Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

11.10.12

Links 11/11/2012: Qt On Android, Debian Back To GNOME, Firefox is 8

Posted in News Roundup at 11:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-Java move

    Micro-blogging site Twitter experienced record traffic as the results of the 2012 US Presidential election were announced on Tuesday night, but the service never faltered despite the increased load – something Twitter engineers credit to the company’s move from Ruby to Java for its backend software.

  • VMware Does Complicated Dance With Open Source
  • VMware updates micro version of open source Cloud Foundry PaaS
  • The Trend Of Open Source And Proprietary Software Business Model

    Open source software has been there for a long time. Its popularity is increasing each and every day and has reached such a level that it’s hard to find a domain which does not have an open source presence. Companies are reluctant to buy proprietary software due to the cost involved. In most cases, open source software seems to be a viable option.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Education

  • Healthcare

    • NIH showcases informatics researchers as new open source ventures launch

      After the National Institutes of Health grew interested in bioinformatics, following breakthroughts in the 1990s, the National Centers for Biomedical Computing were created with the goal of advancing the field by a few leaps and bounds, because IT systems hadn’t quite caught up to molecular biology.

      The nine centers were founded through the 2000s, and with the advent of new data processing and visualization tools, there’s been “an explosion of knowledge” in biomedical research, said Brian Athey, from the University of Michigan Medical School’s National Center for Integrative Bio Informatics (NCIBI).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Beer: The open source beverage of choice

      Beer is truly the most democratic, egalitarian, and open source of all beverages. It is for both common folk and connoisseurs. It is for the masses. And, from my experience as a homebrewer and beer geek, you will rarely find a beverage that can be so liberating (in more ways than one).

    • Crowd-sourcing a cure

      On September 10, 2012, the Italian data artist who is passionate about the open-source medium, posted on the website he created, Open Source Cure (artisopensource.net): “I have a brain cancer. Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors. Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life… I opened them… so that I could share them with everyone. Just today I have been able to share the data about my health condition with 3 doctors. 2 of them already replied.”

    • Open Hardware

      • Compost your server

        It takes talent, luck and charisma to become a rock star (or money, connections and good looks, depending on how you look at it). It’s much harder to become a rock star of the open-source hardware movement. One way to do it is to create a compostable server chassis. No big deal, right?

      • Build Your Own Arduino Powered MP3 Jukebox

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • The party game is over. Stand and fight
  • Should Microsoft sell its search engine Bing?

    It was quite expected from the beginning that the Redmond giant Microsoft is not going to earn huge profits from Bing. Unveiled in 2009, Bing is Microsoft’s online search engine, which was launched to compete with the search leader Google.

  • Microsoft Surface is not durable

    The cover surrounding the touch panel of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, appears to be far from durable, as users are reporting that within mere days of receiving their version, it began to split and come away from the frame.

    The problem is being experienced by multiple users, each of them reporting the same thing: where the keyboard magnetically attaches to the main body of the device, the cover seam begins to split. On top of this, many have also reported that the Windows 8 logo hasn’t been etched or embossed into the frame and has already begun to wear.

  • Apple seeks standard to appease angry university net managers

    Under fire from its customers in the higher education market, Apple has proposed creating a new industry standard that would fix problems with its Bonjour zero configuration networking technology that is causing scalability and security problems on campus networks.

  • Microsoft’s Big Hidden Windows 8 Feature: Built-In Advertising

    Despite the fact that I’ve been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we’re not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen (thankfully), but rather ads that can be found inside of some Modern UI apps that Windows ships with. That includes Finance, Weather, Travel, News and so forth. Is it a problem? Let’s tackle this from a couple of different angles.

  • Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters

    Like a lot of people, I listened to Rush Limbaugh the day after the election. Pure Schadenfreude, I admit it; I just wanted to hear the reaction. I searched the right-wing media landscape far and wide and tried to find even a hint of self-examination, self-criticism, and I didn’t find much. Then again, they didn’t lose the presidential vote by much, so they didn’t take the election result as a total repudiation of their belief system, as they probably shouldn’t have, anyway.

