don’t always see eye-to-eye with Google, but we’re on the same team this time. Google CEO Eric Schmidt just came out swinging against PROTECT IP, saying, “I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems.” And then he went even further.

    [...]

    ORIGINAL: We knew that members of Congress and their business allies were gearing up to pass a revised Internet Blacklist Bill — which more than 325,000 Demand Progress members helped block last winter — but we never expected it to be this atrocious. Last year’s bill has been renamed the “PROTECT IP” Act and it is far worse than its predecessor. A summary of it is posted below.

• Privacy

  • EU Committee Suggests Tough Rules On Locational Privacy; May Influence U.S.

    The opinion was published by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. The Article 29 group is part of the justice division of the European Union, and is formed by a representative in charge of data protection (privacy) in each EU member state. When the Article 29 group puts out an opinion, its recommendations can be followed by either individual EU states or the EU itself.

    The conclusions of the opinion aren’t law; they become law only if the EU itself or EU member states choose to pursue the recommendations in the opinion. The group has been influential in the past. It was the Article 29 group, for example, that ultimately set limits on how long search engines should be retaining their search data.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Copyright policy based largely on “lobbynomics,” not data

      A major new independent report to the UK Prime Minister on his country’s intellectual property laws is out. Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth could hardly make its position clearer: the UK has lost its way when it comes to copyright policy.

    • Google boss: anti-piracy laws would be disaster for free speech

      Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned on Wednesday that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a “disastrous precedent” for freedom of speech.

    • The Cabinet Shuffle: Why a New Industry Minister May Not Mean Changed Policies or Big Delays

      On the substance, the experience of the past five years has been marked by the central role of the Prime Minister on all key policy decisions. On copyright, it was Prime Minister Harper that mandated the digital lock approach in both Bills C-61 and C-32. On telecom, it was Harper that shuffled Maxime Bernier out and Jim Prentice in to facilitate a spectrum auction that was far more interventionist (set aside, roaming) than Bernier wanted. On Internet access, it was the PMO – not Clement – that first confirmed the desire for change on usage based billing.

    • Access Copyright Claims Trademark (i.e. Monopoly) Rights in “©” Symbol

      This is from Access Copyright’s “new and improved” (and, as of now, even less informative than before) website.

      Access Copyright is an aggressive Canadian copyright collective that, despite its name, effectively restricts and charges for “access” to literary and artistic works.

    • Brazil’s Copyright Reform: Are We All Josef K.?

      On 20 April, Brazil’s Ministry of Culture announced the schedule (in Portuguese) for the country’s copyright law reform. It will be accepting comments on the draft bill until the 30th of May. Between 1 June and 14 July, the Ministry will implement modifications into the draft bill, send it to the federal government’s Inter-Ministerial Group on Intellectual Property (GIPI) for its assessment, suggestions, and amendments. Finally, on the 15th of July, the Minister of Culture will send the final version to the President’s Office – which will then be responsible for forwarding it to Congress.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Super-slim Linux on a Raspberry Pi

  Linux on a stick promises to revolutionise low-cost computing

  Linux has a reputation for being available in many shapes and sizes, but now there is a version of Linux that promises to beat all-comers on both size and price. The new Linux PC, created by UK game developer David Braben, is not much larger than a thumb, but packs enough power to replace a lightweight laptop.

• The $25 computer that could help change the world

  Unless you’re a hardcore gamer like me, you’ve probably never heard of David John Braben. Even among gaming circles, he’s no Sid Meier.

  But he has worked on some mighty impressive titles, including the classic trading sim, “Elite.” In more modern times, he’s worked on “Roller Coaster Tycoon 3” and games based on the lovable Wallace and Gromit.

• Dell updates Chromium OS download for Mini 9 and Mini 10V

  Late in 2009, some Dell engineers got the company aboard the Chrome OS bandwagon at a very early stage. The group released a Chromium OS build for Dell’s Mini 9 and Mini 10V netbooks at a time when the only way for others to play with the nascent operating system was to build it from scratch on a 64-bit Linux rig. Now, more than 18 months later, the image has been updated. If you own a Dell Mini 9 or 10V, head on over to the Dell FTP server and download a copy of its May 13th Chromium OS build.

• Desktop

  • Linux on the desktop: Europe leads

    According to a report from the team behind the web site monitoring service Pingdom, Europe leads the way for desktop Linux. The team analysed data collected from web statistics site StatCounter between February and April and published information about the popularity of desktop Linux in different countries.

• Server

  • Allianz Suisse selects Sapiens to upgrade pension systems

    Over a 12-month period, the Sapiens team will port the current platform for the Allianz Suisse pension system from the mainframe to Linux, and upgrade the database to UDB on Linux.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux Goes Hollywood: Inspiration for Your 20th Anniversary Video Submission

  • Kernel bloat, the responsibility lies with the distribution vendor

    It seems as time goes by the Linux Kernel is supporting more hardware and delivering more functionality. This is great but it introduces the problem of bloat. Bloat is bad but the fact of the matter is bloat cannot be avoided although it can be reduced.

    Distribution vendors are the ones responsible for including more or less bloat in their Kernels and unfortunately the current trend is to simply include as much as possible without any thought whatsoever.

• Applications

  • Meet MiniTunes

    Fortunately, MiniTunes is in very early stages of development and will hopefully gain momentum as more and more people get to know it. I bet it will get better and better, even if it is a great audio player already!

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • [Pulp] Introduction

    • Spotlight: Pulp Protected Repositories

    • Spotlight: Content Delivery Server Basics

  • Games

    • Review: Steel Storm Burning Retribution

      Steel Storm Burning Retribution has largely stayed under the radar despite being released across multiple operating systems. The indie shoot’em-up received some attention for its simultaneous release on Windows, Mac, and Linux (from the Linux community, as you probably guessed), and it’s available on Steam, but it seems that most computer gamers have yet to hear about it. Being someone who never quite forgot Raptor: Call of the Shadows and who has always secretly wanted to see it updated, I was more than happy to give this new game a shot.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME To Become A Linux Only Project?

      Something very interesting and potentially controversial is going on in the GNOME project. In an email to the GNOME mailing list, Jon McCann said that GNOME should focus on supporting on only support for Linux and drop the support for the other operating systems such as BSD, Solaris and Unix.

    • GNOME to drop support for BSD, Solaris, Unix?

      Take this one with a pinch of hearty pinch of salt for now, but, in a post to the GNOME Developer Mailing List, Jon McCann – a tour de force in the GNOME world and pioneer of GNOME Shell itself – has urged that GNOME not only become an OS, but forgo keeping support for other non-Linux operating systems such as BSD, Solaris and Unix in the process.

    • Transforming GNOME Into A Linux-Only Project?

      One of the mailing list messages making the rounds on the Internet today is concerning the GNOME project and whether they should no longer concern themselves with supporting non-Linux operating systems.

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat KVM deployments face uphill battle

      Attendees at last week’s Red Hat Summit said that they are evaluating Red Hat’s latest virtualization products, but production deployments are scarce.

    • Red Hat Recognized as Top Support Website

      Red Hat has announced its global customer portal has been recognized as a top support website by the Association of Support Professionals. The 14th Annual Ten Best Web Support Sites competition illustrates the excellence in online support and service.

    • Fedora

      • My Fedora 15 Pre-release experience

        Today, it become clear that Fedora 15 will be released on May 24th . It is an interesting release, specially as the first official Linux distribution coming with GNOME 3. Besides, it comes with a number of interesting features including (but not limited to): KDE 4.6, systemd, power management enhancements, Robotics Suite, Retrace Server, Better SPICE support, Dynamic Firewall and GDB 7.3. You can find the complete list of new features at Fedora 15′s Feature Page.

