• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• 3 Good Reasons To Buy an Open-PC

  As of December, however, another option emerged that’s well worth checking out–it’s even better, in fact, from the perspective of software freedom. It’s called the Open-PC, and it offers “a PC for everyday use built by the Linux community for the Linux community,” in the project’s own words.

• ZaReason Teo Pro Netbook: Test Drive Ready for Takeoff

  I’ve had an affinity for netbooks since they entered public consciousness sometime in late 2008. Despite the limitations of my Dell Mini 9, I loved it dearly. Now that Atom CPUs are getting more powerful, drives are getting smaller, and components are maturing, ZaReason has decided to pack together a good chunk of that new hardware into its new Teo Pro Netbook, and the company was kind enough to send me a review unit. Here are some first impressions …

  Check out the full tech specs of the Teo Pro here, but the unit packs 2GB of RAM and a 1.66 GHz Atom CPU. SSD options are available, but my unit came equipped with 160GB HDD.

• Canada’s government ought to adopt Linux on all its computers

  In mid February there were news reports that Canadian government computers at the Finance Department, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada had been hacked and information mined by persons unknown, most probably operating out of China.

  The federal government said little about this but confirmed that as soon as the activity, which began in January, was discovered the affected departments were immediately shut off from the Internet and a long, difficult process was begun to see if any other departments had been affected.

  [...]

  But best of all, Linux is open source software (the programming code is available to anybody and free for programmers to use and adapt). Government programmers can write their own programs or additions to programs for whatever they need, without restriction. They can get exactly the kind and level of security they want and the specifications will be unique, making the job of hackers much harder since every such system is different. What might work in one for a hacker won’t in another.

Server

• London Stock Exchange: What really went wrong

  The London Stock Exchange has made a U-turn on the system requirements placed on data vendors such as Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data and Bloomberg, after three weeks of problems since the launch of its new trading platform.

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.03.04

  Topics for this podcast:

  *Advantec switches to open source to deliver HR as a service
  *Erlang Solutions solves devops problems with open source programming
  *art of defence and Qualys open source security projects
  *EnterpriseDB benefits from focus on PostgreSQL community
  *Puppet Labs steps up commercial play with Puppet Enterprise

• Episode 157: Floating in the Air

Kernel Space

• Yocto and OpenEmbedded Combine Forces: What Does It Mean?

  Two major embedded Linux projects formally joined their efforts this week, a move that simplifies the landscape for device makers and embedded software developers. Yocto, a Linux Foundation (LF)-stewarded project that creates development tools, and OpenEmbedded, a community-driven distribution build system, announced their “alignment” on March 1st. The merger includes governance changes and new corporate collaborators, but for the average Linux developer, the main effect will be a streamlined embedded development process.

• A Week With OpenBenchmarking.org

  OpenBenchmarking.org has now been live for just under one week since launching it (and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0) from the Southern California Linux Expo when talking about making more informed Linux hardware choices. Here’s some statistics on how it’s going.

• A 13 Line Patch That Boosts Intel Sandy Bridge Performance

  After some initial Linux troubles, last month we finally got Intel Sandy Bridge graphics working under Linux. The latest Intel CPUs (such as the Core i5 2500K) with integrated graphics are blazingly fast, and the classic Intel Mesa driver was fast compared to other open-source Mesa / Gallium3D drivers, but it still was a ways behind the low-end discrete graphics cards with the proprietary AMD / NVIDIA drivers for Linux. It was also shown that the Intel Linux Mesa driver is much slower than the Intel Windows driver for Sandy Bridge, as we had also found was the case for previous generations of Intel graphics. Committed to the Mesa mainline Git repository this week though was a very important Sandy Bridge change. While the commit only touched 13 lines of code (11 lines of new code, 2 lines of changed code), it has dramatically improved the Sandy Bridge Linux performance as our results show in this article.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 270.30 Works With X.Org Server 1.10 Final

    Due to RandR 1.4 being pulled from X.Org Server 1.10, the video driver ABI had to be bumped to again, and this was at the last possible minute with X.Org Server 1.10 being released just days later. For the open-source X.Org drivers this just means recompiling the driver for the latest binary interface. For the binary blobs, this means NVIDIA and AMD must put out new releases.

  • Will Floating Point Textures Be Merged Into Mesa?

    Lucas Stach has brought a proposal to the Mesa mailing list of merging Mesa’s floating point textures and render targets code branch into the mainline Mesa repository. Floating point textures have been available in OpenGL for years, but has yet to enter mainline Mesa as it’s a patented feature.

Applications

• The Sad State of Hashcash

  So today, I received an email from one of the readers of this blog. He wanted to get into OpenPGP with his email, and asked if I could help him get started with some tutorials, how-tos, etc. I was flattered that he valued my opinion. So, I responded to each of his questions and discussion points the best I could. However, during the reply, I reminded myself of Hashcash.

• Some Conky Favorites of mine

  I have come to love Conky, even with its quirky, sometimes plain complicated configurations. I think a GUI application to handle these themes would be a blast, but for now, I simply enjoy having my system monitor beautifying my desktop.

• Proprietary

  • Speed Dial now animates

• Games

  • Life is in alpha–Killing the myth of the open source failure

    In writing my first article about open source games, it became apparent that I had plenty of ground to cover, and not just specific to games. It’s a known trend in open source: The majority of started projects never finish. If you think this is a problem that needs solving, I will argue that you are mistaken. This time around I want to address the topic of ‘making the journey worth your while.’

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME3 Live USB Image 0.0.6 – The return of the Cantarell

    I just pushed release 0.0.6, because the two previous releases (0.0.4 and 0.0.5) were no longer using Cantarell font by default and William spotted the error yesterday.

    Main change : Cantarell font is now used for applications and GNOME Shell (and I also added yelp and more translations for some packages).

  • criticism towards GNOME Shell

    Reading all the controversy around the decision by the GNOME Shell designers to remove the minimize and maximize buttons from GNOME shell reminds me quite a bit of the discussions around Plasma. Especially for stuff like the brilliant yet controversial Folderview widget.

  • Gnome Shell 3, Good Bad & Ugly

    Gnome Shell triggered another controversy when the designer team decided to remove the minimize and maximize buttons. Honestly speaking, both Ubuntu’s Unity and Gnome’s Shell 3 are introducing new User Interfaces, something KDE did with KDE 4.x series. KDE 4.x was a radical moved but users adopted and now they love it. I think Gnome Shell and Unity are good signs — at some point you need to break the status quo and let the innovation take the driving seat.

    openSuse community manager, Jos Poortvliet wrote in a blog, “Reading all the controversy around the decision by the GNOME Shell designers to remove the minimize and maximize buttons from GNOME shell reminds me quite a bit of the discussions around Plasma. Especially for stuff like the brilliant yet controversial Folderview widget.”

  • I’m biased, but still…

    Try minimizing this window if you’re using the GNOME 3.0 Shell.

  • GNOME 3 on Gentoo and related news

    Now that it’s been a few days since the release cycle entered UI freeze, we have been able to evaluate whether or not you folks (i.e., our users), will be able to transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 without too much pain. We came to the conclusion that there is no particular hurry to let go of GNOME 2.32, and that we should wait for things to settle down before unleashing GNOME 3 on our users.

  • Hurray! I’ve landed on Planet GNOME!

    I’m currently the maintainer and most active developer of GNOME Activity Journal (previously known as GNOME Zeitgeist), but i’m also involved with the whole Zeitgeist infrastructure. Randomly i hack in other projects like Unity, Emesene, Emesene2, Cloudsn, and others.

Distributions

• Sabayon Linux 5.5 XFCE, LXDE, E17, ServerBase, OpenVZ Released

  We are happy to announce the immediate availability of E17, XFCE, LXDE, SpinBase/OpenVZ, ServerBase Sabayon 5.5 “Spins” built on top of Sabayon “SpinBase” ISO images.
  The E17 ”stable-releases-are-for-n00bs” Desktop Environment, the well known XFCE and LXDE environments, theSpinBase+OpenVZ template ready to be used in server deployments, and last but not least, ServerBase, a very minimal Sabayon release with a server-optimized Linux kernel.

• Reviews

  • Review: AUSTRUMI 2.2.9

    Unless you’re from Latvia, there’s a good chance that this is the first time you are seeing either the name AUSTRUMI or a review of it. So what is it?
    AUSTRUMI is a Latvian Slackware-based distribution that uses FVWM as the window manager.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat (RHT) Trading Near $42.51 Resistance Level

  • [CentOS-announce] CentOS 4 i386 and x86_64 release of CentOS-4.9

    The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the release of CentOS
    4.9 for i386 and x86_64.

    This release corresponds to the upstream vendor 4.9 release.

  • Fedora

    • First day with Fedora 14

      Yesterday I have switched from Ubuntu 10.10 to Fedora 14 I have chosen to try Fedora because it has an open governance model with a clear leadership. While there are a clear special capacities from the sponsor (RedHat), at the highest level the project is managed by an Executive Board, the board is composed with a mix of RH appointed and community elected members.

    • Bacon Is Still Talked About For Fedora 16

      It’s that time of the year again when the Fedora Project seeks out a codename from the community for their next Fedora release. Once again, Bacon is proposed as a codename.

      Other suggested codenames include Noguera, Bonnet, Sagan, Mt. Orne, Legation, Iao, Dreadlock, Barona, and Rasputin.

    • Out with Windows 2000, in with Fedora 14

      Overall I’ve noticed that Fedora 14 is very well done.

• Debian Family

  • Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Debian 6.0 Branches Out Beyond the Project’s Linux Roots

    Debian 6.0, also known by the Toy Story-inspired name “Squeeze,” branches out from its Linux-centric roots with new, technology preview variants based on the FreeBSD kernel.

  • Adventures in Debian

    Debian comes with Iceweasel and GNASH. Well, Youtube and other video Websites don’t work real well if at all with that combo. GNASH does seem to work with Firefox, so just installing Firefox from tarball was all that was required there.

  • Debian or Ubuntu, which is the best place to contribute?

    As a user it’s relatively easy to choose between Debian and Ubuntu. Everybody has their own personal preference and it doesn’t take much time to try both. But when it comes to contributing, the time investment is bigger and you might want to think twice about it. Where is your time better spent?

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Making your own Unity Place

      In 11.04 we include 2 places. The Files Place (keyboard shortcut Super-F) and the Applications Place (keyboard shortcut Super-A).

      If you imagine your desktop as one entity, the Applications place is a focused place looking just for your applications, and the files place we look for your recently used files, downloads, and favorites. And Places give the user a method of filtering those results as seen the top right of the screenshot.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Alpha 3 Review, Screenshots, Download Links

      It hasn’t been long since we last reviewed Ubuntu Natty Alpha 2 and now, Ubuntu Natty Alpha 3 is already here. This is yet another milestone in this major build up towards the much anticipated release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal final on April 28, 2011. As is expected, latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Alpha 3 comes packed with a number of new features and major bug fixes. Quick review of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Alpha 3.

    • UDW: Day 4 over, last day to come

      It’s a shame, I know, but unfortunately it’s true: Ubuntu Developer Week is almost over. We rushed through 4 days in no time now and today is the last day.

    • Stepping Down As Ubuntu Maryland Leader

      On March 4, 2007 I started the Ubuntu Maryland Local Community Team. Now on March 4, 2011 I’m announcing to the community at large that I’m stepping down as leader of the group I founded.

      This is a decision that has been coming for a while. Part of it is just the amount of time I’ve had with the role of leader. I believe I’ve taken the group as far as I can. I don’t feel that I’ve blocked any thoughts or ideas in my time, but I want to make the change as visible as possible and allow the group to take things in a different direction with new blood at the helm.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • My Thoughts on Bodhi Linux

        Bodhi Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu but uses the Enlightenment desktop environment/window manager. I’ve recently mentioned Bodhi here, but since then I’ve installed the second release candidate (0.1.6) of Bodhi Linux on my upstairs computer, and after using it for about five or six days I can definitively say that I love it!

      • Call for Help: Tips and Tricks in the Kubuntu Chapter

        I have been writing the Kubuntu chapter for The Official Ubuntu Book ever since it came out and now I can barely believe we are on the 6th Edition of the book. In the chapter there is a section of the chapter titled “Tips and Tricks” which need some serious updating.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Meego on pandaboard

    • DoodleDrive Alpha Preview Release

      The “game” we created with my son on Wednesday, DoodleDrive, got a lot of attention and many of you wanted to try it out yourselves. I have now created a new project to Forum Nokia Projects where you can download the binaries (sis for N8, E7, C7… or deb for N900).

  • Android

    • iDect iHome Android phone

      As well as smartphones and tablets Google’s Android operating system has started cropping up in media players, ski goggles, car stereos and even headphones, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s now turned up in the humble landline home phone.

    • How to Find Your Lost or Stolen Android Phone for Free (Smartphone Tip)

    • Google’s Android Spurs More App Jobs Than iPhone

      Employers requested experience or skills with Android in 987 job postings on Dice as of Mar. 1, more than the 970 jobs asking for iPhone expertise, Bloomberg Businessweek.com reported today. The number of available positions mentioning either Android or iPhone surged more than threefold from a year ago, when the site listed 273 Android-related jobs and 312 iPhone-related jobs.

      Demand is swelling for Android programmers as Google woos makers of mobile applications to keep up with the growing popularity of its software. Android became the world’s best-selling smartphone platform last year, according to researcher Canalys, yet it trails in total number of apps, with more than 120,000 compared with the 350,000 programs in Apple’s App Store.

• Tablets

  • Can Android beat iOS and dominate the tablet market?

    Apple currently remains on track to win 70% of the tablet market this year with its next-gen iPad 2. However, one analyst believes Android-based tablets will triumph over the iPad in the long-term.

    Indeed, according to RBC Capital Markets General Manager Mike Abramsky, Apple’s current dominance of the tablet market is likely to be a short-lived phenomenon.

The New Ushahidi Community Website Is Live!

Today we are very pleased to announce the beta release of the Ushahidi Community Website! This site has been in the works for several months and couldn’t have been possible without generous support from Small World News, Konpa Group and most importantly, the talented Rob Baker.

Events

• Western PA Linux User Group visit of Red Hat labs of Carnegie Mellon, Gates Center of Computer Science

• Delhi NCR GeekMeetup – 4th edition at Jamia

  GeekMeetup will be on 13th March 2011.

OpenGL and Web Browsers

• WebGL finalized, brings hardware-accelerated 3D to the browser

  Khronos Group today released the final specification for WebGL, a specification that brings OpenGL hardware-accelerated graphics to the web browser.

  The organization has been working with Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera to implement the specification in popular browsers, with the technology now available in developer builds.

• Khronos Puts Out The Final WebGL 1.0 Specification

  From the Game Developers’ Conference happening this week in San Francisco, the Khronos Group has announced the release of the official WebGL 1.0 specification. This is the OpenGL ES derived specification designed for providing hardware graphics acceleration within HTML5 modern web-browsers.

• Thunderbird 3.1.9 Update Now Available for Download

  An update for Thunderbird 3.1.9 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from www.GetThunderbird.com. This release prevents a crash after update that is affecting some users.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 3.6.15 compatibility update now available

  • First developer release of Web Apps Project

    We are excited to announce the availability of the first milestone release of Mozilla’s Web Application project. Web Apps are applications that run on any device, and can be distributed through any store or directly by the developer. This release contains stable APIs, developer utilities and documentation to help you get a jumpstart on building Web Apps and stores.

  • Firefox 3.6.15 compatibility update now available

    Firefox 3.6.15 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.15.

    We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This updates can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

SaaS

• StatusNet Launching New SaaS – Stops Accepting New Members for Year Old Service

  StatusNet announced this morning that it will unveil a new service and is deferring accepting new members on StatusNet Cloud Service, the offering it launched last year.

  StatusNet Cloud Service launched last March with personal, community and private plans that were offered as a SaaS. Initial customers included Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Interview with Paulo José O. Amaro

  Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Web Designer and Computer Science Student in the Federal University of São João del-Rei, Paulo José. He has been outstanding with his work in LibreOffice, specially in the Design Team.

• [Opendj-dev] OpenDJ 2.4.1 is now available…

• [OpenAM] ForgeRock OpenAM 9.5.2 and J2EE Agents 3.0.3 Released

• Ⓕ New OpenAM and OpenDJ Releases

  Today has been a big landmark for many of the developers at ForgeRock and in the communities in which they participate. Both the OpenAM (identity authentication, authorisation and federation) and OpenDJ (LDAP server) projects have announced new interim releases today to consolidate incremental improvements. For those in any doubt, this work is only happening on the OpenAM and OpenDJ projects and not in any predecessor projects.

Education

• Indian Education got stuck at Turbo C++ IDE and Windows Operating System ! Status of FOSS in Indian Schools

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Ask Richard Stallman anything!

  Well, within reason. In a few days we’re going to meet up with the great man, the founder of the GNU project and free software movement as we know it. Never one to mince his words, RMS has strong views on software freedom and has campaigned rigourously to stop us being locked into a world of proprietary code and DRM.

• ‘No sysadmin’ is the key to Freedom Box

Government

• Councillor an Independent

  COFFS Harbour City Councillor Paul Templeton is the latest candidate to throw his hat in the ring for election to the State seat of Coffs Harbour on March 26.

  Cr Templeton, who attended Saturday’s Pacific Highway Forum, says he is concerned about ‘standard’ issues like roads, health and Part 3A planning approvals, but at the end of the day he wants to listen to what the community really wants and take that to the State Parliament.

  “The expectations of the community are changing rapidly and legislation is not keeping up,” he said.

  Cr Templeton is the information technology and information management officer with the Mid North Coast Division of General Practice.

  The 41-year-old IT systems administrator has lived on the Mid North Coast since he was 16, the past 14 years in Coffs Harbour. His extended family lives in the Nambucca Valley.

  Married with a six-year-old son, Paul Templeton’s interests include the free and open source software movement.

• GR: First migration of a Greek Public Organization to Free Software

  The Musical Studies Department (MSD) of the Ionian University in Corfu has recently taken the initiative to become the first ever Public Organization and educational Institution in Greece that officially embraces Free and Open Source Software in its infrastructure.

• Lion’s share of IT contract spend is taken by four government departments

  Of nearly £16bn spent on IT projects currently underway, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spends the most, with £4bn locked into IT contracts, followed by the Home Office (£3.9bn), the Department of Health (£3.5bn) and the Cabinet Office (£1.5bn).

Openness/Sharing

• I can’t bake croissants: a fable on project documentation

• Million Song Dataset Million Song Dataset

  The Million Song Dataset is a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks.

• Open Data/Transparency

  • Universities need to lift the lid on donations

    Sir Howard Davies resigned as director of the London School of Economics council last night due to controversial links between the LSE and Libyan money. An inquiry headed by Lord Woolf will now investigate the links between LSE and Gaddafi, including a £1.5 million donation from Saif Gaddafi – who was awarded a now-contested PhD by the university in 2008.

  • The Curious Case of Media Opposing Government Transparency

    My gosh there is a lot going on. Republicans – REPUBLICANS(!) who were in charge of America’s prison system are warning Canada not to follow the Conservatives plan on prisons, the Prime Minister has renamed the government, after himself and my friends at Samara had in Toronto the Guardian’s Emily Bell to talk wikileaks and data journalism (wish I could have been there).

    It’s all very interesting… and there is a media story here in British Columbia that’s been brewing where a number of journalists have become upset about a government that has become “too” transparent.

    It’s an important case as it highlights some of the tensions that will be emerging in different places as governments rethink how they share information.

    The case involves BC Ferries, a crown corporation that runs ferries along critical routes around the province. For many years the company was not subject to the province’s Freedom of Information legislation. However, a few months ago the government stated the crown corporation would need to comply with the act. This has not pleased the corporation’s president.

Programming

• How to DOS a developer

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Launches Patent Advisory Group for XML Signature and XML Encryption

• W3C Invites Implementer Feedback on XML Security 1.1 Specifications

  The XML Security Working Group published four Candidate Recommendations today: XML Signature Syntax and Processing 1.1, XML Encryption Syntax and Processing 1.1, XML Security Generic Hybrid Ciphers, and XML Signature Properties. XML Signatures provide integrity, message authentication, and/or signer authentication services for data of any type, whether located within the XML that includes the signature or elsewhere. As companion documents, the Working Group has released new Working Drafts of XML Security 1.1 Requirements and Design Considerations and XML Security RELAX NG Schemas.

Quebec headed toward ‘radical option’ on religious minorities, sociologist fears

One of the great thinkers who helped calm Quebec’s reasonable accommodation debate is stirring it up again, saying he fears the province may be headed toward a “radical option” to deal with religious minorities.

Gérard Bouchard, the sociologist who travelled the province with philosopher Charles Taylor to study Quebec’s integration of minorities, said the province still lacks coherent rules to govern accommodation.

Putting China on the Innovation Map

That’s because it’s a mapping site – here’s Beijing – and hence highly visual, but rather different to Google Maps because it uses an axonometric projection, which makes it look a little bit like SimCity. Paradoxically, this makes it easier to grasp the lay of the land. Moreover, many individual buildings are named (in Chinese, of course), provided a handy level of detail, and you can also pull out categories like food or entertainment.

How Recent Changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service Might Hurt Academic Research

There is a lot to be learned from our tweets. Laugh if you will. Go ahead. But Twitter has become an important historical and cultural record. It’s a site for real-time news and information, to be sure. The stuff of history with a capital H. Politics. Natural disasters. Revolution. It’s a site that marks our cultural as well (is that history with a lower case H?). Ashton Kutcher. Charlie Sheen. The Oscars. Lower case or capital H – these 140 character exchanges have created an invaluable record for researchers looking at history, politics, literature, sociology.

Twitter Puts the Smack Down on Another Popular App: Whither Twitter as a Platform?

Courtney Love to Pay $430,000 to Settle Twitter Defamation Case (Exclusive)

The settlement ends a case that was watched as closely for the unique legal issues in play as the often-erratic behavior of the defendant. Simorangkir, who became embroiled in a dispute with Love over a $4000 payment for clothing, accused the Hole frontwoman of ruining her business with a series of allegedly defamatory tweets posted during a 20 minute rant in 2009. The trial, which was originally scheduled for late January but was postponed when the parties began talking settlement, would have been the first high-profile courtroom showdown over what constitutes defamation on Twitter.

India manager ‘killed by workers’

A senior manager at an Indian steel factory has been burnt to death in the eastern state of Orissa by a group of his workers, police say.

RS Roy of Graphite India Ltd died on the way to a hospital in Bolangir district on Thursday evening.

Police say

5 Key Issues Impacting the Future of Facebook

Chipping In to Pay the Man Who Helped Introduce the Internet to So Many of Us

f you used the Internet using Windows in the early to mid 1990s, chances are you connected with a little program called Trumpet Winsock. It was one of the only ways to get dial-up access using Windows 3.1. I, like so many others, connected to the Internet for the very first time using it. And I, like so many other, had completely forgotten about that program until today.

Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven’t Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?

Neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in has been acquired by AOL, according to multiple reports this morning. Apparently it’s being bought for less than the big pile of money that high-profile investors put into it, back when hopes were high. It’s sad, really: the ambitious hyper-local news technology services of the last few years don’t seem to be working out very well.

Science

• Audio slideshow: Beautiful science

• The rise of the picosecond

  A second is a long time in cash equities trading. Four or five years ago, trading firms started to talk of trading speeds in terms of milliseconds.

  A millisecond is one thousandth of a second or, put another way, 200 times faster than the average speed of thought. In the time it took your brain to tell your hand to click on this article, a broker or market-making firm trading in milliseconds could fill hundreds of orders on an exchange.

• What scientists really think about animal research

  Animal research has always been a polarizing topic; while it greatly advances science and medicine, it also causes the deaths of thousands of animals each year. PETA, the Animal Liberation Front, and other animal rights groups are outspoken about their side of the issue, but we hear less from the scientists who are actually conducting the research. An informal poll by Nature last week describes scientists’ feelings about animal research and their reactions to animal rights activism.

  Nature polled almost 1,000 biomedical scientists around the world, over 70 percent of whom conduct experiments on animals. Not surprisingly, a vast majority of the respondents—over 90 percent—felt that animal research is essential to scientific advancement. However, about a third also reported that they had “ethical concerns about the role of animals in their current work.” In particular, researchers are concerned about minimizing pain in their subjects, using the smallest number of animals possible, and “respecting” their subjects. Fifty-four researchers said that they had actually changed the direction of their research as a result of misgivings about their research practices.

• Cancer rise and sperm quality fall ‘due to chemicals’

  Sperm quality significantly deteriorated and testicular cancers increased over recent years, a Finnish study says.

  The study in the International Journal of Andrology looked at men born between 1979 and 1987.

• Is This Uncanny Valley-Scaling Robot Proof Of Our Impending Demise?

• In an Alberta town, parents fight for a secular education

  It wasn’t until her seven-year-old son asked her if he’d burn in hell that Marjorie Kirsop became concerned.

  A Catholic education is the only local option for the Kirsop family and everyone else in Morinville, Alta., a community of 8,100 northwest of Edmonton. It’s a unique situation, rooted in the town’s origins as an outpost of French-Canadian Catholicism in the late 1800s. But this fall, when five-year-old Sarah Kirsop declared she had converted to Catholicism, her mother joined a group of local families who are challenging the status quo.

Health/Nutrition

• The privatisation of blood donations

  The proposed privatisation of NHS Blood and Transplant service, or parts of it, will instinctively make people shudder and we are right to be concerned about how commercial motives will change the service.

  At Anthony Nolan, we know a lot about blood. We have provided stem cells for transplant to people with blood cancers and similar conditions since 1974. We set up the world’s first bone marrow donor register and have always worked closely with the NHS. In fact our fundraising enables us to support the cost to the NHS of acquiring cells for these life saving transplants.

Security

• Security updates for Friday

• NSA Winds Down Secure Virtualization Platform Development

  The National Security Agency’s High Assurance Platform integrates security and virtualization technology into a framework that’s been commercialized and adopted elsewhere in government.

• Vendor-sec host compromised, shut down

  As moderator of vendor-sec and one of the sysadmins of lst.de I noticed a break-in into the lst.de machine last week, which was likely used to sniff email traffic of vendor-sec. This incident probably happened on Jan 20 as confirmed by timestamp, but might have existed for longer.

• Crackers destroy security mailing list for Linux distributors

  The infrastructure of the members-only security mailing list “Vendor-Sec” for open source vendors has been severely damaged according to a post published by Markus Meissner at the OSS Security mailing list. At Vendor-Sec, Linux and BSD distributors discussed undisclosed vulnerabilities in the kernel and open source software. Some of the information was embargoed to give vendors time to close their holes.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Libya: Gaddafi son says bombs were ‘misunderstanding’

  • Father-of-seven from Manchester reportedly shot dead
  • Gaddafi to be investigated by ICC over crimes against humanity
  • Gaddafi forces strike oil export hubs in Brega for second day
  • Dmitry Medvedev warns of “civil war”

• 20 Years After Rodney King, Who’s Holding Cops Accountable?

  Twenty years ago today Rodney King was dragged out of his Hyundai sedan just after midnight and beaten by Los Angeles police after an eight-mile chase through San Fernando Valley that ended in Lake View Terrace. Officers surrounded the 25-year-old taxi driver and construction worker and kicked, tased and beat him with their batons held like baseball bats. The attack was illuminated by the a spotlight provided by a LAPD helicopter hovering overhead, and the headlights of police cars that surrounded King’s car.

• More carry-on luggage costing TSA millions a year

  Choosing to carry your luggage onto a plane instead of checking it with an airline might save you a few bucks at the ticket counter but it’s costing taxpayers about a quarter-billion dollars a year.

  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress this week that luggage fees have prompted more passengers to hold onto their bags, which means more items for Transportation Security Administration officers to inspect at security checkpoints at a cost of about $260 million annually.

• Windsor man pleads guilty to torching cruiser at G20

  A Windsor man facing two years in prison for setting a heavily damaged police cruiser on fire during the G20 summit in Toronto last summer says he has been made a scapegoat in the aftermath of the riot.

• Hillary Clinton: “We’re Losing the War”

  None other than the US Secretary of State herself, Hillary Clinton, paid fulsome tribute to Al Jazeera last Wednesday, March 2. Appearing before a US Foreign Policy Priorities committee, she was asked by Senator Richard Lugar to impart her views on how well the US was promoting its message across the world.

  Clinton promptly volunteered that America is in an “information war and we are losing the war,” and furthermore, that “Al Jazeera is winning”.

• Justice Cranks Up Its Covert War on Whistleblowers

  According to federal prosecutors, Stirling was the source behind reports published by New York Times reporter James Risen (identified as “Author A” in its pleadings) that exposed a horribly botched, indeed hare-brained plot by the CIA designed to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program. In particular, one chapter in Risen’s book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, describes a CIA-authored scheme to use a Russian double agent to deliver to the Iranians a set of technical drawings that had been carefully doctored so as to be worthless. However, the double agent turned on the CIA in the end, disclosing the flaws that had been built into the design. The end result: the CIA operation had actually advanced Iran’s nuclear project. So what was the purpose of the strenuous U.S. government effort to punish Stirling for making it public? Justice contends that the disclosure harmed national security. But the decision to go after Sterling seems to have more to do with his violation of the intelligence community’s code of omertà, under which no agent ever speaks about another’s mistakes.

Cablegate

• [Old] Julian Assange condemns Australian Labor government at public meeting

  WikiLeaks’ founder and editor Julian Assange strongly condemned the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a pre-recorded address broadcast to a large public meeting convened in Melbourne last Friday.

  The event took place with just four days notice, yet a capacity audience of more than 600 people attended, with hundreds more turned away to watch a live video feed of the event, broadcast on a large screen outside the city’s Federation Square venue. The turnout demonstrated the enormous support for WikiLeaks among ordinary people in Australia, and their opposition to the persecution of Assange on bogus rape allegations by Swedish authorities.

• Bradley Manning and the stench of US hypocrisy

  He now also finds himself faced with a rare charge known as “aiding the enemy” – a capital offence for which he could face the death penalty.

  The revelation will no doubt have come as a blow to Manning, although given his ongoing treatment it is likely he already feared the worst. Made to endure strict conditions under a prevention of injury order against the advice of military psychiatrists, he is treated like no other prisoner at the 250-capacity Quantico Brig detention facility in Virginia. Despite that he is yet to be convicted of any crime, for the past 218 consecutive days he has been made to live in a cell 6ft wide and 12ft long, without contact with any other detainees. He is not allowed to exercise or have personal effects in his cell, and for the one hour each day he is allowed free from his windowless cell he is taken to an empty room where he is allowed to walk, but not run.

• WikiLeaks suspect: Where Army sees traitor, some see whistleblower

  But Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg sees cause for alarm in Army’s prosecution.

• In restricted speech, former MI6 chief credits WikiLeaks with ‘tidal wave’ of revolutions

  Former British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove gave a speech not long ago where all recordings were prohibited. During that talk, he credited secrets outlet WikiLeaks with helping spark revolutions across the Middle East, saying they provide a stark example of the ways technology is changing how people relate to their governments.

  Unfortunately for Dearlove, someone in the audience was recording, and now the whole world gets to see his formerly restricted speech.

• Ex-UK spy boss says WikiLeaks sparked Egyptian revolution

  The former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service has credited WikiLeaks and other secret-spilling sites with sparking the revolutions sweeping the Middle East.

  At what was supposed to be an off-the-record appearance last month at the Cambridge Union Society, Former MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove said that the technology WikiLeaks harnesses is fundamentally strengthening the hand of the individual as he goes up against powerful organizations.

• Wikileaks reveals illegal Peru mahogany exports in US stores

  Peru’s government has secretly admitted that 70-90% of its mahogany exports were illegally felled, according to a US embassy cable revealed by Wikileaks.

• The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG for Thursday, Day 96

  9:15 “Anonymous Will Avenge Manning.” That’s headline on DailyKos piece by Anonymous-connected Barrett Brown. He also talked to NY Daily News: “Not 24 hours after the U.S. Army announced it had filed 22 counts against reputed WikiLeaks source Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, Anonymous issued a new threat Thursday. ‘The decision to charge Bradley Manning with a capital offense in addition to other charges is a provocation, and Anonymous is set to respond accordingly,’ spokesman Barrett Brown wrote on DailyKos. He said the group will keep going after corporate execs involved in plots against Wikileaks.” And, he told The Daily News: “We are looking at information on various military officials.”

  9:10 Mariah Carey admits cable was true–she did get $1 million from Gaddafi son in 2006 to sing four songs for him. Beyonce and Nelly Furtado, also caught, have announced they will donate money to charity where Mariah promises proceeds from one song. No word yet from 50 Cent and Usher.

• Shooters walk free, whistleblower jailed

  Due to the enormous request Panorama has produced an English version of our film about the alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning.

• Bradley Manning may face death penalty

• Soldier in Leaks Case Was Jailed Naked, Lawyer Says

• Bradley Manning ‘forced to sleep naked’

  The US army private suspected of giving classified material to WikiLeaks was forced to sleep naked in his cell at a Marine Corps prison near Washington, which his lawyer has said is inexcusable.

• America’s Dreyfus Case

  Although the U.S. doesn’t have a Devil’s Island, and American soldiers can’t be sent to Gitmo, the military has found a way to make life hell for Pfc. Bradley Manning. Not only has he been held ten months without trial, most of the time in solitary, now he is being stripped naked every night before he goes to bed, his lawyer says.

  Lawyer David Coombs said the decision was made by the commander of the Quantico, Virginia, brig, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Denise Barnes. A Marine spokesman, Brian Villard said it is not punishment.

  [...]

  The Dreyfus Affair became a national scandal in France, attracting the attention of some of the country’s greatest writers. “J’Accuse,” by Emile Zola was the most famous attack on the phony charges.

• Meeting on 2nd March in Parliament House Canberra with MPs re Julian Assange.

  Among others, MPs Andrew Laming, Malcolm Turnbull, Doug Cameron and Sarah Hanson-Young were in attendance, along with parliamentary staff members.

• Editorial – Media Currently Publishing

• WikiLeaks spokesman wins Journalist of the Year in Iceland

  Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson won the country’s Journalist of the Year award for 2010, Iceland’s National Union of Journalists said.

  “Kristinn said when receiving the award that this was the third time he was getting an award for outstanding work in journalism, but that he had also been fired three times for his work,” NUJ official Frida Bjornsdottir said.

• WikiLeaks calls more charges against soldier a “vindictive attack”

  Private First Class Bradley Manning, who has been held in solitary confinement at a military jail in Virginia, is now facing 22 more charges related to leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, the BBC reported. The news comes just after the announcement that WikiLeaks has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

  In the charges, the Army accused Manning of “wrongfully and wantonly” allowing secret intelligence information to be published online, thus aiding “the enemy,” explained the Los Angeles Times.

• Special report: Weapons and the art of diplomacy

  When Lockheed Martin wanted to sell C-130 military transport planes to the government of Chad in early 2007, the U.S. embassy in N’Djamena was ready to lend a hand.

• Swaziland ‘imports firearms through Mozambique’

  Swaziland is importing two containers of firearms through a Mozambican port, two years after Britain blocked an arms shipment to the southern African kingdom, Mozambican state media said Friday.

  The arms arrived in Maputo, the Mozambican capital, on a Panamanian vessel on February 28 from an unspecified country, state daily Noticias reported.

  [...]

  In December 2008, Britain blocked a Swazi move to buy arms worth $60 million (43 million euros) from a British company over “end-use concerns,” according to a US embassy cable leaked by WikiLeaks.

• Harvard Law Reviews WikiLeaks Censorship

  Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler is about to release a comprehensive study on the U.S. government and media’s role in censoring WikiLeaks. The forthcoming report , to appear in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, is titled “A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate.” In the report, Benkler dissects the mechanisms that have censored WikiLeaks.

  A working draft of the report has been made available online. The draft exposes how the U.S. government, mainstream media, and the emerging corporatocracy have been working together to infringe on the First Amendment Rights of the “networked fourth estate” sites, like WikiLeaks. Essentially, the government has been tripping over its feet to find ways to stop Wikileaks from expressing speech which Benkler argues is clearly protected by the U.S. Constitution and solidly supported by Supreme Court precedent.

  [...]

  With false statements coming from the State Department, key Senators, and the White House, major credit cards, Pay Pal, and host of other sites like Amazon cut off ties with WikiLeaks. Benkler points out that legally, the U.S. government did not have the right to shut down WikiLeaks. However, by a series of “extra-legal” means, the government was able to temporarily shut down the site and its revenue stream.

• Colombian armed forces collaborated with neo-paramilitaries: WikiLeaks

  Neo-paramilitary groups with former armed forces personnel as members were able to infiltrate the state by exploiting their military connections, according to a WikiLeaks cable.

• The serial deceit of Geoff Morrell

  On January 26, 2011, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell stood before the Pentagon press corps and made a series of patently false statements about Bradley Manning (the video is here). Even taking into account the position Morrell occupies — in which a penchant for telling the truth is not exactly a job requirement (it actually would be disqualifying) — this Press Conference was an extraordinary display of pure official mendacity.

  Morrell was asked several times about the evidence — first reported here — that Manning was being held in repressive and inhumane conditions: specifically, 23-hour/day solitary confinement, a prohibition on exercising in his cell, and being allowed out only 1 hour per day to “exercise” which entails walking around alone in a room, shackled.

• Is Bradley Manning being treated like a Guantanamo detainee?

  This is “an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated…No other detainee at the Brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.” But, no other detainee is at the center of a case that US military and government officials seem to have decided to use as an example case that could put in fear in any other military or government official who might seek to disseminate information to any organization like WikiLeaks in the future.

• Waiting patiently in the shadows

  Dylan Welch meets the Icelandic journalist who quit his job to work at WikiLeaks.

  Outside the Frontline Club in London, winter has draped itself across the city; inside, in the club’s small first-floor member’s room, WikiLeaks’s second-most famous employee fixes the Herald with a far frostier gaze.

• What Americans really think of Kibaki and Raila

  The US embassy assessed President Kibaki to be in good health and firmly in control while Prime Minister Raila Odinga is depicted as a politician who would put his presidential ambitions ahead of reforms.

• What’s An F-16 Worth? About 80,000 Tons of Chicken

  In connection with a special report, Reuters has scrubbed WikiLeaks, looking for State Department cables related to diplomatic efforts to help facilitate sales of American weapons systems abroad. The Atlantic Wire highlights a couple of the deals today, including one attention-grabber involving a 2005 effort by the government of Thailand to purchase fighter jets.
  The Thais considered Russia’s Sukhoi model, Sweden’s Saab and Lockheed Martin’s F-16. But there was a catch: They didn’t want to pay cash, but were willing to give up 80,000 tons of frozen chicken.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Shark fishing in Japan – video

  Sharks are fished on an industrial scale at the port of Kesennuma, 250 miles north of Tokyo, which accounts for 90% of Japan’s shark-fin trade

• Best Rare-Bird Pictures of 2010 Named

  A picture of an endangered Asian crested ibis soaring over China is a first-prize winner in the first annual World’s Rarest Birds international photo competition, organizers announced in January.

  Launched in 2010, the competition ranked pictures of birds that fall into three categories determined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature: endangered or data deficient, critically endangered or extinct in the wild, and critically endangered migratory species.

• The Eastern Panther is Extinct

  The Eastern Panther is ExtinctThe U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has has determined that the legendary Eastern Panther (also known as the eastern cougar, puma, catamount and mountain lion) is extinct, and likely has been since the 1930s. There have been numerous reported sightings throughout the years, but the FWS says they were other species, “including South American cats that had either escaped from captivity or were released to the wilderness as well as wild cougars from Western states that had migrated east.”

Finance and Corruption

• Damage estimate at Wisconsin Capitol goes from $7.5 million to … uh … $0?

  Amazing. In just one day, the estimate went from $7.5 million to $0. Now that’s a budget repair bill.

• We need Scott Walker here

  Facing a $3.6-billion deficit, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently declared his state “broke.” To overcome this fiscal challenge, Mr. Walker proposed cutting generous public sector pension and health care benefits, and threatened immediate layoffs if concessions were not made. He also introduced legislation to restrict collective bargaining in the public sector and limit future wage increases to the rate of inflation.

• “Koch Whore”: The Scott Walker Story

  Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker speaking to a liberal blogger whom he believes to be David Koch. I have picked some of the choice quotes from the tapes which can be heard by clicking the links below.

  REAL WALKER: ”He’s not one of us” – in reference to Democratic Wisconsin State Senator Tim Cullen.

  FAKE KOCH: “We gotta crush those unions.”

  REAL WALKER: “We stay firm, we’ll wait it out. If they want to sacrifice thousands of workers to be laid-off, we’re not going to compromise.”

  FAKE KOCH: “Bring a baseball bat” – in reference to meeting with Wisconsin Democrats.

  REAL WALKER: “I have one in my office, you’d be happy with that. I’ve got a slugger with my name on it.”

• The real scandal at the LSE

  There is a revealing remark in the minutes of the debate that took place in October 2009 at the governing council of the London School of Economics over whether to accept a donation of £1.5 million from Saif Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator. Fred Halliday, the school’s professor of international relations, had warned the council that accepting the money would taint the LSE’s reputation, but his concerns were dismissed by a fellow academic, David Held, professor of political science. Refusal, Held protested, would cause “personal embarrassment” to Saif Gaddafi.

  Concern for Gaddafi Jnr’s feelings, rather than Halliday’s hard-headed analysis, evidently won the day. The governing council accepted the loot (of which £300,000 was subsequently paid) from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation. The fact that among those members giving their assent to supping with the devil was Sharmi Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty and merciless scourge of those who compromise principles of justice, only adds to the air of unreality that surrounds the whole shameful episode. She has since spoken of her “bucketfuls” of regret.

• Building Ford Nation

  Earlier this week, the mayor threatened to unleash “Ford Nation” on Premier Dalton McGuinty should the province refuse the city’s request for more money.

  It may have come off as a spur-of-the-moment turn of phrase, but Ford Nation is very real and about to change the political landscape of Ontario.

  For months, members of Ford’s former campaign staff have been quietly drawing up plans to form a right-wing advocacy group. The intention is to monetize and organize this huge ideological voting base, essentially forming a quasi Tea Party North.