  • Science

    • Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence

      Every ten years, the average IQ goes up by about 3 points. Psychologist James Flynn has spent decades documenting this odd fact, which was eventually dubbed the Flynn Effect. The question is, does the Flynn Effect mean we’re getting smarter? Not according to Flynn, who argues that the effect simply reveals that IQ measures teachable skills rather than innate ones. As education changed over time, kids got better at standardized tests like the IQ test. And so their score

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Photography Advocate/Journalist Acquitted After Arrest Over Filming Police; Intends To Sue Back

      We’ve linked to the blog, PhotographyIsNotACrime.com (PINAC), a few times in the past (it recently moved locations). Its author, Carlos Miller, not only covered a number of cases involving photographers being arrested or harassed for photographing buildings, police or something else, but was a defendant in just such a case himself. Miller was arrested back in January while videotaping police at an “Occupy Miami” event. Not only was he arrested, but his camera was confiscated and the police deleted footage from the camera — including footage of the encounter that led to his arrest. The police claimed that Miller had disobeyed an order by the police to “clear the area.” However, the videotaped footage — which Miller was able to recover despite the deletion — showed a different story. It showed a clearly-aware-of-his-rights Miller making the case that he was doing nothing wrong. Furthermore, other journalists were allowed to stay in the area, and one of those journalists, Miami Herald reporter Glenn Garvin, testified at the trial about how he was allowed to stay. In fact, he went to the officer who arrested Miller and asked her if he needed to move, and she told him he was “under no threat of getting arrested.”

    • Torture Continues to be Legitimized by U.S. Legal System

      In another blow to human rights, freedom, the law, and morality, the 7th Circuit Court has exonerated Donald Rumsfeld from prosecution for allegations of being a primary architect of U.S. torture policy.

    • Innocents are killed by drones

      THE evidence suggests that innocent bystanders are killed and injured often in US drone attacks – not occasionally.

      The evidence is contained in a report compiled by Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity, Reprieve.

    • Navy SEALs punished for revealing secrets to video game maker

      Seven U.S. Navy SEALs have been reprimanded for giving up classified information connected to their tradecraft so a video game could seem more realistic, according to a navy official.

  • Cablegate

    • U.S. WikiLeaks Criminal Probe ‘Ongoing,’ Judge Reveals

      U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady of Alexandria, Virginia, noted the investigation in a legal flap surrounding three WikiLeaks associates who lost their bid to protect their Twitter records from U.S. investigators. The three had asked the court to unseal documents in their case. In May, O’Grady ordered the documents remain under seal for six months. On Wednesday he renewed that order, based on a government filing.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Secret Documents Show Weak Oversight of Key Foreclosure Program
    • Ex-Goldman trader’s fraud caused $118 million loss: U.S. regulator

      U.S. regulators on Thursday accused a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc trader of defrauding the Wall Street bank of $118 million in a scheme of fabricated trades and fake entries.

    • Cisco VP Threatens To Stalk Memo Leaker… Driving More Attention Than Original Memo

      Internal memos from large companies leak all the time. It happens. Companies don’t like it, but most learn to deal with it. Sometimes, they go a bit nuts. For example, you may remember the spying scandal at HP, in which the board tried to stop leaks by spying on phone records and other info, including trying to spy on various journalists. Apparently some companies just go a bit nutty when they think they have someone to track down, where execs suddenly think they can act like they’re in some sort of spy movie. Apparently this is now happening at Cisco as well. A few weeks ago, Network World reported on Cal State’s decision to use Alcatel-Lucent instead of Cisco, claiming that it saved the university $100 million. As is fairly typical at companies when such bad news is in the press, an internal memo was sent around on how to respond to questions about this story. And… as is fairly typical at such companies, the internal memo leaked to bloggers who posted it. The memo itself is fairly tame and about what you’d expect given the situation.

    • Chris Spannos: Greece Between Austerity and Fascism

      The European Union has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. But it is today’s Greek anti-fascist movement that deserves an award for doing what European states have so far failed to do — confronting the rise of violent neo-Nazi movements on the continent.

      Although fascism is not new in Greece, it has seen a resurgence in the Golden Dawn party, which won 18 parliamentary seats in the last election. Some polls indicate that approximately half of Greek police support Golden Dawn and that the party enjoys legitimacy in wide social circles. Police sometimes even refer crime victims to Golden Dawn for follow-up on law enforcement and citizen protection.

    • Bitter cold inside a disaster shelter

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win

      In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

    • Lauren Lyster Interviews Dan Ariely on Financial Fraud, Moral Hazard, and the Psychology of a Cheater

      I would not necessarily compare the deterrent effects of punishments for a capital crime, which is often a crime of passion, with financial fraud. And beyond some point no matter how severe the punishment may become, the deterrence is not commensurately increased.

      The problem is that there is little or no personal penalty these days for even the most egregious forms of financial misbehaviour and fraud. There is a fellowship of mutual corruption at the heart of the money system.