        I have tried Fedora 15 since its Alpha release, and started using more seriously since the first test compose of the final release. I generally really like this release, however it has a number of issues too because of the arrival of the new GNOME 3. Let’s start with the annoying parts first!

      • Fedora 15 Goes Gold, and That’s Not All

        Several exciting announcements came out of the Fedora project today, the most exciting of which is that the Fedora Go / No-Go meeting resulted in a Go. In addition, the new Contributor Agreement was finalized and posted. A newish community project made its existence widely known as well.

        After the Go / No-Go meeting yesterday an announcement went out to the Fedora Developer Announce mailing list that version 15 “is declared GOLD!” A Release Readiness meeting will take place Thursday to make sure the release is coordinated and that all teams are in agreement and ready for the release.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Creating An Ubuntu Power User Community

          Over the last few months there has been some concerned feedback in some parts of the community about how Ubuntu is focused more and more on attracting new users to Ubuntu by providing a streamlined and simplified user experience. Much of this is being achieved with Unity; a new desktop interface delivered in Ubuntu 11.04, which will continue to be refined and improved upon based on user testing and feedback.

          One key piece of feedback from some Unity users was a concern around the lack of configurability in Unity, and a feeling that it is a little too simple and does not expose enough of the system, for which many more expert Ubuntu users enjoy.

        • As the Natty Narwhal Debate Continues, the Next Ubuntu Is Coming

          As far as Shuttleworth’s comments about the desktop go, Unity–as long as you have the hardware to run it properly–has mostly gotten good reviews and is credited for bringing Ubuntu more in line with other, competitive graphical operating systems.

        • Top 4 Lightweight, Official Ubuntu Based Alternatives for Ubuntu 11.04′s Unity 3D

          Many long term Ubuntu users have been quite critical towards Ubuntu’s new Unity interface. Unity has its share of issues which Canonical is hopeful of rectifying by the next major release, Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. In the mean time, if you are not at all able to adjust with the revamped albeit buggy Unity desktop, there are a bunch of absolutely awesome Ubuntu based distros which runs on other interfaces like KDE, XFCE, LXDE etc. Here is how you install each of them as a different session in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

        • Intel Sandy Bridge On Ubuntu 11.04 Is Still Troubling

          When Intel released their “Sandy Bridge” processors in early January with next-generation graphics, the Linux support was widely criticized as although they had been working on the open-source Linux driver for nearly one year at that time, it wasn’t a pleasurable “out of the box” experience and building open-source graphics drivers on Linux can be a real pain. With Ubuntu 11.04, which was released at the end of April, this “Natty Narwhal” release still largely misses the Sandy Bridge support train.

        • Here we go again!

          Every 6 months the Ubuntu journey starts anew. Those of us entering yet another cycle assume that this all makes sense to the outside world but I like to post up dates on the wall in the office and write a blog post to give those new to the project, and some not so new, a handy reminder of the major milestones in each cycle.

          Each release that we create has a cycle with certain key milestones in it. These milestones are broadly agreed before the previous release is even out the door and are almost always an exact copy of what came in the previous release. The schedule for our next release 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot can be found by following this handy link to the Ubuntu wiki.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 roadmap | Are we moving in right direction?

          What is going to be in Ubuntu 11.10? Conclusions were drawn after much heated discussions and debates at the Ubuntu Developer’s Summit at Budapest. The centre of attraction of these discussions was the status of default applications that should be included and possibly excluded in the new version. Those that were shown the pink slip include Evolution, GMD and PiTiVi. Those which got included are Thunderbird, Chrome and LMD. Certain old warhorses will continue to stand strong in the new version such as LibreOffice. Now the developer community is expected to debate on these in the coming months. Here is our take on the whole thing.

        • What of Power Usering?

          Jono Bacon has come up with a really interesting ideas, in a blog post called Creating An Ubuntu Power User Community which describes Jono’s passion for creating a community of super power using.

          I’m concerned the initiative won’t work without some time and effort put behind the new group to prime the pump. Is there the time to dedicate to this? and importantly is this a Canonical sponsored idea (where Jono will have time during office hours to work on it) or would it be a hobby which may fall by the wayside?

        • Soon Ubuntu Will Be Running In Your Car

          Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, joined The GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of an open source In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform.

          Canonical has joined to bring its new IVI-focused products to the GENIVI Alliance members and to announce its intention to build a new GENIVI compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix.

        • Unity in Natty: update

          2 months ago, I wrote about my experience with Unity in Natty. At that point, it was far from suiting my use-case, but yet, I somehow felt positive about its future and I kept using it. What was troubling me then was the release schedule. With all the remaining crashers and feature gaps 8 weeks before the long fixed release date, I had serious doubts about the final state of Unity in Natty. Now that it (Natty) has been released, and that developers spent a week at UDS and are now either taking some days off or writing blueprints, it’s a quiet period with almost nothing moving, a good time to see what has been achieved.

        • Problem Solvers vs. Problem Spotters

          Over my past few years involved in the Ubuntu Community, I have noticed an interesting trend. We are really good at spotting and vocalising problems. This in itself is not a bad thing. In fact it is good to spot problems. It is how we can make our contributions to the Open Source world better. We find the problems.

Free Software/Open Source

• Events

  • Linuxtag 2011 in Berlin

    Berlin is a great location for the Linuxtag, it’s always nice to come there. Just have a look at the photo: The boosters are getting hip! Nearly the complete boosters team was there to meet, be available at our booth for questions and take part at the talks. With over 10.000 attendees it’s the biggest event of this kind, and you can be sure to always meet some well known faces of the openSUSE community there.

  • LinuxTag 2011

    On that last note, I’d like to publicly ask Canonical and especially Mark to deeply consider getting rid of the Copyright Assignment for the Software Center. It is a blocking issue for real collaboration and as you consider it Bug #1 to get rid of MS’ majority market share, why not put your money where your mouth is and work with the other distributions to do something about that?

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Dear Firefox – it’s not me, it’s you

      The time for excuses has passed so I’ve walked away from Firefox and found a new love in Google’s Chrome.

• Programming

  • Interview with Ken Thompson

    Go Language

    DDJ: Skipping several decades of work, let’s speak about Go. I was just at the Google I/O Conference, where it was announced that Go will be supported on the Google App Engine. Does that presage a wider adoption of Go within Google, or is it still experimental?

    KT: It’s expanding every day and not being forced down anybody’s throat. It’s hard to adopt it to a project inside of Google because of the learning curve. It’s brand new and there aren’t good manuals for it, except what’s on the Web. And then, of course, its label of being experimental, so people are a little afraid. In spite of that, it’s growing very fast inside of Google.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Nerual coding

    A single interneuron controls activity adaptively in 50,000 neurons, enabling consistently sparse codes for odors. Neural codes could in principle take many forms, but in regions forming bottlenecks for information flow (e.g., the optic nerve) or in areas important for memory, sparse codes are highly desirable.

  • Rapid discharge forming for metalic glass parts

  • Security

    • Chrome exploit really Flash and Windows exploit

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fukushima Exclusion Zone Grows

      Japan has started the first evacuations of homes outside a government exclusion zone after the earthquake and tsunami crippled one of the country’s nuclear power plants. 5100 people are being relocated

    • Big oil investor, Bill Gates, pushes nuclear power while his home state is polluted by Fukoshima. He would do better cleaning up Hanford.

  • Censorship

    • A journalist was arrested and their laptop was confiscated because the journalist reported at a security conference.

  • Privacy

    • NSA Agent says ThinThread program spying on entire US population

  • Trademarks

    • the Walt Disney Company has applied for a trademark on the phrase ‘Seal Team 6,’ the name of the special forces unit that killed the world’s most wanted man. Disney now owns the exclusive rights to put Seal Team 6 on ‘clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and entertainment and education services.’