• Nelly Furtado and the public shame of private concerts

  Nelly Furtado played for Muammar. Well, maybe not Muammar. She played for the clan. In Italy. Perhaps she played and the Gaddafi family sang along and they threw each other in the air and then the concert ended and Nelly cashed her cheque. Maybe she bought some gold-plated bathroom fixtures and maybe a racehorse named Like A Bird and she probably even donated some of the money to the Dovercourt Boys and Girls Club, which is just around the corner from me in Toronto, and where Nelly learned how to swim when she was a pre-teen. But then, Tunisia fell. And then Egypt fell

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Themis: Questions about Palantir surface in HBGary Federal’s aftermath

  Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal, along with lobbyist law firm Hunton & Williams, are all linked to separate plots that involve the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America. The links were exposed via emails published to the Internet by Anonymous.

  Based on the publically available information, the idea was for the four organizations to help the Chamber develop a plan that would discredit critics. Moreover, Team Themis, a name selected by the three firms who collaborated with Hunton & Williams, are also linked to plans made for Bank of America in order for them to deal with the “WikiLeaks Threat”.

• Hacked e-mails show Web is an increasingly useful tool in dirty-tricks campaigns

  Although much of K Street spends its time plying the halls of Congress on behalf of well-heeled clients, there is a growing dark side to Washington’s lobbying and public-relations industry: figuring out new ways to undermine and sabotage opponents.

  This little-discussed aspect of the influence business came into view in recent weeks with the release of thousands of hacked corporate e-mails, which detail a pair of high-tech dirty-tricks campaigns aimed at supporters of WikiLeaks and foes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

• Daily Star reporter quits in protest at tabloid’s ‘anti-Muslim’ coverage

  The Daily Star has been accused of printing fictional stories by a disgruntled reporter who has resigned over its “hatemongering” anti-Muslim propaganda.

  In a resignation letter, Richard Peppiatt said he was leaving after the Star gave sympathetic coverage to the far-right English Defence League last month.

Censorship

• Internet traffic in Libya goes dark amid upheaval

  Internet services in Libya, already spotty throughout the country’s violent upheaval, appeared completely halted in an attempt to stifle information about the insurrection.

  The move, coming ahead of planned protests in Libya, appears similar to Egypt’s response to the demonstrations that led President Hosni Mubarak to step down last month. The Libyan government controls the country’s primary Internet service provider.

  Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., network security company said Friday that all Internet traffic coming in and out of Libya had ceased, starting at about noon EST Thursday (7 p.m. in Tripoli, Libya). Google’s transparency report, which shows traffic to the company’s sites from various countries, also showed that Internet traffic had fallen to zero in Libya.

• Libyan Disconnect

• Google’s Blogger banned in Turkey over soccer broadcast piracy

  A Turkey court has issued a statewide ban on Google service Blogger, locking 600,000 Turkish bloggers out of their personal diaries.

  The ban was imposed in response to a complaint from satellite TV company Digiturk. The company claimed that soccer matches it was broadcasting had been posted on Blogger.

• Apple: you must be at least 17 years old to use Opera

  This week, the Opera web browser became the first non-native browser made available in Apple’s Mac App Store. While Apple approved the browser, it still managed to hurt its competitor by putting this ridiculous label on it: “You must be at least 17 years old to download this app.”

• [Old] Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S. [UPDATED]

  Canadian television viewers looking for the most thorough and in-depth coverage of the uprising in Egypt have the option of tuning into Al Jazeera English, whose on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil is unmatched by any other outlet. American viewers, meanwhile, have little choice but to wait until one of the U.S. cable-company-approved networks broadcasts footage from AJE, which the company makes publicly available. What they can’t do is watch the network directly.

Privacy

• Facebook PhoneNumbers & Security

  Since I’m finishing my novel and committed to uploading it to CreateSpace Sunday night, I’m *not* supposed to be blogging!

  But this is a pretty serious FaceBook privacy breach passed on my by friend Mary, and the sooner people know the sooner they can pull their numbers.

Civil Rights

• 47 U.S.C. § 230: a 15 Year Retrospective

  Co-sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this symposium will unite some of the key figures in the history of 47 U.S.C. § 230, widely regarded as the most important internet specific law.

• Constitutional Amendments Exclude Women Candidates for the Presidential Elections

  “The Egyptian Coalition for Civic Education and Women’s Participation” has received and reviewed the constitutional amendments. These amendments have led to great worries amongst the coalition for they did not achieve what the Egyptian people aimed for, nor meet the revolution’s demands. As such the amendments are restoring the system of the past regime.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• LQDN Responds to the Parliamentary Pre-report on Net Neutrality

  La Quadrature du Net sent its response (in French) to the pre-report prepared by the French Parliament’s working group on Net neutrality.

  Mindful of the importance of Net neutrality for the future of our networked societies, the French Parliament’s Economic Affairs Committee has set up a working group led by Laure de La Raudière (UMP) and Corinne Erhel (SRC). After hearing many stakeholders, including La Quadrature du Net and not-for-profit ISP FDN, the working group submitted a pre-report (in French) at the beginning of February.

DRM

• Are iPad magazines being killed by greed?

  Pete Kafka at All Things Digital reports today that publisher Conde Nast is set to increase the price of the iPad versions of its Vanity Fair and GQ titles by $1 and $2 respectively. The reason is increased production costs after they switched from an in-house publishing system to an Adobe-built solution, but the result? Well, digital magazines haven’t exactly taken off so far. Who’s going to want them at an even higher price?

• World Book Night: A book so good they want to give it to you for free

  As reading on electronic devices becomes more common, and panic over the perceived Kindle Catastrophe dies down, people who oversee physical books are thinking more creatively about what they can offer by contrast. So books become more precious as objects (design becomes more important, clever new formats are invented) and booksellers are – or should be – turned to as curators of our cultural lives.

• Judge Lets Sony Unmask Visitors to PS3-Jailbreaking Site

  A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz’s website from January of 2009 to the present.

  Thursday’s decision by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz’s web provider (.pdf) raises a host of web-privacy concerns.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Revolution Will Not Be Properly Licensed

  We have SonyBMG taking administrator-level control of several million customers’ computers to prevent copying of mere music. European authorities mandating wiretapping capabilities of all telecom equipment. Car manufacturers installing remote kill switches in cars. Microsoft embedding the same type of kill switches in their software, along with Apple and Google doing the same to our phones. Intel embedding the same kill switches in processors. Amazon deleting books off our bookshelves.

• British biz roasts Hargreaves’ ‘Google Review’

  Against this, the CBI’s submission, “Exploiting Ideas”, is a reality-check. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) describes intellectual property as Britain’s “Crown jewels”, and notes that investment in “intangibles” now exceeds investment in physical assets by about 50 per cent. Aerospace and pharmaceuticals turn over £37bn between them, copyright accounts for 8.2 per cent of GDP (or £100bn) and trademarks – typically forgotten – £18bn.

• Copyrights

  • Moby Says The Major Record Labels ‘Should Die’

    Moby is no stranger to speaking out against the major record labels. After the original Jammie Thomas ruling, he spoke out saying that the RIAA should be disbanded. More recently, he’s highlighted how giving away free music has been helpful in making money and pointed out that the major record label’s entire strategy seems based on trying to “make the future die.” So it’s hardly surprising to hear him say that he thinks the major labels should die.

  • Copyright gone mad!

    Earlier this week, BoingBoing covered the story of Zazzle – an online merchandise company – taking down a badge which read “While you were reading Tolkien I was watching Evangelion”. The original story alleged that this was prompted by the Tolkien Estate claiming copyright infringement, though subsequently it has emerged that it was actually Zazzle acting on their own initiative who caused the withdrawal of the product.

    While innocent in this particular case, the Tolkien Estate is notorious for a broad interpretation of copyright law. They have recently issued a cease and desist notice to the author of a novel which includes Tolkien as a character, and I have seen reports of similar actions on their part on at least two other occasions. Even more amusingly, back in 2004 the Estate and Warner Brothers claimed ownership of the word “shire”. (The Oxford English Dictionary, unsurprisingly, disagrees.)

  • Pirate Party Calls Protest As Movie Sharer Jailed For 30 Days

    Following an investigation into the online sharing of a new movie, Serbia’s High-Tech crime unit has swooped on an apartment in the capital Belgrade where they arrested a 51-year-old man. Following interrogation and an apparent confession, in just one day a judge has ruled the man can be detained in jail for 30 days. The Pirate Party are now calling for protests today.

  • Copyright reform is needed in UK: letter to the Telegraph

    We co-signed this letter, published today in the Telegraph, calling for copyright reform in the interests of economic growth.

  • Yahoo, BT and more launch UK ‘Cloud Radio’ project. What’s that?

    Here’s an intriguing story – a consortium of technology and media companies including Yahoo, BT, music streaming service We7 and content production company Somethin” Else, have been awarded an £1.8m grant to work on a ‘cloud radio’ service codenamed ‘Apollo’.

    What’s that? As Digital Spy reports, the project will look into the development of “next-generation personal radio and music services that can work across any internet-connected device, such as mobiles, tablets and web TVs”.

  • ICE Arrests Operator Of Seized Domain; Charges Him With Criminal Copyright Infringement

    While Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group has been seizing lots of domains under questionable legal theories, it has been slow to follow through on any sort of actual lawsuits. However, with one of the domains seized a month ago, channelsurfing.net, ICE has now arrested someone and charged him with criminal copyright infringement, such that he’s now facing five years in jail (as well as fines). This is interesting, because when that domain was seized, we had noted that channelsurfing did not appear to host any content itself, but merely embedded content from other sites. That raises an awful lot of serious questions: specifically, what part of copyright law is infringed here. The site does not host any of the content. It does not make any copies. It does not distribute the content. All it does is put in a snippet of code that a user’s web browser then uses to request content from another site.

  • IFPI, UK Police, Credit Card Companies Push People To Pirate Music, Rather Than Pay For It

    Bizarre move out of the IFPI. It’s gleefully announced a new deal, in conjunction with the London Police and Visa and MasterCard to cut off credit card services to online music stores who the IFPI accuses of selling infringing MP3s. This is really targeting sites like MP3Fiesta, which is sort of a modern version of Allofmp3.com. Of course, what they seem to be missing is that both of these sites were examples of people, who would otherwise likely be downloading totally unauthorized versions, being willing to pay for MP3s at a much more reasonable price. What I never understood was why the music industry never realized that these sites actually showed a business model that worked. Tons of people were happy to pay for the music when the prices seemed much more reasonable. What these services really showed was how much the industry has artificially inflated the price of music.

  • Rep. Lofgren Challenges IP Czar On Legality Of Domain Seizures

    A friend of the site sent over a great video of Rep. Zoe Lofgren quizzing IP Czar Victoria Espinel about the recent domain name seizures. It’s clear that Lofgren has been well-briefed on the topic (which makes her one of very few elected officials). Lofgren has always been really good on copyright issues, so this isn’t a huge surprise, though I wish she were more vocal on some of these issues.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux over Windows..? Well, the argument continues

There are no second thoughts about it. With GNOME and KDE, Linux desktops are top-of-the-line products that are sleek, compact and innately user friendly. Linux desktop in fact go beyond being user friendly they are outright flexible. On Linux you simply change distros you no longer want or need. You keep what you need and simply build along as your requirements grow. Most times your Linux desktop is a reflection of your mind. You are doing intense mind-games then you will have the toughest looking distro running. Need to space out and want some relax time then in come the light-hearted distros tickling your brain cells. Bet you cannot even think of creativity with a Windows on your desktop.

Pain and Suffering in Germany, or How Linux Lost to XP

With all the world aflutter about the latest “i-thingie” to emerge from the Hallowed Halls of Cupertino, it’s been a great week for catching up on Linux news from around the world.

Expecting the usual assortment of triumphant tales regarding our favorite operating system, however, Linux Girl’s jaw fairly hit the floor when she came across something entirely different.

It’s the sad, sad story of the German Foreign Office, to be specific, which recently chose to reverse a decade-old migration to Linux. Now, it’s switching back to Windows instead.

“Although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated,” explained The H, where the story was apparently first reported.

Claiming that user complaints have been a problem as well, the government has nevertheless declined to provide any specific figures.

Desktop

• Getting Started With Linux: Fine-Tuning Your Hardware

  On some systems, Ubuntu and other Linux systems will install as if they they had always been right there on your system. Other times, there’s a piece missing. Here’s how to patch up the last piece (or two) of your system if not everything’s working right off.

• Ubuntu-ready Cortex-A8 nettop and netbook drop prices

  Genesi announced price reductions and a new Ubuntu 10.10 update for its small-format, fanless line of Efika MX computers, which run on Freescale Semiconductor’s 800MHz Cortex-A8 i.MX515 system-on-chips. The five-Watt Efika MX Smarttop nettop costs $129, while the 10.1-inch, 12-Watt Efika MX Smartbook netbook costs $199.

• 10 things I miss about old school Linux

  I’ve been using Linux since the days of Caldera Open Linux 1 and Red Hat Linux 4.2 (prior to the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Since those days, I have seen a lot of things come and go. I was glad to wave goodbye to most of the things that have gone by the wayside. However, I actually do miss some of the bits and pieces that have slipped out of the mix. Some of these are software, while some of them are more ideas/ideals. Let’s venture into the time machine and go retro with our memories of Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 194 – Nuclear Chicken

  This week on Linux Outlaws: More on Canonical/Banshee, Red Hat obfuscating their kernel, Freedom Box Foundation funding success, Sony goes completely off the deep end and we give away the first netbook loaded with MeeGo.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 392

• Interview with Jamie “Boo”

  In episode #54, mintCast recorded an interview with Jamie “Boo” Birse, maintainer of the KDE edition.

Kernel Space

• Longterm kernel 2.6.32.31

• Linux 2.6.32.31

• AMD Provides Coreboot Support For Fusion

  AMD has been quite friendly towards the Coreboot project (what used to be LinuxBIOS) with releasing support for new chipsets and other engineering assistance. This support has not dried up at all but has only expanded with AMD’s recent release of Coreboot code to support the Embedded G-Series Fusion processor.

• Graphics Stack

  • Open-Source AMD Cayman GPU KMS Support

    Nearly two months ago AMD released Radeon HD 6000 series open-source support — complete with kernel mode-setting and Mesa/Gallium3D OpenGL driver acceleration support — but this support had only covered the “Northern Islands” ASICs and not the newest Radeon HD 6900 “Cayman” graphics processors. Cayman’s design is much different from the Northern Islands and previous-generation Evergreen GPUs, but the open-source support for these highest-end AMD graphics processors is beginning to emerge.

  • A restart for RandR 1.4

    Having pulled it from X.Org Server 1.10 at the last moment, the X.org developers are taking another look at RandR 1.4, the X resize, rotate and reflect extension. It’s now hoped that it will make it into X.Org Server 1.11, due in August. Long time X and Debian developer, Keith Packard, has posted an entry on the X.org mailing list calling for a protocol review.

Applications

• Linux command line tips: wget

• Dummy-Proof BitTorrent Download Client

  To make BitTorrent appeal to an even wider audience, uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. has released a brand new BitTorrent client today. Codenamed Chrysalis, the new piece of software is aimed at novice BitTorrent users who are generally overwhelmed by the traditional interface of uTorrent and the mainline client. In the months to come Chrysalis will replace BitTorrent’s mainline client.

• Rosegarden – Music editor and MIDI/audio sequencer

  Rosegarden is a MIDI and audio sequencer and musical notation editor whose purpose is to serve as the sequencer of choice for users who prefer to work with music notation. Rosegarden allows you to record, arrange, and compose music, in the shape of traditional score or MIDI data, or of audio files either imported or recorded from a microphone, guitar or whatever audio source you care to specify. You can use Rosegarden to write, edit, and organise music to create a composition, which you can then synthesise, add effects to, and mix down for burning to CD or distribution on the web. Rosegarden also contains well-rounded notation editing support for high quality printed output via LilyPond.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • General hardware commands for the Linux command line

  • Collectd, system performance statistics on Linux

  • Back up Email with a Single Command

  • Super-Charge GIMP’s Image Editing Capabilities with G’MIC [Cross-Platform]

  • Add a Grub2 Entry for Ubuntu booting into console/command line

  • The ultimate Debian/Ubuntu package building system

  • Hidden Linux: Put a tiger in your tank

  • The difference between parameter and variable in bash

  • SSH, X11, and You

  • Installing Adobe flash player in Fedora

  • Why Parallel Matters

  • Building the Ultimate Linux Test Server, part 1

  • Bash script to monitor disk space and email alerts if space is low, great to use with crontab

  • Linux Startup Taking Too Long? Chart It!

  • Follow this Customization Guide for a slick Ubuntu desktop

  • How To Use Bash History to Improve Your Command-Line Productivity

  • Upgrading From Mandriva 2010.x to Cooker

  • How-to: John the Ripper on a Ubuntu 10.04 MPI Cluster

  • How To Create A Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive

  • Fix Pink / Red YouTube Videos Bug Using Flash 10.2 In Ubuntu

  • How to Setup Network Link aggregation (802.3ad) on Ubuntu

  • Sed Error Unknown option to ’s’ + Solution

  • Streaming music with gnump3p and Linux – mp3, ogg, movies | How to

  • Skype in Debian

  • Checking Which Ports Are Doing What On Linux

  • Get Cracking with Cron

• Wine

  • Wine’s Shader Compiler Now Handles… Reflections

    There’s a new unstable version of Wine available on this Friday. There’s only a few prominent changes, but among them is finally having reflection support in its Direct3D shader compiler.

    Besides reflection support in the shader compiler for Direct3D, there is now support for changing network passwords, tests no longer attempt to cope with odd behaviors in Windows 9x, and there’s a number of MSHTML and MSXML improvements. There’s also the usual assortment of bug fixes.

• Games

  • Linux Gamers Command 90% Of Initial Unigine OilRush Sales

    Less than twenty-four hours ago Unigine opened up pre-ordering for their first game, OilRush, which is an impressive real-time strategy game that offers very impressive graphics from their advanced, multi-platform engine. While pre-orders have just got started — and with beta access for those who pay the $20 USD / 15 EUR cost for the game — here’s some very early statistics.

  • Tell a joke, get OilRush!

    One of the years big Linux game releases is coming, Unigine’s realtime strategy game Oil Rush.

    Yesterday the preorders started and while only some 300 copies were sold (which I find respectable given the limited press it got), 90% of those were to Linux users. I think this is worth celebrating, so here is the deal.

  • Install Savage 2: A Tortured Soul On Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”

  • The Important of Linux Gaming

    Both Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Ars Technica recently posted about Jeffrey Rosen and John Graham’s speech at the Independent Game Festival about the success of the Humble Indie Bundles in general, and on Linux in particular.

    [...]

    “Contributions from Mac and Linux users doubled our revenue for the Humble Indie Bundle”

Desktop Environments

• E17- Enlighten your Desktop!!

  Enlightenment E17 or DR17 is a desktop environment that can serve as both the window manager and a desktop environment at the same time in your OS. What makes it really cool is that it brings out the best features out of your PC as compared to the commonly used KDE and GNOME (both require slightly high end hardware). Hence you will be able to run the latest, hottest software even in your old PC.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • It’s alive!

    I’m very excited to announce that qt-atspi has seen some major progress lately. Frederik Gladhorn has been kicking some major butt and has gotten it into much better shape than it has been previously.

  • digiKam Software Collection 2.0.0 beta3 is out…

    digiKam team is proud to announce the 3rd digiKam Software Collection 2.0.0 beta release!

  • KDE Ships March Updates

    March 4th, 2011. Today, KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks. This update is the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.6 series. 4.6.1 brings many bugfixes and translation updates on top of 4.6 series and is a recommended update for everyone running 4.6.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

  • KDE 4.6.1 Changelog

• GNOME Desktop

  • Becoming a GAJ Team Member

  • GAJ continues to improve

  • Gnome 3 removes ‘max’ and ‘min’ window controls – but why?

  • GNOME 3 live image – revenge of the workspaces (aka 0.0.5)

    You probably heard about GNOME 2.91.90 being released last week, with a lot of goodies in various places, including changes to GNOME-Shell (new workspace management, improved design, etc..).

Distributions

• The Sabayon 5.5 experiment was a success!

  Sabayon, for those not familiar with it, is a primarily desktop oriented system originally based on software coming from the Gentoo Linux project. Sabayon, since it is at Version 5.5, has long since created many of its own tools, and though there is still some Gentoo Linux lineage there, the package manager it uses is its own creation, and so is most of the work, but like any good free software system, it certainly uses and benefits from technology elsewhere, and in this case, Gentoo formed the framework for much of the initial work.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat defends changes to kernel source distribution

    Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens, has defended the company’s change to how it distributes the kernel source code in a blog posting. The company had changed its policy on how it distributed the source to its Linux kernel, a key component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Where it had previously shipped out a standard kernel with all the patches which needed to be applied to make that kernel into Red Hat’s version, for RHEL6 it switched to shipping an archive with those patches pre-applied and details of the patches not explicitly listed.

  • Is Red Hat violating the GPL?

    But now things seem to be changing. A few months back, Red Hat settled a patent suit with a patent troll, Acacia, over alleged patent infringement in JBoss, software that Red Hat owns.

  • Red Hat: ‘Yes, we undercut Oracle with hidden Linux patches’

    Red Hat has changed the way it distributes Enterprise Linux kernel code in an effort to prevent Oracle and Novell from stealing its customers, making it more difficult for these competitors to understand which patches have been applied where.

  • Commitment to Open

    I joined Red Hat in 2001, naive yet undaunted about the potential to transform the IT industry through open source. Our engineering group at the time was no more than 50 people. How could our relatively small team compete in the land of giants? Simple. Because the license Richard Stallman wrote, and Linus Torvalds selected for Linux, nearly 20 years ago, and Linus’ benevolent leadership of the kernel since, was key in creating a model for open collaboration.

  • Red Hat defends Linux kernel move

    There is no company on Earth that contributes more to the Linux kernel than Red Hat. That said, Red Hat has recently come under some scrutiny for the way it packages the kernel in RHEL 6 – some mis-informed people have gone so far as to question whether or not Red Hat is violating the GPL.

  • Scientific Linux 6.0 released

  • Fedora

    • Welcome to the Fedora Trusted Computing Project!

      The Trusted Computing Project provides a collaboration area for interested parties with trusted computing requirements to discuss their needs with developers as well as hardware and software partners. Areas of interest would include but not be limited to the use of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), trusted boot, trusted hypervisors, and other areas that insure the integrity of the computing system from the hardware on up.

    • Red Hat Brand guru John Adams analyzes the POSSE brand

      I had a great lunch on Tuesday with John Adams from the Red Hat Brand team – he’s one of the main guys responsible for maintaining Red Hat’s corporate personality and presence, and I was curious about how he’d see POSSE as a brand of its own. Notes follow, posted with John’s permission. As a technical person who has no formal training in marketing or branding, getting to see how John thought about these sorts of topics was an education in itself.

• Debian Family

  • Debian wins two of seven categories at the Linux New Media Awards 2011

    The Debian representatives were quite busy at this year’s Linux New Media Awards, which were presented yesterday during CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. They first took the stage when the award for “Best Open Source Server Distribution” was presented by Peter Ganten, Managing Director of Univention GmbH. In presenting the award he emphasized that Debian has done pioneering work not only in the technical field but also in the definition of free software standards and processes.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • S04E01 – New Frontier

      Laura Cowen, Mark Johnson, Tony Whitmore and Alan Pope return to bring you episode 1 of season 4 of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!

    • PowerNap Improvements for Natty

      For all of those who don’t know, “PowerNap is a screen saver for servers except it doesn’t save your screen, it saves the environment and lowers your energy bill.”

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 Is Out [Screenshots And Video]

      The Ubuntu 11.04 live cd installer finally got upgrade support so you’ll be able to upgrade from older Ubuntu versions using the CD (very useful for those with bad or no internet connection).

    • UDW: Day 3 over, day 4 to come

    • Ubuntu’s new Overlay scrollbars for Natty

      Ubuntu 11.04 continues with the surprises as Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu design team unveil ‘overlay scrollbar’s.

    • Ubuntu Maryland Leader Quits, Is Canonical Hijacking Ubuntu?

      Ubuntu Maryland Leader Chuck Frain is stepping down as the leader of the group which he founded. In a blog post he has given reasons behind his decision and they raise some serious questions. He said that Ubuntu has changed from a community driven project to a company controlled product. “When I began this group I believed in the Ubuntu project was a community driven distribution that was supported by Canonical and guided in some ways to their commercial needs. After all, they were a company that were going to specialize in support for the Free Linux distribution…”

      “I was happy with Canonical’s position and guidance until the announcement of UbuntuOne. Here was software in two pieces, one open source and one closed source. The client on the desktop is open and free for anyone to use, modify, etc. However the piece that makes it all useful, the server, is closed.”

    • Ubuntu Linux – Not yet a Pariah but heading there

      Yes, the most popular Linux distro is working hard to become the pariah of the FOSS community. To give you a typical example, take the case of the GNOME / UNITY switch.

      If I were Shuttleworth, I’d not ship Ubuntu with my in-house DE just yet. I’d rather ship the usual GNOME but put a small script somewhere to inform users that “look, we’re planning on shipping our own DE but think it’s not ready yet. We’ll need all the feedback we can get from you before shipping it as default. Click here if you want to install Unity and help us test.”

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Xubuntu Natty Artwork

        As one of Xubuntu’s artwork contributors and member of the Shimmerproject I would like to take some time now – towards the end of this cycle – and discuss (at least parts of) the design process during the development phase for Natty (11.04). This is planned as a review and in a way (implicitely) a preview: you can see the direction Xubuntu is heading for since Maverick and Natty and hopefully the project will continue this way.

      • Edubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 Released

        Edubuntu 11.04 (codenamed: Natty Narwhal) is the next version of Edubuntu due for release in April 2011. Development on the system is in full swing and today marks the third tested installable development version. It is still in an early state and has known problems, it is not recommended for anything else than testing and experimental purposes for people who are interested in Edubuntu development.

      • Linux Mint 11 Will Use GNOME 3.0 By Default

        As you probably know, Linux Mint 11 “Katya”, the next Linux Mint version that will be based on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal will not use Unity by default. Well, as it turns out, Linux Mint 11 will move even further from Ubuntu and will ship with GNOME 3.0 by default, even though Ubuntu 11.04 will use Gnome 2.32.x.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Matt Asay Backs Up the Wahmbulance

    [H]e’s either playing a game on readers or backing up the wahmbulance (losing himself in self-pity) with his latest at The Register, complaining that open source apps may be dead on mobile.

  • From messiah to pariah: The death of open source on mobile

    Part of this comes from open-source licenses clashing with app store policies. It’s perhaps not surprising that Microsoft isn’t a big fan of GPL software within its Windows Phone Marketplace, but given its still-small market share, it may also not be a big deal. Of far more concern is the fact that Apple has started pulling GPL software from its virtual shelves.

    This may not be that big of a deal. After all, open-source software developers long ago got used to skirting standard distribution channels, and will likely find workarounds like alternative app stores (Sourceforge App Store, anyone?) or may simply use the web to distribute HTML5 apps.

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • World First from Saab: Saab IQon – Open Innovation in Car Infotainment

      Saab Automobile is changing the auto industry infotainment landscape by engaging external partners in ‘open innovation´ for the development of its new IQon infotainment concept, using Google´s Android operating system.

    • [LMN] Birmingham UK – MeeGo Meetup

      Time to get together for another Birmingham UK MeeGo meetup. The interest in the Operating System has increased and also we now have some available devices, So it should be a good time to be had by all.

    • DoodleDrive – Game Jam Afternoon

      My older son was a bit sick today so I stayed home to be with my kids. As usual kids didn’t know what to do and I came up with the idea if we’d create a simple game with help of latest Qt SDK 1.1 Beta that was released a day ago. …and so we did This is a small “documentary” of the process.

    • RIM reportedly to launch BlackBerry Messenger on iOS and Android

      It looks like RIM is finally going to introduce its own version what many third-parties have been trying to implement across smartphone platforms, by introducing its BlackBerry Messenger service on both iOS and Android.

    • MeeGo on the N900 officially targeted by Nokia

      Exciting news. Jukka Eklund, Product Manager at Nokia, just announced that Nokia will be officially directing efforts towards supporting MeeGo on the N900 as Developer Edition. For this purpose, there would be a dedicated team within Nokia who will bring full MeeGo support on the N900.

  • Android

    • Meganoid now available in the Market: a must for all fans of 8-bit platform games

      OrangePixel has a series of titles in the Market, and the company is perhaps best known for the popular Mini Army: an interesting version of the classic Snake game. The developer has now released a new title that at least for fans of all things 8-bit almost seem too good to be true.

      The game is called Meganoid, and it’s an homage to 80s and 90s games such as Mega Man and Metroid (hence the name). I personally grew up playing 8-bit Commodore 64, Sega and Nintendo games, so Meganoid’s retro, pixelart graphics, and its bitpop soundtrack and effects are right up my alley.

    • Nielsen: Android Pulls Ahead Of RIM And iOS For U.S. Smartphone Share

      Nielsen has just released new data on U.S. smartphone share. According to the report, smartphone powered by Android operating systems (29 percent) is pulling ahead of RIM’s Blackberry (27 percent) and Apple iOS (27 percent).

• Tablets

  • Tablets’ rise knocks HDD shipments

    “Among the various computing segments in which HDDs are used, the netbook—with lower computing capabilities than either a desktop or laptop—is considered the most vulnerable to being supplanted by tablets, which do not use hard disks as storage media.”

  • Jobs proclaims the iPad II is the saviour of the universe

    Jobs started off by describing Android tablets as the year of the copycats – a bold prediction, for sure. The iPad II is the third of Apple’s attempts to crush the PC opposition. It won’t be Jobs’ first attempt. The British event is being held at the BBC TV Centre, a cluster of fanbois – but the poor hacks that work there do, we think use Dell. Apple loves the BBC but not as much as Apple loves News International.

  • iPad 2 vs. original iPad: what’s changed?

  • Apple’s key designer Jonathan Ive said to be ‘thinking of move to Britain’

    Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac , the iPhone and the iPad and an absolutely key man at Apple, may be considering a move back to Britain. That is the story whizzing round the world of high tech.

  • The Android community must fight generalizations on Honeycomb tablet price

    I fully understand when people around the iPad 2 announcement make blanket statements that “Android tablets are too expensive”, because I take everything connected to an Apple event through a bias filter. But, when those same comments come from Android sites and in the comments of our stories, I feel like I need to say something: We need to stop the generalization. We can’t use the Xoom as a sample of the entire Android tablet ecosystem. Not all Android tablets are expensive and not all are going to be expensive.

  • iPad 2 vs. Android tablets: who’s winning? [Comparison Chart]

  • Steve Jobs’ reality distortion takes its toll on truth

    In what seems like a ritual at this point, I watched Apple’s iPad 2 keynote in disbelief, noting the factual errors that kept coming up minute after minute. See previous:

    * How Steve Jobs turned a finger spot into a death grip
    * Google responds to Steve Jobs’ activation counting accusations
    * Why does Android have Steve Jobs rattled?

3 Companies Using Open Source

It’s very interesting to note that a recent study revealed that approximately 85 percent of companies globally are using open source software. Not surprisingly, the main motivator for using open source software is cost. Other indicators point to the fact that this software provides companies protection from becoming locked into a single vendor.

Events

• FOSS Marathon in Jodhpur

• Impressions from the Southern California Linux Expo 9x

  If you weren’t in Los Angeles last weekend, you missed all the fun. No, not the OSCARS. I’m talking about the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). Once again, the SCALE folks put on one of the best FOSS community events on the planet and handled a 20% increase in attendees with few glitches.

  According to Larry Cafiero, one of the SCALE guys (as well as being one of the “beards of open source,” ahem), SCALE drew more than 1,800 attendees. And those are the ones who actually registered. The event moved from the Westin LAX to the Hilton LAX to cope with the attendance — and it grew by about 20% this year, so that the space was still close to capacity.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Design Jam London #2: Yet another 50 UX’ers. Same 9 hours. 1 Brand new challenge.

    The all-new and improved Design Jam London 2 took place on Saturday, 26th of February 2011, with support from Mozilla Labs, Fjord, Geeks of London and hosts City University London.

  • Firefox 4 Web Demos: announcing Web O’ Wonder

    Firefox 4 is almost here. Check out some awesome Web demos on our brand new demo web site: Web’O Wonder. Screencast here.

  • Experience the Future of the Web with the Web O’ Wonder

    We are excited to unveil the Web O’ Wonder website, showcasing cutting edge demos from the global Mozilla community. These shiny, new demos showcase the type of ingenuity and fun enabled by modern Web technologies.

  • 1 Bug Left: Firefox 4 Pretty Much Ready For RC

    Can Firefox 4 RC ship yet? More or less, says Mozilla and tells us that only one bug, for which the company already has a “patch”, needs to be fixed.

  • First Firefox 4 RC1 Build Posted

SaaS

• ‘Linux kernel for the cloud’ gets new government

  Rackspace has overhauled the governance of OpenStack – the eight-month-old open source effort to build Amazon-like “infrastructure clouds” – relinquishing some of the control it gained by acquiring one of the project’s other major contributors.

  After acquiring Anso Labs – the tiny outfit that built the Nova compute fabric comprising half of OpenStack – Rackspace controlled seven out of nine seats on the project’s board, known as the project oversight committee. Rackspace built the other half of OpenStack, a storage platform, and it cofounded the project with NASA, which had commissioned Anso to build Nova.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• VirtualBox 4.0 OpenGL Acceleration Leaves Room For Improvement

  VirtualBox, the Sun/Oracle virtualization platform, has supported OpenGL acceleration and Direct3D acceleration within virtual machines for more than two years. When the host system has hardware GPU acceleration, OpenGL/Direct3D calls can be passed from the guest to the host when the VirtualBox guest driver is installed. There has been the Linux 3D support since VirtualBox 2.2 and was initially limited to OpenGL 1.4 support and in the summer of 2009 it turned to OpenGL 2.0. We had not delivered any early benchmarks as the initial support was too buggy, but even with the recently released VirtualBox 4.0, while the support is usable and stable for the most part, it is still far from being very efficient and will crash under some OpenGL software.

• LibreOffice applied for GSoc 2011

  I just have filed the form for LibreOffice to be part of the next edition of Google Summer or Code. The list of the selected organizations will be out on March 18th. This will be a nice adventure to help us improve our mentoring skill and help students getting introduced to an open source community. All the details of the application are available on the GSoc wiki page.

• EU: AFUL supports the Document Foundation and calls on public and private actors to follow suit

  http://www.osor.eu/news/eu-aful-supports-the-document-foundation-and-calls-on-public-and-private-actors-to-follow-suit

Government

• Open Source Procurement: Subscriptions

  When you procure proprietary software, you buy a right-to-use license and then a support agreement. But when you buy open source, you already have the right-to-use from the OSI-approved free license, so you should compare the subscription cost with just the cost of a proprietary support agreement. Right?

  Wrong! The open source subscription includes all the same elements as the combination of both purchases. In most cases, if you are receiving equivalent value, you should expect to pay similar prices.

• MHRD must give Tenders to FOSS Companies and avoid .NET programming language. Rs 1.6 crore goes in M$ partner.

• The Monopolistic Tendencies of Open Source Software

• More Fun with Anti-Open Source FUD

  “Open source operates as a de facto cartel” – now that really is a splendid bit of FUD that deserves closer examination.

  This extraordinary conclusion seems to flow from the earlier flawed analysis of what happens when there are open source companies operating in a market. In fact, there are several quite different flaws there.

  The first is “consider an all-OSS world in which each company offers consumers exactly the same shared code as every other company”: but that’s not how open source markets operate. Typically, there are many different code bases for a given sector: GNU/Linux and the BSDs for operating systems; Firefox, Chromium and Konqueror for browsers; Thunderbird and Evolution for email etc. This means that it’s actually extremely easy for new companies using open source to enter those sectors.

  Indeed, the rapid rise of Google’s Chrome/Chromium is a neat counter-example to the erroneous statement above. It entered the browser sector and proceeded to do rather well, probably halting the growth of Firefox as well as taking away market share from Internet Explorer. Yes, that market did not consist entirely of open source browsers, but given its success against Firefox, it seems clear that it could have entered just such a market and flourished because of its evident merits.

  But for the sake of argument, let us accept the possibility that there are markets where all the companies based on open source use the same code base. The argument is then “no company can then compete by writing more OSS code than its rivals” with the result that “this lack of competition suppresses code production.”

  Leaving aside the fact that hackers code for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with competition, using the metric of how much open source code misses the point: by definition it’s generally 100% – that was the premise. And it’s not how much that counts, it’s how good that matters. And this is where the differentiation comes in.

  [...]

  To summarise, one of the key advantages of encouraging the growth of open source in a particular sector is to undermine existing proprietary cartels by supporting open standards and thus opening up that market to new entrants. Governments rightly concerned about such cartels should be supporting open source wholeheartedly as one of the best and most efficient ways of countering them – not seeking some mythical and counterproductive “balance” with closed source and its deleterious consequences.

• System Error: fixing the flaws in Government IT

  Agreeing standards is hard, as is implementing them correctly. Standards for the web have taken >10 years to develop and mature, and in many respects are still not very well embedded: Microsoft have really only just got there with IE9, and that remains to be seen. And this is in an industry where the incentives to make everything work are huge. I’m really not at all sure that the incentives to use open standards for the NHS spine and people’s tax records are even nearly as strong, where suppliers may be reluctant to facilitate the involvement of others.

• FR: Candidats.fr initiative to raise election candidates’ awareness of free software

  In the light of the cantonal elections of 20 and 27 March 2011 in France, April, a non-profit organisation promoting and advocating free software, relaunched ‘Candidats.fr’, an initiative whose aim is to raise the future local councillors’ awareness of this software.

• Can we use collaboration to solve government’s big problems?

  Aneesh Chopra, the White House’s chief technology officer, was at HIMMS last week talking about government as a platform for innovation. He referenced the open and transparent process that led to the Direct Project, which saw dozens of vendors, some of them competitors, working together with the ONC to establish a secure way to send health information as a possible template for bringing together stakeholders to create innovation.

• Government open source plan hindered by lack of security clearance

  Open source software is effectively banned from government IT because products cannot get official clearance from GCHQ security experts, a meeting of the BCS was told this week.

  Tariq Rashid, lead architect for the Home Office, raised the issue with the BSC Open Source Specialist Group on Tuesday as part of an investigation into the reasons why government doesn’t make more use of open source software.

• ES: Cenatic nominates free and open source community for award

  The entire community of free and open source software developers is nominated by Cenatic, Spain’s national competence centre on open source, for this year’s Prince of Asturias Awards. The centre is calling on members of the community to support its nomination.

  The community enables the sharing of knowledge, provides access to technology on a worldwide level and helps to eliminate financial, social, cultural, language and geographical barriers, Cenatic writes in a statement. “Our candidate deserves recognition.”

Openness/Sharing

• International Journal of the Commons

• The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value

  The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.

  Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history. This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle.

• Open Data

  • “Ladies Mapping Party” Strengthens Google’s Africa Maps

    If you like the idea of a quilting bee but prefer your bits electronic instead of fabric, you might be interested in a “ladies mapping party.” 70 Kenyan women were, and showed up to a Google-sponsored ladies mapping party at Nairobi’s iHub in February.

    The women used Google Map Maker, and their specific local knowledge, to fill in schools, health centers, market centers, community development projects, restaurants and roads in a country too often neglected by cartographers.

  • Zonability founder shares thoughts on apps, open data, advice to civic developers

    Zonability is a zoning information web application for ‘property owners, renters, sellers, buyers, remodelers, investors, and neighborhood watchdog groups.’ It was an Apps for Californians winner and is now competing in the NYC BigApps 2.0 contest. Founder Leigh Budlong discusses her work, challenges with open data, thoughts on Gov 2.0 and shares lessons-learned advice to other civic developers.

• Open Access/Content

  • Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #155

    OA has the momentum of thousands of forward steps every year, in every academic field and every part of the world. But some developments are larger than others, and some are large enough to count as watershed events. I’ve noticed an upswing in watershed events recently and want to point out half a dozen of them. Pointing them out doesn’t amount to a prediction, any more than tremors predict earthquakes. But if you were too preoccupied with local noise to notice these tremors, take a moment to notice them.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Note Published: Describing Linked Datasets with the VoID Vocabulary

  The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a Group Note of Describing Linked Datasets with the VoID Vocabulary.

• Disney acquires gaming engine startup to build HTML5 games outside of App stores

  Disney has acquired an HTML5 gaming engine startup called Rocket Pack, based out of Helsinki, Finalnd. A Disney spokesperson told us today, exclusively: “We can confirm that The Walt Disney Company has acquired Rocketpack, an integrated solution for plugin-free browser game development. Through a merger agreement, Rocketpack is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company reporting into Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG).”

• Web Tracking and Privacy Focus of W3C Workshop

Senate Passes Two-Week Funding Bill, Avoids Shutdown

With a looming March 4 deadline before the government runs out of funding, the Senate voted 91-9 to approve a House measure providing funding for two weeks while making $4 billion in cuts with bipartisan backing.

The move averts a shutdown, but the gulf between the two parties remains wide as Republicans are calling for $61 billion in cuts that Democratic leaders and the White House claim would costs hundreds of thousands of jobs. Democrats say they support scaling back spending, but only if the reductions don’t damage the fledgling recovery or essential services.

How We’re Financing Meaningful Journalism

But as Craigslist, Google, Groupon, et al. have sucked up the ad dollars that once supported journalism, many downsized-but-not-out journalists have plugged into collaborative editorial and funding networks to launch investigative, explanatory, watchdog, audience-generated, and enterprise stories (here’s one example from my own work)—a movement we have only just started to see and understand.

The threat to non-print archives

Whilst the UK’s attention is drawn to the Hargreaves Review of the IP framework, a lesser-known statutory instrument is in the pipeline which could have a severe effect on legal deposit libraries if it is drafted into law.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) consulted publishers and libraries on the legal requirement for publishers to provide non-print (electronic journal articles, e-books, tables, diagrams but not sound recordings or films) published items alongside print items to legal deposit libraries.