      And as some have warned for years, political capture and moral hazard have broken the Anglo-American financial system with profound implications for the real economy. What I find appalling is when so called progressive economists dismiss this important principle for the sake of their models and expediency.

  • Censorship

    • Australia comes to its senses, abandons Internet filtering regime

      The Australian government has now, after years of testing and preparing, formally abandoned a plan to filter its domestic Internet. Officials now say that it will use Interpol’s “worst of” child abuse site list as a way to shield Ozzies from truly awful content.

    • Google Is Blocked in China as Party Congress Begins

      All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China on Friday night and into Saturday, the company confirmed. The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way.

  • Civil Rights

    • AT&T is glad to expand service, but wants pesky FCC regulations dropped

      On Wednesday, AT&T announced a plan to invest $14 billion in expanding its wireless and U-Verse service around the country. At the same time, the company submitted a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking for an end to the “conventional public-utility-style regulation.”

    • Voter Suppression Efforts Blunted by Vigilant Advocates and High Turnout in Wisconsin and Nationally

      With most voter ID laws blocked before the 2012 elections and local election officials and civic groups prepared for True the Vote’s intimidation tactics, some of the worst fears about voter disenfranchisement were averted in Tuesday’s vote. But partisan voting laws and continued confusion over election administration led to long lines — prompting President Obama to note “by the way, we have to fix that,” in his acceptance speech.

    • Why was an Indian man held for sending a tweet?

      How can a virtually unknown Indian boost his Twitter following a hundred-fold overnight?

      Ravi Srinivasan did it by becoming the first person in India to be arrested for a tweet. The 46-year-old runs a packaging business in the southern Indian city of Pondicherry.

    • Law Blog Fireside: Chris Hansen, the ACLU’s Longest-Serving Attorney

      Mr. Hansen, 65, joined the group in 1973 and became senior staff counsel 20 years later, a role that allowed him to pick and choose issues to litigate around the country, from gene-patenting to Internet censorship to failing schools. Friday is Mr. Hansen’s last day.

    • Malala day: an inspiring girl reminds us of the power of the Internet

      This week, I’m just back from Azerbaijan – so human rights issues are very much on my mind.

      The European Union is not just a common market; and not just a guardian of peace. It’s a place of fundamental rights. Rights that we treasure, protect and assure for our citizens. And nor is the Internet just a set of technologies, or just a space for business opportunities. It is the new frontier of freedom. And people like the inspiring young Malala Yousafzai are a reminder of that.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Multi-Stakeholder Discussions á la Internet Governance Forum For WIPO?

      The need to bring all stakeholders together to discuss the future of copyright appears to have gotten a push from this year’s UN-led Internet Governance Forum.

      Trevor Clarke, assistant director general for the Culture and Creative Industries Sector of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said during a workshop on “Rethinking Copyright” today that the multi-stakeholder environment is “the best and and most appropriate” when it comes to the debate on copyright in the digital age. WIPO is preparing for such multi-stakeholder discussions, Clarke told Intellectual Property Watch.

    • UN Wants Multi-Stakeholder Discussions On ‘Rethinking Copyright’ — Ignores That The Only Stakeholder That Matters Is The Public
    • AT&T Admits That The Whole ‘Spectrum Crunch’ Argument It Made For Why It Needed T-Mobile Wasn’t True

      You may recall that back when AT&T was trying to buy T-Mobile, a big part of the argument was a spectrum crunch around its wireless efforts. The company insisted — strenuously — that it would not be able to expand 4G LTE services to more than 80% of the population unless it had T-Mobile. That argument ran into some trouble when a lawyer accidentally posted some documents to the FCC which admitted that the company could fairly easily expand its coverage to 97% of the population of the US without T-Mobile (and, in fact, that it would cost about 10% of what buying T-Mobile would cost). Suddenly, the argument that it absolutely needed T-Mobile rang hollow — even as the company continued to insist exactly that. Still, the FCC suddenly was skeptical and AT&T, seeing the writing on the wall, gave up on the merger.

    • Teen Hacker Banned From The Internet For Six Years

      A teenaged hacker known as Cosmo the God, who was involved in a number of big site takedowns earlier this year, and who is considered a “social engineering mastermind” has been sentenced to probation. The terms include a ban on internet access until his 21st birthday, six years from now, according to a Wired article by Mat Honan. For many years, we’ve questioned whether or not it’s reasonable (or even practical) to ban people from the internet for computer related crimes. It seems not only stupid and counterproductive, but just plain bizarre. The internet is so integrated into our lives these days that taking the internet out of your life is a lot more complicated than some might imagine.