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• LPI Announces New Training Partners in China and Philippines

  The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, and its affiliate, LPI-Asia Pacific announced new LPI-Approved Training Partners (LPI-ATP) in the region: Beijing Shenghao Boyuan Technology Company of mainland China and Concentrix of the Philippines.

• Cheat Sheet collection

• JavaScript: Now powerful enough to run Linux

  Step aside, Google Docs, there’s a new JavaScript tour de force in town.

  I’m talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser.

  The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn’t have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system’s core–2.6.20–runs on the foundation.

• Intel invokes Linux to calm fears of Windows 8 on ARM

  James displayed projections for the server market that show Linux adoption slowly eating into Microsoft’s market share and she made even bolder statements, claiming that most datacenters run Linux, that open source software leads the high performance computing market and that most embedded devices, such as smartphones, run Linux.

• ChromeBook Debuts as Ubuntu Developer Summit Maps Out the Future

  Will 2011 be the year of the Linux desktop? That’s a question some people on the Linux Planet have been asking for a decade, but with new developments in the past week, that dream maybe closer to reality than ever before.

• Server

  • IT Majors Create Open Virtualization Alliance

    BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and SUSE announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

• Kernel Space

  • The Linux Kernel Is Still On A Power Binge

    It’s been about three weeks since last mentioning the major power consumption problem in the Linux kernel (actually, there’s more than one power regression) and it’s affecting distributions like Ubuntu 11.04. The lack of mentioning the power regression in recent weeks isn’t though because the regressions are addressed, they are still outstanding with the about to be released Linux 2.6.39 kernel.

    The power regressions just haven’t been mentioned recently since I’ve been out of the office since late last month due to UDS Budapest, LinuxTag 2011, and beer drinking with Phoronix readers in Bavaria and around Germany. Now that I’m back to the usual workload, I’ve run some more kernel tests to verify the increased power consumption is still there with the latest upstream kernel. Sadly, the issue is still there.

• Applications

  • Activity Log Manager for Zeitgeist released!

    Grab it while it’s hot. Note that you’ll need Zeitgeist 0.8.0 (or later) for it to work. If you’re an Ubuntu user you can get packages for both from our PPA; I’ve also uploaded it to Debian.

  • This is Why We Fight

  • Sentinella: A Snappy System Sentinel for Linux Lovers

    If you’re looking for a simple program that will let you tell your computer “If this happens, do that,” then look no further. In a nutshell, Sentinella lets you monitor your computer’s activity and set limits on what happens so you can automatically execute some function in the background. This approach lets you tap into the working status of your computer’s processors, memory, network interfaces and more.

  • Phatch: Batch Image Processor

  • Proprietary

    • Microsoft Skype

      People who focus on minor issues are greatly exercized about the purchase of Skype by Microsoft.

      How will this affect the success of Skype’s spyware, they ask? Was it good strategy for one or the other? Did Microsoft pay too much? How does this affect the possible success of this or that other company? Questions whose perspective regards people as nothing more than terrain for these nonhumans to squabble over.

    • Adobe Flash Player Linux x86_64 Update Coming

    • Let’s Unite To Create A Skype Killer!

      It’s a lesser known fact, as most don’t talk about it. Most of the free software goodies that you enjoy in your Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux boxes come from the Free Software Foundation — an organization dedicated to keep users free from the clutches of the proprietary companies.

    • Opera 11.11 for UNIX changelog

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • More PulseAudio power goodness

    • Gnome Shell and conky

    • How to convert my IP From Dynamic to static in Ubuntu

    • Network Troubleshooting Basics: The Ipconfig Command

    • Cheat Sheet collection

    • How to Create a Flamethrower

    • Logging and Graphing Power Consumption of Embedded Linux Systems — Busybox and GnuPlot analyzing the Kindle 3

    • Keep Files From Showing Up In Unity (Dash) Or Other Programs That Use Zeitgeist With Activity Log Manager

    • All about pseudo, Part 2: Under the hood

    • Discover Rootkits With Unhide

    • Setting Up A Spam-Proof Home Email Server (The Somewhat Alternate Way) (Debian Squeeze)

    • Inline assembly instructions in GCC

      In embedded software programming there’s often the need to use assembly-level instructions to reach all the functionalities of the processing core. But when the developing is done almost exclusively in C, it is sometimes a burden, often an added complexity and possibly a nuisance to code separate assembly files containing the needed functions. Other than that, sometimes the fact that the C code must call the assembly function located in another module is a performance hit that could slow down execution to a level that is not acceptable. The solution that I prefer is using inline assembly inside small C functions, and let the compiler optimize it into my code.

  • Wine

    • Wine 1.3.20 Released

      The Wine team has announced the release of development version of Wine, 1.3.20. This release adds the option to clip the mouse inside fullscreen windows.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE 3.5 is now Trinity

      I used to run a desktop search program called Beagle, to index all my documents, text files, and emails for quick search. It ran unobtrusively in the background.

      The KDE 4 developers decided to improve on this, by adding the strigi indexer, integrated with the Nepomuk “semantic desktop.” Alas, “unobtrusive” was not in their mission statement. My desktop spent all day accessing the hard drive, at 100% CPU utilization, and according to the task monitor this activity was all to update Nepomuk’s database. This is probably why my system was so slow.

      [...]

      Better still, a later comment told me that KDE 3.5 is still alive and well! Since the KDE project dropped 3.5, it was “forked” into a new project called Trinity.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Advancing with GNOME:Ayatana repository

      Last week I’ve received an email from Bruce Byfield asking a few questions about this project. I’ve replied honestly as I would to anyone, I’ve faced several issues, and it sounded wise to me to hold a bit this. Since the Beta release of Natty that I’m following a technology forum in Portugal (over 150.000 users) and making a few notes on what peoples perceptions are about Unity and Natty.

• Distributions

  • Arch Linux Review

    That being said, it has to be noted that Arch Linux is not meant for users just migrating to Linux from Windows or MAC OS. That is because Arch Linux is targeted at users or developers who know what they are doing and have at least some experience with Linux.

  • Guest Post: Introducing Zenwalk Linux 7.0 Live CD Version

    A few days ago the Zenwalk project released its Live CD of Zenwalk Linux 7.0. Currently Zenwalk offers the main Xfce edition, a Core edition which foregoes the X windowing system and is intended to be a starting point to building a custom desktop or server system, an edition with Openbox as window manager, an older Gnome version that is still at version 6.4, and the Live CD version of the edition based on the Xfce desktop environment. In this guest post, Bernhard Hoffmann walks us through the Zenwalk Live CD version.

  • New Releases

    • RIPLinuX 12.4

    • ALT 6.0.0-20110517

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mageia 1 RC Available, Final Not Far Off

      Mageia 1 Release Candidate was announced today right on time. Final is expected on June 1, so developers are anxious for final bug reports. They are particularly interested in the upgrade process from Mandriva 2010.x. I tested the upgrade this time, but from Mageia 1 beta 2.

      From the beta to the rc, the upgrade process was quick and easy. The installer requires a lot less input than with a full install. As far as I can tell it went off without a hitch. I got a new kernel and new theme. KDE was updated to the latest stable release. NVIDIA drivers were updated and the boot glitch from beta 2 seemed to be cleared up (or rather “nokmsboot” was added to the boot options by default now). All hardware seemed to be supported properly. It could have just been my imagination, but the performance seemed very good, perhaps improved from last release. Even with desktop effects enabled, it just seemed to fly.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Customer Portal Recognized As A Top 10 Best Web Support Site

      Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that its global customer portal has been recognized by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) as a top support website in its fourteenth annual “Ten Best Web Support Sites” competition. Red Hat was recognized in the Open Division among five other technology leaders, including Red Hat partners Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Project News – May 17th, 2011

      DebConf10 Final Report is out

      The DebConf organization team released the final report of the 2010 Debian Conference, which was held in New York City, USA, at Columbia University. According to the DebConf blog entry, “It’s a 46-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events, funny pictures and so on.” There are two PDF versions of the final report available, which can be downloaded from the DebConf Media website.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Developer Community Losing Faith In Ubuntu?