The consultation closed on the 11th January 2011, and a statutory instrument (SI) has been prepared with a view to being introduced into law. However, this SI is not satisfactory and has some incredibly restrictive clauses in it which would allow publishers to embargo access to the material within the libraries.

Can the Tories skate back onside in Quebec City?

The Harper government’s refusal to fund arenas or other facilities for professional sports teams has dropped like a bombshell in Quebec City, where Mayor Régis Labeaume called it “suicidal” to stop now.

Who’s really innovative?

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity. Despite that, a fortuitously fortunate founder often ends up being venerated as a perpetually prescient prophet. As a result, the company becomes over-dependent on the vision of one or two key individuals and never develops a broad-based capacity for ongoing business model innovation. When the founder’s vision fades, the pace of innovation slows and the company tumbles down the innovation league table.

In 2006, Starbucks, Southwest, IKEA, and eBay all ranked among Business Week’s top 25. Yet four years later, none of these companies were that highly ranked. As bambinos, they were industry revolutionaries, but as they aged, they fell out of the innovation vanguard (though all remain well-run companies).

2011 Report on Link Rot

How reliable are those URLs in your OPAC? The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive which harvests and preserves relevant digital information from the web, has been producing reports on “link rot” for several years. They define link rot as “a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Project’s digital archive.”

Wisconsin Republicans call for arrest of missing Democrats

The Wisconsin Senate passed a resolution today that calls for the arrest of the 14 Democratic senators who left the state two weeks ago, if those senators do not return by 4:00 pm today.

Science

• NASA Seeks High-Bandwidth Deep Space Communications

  NASA is seeking innovations in high-bandwidth space communications, the removal of orbital debris, and improved spacecraft navigation in new solicitations from its Space Technology Program.

Security

• Thursday’s security advisories

• Teenagers jailed for running £16m internet crime forum

  Three teenagers who founded and operated one of the world’s largest English-language internet crime forums, described in court as “Crimebook”, have been sentenced to up to five years in custody.

• The wartime economy

  A recent report claims that cybercrime is costing the UK economy £27 billion annually. But Wendy Grossman argues that the report may be over-stating the case

• Malware decreases, Trojans still dominate

  According to data gathered by Panda Security, only 39 percent of computers scanned in February were infected with malware, compared to 50 percent last month.

  Trojans were found to be the most prolific malware threat, responsible for 61 percent of all cases, followed by traditional viruses and worms which caused 11.59 percent and 9 percent of cases worldwide, respectively. These figures have hardly changed with respect to the January data.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Iran Shocker: Office of Supreme Leader Responsible for Arrest and Removal of Missing Opposition Leader, Karroubi, Protests Tuesday in Qom

• The Someone You’re Not

  Our packed prisons are starting to disgorge hundreds of mostly African-America men who, over the last few decades, we wrongly convicted of violent crimes. This is what it’s like to spend nearly thirty years in prison for something you didn’t do. This is what it’s like to spend nearly thirty years as someone you aren’t. And for Ray Towler, this is what it’s like to be free.

• Where were the calls for a no-fly zone when Israel attacked Gaza, asks George Galloway

• Activist Communiqué: Saturday in Toronto – G2O accountabilty rally: Call for the resignation of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair

  Saturday in Toronto – G2O accountabilty rally: Call for the resignation of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair.

• Azerbaijan: As protests loom, Facebook is monitored

  In that context, the publication a few days ago of an article identifying prominent activists and journalists in Azerbaijan with Armenian friends and colleagues on Facebook such as LGBT activist Mamikon Hovsepyan and peacebuilder Georgi Vanyan has concerned many. Translated into English, it might read as fairly neutral, but the original Azerbaijani is considered by native Azerbaijani speakers to be quite critical, portraying those named as “enemies of the State.”

• Soldiers open fire on women protest in Ivory Coast

  Soldiers backing Ivory Coast’s defiant leader mowed down women protesting his refusal to leave power in a hail of gunfire on Thursday, killing at least six and shocking a nation where women’s marches have historically been used as a last resort against an unrestrained army.

• Venezuela talks up Chavez’s Libya peace plan

  Venezuela pushed a vague peace plan for Libya on Thursday, saying President Hugo Chavez’s friend Muammar Gaddafi was in favor of foreign mediation.

Cablegate

• Operation Set-the-Record-Straight

  This should not come as a surprise. Authority figures rarely want to cede power to others. Nevertheless business leaders, government officials, and IGOs need to realize that there is no turning back. The technology is here to stay. The only question remaining is: where do we go from here? The consensus from these entities seems to be to target Wikileaks in order to cut the head off the proverbial snake. However, those who propose this measure fail to comprehend the size and scope of this lofty idea.

  The cyber security giant H.B. Gary realized this when it started testing the waters in defense of Bank of America. In anticipation of a presumably embarrassing document dump by Wikileaks, Bank of America retained H.B. Gary Federal—by recommendation of the U.S. Department of Justice—as a security consultant. Everything seemed okay and out of the public eye until the CEO of H.B. Gary, Aaron Barr, began antagonizing the internet activist group known as Anonymous, which operates in tandem with Wikileaks’ transparency efforts worldwide as a guard dog. In both private correspondences and public statements, Barr boasted of having information that would cripple the infrastructure of the group and render them ineffective.

• Capital charges filed against Bradley Manning

  Things just got even worse for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged source for WikiLeaks’ cache of U.S. military and State Department documents. The Army announced today that it has filed 22 new charges against Manning, in addition to the 12 counts he was initially charged with after his arrest in May.

• Rally for Wikileaks in Brisbane 01

• Why WikiLeaks Is Raising Money Using MasterCard and PayPal Again

  Remember when PayPal, Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks because it leaked secret State Department cables? At the time Julian Assange blasted the firms as “instruments of U.S. foreign policy” because the move cut off one of the organization’s major sources of fundraising. But over the past few weeks, the logos of PayPal, MasterCard and Visa have quietly returned to WikiLeaks and the site is back in the business of asking supporters to send money its way.

  So, did the firms that cut WikiLeaks off last year have an about-face? At the time, MasterCard pulled the plug in a huff, claiming its rules “prohibit” customers from taking part in “any action that is illegal.” PayPal responded in kind, saying its policy is to ban an organization from using its services if it “encourages, promotes, facilitates or instructs others to engage in illegal activity.”

• PFC Manning Stripped Naked Again

  PFC Manning was forced to strip naked in his cell again last night. As with the previous evening, Quantico Brig guards required him to surrender all of his clothing. PFC Manning then walked back to his bed, and spent the next seven hours in humiliation.

  The decision to require him to be stripped of all clothing was made by the Brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Denise Barnes. According to First Lieutenant Brian Villard, a Marine spokesman, the decision was “not punitive” and done in accordance with Brig rules. There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning. This treatment is even more degrading considering that PFC Manning is being monitored — both by direct observation and by video — at all times. The defense was informed by Brig officials that the decision to strip PFC Manning of all his clothing was made without consulting any of the Brig’s mental health providers.

• WikiLeaks: Cable Revives Horror of Colombia’s “False Positives” Carnage

  Goya-Guerra

  When Major General Mario Montoya Uribe was appointed commander of the Colombian army in March of 2006, the US embassy in Bogota was largely unaware of his background and bona fides. The American ambassador to Colombia at the time, William Wood, reported in a cable WikiLeaked on Friday, that relatively little was known about Montoya aside from his many decorations as a career military man, his close personal relationship with then-president Alvaro Uribe, and persistent but as yet unsubstantiated rumors that the commander was corrupt and tied to conservative paramilitary forces throughout the country.

• Labor’s destructive secrecy

  The Age today published new Wikileak revelations about the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) and its policy vis-a-vis China…

• Julian Assange lodges extradition appeal

  Lawyers representing the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, have lodged papers to appeal against his extradition from Britain to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

• US cable throws more mud at Huawei

  A US diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks has further hampered the efforts of network equipment vendor Huawei as it aims to win more global business.

  Huawei and fellow Chinese-held networking vendor ZTE have already been banned from contracts in India over national security fears.

  In a cable released on WikiLeaks, Huawei and rival Chinese telco supplier ZTE are credited with providing “good and cheap” equipment that often wins government procurement tenders.

• WikiLeaks: Feudal Social Relations in the Brazilian Countryside

  This past fall, I had the opportunity to observe the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. In a logistical feat, the government managed to draw correspondents from all over the world for the occasion while taking care of all travel amenities. Politically and economically, Brazil has been on a roll over the past ten years or so, and the country has spared no expense when it comes to showing off its many accomplishments. Yet peer beneath the surface, and the South American powerhouse is still pre-modern in many ways. That, at least, was the impression I got from reading recently disclosed U.S. diplomatic cables from the whistle-blowing outfit WikiLeaks.

  [...]

  According to WikiLeaks documents, the Brazilian military held socially retrograde views of indigenous people in the countryside. As recently as 2009, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Lisa Kubiske noted that officers held the general opinion “that the Indians don’t produce anything but the farmers do, so the farmers should be the ones using the land.” In a sign of the times, Augusto Heleno, a four-star army general, received rousing applause after speaking out against indigenous demarcation at Rio de Janeiro’s Military Club. Following his broadside, Heleno ominously declared “the Army High Command is an organization that serves the Brazilian state, not the government.”

• In the Age of WikiLeaks, the End of Secrecy?

  I am a big believer in technology, and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.

  Obama added, “The truth is that because in the United States information is free…I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me. I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger, and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

  Or take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. No American official has been more eloquent in expressing support for the power of the Internet than Clinton, who gave a highly visible speech on “Internet freedom” on January 21, 2010, in Washington, where she waxed poetic about how “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet”…

• Former President George W. Bush Prejudices the Legal Process Against Julian Assange

  When a former president of the United States weighs in on an ongoing criminal investigation, there is considerable risk that his comments could make it impossible for justice to be fair and objective.

  Recently, former President George W. Bush said that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, “has willfully and repeatedly done great harm to the interests of the United States.” He made this statement, through a spokesman, in explaining why he was canceling a speech he had agreed to deliver to the Young Presidents Organization. He said he “had no desire to share a forum with” Assange, even though Assange was to speak by videoconference and they would not literally be sharing a platform or forum.

• Much ado about leaky cables is hilarious

  There is a comical and yet revelatory side to spillage of US secret diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. Comical in that they expose the wishful thinking of some our politicians, some of which border on the absurd. The cables are also revelatory as they unmask secret desires of those who seek to rule us — especially on what they think of people they kneel before and pretend to be friends with 24/7.

  You see from the WikiLeaks cables from Nairobi’s US embassy that, Kenyan politicians trust and worship foreigners more than their fellow countrymen. It may be a colonial hangover, what Ngugi Wa Thiong’o calls neocolonialism, that our leaders open up to foreigners and can literally bad-mouth their mother if that assures them they have a white man’s ear.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Republicans attack Obama’s environmental protection from all sides

  It started on a sultry day in Houston when hundreds of protesters, mostly oil company employees, were bussed to a concert hall in their lunch hour to rally against a historic first step by Congress to reduce the pollution that causes climate change.

  The event marked the start of a backlash by wealthy industry owners and conservative activists against Barack Obama’s green agenda. Now it has snowballed into what green campaigners say is the greatest assault on environmental protection that America has ever seen.

• What Is a Sacred Mountain Worth?

  A Vancouver-based company, First Majestic Silver Corp, has ignited fierce controversy over plans to mine silver from a mountain considered by an indigenous nation to be the birthplace of the sun.

  The Huichol called the Canadian mining project an “unlawful imposition” and part of a “a deepening war of extermination against our native peoples” in an October 2010 manifesto entitled Declaration in Defense of Wirikuta.

• More big snowstorms on the way as world’s climate warms

  In each of the past two winters, the northeastern US has been hammered by three Category 3 or above snowstorms. This has happened only once before in the last 50 years, during the winter of 1960-1961.

  “Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” says Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground website.

  “In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.”

• Stop oil sands from blowing into Europe!

  The European Union (EU) is about to make a decision that could define if we move towards a better, cleaner world or a short-sighted, dirty energy future.

• UK facing 1970s-style oil shock which could cost economy £45bn – Huhne

  Britain is facing a 1970s-style oil price shock that could cost the UK economy £45bn over two years, the climate and energy secretary, Chris Huhne, is expected to warn in his first intervention on the issue since the start of Middle East political crisis.

  In Thursday’s keynote speech on the impact of the oil crisis, Huhne argued that an $100 (£61) a barrel price for oil transforms the economics of climate change in Britain.

Finance

• The Guy Who Calls You “Chief” And 24 Other People To Avoid On Wall Street

  There are lots of critical skills you need to succeed on Wall Street. It helps to understand market forces. A facility with numbers is useful.

  Having a feel for group dynamics is necessary to succeed on trading desks and deal teams. Superb time management, verbal acuity, and judgment are all important.

  But, mostly, what you need to do is avoid the things that will destroy your career. And most of the things that will destroy your career go under the general heading of “people.”

• The World’s Ominous Reckoning

  Discussions about possible solutions to the debt crisis tend to degenerate into ideological bickering because ideologies provides an inadequate framework in which to understand the nature of the problem and discover real effective solutions. Fiscal conservatives want to cut social spending so as to avoid raising taxes on the rich and privileged class. Political liberals have largely caved in to the same interests because they think that supporting the privileged class’s agenda is their only hope of gaining power. They will pay lip service to a social agenda and throw a few crumbs to the masses in an attempt to get elected, but they will ultimately advance the same elitist agenda, as have Presidents Clinton and Obama. Progressives argue that budgets can be balanced by cutting the military budget and raising taxes on the rich, but they remain impotent because political power has been so thoroughly centralized that popular progressive agendas have not a prayer of being implemented. Even if they were, they would simply make matters worse because under the present money and banking regime, a balanced government budget is not possible. How can the debate move beyond ideologies, and common ground be found?

  Samuelson, like almost all conventionally trained economists, blames the woes of Ireland, and every other country, on failures in policy. He says, “Most European economies suffer from the ill effects of some combination of easy money, unsustainable social spending and big budget deficits,” but he fails to address the deeper questions of why? Why has money been easy? Why is social spending unsustainable? Why have budget deficits been too big?

Censorship

• China warns foreign media not to cover protests

  Chinese police are further intensifying pressure on foreign reporters, warning them to stay away from spots designated for Middle East-inspired protests and threatening them with expulsion or a revoking of their credentials.

  The warnings show how unnerved the authorities are by the online calls for protests every Sunday. The appeals, which started two weeks ago, have attracted few outright demonstrators but many onlookers, loads of journalists and swarms of police.

Privacy

• ICO evidence raises Freedoms Bill data worries

  The Information Commissioner (ICO) has just published a critique of the Home Office’s Freedoms Bill, which is being sold to the public as reining in New Labour’s surveillance state.

  Although there is general applause for the fact that the Government has recognised that there has been excessive intrusion into privacy, the ICO’s analysis points to a number of serious deficiencies.

Civil Rights

• Muslim student sues FBI over GPS tracking device placed on his car without a warrant

  The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) this week filed a civil rights lawsuit against the FBI on behalf of Yasir Afifi, a Muslim-American student of Egyptian descent who lives in Santa Clara, California.

• Richard Peppiatt’s letter to Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond

  You probably don’t know me, but I know you. For the last two years I’ve been a reporter at the Daily Star, and for two years I’ve felt the weight of your ownership rest heavy on the shoulders of everyone, from the editor to the bloke who empties the bins.

  Wait! I know you’re probably reaching for your phone to have me marched out of the building. But please, save on your bill. I quit.

  The decision came inside my local newsstand, whilst picking up the morning papers. As I chatted with Mohammed, the Muslim owner, his blinking eyes settled on my pile of print, and then, slowly, rose to meet my face.

• 6 Things Social Networking Sites Need to Stop Doing

  That’s what makes increasingly annoying and/or invasive social networking practices so much harder to swallow. We want all of the below to stop and, barring that, at least not get any worse. But if they don’t, what are we going to do? Ditch our computers and go live in the woods?

• Native Women Seek Justice at U.N.

  The United States is facing international scrutiny for its apparent failure to prosecute criminals who enter indigenous territories to prey on Native women and girls.

  Between 60 and 80 percent of violent victimisation of Native American women is perpetrated by non-Natives, says a U.N. expert on legal matters related to women’s rights violations worldwide.

  Rashida Manjoo, the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women, notes that in the U.S., indigenous women are much more vulnerable to abuses than any other ethnic group in the country.

• OPERATION ANONYMISS

• Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa

  On 26 October 2005, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa received its 15th ratification, meaning the Protocol entered into force on 25 November 2005.

• Cabinet Office gathers international examples of Big Society

  The Office for Civil Society has published a report citing international examples of Big Society initiatives.

  The aim of the report is to look at how other countries run their public services or organise local community projects that UK citizens or organisations can take inspiration from.

  It is not intended to be comprehensive review of what exists but to see how the Big Society is in action elsewhere and provide ideas for adaptation here.

• Beijing to track citizens with their cell phones

  As if the Great Firewall is not enough, the Chinese government is now looking into monitoring the movement of 17 million cellphone users in Beijing, China by tracking the signal of their mobile devices.

  Purportedly to improve Beijing’s public travel and reduce traffic congestion, the new initiative, literally translated as “Platform for Citizen Movement Information” proposes to track each individual citizen’s movement in real time via cell phone signals, as reported on the Beijing Municipal People’s Government website.

DRM

• Scorned librarians and the eBook piracy underground

  Early last year was the first time I found out one of my books was on a torrent site. It knew it was just a matter of time, and I was kind of relieved. Pleased, even. Like many authors, I have Google Alerts on certain things, and some of those things are my books. Really, I expected this.

  E-books and the ability to share or not to share them: that is the question every publisher and distributor is agonizing over. But no one seems to be answering it with anything short of clutching their petticoats and jumping up on the nearest chair.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier as an author to regard people stealing my work like this; after all, I hope to exist off of royalties.

• The rise of the 99-cent Kindle e-book

Intellectual Monopolies

• ‘Self-incriminators’ may be forced to tell the court what they know

  People accused of misusing confidential commercial or technical information have lost the right to avoid self-incrimination in court cases, following a High Court ruling.

  The ruling means that a law previously thought to apply only to intellectual property cases now applies to any case in which confidential commercial or technical information is involved, according to one expert.

• Genetics Company Myriad May Shift From Patents To Proprietary Data

  Myriad Genetics, a United States-based biotechnology company with exclusive patent rights over a key breast cancer diagnostic test in the US, may shift its patent strategy from its inventions to guarding its data in the face of drawn out litigation and upcoming competition, an industry journal has reported.

  The Genomics Law Report has published an analysis by a group of US academics and attorneys on how the company is likely to react to future competition.

• Copyrights

  • Top 40 Countries for Copyright Piracy & Cyberlockers

    The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is preparing for its annual “Special 301” report, which describes the adequacy and effectiveness of US trading partners’ protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). It is due to be presented to Congress in the next month or so.

  • Minecraft Creator Says ‘No Such Thing As A Lost Sale’

  • Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don’t Exist, Says Minecraft Creator

    The “piracy is stealing” argument raises its head in the media every week and is on the lips of anti-piracy outfits and copyright holders every day. To them, every unauthorized copy is a lost sale and another small dent in the company spreadsheet which, when added to a million others, will destroy it bit by bit. To the maker of Minecraft, however, its an opportunity. Piracy is theft? You must be kidding. Lost sales? They don’t exist.

  • Portuguese Government Creates Honeypot To Combat Piracy

    In Portugal, a collaboration between a Ministry of Culture affiliated organization and the local music industry has resulted in a protocol that calls for such a honeypot, in order to shame, scare and threaten those who download music without authorization.

  • Leaving A Major Record Label… And Seeing How The Music Business Is Thriving

    A few years ago, after seeing Ethan Kaplan speak, I had suggested that Warner Music promote him. At the time, Ethan was VP of technology for Warner Bros. Music, one of Warner Music’s sub-labels. I’d followed Ethan’s writings for a while, but hearing him speak convinced me that he was definitely one of the folks inside a major record label who really understood where things were headed. There definitely are a few such folks mixed in here and there, but they’re not always easy to find, and they usually don’t get the attention they deserve within those labels. Warner Music didn’t promote him until sometime last year, when they moved him up to the parent company, Warner Music Group, but the company’s top management still never seemed to recognize quite what they had in Ethan in terms of his ability to recognize where the market was heading and how a major label could (and should) respond to those challenges. So it was disappointing, but of little surprise when he left Warner Music a month ago. I have little doubt he’s now in high demand from a variety of forward-looking companies doing technology stuff in the music space, and I imagine he’ll pop up somewhere interesting soon.

  • ACTA

    • Mexico: ACTA Public Hearings Kick Off

      The controversial Anti-Counterfeit Commercial Agreement –widely known as ACTA– is currently under discussion in the Mexican Senate in response to opposition from civil society to the way the treaty’s negotiation process is being conducted.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Sydney Linux group may merge with Linux Australia

The Sydney Linux User Group may be wound up by the end of the month and function instead as a sub-committee of Linux Australia if a motion drafted by its president, James Polley, is passed at the AGM on March 25.

Weighting for Good Web Stats

Now, China has a high usage of GNU/Linux compared to Canada or the USA but, if the client sites of Net Applications are more likely to be visited by businesses or organizations using XP than GNU/Linux, overweighting them could certainly exaggerate the tenacity of that other OS share.

Desktop

• Dell Inspiron M101z review

  Dell’s latest netbook cum sub-notebook boasts the latest AMD technology and dual boots with Ubuntu. We’re still in shock, but have pulled ourselves together long enough to bring you a full review…

• Linux Leaders: Debian and Ubuntu Derivative Distros

  Most of the netbook-centered choices are based upon Ubuntu, and emphasize social media and cloud computing. They include Aurora (formerly Eeebuntu), Easy Peasy, and Jolicloud.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Full Circle Podcast 16: Its probably plugged into a tree

  Full Circle Podcast #16: Its probably plugged into a tree

  In this VERY late and LONG DELAYED episode (blame Catling), Firefox versus Chrome-Ium.

• FLOSS Weekly 155: PacketFence

Applications

• Have some Linux ascii fun with asciiquarium

• Scrivener for Linux gets official beta release

  An official Linux beta release of popular writing application Scrivener is now available for users to try.

• gEcrit – A new Python IDE intended for beginners

• Top 5 Media Center Applications for Linux

  We have discussed a lot about multimedia applications available for Linux, but never really about media center applications specifically. Unlike many other niches where Linux lags behind other proprietary OS’s in terms of good applications available, Linux have a clear upper hand when you consider the sheer number of very good open source media center applications available out there. Here is a quick listing of top 5 media center applications for Linux.

• Proprietary

  • Speed Dial zooming, multi-column, and mail fixes

    We are still focusing on improving Speed Dial, and here’s the next piece of the puzzle! The first thing you should test is zooming in on the Speed Dial page and then add some new Speed Dials. When that is done, why not try out some of the new options in the configurations dialog? Note that this is still work in progress, so more changes are expected. See the highlights below for more on what’s new in Speed Dial.

  • Opera Will Be Doing It Right

    The news from the Opera Desktop Team has not been so easily flowing for a while now, and with a look on the developers’ page, it is now clear to see why.

    Though the 11.10 release has had a couple of alpha efforts (they were mistakenly given a beta moniker by some places, like Betanews, but when checking with the Desktop Team blog, it was clear that they were being called alpha efforts. The first thing that was happening was a few niggling bugs were fixed, and they have also promised that the Speed Dial feature would be user selectable in the number of spots offered.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Nested-RAID: The Triple Lindy

  • Batch Process Photos in digiKam

  • Unattended Linux Wakeup, Backup, Shutdown (part 5)

  • The mysterious Linux command line

  • Add More Layouts To gMusicBrowser With gMusicBrowser-Art

  • How to Browse Privately on Public Wi-Fi for Free

  • Easy way to create reports from any data

• Games

  • Dev-Corner: the challenges of developing long, plot-heavy FOSS games

    Xenogears is one of my favorite games of all time. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it was a Japanese RPG for the Sony PS1 in 1998. Not everyone agrees that it was an amazing game, but it’s undeniably one of the longest, most plot-heavy RPGs ever made, especially given the fact that most of the plot is in the form of the main story line as opposed to random side-quests that have very little to do with the overall goal. Xenogears is particularly interesting in that each time you play it through, you’ll pick up more and more little plot details that you missed the first time around. This is because not only does it have a massive main plot, it also has a massive back story spanning several thousand years, which is only really revealed in small details that are only apparent once you’re already familiar with the main plot.

  • Oilrush Pre Order has begun!

Desktop Environments

• What is Your Favorite Desktop?

  KDE and GNOME were always the two top favorites. In 2005 KDE got 53% of the votes while GNOME received 27%. In 2008 KDE got 46% and GNOME 39%. Last month KDE earned 41% of the vote in contrast to GNOME which got 37%. We can conclude that for a while GNOME was catching up with KDE as it gained in popularity while KDE declined. This could probably be attributed to the rise of Ubuntu and the release of KDE 4. But the anomaly of GNOME’s recent slight recline could reflect on diminishing use of Ubuntu in response to their move to Unity or perhaps users are moving to other desktops again in response to the move to Unity. We can only speculate. However, it is interesting to note that the new addition, Unity, to the poll this year netted a 2% take. While that would make up the decrease in GNOME this year, KDE still decreased as well by 5%.

  The interesting numbers for KDE and GNOME make the third, fourth, and fifth placements even more relevant. Xfce came in third all three years of polling. In 2005 it got 8% of the vote, 6% in 2008, and 6% in 2011. So while it lost 2% between 2005 and 2008, it remained the same this year as it did in 2008. Could that 2% have moved to GNOME?

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Back to Basics with KDE 4

    After our review of KDE 4.6, we received a great deal of positive comments, but not all of them were sparkling assessments of KDE’s functionality. For that reason, I have decided to get back to the basics this week with a little how-to guide for KDE 3 users who may be reluctant to switch to KDE 4, Gnome or other desktop users who avoid KDE because of certain usability problems, and anyone who might be new to the software and its unique desktop interface.

    [...]

    KDE also has a “Multiple Monitors” configuration that gives you extra settings for virtual desktops, screen maximization, and more.

  • KDE Commit Digest for 13 February 2011

  • Qt and the Future of KDE

    Qt remains the strong, cross-platform foundation of everything we do. Combined with KDE technologies, we believe Qt is the compelling framework for cross-platform software development. There has never been a better time to shape the future of computing. Join us and make that future a future that is free.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3 Beta: Ever So Slightly More Than a Pretty Face

    GNOME 3 still lacks its own applications dock. And the GNOME panel that lets you pin icons to it for quick launch is gone. So I use Avant Window Navigator for my comfort zone. I discovered early on that AWN is still going to be a vital part of my desktop navigation after the official upgrade to GNOME 3. See my review of AWN here.

    Even worse, the change to GNOME 3 disables Compiz, so all of the cool special effects — mostly desktop eye candy but still some nifty features — are left behind permanently, according to GNOME3.org.

    The new GNOME shell uses the Mutter window manager to provide its own style of eye-popping animation effects. Compiz is a compositing manager that can also be a window manager. It improves user interaction by adding fancy effects to the desktop windows. In layman’s terms, Mutter and Compiz are like oil and water. They do not mix.

  • Track Me! Just Track Me, GNOME Project!

    The upcoming GNOME 3 release will be making some controversial changes, such as removing the Window List from the panel making for a more “task-based environment” as they say, they’re also removing the Minimize and Maximize window control buttons and Desktop icons (at least at the moment that’s what it seems like.)

    These design changes along with some inflexible and controversial Power Management settings, more and more people are expressing disinterest in GNOME 3.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Kororaa GNU/Linux is back

    GNU/Linux distributions are like ships in the night – they come and go and sometimes disappear from sight altogether. Some last just a few months, while others, despite being the brainchild of a single individual, stay on for years and years.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • [p]review: Fedora 15 + GNOME 3.0, a skippable release

      So now that the Alpha release for Fedora 15 has been declared gold, all the features are in, only polish and bug fixing are to be applied until final, is the time for previews are reviews, it was also the time for me to look at the new default desktop and understand what is coming. The executive summary of my review is: from a desktop point of view, this is a release to skip, and I am not talking about the Alpha, but about F15 altogether.

• Debian Family

  • Debian announces first South American Security Mirror

    The Debian project is proud to announce the availability of the first official security.debian.org mirror in South America. security.debian.org carries all the security updates of the stable and oldstable releases.

  • Spotlight on Linux: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 “Squeeze”

    Rock solid stability, timely updates, and easy package management are top reasons Debian is used on a large number of desktops and laptops.

  • People behind Debian: Christian Perrier, translation coordinator

    Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he’s very involved at the social level. He’s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 11.10 Release Schedule

      The Ubuntu team is already planning for the release of Ubuntu 11.10, it will be released on the 6th of October 2011.

      Here is a list of dates when the Alpha and Beta versions will be released.

    • Ubuntu, the cloud OS

      We made a small flurry of announcements last week, all of which were related to cloud computing. I think it is worthwhile to put some context around Ubuntu and the cloud and explain a little more about where we are with this critical strategic strand for our beloved OS.

      First of all, the announcements. We announced the release of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Dell servers. This is a hugely significant advance in the realm of internal cloud provision. It’s essentially formalising a lot of the bespoke work that Dell has done in huge data centres (based on a variety of OSes) and making similar technology available for smaller deployments. We attended the Dell sales summit in Las Vegas and we were very encouraged to meet with many of the Dell salespeople whose job it will be to deliver this to their customers. This is a big company, backing a leading technology and encouraging businesses to start their investigations of cloud computing in a very real way.

    • Open Letter to Ubuntu – fix the patching schedule

      We love the operating system. We use it almost exclusively at Yooter’s offices, but we do have one serious complaint.

      Over the past 6 months we have logged nearly daily updates to the linux based operating system. To the point where nearly every single day we have a new patch. We want to propose a change to the way Ubuntu patches the system.

    • Stepping down considerately

      I have started as an Ubuntu user in 2005, I have found it a promising project mostly because it was aimed at “humans” users, while most similar projects had still a greater focus on developers or development oriented aspects.
      Getting involved was easy, the developers could be found on IRC some of them more friendly than others but always there, a point of connection with the community.
      As soon I had some know-how I have started participating in the forums, each question was an opportunity for teaching, learning or improving, it was a great experience.

    • Interview: Ted Gould on Ubuntu Unity

      Linux Magazine’s Senior Software Editor Brockmeier, talks with Ted Gould of Canonical about the upcoming release of Ubuntu Unity. In this interview Ted touches on Unity’s UI design decisions, hardware drivers and bundled software.

    • Xnoise is a Fast, Lightwieght Music Player for Ubuntu

      Xnoise is a fast, lightweight and minimal music player for Ubuntu based on a unique track list queuing feature where users can drag and drop tracks or group of tracks from multiple albums/artists on a playlist.

      The layout is quite simple with a left sidebar that shows song artists and other metadata in a hierarchical structure and a right column that shows your playlist. Xnoise also comes with lots of plugins that bring Lastfm integration, native notifications support, album covers and the new Ubuntu sound menu integration.

    • Ratings&reviews “Was this review helpful?”

    • Thanks Ubuntu

      Nothing is free (as in beer). Somebody throughout the years has been sponsoring this: parents, universities, companies, individuals, etc. Who is paying bills for all the bandwidth, disk space, buildbots, that you have ever used? Surely it wasn’t yourself all the time.

      [...]

      This “flame war” was actually very boring…

    • Introducing Overlay Scrollbars in Unity

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 Is Out [Screenshots And Video]

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 Released with Lots of New Features

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 Released – Overview and Screenshots

      Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Alpha 3 has been released today that brings many fixes, improvements and new features over the last Alpha 2. For Ubuntu 11.04, a feature freeze is already in place and Alpha 3 is first release after that.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 released

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Bodhi Linux 0.1.6 RC2 – First Look and Initial Impressions

        My immediate reaction? I love the theme/profile selection. I love the tablet/netbook usability. I love how minimal/lightweight it is. Just a few things keep it from being 100% for me… click “Read More” below to watch the video and see why…

        If you’re interested in trying it out, head over to bodhilinux.com.

      • Kanotix 2011-03 Is Based on Debian 6 Squeeze

        Kanotix 2011-03 Hellfire has been released. The latest release of the KDE-based distro uses the recently launched Debian 6 Squeeze and adds a number of packages and fixes along with a modern kernel.

        Kanotix 2011-03 Hellfire uses the rather old, but stable, KDE SC 4.4.5, with some customizations, and introduces Libre Office 3.3.1 which replaces OpenOffice.org.

Devices/Embedded

• Saab demos in-car Android infotainment system with open API

  Saab Automobile unveiled an Android-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) concept supported by an open API and app store. The “Saab IQon” system is equipped with an eight-inch touchscreen, provides streaming multimedia, navigation, and on-board storage, and offers API access to more than 500 sensor signals that can be remotely relayed back to Saab dealerships.

Packt Publishing Supports Open Source by $300,000 (So far)

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve reviewed a couple of books for Packt before; they asked me and I was happy to (I got a free book for my time and learned some new stuff). Last year I felt rather honoured when asked to be a judge on their popular Open Source Awards – In the Open Source E-Commerce Applications category.

Events

• DrupalCon Chicago is Only Days Away–Focused on Design, Usability

  Here at OStatic, we’ve had good success running our site on the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal, and Drupal has been steadily spreading out, becoming popular at countless sites, and arriving as the publishing platform that many online newspapers and media outlets now favor. From March 7th to 11th, DrupalCon Chicago–a huge conference dedicated to the CMS–will be held, and there will be a special focus on design and user experience. Here are some of the details on the conference, and some useful Drupal resources and introductory materials that we’ve collected.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Fortifies, Crashifies Firefox For Hacking Contest

    Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.14 as well as 3.5.17 in anticipation of a round of nasty hack attacks.

  • Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, Feb 28, 2011

  • New Ubuntu Integration!

  • Robust Firefox

    I opened up Firefox and applied the same procedure except for renaming the .chrdownload file to .part file and Firefox intelligently downloaded only what remained of the file completing the download in minutes.

  • Firefox 4 and that wee menu!

SaaS

• Latest Releases of Karmasphere Products Further Hadoop Usability and Performance in the Enterprise

• DMTF highlights demand for cloud license management relief

  Still, concerns and cost pains associated with license management are part of a theme that has been resonating among both customers and providers, and I believe it is among the primary drivers of open source in cloud computing. Open source is not only associated with cost savings, it is associated with greater ease and simplicity in licensing. After all, if you’re concerned about figuring out and paying for the cloud computing resources you use instead of taking advantage of those resources, you can always just use the free, unpaid software if it is open source. While there may well be similar licensing headaches awaiting customers of commercial open source software, the fact of the matter is open source does provide more flexibility and open source is no-doubt associated positively with cost savings, license management savings and general user empowerment.

  We also discussed the importance of license management and related open source advantages when we highlighted the year 2011 for Linux. In addition, the work of the DMTF and the issue of license management also plays into our recent take on the pillars of openness in today’s enterprise IT landscape.

Databases

• 5 of the Best Relational Database Management System for Linux

  A Database Management System (DBMS) is described as a set of computer programs that manages the creation, maintenance, and administration of a database. It is a system software package that supports the use of unified collection of data records and files known as databases. A DBMS could utilize any of a variety of database models, such as the network model or relational model.

  A relational database management system (RDBMS) is a DBMS in which data is stored in the form of tables, and the relationship among the data is stored in the form of tables as well. Nowadays, majority of popular commercial and open-source databases are based on the relational database model.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Survey: Oracle bad for Java, MySQL (infographic)

  On March 3, database vendor EnterpriseDB is set to release the results of its survey conducted at the JavaOne conference last September in San Francisco.

  More than 600 IT professionals completed the survey, the results of which provide a bit of insight into community sentiment regarding Oracle’s control of open-source projects Java and MySQL.

• Surprised? Survey Suggests Oracle Bad for Open Source

  Open source database vendor EnterpriseDB is taking the fight to database market leader Oracle via a survey showing that respondents generally don’t trust Oracle on prices, think Oracle is bad for Java and don’t really like Larry Ellison. Although EnterpriseDB acknowledges the survey — which was answered by more than 600 JavaOne conference attendees — is unscientific, the results do seem to mirror the thoughts on Oracle that pop up again and again in the IT press. And the infographic is fun.

• LibreOffice Suite Features Unique to Open Source Community

  Lest anyone complain that the free-software world doesn’t offer enough choices, there are now two major open source office suites vying for the hearts and minds of choosy end users. But since both of these products — OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice — derive from the same codebase, what actually sets them apart? Here we take a look at a few features unique to LibreOffice.

• Using Oracle Berkeley DB as a NoSQL Data Store

Business

• Openbravo Introduces Agile ERP with Openbravo 3

  Openbravo, the leading web-based Open Source ERP provider, today released the next-generation of its flagship open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Openbravo 3 introduces the concept of ‘Agile ERP’ to a software category known historically for bloat and cost overruns. Openbravo’s Agile ERP approach is a significant departure from mainstream ERP, which forces businesses to over-pay for massive, yet inflexible systems. Unlike today’s conventional ERP, organizations can deploy Openbravo in as little two weeks, then add modular functionality as the needs of their business evolve.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Vaadin Pro Account Adds Tools and Support for the Open Source Framework

BSD

• PC-BSD 8.2 review

  PC-BSD is a desktop distribution based on FreeBSD. The latest stable release, PC-BSD 8.2, was made available for public download last month. This article presents a review of this latest release.

Project Releases

• Spring GemFire 1.0.0 Released!

  I am pleased to announce that the first GA release of the Spring GemFire 1.0 project is now available for both Java and .NET! The Spring GemFire project aims to make it easier to build Spring-powered highly scalable applications using GemFire as distributed data management platform.

Government

• German Open Source Experiment: Things Not Going To Plan

  Unfortunately, all of the reports that I have been able to find and translate lacked the precise details or hard figures that proved that Linux had failed. The forums and discussion threads on various sites are bubbling with comments hinting that Microsoft may have stepped in with huge financial incentives to switch. However, there have been no reports of a backlash from the workers themselves now that they are being to being moved back to Windows and other proprietary software, and we need to ask some tough questions about why.

• FR: Candidats.fr initiative to raise election candidates’ awareness of free software

  In the light of the cantonal elections of 20 and 27 March 2011 in France, April, a non-profit organisation promoting and advocating free software, relaunched ‘Candidats.fr’, an initiative whose aim is to raise the future local councillors’ awareness of this software.

  The association wishes to advise local councillors on related issues, in particular open standards and the use of open free software in government and communities. For this purpose, April invites everyone to participate in the campaign by contacting candidates and encouraging them to sign the Free Software Pact.

Standards/Consortia

• Introducing PhiloGL: A WebGL Framework from Sencha Labs

  For some time now I’ve been working on a Sencha Labs project to build a WebGL framework and today I’m very proud to release it. It’s called PhiloGL and it’s intended for advanced data visualization, creative coding and game development.

Former Tory MPs speak out against Conservative ‘in-and-out’ scheme

The Conservative party wanted them in, but they wanted out.

Two former Tory MPs say they refused to join the party’s “in-and-out” election financing scheme, adding to the number of Conservatives who say they had misgivings about the system.

Inky Mark, who resigned his Manitoba seat last year, said his staff was contacted by party officials during the 2006 election campaign. He said the officials asked of they could deposit several thousand dollars in his campaign account and withdraw it later to buy advertising.

Tories re-brand government in Stephen Harper’s name

And lest anyone forgets, a directive went out to public servants late last year that “Government of Canada” in federal communications should be replaced by the words “Harper Government.”

Science

• Bruce Winstein, physicist, 1943-2011

• Fermilab releases a new version of Scientific Linux

  For more than 12 years, Fermilab has supplied thousands of individuals in the scientific community with the operating system that forms the foundation for their exploration of the universe’s secrets. The Linux operating system produced at Fermilab enabled the laboratory, and other high-energy physics institutions to build large physics data analysis clusters using affordable, commercially available computers.

  The newest version of the Scientific Linux is now available.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Battle rages over Libyan oil port

  The Libyan air force has bombed the oil refinery and port town of Marsa El Brega as battles between forces loyal and against Muammar Gaddafi continued to rage in several towns across the North African country.

  “We just watched an air force jet … fly over Brega and drop at least one bomb and huge plumes of smoke are now coming out,” Al Jazeera’s Tony Birtley said on Wednesday.

• Police services review of G20 moves to next phase

  The Toronto Police Services Board’s investigation of the G20 summit has concluded its research phase and will now move into the interview stage of the process.

  This update was provided Thursday at a police board meeting at police headquarters on College St. The civilian review, headed by retired judge John W. Morden, will scrutinize policing issues surrounding the G20 summit this June, which saw 1,105 people arrested.

• Tories rebrand Gov’t of Canada as ‘Harper Gov’t’

• Ivory Coast on brink of civil war as seven women killed at protest march

  Seven women have been massacred during a peaceful protest in Ivory Coast as the country appeared to stand on the brink of all-out civil war.

  More than 200,000 people have fled, and the nation that was once a model of stability in west Africa is now experiencing bloodshed and economic meltdown.

• Not $1 more

  Despite all the tough talk, neither the President nor the Congress are proposing to cut overall spending on war and weapons. In fact, BOTH parties are still talking about an INCREASE in spending for the Pentagon, which already gets more than 50% of all the money Congress votes on, and that doesn’t even *count* the money for the actual wars.

Cablegate

• Lawyer: Bradley Manning Left Naked In Jail Cell

  A lawyer for Bradley Manning, the Army private charged with passing along secret government files to WikiLeaks, said Manning had been stripped naked in his Quantico, Virginia, jail cell for seven hours Wednesday. Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, said Manning was only given his clothes Thursday morning after being required to stand outside of his cell naked after an inspection. First Lt. Brian Villiard, a Marine spokesman, said a brig duty supervisor had ordered Manning’s clothes taken from him, and said it would be “kind of inappropriate” to explain what exactly happened. Manning is being held as a maximum security detainee and is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. One of Manning’s friends, David House, said Thursday that he had visited Manning the previous weekend and the soldier’s mental condition is deteriorating as a result of his prison conditions. Manning is also under suicide watch.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Coal safe come ‘hell, high water’

  STATE Treasurer Kim Wells has vowed to protect Victoria’s brown coal competitive advantage ”come hell or high water”, warning he will not put at risk hundreds of thousands of jobs that rely on cheap power.