    • Teenage Hacker ‘Cosmo the God’ Sentenced by California Court

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • GEMA Gets Bailed Out By Germany’s Parliament; Allowed To Proceed With Venue-Killing Rate Hikes

        The threat posed to Germany’s underground club scene by all-around IP thug GEMA is no longer just a threat. Back in July, GEMA decided to “streamline” its convoluted fee structure. Naturally, it decided to smooth things over in a upward motion, raising the fees charged to these clubs by up to 1,400%. This sparked protests against GEMA’s tactics and a petition with 60,000 signatures was brought to the Deutsches Bundestag (Germany’s parliament). Unfortunately, the Deutsches Bundestag punted, suggesting those unhappy with the new fee structure negotiate directly with GEMA. [However you spell "LOL" in German goes here.]

      • Viral Video Of 9-Year-Old Girl Football Star… Taken Down Because Of Music
      • Music Publishers Win $6.6 Million in Song Lyrics Copyright Case

        The copyright infringement lawsuit concerned the online publication of lyrics to works by Van Morrison, Ray Charles and others.

      • $6.6 Million Ruling Against Lyrics Site, Once Again, Shows How Short Sighted Music Industry Is

        For many years now, we’ve covered how music publishers have gone after all sorts of sites that post song lyrics, arguing infringement. As we’ve noted time and time again, this whole thing seems short sighted in the extreme. Lyrics sites don’t take away from interest in a song, they only increase it. And, yes, publishers have different interests than the musicians or labels, but it still seems counterproductive to sue and take down sites that were increasing interest in the actual music, as lyrics sites do. Unfortunately, lots of lyrics sites have been forced offline because the rates the publishers want are insane. A few years ago, a bunch of publishers went after Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse for its lyrics offerings. Greenspan — who was associated with MySpace in the early days as its parent company Intermix’s CEO — has, well, a colorful history. He’s spent many years stamping his feet about how Rupert Murdoch should have paid more for MySpace back in the day.

11.09.12

Links 9/11/2012: Qt Creator 2.6.0, Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Builds

Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Windows 8 is a one way street for consumer PC users

    If you buy a Windows 8-powered HP consumer PC, or from any other PC vendor, you’ll get no help from them if you decide you’d rather have Windows 7. And Linux? Forget about it!

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • ending the cults of personality in free software

      Free software has a history of creating and supporting cults of personality. Since it is a widespread human phenomenon, it is easy to understand how this happens. It is, however, unhelpful and destructive and we really ought to actively discourage it, starting by putting aside the current cults.

    • The free software media and cults of personality

      .
      I’m not naming names, but if you follow community news, you’ll know that all these things have happened in the last month, as well as many, many times before. Moreover, each time that they happen, they distract people from more important matters.

    • Trying out Systemd
    • AMD Shuts Operating Systems Research Center, Fires Linux Employees
    • Did AMD shoot itself in the foot by laying off open-source talent?
    • The Z-Factor: Meet the Simon Cowell of Linux

      Such moves have not always been welcome. I’ve criticised the Linux Foundation for getting beyond its roots and getting in the way of its sponsors. By taking sides with MeeGo, for example, the Foundation threatened to undermine its credibility with other Linux-based mobile projects.

      [...]

      Zemlin and the Linux Foundation, however, go one step further. Zemlin is an active advocate for Linux, constantly in the news and on his blog, whether ripping on patents, taking pot shots at Microsoft Windows, or talking up Linux in automobiles. In other words, he helps to make the Foundation’s brand bigger, giving it more credibility within the development community and, perhaps particularly, the sponsoring vendor community. No one has raised money more successfully for an open source foundation than Zemlin has.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Benchmarking NVIDIA’s R310 Linux Driver Improvements

        This week NVIDIA began advertising their new “R310″ Linux graphics driver that “delivers [a] massive performance boost to Linux gaming” as a result of Valve releasing their Steam Linux Beta. The NVIDIA 310.xx Linux graphics driver not only improves the performance for Valve’s Source Engine games, but many Linux OpenGL games. In this article are benchmarks from three graphics cards to highlight the optimizations.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Experimentation vs. Tradition: The Future of Innovation on the Linux Desktop

      A few years ago, users had two — maybe three — major choices for a Linux Desktop. Now, several user revolts later, they have eight or more.