          Ubuntu Natty aka 11.04 was released on April 28, 2011. The release had several bugs, one being the inability of a user to mount a drive during installation. Which mean that if you are running DLNA servers or if your are using applications which needs access to different partitions during start-up you are in big trouble.

        • Canonical considering removing LibreOffice from default CD installer of Ubuntu 11.10

          Canonical considering removing LibreOffice from default CD installer of Ubuntu 11.10

          Online sources are reporting that the next edition of Ubuntu might not include LibreOffice by default in the CD installer.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu Studio, the podcaster’s distro.

            As a Linux user I’ve endured a fair amount of jabs on the podcast that I co-host every week. First my microphone sucks, then my levels suck, then my bandwidth sucks. Well, no more. Time to take these freedom-hating fools to school, and what better way to do that than with a 64-bit Linux distribution and a real-time zero latency kernel?

Free Software/Open Source

• The 451 Take on the Future of Open Source

  The 451 Group’s research has previously shown that the benefits of open source software are many and varied and The Future of Open Source Survey highlights the fact that multiple factors are driving the increased adoption of open source software, including freedom from vendor lock-in, greater flexibility and lower cost.

• Sendmail Releases Update to Sendmail Open Source MTA

  Sendmail, Inc., the leading provider of message processing appliances and applications for enterprise messaging infrastructures, and the Sendmail Consortium (http://www.sendmail.com/sm/open_source/), today announced the availability of the latest version of the popular sendmail open source MTA (Mail Transport Agent). This new version addresses many of the requests that have been reported by the large community of sendmail open source users and developers around the world.

• Selecting Open Source: a Practical View

  Summary: In the past few years, free open source software (FOSS) adoption has enjoyed tremendous growth in the IT industry. In the geospatial arena, growth is evidenced by the popularity of many tools and applications, and the emergence of a vibrant community of developers and users. Ignacio Guerrero, an IT consultant and former software director at Intergraph and Rolta, takes a look at the decision to evaluate and choose FOSS versus proprietary software from the standpoint of a typical GIS program manager.

• Survey Reveals Open Source Growing Quickly in Mobile and Cloud Development

  North Bridge Venture Partners today announced the results of its annual Future of Open Source Survey. Conducted in partnership with The 451 Group, the 2011 survey involved more than 20 industry collaborators and polled a wide variety of members of the open source community on the important issues, opportunities and expectations of the industry for 2011 and beyond. The results of the survey, now in its fifth year, reveal that open source is now fully embraced by both the public and private sectors, and is being implemented across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data. Additionally, user confidence in open source continues to grow dramatically, represented by the fact that users are much less concerned with historical impediments to adoption such as licensing or conforming to an organization’s internal policies. Survey responses also show that the future is bright for open source. Emerging technology segments such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), private cloud, public cloud, and mobile are driving growth in open source.

• Events

  • Focus Group Open Source 2011

    Filippo Sorbello of the university of Palermo shared his take on how Linux and the mainframe fit together, while Massimiliano Belardi – Sales Specialist at IBM – talked about IBM continued engagement with Linux and providing some case-history details.

  • Android QuickStart Workshop In Pune, India

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Lazarus – A nifty little FireFox addon to restore your webforms.

    • Mozilla’s New Firefox 5 Aurora to Beta plan is working out

      Count me among those that have been a bit skeptical about Mozilla’s new rapid release cycle.

      You can also (potentially) now tell me that I’m wrong too.

      Part of the Mozilla Firefox 5 rapid release cycle involves a regular and routine merge of code from the Aurora development tree to the Beta tree at set intervals.

• SaaS

  • Software Freedom and the Cloud

    Does this mean no-one should use cloud solutions? While there are some extreme voices that assert abstinence, I think that’s an untenable position. Cloud computing offers so many benefits – many resonant with what people have historically sought from software freedom – that it’s sure to be used. Listening to entrepreneurs and investors here at OSBC, there’s no doubt that the future of software has a substantial dimension in the cloud.

  • Open Source Cloud Computing with Hadoop

    Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance. The flexibility of Linux combined with the seamless scalability of cloud environments provide the perfect framework for processing huge datasets, while eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and custom proprietary software. Nowadays, Hadoop is one of the best choices in open source cloud computing, offering a platform for large scale data crunching.

  • New OpenNebula Pro 2.2 Cloud Platform Targeted at Telcos, Hosting Providers and HPC Centers

    C12G Labs announced today the availability of OpenNebulaPro 2.2 for customers and partners with an active subscription to OpenNebula.pro. This is the third major release of the commercially supported, enterprise-ready distribution of the OpenNebula open-source toolkit, which is used by thousands of organizations worldwide.

• Databases

  • EnterpriseDB Announces Postgres Plus Advanced Server on HP-UX

    EnterpriseDB, the largest independent PostgreSQL open source database company, today announced its commitment to support the HP-UX operating environment on Itanium-based HP Integrity servers. EnterpriseDB will introduce full support for HP-UX via Postgres Plus Advanced Server in June 2011. A beta version is available for download here.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • VirtualBox 4.0.8 Improves 3D Support For Gnome 3

    Oracle has announced the development release of VirtualBox. The version 4.0.8 brings numerous bug fixes including enhanced 3D support for Gnome 3. The release fixes a potential crash when resizing the guest window. It also fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15.

  • Letting dogs bark and answering real questions

    These days I started to see some questions arise here and there, about why we’re not proceeding as fast as we could with the setup of the legal entity, why we sometimes fail to communicate a vision for the project, etc. These are all good questions. Ultimately, we have to react to them by acting on the issues that are raised. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the light at the end of the tunnel is growing fast. I hope (I know) we will soon see several announcements pertaining to the community and the project. We’re working hard at making the foundation a reality, but we’re also working hard at securing the Document Foundation’s financial future and at improving our community processes. Questions that arise about these matters are legitimate, and if you feel we’re not answering them, then it means we’re either swamped or are currently not able to answer them (because of various constraints). But we do read them, we do hear them. And they will be answered, either in writing, or in solid fact, usually expressed by an announcement. You can help make many things a reality by contributing to the LibreOffice project. It’s fun, it’s even exhilarating and it’s a formidable human adventure alongside being technically exciting and challenging.

• Funding

  • Georgia Tech Research Institute Leads $10 M Open Source Initiative

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate has named the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to lead implementation efforts for the five-year, $10 million Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program. The HOST program will investigate open source and open cyber security methods, models and technologies, and identify viable and sustainable approaches that support national cyber security objectives.

    “The strategic objective of the HOST program is to lead efforts of discovery and collaboration, seeding development in open source software and practices that produce a measurable impact for government cyber security systems,” said Joshua Davis, associate division head at GTRI’s Cyber Technology and Information Security Laboratory and principal investigator for the HOST program. “The collaborative nature of open source and open technologies provide unique technical and economic value and opportunities for government users.”

    [...]

    Open technologies are not a panacea for all challenges, Davis added. HOST will reach out to government, industry, academic and open source community representatives to learn where and how open technologies have been successfully adopted within public and private systems and where the challenges still remain.

  • Kleiner Perkins Leads $9M Round In Apache Hadoop-Based Analytics Platform Datameer

    Datameer, a startup that offers a big data analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop, has raised $9.25 million led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint Ventures. Kleiner partner Ellen Pao will be joining Datameer’s board. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.