  In an interview with The Age, Mr Wells also said the government had not yet decided whether Victoria would sign up to the federal government’s carbon tax, but would honour a commitment to cut state greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent over the next decade.

Finance

• Inside Job Director Charles Ferguson With Charlie Rose: “It’s A Wall Street Government”

• Lawsuits could cost Goldman Sachs up to $3.4bn

  Goldman Sachs faces a barrage of litigation that could “reasonably” cost it as much as $3.4bn (£2.1bn), according to a regulatory filing by the investment bank.

  The bank has been named as a defendant in lawsuits related to its actions during the 2008 credit crisis, its research coverage and the collapse of the cable company Adelphia Communications. It is being sued by the city of Cleveland for causing a “public nuisance” with its backing of sub-prime loans.

• Inside Job Trailer #1 – Former Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin Is Corrupt

• Sheila Bair Makes Another Useless Threat: “If the biggest banks can’t show they can be resolved in bankruptcy then they should be downsized now”

  One requirement of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill is that the big banks are required to file resolution plans, or “living wills,” outlining how they could be broken up in the event of failure. In her interview today with Reuters, FDIC chair Sheila Bair says that some of the large, complex institutions, (Citi, Goldman Sachs, et al.) would have to be restructured if they can’t come up with a credible resolution plan. Of course, they can’t come up with a credible resolution plan that would cause the Federal Bailout Machine to stand down during a crisis — that’s why they’re Too Big To Fail.

• Is G.E. the Real Reason Paulson Panicked in the Aftermath of Lehman? – Shrieking Cries Of Immelt Pain

  Last night (just for kicks), I watched the BBC documentary from last year on the fall of Lehman and I was struck by two things. First, the “credit was frozen” meme went unquestioned — we’ve come to expect that. But the second thing that struck me was that Neel Kashkari went out of his way to say that it wasn’t just financial companies that were having problems with short-term borrowing, but that non-financial companies were, too.

• Inside Job Wins The Oscar: “Not A Single Financial Executive Has Gone To Jail, And That’s Wrong”

  Charles Ferguson’s brilliant film on the financial crisis won the Academy Award last night for Best Documentary Feature. In itself, the Oscar represents a win for the anti-bailout movement, but Ferguson seized the moment during his speech to make this simple, but powerful statement:

  * “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”

• Libya’s Billions Invested In U.S. Private Equity, Big Banks

  The oil-rich country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority, controls at least $70 billion in fixed assets and reserves. It has invested the bulk of its money in European banks and businesses, including Dutch-Belgian bank Fortis, Italian bank Unicredit, the Pearson publishing empire, Italian defense firm Finmeccanica SpA, an oil-production sharing agreement with BP and even a slice of the Italian soccer team Juventus.

• Republicans Offer Lame Brain Reasons Why Americans Shouldn’t Have Safe Roads

  A minor debate in the House of Representatives a couple of days ago regarding funding for highway and mass transit in America exposed a stark difference between Republican and Democrats’ approach to job creation and infrastructure improvements. Indeed, the Republicans showed they are not serious about job creation or infrastructure improvements, but instead propounded the myriad ways Democrats and President Obama are attempting to squander tax dollars the Republicans would rather hand over to corporations and the wealthy.

• Highway Survival – The Warning Signs of Construction

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Regulators Reject Proposal That Would Bring Fox-Style News to Canada

  As America’s middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades — against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News — fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada’s right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Civil Rights

• US Supreme Court: 1st Amendment Shields Westboro Baptist Church – The Decision as Text – Updated

  The US Supreme Court has just ruled [PDF] that the First Amendment shields Westboro Baptist Church from tort liability for picketing at military funerals. The case centered on whether the “speech is of public or private concern, as determined by all the circumstances of the case.” The court held that it was public speech, and hence protected. Because it’s a controversial case, and the opinion is a narrow one with a vigorous dissenting opinion by Judge Samuel Alito, I thought it would be useful to do a text version for you so you can understand the nuances.

DRM

• Impoundment Issues and an Agreement on “Narrowed” Subpoenas in SCEA v. Hotz – Updated

  The parties in SCEA v. Hotz have been trying to work out their differences about the impoundment protocol. The parties can’t agree, so they have written a joint letter to the magistrate judge, Judge Joseph Spero, laying out their conflicting positions. If you recall, the presiding judge, Hon. Susan Illston, told the parties to work these things out with the magistrate judge. So this is following up with that directive.

  The parties have reach an agreement on the scope of the third-party subpoenas on Bluehost, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Softlayer and such regarding jurisdictional discovery that Sony feels it needs to counter George Hotz’s Motion to Dismiss. Or more exactly, SCEA says they have reached agreement. The parties still don’t agree on subpoena to Paypal, an issue already before the court.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Full migration to Linux

  These users now use Evolution as your mail client and OpenOffice as office suite, all running on Linux Fedora 14, and with some benefits own Linux networks…

Ballnux

• HTC Magic / T-Mobile G1 gets Honeycomb port, Android past and future fused together (video)

  The original gangster of Android, T-Mobile’s G1, just refuses to quietly fade into the annals of history. Even in spite of its long overdue end of retail life last summer, the handset continues to see support from grassroots modders and tweakers, with the latest project being the most ambitious of them all: an Android Honeycomb port. A pair of xda members have succeeded in splicing Android’s most senior hardware with its very latest software and the results are available to see on video after the break. As usual with these builds, half of the phone’s functions have still to be enabled and the UI lag seems like it’ll be a permanent feature whatever happens, but still — it’s Honeycomb on the G1!

Kernel Space

• Linux 2.6.38-rc7

• A New, Unique Linux Hardware Blog

  If you’re a Linux enthusiast and/or a computer hardware enthusiast, a new blog has launched this morning that definitely should be of interest to you.

  This new blog focuses upon benchmarks, performance testing, new hardware launches, computing trends, Linux software performance, etc. It’s the OpenBenchmarking.org blog. But before wondering if it’s just a Phoronix blog or something else mundane, it is not. In fact, it’s based upon community content and test results. The blog’s content, in fact, is mostly auto-generated.

• Yocto Project Aligns Technology with OpenEmbedded and Gains Corporate Collaborators

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that the Yocto Project will align with the OpenEmbedded community to advance embedded Linux. The Linux Foundation today is also announcing a variety of new companies that are participating in these embedded Linux efforts.

  The Yocto Project is merging technology with the OpenEmbedded community and extending governance to include OpenEmbedded representatives. In addition, the projects are planning to share a common OpenEmbedded Core consisting of software build recipes and core Linux components, preventing fragmentation and reinforcing the OpenEmbedded methodology as an open standard for embedded Linux build systems.

• Stable kernel 2.6.32.30

• Linux 2.6.32.30

• Glamorous pictures?

  The event last weekend was a “no cameras” event, and while we’ll have pictures, I don’t have them yet.

  And I think I’ll keep them private when we get them – no need to embarrass the beautiful people any more than we already did.

  So to make up for that, here’s a glamorous shot from about seventeen years ago that maddog (on the left) found the other day. It’s from DECUS, New Orleans, 1994.

• Graphics Stack

  • The Mesa S3TC External Library Hits Version 1.0.0

    For those that use libtxc_dxtn, the external S3TC library to Mesa to provide S3 Texture Compression support, version 1.0.0 is now available.

  • Intel Is Readying The xf86-video-intel 2.15 Driver

    With it nearing the end of the quarter, Intel’s OSTC team working on their Linux graphics driver stack is readying their quarterly driver update. Along with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and Mesa 7.11 as some of the key components to make up this quarter’s Linux package, the xf86-video-intel 2.15.0 X.Org driver will also be released. In preparing for this milestone, Chris Wilson has released the first development snapshot of this DDX driver.

  • Mesa 7.10.1, Mesa 7.9.2 Stable Releases

    While there are already lots of exciting work within Mesa’s Git master repository for Mesa 7.11 within core and classic Mesa along with the Gallium3D area, for those users sticking to stable releases, Intel’s Ian Romanick has announced the releases of Mesa 7.9.2 and 7.10.1.

Applications

• Writers Rejoice: First Look at Scrivener for Linux

  Scrivener is a tool for outlining, storyboarding, writing, and editing longer-form writing — think books, lengthy reports, movie scripts, and so on. Scrivener started as an app for Mac OS X, but there’s been a steady stream of users who’ve asked the company to produce a Windows and/or Linux version. Turns out, the company has been listening and is working on a beta for Linux and it’s looking pretty good.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Backup Gmail Using Thunderbird

  • Add More Layouts To gMusicBrowser With gMusicBrowser-Art

  • How to Create a Media Player in 30 Seconds

  • The @Font-Face Rule and Useful Web Font Tricks

  • FAST Win7 KVM VirtIO{Disk-Net} Install

• Games

  • Unigine OilRush Pre-Order For Linux Now Open

    On Monday I reported that pre-ordering for Unigine’s OilRush Linux game would be imminent. This morning, you can now pre-order this impressive game built atop the demanding but beautiful Unigine Engine.

    OilRush is Unigine’s first in-house game and we have been testing it since December while the February build is quite nice with the game being just weeks away from release.

Desktop Environments

• Call for Participation

  The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organised by the GNOME and KDE communities in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011. Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC and Akademy are the world’s largest gatherings of those involved with the free desktop or mobile user interfaces. Developers, artists, translators, community organisers, users, and representatives from government, education, and businesses and anyone else who shares an interest are welcome. GNOME and KDE are Free Software communities that drive the user interfaces of many Linux-powered devices, ranging from smartphones to laptops, or personal media centers. This year, for the second time, both communities have decided to organise a single, joint conference expecting over a thousand participants, covering both projects as well as related technologies.

• Zeitgeist proceedings for GNOME 3.0, Unity and KDE

  Currently the Zeitgeist team is back from a short hiatus after the successful hackfest, leading to a release of Zeitgeist and all the belonging modules as part of the 0.8 cycle on the 15th of March.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Fitts Is An Interesting “Big Buttons” Metacity Theme

    Fitts is a new Metacity theme created by albyrock87 (Alberto) who’s also behind the cool new Avant Window Navigator Lucido style and also a Synapse developer. The theme is based on a mockup by rAX and is designed to use big buttons so they are easy to click.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Kanotix Hellfire 2011-03 Linux Released

    Kano, a well known member of the Phoronix community, has just released his Kanotix “Hellfire” 2011-03 German Linux distribution.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Follow Mageia calendar and stay tuned!

    Mageia now provides a calendar so that you can follow everything happening in the project. For now, we’ll use Google Calendar as it was fast to set up but later we will switch to a self-hosted calendar.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • systemd for Administrators, Part V

      In systemd, there are three levels of turning off a service (or other unit).

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Upstart 1.0 “This is a fertile land, and we will thrive” released

      The trouble with a “1.0″ release is that the temptation is for that version to be the one with all the features you want when your users want it to be stable. This is a 1.0 release of the latter kind, based on the 0.6.x code that was shipped in both the most recent Ubuntu LTS and RedHat Enterprise Linux releases. If you’re running Upstart anywhere right now, it’s highly recommended that you update to this version, there shouldn’t be any surprises!

    • Upstart 1.0 released

    • Ayatana overlay scrollbars: something truly Natty

      A wit said of Google Wave “if your project depends on reinventing scrollbars, you are doing something wrong.” But occasionally, just occasionally, one gets to do exactly that.

      Under the Ayatana banner, we’ve been on a mission to make the desktop have less chrome and more content. The goal is to help people immerse themselves in their stuff, without being burdened with large amounts of widgetry which isn’t relevant to the thing they are trying to concentrate on. And when it comes to widgetry, there are few things left which take up more space than scrollbars.

    • Unity To Get Overlay Scrollbars!

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 11 “Katya” to use GNOME 3

        Linux Mint Founder and lead developer Clement Lefebvre has announced that the next major release of his Ubuntu-based Linux distribution will feature the GNOME 3.0 desktop environment, which is expected to be finalised on the 6th of April. According to Lefebvre, unlike Canonical’s Ubuntu, Linux Mint 11, code named “Katya”, will not use Unity, instead opting for GNOME 3 “using a traditional desktop layout” without the GNOME Shell.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Widelands for MeeGo Tablet

      This is Widelands patched for touchscreen friendly UI.
      It’s running on Lenovo Ideapad with MeeGo 1.1.90 and Cordia on top.

      I originally made the touchscreen Widelands wersion for Maemo 5 and as you can see it runs just fine on MeeGo.

    • [MeeGo-dev] tablet release…

      Hi everyone… I know there are a lot of questions about the open sourcing of the meego tablet pre-alpha that was shown couple of weeks ago… I just want to let you know that we are planning on open sourcing the tablet UX code in the next few weeks. This was planned to go open source at the same time we showed it, but given few complications, we had to delay this a bit…

    • Nokia strategy for MeeGo after Microsoft partnership

      MeeGoExperts has an overview of MeeGo-tablet 1.2 UX: The MeeGo Tablet User Interface (UI) is different to most tablet manufacturers as it does not have a wall of icons or widgets, but alternatively has a series of panes. Each Pane can be assigned a particular category such as Photos / Video / Music or Twitter. We can see these also being used for additional business functionality such as Email and Calendar as well as other social networking clients.

    • Come and get em, More updates to MeeGo 1.1 and 1.0

      The MeeGo team have released two MeeGo Software updates, including the 3rd update for MeeGo v1.1 Core, Netbook, and In-Vehicle and also the 7th update for MeeGo v1.0 Core and Netbook.

    • How Much Will MeeGo Cost Nokia: Can It Afford Not to Pay?

      Nokia’s new strategy to use Microsoft’s software is both plan A and B for the Finnish handset maker, but plan C may stand for “costly.” The company is reportedly paying out bonuses to keep developing its MeeGo platform. Today’s Mobile Business Briefing blog says salary increases and bonuses are going to developers and engineers in the MeeGo area in order to maintain progress on the first MeeGo handset, dubbed the N950. Although Nokia has announced plans to use Windows Phone 7 on future smartphones, the company officially committed to delivering at least one MeeGo product this year.

    • Initial work on porting GNUstep over N900

    • Meego qtdemos tegra2

    • QmlBook

  • Android

    • 5 Incredible Android Tablets Showcased at Mobile World Congress 2011

      Mobile World Congress 2011 was quite literally overwhelmed by the sheer number of new Android OS based devices. Among the devices, the ones who completely stole the limelight were the Tablets. Almost all major hardware manufacturer has a Tablet in the pipeline and most of them are running open source Android OS. Here we are going to feature some of the best and most promising Android based Tablets unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2011.

    • Android developers form ‘union’ to protest Google policies

      A group of Android developers have formed the Android Developers Union, a movement that intends to protest Google’s Android Market policies.

      The group has made seven demands and claims that its members will, if demands are not met, move to other platforms and attempt to dissuade fellow developers from working with the Android platform. Among the Android Developers Union’s demands are a renegotiation of the 32% Google cut on applications sold through the store, more payment options and public bug tracking.

    • Google TV to get Android Market access “shortly”

      W00t! A platform-specific version of the popular Android Market is expected to arrive on Google TV sometime in the very near future.

      
”It will happen shortly,” Logitech VP Ashish Arora confirmed during a OTTCon keynote speech.

    • Android Marketplace coming to Google TV soon, what apps would you want?

      With the news about Android tablets coming these days, it might have been easy to forget that Google TV still exists, and it turns out GTV is about to get a big boost. At the Over-the-Top TV Conference (OTTCon) in San Jose yesterday, Ashish Arora,?the VP and general manager of Logitech’s Digital Home Group (of which GTV is part), was asked about the Android Market on GTV.?He didn’t give an exact time frame, but he said that the Android Market would “definitely” be on GTV this year, and that it would likely happen in the “very short term”.

    • Google kills 21 Trojan apps in the Android Market that were stealing data

      We’ve heard various reports of malevolent apps in the Market over the last couple of years, but the malware in question has rarely posed any real threat and few users have been affected. This particular piece of malicious code, however, seems to have been unusually cunning and insidious.

      Apparently, someone stole 21 well-received apps, infused them with root exploits and then republished the applications in the Market under different names. In just four days, the hijacked apps were downloaded between 50 000 – 200 000 times.

    • The unofficial list of Honeycomb optimized applications [from the forums]

      After unboxing your Motorola Xoom last week, and playing around with all the Honeycomb goodness that it brought to your life, the time to find some fun apps has come, and we want to help you out.

    • ZeptoLab’s popular puzzle game Cut the Rope is coming soon to Android

      Cut the Rope is an addictive puzzle game with cutesy graphics and sound effects in the same vein as Angry Birds. By slashing ropes and coming up with clever ways to use the game’s physics engine, you need to avoid various enemies and obstacles in order to bring the candy to a creature called “Om Nom.” Just like Angry Birds, the game also lets you collect stars.

    • Japan Phone Makers See Opportunity in Android

      Japanese mobile phones are a gadget lover’s dream. They double as credit cards. They can display digital TV broadcasts. Some are even fitted with solar cells.

Events

• The Humanitarian FOSS Symposium 2011

• Join us at the Reader Round Table!

  Can you get to Bath, south-west England by 7pm on Wednesday 30th March? Do you want to chat about Linux and free software with other Linux fans in a nice pub? Let us know. We’re planning to organise a Linux Format reader (and TuxRadar podcast listener) get-together where we chew over big topics in the Linux world, and put the results in our magazine.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/03/01

  • Announcing Add-on SDK 1.0b3

    The Jetpack team is pleased to announce the release of Add-on SDK 1.0b3. This version, the third in the series of beta releases of Mozilla’s downloadable software development kit for building Firefox add-ons, includes better documentation, new features, and a bunch of bug fixes.

  • Thunderbird 3.1.8 Update is Now Available

  • Firefox 3.6.14 and 3.5.17 security updates now available

    Firefox 3.6.14 and Firefox 3.5.17 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.14.

  • Test add-on features, Hackasaurus, Build a virtual park, Game on spotlight and more…

    In this issue…

    * Test add-ons related features this Friday
    * Firefox for mobile now with more power
    * Help us build a Virtual Park
    * Mozilla Game on spotlight: Far7
    * Hackasaurus in Long Beach!
    * Next MDN Doc Sprint: April 1-2
    * Meet Mozillian Karsten Düsterloh
    * Software updates
    * Upcoming events
    * Community calendar
    * About about:mozilla

  • Is Mozilla Open-By-Rule?

    Host to the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird mail client among many other projects, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the largest and most significant open source projects. Long-term contributor and employee Gervase Markham has kindly provided the data for an open-by-rule scorecard for Mozilla.

  • Firefox and Thunderbird security updates

  • Knowledge Base Days – Preparing for Firefox 4

  • Firefox 4 RC expected to ship roughly on March 9

    Mozilla is planning to spin the first release candidate for Firefox 4 this Friday and the code is aimed to be released to beta testers as early as next Wednesday, March 9, developers said during a call today.

  • Mozilla’s Comments in Response to the FTC’s Inquiry on Privacy

    Last week Mozilla submitted comments to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in response to their request for comment on a proposal describing a new framework for protecting consumer privacy in both online and offline environments. The FTC sought input on a broad range of of issues from online privacy protections for children to the blending of distinctions between PII and non-PII. More than 400 comments were submitted from a wide array of interests including individuals, consumer groups, advocacy coalitions, advertisers, social networks and all kinds of service providers. You can see the complete list here. It’s worth reading a few of these to get a sense of the discourse (i.e. Future of Privacy Forum, Facebook, CDT, and US Chamber of Commerce)

  • Wiki Wednesday: March 2, 2011

  • Updated Skype Toolbar Extension Available

    On January 20th, 2011, the Skype Toolbar extension was added to Firefox’s add-on blocklist for causing Firefox to crash and imparting a significant performance hit on DOM manipulation. We’ve been in contact with Skype since that time, and have provided information to identify the crashes our users are seeing, along with suggested methods to reduce the performance impacts of their extension.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Let the pictures speak for themselves…

Government

• Open Source by Any Other Name…

  Now, in a 100-page report, those two paragraphs might seem to be rather thin gruel, but actually I’m not too worried by this apparently perfunctory dismissal of open source and its virtues. Because it turns out that the entire report is essentially an espousal of precisely those virtues, albeit without fully admitting that fact.

Openness/Sharing

• Launching the Open Genealogy Alliance

  Open Rights Group has co-founded the Open Genealogy Alliance in order to start looking at an alternative future for the sector based on open data, open standards and innovation through collaboration across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

• Videoing council meetings redux: progress on two fronts

  Tonight, hyperlocal bloggers (and in fact any ordinary members of the public) got two great boosts in their access to council meetings, and their ability to report on them.

• Open Data

  • Introducing FigShare: a new way to share open scientific data

    FigShare is being developed with the great work done by the Open Knowledge Foundation in mind. Ongoing converstaions with them about their CKAN project mean that we are all pulling in the same direction, and all data stored witin FigShare will be listed on a new CKAN science group.

  • Open Government Data in Slovakia

    When we started to build a data catalogue of all possible flows of public finances to the private sphere in 2003, we had no idea it would be a perfect fit with the open data movement’s efforts. As former journalists, we simply saw the great advantage of having all kinds of public data (freely accessible thanks to the freedom of information act) brought together in a searchable database format. After years of FOIA requests and litigation, Fair-Play Alliance now offers the most comprehensive catalogue in Slovakia. We track flows of public money (subsidies, tenders, EU funding, grants, tax pardons, political sponsorship etc), as well as information on people in the public domain (e.g. elected officials, management of state institutions or state controlled companies, advisors in politics).

• Open Access/Content

  • Project Gutenberg adds their 40,000th free eBook!

    Project Gutenberg, the granddaddy of all eBook libraries, announced today they have put number 40,000 of internally produced free eBooks online as of March 1st.

    This raises their grand total to 100,000, as they receive a number of eBooks from other producers worldwide. These figures even subtract 15,000 for various duplications.

  • State of the Art: Public Access to Publicly Funded Educational Materials

    In the U.S. and around the world, there’s been increasing interest from policymakers in exploring the benefits of publicly funded open educational resources (OER). OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

Programming

• RStudio: An Open Source and Cross-Platform IDE for R

  RStudio a is free and open source IDE for R programmers. It’s available for Linux, OSX and Windows – and you can run it from the Web. It’s built with HTML and JavaScript and looks pretty slick. You can find it on Github here.

  According to the RStudio blog, the team plans to monetize the product by selling services such as support, training, consulting and hosting.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Launches HTML5 Chinese Interest Group

  W3C has launched the HTML5 Chinese Interest Group, whose mission is to facilitate focused discussion in Chinese of the HTML5 specification and of specifications closely related to HTML5, to gather comments and questions in Chinese about those specifications, to collect information about specific use cases in Chinese speaking region for technologies defined in those specifications, and to report the results of its activities as a group back to the HTML Working Group, as well as to other relevant groups and to the W3C membership and community. Learn more in the charter (available in Chinese as well), join the Interest Group, and learn more about the W3C HTML Activity.

• Beyond HTML5 – Peer-to-peer conversational video

  We’ve in a previous blog post shown you our work on conversational voice and video using “beyond HTML5″ solutions. In that work we used websockets and a media relay to route streams between peers. Now we’d like to show you how we have extended this to use peer-to-peer streaming.

  Peer-to-peer streaming means that voice/video frames are streamed directly between peers, without any server in between. The effect is lower latency and more efficient network utilization. Up until now, however, web browsers have lacked the capability to communicate peer-to-peer. Instead, communication has traditionally relied on a shared relay server in the network.

The Very Rich Indie Writer

Amanda Hocking is 26* years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published. This is her blog. And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per book1/70% per sale for the Kindle store – that she makes a lot of money from her monthly book sales. (Perhaps more importantly: a publisher on the private Reading2.0 mailing list has said, to effect: there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.)

How can news sites cross the language barrier and appeal to foreign readers?

In August 2010, the Audit Bureau of Circulation published figures from the first half of the year. While there were several magazines that managed to hold steady with circulation, the industry as a whole saw a 2.3% drop. One magazine that has consistently bucked this trend is The Economist. While other news weeklies like Time and Newsweek have shed swaths of readers over the last few years, The Economist’s sales have nearly doubled in the last decade. There are no-doubt multiple reasons for this widespread appeal, but I’d posit that the magazine has benefited greatly from the fact that it is one of the only publications that deals with a scarcity in news.

In their pre-Internet heyday, general newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek were able to provide an overview of the previous week’s national news. The average news consumer in Portland, Oregon didn’t have ready access to news in Virginia, for instance, and so these publications produced a quick spread of the nation’s domestic affairs. These days, of course, a consumer from Portland can easily follow a link to a story in the Richmond Times Dispatch, a story that would provide much more comprehensive coverage of Virginia affairs than Time or Newsweek ever could. As Om Malik detailed recently at Gigaom, the internet is creating an unbundling of content, where a publication’s content is only as good as its most visited article. With this new media ecosystem, the Newsweeks and Times of the world have to compete with every other US-based publication, driving down their worth.

BBC Multimedia Journalism Head Clifton Redundant

BBC News Online is to lose one of its most experienced journalism executives, when Pete Clifton is made redundant next month.

Recap: A Practically Radical webcast with Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre

Bill Taylor, the co-founder and editor of Fast Company magazine, joined us for today’s edition of our Open Your World Forum series to talk about his new book, Practically Radical. Bill was joined by Polly LaBarre, the co-author of his earlier book, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win. Polly was also a part of the original Fast Company team and served as senior editor for nearly a decade. Like Mavericks, Practically Radical is already a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

“Bill undertook a multi-year journey doing what he does best, which is exploring and scouring the world for the organizations and individuals that are setting the stage for the future,” Polly said. He sought the answers for companies and leaders who are looking to change their organizations in a meaningful way. How do you lead your industry, and how do you conduct yourself as a leader?

How did Google lose, and find, all those e-mails?

Tens of thousands of Google e-mail users got a shock early this week: All of their e-mails and contacts disappeared.

Google said Monday night that it was in the process of restoring all of these messages, however. “We’re very sorry,” the company said in a blog post.

The burning question here is, how did Google lose all of these e-mails, and how was the company able to get them all back, if they in fact were lost?

Science

• Giving children the power to be scientists

  Children who are taught how to think and act like scientists develop a clearer understanding of the subject, a study has shown.

  The research project led by The University of Nottingham and The Open University has shown that school children who took the lead in investigating science topics of interest to them gained an understanding of good scientific practice.

Health/Nutrition

• Mexican Drug Lord Officially Thanks American Lawmakers For Keeping Drugs Illegal

  Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes’ yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, “I couldn’t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.”

• Dear Rep. Franklin: I Submit My Used Tampons as Evidence

  I applaud your efforts to support the rights of zygote citizens of Georgia by criminalizing miscarriages and investigating every instance of fetal death as a potential crime. The bill you are trying to pass is clear that the Georgia State Assembly knows that life begins at the moment of conception, and that any fertilized egg that dies is a human death that we should all grieve. I couldn’t agree more, and I would like to help.

  As I’m sure you know, more than 50% of fertilized eggs –Georgia citizens! — naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the body during menstruation. I am personally concerned that my own murdering woman-body may have flushed out some human beings, and I may have flushed them down the toilet without knowing that I was disposing of Georgia citizens in such an undignified way. This must be remedied. I would like to be sure that I am not killing any more Georgia citizens — and that if I am, they are able to receive a proper funeral and not a burial at sea, and that our state police can dedicate valuable time and resources to investigating their deaths.

• Don’t swallow this pill

  Are the European Union and its multinational pharmaceutical companies now pressuring the Indian prime minister’s office? In recent months, as negotiators from India and Europe have been thrashing out the details of a free trade agreement to be signed within months, people living with HIV have been hitting the streets. From New Delhi to Nairobi and Brussels to Bangkok, they have been protesting against the very real threat posed to India’s ability to supply life-saving generic medicines to people across the developing world.

  Publicly, both sides have assured that the trade deal will not harm access to the affordable generic medicines, and have reiterated, as if by rote, the primacy of people’s health over economic interests. But the Indian press now reports that the PMO, under pressure to conclude the deal, has asked the concerned government department to reconsider intellectual property (IP) provisions it had earlier rejected.

• Glaxo Gets Its Day in Court

  Yesterday, lawyers for GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) made opening statements in its lawsuit against competitor Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT). Glaxo and its co-plaintiffs, Rite Aid (NYSE: RAD) and CVS Caremark (NYSE: CVS), have alleged damages of $1.5 billion and are seeking triple damages of $4.5 billion in the case.

Security

• Wednesday’s security advisories

• Anti-bully effort grows in Montgomery County schools

  The Clarksville-Montgomery County School System is attacking bullying with an expanded effort over the next couple of weeks.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Egypt: Stop Military Trials of Civilians

  Egyptian military authorities should stop using military tribunals to prosecute civilians, Human Rights Watch said today. The military should also halt detentions of peaceful demonstrators and end violence by soldiers against protesters and detainees, Human Rights Watch said.

• Arabs may impose Libya no-fly zone

  The Arab League has said it may impose a “no fly” zone on Libya in co-ordination with the African Union if fighting continues in Libya.

  Wednesday’s Arab League ministers’ meeting in Cairo rejected any direct outside military intervention in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi is trying to put down a revolt threatening his four decades in power. They reiterated their condemnation of his use of force.

• U.S.-led coalition admits it killed 9 Afghan boys in error

  Troops in attack helicopters that belong to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan mistakenly killed nine boys Tuesday with machine-gun and rocket fire as they collected firewood, thinking that the children were Taliban insurgents, the international forces acknowledged Wednesday.

  U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, ordered all field commanders and helicopter crew members to study their orders again on when coalition aircraft can open fire on people on the ground.

• How The Great Game emptied the Pentagon

  In April 2009, The Great Game opened at the Tricycle theatre in London, and last year we revived the production and took it on a US tour. Before leaving for America, General Sir David Richards, then head of the British army, hosted a day-long performance for the British military. Taking to the stage, he said that, had he seen these plays before going to Afghanistan in 2005, they “would have made me a much better commander”.

  He told me he would do his best to ensure that people from the Pentagon saw it. We opened in Washington in September, and the production was warmly welcomed, but our fortnight’s run was ignored by the Pentagon and Capitol Hill – until a few days before its end, when a congresswoman was asked by General Petraeus, in Kabul, to send him a tape of the plays. Then, on the last Saturday performance, General “Mick” Nicholson came. He was incredibly enthusiastic and asked to meet the cast. He was about to be posted to Kabul as head of operations for Petraeus, and thought it vital that more people from the Pentagon saw the plays.

• Plan to cut police pay slammed by federation

  Home Secretary Theresa May’s warning that police officers face cuts to their pay and conditions undermines the independence of a review and will attack officers’ morale, the Police Federation said today.

  Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the organisation which represents rank-and-file officers in England and Wales, said it was clear the Home Secretary undervalues the work of the police, despite her claims to the contrary.

  “Officers will see straight through that,” he said.

• Qaddafi Military Spending Below Sweden, Leaves Authority Gap

  In a region with a history of rulers who strengthened their armies to keep a grip on power, Muammar Qaddafi has been doing the opposite.

  Qaddafi spent an average 1.2 percent of gross domestic product on the military in the three years through 2008, the lowest in the Middle East and North Africa and also less than Sweden or Denmark, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute or Sipri, which tracks defense spending. Before it was split by an uprising that started last month, Libya’s army had 50,000 men, half of them draftees, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

• Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom

  A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel Gaddafi’s son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his own. So is plagiarism out of control?

• Nine Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Killed by NATO Helicopters

  Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.

• WikiLeaks Trying To Make It Appear Like U.S. Troops Are Intentionally Murdering Iraqi Civilians

• Calls to punish those behind Standard Group raid

  Renewed calls to have those behind the infamous Standard Group raid of March 2006 brought to account were made as the media house marked the fifth anniversary of the attack.

  Five years ago, heavily armed and hooded mercenaries hired by individuals in Government attacked the Group’s premises in Nairobi, burned newspapers, and confiscated KTN equipment that are still under police custody.

  Imenti Central MP Gitobu Imanyara, Senior Counsel Paul Muite, and Kenya National Commission on Human Rights Commissioner Hassan Omar, who were among special guests, called for an end to impunity and action against those named in a report, which Parliament adopted last November.

Cablegate

• Bradley Manning Charged with “Aiding the Enemy”

  Both MSNBC and Marc Ambinder are reporting that the government is issuing new charges against Bradley Manning. Now that the government’s case against Julian Assange is falling apart, the Pentagon is ratcheting up the pressure on Manning by charging him with “aiding the enemy.”

• Manning faces new charges, possible death penalty

  Following an intensive seven-month investigation, the Army on Wednesday filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of illegally downloading tens of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents that were then publicly released by WikiLeaks, military officials tell NBC News.

• The Syrian regime could be the next Middle Eastern domino to fall

  With the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes gone and street protests roiling cities from Algiers to Tehran, many people are now wondering which domino might fall next. Syria, whose secular, militarized dictatorship most closely resembles the fallen regimes of Tunisia and Egypt, may not be next in line, but appears nonetheless to be approaching a tipping point.

  Of course, the old “domino theory” in international relations was only a crude way of emphasizing that different parts of any region are linked to each other. For today’s Arab world, a better metaphor might be a chessboard, from which the removal of even a pawn inevitably alters the relationships among all the other pieces.

• WikiLeaks cables expose Peruvian politicians’ subservience to Washington

  Two weeks ago, El Comercio, Peru’s most influential newspaper, began publishing secret cables from the US embassy in Lima released by of WikiLeaks. What has been released so far reveals the degree of submission and dependency on US imperialism by all the major political parties of the Peruvian bourgeoisie.

  The day after El Comercio made public its possession of 4,000 pages of WikiLeaks cables, Washington’s ambassador to Peru, Rose Likins, visited the director of the newspaper Francisco Miró Quesada, to express “her concern over the publication of the embassy documents, which are labeled as classified by the US Department of State,” said El Comercio. “It is uncomfortable,” added ambassador Likins, “to be in this situation.”

  Miró Quesada assured the ambassador that his intention was not to dig into US internal affairs and that the newspaper “would not put in danger the honor or the integrity of people who could feel threatened,” reported El Comercio.

• Confinement Conditions Persist

  Despite a change in command at the Quantico Brig, PFC Manning remains in maximum custody and under prevention of injury watch. On January 19, 2011, the defense filed an Article 138 complaint with the Quantico base commander, Colonel Daniel Choike.

• Laws ‘aimed to limit’ Chinese investments

  The embassy report on MrColmer’s remarks, titled “New Foreign Investment guidelines target China” and classified “sensitive”, is among US embassy cables leaked to WikiLeaks and provided to the Herald.

• DreamWorks lines up WikiLeaks film based on Guardian book

  Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood studio looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie after securing the screen rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, the book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding.

  Reportedly conceived as an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men, the film will be backed by DreamWorks – the studio founded in 1994 by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

  Leigh and Harding’s book charts Julian Assange’s life and times, from his itinerant childhood through to the creation of the WikiLeaks website in 2006. It also provides the inside story of Assange’s explosive partnership with the Guardian and the release, last December, of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables.

• Exclusive – WikiLeaks: How the Cola war was won in Libya

  An unpublished U.S. diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks tells the previously undisclosed story of how an American corporate powerhouse — the $35-billion (21 billion pounds) Coca-Cola Co.(KO.N) — got caught up in a fierce fraternal dispute between two of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s sons.

  The contretemps among the freres Gaddafi over a local bottling plant escalated into a heavily armed confrontation resembling a Hollywood gangster film, as a classified 2006 U.S. cable put it.

• Inhumane Treatment of WikiLeaks Soldier Bradley Manning

  The US army private, 23, has been held for 23 hours a day in a sparsely furnished solitary cell and deprived of a pillow, sheets, and personal possessions since July 2010.

  Amnesty International last week wrote to the US Defence secretary, Robert Gates, calling for the restrictions on Bradley Manning to be reviewed. In the same week, the soldier suffered several days of increased restrictions by being temporarily categorized as a ‘suicide risk’.

• 5 environmental revelations from WikiLeaks

  How the Dalai Lama feels about climate change and Canada’s inferiority complex are just a few of the issues to come to light through classified diplomatic documents.

• WE LOOK UNCOORDINATED”: SWEDES “EMBARRASSED” BY EU BEHAVIOR AT AHMADINEJAD SPEECH

• WikiLeaks: ‘Kibaki unwilling to act on graft’

  One of President Kibaki’s most trusted aides told the US ambassador that the President had lots of information about Cabinet-level corruption but was reluctant to act.

  [...]

  The information on the State House visit is contained in one of thousands of cables leaked by whistleblower website, Wikileaks.

• The Spy Who Hated Wikileaks (LOVE POLICE EXCLUSIVE)

• Bradley Manning could face death: For what?

  The U.S. Army yesterday announced that it has filed 22 additional charges against Bradley Manning, the Private accused of being the source for hundreds of thousands of documents (as well as this still-striking video) published over the last year by WikiLeaks. Most of the charges add little to the ones already filed, but the most serious new charge is for “aiding the enemy,” a capital offense under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although military prosecutors stated that they intend to seek life imprisonment rather than the death penalty for this alleged crime, the military tribunal is still empowered to sentence Manning to death if convicted.

• Viewing cable 08NAIROBI2671, DRUG TRAFFICKING ON THE RISE IN KENYA

• Article 104 Offense

  “Enemy” includes (not only) organized opposing forces in time of war, (but also any other hostile body that our forces may be opposing) (such as a rebellious mob or a band of renegades) (and includes civilians as well as members of military organizations). (“Enemy” is not restricted to the enemy government or its armed forces. All the citizens of one belligerent are enemies of the government and the citizens of the other.)

• ‘Alfonso Cano’ will never negotiate: WikiLeaks

  An ex-FARC commander said in 2006 that “Alfonso Cano,” now the supreme leader of the guerrilla group, would never negotiate, but that “Ivan Marquez” wanted peace, according to a WikiLeaks cable released by Colombian newspaper El Espectador.

  In the diplomatic cable dated June 21, 2006, former FARC commander alias “Nicolas” said, “Mono was pragmatic only because he doesn’t believe in negotiation; he’s a man of action. Cano would never negotiate, for the opposite reason, that he’s too political … Ivan Marquez would be disposed to peace. He said that after 40 years of fighting it’s time to end it but without betraying Marxist principles … The Army should get Cano and Mono, to allow Marquez to breathe and lead.”

• Alleged WikiLeaker could face death penalty

  Manning’s counsel has a blog post up today with a copy of the statute that could put Manning away for life. Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, “Aiding the Enemy-Giving Intelligence to the Enemy,” prohibits giving to the enemy, where “intelligence” is defined as information that is “true, at least in part.”

• Birgitta Jonsdottir Interview on Wikileaks

  Icelander Birgitta Jonsdottir – poet, author, activist, and member of parliament – has now broken with WikiLeaks, but she is continuing to devote herself to making her country a haven for information, a Switzerland of the bytes. In the meantime, the American judicial authorities are trying to reach Julian Assange through her Twitter details.

  Last week, Birgitta Jonsdottir was in our country for a while at Deburen’s invitation in order to take part in an evening of debate on the state of the media today, partly organized by the Pascal Decroos Fund and the Investigative Journalists’ Association. We met with her at the Vooruit (arts center) in Ghent. She immediately wrong-footed us: Instead of the eccentric Goth about whom we had read, we were welcomed by an elegant person with a captivating laugh. She talked in a soft voice but with a very great deal of passion about the importance of freedom of information. Although her “Movement” is not a real party and she surfed to parliament in 2009 on a wave of popular anger about the banking crisis, she has turned out to be a born politician who knows what she wants and how she is to achieve it.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• U.S. Approves First Deepwater Drilling Permit In Gulf Of Mexico Since BP Oil Spill

  The U.S. has approved the first deepwater drilling permit in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s massive oil spill.

  The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement announced Monday that it issued a permit to Noble Energy Inc. to continue work on its Santiago well about 70 miles southeast of Venice, La. Drilling will resume nearly one year after BP’s blowout created the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.

• Federal researchers declare eastern cougar extinct

  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirms there are no breeding populations of the big cats left in the eastern U.S.

• Federal government to cut environmental spending

  The Harper government is projecting some major cuts over the next year to several of its environmental initiatives, including climate change and clean air, according to newly released federal estimates.

  The numbers, released Tuesday by the Treasury Board Secretariat, show a 59 per cent cut in global-warming and air-pollution spending as part of more than $1.6 billion in annual, governmentwide reductions to environmental services across the different federal departments. The shift is the equivalent to a 14 per cent reduction in spending that also includes a $222-million or 20 per cent reduction in spending at Environment Canada.

• African lions under threat from a growing predator: the American hunter

  American hunters are emerging as a strong and growing threat to the survival of African lions, with demand for trophy rugs and necklaces driving the animals towards extinction, a coalition of wildlife organisations has said.

  Demand for hunting trophies, such as lion skin rugs, and a thriving trade in animal parts in the US and across the globe have raised the threat levels for African lions, which are already under assault because of conflicts with local villagers and shrinking habitat.

• What Are Species Worth? Putting a Price on Biodiversity

  We live in what is paradoxically a great age of discovery and also of mass extinction. Astonishing new species turn up daily, as new roads and new technologies penetrate formerly remote habitats. And species also vanish forever, at what scientists estimate to be 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate of extinction.

  Over the past few years, as I was working on a book about the history of species discovery, I often found myself coming back to a fundamental question: Why do species matter? That is, why should ordinary people care if scientists discover one species or pronounce the demise of another?

• Bicycle master plan is expected to be approved by the L.A. City Council

  It’s been a long ride, but bicycle riders’ push for for new routes and services is paying off. The plan calls for 1,680 miles of interconnected bikeways.