      But while this increased choice may be good for users in the short term, how will it affect long-term development? It may be that this diversity means either less innovation in the future, or a constraint of innovation to one or two unpromising directions.

    • A New Day Dawns In Linux With The Near Arrival Of E17 (stable)

      If you want less of your system consumed by your desktop and more left to your apps, then E17 is pretty much right near or at the head of that field. – Carsten Haitzler, Enlightenment

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt Creator 2.6.0 Out, Includes Experimental Android Support
      • plasma sdk accreting

        If you have used plasmoidviewer, plasamengineexplorer or plasmawallpaperviewer from past releases of KDE Workspaces while developing Plasma components, you may be surprised to find them gone in the upcoming 4.10 release.

      • Qt Creator 2.6 Development Environment Released

        Qt Creator 2.6 introduces “Kits” as a replacement to the feature known as “Targets” in earlier versions, the integrated development environment also adds experimental Android support, improved C++11 support, and many bug-fixes throughout.

      • Qt Creator 2.6.0 introduces Kits

        Version 2.6.0 of Qt Creator has been released with a change that, its developers say, will affect almost every user: the new release of the cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) introduces “Kits” as a replacement for the “Targets” that were in versions 2.5 and earlier.

      • Slax 7.0 packs a KDE 4 live OS into 183MB

        With the arrival of a first release candidate, the next major release of Slax, version 7.0, is nearing completion. Slax is a fast and full-featured Linux operating system based on Slackware that includes KDE 4 as its default desktop. The small distribution weighs in at less than 190MB and is designed to run as a live system from a CD or USB drive.

      • Slax is bare bones modular Linux
      • Calligra 2.5.3 Released

        he Calligra development team has announced the third bug fix release (2.5) of Calligra office and productivity suite. As this is a stable release with numerous bugfixes, it’s advisable to upgrade to this release as soon as possible to enjoy the latest features and extra stability of the apps.

      • Guest post: Newcomer experience in KDE and other FOSS communities – Survey

        This is a guest post from Kevin Carillo, a researcher I’ve been working with to help us improve KDE’s newcomer experience. If you fit the criteria please do take the survey. It’ll help improve the experience of new contributors and thereby help improve KDE. Thanks!

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3.8 is dropping Fallback Mode
      • Gnome 3.8 To Drop Fallback Mode: Oops! I Did It Again

        As a Gnome user you know that in case you are using a computer that doesn’t support 3D acceleration by default, you will be switched to Gnome’s fallback mode. This mode though using GTK3, looks like the earlier 2.x version of Gnome shell. Users who were not satisfied by changes in Gnome 3 shell used the fallback mode as it looks and worked similar to older version. There is some bad news.

      • The Ups and Downs of GNOME 3

        One of the most interesting parts of being Executive Director of GNOME has been riding the wave of feedback on GNOME 3. I took the position after GNOME 3 was already released, and it was that beautiful vision of the GNU/Linux desktop that inspired me to leave a job I loved. Since then, the highs have been really high and the lows have been tough. One of the very visible disappointments we had was aggressive criticism from Linus Torvalds, which started a cascade of detraction by others and a perception of a real decline in the GNOME community. It’s been difficult to reconcile all of the ups and downs. At GUADEC, we had such a rich experience with great participation by a broad community (and with a very high percentage of active attendance by newcomers) while at the very same time the blogoverse was exploding with news that our contributor diversity had completely dwindled away.

      • GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes

  • Distributions

    • PUIAS Linux review – Say what?

      Alas, it was not meant to be. I was hoping for another solid RedHat clone, and this distro ought to be that, but probably in a more conservative setup, with mechanical disks or something of that sort. I must add that CentOS did not have any such issues, plus it comes with its own live CD/DVD versions, so you can test before committing.

      All in all, I do not really know what to say about PUIAS. Except the fact that it refused to install on SSD, there’s nothing else that I can add. I have no idea what it looks like, how it behaves, whether the extra repositories offer all the goodies normal people need and all that. Therefore, this review ends without a verdict. That would be all, gents. Almost pointless, I know, but then, I had to share.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Alpha Tests New Name, Mageia Needs Artwork

        The second alpha of upcoming Mandriva 2012, announced on November 6, reflects some progress while other issues remain. Mageia ran a contest for artwork during the version 2 developmental phase, and it was such a success, they’re doing it again for 3. So, test Mandriva and draw some pretty pictures for Mageia.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Two Weeks With Spacewalk

        After using Chef and Puppet, I have the opportunity to compare and contrast the pair with Spacewalk, the open source component of RedHat Satellite. Spacewalk represents one perspective on data center management applications, which if you are more inclined to work in the command line might not agree with you. Spacewalk, Chef, and Puppet are configuration management and data center automation tools, and if there is any truth to the state of such tools today, it is that we still have so much farther to go.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Delayed Further, To Be Released Next Year
        • Fedora 18 Linux Delayed to 2013
        • Happy Second Anniversary Fuduntu!