• BSD

  • Embedded BSD: FreeBSD & Alix

    In order to download the magazine you need to sign up to our newsletter. After clicking the “Download” button, you will be asked to provide your email address. You need to verify your email address using the link from the activation email you will receive.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Libidn2 0.5

    Libidn2 is a free software implementation of IDNA2008. Libidn2 is part of the GNU Libidn project. Libidn2 is in beta testing, but is believed to provide complete IDNA2008 functionality (i.e., both lookup and register).

• Project Releases

  • Icinga v1.4 released!

• Public Services/Government

  • DE: Launch of the Open Source Integration Initiative

    Several Open Source German companies cooperate in the newly launched Open Source Integration Initiative (OSII) in order to develop a modular ‘stack’ solution for open source business solutions. The Initiative is supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and backed by Lisog, the largest open source network in the German-speaking world.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • PLoS ONE Publishes its 20,000th Manuscript!

      Today we are happy to announce that PLoS ONE has published its 20,000th manuscript! We could not have gotten here today without the help and support of our authors, reviewers, academic editors, and the OA community. Thank you for helping us to achieve this incredible milestone!

  • Open Hardware

    • Aldebaran to open source Nao robot

      Aldebaran Robotics is planning to release a significant proportion of its proprietary source code. This was announced at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the details are still far from clear.

• Programming

  • Perl 5.14 Improves IPv6, Unicode

    Perl 5.14 is now available, marking the first major release of the open source development language since Perl 5.12 in 2010.

    The new release provides improved Unicode support and expands IPv6 capabilities. While Perl 5.14 is now generally available, the release follows 12 incremental releases in the development tree.

    “Like Linux, Perl follows the even/odd versioning convention that has an odd minor version number [e.g. '13' in 5.13] indicate it is a development release that will become 5.14,” Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState told InternetNews.com. “There were actually 12 releases [through to 5.13.11] for 5.13 that were used to experiment with, test and harden the new features that became part of 5.14.”

  • A Functioning Stand Alone Python Program

    In the last tutorial we created a file using our text editor and saved a function to it. This file was called trivia.py and in it was the module “trivia”. We then started Python in a console and import()ed the trivia module. Once imported, it created a “namespace” and we could access the askQuestion() function from within the trivia namespace by using a dot – trivia.askQuestion(). In order for the module to work properly we had to include an import statement within the module itself so that everything that the module relied upon was imported within the module. We then manually loaded our data from a pickle file we created and, manually, ran the askQuestion() function on the first question in our data store. Finally we added docstrings to the function and the module.

Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition

  • Got Health Insurance? Pray You Won’t Get Purged

    The purging of less-profitable accounts through intentionally unrealistic rate increases helps explain why the number of small businesses offering coverage to their employees has been declining for several years and why the number of Americans without coverage reached a record high of nearly 51 million last year. According to the National Small Business Association, the number of small businesses that provide health insurance to their employees fell from 61 percent in 1993 to 38 percent in 2009.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • BAHRAIN: Activist describes electroshock, torture by government forces

    After reports this week of security forces in Bahrain torturing detainees, particularly medical personnel, Babylon & Beyond spoke with Mohammed Maskati, president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights who has been working to document human rights abuses in the capital, Manama, and throughout the Gulf nation with international partners such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Victory! Scholastic Pulls Its American Coal Foundation Curriculum

    Last week I wrote here that Scholastic’s coal curriculum distributed to 66,000 fourth grade teachers, was sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, meaning that it somehow failed to mention any of the downsides of coal production: no negative effects of mining and burning coal, no toxic wastes, no lung disease, no greenhouse houses.

• Finance

  • Taibbi: Justice Dept Has No Appetite To Take ANY Cases Against Wall Street Executives

    With most Asian stock markets rallying overnight with the Shanghai index at a one week high (Indian Sensex in contrast at a fresh 8 week low), commodity prices are bouncing with copper in particular back above $4 and a touch above its 200 day moving average. With respect to Greece, the rhetoric is getting more heated between the ECB and other EU members over what to do next. ECB member Stark said a Greek debt restructuring “would create a catastrophe” as he believes that it “would wipe out part or all the capital of the Greek banks.”

  • Goldman Sachs Wins: EuroZone Endorses Draghi to Become Next ECB President

    The ministers from the 17 nations that use the euro endorsed former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs Inteernational, Mario Draghi, 63, to take over as head of the European Central Bankin November, Luxembourg’s Jean- Claude Juncker, who leads the group, told reporters in Brussels late yesterday. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet’s eight-year term ends on Oct. 31.

  • Mario Draghi and Goldman Sachs, Again

    In its previous response to us, the Bank of Italy pointed out that Mario Draghi (its current governor) did not join the management of Goldman Sachs until 2002 – hence he was not there when the controversial Greek “debt swaps” were arranged.

    We agree that he joined Goldman only in January 2002 (this was in our original post). But the latest revelations regarding the Goldman-Greece relationship (on the Senate floor, no less) clearly indicate that Goldman was a lead manager of Greek debt issues in spring 2002, i.e., when Mr. Draghi was on board.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Websites Skew Views of the News

    The efforts of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major websites to tailor our online experiences to our supposed interests can affect our ability to get a view of the world the way it really is.

• Civil Rights

  • No Exemptions for Wisconsin Firefighters and Police

    The fact that they were exempt from from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill never prevented Wisconsin’s firefighters or police from stepping up to protest Walker’s union-busting agenda. Walker said the unions were exempt from the bill not for political reasons but for reasons of public safety (strikes and burning houses are not a good combination), but the police and firefighter’s unions knew that their rights too could soon be on the chopping block.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • New copyright bill to duplicate C-32: Tories

      Canada’s new copyright reform legislation will look a lot like its earlier versions, Conservatives say.

      Tory MP Dean Del Mastro said Tuesday the copyright modernization bill the Harper government pledged to pass in its election platform would essentially be a duplicate of the previously introduced ­ and controversial ­ Bill C-32.

    • UK IP Report Recommends Creating New Copyright Exceptions, Warns Against Over Regulation

      The much-anticipated UK Independent Review of IP and Growth, typically referred to as the Hargreaves report, was released this morning. The report focuses on how intellectual property laws can stifle innovation and urges the UK government to enact reforms that remove legal barriers to economic growth (James Boyle, who served as expert advisor to the review, gives his take here). For example, it notes:

      Because IPRs grant a form of monopoly, an overly rigid and inflexible IP framework can act as a barrier to innovation. When a firm has acquired exclusive rights over its innovative technology or content, other firms will be able to learn from that technology or see the content, but may be unable to use them for further innovation unless licensing can be agreed. IPRs can constrain third parties wishing to access or innovate on top of this protected knowledge or content, with potentially serious economic and social costs.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Linux PC in a browser

  French hacker Fabrice Bellard has demonstrated how JavaScript can do much more than simply animate web sites and process server data by creating a PC emulator written in the scripting language. JS/Linux emulates a 32-bit x86 compatible CPU, a programmable interrupt controller, a programmable interrupt timer and a serial port – taking just over 90 KB to do so. It lacks a mathematical co-processor and MMX commands, making it roughly on a par with a 486-compatible x86 CPU without FPU. It can, however, be used to run older Linux kernels (2.6.20), as they include an FPU emulator.

• Some Statistics about my Linux Box

  Seven months ago, I posted the first statistics of my Linux box. Now it’s time to check again on it to see how it has behaved in these seven months. I’m not counting the old figures.

  A. Number of attacks by trojans, spyware, or malware: 0. AGAIN!

• Linux job portal launched: LinuxCareer.com

  As a demand for Linux-related jobs has jumped unexpectedly high in the last couple of years, LinuxCareer.com as a new Linux related job portal attempts to compensate for this sudden surge in demand for Linux skilled professionals and will surely accommodate both employers and job seekers. LinuxCareer.com is not affiliated with any local or international company, nor is it a recruitment or employment agency and it is specialising only in Linux based careers and closely related Information Technology fields.