• Queensland Reconstruction Authority

  Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has established the Queensland Reconstruction Authority to develop, implement and manage a statewide plan for rebuilding and reconnecting communities affected by the flooding and cyclones.

• Saving Ethiopia’s “Church Forests”

  There are some 35,000 church forests in Ethiopia, ranging in size from a few acres to 300 hectares. Some churches and their forests may date back to the fourth century, and all are remnants of Ethiopia’s historic Afromontane forests. To their followers, they are a sacred symbol of the garden of Eden — to be loved and cared for, but not worshipped.

• Rare leopard caught on candid camera

Finance

• The scandal no one talks about: Income inequality

  Some figures to consider: The bottom 80 percent of American households have lost ground in share of income since 1979. The top one percent, meanwhile, has seen its slice of the pie increase more than 120 percent. What these shifts translate to is this: The top 10 percent of Americans earn nearly three-quarters of all income in the country, leaving the poor with whatever is left. Stephen Colbert views this as the beginnings of a major problem, because disparity leads to revolution. The solution: All the rich people should start their own country.

• Bernard Madoff, the financiers’ fall guy

  Don’t shoot the messenger is usually a good rule to live by. But it is hard when it comes to Bernie Madoff, the former billionaire serving a 150-year jail term for running history’s biggest Ponzi scheme.

  Yet, in recent jailhouse interviews, Madoff has given a valuable insight into causes of the Great Recession, whose awful impact has blighted millions of lives across America and around the world. No one can deny Madoff’s activities were an appalling fraud, but, he insists, what about the involvement of everyone else in the global financial system.

• ECM Publishers: Sen. Franken offers three ideas to help cut government spending

  OpEd piece by Sen. Al Franken – It’s easy to agree that we should cut government spending. It’s harder to agree on what government spending we should cut.

  We can’t just say, “Let’s cut $500 billion” or make vague promises about “increasing efficiency.” Serious budget proposals should be clear about exactly what we’d be cutting, saving, and sacrificing.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rupert Murdoch BSkyB takeover gets government go ahead

  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been given government approval for its controversial takeover of BSkyB.

• Rupert Murdoch BSkyB takeover gets government go-ahead

  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been given government approval for its controversial bid to take over BSkyB.

  The green light follows News Corp’s offer to spin off Sky News as an independent company.

• Chris Dodd shows how Washington works

  Over the last two years — particularly during the debate over the financial reform bill — Sen. Chris Dodd served on multiple occasions as chief spokesman for, and defender of, the interests of Wall Street and corporate America. That led to widespread speculation that the five-term Connecticut Senator, who announced that he would not seek re-election in 2010 in the wake of allegations of improper benefits from Countrywide Financial, was positioning himself for a lucrative post-Senate lobbying job — i.e., peddling the influence and contacts he compiled over five decades in “public service.”

• Customer service on Twitter

  Great, right? A company that gets the joke and participates meaningfully in an actual conversation with a full awareness of the context.

  Here’s how not to do it, courtesy of United Airlines. Mena Trott, a co-founder of Six Apart, had her flight to NYC randomly cancelled on Monday night by “a robot”.

• Conflicting horse race numbers fuel raging debate over reliability of political polls

  A battery of conflicting federal horse race numbers is pouring fuel on a raging debate over the reliability of political polls.

Privacy

• Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, Inc.

  Corporations do not have a right of personal privacy for purposes of Exemption 7(C) of the Freedom of Information Act, which protects from disclosure law enforcement records whose disclosure “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

• Supreme Court Case Could Jeopardize Medical Record Privacy

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday to focus on the privacy issues at stake in a battle over the sale and data mining of medical records, urging justices to reverse a ruling that could jeopardize patient privacy.

• Facebook will soon share users’ phone numbers and addresses with 3rd parties

  It’s been a while since we’ve had an uproar over Facebook’s handling of its users personal information, so we suppose the time is ripe.

  So cue the online outrage: Facebook announced today in a letter to Congress that the social-media platform is moving forward with plans to give third parties access to user information, such as phone numbers and home addresses.

• Almost half the UK is now on Facebook

  Joanna Shields, VP EMEA at Facebook, stated today that the popular social network now has 30 million UK users, equating to almost half of the UK population.

• Sequencing A Child’s DNA — And Convincing An Insurance Company To Pay

  Geneticist Elizabeth Worthey worked on the first-ever treatment of a patient based on DNA sequencing, helping doctors decide to give a bone marrow transplant to a 6-year-old boy who had suffered through more than a hundred operations. Now Worthey, an assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, is part of a team working to comb through the sequences of five more children.

Civil Rights

• Documents Reveal TSA Research Proposal To Body-Scan Pedestrians, Train Passengers

  Updated with the TSA’s response below, which denies implementing airport-style scans in mass transit.

  Giving Transportation Security Administration agents a peek under your clothes may soon be a practice that goes well beyond airport checkpoints. Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city streets.

• Passing Through

  In 2003 Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, published an article on the once-sleepy subject of telecommunications policy. In it, he coined the term “net neutrality” to capture the idea that network operators—the Comcasts and Verizons of the world—should not be in the business of regulating the information traffic that passes through their networks. The term took hold, and the article launched Wu to cyber-rock-star status.

• 10 Women Who Secretly Control the Internet

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• ISPs must advertise average broadband speeds, not ‘up to’ speeds, says Ofcom

  ISPs should be forced to advertise the typical speeds available on internet access packages and not the theoretical maximum currently advertised, telecoms regulator Ofcom has said. They should also not be allowed to cap ‘unlimited’ services.

  Advertising regulators should change the rules so that the speeds available to customers in the middle of the range of actual available speeds is advertised at least as prominently as ‘up to’ speeds, it has said.

• House Panel Delays Net Neutrality Vote

  A House panel postponed a vote Tuesday to nix the Federal Communication Commission’s controversial “net neutrality” rules. The repeal effort would still go forward, but after another hearing, said Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

  Conservatives seek to block the FCC’s December ruling, which prevents Internet providers from giving preference to certain types of content. Verizon Communications Inc. sued in federal appeals court to block the rules. Other Internet content companies say the rules keep the Internet fair.

DRM

• Australia Considers New Digital Lock Exceptions

  Australia’s Attorney General has said he is looking into establishing new digital lock exceptions under that country’s copyright law.

• Europe confirms raids on ebook publishers

  European officials were accompanied by local competition regulators. The UK’s Office of Fair Trading started investigating ebook pricing last month.

  The Commission said the raids were just a first step and not necessarily evidence of guilt.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Michel Barnier tells the European Blind Union the EU does not support a treaty for persons with disabilities

  KEI comment: According to Barnier’s logic, the EU should not be pursuing any new treaties on any copyright issue or intellectual property issues. Why then, is the EU pressing for a WIPO treaty for broadcasting organizations, or the ACTA agreement? Why did the EU press for the 1996 WIPO WCT and WPPT digital copyright treaties, and then not sign them for many years? Why does the EU press for binding IP chapters in trade agreements with Canada, India and other countries, which only involve at best a single country outside of the EU?

  A Joint Recommendation would be an “authoritative interpretation of the Berne Convention,” but not of the TRIPS agreement, and it would be authoritative only in the areas where it actually says something. If you enter into a negotiation on something that requires everyone to agree, strategically, you end up with something that may be very weak, or even harmful to consumers — given the capture of some national delegations by publishers.

• Trademarks

  • If App Store’s Trademark Is Generic, So Is Windows’

    Toe, The writes “In response to Microsoft’s attempt to dismiss Apple’s ‘App Store’ trademark application, Apple references Microsoft’s claim to the Windows trademark. ‘Having itself faced a decades-long genericness challenge to its claimed WINDOWS mark, Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public.’”

• Copyrights

  • Is Bing doing a better job than Google on torrents?

    Late last year, Google announced it would be blocking autocomplete on searches for “torrents” They did this in a rather blunt way, blocking any attempt to use the word in an autocomplete, regardless of the likely copyright status of the content searched for.

    We argued that this would create a subtle but important discrimination against legal torrent distribution, by making it a bit harder and less suggestive that you might try searching for, say a “Linux torrent” or a “Yes Men Save the world torrent”. After all, if the Yes Men want you to find their film on torrent, why should they and you be pushed back?

  • News Flash: Your Music Is Not Your Product

    I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over again.

    The conversation about how we should go about dealing with “thieves” and “pirates” “stealing” our “product” like so many shoplifters. I’m just gonna say it.

    It’s absurd.

    Music is not, and never was, a product.

    When a label executive tells you that they are “not in the business of selling discs”, (or vinyl, tape, t-shirts, etc.) and that they are actually “selling music,” they are, at best, fooling themselves, or at worst, lying to your face. Moving plastic, vinyl, paper and/or any other tangible good they can dream up is exactly what the recording industry has been about since it was established.

  • An Important Dent In The Copyright Monopoly

    Yesterday, the Legal Affairs Committee in the European Parliament voted unanimously to introduce an exception to the copyright monopoly to benefit the public at large. This is an important dent in the monopoly’s sanctity.

    Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament for the Pirate Party (and also a member of the Legal Affairs Committee), explains the win on his blog. In short, blind people today are banned from sharing Braille books across borders — they must be individually translated into Braille in each country, which would be a waste of resources if it were done, which it isn’t. Instead, the disabled are subjected to a so-called book famine where the culture and knowledge simply isn’t available to them.

  • Ubisoft Uses ‘Copyright’ Claim To Block Americans From Seeing Its Own Ad For Ridiculous ‘Adult’ Wii Game

    Jay points us to the news that Ubisoft is offering up a new video game for the Wii, in Europe only, called “We Dare,” which appears to be a ridiculously awkwardness-inducing game designed to try to make people engage in sexually suggestive activities with one another. Since the game is only being offered in Europe, the advertisement for the game, which the company placed on its own YouTube account, is blocked for viewing in the US — though, ridiculously, it says this is so for “copyright” reasons.

  • Anti-Piracy Outfit Suffers Huge DDoS Attack, Blames Usenet Users

    Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been subjected to a major DDoS attack which has taken its website offline. The Hollywood-backed group has been making a number of enemies with its actions in The Netherlands so the range of culprits is quite large. Nevertheless, BREIN chief Tim Kuik says he thinks he knows who is behind it.

    When it’s your job to go around disrupting various communities on the Internet, it’s perhaps inevitable that, rightly or wrongly, you’ll become somewhat of a hate figure among some. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, with chief Tim Kuik at the controls, is understandably unpopular within files-sharing circles. That position can have its consequences.

  • Senator Franken Defends Censoring The Internet Because He Doesn’t Think Hollywood Should Have To Change Biz Models?

    This is pretty disappointing, on any number of levels. First of all, his repeated use of the technically and legally incorrect words “stealing” and “theft” are troubling. Second, his repeating the totally debunked claims that this is somehow costing “tens of billions of dollars.” The GAO has already debunked those numbers as having little to no basis, and it’s disappointing that Franken would repeat them. But the key point is that yes, of course it changes the entire business model for the industry. But that’s what new technologies do. They change the business models for legacy companies and it’s not our government’s job to protect those legacy companies and their business models, even if our elected officials used to work for those companies.

  • Balanced Copyright Facebook Group – Persona Management Software Example?

    It’s always interesting watching the comments on the Balanced Copyright Facebook group. Like Trained seals the members spew forth ‘Good news’ and ‘Finally they are taking action’ for every ‘Pro-IP’ action reported, and his ‘How terrible’ and ‘No wonder Canada is a pariah’ for every post saying negative things about Canada.

    Curiously none of them appear to have ever done any research at all on the subject, and when pressed for details, they get upset.

    That is, of the few that actually seem to be human. When Anonymous raided HBGary, some of the emails that they released talked about ‘Persona Management Software‘, and based on an evaluation of the posts in the Balanced Copyright group, I’m beginning to wonder if most of the ‘people’ who are responding aren’t really bots.

    For example most posts made by the Group itself are liked by a lot of people. Liking something on Facebook requires just clicking on a button. It would be fairly simple to get a bot to do that, and to get the bot to vary the number of likes, so that it doesn’t look too suspicious.

    There are also a lot of weird comments, where it looks like the commenter hasn’t read the thread at all. Admittedly busy people often don’t bother to read an entire thread. But when comment 10 appears to apply comment 2, and ignores comments 5, 6, and 8, all of which commented on the same angle to the original post, you have to start wondering.

    When you look at the number of people who are commenting, and making sense (based on the original post and the earlier comments in the thread) there can’t be more than 4 or 5 real people who are actually taking part.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Powered by Linux

Linux Everywhere

Do you Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)? You use Linux! Do you do shop at Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN)? You use Linux! Do you have a router for your home network? Do you have NAS (Network Attached Storage) on your home network for shared backups? Do you own a Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) Squeezebox? Do you Tivo your shows?

Desktop

• Windows shuts door on user, Linux welcomes the guest!

  It happened a few nights ago. My sister pulled out her laptop & was all set to do her work on it. As the login screen on her windows vista laptop prompted, she religiously entered her credentials only to be shown the door out by windows.

  [...]

  Linux came to the rescue when Windows seem to have shut its door on its loyal user.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Episode0x0A: Windows Mobile Windows Phone 7 Series Application Store

  Bradley and Karen discussed the Windows Phone 7 Application Store terms and conditions which prohibit GPL’d and other copylefted software in the application store.

Kernel Space

• Is Linus’ Law still valid?

  But I wonder if that Linus’ Law is really as effective today as it was 10 years ago. Today Free Software is much richer and more complex than it was in the 90s.

• Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.38 (Part 4) – Storage

  Expected in March, the forthcoming kernel will contain the new LIO target framework for implementing Storage Area Networks (SANs). Also new are a kernel-side media presence polling feature for disk drives and various Device Mapper optimisations that are relevant for desktop systems.

Applications

• Updates for GIMP 2.8 and future plans

  * a new roadmap for newly developed GIMP features on an new unofficial GIMP wiki until the official one is up again. This inclued plans for non-destructive image editing,
  * GIMP release cycles will be much shorter in the future (after GIMP 2.8 is released).
  * the wiki should be a place for new developers where they quickly find needed information to start hacking on GIMP
  * release more dev/beta builds in the future
  * more scheduled meetings like the one last night.
  * Google Summer of Code 2011: who will be mentoring and project ideas

• 12 Things You Maynot Know About Gimp

  12: GIMP was originally created for UNIX systems.

  11: Gimp’s original creators are Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis (Peter Mattis’s Official Website)

• Sabayon “App Store”, abbr: Entropy Store. Ain’t that something?

• Tom’s Definitive Linux Software Roundup: Audio Production

  Welcome to Tom’s Definitive Linux Software Roundup: Audio Production. In this article, we’re looking at Linux applications for audio content creation. Our previous segment covered general end-user audio consumption apps like media managers, audio players, and CD rippers. This segment is for the audio professional, hobbyist, and musician.

• Proprietary

  • Opera Browser Gets Hardware Acceleration

    Opera stressed that this is an experimental build and that it isn’t even in alpha status yet. However, the software provides a first look at browser hardware acceleration – which is decidedly different than what Microsoft and Mozilla do, for example. Instead of limited the acceleration capability to Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 (IE9) and delivering only half the feature set on XP (Firefox 4), Opera says it will support all popular operating systems, including Windows XP, Max OS X and Linux.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze

  • Volume icons disappear from Ubuntu Places menu & Nautilus sidebar

  • Fun with Linux – Changing the root user name

  • wireless: remember the firmware!

  • Get Your Camcorder Working in Linux with Kino

  • How To Install Apache 2 with SSL on Linux (with mod_ssl, openssl)

  • Cannot authenticate privileged applications

  • Linux Gazette March 2011 (#184)

• Wine

  • Introduction to Bordeaux 2011.03 for Linux, FreeBSD and PC BSD

    The upcoming Bordeaux for Linux and BSD 2011.03 release will see a major shift in how the program is written and the new features that will be available to current and future Bordeaux customers. This is a brief introduction to explain some of the many planned features that will be available in the upcoming Bordeaux 2011.03 release.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Dropbox for KDE

    A question I have been coming across a lot lately has been, “How do I get Dropbox to work with KDE?” Most have probably noticed that when you go to the Dropbox website and go to download it, it is for GNOME and the Nautilus file manager. Unfortunately for us KDE users, we don’t use Nautilus. Or I could say fortunately for us KDE users, but I am sure that will start all kinds of flame wars in the comments. Instead, KDE utilizes Dolphin as its file manager. I will use this post to show you how to quickly get Dropbox installed and up-and-running in KDE, without the use of the terminal or command line.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Why Did They Take My GNOME Buttons Away?

    To answer this, Allan Day, GNOME Marketing Contractor, has offered his explanation. For him, there are a number of factors for the removals. First he says that the minimize button is no longer of any use in GNOME 3 as there is no dock or window list. Where would a window minimize to? GNOME wants to focus on the new rather than trying to make the old work in some logical manner. Overall, he thinks this makes for a more streamlined experience.

Distributions

• Getting Started With Linux: Pick The Right Linux Flavour For You

  Don’t try to set up Arch Linux during a lunch break. Do dig into Arch Linux if you want to learn way more about Linux, get a system at just the right size and configuration for your needs, and want a crash course in how to tweak a Linux system for better performance.

  Want some detailed guidance on the process? Whitson already showed us a step-by-step Arch installation, ending up with a system he’s still digging into today.

  As noted, we couldn’t possibly cover all the distributions out there, or even give full due to some of the more popular varieties: openSUSE, Debian, Sabayon, and the adorable and teeny-tiny Puppy. No slight intended, but we just don’t have as much experience with them. If you think a particular distribution is very friendly to beginners, whether yourself or another first-timer you know, give us the scoop on it in the comments.

• Red Hat Family

  • Scientific Linux 6 RC2 is released| with screenshots

    Scientific Linux (SL) is a Linux distribution produced by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It is a free and open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and aims to be 100% compatible with and based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  • U.S. Government Configuration Baseline for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

    On February 28, 2011, the U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released. The long awaited Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) content is the next phase in supplanting the legacy Bourne shell scripts collectively known as the System Readiness Review (SRR) scripts.

    In 2010, the USGCB replaced the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) which has always been associated with Microsoft® software. The USGCB initiative is to create security configuration baselines for Information Technology products widely deployed across the federal agencies.

  • Controversy surrounds Red Hat’s “obfuscated” source code release

    Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat’s source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Removing the visibility of information about which patches have, or have not, been applied will be difficult for companies like Oracle who use the patch information so they know what state the Red Hat kernel is in before applying their own patches.

  • Fedora

    • Defaulting to open.

      One of the fundamental principles I think our community expects from Fedora is that we default to open wherever possible. In other words, unless carrying out a process in an open and transparent way would be impossible (legal reasons, for example), we should do it. And by and large, we really do.

      [...]

      This post was prompted by a couple instances recently where I saw teams not reaching out for each other to ask questions or give information. I haven’t seen evidence of any widespread trends; in general, Fedora team members do a great job of communicating across teams. These instances were exceptions to the rule, but it would be fantastic if those exceptions never happened at all. (Zero may be an unattainable goal, but that doesn’t make it the wrong goal.) I’m not calling out specifics simply because they wouldn’t change the value of the ideas and practices discussed here.

• Debian Family

  • Testing SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Beta 2 again, then antiX core and aptosid

    I used the version of SimplyMEPIS, Version 11.0 Beta 2 that I had already installed on my Gateway 2000 series portable 17″ PA6A system, but when I moved on to antiX core and aptosid, I ran both of these systems directly from DVDs that I had recently created. But I did something else; I loaded their images completely into memory.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Wayland snapshot available for Ubuntu 11.04

      A snapshot of the Wayland display server has been uploaded to the Ubuntu 11.04 Universe repository. Canonical developer Bryce Harrington says in his announcement that this has little relevance to end users and is experimental code intended to act as a foundation and starting point for packaging and further development work.

    • Canonical: Hardened corporate or community leader?

      Open Source is starting to become a very lucrative business model these days and I think we have Google to thank for that. However, this means money is coming in for people who didn’t get much before and who feel that it’s long overdue.

    • Ubuntu fast becoming Linux pariah

      Bruce Byfield said that political manipulation of the various software projects has miffed a lot of Open Saucers. They feel that Ubuntu is choosing projects on the basis the ability to dominate the projects that dominate its software stack.

      Shuttleworth got miffed at the glacial pace that Gnome was making interface improvements and he moved to beef up interface software called Unity and this meant that many Canonical developers were suddenly not supporting Gnome.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • froglogic Confident of the Qt Platform’s Future

      froglogic announces its continued support for, and confidence in, the Qt platform. After making significant investments in Qt and MeeGo, Nokia recently announced that it will use Windows Phone as the operating system for its smartphones. As a result many questions about the future of the Qt Platform have been raised. froglogic would like to share its take on the situation and on Qt’s future.

It’s the Free Software, stupid!

Heated discussions are going on in the KDE community in the aftermath of the announcement of Nokia’s platform strategy change. Rationality often goes out of the window when people feel such a change goes against their personal values or beliefs. In the past days, I worked on an analysis of the impact of the changes on KDAB, Qt and the Free Software communities we work with, especially KDE. KDAB is rooted deeply in the KDE community, and many of our developers work with Qt and KDE for years now. We are sharing the same worries and hopes, so the results may be interesting for others as well. This post is about Qt, KDE, Free Software, politics, devices, markets, strategies – it does not get much better than that. Read on.

Open Source Software is not Free

I believe this statement to be true for a number of reasons. The important thing to recognize is that I believe the “free” in this quote and the “free” in FOSS are two different types of “free”. In the quote the “free” refers to a monetary value. Even if you pay no monetary value for software – that software cost someone, somewhere, something. Whether that something is a paycheck for the software developer coming from a company backing the project or it is simply a dedicated individual hacking at code during his spare moments – that “free” software comes at a cost to someone.

The Ins and Outs of Open Source Audits: Part One

No matter what industry your business is in, you’re almost certainly using open source software. The question is whether you know how you’re using open source, what licenses are in play, and whether you’re meeting all of your license requirements. If you can’t answer all of these questions — and most businesses can’t — you may want to perform an open source audit as a starting point. Why? An audit can answer the question of what Open Source Software (OSS) is present in your code and what licenses that OSS falls under.

Open Source Junction: cross-platform mobile apps

The open source mobile app space is getting increasingly crowded. The recent opportunities for developers to produce and distribute mobile apps through a range of app stores is taking the developer world by storm. If, as the saying goes, all people dream of writing a poem at least once in a lifetime, then perhaps there aren’t many developers out there either who haven’t dreamed of building a great mobile app themselves.

thebigword Goes Open-Source as Lisa Shuts Down

The global language services company, thebigword, has announced it will open-source part of its language technology software in order to support industry standards.

Events

• SCALE 9X: It’s a wrap

  More people: SCALE had been flirting with overwhelming success all weekend. Friday’s “problem” at registration was that the folks in that department faced a lot more people than normally come on a Friday, to the point of where 800 of the attendees for the weekend came on Friday. The final tally — 1,802. So 1,002 folks came over the weekend to make this a record year for SCALE, and as a result, it makes the outlook for FOSS this year really robust. So get out there and FOSS it up, folks.

• Scale 9x: Day 3

  The final day of SCALE 9x arrived far too early, since the Gentoo developers were still recovering from the merriment the previous evening/morning. We congregated in the hotel room Mike & I shared. You know you’re having some good times when hotel security places a call to your room, asking you to keep the noise down.

Funding

• Boxee Gets $16 Million in Funding for its Media Center Platform

  New frontiers lie ahead for open source media center platform, Boxee, which we’ve covered ever since it was born. Today, the company is announcing a very healthy infusion of $16.5 million in venture funding, featuring some heavy-hitting new investors, and ones that had already invested. Boxee’s previous round of funding was only $6 million and came when the company had only 12 employees.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Exciting developments in GNU Radio

  GNU Radio had a pretty good year in 2010, and we are already on track for an even more productive year in 2011. While we only produced one release in 2010, a large amount of work went into our source repository to improve the quality and stability of the project, and we are on track for a new release soon that incorporates many of these fixes into a new stable release. From here, we have been implementing some major improvements and additions to GNU Radio that will be part of the releases in 2011, so 2010 was an important year for getting us to the next major milestones.

  [...]

  We are directly pursuing this by hosting the first GNU Radio conference in September of 2011.

Government

• Open Source Tool Helps US DoD Eye in the Sky To See

  The US Department of Defense is awash in digital images and videos taken by a variety of sources including satellites, manned airplanes and unmanned drones. Going through all of that imagery by hand would take untold resources that the DoD just doesn’t have. Instead the DoD has turned to a computer vision program to help sort through the imagery. The programs they use are supplied by Kitware and get ready for this – are open source! That’s right the US Department of Defense is using open source computer vision solutions to help identify potential threats.

• Death, taxes and open source software certainties

  Open source software gets a lot of positive press. Along with death and taxes we can say that this is a fair certainty. But are there hidden and very blatant flaws that we should be looking out for and be aware of?

  The Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report was launched at the end of last year to examine open source software integrity and was originally initiated between the company itself and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Programming

• Origins (Part 01)

  It may seem odd to people today, but programming came around long before the computer. Actually, it came about so much earlier that it wasn’t really recognizable as such. The three earliest examples I can think of are the Antikythera Mechanism, the Castle Clock, and the Jacquard Loom. The Antikythera Mechanism was a mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It is estimated to be from about 150 BCE, and is thought to be of Greek origin. Much later The “castle clock” of Al-Jazari (1206 CE) displayed the orbits of the Sun and Moon, along with the Zodiac. On the Castle Clock, one could change the length of day and night, important for the seasons. The first largely reprogrammable (something more than day and night on the Castle Clock) device that I found anything about was the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard loom used punch cards to change the pattern of weaves going through the device. This was so profound a revelation that our early computers used these cards as well. These three innovations are by no means the limit of pre-computer programming, but they were important achievements. They show the want of mankind to automate tasks before significant means to do so had been made available.

Mayor Ford would aim to privatize TCHC

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he would “absolutely” consider privatizing the Toronto Community Housing Corporation in the wake of revelations of wasteful spending and untendered contracts at the agency.

Ford made the comment in a Wednesday morning interview with Toronto radio station Newstalk 1010.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Fox News uses fake footage to make Wisconsin protests seem violent

  Doesn’t seem to get much lower than this. Remember the peaceful protests for worker’s rights in Wisconsin that Vanessa wrote about last week? Via Amanda Marcotte, it looks like ever-trustworthy Fox News is using fake footage to make it seem as if the Wisconsin protests are violent.

• UK: Stop Rupert Murdoch!

  Murdoch has exploited his vast media empire to push war in Iraq, elect George W Bush, spread resentment of muslims and immigrants, and block global action on climate change. And he has interfered with our democracy — determining our election results, bolstering political careers in exchange for influence and destroying others with media smears when they refuse to do his bidding.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

GNU/Linux in Turkey

Here is a country where you can buy GNU/Linux and that other OS on PCs side by side. Turkey has its own GNU/Linux distribution, Pardus.

Getting Started With Linux: Why Install Linux?

Curious about Linux, but not ready to dive in head first without a little background? We’re on it. As part of our our Night School series, we’ll be detailing, troubleshooting, and taking a deeper swim into the open-source OS this week. Today, we’re offering some encouragement for the hesitant.

Splashtop: Linux for Windows users

Ever just want to turn on your laptop and get right to work on the Web without any delay? If that’s you, even if you’d never consider switching from Windows to Linux, you might want to give the new release of Splashtop a try.

Indeed many Windows users, especially those with newer laptops have already been using the Linux-based Splashtop-they just haven’t known it. On Dell laptops, it’s called Latitude ON; on HP laptops, it’s known as QuickWeb; and on Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks, its Quick Start 2. Whatever the name, it’s actually an embedded Splashtop Linux variation designed for quick and easy access to the Web. On each of these laptop lines, and many others, Splashtop is there to make it fast and easy for “Windows” users to check their Web-based e-mail; look up information, write a document in Google Docs, etc., etc. without waiting for Windows to boot up.”

On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web

Great programming is an art form. When you see it, the first thing you ask yourself is this: Why didn’t I think of that? Just four lines of code can match and outperform 200. When we read a great passage from Shakespeare or Keats, the effect can be the same. They can make the poetry look effortless and inevitable. The same could be said for music. Johann Sebastian Bach, my favorite composer, (in another time and place) would have been a programmer of unrivaled genius. He sets forth his musical ideas with precision and develops them with such a sense of simple inevitability that one could be forgiven for thinking that his music wrote itself. Bach was God’s sewing machine and his cloth was sound.

What’s so unique about the Linux ecology (and without getting too specific) is the licensing under which the software is circulated.

Ballnux

• Mobilecity puts LG G-Slate 4G pre-order at $699

  Mobilecity has put up a pre-order page for the LG G-Slate with a listed “Retail Price” of $799, but their price at $699.?Of course, this is not an official price announcement by LG or T-Mobile, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it verified in the coming weeks.

  Just about everyone has been balking at the price of the Motorola Xoom, which is selling for $799 for the 3G model (upgradeable to 4G) off-contract. Luckily, T-Mobile loves to undercut Verizon, so I’m willing to bet this price will hold. Interestingly, the pre-order page doesn’t have a release date listed, even though we’ve seen leaked T-Mobile documents which put the G-Slate release date at March 23rd, just about 3 weeks away.

Kernel Space

• 2.6.32.30-longterm review

• OpenBenchmarking.org Launch Statistics

  OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 “Iveland” were released over the weekend (press release) from the Southern California Linux Expo during our talk entitled Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. Here’s some statistics as of this morning that OpenBenchmarking.org has been public for a few days.

• Kernel prepatch 2.6.38-rc7

  Linus has released the 2.6.38-rc7 prepatch. “There really isn’t a lot to report here. Driver updates (random one-liners and some sound soc codec and smaller dri updates) and a few filesystem updates (in particular btrfs fiemap and ENOSPC handling), but most of it really is pretty tiny. Regressions fixed, hopefully none introduced.” Full details can be found in the long-format changelog.

• Graphics Stack

  • The Nouveau Driver Is Moving Along Slowly But Surely

    The Nouveau Companion, the newsletter by the Nouveau driver developers about the progress on their NVIDIA reverse-engineering challenge for creating an open-source NVIDIA Linux driver, has its first new issue in nearly two years.

    It Is Nouveau Companion 44 and can be found on the Nouveau Wiki. Sadly it’s not too overly exciting if you pay attention to the Phoronix news posts pertaining to this community project

  • A Glide State Tracker For Gallium3D Is Talked About

    A student developer has written to the Mesa3D development mailing list about creating a Gallium3D state tracker for the Glide API. Yes, the 3Dfx that hasn’t been used in more than a decade.

    Blaž Tomažič has expressed interest (mailing list message) in creating a Glide state tracker for Gallium3D so that any ancient applications still relying upon this once proprietary graphics API intended for 3Dfx Voodoo hardware can seamlessly run with a modern open-source Linux graphics stack. But there is barely any major software around that still uses Glide, let alone Linux software.

  • X.Org Server 1.11 Release Planned For Mid-August

    It seems as if the X.Org project has finally formed a habit of wanting to release on time. In years past, even point releases have been more than 200 days late and there hasn’t been much to their release schedules that were actually executed on time. It’s something I had long pointed out and have received jabs back in turn, but the past few X.Org Server releases have been tagged on time, plus or minus a few days. It looks like X.Org Server 1.11 may be another on-time release, it’s at least being planned right out of the starting gate.

  • A Restart For The Botched RandR 1.4

    Besides laying out the plans for releasing X.Org Server 1.11 in August, Keith Packard has restarted the discussion surrounding RandR 1.4 so that it will hopefully be readied for integration into this next X Server release. It was part of X.Org Server 1.10 until the last minute when it was pulled from the server and caused a last minute video ABI break.

Applications

• The other apps

  MANY people still don’t realize it, but Linux has long been a viable free alternative to desktop operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS X. The version of Linux that I use, Ubuntu, has improved dramatically in both features and ease of use since it was introduced in 2004, but many other distributions are well suited, too, for everyday home and office use.

  One of the best things about Linux is that it already comes with many of the applications you need installed, such as OpenOffice, which gives you word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database software that’s compatible with MS Office. There’s also Gimp, a sophisticated image editing program (though Ubuntu has stopped including it as an installed program, which means you’ll need to download and install it on your own, if you want it). Like the operating system, the applications are free, too.

• Audacity: The Free Dimensional Sound Editor, Part One

  Audacity is a free, open source, cross-platform sound recorder and editor program that allows you to perform simple and advanced sound recording and editing tasks. If you’re into recording, sound effects, mixing, or editing, Audacity takes you there and beyond. Audacity offers a huge (and growing) list of features found in expensive and proprietary sound software. Can you imagine the audacity of developers who would create and maintain software of this caliber? Alas, that is but one of free software’s primary pillars.

• Sanity Check

  Running your scanner from the command line offers greater control of tasks. We show you how to get started.

• Proprietary

  • First Adobe Flash Player 11 “Incubator” Preview Available For Download

    Adobe announced the Adobe AIR and Flash Player Incubator program a few days ago. This is a place where the Adobe team shares features under development or experimental with the community so they can test it and give feedback.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Backup Server: Refining Rsync, Passwordless Authentication

• Games

  • The Humble Indie Bundle: Leaving no customer behind

    Linux users seemed particularly grateful for the support — when the first bundle concluded after racking up $1,273,613, Linux users had spent the most with $14.44 on average. “If you reach out to them, they want to take care of you too,” John Graham said.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Bogdan Vatra

    We had heard something about it but few people took it seriously. Yet last week we were surprised by a very nice announcement: the Qt SDK has been ported to Android and the first release is available. We were immediately interested in knowing more.

    This time, in the Behind KDE Platforms series, Pau Garcia i Quiles talks about Qt on Android with Bogdan Vatra, the lead developer behind it.

    [...]

    What do you do these days in Qt Android?

• GNOME Desktop

  • Where did the buttons go?

    Minimise and maximise buttons were recently removed from the window titlebars in GNOME 3. Discussions of the change have been ongoing for some time, but the decision only just happened, and the change came as a surprise to many. Personally speaking, I think the removal of the buttons is a definite improvement, and it’s a move that I’ve been in favour of for a while. Though Owen gave a really excellent account of his reasoning for the decision, some people are still wondering why the buttons have been removed, so I thought I’d try and explain why I think it’s a positive change. As with most major design decisions, the removal of the buttons is an attempt to balance a number of factors: there isn’t a single reason that you can point to.

  • An Early Look at GNOME 3.0

    GNOME 3, the first major-version revision of the popular desktop environment in eight years, is slated for release in April. The good news is that you can now easily take the new release for a test spin with a spare USB key, and provide some real-world feedback to the project before the final code gets released into the wild.

    To test GNOME 3 for yourself, you can download 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images built by Frederic Crozat. Crozat updated the first builds for FOSDEM, and said he plans to do so periodically; the underlying system is based on openSUSE. The images can be burned onto a bootable CD or DVD, but if you install them onto a USB flash memory stick instead, you can take advantage of persistence to preserve changes, documents, and additional packages you install. There are also Fedora-based images created by the distribution, and Ubuntu repository packages for GNOME Shell, the desktop user interface, although it is not clear how often either of the latter are updated.

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 Alpha 2 Released, Screenshot Tour

    Mandriva, through Eugeni Dodonov, announced on the last day of February the immediate availability for testing of the second Alpha version of the upcoming Mandriva 2011 Linux operating system.

    Mandriva 2011 Alpha 2 is now powered by Linux kernel 2.6.37.2, it features an up-to-date NetworkManager, the iBus input framework replaced the old SCIM one, lots of updates and bug fixes.

  • March 2011 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the March 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Close to Support

    Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated support at $39.42 with current price action closing at just $41.28 places the stock price near levels where traders will start paying attention.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Mistakes made, lessons learned, a principle clarified and upheld

      Money is particularly contentious in a community that mixes volunteer and paid effort, we should have anticipated and been extra careful to have the difficult conversations that were inevitable up front and in public, at UDS, when we were talking about the possibility of Banshee being the default media player in Ubuntu. We didn’t, and I apologise for the consequential confusion and upset caused.

      The principles from which we derive our policy are straightforward:

      The bulk of the direct cost in creating the audience of Ubuntu users is carried by Canonical. There are many, many indirect costs and contributions that are carried by others, both inside the Ubuntu community and in other communities, without which Ubuntu would not be possible. But that doesn’t diminish the substantial investment made by Canonical in a product that is in turn made available free of charge to millions of users and developers.

    • Righthaven Sues Radio Giant For Hosting Caption Contest On Denver Post Photo

      (standard junk: this is my personal opinion and i’m possibly ethically compromised because i’m currently on contract working for canonical, etc. etc. blah)

      canonical does a lot of things that i would classify as pretty boneheaded in terms of their relationship to various free software communities. they have an interesting and colourful history with quite a lot of projects and our project is pretty close to the top of that list.

      it’s my opinion that canonical takes a more pragmatic approach than most free software projects have. they have a bit more of a “…and damn the consequences” attitude. they’ve made a lot of decisions that have put them at odds with a lot of people. i’ve found myself on both sides — defending their choices when i agree and calling them out when i don’t.

      binary drivers so that it “just works”? win. copyright assignment? not such a win. this mess with banshee? ya. that’s pretty lame.

    • Welcome to Righthaven Lawsuits

      This website is dedicated to gathering together and posting for Righthaven Defendants and the public information about Righthaven LLC — the Las Vegas “technology company” that has been filing copyright infringement lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada (and South Carolina and Colorado) against numerous unsuspecting website owners (almost always without notice) for copyright infringement of news articles originally published in the Las Vegas Review Journal (and Denver Post) and purportedly assigned to Righthaven (sample assignment here) which subsequently registers the copyright to such articles with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to then file suit in federal court.

    • Ubuntu Live CD Will Let You Upgrade To Newer Ubuntu Versions [Ubuntu 11.04 Development]

      Because this has just landed in Ubuntu 11.04 (and because Ubuntu 11.04 is still in alpha!), it’s best not to try this feature yet as it may break stuff (I didn’t tested it).

    • UDW: Day 1 over, day 2 to come

      I simply love Ubuntu Developer Weeks. They’re sometimes a tad hectic, but they’re just so full of energy, it’s awesome! Yesterday we had 320+ people attending, which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone for bringing so much fun to the sessions and thanks to all the speakers and helpers. You all ROCK!

    • First Ever Ubuntu Cloud Day

      I am very excited to announce the very first Ubuntu Cloud Days! UCD is an online event that is designed for everyone interested in cloud computing, as well as someone who is already using Ubuntu server and who’s thinking about “that cloud thing” everyone is talking about. If the words “virtualization”, “cloud”, “server”, “scalability” or “automation” intrigue and amuse you, then you should definitely attend! It’s a chance to learn a lot, get your questions answered as well as share your experiences and have fun with the rest of the cloud community!

    • Unity 3.6.0 Comes With Option To Maximize Dash, Lots Of Bug Fixes [Ubuntu 11.04 Updates]

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Mint 10 KDE Screenshots

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • China Unicom plans to dominate China with its own mobile OS

    The Wall Street Journal reported that the wireless operator is developing a new mobile operating system known as “WoPhone.” The new platform is based on Linux and is aimed at smartphones and tablets. Phone manufacturers that are on-board include China’s ZTE, Huawei Technologies and TCL, as well as South Korea’s Samsung, US’ Motorola and Taiwan’s HTC. There’s no official release date yet but the company said that it is “imminent.”

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Qt Creator 2.1.0 released

      Today we release Qt Creator 2.1.0 as well as the Qt SDK 1.1 beta and Qt 4.7.2 .

      [...]

      So grab the Qt SDK 1.1 beta release (includes Qt Creator 2.1.0) or get the Qt Creator-only binary packages from our download server.

  • Android

    • BlackBerry’s Android?

      In the Mirror, Mirror universe, Research in Motion (RIM) uses Android instead of QNX for its next generation of BlackBerry smartphones and its PlayBook Tablet. Now, there’s a rumor that RIM may well add support for Android applications to its BlackBerry line on top of its forthcoming QNX operating system.

    • Bringing Qt applications to Android – a quickstart video

      If you want to try it out, first note that Necessitas currently supports only Linux. Also, you currently need to install Necessitas into /opt/necessitas. More information can be found in the Necessitas Wiki. If you encounter technical issues with Necessitas or just want to send the well deserved kudos to the team, just visit the android-qt Google Groups.

    • Atrix 4G cranks up Android with Tegra 2, HSPA+, says review

      Motorola’s Atrix 4G smartphone provides a solid AT&T answer to Verizon Wireless’ Droid lineup and the various Samsung Galaxy S Android handsets, says this eWEEK review. With features like a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and HSPA+ support, the Atrix 4G is dubbed the best Android phone from AT&T yet.

    • Things overheard on the WiFi from my Android smartphone

      What options do Android users have, today, to protect themselves against eavesdroppers? Android does support several VPN configurations which you could configure before you hit the road. That won’t stop the unnecessary transmission of your fine GPS coordinates, which, to my mind, neither SoundHound nor ShopSaavy have any business knowing. If that’s an issue for you, you could turn off your GPS altogether, but you’d have to turn it on again later when you want to use maps or whatever else. Ideally, I’d like the Market installer to give me the opportunity to revoke GPS privileges for apps like these.

    • Motorola Working on 7-inch Tablet to Compliment XOOM

      Among the many other tidbits Sanjay Jha dropped during today’s talk with Stanley Morgan investors was the revelation that Motorola is already working on a 7-inch Android tablet for release by the end of the year. The company just released their first tablet, the Motorola XOOM, during the final week of February, but Jha sees exploring various size options as beneficial.

    • Honeycomb statue arrives at Google, immediately rooted

      For those of you who may have grown tired with proper news, analysis, and commentary, you’re in luck, because we have a fluff piece! The Honeycomb statue has finally made it to the Google campus. You can all stop holding your breath now.

      Google tradition had informally been that the new statue for each Android version would be planted in the yard before the official release of the OS SDK. The Froyo statue was unveiled five days before the SDK release. The Gingerbread statue landed a full six weeks before the SDK, which made quite a few people anxious. Perhaps it is in response to that anxiety, Google has planted the Honeycomb statue six days after the Honeycomb SDK release. Although even that plan had its flaws in that there was a small number of people who were worried that the Honeycomb statue hadn’t arrived.