  LinuxCareer.com offers tools such as application tracking, job alerts, login and syncing resumes with facebook.com and linkedin.com accounts as well as screening questionnaires for employers and resume uploads for job seekers.

• The People Who Support Linux: Unbridled Play, Uncompromising Innovation

  Jared possesses the same passion for knowledge, collaboration, and continual improvement that sparked the Linux revolution two decades ago—and that keeps it moving forward today. “I have the greatest admiration for Linus Torvalds and the team of skilled engineers that continue to evolve the Linux kernel,” he says.

  “When I first started using Linux, installation was difficult, and it wasn’t easy to find drivers for the hardware. But times have really changed! Now, Linux is as easy to install as Windows, and it does everything that the average computer user needs to do.” Of course, it also does much, much more. And for ambitious developers like Jared, it’s the foundation upon which a whole world of innovation is built.

• Linux for AEC Industry

  Its nearly a year after that and I’ve been scheduled to present a follow-up to his talk. Yeah, I know, that’s a lot of time-lapse for a follow-up but that’s how it is. In two days time, on the 19th of May 2011, the heat will be on during the Technical Session, as I do my best to convince my colleagues that Open-Source Software is adequate for Nigerian AEC professionals. The presentation is titled: Linux for Nigerian AEC Industry. My predecessor is an Ubuntu guy so its not surprising he showcased examples using that Distribution. I am a Fedora Guy, and I will be showcasing my examples on Fedora (Laughlin), better still, media will exchange hands. His was broad because ICT is broad, mine is narrower as I will focus on Linux and other hosted open-source tools.

• Desktop

  • Chrome OS is only a failure to people living in the past

    Point-Counterpont. In the second of two posts about Google’s cloud-connected operating system and Chromebook, Joe Wilcox argues that PC defenders are an unimaginative lot living in the past. He refutes Larry Seltzer’s morning commentary: “I’ll take Windows and a good browser over Chrome OS.”

• Server

  • An Extreme 40 Gbps Switch

    The X8 was first shown last week during the Interop conference running 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40 GbE) traffic. The X8 Chassis can be setup to run up to 192, 40 GbE port or up to 768, 10 GbE ports. In terms of total overall performance, Extreme is positioning the X8 as a 20 Terabit chassis.

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Will Wayland Become A New Desktop Standard?

      As mentioned earlier on Phoronix, LinuxTag 2011 took place this past weekend in Berlin. One of the few talks I was able to make due to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest colliding with the event was the Wayland talk by SUSE’s Egbert Eich. The focus of this talk was whether Wayland is on the way to becoming a new desktop standard.

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Beyond Skype: VoIP Alternatives

      Ekiga is probably the best known of the Linux VoIP clients; it’s also available on Windows. On either platform it works well. It’s a SIP client, but it also supports the H.323 video-conferencing protocol. With H.323, you can use Ekiga with the older Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing program. I’ve found that a very handy feature over the years. Unfortunately, when Microsoft “upgraded” NetMeeting to Windows Meeting Space with Vista, they also broke its compatibility with Ekiga and other third-party programs.

      I like Ekiga, but these days I usually use the Google package described below on Linux.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.04 (LAMP)

  • Games

    • Blocks That Matter Coming Soon To GNU/Linux

      Swingswing Submarine the company that is working on Seasons after Fall (release date : when it’s done), has now released a new game called Blocks That Matter, and soon will port it to GNU/Linux.

    • Puzzle Moppet – a new 3D indie puzzle game

    • New Version Released for ‘Greedy Car Thieves’, Getting Better and Better

      Greedy Car Thieves has just reached a new version which brings many new features and fixes to this much anticipated Linux game. We covered this game in past and the response has been great within the Linux community. The game is heavily under development and these builds are test versions having multi-player mode at the moment.

    • Amnesia: Justine – Now Available To Everyone

      On April 18 Frictional Games joined Valve to celebrate the release of Portal 2 and wrap up our collaboration which has spanned the last few months. During this period we have worked with not only Valve, but an entire range of talented independent developers, to give gamers a unique gaming experience. Together we created a massive Alternate Reality Game which spanned 13 Steam games, as well as plenty of internet forums and publications, and the real world. Frictional Games’ main contribution to this game was a DLC called Justine and truth be told, it plays pretty damn well even without the other stuff.

    • UPDATE: Greedy Car Thieves – New version released

      Greedy Car Thieves, the indi game that looks towards the earlier Grand Theft Auto games for inspiration has just had another version released. Readers to this site will remember we were very impressed by its retro feel, which had been modernised for today’s hardware whilst still retaining the charms of the early part of the GTA franchise.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Promo Sprint 2011

      The KDE Promo team has just wrapped up a busy weekend at their sprint in Southampton, England. The group set out with an aggressive agenda and accomplished many of their goals throughout the weekend.

• Distributions

  • Where are the new Arch Linux release images?

    This is a question I get asked a lot recently. The latest official images are a year old. This is not inherently bad, unless you pick the wrong mirror from the outdated mirrorlist during a netinstall, or are using hardware which is not supported by the year old kernel/drivers. A core install will yield a system that needs drastic updating, which is a bit cumbersome. There are probably some other problems I’m not aware of. Many of these problems can be worked around with (‘pacman -Sy mirrorlist’ on the install cd for example), but it’s not exactly convenient.

    [...]

    Bleeding edge images for everyone, and for those who want some quality assurance: the more you contribute, the more likely you’ll see official releases.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Linux Mandriva 2010.2

      Before even trying Linux Mandriva like any other UNIXoid noobs I was using Ubuntu 8.02 and 9.04, and boy how stupid I have been back then. Why? Because all this time Mandriva DVD was sharing the dust on my forgotten shelve until one day I didn’t pick it up.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat expands SAP relationship

      Raleigh open-source software company Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and German software giant SAP (NYSE: SAP) are combining some services to provide enhanced customer service.

      The companies are integrating the SAP Solution Manager application management product and the Red Hat Global Support Services support ticketing system. The companies announced the deal, financial terms of which were not released, at the Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Fla.

    • Red Hat, In Cooperation With SAP, Provides Enhanced Value for Enterprise Customers

    • Microsoft softens its journey to cancerous CentOS Linux

      However, with Microsoft’s expansionist mode into open source territory most suggest greater caution and diligence towards it as ultimately open source will allow code to remain where it belongs- to the community that developed it. This is a principle that will never be acceptable to proprietary software giants such as Microsoft.

    • Fedora

      • A Preview of Fedora 15 – Rough around the edges, but worth the trouble

        With all the hype surrounding Gnome 3, Fedora 15 is sure to get a lot of attention when it is released, as it is one of the first major Linux distributions to include Gnome 3 out of the box. After using Fedora 14 on my work laptop for my day to day computing, I decided to take the plunge and install the beta of Fedora 15. Here are some of my initial impressions.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Other Linux Distros’ View of Ubuntu’s Unity: It Ain’t Pretty

          You might expect other distributions to be as divided about Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop as users are. That is, at least among the vocal, you might expect to find that the condemnation slightly outweighs the praise, but that both sides are passionate in their beliefs.

          However, that is not the case. If anything, developers working on other distributions are surprisingly lukewarm about Unity. Most are in no rush to package Unity — if at all — and many express technical or practical objections to it. Others are waiting to see how Unity is received, but even the handful that have definitely decided to package it express no great enthusiasm.

          It’s a lackluster response that may not only suggest Unity’s future, but also an increasingly isolated position for Ubuntu in the free and open source software community.

        • Awoken 2.0 Comes With Customization Script, Extensive Ubuntu 11.04 Support, Natty PPA

          Now, if you like Awoken icon theme, you need to definitely check out this beautiful Elegant GNOME Theme Pack which uses a modified Awoken based theme as its icon theme. The whole package looks really pretty IMO.