    • Android 2.3.3 supports screen shot apps on non-rooted devices

      That Android doesn’t support screen shot apps might have come as a surprise to some people when they first started using Google’s OS, since other smartphone platforms feature such utilities. Android users with root access have enjoyed the option to take screen grabs with applications such as the excellent ShootMe, but so far we haven’t been able to capture screens directly from an Android without rooting it first.

      However, users of Android have always been able to capture its UI with a PC and the SDK. By enabling USB debugging from Settings > Applications > Development, installing the Android SDK, connecting your Android device to a computer, and then launching ddms.bat from the android-sdk/tools folder, you can quite conveniently capture your phone’s user-interface in action. And some custom ROMs, such as MIUI, let you take screen shots just by pressing a hardware key combination.n

    • F4A [Freedom 4 Android] 1.4 released

      The new F4A version comes with the spring and includes a new wizard for newbies, a nice wallpaper for your viewing pleasure, some internal tweaks and increased USB and virtual disk images size (to 512 MB) – so you can have lots of persistent data between reboots.

    • Android Honeycomb Sculpture Arrives at Google Building 44 | Android Community

• OLPC

  • VIA DRM Kernel Mode-Setting On The OLPC

    While the group behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) child ended up writing their own VIA Linux graphics driver, which is further fragmenting VIA’s nasty Linux situation, James Simmons now has his OpenChrome-based VIA DRM kernel mode-setting driver working from the OLPC hardware.

• Tablets

  • ECS 7 and 10 inch tablets launched at CeBIT

    Elitegroup Computer Systems or just ECS is making a splash at the CeBIT in Germany with quite a few tablet PCs. The tablet from ECS can be classified into two broad categories – 7 and 10 inch displays with both Android and Windows coming in as the operating system of choice. Further, when it is about the core of the tablet PCs, it’s both the Intel Atom Oak Trail as well as ARM-based chips from Marvell that comes into the picture.

    Coming to the larger tablets with 10.1 inch display, the tablets comes with either 1366 x 768 or 1024 x 600 pixel resolution. With an Intel Atom Z670 Lincroft heart, the tablets run Windows 7 Home Premium and are able to support up to 2 GB of RAM and solid disk drives or 1.8 inch hard drives. The tablet will have WiFi, Bluetooth, as well as 3G as an optional extra and are expected to weigh around 1.8 pounds.

10 terms and concepts related to open source

Despite the proliferation of open source projects, some people are still fuzzy on the terminology and basic open source concepts. Susan Harkins put together this list to help clear up some of the confusion.

Implementing Open Standards in Open Source

Industry standards morph into functional computer software. I use the word “morph” on purpose to avoid any term that can be found in US copyright or patent law. Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animation to turn one image into another through a seamless transition. Wikipedia shows an image of George W. Bush morphing into Arnold Schwarzenegger, and so too the morphing of an industry standard into software can result in something that looks entirely different at an expressive level and that potentially does useful things.

In the case of software industry standards, morphing transforms a written specification into working code through a mental process conducted internally by programmers and engineers. The end result – functional software – is a created outcome of human intellect that starts with a written specification and ends with a working implementation.

Wanted – Open Source Organisations

Google’s is now in the process of recruiting mentoring organisations for its 2011 Summer of Code. Sign up now to get help with your open source project.

Google’s Summer of Code is a global program in which student developers are paid stipends to write code for open source software projects over a three month period.

10 industries that would benefit from using open source

Open source solutions are gaining popularity across a wide spectrum of businesses — but its adoption is slow in some sectors. Jack Wallen lists the industries he thinks should be using (or using more) open source software.

Events

• Desktop Summit CFP announced and Registration open

  The CFP for the Desktop Summit, which is a joint GNOME and KDE conference to be held August 6-12 in Berlin, Germany, is now open. Abstracts for presentations are due by March 25.

• Open Source Software for Public Administrations: ePractice Workshop, Brussels 7 April 2011

  The ePractice Workshop on Open Source Software for Public Administration, supported by the ePractice.eu and the OSOR.eu communities, will be held in Brussels, on Thursday 7 April 2011.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Thunderbird 3.1.8 Update is Now Available

  • What’s New in Thunderbird 3.1.8

  • Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.8, Firefox 3.6.14, 3.5.17 Updates Released

    Mozilla Messaging has released a new version of the desktop email client Thunderbird. Thunderbird 3.1.8. is a security, stability and performance upgrade for the stable version of the email software. Not all pages have been updated yet to reflect the new release.

    Bugzilla lists a total of 56 bug fixes of which 13 have a severity rating of critical. Among the critical fixes are memory leaks, crashes and security issues.

    The download link at the official release notes page links already to the newest version of the browser. Existing Thunderbird 3.1.x users should receive update notifications in the email client shortly. Those who do not want to wait can download the new version and install it manually instead.

  • Tumucumaque Park

    While you’re enjoying the web like you never have before with Firefox 4, you can also help protect the diversity of Tumucumaque with your donation to World Wildlife Fund today. The Mozilla community is raising $25,000 to support WWF’s conservation efforts in the Amazon, and to help them harness open web technology to keep places like Tumucumaque protected and diverse. Do your part today.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The first LibreOffice Conference will be in Paris!

  First, apologies should be made here: The choice of Paris for this conference is a story in itself, and the real issue here is that there was minimal community discussion on this. It all started with yours truly announcing that the OOoCON 2011 would take place in Paris…

• LibreOffice Conference to be held in Paris this October – First annual project meeting from October 12th to 15th

  The Document Foundation today announced the first annual LibreOffice Conference, which will be held in Paris from October 12th to 15th. Carrying on the tradition of previous OOoCon conferences, the LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally.

• The Death Of Hudson? Oracle Shows Its True Colors

  As PJ says, “It’s all about the money, honey.” Oracle has just admitted that all of the excuses that they’ve provided up till this point have been a smoke screen. It doesn’t matter that Kohsuke Kawaguchi founded the Hudson project. It doesn’t matter that the Hudson project has done well under his leadership, gaining an 80% share of the continuous integration market for Java (whatever that is).

  What matters is that Oracle thinks it can make more money, and since Oracle managed to trademark the project name, it thinks it can control it. Thought. Kohsuke Kawaguchi has already proved that Oracle can’t control the project by forking it, and naming his fork Jenkins.

  So Oracle ends up with little of value, and probably won’t be able to keep up with the Jenkins release schedule, any more than they’ve been able to keep up with the Libre Office release schedule.

• Who Contributes the Most to LibreOffice?

  Red Hat, who also contributed to OpenOffice.org, has chipped in as well. With usually two contributions per week, Red Hat developers have provided 39 patches since the fork.

  The newest known name to join the contributors list is Canonical. They contributed the Human theme and a later fix, but more Ubuntu integration code is likely. Björn Michaelsen contributed 2 patches in the last few weeks so far.

  Bosdonnat says there are 133 new coders and 55 localizers since the fork. There seemed to be a slight dip at the end of last year according the graph and Bosdonnat attributes that to the festivities of the holiday season.

Education

• Education reform wars: Caricaturization, not disagreement, is the problem

  Wake County Public School System is the eighth largest school district in the United States, and one of the mostly highly regarded. But lately it’s not been our graduation rate or test scores that make the headlines. It’s the school board’s decision to end a highly regarded socioeconomic integration program.

  One of the few urban school districts in the United States that is truly racially and socioeconomically integrated, Wake County is also an extremely fast-growing area with residents largely adverse to paying taxes for the local infrastructure.

  As you may imagine, this has created a rather untenable situation for the public schools, as many are bursting at the seams with children packed into classroom trailers. Oh, and let’s not forget the economic recession, which has further reduced funding for building new schools.

Healthcare

• Whitehall to launch son-of-NPfIT scheme within weeks

  No mention of the Cloud, open source or innovation

  There is no mention in the CfH procurement plans of open source software, open data standards, G-Cloud or data centre rationalisation. There are no references to the announcements by Downing Street and the Cabinet Office on new open standards and procurement rules for IT.

  There is no mention either of the government “skunkworks” that Downing Street has announced to “assess and develop faster and cheaper ways of using ICT in government”.

Funding

• 5 Free Software To Support With Flattr

  Another month and thus another issue of Flattr FOSS. Time flies but Flattr’s usage seems to remain relatively strong.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Software Freedom Is Elementary, My Dear Watson.

  I’ve watched the game show, Jeopardy!, regularly since its Trebek-hosted relaunch on 1984-09-10. I even remember distinctly the Final Jeopardy question that night as “This date is the first day of the new millennium”. At the age of 11, I got the answer wrong, falling for the incorrect “What is 2000-01-01?”, but I recalled this memory eleven years ago during the debates regarding when the millennium turnover happened.

  I had periods of life where I watched Jeopardy! only rarely, but in recent years (as I’ve become more of a student of games (in part, because of poker)), I’ve watched Jeopardy! almost nightly over dinner with my wife. I’ve learned that I’m unlikely to excel as a Jeopardy! player myself because (a) I read slow and (b) my recall of facts, while reasonably strong, is not instantaneous. I thus haven’t tried out for the show, but I’m nevertheless a fan of strong players.

  Jeopardy! isn’t my only spectator game. Right after college, even though I’m a worse-than-mediocre chess player, I watched with excitement as Deep Blue played and defeated Kasparov. Kasparov has disputed the results and how much humans were actually involved, but even so, such interference was minimal (between matches) and the demonstration still showed computer algorithmic mastery of chess.

  [...]

  I don’t think I’m going to convince IBM to release Watson’s sources as Free Software.

Government

• EU Governments United Against the Knowledge Society?

  With the upcoming revision of the 2004 “Intellectual Property Rights” Enforcement Directive (IPRED), the European Union is getting ready to toughen up the war on sharing of culture in the digital environment. The Member States, gathered in the EU Council, have set up a working group to work on the revision of IPRED. An internal document dated February 4th clearly suggests that the Council is also taking the side of the patent, trademark and copyright lobbies, who want to push for even more extremist measures to deal with online copyright infringements. If nothing is done to stop them, freedom of communication on the Internet, the right to privacy and access to culture will be durably undermined in the name of baseless policies.

Openness/Sharing

• What would you do with Open.org?

  That was the question put forth by members of the Linux Fund organization last night during a Birds of a Feather session at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 9X).

  The domain name was recently acquired by Linux Fund from the City of Salem, Oregon for an undisclosed amount. Salem’s public library was using the domain for a kids-to-Internet program entitled the Oregon Public Education Network. The Linux Fund purchased the domain at public auction.

• Santhosh gets a seat in Wikipedia Language Committee

• This one goes out to the fence painters

  It seems like many people approach community strategy with this Tom Sawyer thinking (see: crowdsourcing). How can I get people to paint my fence for me?

  Why is the default reaction of most people and organizations usually to create a new community with them at the center? Why instead don’t more people look for and join a community that already exists with a purpose or goal similar to their own?

  I’ve even seen this Tom Sawyer thinking creeping into the business book world. How many times have you read a great new book, only to be greeted at the end with a plea like this one: “If you like the ideas in my book, please come join the discussion on my website, [yetanotherbookcommunity.com]”? (Sidebar: I have a new book coming out this fall. It’s called The Ad-free Brand. I mention this because, instead of starting Yet Another Community around my book and asking you to come join, I’m going to try my best to use my ideas to help paint fences that already exist. Promise.)

• Neighbors helping NeighborGoods

  Since we launched 6 months ago, NeighborGoods has quickly become the leading online community for local resource sharing. With NeighborGoods, neighbors can borrow, lend and rent anything from bicycles to camping gear to baby clothes in a safe and fun community. By working together to share resources, neighbors save money, live more sustainably and strengthen their local communities in the process.

• Learn how to get your Creative Commons project funded

  If you are serious about a Creative Commons project idea, you may be interested in the free, online course, “Getting your CC project funded,” set to run in April. The course consists of a series of workshops and seminars that will take you through the steps from an initial idea to having a finished project proposal for submission, including assistance in identifying and finding funding bodies and collaborations relevant for your project. You provide the idea; the course provides the guidance to turn it into a proposal that can’t be refused.

Standards/Consortia

• The Dutch ODF Policy in Retrospect

• Best practices for creating MMI Modality Components Note Published

• Web Notifications First Draft Published

Canada is lone bidder for 2015 Women’s World Cup

FIFA says Zimbabwe has withdrawn its bid to host the Women’s World Cup in 2015, leaving Canada as the only candidate.

German Defence Minister Guttenberg resigns over thesis

German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has stepped down after he was found to have copied large parts of his 2006 university doctorate thesis.

Perfectionism in the “Tiger Mom” and “The King’s Speech”

You’ve probably heard about Amy Chua, the so-called Tiger Mom. A few weeks ago she had a firestorm of publicity around her book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she boasts of her authoritarian and coercive parenting methods, which include not only insisting that her daughters follow a narrow course of “success-oriented” classes and activities, but punishing them harshly – via withholding, threats and insults – when they don’t toe the line or achieve top-level success. (For instance, she deprives them of bathroom breaks, threatens to burn their toys, and calls them “garbage.”) She got a major boost when conservative bastion The Wall Street Journal featured her in an admiring article. No surprise there – conservatism and authoritarianism go hand in hand.

Ebay – Paypal relationship scrutinized by MEP

Obviously that does not answer the question of the MEP and seems to contradict the single market objective. It is odd to watch the protectionism of the Luxembourg company from competition enforcement and their borderline consumer relations and service practices without sanctions by the Luxembourg authorities. All this in the context that the European Union says they want to tighten rules on financial services. At least this provider of cross-border services seems to receive special treatment which enables them to contravene the usual modes of operation.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 34 languages

Last June, we introduced the ability to upload documents into Google Docs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR analyzes images and PDF files, typically produced by a scanner (or the camera of a mobile phone), extracts text and some formatting and allows you to edit the document in Google Docs.

The Reputation Economy is Coming – Are You Prepared?

Last week, I hit a nerve when I wrote about how your online presence will replace your resume in the future. I believe that in order to compete in the global economy, you have to have an online personal brand. After you create that presence, you have to maintain it throughout the course of your entire life, before someone else does it for you. We are living in a world now where visibility creates opportunities and reputation builds trust. Submitting a resume to a job board, or cold calling randomly, will increasingly become ineffective until it simply doesn’t work at all. On the other hand, building an online presence and managing your reputation (like a brand) will become increasing effective and yield strong results.

The best fail compilation in existence

When a video reduces us to tears, we bring it to you. What follows below is a solid 8 minutes of slips, falls, mistakes, poor decisions, crashes, burns, and of course, fails

Schoolgirl strip-searched by principal

“The wheels of justice have flat tyres. But sometimes, they do turn, as they did for Savana Redding, who, when she was a 13-year-old honours student at the Safford Middle School in Arizona, was strip-searched.

“But it took six years for SCOTUS, the Supreme Court of the US, to rule the school was, in effect, guilty of serious misbehaviour.”

The above quotes from a 2009 p2pnet story centering on Savana Redding, strip-searched for presumed possession of Advil.

Science

• The Positive Balance of Technology

• Facebook Linked To One In Five Divorces in the United States

  If you’re single, Facebook and other social networking sites can help you meet that special someone. However, for those in even the healthiest of marriages, improper use can quickly devolve into a marital disaster.

  A recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that Facebook is cited in one in five divorces in the United States. Also, more than 80 percent of divorce lawyers reported a rising number of people are using social media to engage in extramarital affairs.

• Plague scientist dies of… the plague

  It must be a recurrent nightmare for researchers who work with deadly microbes: being killed by your own research subjects. Microbe hunters know better than anyone else just how nasty infectious disease can be, and they spend much of their professional lives wielding bleach and maintaining stringent lab protocols to keep the objects of their fascination at bay. But sometimes one jumps the fence. Just such a tragedy caused the death in 2009 of Malcolm Casadaban, aged 60, a respected plague researcher at the University of Chicago. But how it did so was a mystery, until now.

Health/Nutrition

• Healthcare for People, Not Profit

  If you think you’re covered by health insurance, think again. According to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Medicine, illness and medical bills caused 62% of all bankruptcies and most of those people were insured and middle class. Meanwhile, “the five largest health-insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion, up 56 percent over 2008”, according to a report by Health Care for American Now based on SEC filings.

  In CNN’s analysis of the Fortune 500, “The star of 2009 is undoubtedly health care. The sector’s earnings jumped to an all-time high of $92 billion. Health-care earnings rose by $23 billion, or 33%…from two groups, one surprising — medical insurers — and the other more predictable, pharmaceuticals. For the drug industry, it’s as if the recession never happened. The sector’s earnings surged by one-third to $64 billion.”

Security

• Undercover agent slips through TSA naked body scanner multiple times with handgun

  The “enhanced” screening procedures now used by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at the nation’s airports has once again been demonstrated as a total failure, this time at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). According to a high-ranking, inside source at TSA, an undercover agent was successfully able to smuggle a handgun through the naked body scanner — and she did so not only once, but several times.

• Security updates for Tuesday

• After dealing with Anonymous, HBGary Federal’s CEO resigns

• Aaron Barr Falls On His Sword – Anything To Protect The Company!

• HBGary Federal’s Aaron Barr Resigns After Anonymous Hack Scandal

  “I need to focus on taking care of my family and rebuilding my reputation,” Barr told Threatpost. “It’s been a challenge to do that and run a company. And, given that I’ve been the focus of much of bad press, I hope that, by leaving, HBGary and HBGary Federal can get away from some of that. I’m confident they’ll be able to weather this storm.”

• Morgan Stanley hit by same attackers that breached Google

  Morgan Stanley was hit by a “very sensitive” breach to its network by the same attackers who penetrated computer systems maintained by Google and dozens of other companies, according to leaked emails reviewed by Bloomberg News.

  The emails came from California-based HBGary, which suffered a major compromise of its own at the hands of hackers from Anonymous. After being hired by Morgan Stanley in 2010, HBGary members found that the world’s top merger adviser fell prey to the so-called Aurora hacks, which siphoned source code and other sensitive data from the victim companies over a period of many months.

• 19 vulnerabilities – Chrome 9 update proves expensive for Google

  Google has released version 9.0.597.107 of its Chrome browser, which fixes a total of 19 security vulnerabilities, 16 of them rated as high risk. It was, for example, possible to crash the browser using JavaScript dialogues and SVG files, or to use the address bar for URL spoofing. Also fixed is an integer overflow when handling textareas. As ever, Google is keeping full details of the vulnerabilities under wraps until the bulk of users have switched to the new version.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Aid crisis on Libya’s west border

  The situation on Libya’s border with Tunisia has reached crisis point, as tens of thousands of foreigners flee unrest in the country, the UN says.

  Aid staff are battling to cope with an exodus that has seen some 140,000 people crossing into Tunisia and Egypt.

• Sometimes One Picture Says It All

• How Egypt Can Help Libya

  The Libyan people deserve help in their fight against Gaddafi’s butchers, but direct U.S. or European military intervention would have several drawbacks. Western troops, not speaking Arabic, would make deadly mistakes. Even if successful, this intervention would diminish the sense of local and Arab ownership of the revolt.

  I suggest that the UN Security Council invite Egypt to intervene, if Libyans approve. A small part of Egypt’s army would dwarf Gaddafi’s forces. Without even having to fight, it could join and support the Libyan rebel forces that have already liberated eastern and southern Libya. This would change the situation completely.

• Libyans in “Liberated” Eastern Cities Balance Self-Government with Supporting Tripoli Resistance: Anjali Kamat Reports

  As anti-government rebels close in on the Libyan capital city of Tripoli, we get the latest from Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat. She has just returned to Egypt after spending five days in eastern Libya, where popular uprisings have liberated the area from pro-Gaddafi forces. “There’s a sense that Gaddafi can do anything to people [in Tripoli], and there’s a real sense of fear,” Kamat says, “but I think people are also trying to see what they can do to manage their city and to also support their friends and families in Tripoli, who continue to be under siege.”

• Nelly Furtado To Donate $1 Million Received From Gadhafi

  Things are falling apart in many ways for longtime Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. With his countrymen in uproar and demanding that he step down after more than 40 years in power as part of the freedom wave rushing through the Middle East, the dictator is also getting push back from one of the pop stars who’ve performed for his family over the years.

• In U.S.-Libya nuclear deal, a Qadhafi threat faded away

  In late 2009 the Obama administration was leaning on Col. Muammar el-Qadhafi and his son, Seif, to allow the removal from Libya of the remnants of the country’s nuclear weapons programme: casks of highly enriched uranium.

  Meeting with the American Ambassador, Gene A. Kretz, the younger Qadhafi complained that the United States had retained “an embargo on the purchase of lethal equipment” even though Libya had turned over more than $100 million in bomb-making technology in 2003. Libya was “fed up,” he told Mr. Kretz, at Washington’s slowness in doling out rewards for Libya’s cooperation, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.

• Dictators and their sons: Col Gaddafi’s billionaire children

  Seen as the natural successor to his father before the wave of protests across the north African nation, the 38 year old Saif al-Islam presented himself as a reformer. He was welcomed in the West as the acceptable face of the regime, and claims the Duke of York, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair among his “good friends”.

  In 1995, he received his degree in architecture and engineering at Tripoli’s al-Fateh University, and then went on to obtain a management degree from the International Business School in Vienna before gaining a doctorate at Britain’s London School of Economics (LSE).

• UN: Libyan refugee ‘crisis’ tops 140,000

  Violence and chaos in Libya have triggered an exodus of more than 140,000 refugees to Tunisia and Egypt, a U.N. official said, as aid workers warned the situation at the Tunisian border has reached crisis point.

  Officials say the situation has been made even more volatile by humanitarian aid workers being blocked from reaching western Libya, patients reportedly being executed in hospitals, or shot by gunmen hiding in ambulances

  At the Libya-Tunisian border – where authorities say up to 75,000 people have gathered in just nine days – “the situation is reaching crisis point,” U.N. refugee agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming warned Tuesday.

• NATO’s Afghan night raids come with high civilian cost

  A few minutes and a few bullets were enough to turn Abdullah from an 11th grade student with dreams of becoming a translator to the despairing head of a family of more than a dozen.

  His father and oldest brother were shot dead last August at the start of a midnight assault by NATO-led troops on their house in Afghanistan’s east. Abdullah himself was hooded, handcuffed and flown to prison, where he was detained for questioning and then released.

• Thuraya satellite telecom says jammed by Libya

  Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Co’s services are being jammed by Libya, the UAE-based firm’s chief executive said on Thursday, as a revolt continued against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

  “Unfortunately there is deliberate jamming by Libya … which is illegal,” CEO Samer Halawi told Al Arabiya television.

• Tunisian prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi resigns amid unrest

  Tunisia was thrown into turmoil once more after Mohamed Ghannouchi resigned as prime minister of the post-revolution government amid further clashes between police and protestors. The interim president, Fouad Mebazaa, named the former government minister Beji Caid-Essebsi as Ghannouchi’s replacement.

• Rebels’ gains threaten return to all-out war in Ivory Coast

  Rebels controlling northern Ivory Coast have seized a town in government territory and said yesterday they were still advancing, raising the prospects of a return to open war.

  Forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, who is still clinging to power after an election most of the world says he lost, confirmed the fall of Zouan-Hounien in an overnight attack and said they would fight to take it back.

• Mass arrests stopped further Djibouti protests

  The planned resumption of mass protests in Djibouti this weekend was hindered by massive police presence in the capital and arrests of about 300 opposition and civil society leaders.

  Friday 18 February saw an estimated 30,000 Djiboutians protesting in central Djibouti City. Their main demand was for President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh to step down, or at least refrain from standing candidate in the upcoming April elections.

• Urgent: Mousavi is in Jail

  Shame on Mousavi’s webstie, kaleme.com, that we should receive Mousavi’s news form the CNN. The CNN has said : Iran’s two opposition leaders, their wives are placed in ‘safe house’ they have added: “Moussavi, Karrubi and their wives were placed in a “safe house” for their own welfare !!!!!!!!!!! , but they have not been arrested !!!!!!!!, Iranian government sources told CNN Saturday !!!!!! …. The human rights organization also pointed out that “a ‘safe house’ is considered a place for the secret detention of high security-value detainees, which is not under the control of the judiciary or any other monitoring mechanisms.

• 2011-03-01 French, English and US Special Forces Enter Libya to Reinforce Uprising

  10:00 PM The Pakistan Observer reports that French, British and US special forces have entered Libya, to train and assist rebel groups to overthrow Gaddafi. The article also outlines how naval vessels from India are underway for deployment in defense of the Libyan uprising. The vessels will presumably join the USS Enterprise, which is also on its way into the Mediterranean via the Suez canal. This follows US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admission on 28th February that preparations for military assistance for the Libyan pro-democracy movement were underway.

• Olivia Chow in Question Period: Call a public inquiry now

  Ms. Olivia Chow (Trinity—Spadina, NDP): Mr. Speaker, it is unbelievable.

  When free speech is denied in the only designated free speech zone, when women are aggressively strip-searched in a warehouse, and when an amputee is dragged off without his leg, Canadians know there is something desperately wrong.

• Violent suppression of protest at Toronto’s G20 – CBC documentary

• (FULL MOVIE) G20 -CBC The Fifth Estate ‘You Should’ve Stayed at Home’

• G20 RE-EXPOSED: Toronto Inquiry Now (Documentary)

Cablegate

• Raila’s family was involved in maize scandal, claim US cables

  Wikileaks claim Prime Minister Raila Odinga attempted to suspend former Agriculture Minister William Ruto to divert attention from his family’s involvement in the Sh2 billion maize scam.

  Secret cables sent by US Ambassador, Michael Ranneberger, to Washington and now released by WikiLeaks allege Raila wanted to create confusion when he said he was suspending Ruto and Education Minister Sam Ongeri. It claims Raila wanted public debate to focus on the two, and not his family’s role in the scandal.

• Kenyan president’s mistress linked to mercenaries

  In 2006, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, Kenya’s current vice president and an opposition leader at the time, told U.S. Embassy officials in Nairobi about an unfolding political scandal in which he was involved, according to a State Department cable released yesterday by WikiLeaks. Although the story itself is a bit banal — involving a rivalry between Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s first and second wives — Musyoka’s allegations against the Kenyan president’s family are serious, including an accusation of links to “Eastern European” mercenaries used in a 2006 media crackdown.

  The story goes something like this: In 2006, the Standard Media company, one of the country’s largest, published a story alleging that Musyoka, as opposition leader, had cut a deal with Kibaki. The story, which Musyoka denied to embassy officials, was a bigger blow to his political prospects than to the sitting president’s. But the government unleashed a wave of raids against the Standard Media group anyway.

• 07NAIROBI4246, KENYA – DOING BUSINESS THE CHINESE WAY

  Chinese firms selling into Kenya’s information
  and communications technologies (ICT) sector are throwing a lot of
  money around, according to industry contacts. Indeed, Chinese
  influence may be so great that it is distorting important investment
  decisions in the country. Putting aside corruption, Chinese ICT
  vendors are difficult to beat on price and quality, and therefore
  often win government procurement tenders. However, companies that
  buy Chinese equipment often find that they end up paying the piper
  later due to poor after-sales service.

• Julian Assange™ applies to trademark himself

• Divided With No Clear Aim While the World Is Burning

• WikiLeaks, Internet in record Nobel Peace field

  Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, the Internet and a Russian human rights activist are among a record 241 nominations for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

  The Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Tuesday that the 2011 field includes 53 organizations and tops last year’s 237 nominees.

  Known nominees also include Afghan rights advocate Sima Samar, the European Union, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, Russian rights group Memorial and its founder Svetlana Gannushkina.

• WikiLeaks Shames the Old News Media

  If there were ever a doubt about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is “a real journalist,” recent events should erase all those doubts. Indeed, they should put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.

• WikiLeaks at the Forefront of 21st-Century Journalism

  If there was ever doubts about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is a journalist, recent events erase those doubts and put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.

  The U.S. Department of Justice is still trying to find a way to prosecute Assange and others associated with WikiLeaks. A key to their prosecution is claiming he is not a journalist, but that weak premise has been made laughable by recent events.

  The list of WikiLeaks revelations has become astounding. During the North African and Middle East revolts, WikiLeaks published documents that provided people with critical information. The traditional media has relied on WikiLeaks publications and is now also emulating WikiLeaks.

• Wikileaks Cables on Raila And Uhuru

• In 2006 State agents and hirelings raided Standard but…

  According to the classified embassy cables, former US ambassador William Bellamy claims that Gichugu MP Martha Karua, then the Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister, told him “Kenya had a rogue press and something had to be done to bring press practices into line with laws and regulations.”

• 10NAIROBI11, Kenya: Inadequate Witness Protection Poses Painful Dilemma

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 100,000 oil disaster claims may never be paid by BP

  Not that it comes as much of a surprise. Louisiana officials thought they had an agreement with BP to pre-fund critical projects to rebuild the fishing industry but the terms there have also changed.

• BP reneges on deal to rebuild oyster beds, repair wetlands, Louisiana officials say

  Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority chairman Garret Graves and Department of Wildlife & Fisheries director Robert Barham said the state will instead scramble to find millions of dollars to begin the work itself, then bill BP for the costs.

• What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water

  A controversial new method of natural-gas drilling, embraced rapidly across the US, has contaminated water supplies with radioactive waste, according to an investigation by the New York Times. The paper said internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators showed that the dangers to the public from the drilling method – hydraulic fracturing – were greater than previously understood.

  Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses huge volumes of water, chemicals and sand injected into rock at high pressure to release natural gas. Its development has unleashed a natural gas boom in the US and around the world. But the NYT said the waste water contained dangerously high levels of radioactivity. It was being sent to treatment plants that were not designed to deal with or being discharged into rivers that supply drinking water.

• Thick foam found in Mobile Bay — Orange substance in many areas (PHOTOS)

• The dogs who listen to children reading

  Danny received five months of training to become a Read dog. Greyhounds are particularly well-suited because they do not bark and their short coat is less likely to trigger allergies.

• Government attacks EU fishing rules

  The government has launched a new attack on controversial EU fishing rules which force fishermen to throw millions of dead fish back into the sea.

  Fisheries minister Richard Benyon, attending a special EU summit to tackle the problem, said: “Everybody wants to see an end to the disgraceful waste of huge amounts of fish having to be dumped back overboard, and the UK is leading the way in efforts to tackle the problem.

• BP fund lawyer to refuse 100,000 Gulf spill disaster claims

  Upwards of 100,000 claims arising from the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may never be paid, the beleaguered administrator of the oil company’s compensation fund has acknowledged.

  A defensive Ken Feinberg, under fire from the Obama administration, Gulf leaders and local business for the slow pace of payouts for losses due to the BP spill, said the vast majority of the 130,000 unsettled claims did not have adequate documentation.

  “Here is the problem that I continually have to address … roughly 80% of the claims that we now have in the queue lack proof,” Feinberg told foreign reporters in Washington. “That is a huge number.”

  Feinberg did not rule out settling claims in the future, but he added: “The claims that were denied had woeful, inadequate or no documentation to speak of.”

  He indicated that BP is unlikely to pay out more than the initial $20bn (£12.3bn)agreed for the compensation fund in a meeting at the White House last summer. “I am cautiously optimistic that $20bn will be enough,” he said.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs’s Adam Storch

  In the Scribd. document embedded below entitled, How Goldman Sachs Made Tens of Billions of Dollars From the Economic collapse of America In Four Easy Steps, Adam Storch is mentioned in the third step (on page 4), as one of the “[e]x-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the US government….”

• Will banksters get away with it?

  Hats off to Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

  “Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”

  True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to reign in financial crime. Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview.

• Fine Gael banking strategy in meltdown

  Our masters have now gone off to high ground and are shouting at us through a loudhailer to keep that finger in the hole. We’re tired and cold and starving and we don’t want to do it any more. So how do we get this message across? There’s only one way – threaten to pull our finger out of the dyke. Nothing else will get more than a few cosmetic concessions.

  Fine Gael is now on course to form a single-party government. Voters need to know whether the party is at all serious about facing up to the immorality and impossibility of the official approach since September 2008. (The money still at stake is €75 billion of debt securities held by Irish banks, including €7.3 billion in subordinated bonds and €17 billion in senior unsecured bonds.)

• It’s the Inequality, Stupid

• The Real Cause of High Budget Deficits: Corporate Tax Dodgers

  The protests in Wisconsin over workers’ rights and state budget cuts are sparking national action. While not every governor will recklessly attack collective bargaining, all states are facing major budget constraints.

  Now is the strategic moment to dramatically juxtapose the pain of local budget cuts with the scandal of corporate tax dodging. While states must close combined budget gaps of over $102 billion, U.S.-based corporate tax dodgers are costing us over $100 billion a year. Every time a politician complains that “there is no money” or “we must make these cuts,” we should be pointing to the corporate tax dodging that could immediately close our budget gaps.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Leading article: A dishonest campaign that deserves to lose

  The organisation making the case for a No vote in May’s referendum on voting reform has launched a series of adverts that are desperate and cynical in equal measure. These adverts focus on the supposed cost of the transition to the Alternative Vote system. The campaign asserts that the bill would be £250m and that “our country can’t afford it”.

  Yet that figure is entirely spurious. It apparently includes the £82m that will be spent on the referendum regardless of the outcome and £130m for the purchase of electronic vote-counting machines. The problem with this line of argument is that no new vote-counting machines will, in fact, be needed. Votes would continue to be counted by hand, as they are at present. It displays a staggering disregard for honesty for the No campaign to rely so heavily on this confected figure.

• Democrats call for an investigation of law firm, 3 tech companies

  A group of House Democrats is calling on Republican leaders to investigate a prominent Washington law firm and three federal technology contractors, who have been shown in hacked e-mails discussing a “disinformation campaign” against foes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

  In a letter to be released Tuesday, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and more than a dozen other lawmakers wrote that the e-mails appear “to reveal a conspiracy to use subversive techniques to target Chamber critics,” including “possible illegal actions against citizens engaged in free speech.”

• SCOTUS: Corporations Not People (at least with respect to one FOIA provision)

  Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision in FCC v. AT&T (decision here [PDF]) in which the Court decided that corporations do not have “personal privacy” for the purposes of FOIA exemption 7(C). Our former law clerk wrote about this case earlier this year.

Privacy

• Supreme Court Says AT&T Has No Right To ‘Personal Privacy’

  Last year, we wrote about an important case in which AT&T bizarrely claimed that it had personal privacy rights over information the FCC collected in an investigation concerning AT&T overbilling the government. An organization had made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the info, but AT&T protested that, as a corporation, it had a personal right to privacy. As we noted, that seemed like a pretty ridiculous claim, but the appeals court accepted it.

Civil Rights

• The folly of CCTV in schools

  There has been much concern recently about CCTV inside schools. As ever BBW has been at the forefront of the issue with articles such as “Rising number of CCTV cameras in schools”, “CCTV in York Schools (and new research which says it’s a total waste of time)” and others. One school has 113 cameras, and several have them in the pupils toilets.

• Analysis: DHS plans on scanning DNA at checkpoints

  Just when you think the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has enough wonderful toys to keep them busy, they go out and add another. Get ready to have your DNA screened by the DHS.

  According to The Daily, DHS has plans to begin testing a portable DNA scanner. The device has not been revealed, but it reportedly resembles a desktop printer. It is expected to make genetic tests far more common, especially in cases related to refugees, human trafficking and immigration. Experts think it will soon make its way into everyday medical and law enforcement usage.

• Euro court slaps down insurers over gender risks

  Euro court slaps down insurers over gender riskszThe European Court of Justice has ruled that insurers should not treat gender as a risk factor when assessing premiums, clearing the way for higher costs for women. And probably men.

  A Belgian consumer organisation had brought the case, which centred on exemptions from the EU’s anti-discrimination directive that allowed insurance companies to take gender into account when setting premiums.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• ICANN: No government veto over controversial top-level domains

  Less than two weeks away from ICANN’s conference in San Francisco, representatives from the organization’s Government Advisory Committee have rejected a US Department of Commerce proposal that would give GAC members veto power over new domain endings.

  The Department of Commerce plan would have allowed governments to object to a generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) “for any reason.” On top of that, “if it is the consensus position of the GAC not to oppose objection[s] raised by a GAC member or members, ICANN shall reject the application,” the proposal added.

• House plans first vote to overturn Net neutrality rules

  The Federal Communications Commission’s controversial Net neutrality regulations may soon vanish.

  A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee is planning a vote Wednesday morning on whether to rescind the agency’s Internet regulations that it adopted by a 3-2 vote in December.

DRM

• Tell Sony to stop harassing hackers

  This month we’re focusing our attention on Sony. Sony has been in the news a lot recently: suing developers for figuring out how to run free software on their PlayStation 3 consoles.

  Both George Hotz (geohot) and more recently, Graf Chokolo — operator of the PS3 Hypervisor Reverse Engineering blog have been harrassed by Sony, with Graf Chokolo having his home raided on Feb 23rd.

• Forensic Analysis Of Geohot’s Hard Drives In Dispute

  Earlier this month, we reported that the court hearing Sony’s case versus Geohot, had ordered the New Jersey based hacker to turn over all of his hard drives to a third party. According to Geohot’s attorney, the court did not allow Sony or the third party to make copies of the hard drives, but only store them. The company holding them, known as TIG, is now recommending to Sony that backups of Geohot’s hard drives should be allowed by the court. Sony has submitted that request to the court and also is demanding that Geohot turns over any keys or p***words used in decrypting the drives.

Intellectual Monopolies

• New Legislation ‘To Protect Farmer IP’ Would Make It A Felony To Photograph Farms

  An awful lot of you sent in this story about a proposed law in Florida that could put people in jail for taking a photograph of a farm without permission. Seriously. Not surprisingly, the “excuse” for this is that it is “needed to protect the property rights of farmers and the “intellectual property” involving farm operations.”

• Copyrights

  • Warner Music Mutes MP Angus’ Radio Documentary On Youtube

    In recent years, Warner Music has become infamous for “muting” the sound on hundreds of YouTube videos that include music over which they hold copyright. While takedowns of full copies of songs is their prerogative, the effect of muting user-generated content that may have a snippet of a song as background for a non-commercial work is precisely why the Canadian government introduced the so-called YouTube exception into Bill C-32.

  • CRIA Continues Fight Against Industry Canada Sponsored P2P Study

    Ever since Industry Canada released an independent study it sponsored on the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing in late 2007, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has worked overtime to try to discredit it.

  • Pandora founder decries Canadian barriers to entry

    The industry group steadfastly believes their proposed rates represent the fair market value of their content. However, Pandora has argued those rates are actually several multiples of the standard licensing rates set by the United States and the United Kingdom.

  • Righthaven Sues Radio Giant For Hosting Caption Contest On Denver Post Photo

    For the most part, Righthaven has been careful to sue individuals and smaller sites who would have a much tougher time fighting back. However, in its mad dash to sue a ton of websites for using a viral photograph of a TSA agent searching a passenger, it appears to have gone after Citadel Broadcasting, a radio giant, for running a “caption contest” on the photo.

  • U.S. Government Stings Chinese Websites Baidu.com, Taobao.com As “Notorious Markets”

    Chinese search engine Baidu.com and an e-commerce subsidiary of Alibaba, Taobao.com, have just been placed on the United States Trade Representative’s “Notorious Markets List”.

    USTR states: “The Notorious Markets List identifies selected markets, including those on the Internet, which exemplify the problem of marketplaces dealing in infringing goods and helping to sustain global piracy and counterfeiting. These are marketplaces that have been the subject of enforcement action or that may merit further investigation for possible intellectual property rights infringements.”

    No official response from either Taobao.com or Baidu.com has yet been issued via their respective websites.

  • U.S. Government Targets Large BitTorrent Sites And Trackers

    The US Government has classified some of the largest players in the BitTorrent scene as examples of sites which sustain global piracy. Indexing and search engines The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt, Kickasstorrents and BTjunkie all make appearances, with Demonoid, OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT described as trackers which have become “notorious for infringing activities.”

    In its “Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets”, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has listed more than 30 Internet and offline physical ‘markets’ which it says exemplify “key challenges” in the fight against piracy and counterfeiting.

  • ICE Boss: It’s Okay To Ignore The Constitution If It’s To Protect Companies

    While the folks at Homeland Security keep telling me that they simply cannot speak publicly about the seizure of various domain names — and specifically the numerous mistakes they’ve made that appear to clearly violate both the First Amendment and Due Process rules — it seems they have no problem talking about the domain seizures to folks in the press who don’t bother to ask tough questions.

    ICE boss John Morton did an interview with Politico, where he trots out a bunch of highly questionable statements about the domain seizures, including claiming that it’s all okay for them to do this because they’re trying to “protect U.S. industry” rather than “regulate the internet.” But that’s not the role of Homeland Security or ICE. And there are limits on what ICE is actually allowed to do, and Morton’s technically clueless agents seem to have ignored many of those rules.

  • Rosetta Stone Says Google Is A ‘Gateway For Criminals’; Urges Congress To Make Google Liable For Infringement Via COICA

    However, we noticed that Rosetta Stone was one of the companies that had signed a letter in support of COICA, and assumed it was just about trying to stop sites from offering unauthorized versions. However, it appears that Rosetta Stone actually would like the censorship law to go much further, specifically suggesting that COICA include making Google liable for any infringement found via the site.

    [...]

    Google correctly responded that Rosetta Stone’s “exaggeration doesn’t belong in a serious conversation.” Of course, it really makes me wonder what the folks at Rosetta Stone are doing and thinking. Promoting and supporting censorship and blaming third parties for infringement is no way to run a business.

  • Massachusetts Apparently The First State To Let You Officially Register As A Pirate Party Member

    I’m not a member of any political party. I even hate the term “independent.” When I was first eligible to register to vote, oh so many years ago, the voter registration form told me to check off “Democrat,” “Republican” or “Independent.”

  • Kill Copyright, Create Jobs

    The copyright industry’s lobby has — again — claimed that unless strong measures are taken to enforce copyright, jobs will be lost across Europe. This claim is false, deceptive and misleading, as it only focuses on copyright-dependent sectors while ignoring the copyright-inhibited sectors. It turns out the latter account for ten times more of the economy.

    Executive summary: for every job lost (or killed) in the copyright industry due to nonenforcement of copyright, 11.8 jobs are created in electronics wholesale, electronics manufacturing, IT, or telecom industries — or even the copyright-inhibited part of the creative industries.

  • ACTA

    • Is the Com aware that the US has not ratified the Vienna Convention

  • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

    • ORG files Judicial Review intervention

      Early last week Open Rights Group filed and served its intervention into the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. You can read our intervention here.

      It is an important step for us to be intervening in the Judicial Review. We are aiming to contribute an important bank of expertise and evidence to the considerations of the court that might otherwise not be heard. This is not just a ‘me too’ exercise – we believe we have information that can be useful to the court. And we haven’t said everything we could have, focusing on what we saw as the gaps in the arguments being put forward that we could help fill. Our perspective is one of the likely impact on individuals of legislation about digital issues, which is informed by an understanding of the relationship between technology, human rights and civil liberties.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Linux-based Anti-virus rescue CDs – and the alternatives!

  And that’s it. Please, let me repeat the main message of this article once again: You do not need anti-virus software, honestly. But you should have a Linux live CD handy. Any one will do, since they all pack the mighty toolbox that you can use to fix your operating system, regardless of what caused the mess. Security wise, you should aim for a whitelisting approaching, with a strategy that spans pinpoint tactical solutions relevant only for specific operating systems and go with a generic formula that always works.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This Week in Debian Episode 20

  Interview with Jon “Maddog” Hall discussing Project Caua.

Kernel Space

• Pearls before swine..

  I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society, and the common perception is that we live the life of rock-stars and party all night with all the other glamorous people.

  Not so.

  I sit in my office (which used to be in the basement, now it’s a room above the garage), usually in my ratty bathrobe, reading and writing email all day. And a lot of wasting time while waiting for people to answer or just report problems. I go to bed at ten, and wake up at seven to get the kids to school. And then it all repeats.

  So not glamorous. When I actually write code (which is usually in the mail reader these days – mostly telling people “do it like this” rather than actually writing real code), that’s about the most exciting part of the day.

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI R600 Gallium3D Driver Does Instanced Drawing

    Instanced drawing support is not new to Mesa in general but last month there was instanced-draw support merged into Mesa for the GL_ARB_draw_instanced and GL_ARB_instanced_arrays support as part of the (slow) OpenGL 3.0 support upbringing. With the commits over the weekend, Christian König implements instanced drawing support in the R600g driver.

  • An Open-Source Intel GMA 500 Driver Appears

    If you’re an owner of a netbook or other hardware containing an Intel Poulsbo / GMA 500, the Linux 2.6.39 kernel should be rather exciting. Entering the Linux kernel’s staging tree is an initial open-source driver for this notorious Intel graphics processor derived from Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX graphics core.

    Intel’s Alan Cox has pushed forward an Intel GMA 500 DRM driver for mainline kernel inclusion that already has been pushed into the staging-next tree. It’s been a few days since the actual patch/driver was proposed, but for some reason it slipped under my radar until now when it was mentioned in the forums.

  • NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 Tool-Kit Released

    NVIDIA has announced the release of the CUDA 4.0 Tool-Kit this morning, which continues to be fully supported under Linux. NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture 4.0 focuses upon GPUDirect 2.0 Technology, Unified Virtual Addressing, and Thrust C++ Template Performance Primitive Libraries.

    GPUDirect 2.0 is geared to provide peer-to-peer communication between multiple GPUs in a single server/workstation, Unified Virtual Addressing provides a single memory address space for system memory and GPU memory, and the Thrust C++ Template Performance Libraries ramp-up the GPGPU computing performance via an open-source C++ library with parallel sorting abilities that are 5~100x faster than the Standard Template Library or Intel’s Threaded Building Blocks.

  • Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Is Using X.Org Server 1.9

    Jeremy keeps pushing out new X.Org Server 1.9 stable updates to bring XQuartz fixes for Apple and various other bug-fixes for users of the xorg-server under Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems. With the Mac OS X 10.7 developer preview that Apple began seeding to developers last week, X.Org Server 1.9 can in fact be found.

Applications

• Top 10 Box Office Movies Wallpaper Generator

  IMPloader is a script that fetches the posters for the top 10 Box Office movies of the week and automatically generates a wallpaper. You can customize how many images are used (but there’s a maximum of 10), the style (black, white and polaroid), width and height of the wallpaper and border of the images.

• iptstate, pktstat – Network stats.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Start uTorrent Server As A Daemon With This Upstart Script

  • Updating a distro in cobbler

  • Fixing screen brightness on Thinkpad X201 and Ubuntu 10.10

  • Sudo Logging Feature – helps in multi-admin Linux environments

  • Dual-booting PC-BSD 8.2 and Windows 7

  • Avoiding tedious remote login ssh syntax

  • How to add personalized icons to Kopete

  • Log Parser

  • Using the /proc filesystem

  • Use gvim for a better vi experience

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze

    Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Debian Squeeze server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

• Games

  • OilRush Pre-Ordering Is Imminent; Unigine Now Does Flash

    For those that have been wondering when the pre-order process will begin for Unigine’s OilRush game, which will grant gamers access to a beta version of the game until launch, the pre-ordering is imminent.

  • Kajongg: True Mahjong at last

    For as long as I’ve owned a computer, I’ve been looking for Mahjong game. Not a decent Mahjong game, but any at all. Years ago, I found a monochrome shareware game for DOS, and later I found a Windows game, but both were soon rendered unusable by developments in hardware and software. Nor did I ever find a Mahjong game that ran natively in GNU/Linux — not, that is, until KDE released Kajongg a couple of versions ago.

Desktop Environments

• Fluxbox 1.3.1 on Fedora 14, 13 or 12

  If you’re looking for Fluxbox 1.3.1 on Fedora 14, then you’re in luck. I’ve gone through the .spec and cleaned it up a bit, along with a version bump, and have built the 1.3.1 packages in SUSE Build Service under my home directory.

• GNOME Desktop

  • [GNOME Shell] Re: The logic behind remove “Restart” and hide “Power Off” in User menu.

  • Why I Think Gnome 3 Is a Dead End

    In short because it’s cat-dog. What I mean is – what is the new gnome target audience? To me it seems like it tries to satisfy everyone which obviously cannot work. Let’s look at the potential users who might want to use it.

    [...]

    Still from the design it seems like these people were thought of as well when making gnome shell. But that’s the problem. It stopped halfway. It tries to be both for power users and newbies and ends up neither. Sorry, but I really can’t see a way to satisfy both camps and that’s why I think gnome 3 is bound to fail. And it’s going to drag Fedora 15 down with it (being the default DE). But only time will show whether I’m right or wrong.

  • GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu Unity: Which desktop wins?

    Both GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity are looming on the horizon. Both of these desktop replacements will incite a lot of reactions from users — some good, some bad.But when it all boils down, one of these two takes on the desktop will rise above the other. Which one? I’m going to compare the two and offer up a conclusion on the future of both GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity.

  • My new favorite GNOME Patch

    For those of us without a disability, understanding the challenge users may experience when trying to use a computer can be a foreign concept. (Or at least it is for me.)

    Browsing Reddit, of all places, this weekend I came across this story of a user with ALS who created a patch for Eye of GNOME. The patch contributor’s son added a comment to the bug report (and a link to a picture) that is a must read. Go read it. Now.

Distributions

• Hanthana Linux for all ~

  Hanthana Linux is an easy to use operating system in a environment with less or no internet facility. A lot of applications to be used to aid in school curriculum are included. Applications to study periodic table, planetary behaviour and astronomy as well as to generate 2D and 3D graphs, to solve equations are there in Hanthana Linux. Nevertheless, educational games, applications to design and simulate circuits, GNUoctave which is an alternative to MathLab for statistics and wine in case to run a .exe file and many more comes by default.

• Reviews

  • Frugalware 1.4 Nexon

    Frugalware is not as well known as other distros like Ubuntu, etc. So I’ve included some background information below to get you up to speed if this is the first time you’ve heard of Frugalware. Yes, we do get some folks here on DLR coming from other platforms that sometimes aren’t familiar with various distros. So I like to include a bit of background links & information to help give them an overview of what the distro is all about. If you’re a Frugalware veteran you can skip down to the What’s New section of this page.

• Arch

  • Arch’s Dirty Little Not-So-Secret

    A reader of my blog recently made a comment about Arch’s lack of package signing, and this got me looking into the issue more carefully. What I found has left me deeply concerned with a number of aspects of Arch.

    Most distributions, even Windows, sign their packages so that when the computer downloads and installs them, it can check the signature to make sure the package is authentic – it hasn’t been tampered with on the server, or anywhere between the server and the local system. This mechanism has been around for many years and works well – the tools to implement it are available and simple to use. Yet for some reason I can’t understand, Arch Linux has never had package signing. Arch packages are simple tarballs – they can be opened, modified, and retarred, and the updating system has no way to detect this. This tampering can take place on one of the many mirrors that host Arch packages, yet it can also take place elsewhere – in network proxies and misdirection, in intranet caches, and on local systems. Package signing gives admins a way to verify that the packages they’re using to update their system are authentic, regardless of how those packages have been delivered or stored, or who has access to the data.

  • Mirror Mirror

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 Alpha2

    2nd Alpha version of Mandriva 2011 should be appearing on mirrors shortly.

  • Next project-builder.org version will support the Mageia distribution

    With the announcement of the first Mageia ISO, I thought it was ready enough to try to add Mageia support to project-builder.org. So after the patch rev [1213], I produced my first mageia packages made with project-builder.org for pb itself.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s “obfuscated” kernel source

  • Red Hat’s “obfuscated” kernel source

    I tracked down and interrogated several Red Hat engineers on this issue, and while they were very reticent to speak about it, I discovered the following things:

    - It is not about Centos.

    - The primary motivation was to make it harder for Oracle Enterprise Linux to repackage the work that Red Hat do.

    - The kernel tarball inside the srpm is created from a git tree that is only accessible to Red Hat engineers.

    - This change to the way that kernels are dealt with inside Red Hat has angered and frustrated engineers who work on the product. Employees of the company are Not Happy.

    - The orders to do this, to make it harder to rebuild the kernel with and without patches, and to make it harder to extract specific patches from the Red Hat kernel came from the top. This is with the knowledge of, and by the order of, the CEO: Jim Whitehurst.

    - There is a web interface (somewhere!) that is available that will allow you to specifically omit specific patches and download a new kernel. This is a clunky web front end to the git tree.

    - An Oracle engineer I interviewed on this matter greeted this news with in-credulousness, and quickly got out his notebook so he could provide me with links to the various public git trees that oracle maintains of their kernels, and showed me where I could download them from.

  • Red Hat Announces Extended Lifecycle Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

    Today, Red Hat announced the availability of Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, in line with the one-year notification of the end-of-life of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which is scheduled to occur on February 29, 2012. ELS, an optional Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extends an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for an additional three years over its standard seven year life-cycle. As a result, subscription customers have a choice of purchasing ELS to extend their use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, or to upgrade to a more recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 version.

  • Fedora

    • Btrfs May Be The Default File-System For Fedora 16

      This news is a few days old, but not many people seem to have caught it while I was busy finishing up Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org: Btrfs may be the default file-system in Fedora 16.

      Brought up on the Fedora development list are the plans for Btrfs in Fedora, which provides a target of Fedora 16 when EXT4 will be replaced by Btrfs as the default Linux file-system on new installations.

    • Internationalization and localization Test Week this week!

      After the highly successful Graphics Test Week last week (thanks to everyone who came out! A full recap will be posted soon), it’s another Test Week this week: this time for internationalization and localization. This is a hugely important area (the majority of Fedora users pick something other than English with a US keyboard layout) which we don’t always test very comprehensively, so I’d like to say a huge ‘thanks!’ to Rui He, Igor Soares, and Aman Alam for their hard work in putting together these events.

• Debian Family

  • MP3 files in Debian

    A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

  • Debian Project News – February 28th, 2011

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.04.2 released

      The second maintenance update of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has been released.

      Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be supported with routine maintenance updates until April 2013 on desktops and April 2015 on servers.

    • Legally open, socially closed

      By releasing Banshee under the terms of the MIT license (as was pointed out to me in the comments), it’s developers have given Canonical and anybody else the legal ability to change it however they want. Canonical would have been legally within their rights to keep 100% of all Amazon sales commission. I haven’t seen anybody arguing otherwise, even the detractors of the decision make it clear that the problem is not a legal one, but a moral and ethical one. Discussions about the legal (copyright/trademark/etc) options and implications I’m going to leave for other posts. I mention this only to get it out of the way so we can focus entirely on the moral question.

    • Legally open, socially closed: part 2

    • Faster ‘help’ browser lands in Ubuntu 11.04

      So you accidentally hit the F1 key and wince. Why? You know what’s coming.

      For the next few minutes your hard drive will churn and your patience will burn as GNOME’s built-in ‘Help’ browser loads on your screen like a 100KB .jpg arriving piecemeal through a 52k modem.

    • Ubuntu Developer Week kicks off today

      Today is a very special day. I’m sure that if you live in the Northern hemisphere you can feel it already: Spring is right around the corner. In addition to that it’s one of the most awesome weeks of the release cycle: It’s Ubuntu Developer Week!

    • Ubuntu Mascots Wallpaper

    • Jono Bacon Defends Ubuntu: An Insider’s Perspective

      “I want to do everything I can to bring free software to everybody,” Bacon says. “And that’s why I’m passionate about Ubuntu. Canonical as a company is incredibly committed to that goal. But you know what? With the best intentions in the world, people make mistakes.”

      Bacon suggests that there is currently a “natural tension” in FOSS between those who want the configurability and full set of options that is part of the traditional philosophy and those who emphasize usability.

      He personally favors focusing on usability first on the grounds that it “is additive and the other isn’t. If you take Ubuntu and design it around end-users, so it’s really simple, really easy, and there’s no unnecessary clutter — if you make some opinionated decisions, which we’ve always done — it’s easier to then build configurability on top of that. Giving my Mom and Dad an incredibly configurable distribution for Linux enthusiasts and trying to make that easier is harder. So that’s why I think the approach we’ve taken Ubuntu is a good one.”

Devices/Embedded

• Infibeam Launches Pi2, EBook Reader With Wi-Fi Connectivity and Touchscreen

  # OS: Linux2.6.28

• Further adventures in mobile Linux

  I picked up a couple of cheap Linux devices at the weekend. First of all, a $99 Android tablet from CVS, made by Craig. It’s a generic RK2818 device and of course it’s lacking any kind of GPL offer in the documentation. As far as I know the only company that’s released any Rockchip source so far has been Archos, and even then they haven’t released the tools you need to actually build an image – they seem to be floating around the internet anyway.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • [maemo-developers] I am currently reverse engineering rtcom-call-ui (dialer app), help is wanted

      http://wiki.maemo.org/Dialer is where I have put all my notes and reverse engineering info so far. I am specifically focusing on non-UI bits as that’s what someone building a dialer replacement would need to know.

  • Android

    • Google Nexus S with Android 2.3 (‘Gingerbread’): the 60-day internment review

      Pros: excellent functionality in operating system; press-and-hold (“long press”) adds contextual elements; very good integration with Google services; future-proofed if NFC becomes effective.
      Cons: keyboard can be extremely frustrating; Market still lacks apps from many big organisations; lack of markings on phone makes it hard to figure out which way you’ve got it up.

      Basically, Gingerbread is arguably the best smartphone operating system you can get at the moment – if you can live with the keyboard. (If we had a more subtle star system, I’d give it 9/10.)

    • Further evidence that RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook will support Android apps

      A few days ago, Andrew reported that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet might be able to run Android apps when it’s released. Anonymous sources claimed RIM was working on a virtual machine that would enable this, and later the developer ShopSavvy discovered something curious in its logs: a series of old BlackBerry devices had been running the company’s Android app.

    • Turn your Android Into a Keyboard and Mouse for Your Playstation 3 or PC

      Another reason we all love technology, thanks to some clever development by XDA member berserker_devel, you can now use your rooted Android device as a keyboard or mouse on your Playstation 3.

    • Android Likely to Crush Nokia-Microsoft, Analyst Says

      With the rise of Android, the number of handset OEMs with significant smartphone market share increased in 2010. This competitive landscape is forcing handset OEMs to consider their device and portfolio strategies carefully as they jockey for position.

      Senior Analyst Michael Morgan elaborates: “Motorola has pinned its entire turnaround strategy on Android. As competitors flood the Android ecosystem, Motorola wants to become known as the OEM that brings Android devices to business.

    • Android phone to replace shop till

      Alcatel-Lucent has demonstrated Google’s Nexus S being used to accept a Near Field Communications (NFC) payment, showing that NFC can do more than replace a customer’s wallet.

      Mobile phones are going to replace physical wallets, but for taking payments, merchants still use expensive readers bought (or hired) from the banks. Alcatel-Lucent reckons that becomes unnecessary as its software will use a standard Android handset to enable Near Field Communications transactions.

    • Android Fragmentation is so last year. Processor fragmentation is the real issue [OPINION]

      Everyone discussing Android OS fragmentation should take a seat. You’ve have had more than a year to discuss the differences among Donuts and Froyo ad nauseam. The new source of headache for developers and end users will not be whether a device is running Android 2.2. It will be whether that device runs the right processor.

      MadFinger Games today released Samurai II: Vengeance, an excellent adventure game in which players slash their way through multiple levels of blood and bad guys. I played it briefly at Mobile World Congress, and that will probably be the only time I get to play Samurai II until I purchase a new device. According to its Android Market listing, Samurai II: Vengeance “is optimized for use on NVIDIA Tegra based Android devices only.”

Contribute FOSS with Summer internship at IIT Bombay – FOSSEE project

The FOSSEE textbook companion project is part of the FOSSEE project at IIT Bombay. This project is handled by the following professors at IIT Bombay…

Support Free and Open Source Software Community as a candidate for the Prince of Asturias Awards 2011 in the International Cooperation category

Prince of Asturias Foundation has invited CENATIC to nominate a candidate for the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award. During the last weeks CENATIC Foundation has been evaluating potential candidates, intending to find the one with the biggest chances of winning the award, which would, at the same time, represent the interests of all the agents of the Free and Open Source Software sector in Spain.

Events

• FSFE at ODF Plugfest and Pirate Party Conference

  On Wednesday night I travelled from Manchester to London to attend the ODF Plugfest event, located in nearby Maidenhead the following day. Just before catching the train from Manchester Picadilly, I collected a new 2m tall self-supporting FSFE banner, for use at the booth that I would be running a few days later at the Pirate Party Conference.

  I stayed with British FSFE team member Chris Woolfrey in his London flat, and on Thursday morning I took the train to Maidenhead, and headed to the town hall, where the ODF Plugfest was being hosted. During the day there were several talks on various technical aspects of Open Document Format, including new solutions in KOffice to old interoperability problems between desktop ODF editors.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • What’s up with SUMO – Feb. 28

  • Upcoming MDN doc sprints

    After the huge success of our most recent documentation sprint for MDN, it seems too long to wait for the next planned sprint in June.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Who Did The Most For X.Org Server 1.10? Oracle?

  Oracle’s (former Sun engineer) Alan Coopersmith led with the most change-sets, sign-offs, and reviews. Overall this put Oracle in first place for the most change-set contributions by employer, even beating out Red Hat, Nokia, and Intel.

  There were 70 employers involved during this process. When it came to the most changes lines overall, coming in first was actually Matthew Dew, who has been working on cleaning up and organizing the X documentation.

• Sun’s Scott McNealy Recalls Triumphs, Near Misses

  The former Sun Microsystems CEO recollects brilliant innovations, hiring Bill Joy, and almost acquiring Apple, but talks little about missteps in a conversation with former Sun president Ed Zander at Silicon Valley’s Churchill Club.

• New: OpenOffice.org 3.4 Alpha Release (build DEV300m101) available

  OpenOffice.org 3.4 Alpha Release is available for download as Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m101.

  If you find issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org’s bug tracking system BugZilla.

Healthcare

• The Real Fight for Government Control is Open Source

  In the contracting model that dominates the boom town of modern Washington created by the Bush Administration (the Iraq War was almost all done by contract, and the Administration’s “privatization” efforts mainly involved contracting) this doesn’t compute. If you do switch to open source (and some contractors have) the savings are all the contractors’, both now and later.

  For government to get the most value from open source, it has to hire its own programmers whose time can be spent capturing that value on behalf of their employer, namely you and me.

  This is not necessarily a partisan issue. The Conservative government of the U.K. is pushing open source heavily, to the delight of the industry.

  But it’s moving ahead slowly, and there is little indication the government has accepted the move’s implications. They seem to think it relates to standards and interoperability.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • No matter what you call it, a rat is still a rat…

    In the past few months, as success of open source in several markets has sunk in, a number of players in those markets have started to behave very badly.

    I am not talking about the old, everyday proprietary vendor FUD – that’s an old story, and has become painfully cliché by now. FUD has been part of the software game for a long time, but it has certainly lost a lot of efficiency against open source – only the most laggard still dare to call open source “trialware for non-strategic projects”. Maybe the numerous deals they’ve lost in the past 18 months to enterprise open source vendors have forced everyone else to revise their position…?

    I am actually talking about several categories of rats:

    * those who have adopted “faux-pen source” strategies (from the French “faux” which means fake, and “open source”, which means… great!) after attacking open source
    * those who continue to attack open source for their own benefit
    * and – how could we forget? – those who walk away from open source

    In the first category (faux-pen source), you find the “rats” who have spent years claiming that “free stuff” provides no value and is a mere copy of traditional software. They mocked users of open source software who were “getting what they paid for”. Now, all of a sudden, “free” is the new great thing, and they’ve jumped on the bandwagon and released free versions of their own.

Government

• Lend some code to your local representative

  There was a bit of news coming out the European Parliament recently that could be easily overlooked. MEP Indrek Tarand (of Estonia no less), along with some non-MEP partners, started the European Parliament Free Software User Group (EPFSUG).

  With goals like “assist people in using Free Software in the European Parliament” and planned sessions like “making your laptop free” it’s largely internal focused and not geared toward policy making. The acronym doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, in English at least, and the website leaves much to be desired, but there’s still something interesting here.

• Zaragoza: ‘Spain’s public sector major driver open source desktop’

  Spain’s public administrations are an important driver for the advance of open source software on desktop computers. That is one of the conclusions of a desktop migration guide published by the IT department of the city of Zaragoza.

  Many Spanish public administrations have already adopted a free and open source desktop system, the report notes, listing implementations done by the administrations of Extremadura, Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha, Cataluña, Zaragoza, Valenciana and Madrid. Most of the larger city administrations are interested in this type of software, the IT department writes, based on research by Cenatic, the national resource centre for open source.

• True Open Standards; Open Source Next?

  That stark contrast between the watered-down version adopted at the European level, and the real openness now being promulgated in the UK is one reason why this is an important move. It shows that despite the European Commission’s pusillanimity in the face of lobbyists, national bodies are setting higher standards because they understand that anything less would be pointless if openness is the aim.

Openness/Sharing

• “Like,” “share,” and “recommend”: How the warring verbs of social media will influence the news’ future

  But I’m less interested in the details of the implementation than the verbs: sharing (tonally neutral, but explicitly social) has clearly lost to liking (with its ring of a personal endorsement).

  There’s actually a third verb, “Recommend.” Unlike “Share,” it’s not its own separate action within FacebookWorld; it’s just “Like” renamed, with a less forceful endorsement. But it lives deep in the shadow of “Like” everywhere — except on traditional news sites, which have tended to stay far away from “Like.” I just did a quick scan of some of the web’s most popular news sites to see what metaphor they use to integrate with Facebook on their story pages.

• Open Data

  • U.S. Public Sector Information as an Engine of Growth

    Vollmer ends with an uplifting Carl-Malamudism that underscores the positive, economic externalities. “Public data is “the raw material of innovation, creating a wealth of business opportunities that drive our economy forward. Government information is a form of infrastructure no less important to our modern life than our roads, electrical grid, or water systems.”

• Open Access/Content

  • BMJOpen launched

    BMJ Open – BMJ’s new online-only, open access journal – has been launched. The journal will publish “all research study types, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small or potentially low-impact studies”.

    In a move to promote greater transparency in the peer review process, all published articles include the reviewers reports, responses from the author and (where necessary) a further commentary by the reviewers. All reviewer reports include details of who has undertaken the review (name, affiliation, and contact details.)

Programming

• Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code!

  Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in our Google Summer of Code program. We are now accepting applications from open source projects interested in acting as mentoring organizations.

  Now in its 7th year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academia, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 4,500 students from 85 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 300 mentoring organizations. Students earn a stipend for their work during the program, allowing students to gain exposure to real-world software development and an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects and these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

Mallick: We’ve found Gadhafi’s replacement — Charlie Sheen

He’s a strange piece of famous, a mottled cheese, a hyper-haired man given to making jaw-dropping statements while people nod sycophantically and stare at the phalanx of tall beautiful salaried women who surround him under the palm trees. And the things he says! “I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time — and this includes naps — I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordnance to the ground.”

Frankly, I’m amazed they let him speak to the UN Security Council with those military threats and that level of ludicrous bombast, I think the Israelis were quite right to object. Not to mention the costuming … What? I’m sorry, I’m being told that wasn’t a quote from Moammar Gadhafi. That was Charlie Sheen giving the radio interview that finally got him fired Thursday.

Well, six of one, half a dozen of the other, I’ll check the transcript.

Emergent Religions

Emergent religions are primarily reflections of society. They are a collective attempt to understand and make meaning. In places like China where there is currently a vacuum of meaning — no scriptures, no constitution, just the little red book of Mao, and rampant Darwinian pressure to make money — it should be no surprise that vehicles of something larger to believe in will appear. In Russia, a belief in science mixes with a resident mysticism producing new religions. In Africa, the dire lack of health care summons all kinds of new faith healing churches. And in the west, the need to make sense of technology and our own mutating human identity will breed new religions.

IT graduates not ‘well-trained, ready-to-go’

There is a disconnect between students getting high-tech degrees and what employers are looking for in those graduates.

Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as “well-trained, ready-to-go,” according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers.

London’s “King of the Looky-lous” top Baidu charts

Paul offered his personal statement during a one-on-one interview: “I’m here, this is me. I am sorry I don’t have a suit, and I am not slender. I am always the one being neglected simply because I’m overweight. Maybe I have something great to say about a particular matter, but the microphone is always passed to those beside me. The more I am neglected, the harder I will try to make others notice me. I want to change the media’s belief that ugly fat people like me are an eyesore to the viewers!”

McLuhan on the future of newspapers

Despite finding much of McLuhan absurd, this leapt out at me last night:

The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.

Is this a case of even a blind pig finding an occasional acorn? Or of prescience bordering on genius?

Canadian developer to RIM: ‘I concede defeat.’

Olympic Logo Is ‘Racist’, Claims Iran

Anti-gay Christian couple lose foster care case

A Pentecostal Christian couple have lost their high court claim that they were discriminated against by a local authority because they insisted on their right to tell young foster children that homosexuality is morally wrong.

Suffer the Little Children

The state legislature of Oregon is debating a real step forward for human rights for their constituents: removing the special legal protection that shields faith healing parents from charges of homicide after the preventable death of their children. There is widespread support from the public, state prosecutors, and legislators for House Bill 2721. Clackamas County District Attorney, John Foote, said the measure will “make it easier to hold parents accountable who don’t protect their children.”

According to the Oregonian, Oregon “is the only state that provides immunity from prosecution for murder by neglect and first-degree manslaughter to those who provide care or treatment to minors ‘solely by spiritual means pursuant to (their) religious beliefs.’” This is likely because any measure designed to protect children has, in the past, faced serious opposition from groups that encourage faith healing like Christian Scientists. This article of faith has caused dozens of preventable deaths in the last twenty years in the state of Oregon alone, and in a Pediatrics article, “Child fatalities from religion motivated medical neglect,” authors Asser and Swan found 172 U.S. deaths of children when medical care was withheld on religious grounds.

Science

• Biology Nobelist: Natural selection will destroy us

  The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

• No proof of P=NP after all (yet?)

  Vladimir Romanov has conceded that his published “proof” of P=NP is flawed and requires further work.

• Planet Earth valued at $4,800 trillion

  Such is the state of global capitalism, TechEye can confirm that everything has its price.

  This time it’s not a marketing exec who would have undoubtedly recieved both barrels from the late Bill Hicks, it is astrophysicist Greg Laughlin who reckons he’s worked out the monetary value of the earth itself.

  The price for our blue planet? Laughlin’s recommended retail comes in at an impressive £3,000 ($4,800) trillion, dwarfing even Manchester City’s 2011 wage bill.

Health/Nutrition

• Monsanto Shifts All Liability For Damages Caused By Its GM Crops to Farmers, Now and For Perpetuity

  I’ll say it bluntly and blanketedly: I can’t stand Monsanto, even separate from my disdain for GM crops–they are a perfect example of the worst excesses of opaque corporate shenanigans that, alongside outright political dictatorship and oppression, are direct threats to true democracy.

  Here’s the source of that brief rant: As TruthOut highlighted earlier in the week, the Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement (the name itself is Orwellian in it’s use of language to obscure and not illuminate) indemnifies Monsanto against “any and all losses, injury or damages resulting from the use or handling of seed (including claims based in contract, negligence, product liability, strict liability, tort, or otherwise)…in no event shall Monsanto or any seller be liable for any incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages.”

  Which would be bad enough, but even if you terminate your contract with Monsanto, “Grower’s responsibilities and the other terms herein shall survive.”

  If a Monsanto GM Crop Causes Damage, Monsanto Off the Hook

Security

• Monday’s security advisories

• Vodafone’s UK network taken down by a break-in (update: some services restored)

  No further details have been provided, though work is naturally underway to repair the damage done and we’re assured customers’ private data has remained so. We can’t imagine quite such a service disruption being caused by a random act of vandalism or burglary, perhaps a disgruntled employee felt the need to vent his or her frustrations in grand style? Or has O2 gone gangster on the competition?

• Anonymous vs HBGary

  In cyberspace, the balance of power is on the side of the attacker. Attacking a network is much easier than defending a network. That may change eventually — there might someday be the cyberspace equivalent of trench warfare, where the defender has the natural advantage — but not anytime soon.

• That Soldier Wooing You Over Facebook Probably Isn’t Real

  Is a handsome young soldier currently professing his love to you on Facebook? He might be real! But probably, he’s not. Especially if he’s asking you to send him money. The AP reports that the fake-Facebook-soldier (or whatever the snappy conman name is) is “becoming an all-too-common ruse,” in one case costing a victim $25,000.

• British Airways IT worker found guilty of plotting terror attack

  An IT expert for British Airways has been found guilty of using his position to plan a terrorist attack on behalf of the Yemen-based radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, according to news reports.

  Rajib Karim, 31, of Newcastle, used his job as a software engineer for the UK airline to aid attacks being planned by Awlaki, who is accused of having links to the to the attempted shoe-bombing of a plane over Detroit on Christmas 2009. The plot came to light after experts from the Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command spent nine months cracking 300 encrypted emails found on Karim’s hard drive.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• U.S. silent as Iraqi regime cracks down

  We saw it with Yemen, and now we’re seeing it again with Iraq: The Obama administration is conspicuously quiet when friendly Middle East regimes use ugly tactics — including violence and imprisoning peaceful demonstrators — to quell growing protest movements in their countries.

  That’s in marked contrast to the administration’s tough stand when similar tactics are employed by unfriendly governments like the one in Iran. In a statement yesterday, the White House “strongly condemn[ed] the Iranian government’s organized intimidation campaign and arrests of political figures, human rights defenders, political activists, student leaders, journalists and bloggers.”

• Report calls for in-depth public inquiry into ‘shocking’ abuses at G20 summit

  A full-scale public inquiry is needed in light of the widespread and violent trampling of civil rights by police at last summer’s $1-billion G20 summit in Toronto, a new report concludes.

  The call for an inquiry is among recommendations in the report – by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and National Union of Public and General Employees – which is aimed at holding governments accountable and avoiding a recurrence.

• G20 Report: Whose peace breached?

• Qaddafi’s Private Jet Just Dropped Someone Off In Minsk

  Muammar el-Qaddafi’s private Dassault Falcon jet 5A-DCN dropped someone off in Minsk on Friday, according to reports in Haaretz and Malta Today.

  It is believed to have been someone in Qaddafi’s family. That person could be his daughter Aisha, who was denied entry to Malta last week, according to Al Jazeera.

  Qaddafi is friendly with Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.

• U.S. continues Bush policy of opposing ICC prosecutions

  It has been widely documented that many of the worst atrocities on behalf of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi have been committed by foreign mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia. Despite that, the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions Resolution aimed at Libya, which was just enacted last week, includes a strange clause that specifically forbids international war crimes prosecutions against mercenaries from nations which are not signatories to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which protects many of the mercenaries Gadaffi is using.

• ICE detainee passes away at Lock Haven Hospital

  A Chinese national in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Feb. 14 passed away on Feb. 23 at the Lock Haven Hospital in Lock Haven, Pa., of an apparent suicide.

Cablegate

• Wikileaks Goes After The Saudi Royal Family

  Wikileaks just released a motherload of info on the taboo subject of Saudi Arabian royal rents.

  The 1996 cable — entitled “Saudi Royal Wealth: Where do they get all that money?” — describes legal and illegal ways that royals grab money, according to Reuters.

• “If law fails, CIA will assassinate Assange”

• “If law fails, CIA will assassinate Assange”

• How US choppers ended up in Colombian money-laundering hands

  To get a sense of just how interconnected the formal and illicit dimensions of international political economy are, take a peek at this brief cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota published by WikiLeaks Sunday.

  The cable details then-Ambassador William Woods’ hunt for two missing helicopters that had originally been sold to the Israeli military by the United States government, but had somehow ended up in the hands of multimillionaire Enilse Lopez, a businesswoman who was suspected of close ties to Colombian paramilitaries.

• Julian Assange and Raymond A. Davis

  America wants them both – who should be released?

  The US desperately wants to extradite both Julian Assange and Raymond A. Davis but for different reasons.

• The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Monday, Day 93

  2:05 New Chomsky interview. Asked about whether U.S. knew truth about Tunisia, he replies: “In the case of Tunisia, which is kind of an interesting case, Tunisia was held as (the) very beacon of democracy and progress in the region. Some of the articles that appear kind of embarrassing to read now. But they knew. In fact one of the interesting WikiLeaks disclosures was series of cables by the American ambassador in Tunisia who said, very straight out, look this is a police state, there is no freedom of speech or association, the public is extremely angry at the corruption of the ruling family. So they knew but the … doctrine prevailed. It was quiet so everything was fine.” 9h/t Kevin Gosztola)

  2:00 Thanks to all for helping make my e-book The Age of WIkiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate become the top-selling book on this subject (even topping the big boys at NYT and Guardian –and Daniel Domsheit-Berg, too) at Amazon. Print edition here. Hailed by Dan Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, and more.

  12:45 New summary with links on Wikileaks cables impact from OpEdNews.

  12:15 Chris Hedges in new Truthout piece focuses on antiwar demos coming up in March, but also mentions protest to support Bradley Manning on March 20 — and the importance of earlier WikiLeaks docs on Iraq and Afghan torture and civilian casualties.

• Musyoka: Lies, Lovers, and Mercenaries in Kenya’s Politics

• 06NAIROBI3217, CHARTERHOUSE WHISTLEBLOWER DETAILS MONEY

  Summary: Kenyan auditor Peter Odhiambo exposed
  billions of shillings of tax evasion and money laundering at
  his former employer, Charterhouse Bank, by a group of major
  companies partly owned by notorious businessman John Mwau and
  MP William Kabogo. On July 20, Odhiambo briefed Emboffs on
  the details of the scam, and explained he had experienced
  death threats and a frightening attempt by some policemen to
  serve him with a bogus warrant. Because the people
  implicated in the scandal are dangerous and appear to have
  bought influence and protection from the GOK, Odhiambo
  requested refuge in the U.S. Refugee Officer is prepared to
  write an Embassy referral for Odhiambo to DHS for processing
  his application for refugee status, and DHS is willing to
  interview him.

• 06NAIROBI1114, AN UNSETTLED KENYA AWAITS NEXT SHOE TO DROP

  President Kibaki publicly stands firm behind
  the Kenyan Police raid on the Standard Media Group.
  Meanwhile, Standard journalists and others privately say the
  raids were prompted by a State House belief that the paper
  possesses documents implicating the President’s family in
  grand-scale corruption, possibly including narcotics
  trafficking. First Lady Lucy Kibaki has reportedly
  personally threatened to “burn down the Standard” unless the
  information on her is relinquished. Even as the government
  ridicules claims of “foreign mercenaries” in the country,
  political opponents and journalists believe unofficial Second
  Wife Mary Wambui is behind the foreigners — and the cocaine
  trafficking. Opposition leaders say they are being
  blackmailed to keep quiet; shocked by the steps already
  taken, they privately fear a cornered government will move to
  arrest them, with or without charges. And they worry about
  the possible use of lethal force.

• 10NAIROBI181, Chinese Engagement in Kenya

  China’s engagement in Kenya continues to grow exponentially. China enjoys a large trade surplus with Kenya; exports increased by more than 25 percent a year from 2004 to 2008. The China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) is drilling for oil in the Isiolo region. China may be a potential partner in the development of the new mega-port at Lamu. In addition, China is heavily involved in various infrastructure projects across Kenya primarily with roads. China is also providing weapons to the GOK in support of its Somalia policies and increasing their involvement with the Kenyan National Security and Intelligence Service (NSIS) by providing telecommunications and computer equipment. Recently, China signed an economic and technical cooperation agreement with the GOK providing new development grants. To date, China and the U.S. do not collaborate on development projects in Kenya.

• 09NAIROBI1938, VISAS DONKEY: CORRUPTION 212(F) VISA DENIAL

  Embassy is seeking a security advisory opinion under
  Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act,
  Proclamation 7750, suspending the entry into the United
  States of Aaron Gitonga Ringera and members of his family.
  Ringera was born in Meru, Kenya on June 20, 1950. Post
  strongly believes Mr. Ringera has engaged in and benefited
  from public corruption in his capacity as Director/Chief
  Executive of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) for
  the last five years by interference with judicial and other
  public processes, and that this corruption has had a serious
  adverse impact on U.S. national interest in the stability of
  democratic institutions in Kenya, U.S. foreign assistance
  goals and the international economic activities of U.S.
  businesses. Ringera travels frequently to the U.S. He is
  expected shortly to apply for a U.S. visa. The following
  provides information requested in ref a, paragraphs 26-28.

• Julian Assange: At the Forefront of 21st Century Journalism

  If there were ever a doubt about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is a journalist, recent events erase all those doubts and put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.

  The U.S. Department of Justice is still trying to find a way to prosecute Assange and others associated with WikiLeaks. A key to their prosecution is claiming he is not a journalist, but that weak premise has been made laughable by recent events.

  The list of WikiLeaks revelations has become astounding . During the North African and Middle East revolts WikiLeaks published documents that provided people with critical information. The traditional media has relied on WikiLeaks publications and is now also emulating WikiLeaks.

• Equitorial Guinea ruler’s son ‘ordered superyacht’

  The son of Equatorial Guinea ruler Teodoro Obiang Nguema has commissioned plans to build one of the world’s most expensive yachts, a rights group claimed on Monday.

  President Obiang’s son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin, has commissioned plans for a yacht costing 288 million euros ($400 million), said Global Witness, which works to break the links between resource exploitation and bad governance.

• What US cables reveal about France and the Ben Ali regime

  “Tunisia is not a dictatorship.” That was the analysis made in August 2007 by the then-French ambassador to Tunis, Serge Degallaix. Revealed by WikiLeaks in a series of cables published here by Mediapart, it succinctly sums up France’s position towards the regime of now-deposed ruler.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Vancouver Island Bald Eagles Are “Falling From the Sky”

  It was one thing when starlings, robins, and turtledoves were falling dead from the sky in places like Kentucky, Italy, and Arkansas. Those places are far from the Pacific Northwest, and the birds are just common species that no one cares about anyway. Well, now bizarre bird deaths have finally made their way to the PNW, and it’s eagles that are falling from the sky. That’s right, bald freaking eagles.

  The Vancouver Sun reports that Maj Birch, manager of the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, is currently caring for seven injured eagles that were starving and fell out of the sky. Several others didn’t make it.

• Coal Is Cheap – Because We Pay $345 Billion Of Their Annual Costs

  Earlier today, we looked at the constantly rising price of dirty energy: both direct costs (extraction from the ground, transport, etc.) and the externalities, that is, costs or opportunities shifted to other sectors of the economy.

  The classic example of a negative externality (a cost shifted to another part of the economy) is pollution. If a chemical company forgoes proper disposal of its waste, and dumps it into a reservoir, they’re abdicating their responsibility to pay for that pollution, and shunting the cost on to the folks downstream.

• The Great Climate Change Conspiracy

  Gotta love it. There’s so much money in Climate Science, that every climate scientist in the world is willing to lie about it. In fact they are not only willing to lie, they are willing to try and mess up scientists from other disciplines so that they can keep on enjoying the gravy train…

  It’s rather scary actually listening to the True Believers who know the truth about Climate Change. According to them we’ll never run out of oil. Oil is a renewable resource! Yes, isn’t it wonderful? Curiously none of them are capable of telling us exactly how it’s going to become renewable.

  Let’s take a look at some of the points that have been made:

  Lots of scientists don’t believe in Climate Change either – while this is true, the scientists who don’t believe in it aren’t Climate experts. When I pointed out that most of the scientists who disagreed with Climate Change were actually mathematicians, I was accused of hating mathematicians.

• The Cove director sends dolphin slaughter DVDs to whole fishing town

  The director of The Cove, an Oscar-winning film about the annual slaughter of dolphins in Taiji on Japan’s Pacific coast, has sent free DVDs of the movie to the town’s residents.

  Louie Psihoyos said he was concerned that the film had not been given enough exposure in Japan, particularly among the 3,500 residents of Taiji.

  The American director said Japanese-language copies of the movie, which last year won the Oscar for best documentary, had been delivered to every household in Taiji over the weekend with the help of a local ocean conservation group.