        • Evolution or Thunderbird? | Who do you vote for?

          As expected, this time too, we saw a heated exchange over the default apps in Ubuntu during the Ubuntu developer summit in Budapest. Sometimes I feel that there should not be any default apps, users should be just allowed to use one as per his convenience. Most of the time the debate ends in a stalemate; then why do we need to point to any one application as the default? This time the victims were the two popular clients email clients – Thunderbird and Evolution to be included in the next release of Ubuntu.

        • Nine Features We May See in Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’

          Canonical’s Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” may still be occupying much of the Linux world’s attention, but at last week’s Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, the next version of the free and open source Linux distribution began to take form.

          [...]

          3. Evolution — or Thunderbird?

          For email, Ubuntu 11.0 is still on track to include Evolution, the Ubuntu standard. There’s a chance, however, that Mozilla Thunderbird may be adopted instead, as noted in the software’s blueprints.

        • The Good and Bad of Unity (Part 1): Useless Application Menu

          Back to five years ago, when I first started my blog, many of my articles were just translated from the English articles.

          After five years’ writing, I have a lot of my own thoughts, so most articles were written by me. A friend told me that it’s time to translate my articles back to English, to share with the people over the world.

          So, here’s the first article not about Ubuntu Tweak. I don’t have a good written English yet, but I will improve. Just point out the grammar/word mistake, thanks!

        • Going Agile: The 6-Months Cadence

          I have commented several times on the 2-weekly cadence that we follow at the certification team, but I haven’t gone into much detail on our 6 monthly cycle. We have just completed the Natty cycle (normally release date + 2/3 weeks) and we are about to start our Oneiric one.

          6 monthly cycles help to plan achieving longer goals that drive the user stories implemented by the team in each iteration/sprint. During Natty, we had a loose coupling between these two. I regularly (once a month) reviewed the progress of the Natty backlog and made sure that nothing was falling through the cracks. Despite the good completion rate in Natty, it was more of a case of the user stories forming the Blueprints (6 monthly requirements) than the other way around.

        • How we triage Launchpad bugs

          If you’ve ever wondered why a particular bug report about the Launchpad project is marked as Low, High or Critical, you should read our bug triage guidelines.

        • Did you know…..

          …Ubuntu Software Center (USC) has for purchase games and apps?

        • Providing More Scalable Community Growth And Mentoring

          One of the most complex things we need to deal with in the Ubuntu community is scale. We are a big community and as I have talked about before, I am really keen to ensure that as many people as possible get a very personal Ubuntu experience. We are keen to ensure that everyone who strives to become an Ubuntu Member, Core Developer or MOTU gets the very best support and guidance they can from the community to help them be successful.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Kubuntu 11.10 Sneak Peak

            Last week the Ubuntu project met in Budapest for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. The Kubuntu team discussed an incredible amount of cool things, of which I’d like to present a number of generally interesting topics.

            A very strong focus of the 11.10 release will be continuing innovation in the area of embedded systems such as mobile phones, but also for the first time on tablets. Since the work in embedded systems is quite extensive, information on that will be posted separately in a special ‘Embedded Sneak Peak’.

            [...]

            Muon is developed by one of the Kubuntu Developers and uses, unlike KPackageKit, the native APT libraries. As it is using APT directly it enables Muon to have a much tighter integration into Debian-like systems (such as Kubuntu) as well as expose specific functionality of APT/DPKG more directly.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Video: Inside the opengear Linux powered console server

    Console servers are critical bits of infrastructure, that many of us tend to overlook. Not so for opengear – a company whose sole purpose is to build console servers leveraging open source software for both the OS and the underlying application.

    I’ve been writing about opengear for the last 6 years or so, when they first introduced an open source KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) solution. The company has since grown into bigger servers and broader monitoring capabilities.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Barnes & Noble Brings Periodicals to Android Tablets

        Barnes & Noble updated its Nook for Android app Friday, adding support for digital periodicals on a variety of Android tablets.

        Previously, the Nook app only offered digital magazines and newspapers on the Android-powered Nook Color. Now, it will now be available on Android tablets 7 inches and larger, running Android OS 2.1 and higher, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom. It will not be available on Android smartphones.

      • More Stats on Android/Linux

        According to Google:

        * 100 million Android devices have been sold, more than Apple…,
        * 36 OEMs, 215 carriers, and 450K developers push Android/Linux,
        * 310 different devices sold in 110 countries,
        * 400K activations daily, 4.6 per second,
        * 200K available applications exist, and
        * 4.5 billion installations of applications have been done, an average of 45 per device.

      • Android Open Accessories gains third party support

        Google’s Android 3.1 Open Accessories initiative for connecting Arduino-based gadgets via USB has attracted third-party support. In addition to the RT-manufactured Google reference platform, Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) is preparing a compatible product using a “Vinco” development board that incorporates the Vinculum II USB controller, and Microchip is shipping a compatible PIC24F Accessory Development Starter Kit that uses its own PIC microcontroller.

      • Ice Cream Sandwich Nexus devices to offer quad-core Tegra 3

        Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed his company is building quad-core Tegra 3 processors for new Nexus tablets or smartphones running the upcoming Android “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system. Meanwhile, a Tegra 2-based Motorola Droid X2 is coming to Verizon May 26, followed later by a Droid 3 that switches to Texas Instruments’ dual-core Cortex-A9 OMAP4430, according to industry reports.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open letter to Pamela Jones, Groklaw

  I want to thank you publicly for all of the work you have done on Groklaw.

  And it certainly has been a lot of work. I should know.

  It is very difficult to address the many issues that have surfaced over the last 8 years or so. Copyrights, patents, antitrust, contracts and other issues are all very complex legal issues. And they are not easy to understand much less explain to the public. You have done a very good job in that regard despite not being a lawyer yourself.

  I am also glad to hear that you have been able to pass on some of the responsibilities to Mark Webblink. It believe it is true that Microsoft will try to use patents to prevent the growth of competition. All you have to do is read the recent litigation against Barnes and Noble. Microsoft wants to charge more for a few minor patents than it intends to charge for the whole of WM7. Clearly it wants to just force Barnes and Noble to use Microsoft software.

  And I think both PJ and Mark Webblink know that digging up prior art is a key strategy in defeating software patents. It has been know for many years that software patent applications have been devoid of proper prior art references. Either the prior art is unknown or simply ignored hoping to get a patent issued. And certainly a group or site such as Groklaw is ideal for digging up that prior art. Knowledge is power in this regard.

• Groklaw 2.0: PJ Leaves Groklaw but legal news site to continue under new editor

  Pamela “PJ” Jones, editor and creator of Groklaw, the leading open-source legal news and analysis site, has kept her word. After eight years, PJ is leaving Groklaw. The site though will continue under the guidance of Mark Webbink.

  Mark Webbink is also Executive Director of the Center for Patent Innovations, a research and development arm of New York Law School’s Institute for Intellectual Law & Property. Webbink is also a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Before that, he was Red Hat’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel. In short, Webbink knows intellectual property (IP) law and open source about as well as anyone on the planet.

• Future of FLOSS

  All of that FUD was not true and the same can be said about the surviving FUD about software for clients.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Download VirtualBox 4.0.8 for Ubuntu 11.04 and RHEL 6

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • SugarCRM, Cloudera debut on list of open source firms to watch in ’11

      It should come as no surprise that Red Hat and Google are ranked among the top open source companies to watch, according to an annual survey conducted by an industry VC and market researcher.

      And it comes as no surprise that Acquia, EnterpriseDB and JasperSoft made the top 8 list again, published today as part of the 2011 Future of Open Source survey, conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners and the 451Group. The Waltham, Ma. VC is an investor in Acquia.

      But there are a few names – SugarCRM and Cloudera – new on the list this year, while other companies that showed up in last year’s ranking – Talend, Ingres and Canonical – got bumped. .

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Open Source Advocates Angry at German Gov’t Decision

    The German Foreign Office announced it was dropping its policy of using only open source software in February prompting an inquiry by the green Bündnis 90/Grüne party. But the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) said that the government’s responses to this inquiry have “led to more pending questions than answers.”

    “Many replies show that the government either doesn’t understand important aspects of free software or is deliberately offending free software in general as well as free software companies in particular,” said Matthias Kirschner, Germany coordinator of FSFE.

    The German Foreign Office first started using Linux as a server platform in 2001 before making Linux and open source software their default desktop choice in 2005. Most observers thought the move a success. However, the government will now transition back to Windows XP, to be followed by Windows 7, also dropping OpenOffice and Thunderbird in favor of MS Office and Outlook.

  • Free Software Foundation campaigns against Nintendo 3DS

    Hard on the heels of the Free Software Foundation’s Day Against DRM earlier this month, the advocacy organisation last week launched a new campaign targeting the Nintendo 3DS.

    “The Nintendo 3DS comes with Terms of Service (TOS) that should not be accepted,” wrote the group’s campaign manager, Joshua Gay. “In fact, the TOS are so unbelievable that we have included a more detailed summary of them on a separate page.”

• Public Services/Government

  • Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government

    This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This article is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.

• Programming

  • Dual-Monitor Setups Are Ideal for Open Source Enthusiasts

    If you happen to work each day around other computer users, you’ve probably noticed that more and more of them have dual-monitor setups on their desktops. A closer analysis of this phenomenon reveals that certain kinds of users benefit most from having two monitors instead of one. Working with that idea, Computeworld has an interesting analysis posted on whether developers benefit disproportionately from dual monitors. In my experience, developers can definitely benefit from this setup, but so can open source enthusiasts who work in more than one desktop environment, and open source users who favor both of the leading open source browsers: Firefox and Google Chrome. Here is why you should investigate a two-monitor lashup if you haven’t already.

Leftovers

• Security

  • Net pirate monitoring firm hacked

    A firm employed by the French government to track down net pirates has been hacked.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • U.S. asked weapons firm to twist Canadian arms on missile defence: diplomatic cables

    Former U.S. ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci asked senior corporate executives with a major weapons firm to press Stephen Harper, while opposition leader, to take a stronger stand on Canadian involvement in the controversial continental missile defence system, according to U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by APTN National News.

    Weapons maker Raytheon was already actively lobbying Canadian government officials behind the scenes to support the missile defence system and had asked Cellucci what it could do to “turn things around,” the cables show.

  • Spanish youth rally in Madrid echoes Egypt protests

    About 2,000 young people angry over high unemployment have spent the night camping in a famous square in Madrid as a political protest there grows.

    A big canvas roof was stretched across Puerta del Sol square, protesters brought mattresses and sleeping bags and volunteers distributed food.

• Finance

  • Confidential Federal Audits Accuse Five Biggest Mortgage Firms Of Defrauding Taxpayers [EXCLUSIVE]

    A set of confidential federal audits accuse the nation’s five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans, four officials briefed on the findings told The Huffington Post.

    The five separate investigations were conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general and examined Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial, the sources said.

  • Fear Companies Lurking in Dark Financial Shadows: Simon Johnson

    On the face of it, Glencore International AG doesn’t look too scary. With about $80 billion in assets, the Swiss-based commodities trader is a lightweight in comparison to global megabanks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), one of its trading rivals. Goldman has assets more than 10 times Glencore’s, is more leveraged and has less capital.

    So why do executives at Goldman, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase argue that lightly regulated or unregulated companies operating “in the shadows” — private equity firms, hedge funds and commodities traders like Glencore — risk another financial calamity?

  • In Wisconsin, all eyes are on Paul Ryan

    Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, undoubtedly holds the first right of refusal in the newly open Wisconsin Senate race. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn have already spoken to him about the prospect. His rising stardom would almost guarantee him to be a prolific national fundraiser. And even Democrats who loathe his ideology acknowledge he’d be a substantive, formidable opponent.

  • Pelosi Says Republican Budget Cuts Would Hurt Growth

  • Gasoline, Oil prices decline

  • Raising the debt ceiling is very unpopular

    This is the source of some of the GOP’s leverage. It’s very difficult for Democrats to argue for a clean debt-ceiling bill when raising the debt-ceiling is so unpopular. But it’s also why the major mistake in this negotiation was when Democrats refused to attach an increase in the debt ceiling to the 2010 tax deal. That was an instance where Republicans were a) on the wrong side of public opinion, b) championing a giant increase in the deficit, and c) had skin-in-the-game on increasing the deficit. Plus, the election was over, so it was easier to do something unpopular, and attaching an increase in the debt ceiling to the tax deal would have emphasized the fact — and it is a fact — that unpaid-for tax cuts increase the deficit.

  • US hits credit limit, setting up 11-week fight

    The United States reached its $14.3 trillion limit on federal borrowing Monday, leaving Congress 11 weeks to raise the threshold or risk a financial panic or another recession.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Eighth Circuit: Companies Must Disclose Campaign Spending

    At issue in the case is a 2010 law that requires companies to file reports before the primary and general elections disclosing spending for or against candidates. One such report showed that certain corporations had contributed to MN Forward, a pro-business group that is supporting GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, and the disclosures angered groups at odds with Emmer’s opposition to same-sex marriage, according to the Star Tribune.

• Censorship

  • Freedom #Fail

    But other companies have made very different calculations. Take Microsoft, for example, whose Bing search engine emerged in 2009 as a serious competitor to Google. But unlike Google, Bing automatically enforces safe search on users who set their home base to one of several countries, among them India, Thailand, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and the entire Arab world. Flickr, the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, recently came under fire for deleting a series of photographs posted by Egyptian journalist Hossam El-Hamalawy. The images of state security officers had been retrieved from Amn El Dawla, the Egyptian security apparatus, and contained no offensive content. Flickr’s justification? El-Hamalawy hadn’t taken the photos himself, therefore they were in violation of the site’s terms of use.

• Privacy

  • Social-networking sites face new privacy battle

    California could force Facebook and other social-networking sites to change their privacy protection policies under a first-of-its-kind proposal at the state Capitol that is opposed by much of the Internet industry.

    Under the proposal, SB242, social-networking sites would have to allow users to establish their privacy settings – like who could view their profile and what information would be public to everyone on the Internet – when they register to join the site instead of after they join. Sites would also have to set defaults to private so that users would choose which information is public.

  • Take Your Paws Off Our Privacy Laws! Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga Formally Oppose California Social Networking Bill

    A coalition of industry associations and Internet companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga, Match.com and Skype this afternoon submitted a formal letter of opposition to proposed California legislation that would mandate new privacy policies for social networking sites.

  • Clearing Flash cookies using Firefox

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Belgian court rules that Google infringes newspaper copyrights

      The Belgian Court of Appeals ruled this week that Google is infringing the copyrights of Belgian newspapers by linking to and posting portions of the articles on Google news. Google must remove all articles and photos from Belgian newspapers in French and German or face a fine of 20,000 euros per day.

    • You heard of the iPod tax, here’s the SD card tax

      The Canadian Private Copying Collective is seeking to establish a new levy on the cards used to store photos, video and music to compensate songwriters and record labels “in recognition of the fact that Canadians copy hundreds of millions of tracks of recorded music for their own private use.”

    • French 3 Strikes Suspended Due To Anti-Piracy Security Alert

      Following a weekend security breach at Trident Media Guard, the outfit spearheading data collection for France’s 3 strikes anti-piracy drive, the country’s HADOPI agency has severed interconnection with the company. This means that, pending an enquiry, French file-sharers are no longer being tracked, a major embarrassment for the government.