• If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong

  You can’t make a bundle pushing the consensus

  So, are there big bucks to be had in climate science? Since it doesn’t have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department’s salary information available. It’s easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

• Republicans recycle an old idea: the foam plastic coffee cup

  A bit like the Republican party, they are white, seemingly indestructible and bad for the environment. But after an absence of four years, foam plastic coffee cups have made a comeback in the basement coffee shop of the United States Congress building after Republicans began reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats.

  The about-turn was announced by a press aide to John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, who tweeted on Monday morning: “The new majority – plasticware is back”.

Anonymous/Wisconsin/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Anonymous Joins The Wisconsin Protests By Taking Out Americans For Prosperity

  The cyber protest group Anonymous has joined the protesters of Wisconsin and Americans all across this country in the battle against what they described as the “Koch brothers attempt usurp democracy.” The opening salvo in Anon’s OpWisconsin occurred today when the Koch brothers funded Americans for Prosperity was knocked offline in an attempt to take a small slice of the Internet back from the liberty stealing propagandists.

  In a press release Anonymous put the Koch brothers on notice, “It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.”

• ‘Anonymous’ targets the brothers Koch, claiming attempts ‘to usurp American Democracy’

  The decentralized protest group “Anonymous” has a new target: no, it’s not a middle eastern dictator, a major bank or even a bit player in the military-industrial complex.

  It’s none other than tea party financiers Charles and David Koch, who were being targeted, an open letter stated, for their attempts “to usurp American Democracy.”

• Anonymous versus Fox News’ Dan Gainor

  That’s Anon News in what a post on the site describes as a “Twitter Bitch-fight with FoxNews.com Columnist Dan Gainor”.

  Anon News is fast becoming a distribution and media centre for Anonymous and “THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE STORY, AND TOOK PLACE ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 27″, says an Anon who’d engaged in a lengthy ‘discussion’ with Fux’s Gainor.

• Making the world go around

  Now it’s become clear the explosions of citizen anger first manifested in Tunisia following a determined Anonymous campaign aren’t just examples of temporary “student unrest”.

  They’re the new paradigm in which people around the world take control of their lives, reversing the way things used to be when those who were supposed to serve us served only themselves.

• Anonymous makes a laughing stock of HBGary

  Following a failed attempt at mediation on IRC, Anonymous published both the alleged identities of its leading figures and HBGary’s entire email archive online. And whilst the allegedly explosive data on Anonymous proved to be almost entirely without substance, the email archive painted a very detailed picture of the US security company’s leading figures and their business dealings. Whilst it’s worth bearing in mind that these emails could have been ‘interfered with’, plausibility checks offer no indication that this is the case.

Censorship

• Russia: Police Receive the Right to Close Websites Without a Court Order

• YouTube urged to delete radical cleric’s sermons

  Sermons from Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric said to be linked to multiple terrorist plots against Britain and the United States, remain on YouTube despite calls for them to be taken down.

  The news follows the conviction of Rajib Karim, a former British Airways computer specialist, for terrorism offences after being inspired by Awalki to explore ways of staging al-Qaida style attacks.

Privacy

• Newspaper does not have to identify anonymous commenters, rules High Court

  The Daily Mail does not have to identify the people behind two anonymously posted comments on its website because to do so would breach their rights to privacy, the High Court has said.

  The subject of a news story had demanded information from the Daily Mail that would help her to identify the two commenters so that she could sue them for defamation, but the Court said that identification of those people would be disproportionate.

• Europe’s highest court to rule on Google privacy battle in Spain

  Europe’s highest court looks set to decide whether Google should remove links to articles in newspapers, including El País, from its online search engine following a Spanish demand about invasion of privacy.

  Google was ordered to remove almost 100 online articles from its search results by Spain’s data protection authority earlier this year. The articles, some of which appeared in official gazettes, were subject to privacy complaints by their subjects.

Civil Rights

• When does life mean life?

  Three convicted murderers are challenging their sentences in the European Court of Human Rights. They claim that the rare “whole life” tariffs which have been imposed in their cases is contrary to their human rights.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• The Right to Information in Brazil– Censorship, Fines for Sharing Wi-Fi

  Following up on several other related posts, two recent news items give us reason to wonder about freedom of information in Brazil. First, Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, ANATEL, confiscated the computer equipment of three young people and fined them $3000R (about $2000US) for sharing an internet signal among their three dwellings in an effort to save money. Second, news has surfaced that in the first half of last year, Brazil asked Google to remove more news articles from the internet than any other country in the world, a total of 398, of which 177 requests involved a Judicial order [postscript: this was misinformed news-- based on false reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists, please see correction, next post.]. Brazil’s efforts to censure information were more intense than Libya’s, which came in second.

DRM

• Geohot: We Built Your PS3. We Built This World.

• Limits on library e-books stir controversy

  Some librarians are “appalled” by a new HarperCollins policy that would allow library e-books to circulate only 26 times before their license expires. Others, however, note that some major publishers don’t allow their e-books to circulate in libraries at all.

• The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

  Every eBook user should have the following rights:

  * the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
  * the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
  * the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
  * the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

• The Debate Over Copyright Gets Loud At Digital Music Forum

  Not surprisingly, there was a fair amount of disagreement on some of the issues, with Bengloff doing the usual song and dance about “piracy” destroying the music industry. Julie Samuels, correctly, pointed out that Bengloff was being misleading, and it was the recording industry that was having trouble adapting, not the music industry. Bengloff insisted this wasn’t true, and insisted (contrary to every single study we’ve seen) that every other aspect of the music business was in massive decline. Petricone then responded by bringing things around to a key point: copyright law was designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to act as an incentive to create content. And, if you look at the market today, you’d have to be delusional to say that the market is having any problem in that area whatsoever. More music is being created today than ever before. More people are spending more money on music and music related goods than ever before. There’s a massive variety of music available today. Basically, the content space is absolutely thriving. So, arguing that there’s a problem in the market seems misguided.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Major Second Life Content Theft Lawsuit Against Linden Settled With Promise of Better Protection, Says Ex-Plaintiff

  A major lawsuit against Linden Lab filed by its own users in late 2009 has been settled. That news was recently announced by one of the plaintiffs, virtual adult entertainment impresario Stroker Serpentine, during the taping of Metaverse TV’s “Grumpy Old Avatars” show. The lawsuit alleged that the company was allowing and enabling content theft of the plaintiff’s material by other Residents. Last week, however, Mr. Serpentine (Kevin Alderman IRL) said the dispute had been resolved out of court:

  “We settled the lawsuit with Linden Lab,” he told the “Grumpy” hosts, “we settled amicably, and reasonably, and we’re anticipating a concerted effort on Linden’s behalf going forward towards content protection and the rights of content creators and at least being aware of the fact that there is a lot of content theft going on out there.”

• Female Artists of Second Life: Stanford Libraries and Lynn Hershman Want Your Art!

• Trademarks

  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange applies to trademark his name

• Copyrights

  • Google looking to launch YouTube movie service in UK

    Google is actively looking to begin an unlimited streaming subscription service, one that will rival Netflix and Amazon, and may launch it first in the UK.

  • Righthaven defendant threatens to seek settlement refunds

    A South Carolina woman sued by Las Vegas copyright enforcer Righthaven LLC escalated her counter-attack on Sunday, arguing Righthaven should refund hundreds of thousands of dollars it has obtained in dozens of lawsuit settlements worldwide since May.

    Attorneys for the woman, Dana Eiser, based their refund claim on charges that Righthaven in its lawsuits regularly threatens to seize the website domain names of defendants — and that this demand is improper and is used to coerce defendants into settling.

  • Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age

    We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society. The aim of this document is to promote innovative strategies to defend and extend the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably.

  • Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services

    “Piracy is the Future of Television” is Abigail De Kosnik’s Convergence Culture Consortium paper on the many ways in which piracy is preferable to buying legitimate online TV options. None of these advantages are related to price — it may be hard to compete with free, but it’s impossible to compete with free when you offer something worse than the free option. De Kosnik finishes the paper with a series of incredibly sensible recommendations for producing a commercial marketplace that’s as good or better than the illicit one.

  • Securing a right doesn’t mean granting a monopoly

    Such an assumption of power was unconstitutional.

    Securing a right does not require annulling another right, as Thomas Paine makes clear.

    1. Abolish copyright.
    2. Secure the author’s exclusive right to their writings, for a time limited to that of their natural lifespan.

    Securing a right does not require the grant of a monopoly.

  • Hollywood Gone Mad: Complaining That Oscar Nominated Films Downloaded More

    The article also highlights, as we’ve discussed at great lengths, how the producer, Nicolas Chartier of Voltage Films, of last year’s Oscar winner for best picture, Hurt Locker chose to sue 5,000 fans of his film for unauthorized downloading. Of course, it leaves out the part where he also called someone a “moron” and a “thief” for explaining to him, quite politely, why such a strategy might backfire. The reporter asks Chartier about the backlash, and he suggests that nobody knows who produces what films, so he doesn’t care if he gets a bad reputation: “I don’t think anyone is waking up saying, ‘Let’s boycott movies made by Voltage.’” Apparently Chartier doesn’t use the internet much. There are, in fact, efforts by people to get everyone to boycott Voltage films because of his actions.

  • Falling off the edge of a flat world?

    This blog challenges an attempt by entertainment industry stakeholders to discredit the Andersen-Frenz report (2007): The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada.

    Findings from the report have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and used as expert evidence in two British landmark court-cases dealing with P2P filesharing (Oink’s Pink Palace and one other). It also plays a central role in the debate on copyright reforms internationally.

  • The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada

    Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which music downloads over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, for which the sound recording industry receives no remuneration, affect music purchasing activity in Canada.

  • 70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable

    A recent study on moral standards and whether some law breaking is socially acceptable has revealed an interesting stance on file-sharing among the public. Of those questioned in the study, 70% said that downloading illicit material from the Internet is acceptable. Three out four, however, felt it was completely unacceptable to then sell that product for profit.

  • ACTA

    • Dutch trade minister: ACTA not superior to European or national law

      Will ACTA be binding on the US, EU, France, Romania, the Netherlands and Singapore? Confusion over whether the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is binding is mounting. On 1 December 2010, Dutch Trade Minister Verhagen said in a parliamentary commission meeting: “It has never come up to implement ACTA in the Netherlands. It so happens that ACTA is not superior to European or national law.”

      This is a remarkable statement. It is in direct conflict with an EU Commission’s answer to a European Parliament question. It is also in conflict with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which was ratified by the Netherlands. The minister misinformed parliament.

      A group of prominent European academics state that ACTA will directly or indirectly require additional action on the EU level. ACTA goes beyond current EU law. ACTA is legislation by the back door.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Five ideas for escaping the Blu-Ray blues

Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I’ve been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out, mostly because Richard Stallman said it has an evil and oppressive DRM scheme. After my first serious investigation, I can confirm his opinion, and frankly, it’s a pretty bleak situation. What can we do about it? Here’s five ideas for how we might release high definition video.

Desktop

• reason i love my wife

  Then one day. Danny (my wife) says to me.

  “Ahh I hate windows. I have to do too much crap just to do something. Install ubuntu.”

  [...]

  And now that ubuntu is up and running. My wife feels at home. And it is running way better then our last computer. I am in heaven ^_^

Server

• Who Owns Your Datacenter?

  It is surprising how fast some proprietary software vendors can turn hostile towards their customers. Anyone who’s been in the IT field for the past decade or so should be familiar with the term “licensing audit”, and how it runs shivers up and down the spine of the entire organization. Those vendors can perform the audit on your company because they own your datacenter, and they know it. They can come in anytime they want and, probably, demand more money for the continued use of their product.

• London Stock Exchange in crisis meeting with market data vendors

Google

• Google’s CR-48: An adventure in brickdom

  Scanning for something easier, I located this little guide. Easy way to install Ubuntu? Sold.

  The instructions are ridiculously easy to follow and straightforward. Bear in mind it’s a rather large download (52 100MB files), so give it some time, especially if you’re rocking a slow connection. I did test to see if the script will pick up where it left off by battery pulling the unit mid-download and it absolutely does, so don’t worry about it being flakey in that regard.

Ballnux

• Why all Symbian developers should become Bada Developers

  You might be aware about the news that Nokia will no longer using Symbian as their smartphone OS. They are going to use Windows Mobile and Meego. All the loyal Symbian Developers are now under the pressure to choose another platform. Few days ago, I asked prominent voices in Bada universe why these developers should choose bada as their next developing platform.

Applications

• Script to set the ‘NASA wallpaper of the day’ as your wallpaper daily

  It’s easy to get bored staring at the same desktop background day in and day out yet even easier to get bored hunting down new interesting wallpapers to spice things up with.

• Top 10 applications for year 2011 in Linux

  Linux is all about choices. Therefore, Linux has many software tools that perform the same functionality. As an example, one may like Chrome browser as the Internet browser while some others preferring Firefox. So, the top 10 applications for year 2011 is just my selection of tools. For you, you may have your own selection and choices.

• Incron – a cron based on FS events

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Fun with Linux: How to wipe out Windows to install Ubuntu

  • HOWTO: Create and submit your first Linux kernel patch using GIT

  • Incron – a cron based on FS events

  • Opening Tabs In Firefox, Configuration Options

  • Jumping Long Distances in Vim

  • Make Windows 7 Look Like Ubuntu With Maverick For Win7

  • Avoiding tedious remote login ssh syntax

  • The proper use of redirection with sudo.

  • Qmail-Scanner With ClamAV And SpamAssassin On Ubuntu

  • Burning CD’s over the Internet with or without ISO image

  • Weekend Project: Harvest Microformats for Fun and Profit

    Microformats are a way to slip computer-readable information into HTML, so it’s “semantically” marked-up, not just visually marked up. With hCalendar, for example, when you advertise a big event on your Web page, it’s not only human-readable, but the browser can notice that it’s a calendar event and prompt the reader to add it to his or her Sunbird or Google Calendar schedule. The tricky part is, most browsers don’t highlight microformats at all, much less prompt you to do something interesting with them. This weekend, you can enable that power in Firefox and start making better use of the microformats that are hidden, all around you, on the Web.

• Games

  • Planet Stronghold And Official Strategy Guide Released !

    Planet Stronghold is a sci-fi role-playing game with a turn-based combat system.
    You take the role of a young, new recruit that somehow gets assigned to the most well-known, and well-defended, human outpost in the whole galaxy: Planet Stronghold.
    As the story goes on, you’ll have to choose a side in a a war that will change the destiny of the planet, and of humankind, forever.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Facebook support in KDEPIM

    I am at the annual KDEPIM meeting in Osnabrück for the weekend. It is awesome meeting old friends again and seeing new faces as well. Even better is that it is a welcome break from writing my thesis which is due next week, one weekend of hacking in discussing without worries.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Atolm GTK Theme + Clarity Icon Theme = Perfect for Dark Theme Fans

Distributions

• Upstream projects vs. Distributions

  You can globally split open source projects into two broad categories. Upstream projects develop and publish source code for various applications and features. Downstream projects are consumers of this source code. The most common type of downstream projects are distributions, which release ready-to-use binary packages of these upstream applications, make sure they integrate well with the rest of the system, and release security and bugfix updates according to their maintenance policies.

• Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name?

  Have you ever wondered what “XP” stands for or where “Ubuntu” comes from? Some operating systems get their names from obvious places, but others need some explaining. Read on to find out where your favorite OS got its name.

• Reviews

  • A look at Wolfer Linux 2

    If you have already settled into the Linux scene and have gained some comfort with the operating system, Wolfer probably won’t give you anything new. But if you’re standing outside the Linux community and considering which distro to try, Wolfer is one option that will make the transition easier.

• New Releases

  • Toorox 02.2011

  • StressLinux 0.6.108

  • GParted 0.8.0-2

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Making the most of the planet.

      With a title like that, I could go two ways with this blog post, right? One way would be to encourage people to do stuff that’s good for the Earth, like recycling and so forth. There are probably lots of people who could do that better than me. Instead, this post is going to be about making the most of the Fedora Planet, which carries information about contributors and their work to each other and to audiences outside the Fedora Project.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Unity keyboard shortcuts have a distinct Windows 7 flavor

    • Legally open, socially closed

      Much has been said lately about the revenue sharing decision made by Canonical in regards to the Banshee music store sales, starting with the announcement on Jono Bacon’s blog. This was soon followed by posts questioning how the decision and announcements were handled. Sense Hofstede followed up with an excellent post discussing the value of Ubuntu as a distribution channel complimenting the value of Banshee as a product.

      What I haven’t seen discussed, and what I would like to bring up, is this often cited but never quite defined notion of the moral or ethical restrictions on the use of FLOSS.

    • Best Ubuntu 10.10 Feature

      Doing an install of Natty alpha in VirtualBox, I remembered what I love most about 10.10: The installation. Whoever decided to add the Download updates checkbox, brilliant.

Devices/Embedded

• Datalight Releases First Full-featured File System for Embedded Linux

  Datalight announced today that it has released Reliance Nitro 2.0, the first full-featured file system for embedded Linux. The new file system combines strong read and write performance with fast and consistent mount time, rock-solid reliability, a comprehensive tool set, and support by a dedicated team of in-house engineers.

• Phones

  • LiMo hits version 4, reminds us why consumers don’t care

    Once considered a possible Android competitor, the LiMo Foundation has since dug in its heels as a carrier- and manufacturer-facing group rather than a consumer-facing one. To put that in more direct, un-politically correct terms: if you’re an end user, you probably don’t care that LiMo version 4 was just announced (though it’s possible that your carrier might). In fact, the announcement actually happened a few days back during MWC in Barcelona, but it was a quiet affair — the Foundation has yet to finalize device specs, the code won’t be available to the public until July, and commercial hardware isn’t expected until the second half.

  • Android

    • 4 HTC Devices to Get Gingerbread in Q2

      Good ol’ HTC has confirmed that the Desire Z, Desire HD, Desire, and the newly announced Incredible S will all be getting some Gingerbread love soon enough. While they didn’t give an exact date, they’re promising a Q2 release. This is one reason I always buy HTC: they’re reliable. They don’t promise an update and then delay or cancel it 2 months after the deadline. Of course, we can’t really say that until after Q2. But when it’s all said and done, I have no doubt that the 4 devices mentioned above will have some 2.3 goodness.

    • 40 best free Android apps

    • HTC tips Android global roaming phone

      HTC announced it will launch an Android-based “world phone,” including both CDMA and GSM. Due this spring, the HTC Merge features Android 2.2, a 3.8-inch display, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a five-megapixel camera, and appears likely to be heading for Verizon Wireless.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Ubuntu gives new, speedier life to Netbooks

    For one, opening, closing and arranging windows and folders will throw off new users at first because they can’t be moved with total freedom. For example, the Ubuntu 10.10 operating system won’t let you drag and drop files on the desktop — you have to put them in a folder titled desktop. Another thing that sets Ubuntu apart from Windows and Mac is that the program and folder list is docked on the left side of the screen. But these are minor and inconsequential differences.

    Ubuntu boasts plenty of perks, mainly its software center that instantly connects you to thousands of free applications, including art and photo editing programs, word processors, games, video players and more. It’s like the app marketplace on most smartphones. And, like Ubuntu itself, it’s pretty much all free.

• Tablets

  • Emergence of the Tablets

    Android phones are everywhere. Even on prepaid packages. Everyone can have them. This is where the open OS shines.

  • Odd One Out: My 5 Minutes With the Motorola Xoom

    Concluding, I didn’t hate the Xoom. Motorola did a great job (for the most part) of making a killer device to compete with the iPad. Google made a pretty awesome version of Android to run on said device. While both have their faults, they go well together. Does this mean I would buy a Xoom if I had the money? No, it doesn’t. Does that mean it’s a terrible device? No, it doesn’t. The Xoom just felt like it was released before it was finished. Whether this is Google’s fault, or Moto’s fault is irrelevant. The Xoom just isn’t ready for primetime yet. So, with all of this being said, bring on the agreeing or disagreeing (more likely the latter of the two) comments!

  • Freescale spins Cortex-A8 SoCs, tablet design, and $149 dev board

    Freescale Semiconductor announced two new members of its i.MX53 family of Cortex-A8 system-on-chips: an industrial-focused, 800MHz i.MX37 and the consumer-oriented, 1GHz i.MX538. Also unveiled were a $149 “Quick Start” development board for the original i.MX535 SoC, as well as a 10.1-inch, $1,499 “SABRE” tablet reference design, both compatible with Android, Linux, and Windows Embedded Compact 7.

Ning Galaxy deployment management system open sourced

Ning, provider of the social web site platform of the same name, has released its internal deployment management system, Galaxy, as open source. For the past four years Ning has used Galaxy to manage the various services its engineering produces.

Events

• SCALE 9x: Day 2

  We’ve had a pretty successful day at SCALE. We’re all out of LiveDVDs. The fifty-disc spindle was gone by the end of the day, as was nearly half of the 100-disc spindle of minimal LiveCDs.

• Day one at SCALE9x

  As I mentioned in my previous post, I am at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles this weekend. What I failed to mention in my previous post was massive showing from the openSUSE community at the exposition.

• SCALE 9x lifts off on Saturday; Leigh Honeywell kicks off Day 2 as attendance numbers rise

  The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo started its second day on Saturday with a keynote by Leigh Honeywell as the attendance numbers showed a significant increase over last year. Honeywell, who spoke on the topic “Hackerspaces and Free Software,” headlined a wide variety of sessions that included a standing-room only crowd for Owen De Long’s “IPv6 Basics for Linux Adminstrators” and various education-related talks in the Open Source Software in Education (OSSIE) track.

• FOSDEM: Icing the robot

  Anybody who looks at an Android system knows that, while Android is certainly based on the Linux kernel, it is not a traditional Linux system by any stretch. But Android is free software; might it be possible to create a more “normal” Android while preserving the aspects that make Android interesting? Developers Mario Torre and David Fu think so; they also plan to soon have the code to back it up. Their well-attended FOSDEM talk covered why they would want to do such a thing and how they plan to get there.

SaaS

• The Man Behind Swiss Federal Mapping Discusses What’s in His Cloud Stack

  Recently, we at OStatic launched our “What’s in Your Cloud Stack?” series, where we discuss components and processes that power some of the most sophisticated cloud computing deployments with people who know a whole lot about the cloud. The series began with our conversation with PHP Fog founder Lucas Carlson, where he provided many insights into a smart cloud stack.

Databases

• PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

  The OpenSSL license, which is BSD-style with an advertising clause, has been a source of problems in the past because it is rather unclear whether projects using it can also include GPL-licensed code. Most distributions seem to be comfortable that OpenSSL can be considered a “system library”, so that linking to it does not require OpenSSL to have a GPL-compatible license, but the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and, unsurprisingly, Debian are not on board with that interpretation. This licensing issue recently reared its head again in a thread on the pgsql-hackers (PostgreSQL development) mailing list.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice software is here to stay

  If there was any doubt as to long-term ability of LibreOffice to sprint ahead of Oracle-backed OpenOffice.org, those concerns pretty much just flew out the window. In a wildly successful fundraising effort, the Document Foundation has succeeded in collecting $68,800 (50,000 euros) in just eight days, effectively ensuring a future for the open-source productivity software suite.

  Some 2000 donors from all over the world contributed the funds, which will serve as the capital stock necessary to set up the Document Foundation as a legal entity in Germany.

• Made by the people, for the people

  Perhaps even more incredibly, we were not just busy at raising funds all this time. Not only did we release LibreOffice 3.3.1 and its brand new icons, we are also busy deploying our community processes. For instance we are almost done completing our trademark policy as well as offering a general, third party purpose logo with practical guidelines. We are also in the process of deploying a full set of automated testing tools for our QA teams, as to make it possible to everyone to help improve the quality of our software. Yes, you read well, everyone. Because LibreOffice is a software that is made by the people, for the people, an old principle that is coming back in force quickly these days and a principle the Document Foundation has been based on from day one.

• LibreOffice gives OpenOffice a run for its Money

  OpenOffice and its curiously similarly named counterpart LibreOffice are officially neck-in-neck. Despite Oracle’s backing of OpenOffice, LibreOffice is still kicking, and recently received over $68,000 in funding — in just eight days.

  The fundraising effort from LibreOffice maker Ubuntu was short, sweet, and everything they need for now. Their over 2,000 donors raised enough money to serve as capitol for setting up the Document Foundation, a goal to become a legal entity in Germany.

• Sudbury

  However the result of studies made was to migrate everyone to Office 2007 and “lowering costs”. It turns out that OpenOffice.org did work reasonably well that folks were using it instead of Office to do their document conversions… However, to get stuff/information in and out of the ERP system, Office was chosen as it was well integrated.

Healthcare

• VA, DOD will decide on common EHR method in March

  At the same time, VA must proceed in revamping its VistA system. To that end, VA has been considering open source software with a request for information to gauge industry approaches.

  “No matter what happens in the joint session with the DOD, we have to increase the pace of modernizing VistA,” he said. “That’s why we’re exploring the open source avenue.”

  DOD has also been considering industry ideas for modernizing its AHLTA electronic health record with a Web-based system.

  As it examines the open source model, VA will be influenced by both the work it’s doing with the DOD for a joint electronic health record and also by substantial industry input in order to most easily integrate private sector technologies into the next version of VistA. Even in its updated form, VistA will still rely on its aging MUMPS code.

• VA plans for an open source VistA

Business

• Openbravo Emphasizes Modularity In New Release Of Open-Source ERP Suite

  Open-source ERP application vendor Openbravo unveiled a new release of its flagship software this week, offering a more modular system the company said is easier to implement than traditional ERP systems and is more adaptable to changing business conditions.

• More than half of businesses have adopted ‘some’ open source

• 3 Reasons Why Open Source Brings Better ROI for Businesses

  Quite often businesses view alternatives if products or services offer better Return on Investment. Open Source is one such option that is often debated in terms of better returns, lower operational costs and of course minimum breakeven time depending on the size of your organization etc. However, delving a little deeper into open source capabilities reveals great returns far beyond the initial investment in terms of time, investments etc and migrating to greener Open Source makes great practical sense. Some of these returns are subtle, some paradigm shifts from propriety sources but all effective and productive to every business. Here is a look at some of the top returns.

BSD

• The Coding Studio OS Screenshots: PCBSD 8.2 Screenshots

  “PC-BSD has as its goals to be an easy-to-install-and-use desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD. To accomplish this, it currently has a graphical installation, which will enable even UNIX novices to easily install and get it running. It will also come with KDE pre-built, so that the desktop can be used immediately. Currently in development is a graphical software installation program, which will make installing pre-built software as easy as other popular operating systems.” – read more at Distrowatch

• PC-BSD 9-current

• FreeBSD 8.2 Expands ZFS Support — Without Oracle

  When one door closes, sometimes another one opens.

  The open source FreeBSD operating systems is out this week with a new release expanding support for the ZFS filesystem and improving disk encryption performance.

  The FreeBSD 8.2 release is the first FreeBSD release in 2011 and follows the 8.1 release, which debuted in July of 2010. Alongside the 8.2 release, FreeBSD 7.4 is also being released, marking the final release in the FreeBSD 7.x branch.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• When You Are Born To Be Great!

  By now, you may wonder, what makes me talk about this book and the hero, in a blog post, which is supposed to be dedicated for free and open source movement! Well, I don’t know why but I think, (Boray Qaplan) and Richard Stallman are so much alike.

Government

• Satish Babu to head ICFOSS

  Trivandrum, Kerala, India, February 28, 2011 – The President of InApp, Mr. Satish Babu, has been appointed as the Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source software (ICFOSS) by the Government of Kerala.

• Procurement environment ‘discourages open source technology’

  According to Computer Weekly, chief engineer at Atos Origin UK Darren Austin said standard government contracts and enterprise software licences have proved a barrier to the desire for greater use of open source in the public sector.

• RO: ‘Romanian government not against, nor in favour of open source’

  The government of Romania is not opposed to but also not in favour of using open source software in public administration IT systems, ICT minister, Valerian Vreme, recently remarked in public. However, advocates of free and open source software in the country fear this means the public administration will continue to rely on the usual proprietary IT vendors.

• Cabinet Office pushes suppliers on open source

  The government’s deputy chief information officer has told suppliers that it wants to open source technology to feature in its ICT strategy.

• Whitehall open source plan heralds a behaviour change for suppliers

  This time, says the Cabinet Office, it’s going to be different. This time, open government means open standards and open source. But will it?

• Interoperability And Open Standards Would Drive Government ICT Procurment – Deputy CIO Tells Suppliers

  The Government wants large IT suppliers to provide open source and inter operable standards, the Deputy Government CIO Bill McCluggage told assembled system operators in a meeting last week.

  While there has been similar announcements in the past, this time the push for open source is being driven from the very top – No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street. The government has even appointed an open source team within the cabinet office led by a Director and has laid out a clear strategy to implement the vision.

• New federal deputy CTO chosen

  Vein worked on San Francisco’s open source and government 2.0 initiatives.

• Land Registry deploys open source data management

  The UK Land Registry, the government agency that maintains land property records, has recently deployed an open source data management from Talend to support its business intelligence.

• SI: Slovenian public administrations moving to open source desktops

  Public administrations in Slovenia are to increase their use of free and open source software on their desktop computers. Around 2015, 80 percent of the government’s offices should be using this type of desktop software, according to a plan published by the Ministry of Public Administration in January.

  The open source software stack to be implemented includes open source office suites, open source web browser and open source operating systems. The ministry is setting-up a task force for the migration project, including representatives from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • DOTKLOK Is A Hackable, Open-Source, Arduino Clock. Also Neat Looking

    Sick of telling time the old way? Spice up your time-telling time with the open-source, hackable and Arduino-based DOTKLOK. Basically, you can get a bunch of different ways to tell time. Different customizable animations will make you proud to show off your hard work the next time someone asks for the time. Speaking of time, it passes in a unique way with numbers and abstract/geometric patterns. It also has classic video games like Pong, Tetris and Pacman, that pretty much makes it sweet in our book.

Programming

• IT Poll: Does Your Organization Contribute to the Open Source Projects It Uses?

Standards/Consortia

• Webstock: Facebook leads the way with HTML5

  Recordon was in New Zealand for the recent Webstock conference in Wellington, where he spoke about the use of HTML5 at Facebook and later spoke exclusively to Computerworld.

  Two video codecs, H.264 and WebM, have been advanced as candidates for inclusion in HTML5. Each has its pros and cons, says Recordon and the debate has become somewhat heated, “about freedom and what does freedom mean, in terms of can I implement it in open source and is it royalty free, or is it an industry standard and can we collaborate freely on developing it?”

• China hopes to take lead in int’l hi-tech standards

  China has announced its ambition at the National Standardization Conference held on Feb.24 to take the lead in high-tech international standards. China’s Standardization Administration (SAC) will launch the promotion and applications of some national technologies standards within key countries and regions.

Former president of MADD arrested on DUI charge

A former president of the defunct local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving was arrested recently by the Gainesville Police Department on a DUI charge.

Consumers Buy Less Tech Stuff, Keep It Longer

How to: Uyghur Homestay in Xinjiang

One of the most asked questions I receive from travelers who will be heading to Xinjiang this next travel season has to do with homestays. Is it possible to do a Uyghur homestay in Xinjiang?

The answer, thankfully, is YES! There are many places where homestays are offered, including Tuyoq (near Turpan) as well as outside Kashgar. Don’t mistake this with an overnight stay at a Kyrgyz yurt, which is also an incredible experience but not quite the same.

Google whacks link farms

Free whitepaper – The benefits of choosing a Hosted Security Solution

Google has made a major change to its search algorithms in order to try to scrub more link farm results from appearing near the top of search results.

The search and advertising giant tweaks results all the time, but said these changes would hit 11.8 per cent of results, and so it wanted people to know what is going on.

Dear US gov: Stay the hell out of Silicon Valley

It will come as no surprise to the largely libertarian technology industry that big government has done little to advance the interests of Silicon Valley. But you might raise your eyebrows at the degree to which the US government is hurting the very people it tries to help.

As a general rule, Silicon Valley has been happiest when the bureaucrats in Washington, DC stay far away from tech and mostly uninvolved. Ever since the US Justice Department inserted itself into Microsoft’s business practices, however, the tech world has been forced to invest in lobbying federal lawmakers. Just last year, Google increased such spending by 29 percent over 2009.

Craigslist A ‘Cesspool Of Crime’? Or Are Bad Reporters A Cesspool Of Repeating Dubious Research?

Slashdot points us to an article at the “International Business Times,” that reports on a study from the AIM Group which claims that Craigslist is ‘a cesspool of crime.’ Interesting claim. What seems to be totally missing from the IBTimes report is the fact that AIM Group works for Craigslist competitors and, in this case, the “research” was funded by Craigslist wannabe-Oodle. That’s not mentioned in the IBTimes report at all. In fact, the only mention of Oodle in the article is a quote by the CEO of Oodle mocking Craigslis and playing up Oodle… but never mentioning that he paid for the research in question.

Security

• HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr Steps Down

  Embattled CEO Aaron Barr says he is stepping down from his post at HBGary Federal to allow the company to move on after an embarassing data breach.

  The announcement comes three weeks after Barr became the target of a coordinated attack by members of the online mischief making group Anonymous, which hacked into HBGary Federal’s computer network and published tens of thousands of company e-mail messages on the Internet. HBGary did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comments on Barr’s resignation.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Sometimes The Twitter Stream Makes A Funny

• Zimbabwe Prof Arrested, Tortured for Watching Viral Vids

  Munyaradzi Gwisai, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s law school, was showing internet videos about the tumult sweeping across North Africa to students and activists last Saturday, when state security agents burst into his office.

• Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue

  When narcotics officers appeared at a Castro home shortly after 7 a.m. on Jan. 11, they had permission from a judge to search for “proceeds” from an illegal marijuana grow.

• Possible Actions in Libya

  Al Jazeera reports that “conservatives” in USA are recommending “military intervention”. The concern seems to be that this could be a repeat of Iraq.

  There are some similarities but also a lot of differences between Iraq and Libya. In Iraq popular uprisings were dealt harsh blows and were no threat to the Baathist regime. In Libya, opponents to Gaddafi have control of most of the country and are cooperating and it would not be necessary to occupy the country in order to bring down Gaddafi’s regime.

• US neo-cons urge Libya intervention

  In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage US intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

• The Coast Road Past Sirte in Libya

  A blogger reports that anti-Gaddafi forces in Benghazi are heading to Tripoli by avoiding the stronghold of Sirte which guards the coast road along the Mediterranean Sea by travelling hundreds of kilometres to the south. This might be the easiest strategy for forward observers or emergency relief supplies but for a lengthy campaign it would be much wiser to follow the coast road and detour around Sirte much closer to the town.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Data Diving and the Federal Reserve: The Politics of Food and Energy Inflation

  The Federal Reserve has come under strong attack recently for the outbreak in global food and energy price inflation. The ensuing discussion has drawn commentary from Paul Krugman, who favors climate-change and crop failure to explain recent food commodity prices, to various commentary such as today’s WSJ Op-Ed, The Federal Reserve Is Causing Turmoil Abroad. Krugman is a consistent defender of FED policy, and remains sanguine on inflation. The financial community more generally, despite its enthusiasm for the effects of reflationary policy on the stock market, suffers from normalcy bias with regard to commodity prices and is more persuaded by monetary policy’s role in prices.

• What we need to do to stop the pointless waste of discarded fish

  Discards are disgusting. No-one with any sense can support the catching, killing, and throwing away of fish. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight – which Greenpeace has supported from the outset – has at long last made the waste of perfectly good fish a national outrage. It is a pointless waste of life, and potential resources. It’s abhorrent whether you eat fish or don’t.

Wisconsin and Finance

• Wisconsin Protests, Friday, February 25, 2011

• Cheeseheads Have Never Been So Chic

  In Washington D.C.: Protesters warn, “What’s happening in Wisconsin will hurt us all.”

• “We Shall Not Be Moved”

  A large, multi-union coalition gathered near the “Fighting” Bob LaFollette bust on the first floor of the East Gallery in the Wisconsin State Capitol this afternoon. Wearing grey T-shirts with the words “Wisconsin United for Worker’s Rights,” printed in red across an outline of the state sat down and started to sing, “We shall not be moved,” just after the official building shut-down at 4 p.m.

  “We know we have a right to peaceful protest,” said Candice Owley, a Milwaukee nurse with the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. “We don’t believe they should be removing us from the State Capitol.”

  Owley said those in her group planned to follow directions outlined by a grass-root group inside the capitol that this week has been preparing those for today. The goal: to keep the protest peaceful, and allow those who wish to continue to keep vigil in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill to remain in the building.

• Wisconsin Protests, Saturday, February 26, 2011

  In addition to drumming and dancing, civil disobedience training continued Saturday night as people prepare to be asked to leave the building at 4:00 p.m. Sunday.

• Prank Koch Call Prompts More Legal Questions

  The section of the tape that has come under the most scrutiny involved Walker’s comments that he considered planting “troublemakers” into the crowd. People on the ground here in Madison were quite aware that the first five days of protests were packed with children. The Madison school district and many surrounding districts were closed. Thousands of elementary school children and their parents marched at the capitol in support of local teachers. On the first day and second days, thousands of high school students walked out on their classes and headed to the capitol. The atmosphere was festive and fun, popcorn stands on the corner and thousands of homemade signs.

  When fake Koch says “We’ll back you any way we can. But what we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.” Walker says: “We thought about that,” but he rejected the idea in case it backfired, but not in the way one might think. He didn’t want to create a ruckus that would “scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has to settle to avoid all these problems.”

• Boaters baffled by new federal rules, fee

  Many canoeists and kayakers are confused and worried about new federal regulations that re-classify their boats as commercial vessels.

  The Transport Canada regulations, brought in last fall, will require everyone from professional outfitters to people leading recreational boat trips to fill out five separate forms, measure their boat and pay a $50 fee.

  Federal Transport Minister Chuck Strahl’s office told CBC News in an email that the department is reviewing the policy, and that “common sense would prevail.” But boaters are still concerned it could affect their summer paddling plans.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Today’s News, Brought to You by Your Friends at the CIA

  Now that the revolution is over, Egypt’s newly free press will make a fascinating read—if you happen to know Arabic. How the Libyan crisis plays in the newspapers of oil-rich Azerbaijan might be intriguing, too—if your Azeri is up to snuff.

  If it isn’t—and if your Urdu is as rusty as your Mandarin—you might check out the biggest news service in the U.S. that almost nobody has ever heard of. It’s called World News Connection.

Civil Rights

• Inspiring manifesto from China’s Jasmine revolution

  As Bruce Sterling notes, this manifesto of the Chinese Jasmine revolution (translated by Human Rights in China), “sounds almost identical to the gripes that the impoverished American populace might make to their own leaders. There’s nothing specifically Chinese about these demands.”

• DOJ gets reporter’s phone, credit card records in leak probe

  A court filing in the case of a former CIA officer accused of spilling secrets about Iran’s nuclear program provides new details about the extraordinary measures Justice Department prosecutors are using to identify government leakers.

  The former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was indicted in December on charges that he disclosed “national defense information” to New York Times reporter James Risen.

• US citizen recalls ‘humiliating’ post-9/11 arrest

  Handcuffed and marched through Washington’s Dulles International Airport in his Muslim clothing, the man with the long, dark beard could only imagine what people were thinking.

  That scene unfolded in March 2003, a year and a half after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. One of the four planes hijacked in 2001 took off from Dulles. “I could only assume that they thought I was a terrorist,” Abdullah al-Kidd recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Julian Assange applies for a trademark on his own name

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has applied to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office for a trademark on his own name.

    The application, submitted by Assange’s London law firm two weeks ago, covers use of his name in the fields of “Public speaking services; news reporter services; journalism; publication of texts other than publicity texts; education services; entertainment services.”

    It’s not uncommon for those in the public eye to protect their image with such a trademark to help ensure their financial stake in any commercial use of their name or likeness. Given Assange’s high profile in recent months, both as the frontman for WikiLeaks and for the drama surrounding his personal life, this seems like a smart move.

  • Hulk Hogan Sues Car Dealership for Stealing His Catchphrases

    Hogan is suing Southland Imports and Suntrup Automotive Group over a commercial that warns unwary car buyers of getting “body slammed” over bad deals and that invites customers “tired of wrestling for a good deal.” The lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Florida District Court alleges that the defendant violated Hogan’s likeness and implied an endorsement by imitating his voice and using his catch phrases.

• Copyrights

  • Three Pirate Rule

    There are only three exceptions to the Three Pirate Rule:

    1. Don’t do anything illegal.
    2. You can’t allocate party funds (although you can ask for them).
    3. You can’t do anything in Northern Ireland, due to current law. If you’re interested in doing stuff in Northern Ireland, please contact the NEC for more info.

    The NEC receives a lot of requests from members to grant some sort of Official Stamp of Officialness to various initiatives. Hopefully, adopting this rule will make it unnecessary for people to make this sort of request.

  • Court Drops FileSoup BitTorrent Case, Administrators Walk Free

    Two administrators of FileSoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – had their case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today. The prosecution relied solely on one-sided evidence provided by the anti-piracy group FACT and was not able to build a case. Following the trial of OiNK BitTorrent tracker operator Alan Ellis, the FileSoup case marks the second where UK-based BitTorrent site operators have walked free.

  • 40,000 P2P lawsuits dismissed – bad week for copyright trolls

  • Hollywood Studios Kill ‘Family-Friendly’ DVD Service (Exclusive)

    A coalition of Hollywood studios has scored a victory against a company that has been marketing and distributing films stripped of objectionable content.

  • Roundup: Developments in Righthaven copyright suits

    Has Righthaven been so busy filing and settling lawsuits that it forgot to renew its state business license?

    Its status with the Nevada Secretary of State as of Monday was listed as “default” after the license expired Jan. 31. Net Sortie Systems LLC, Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson’s company that co-owns Righthaven, is also listed as in default.

  • Consumer group wants to tax Netflix to pay for rural broadband

    Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), says Netflix should have to pay into the Universal Service Fund.

    “The Internet is not an infant industry anymore. It can certainly bear the burden of making sure that wires and the communications mediums are there,” Cooper said.