          Happy second anniversary, Fuduntu! Today we celebrate the second anniversary of the Fuduntu Linux distribution, and what a year it has been!

        • Happy Second Anniversary Fuduntu!
        • Fedora 18 slips into next year

          After five previous slips of the release date and a shortening of the beta cycle, the Fedora developers have had to now push the Fedora 18 release into January 2013. The revised schedule currently sees a beta release planned for 27 November and a final release on 8 January 2013. The original planned final release date was 6 November.

        • GNOME 3.6 Test Day today!

          It’s that Test Day time again, folks! Depending on where you are, tomorrow or today – Thursday 2012-11-08 – is GNOME 3.6 Test Day. We’ll be testing various areas of GNOME to ensure the desktop is working smoothly for the upcoming Fedora 18 release. If you have some time to drop by and help GNOME continue to get better, please do!

        • No Fedora
        • Fedora 19 Will Have Another Unique Codename

          After the codename proposal period for Fedora 19, the list of potential codenames for this next Fedora Linux release have been narrowed down by Red Hat and now it’s time to vote for the official name.

    • Debian Family

      • Reflecting on 14 years of free software

        14 years ago last month, I created my first PGP key to sign up to be a Debian developer. I recall what brought me to that place. I had been trying to improve my skill-set for my resume and wanted to learn to program.

        Considering Linux was free compared to development software on Windows (and it ran on my Pentium 90MHz CPU when BSD didn’t), it was an easy choice. However, I had no idea what I was getting into.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Builds Out
          • Ubuntu 13.04 Daily ISO Images Are Now Available

            The first daily ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system were made available by Canonical on the regular FTP website.

          • Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption
          • Note to EFF: FDE implementation in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity is only at 50%

            In Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Micah Lee gave the non-profit organization some credit for pushing Mark Shuttleworth and crew to implement full disk encryption (FDE) in Ubiquity, the graphical installation program of Ubuntu Desktop.

            That feature, together with LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, made their debut in Ubuntu 12.10, the latest release of the popular Linux distribution. (See Ubuntu 12.10 review.)

            while their’s no arguing the fact that the EFF’s campaign played some part in getting FDE implemented in Ubiquity, Micah’s article failed to mention that FDE is only available in the automated partitioning modes. What that means is that if you opt to create partitions manually for installing your copy of Ubuntu
            12.10, you lose the benefits of FDE. There are workarounds, but straight from the installer in Ubuntu 12.10, you cannot configure FDE on manually created partitions.

          • I don’t care

            There’s an old saying: to each their own. That’s how I feel about most things. Everything that I just mentioned, and more, is a matter of personal choice. Mine, yours, and everyone else’s. In my case, it’s also about what works for me. It’s not about ideology or what’s popular or even me going against the grain.

          • Welcome to the Skunk Works

            A few weeks ago, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced a new project initiative dubbed “skunk works”, that would bring talented and trusted members of the Ubuntu community into what were previously Canonical-only development teams working on some of the most interesting and exciting new features in Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 290
          • What Canonical Could Have Done With The Shopping Lens

            Ubuntu 12.10 was released last month with the Amazon shopping lens enabled by default. This was met with much criticism (even EFF raised its concerns) mainly about how user data is being handled or submitted to Amazon and other 3rd parties. While most of the issues have been addressed, the lens is still on by default. So if you search dash, you may likely find the Amazon results too, along with local files, apps and video results.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Facebook warehousing 180 PETABYTES of data a year

    Facebook’s data warehouses grow by “Over half a petabyte … every 24 hours”, according to an explanatory note The Social Network’s Engineering team has issued to explain a new release of open source code.

  • Trying out FreeDOS
  • Cross-device cross-platform incompatibility incongruence

    There is now, it seems, a cross-device compatibility imperative rising.

    We know this of course. Windows 8 is very much positioned as a ‘desktop, to tablet, to mobile handset’ cross-device operating system and Apple’s iOS has (arguably) already been in this space for some time already.

    Carrying this thought forward, we might argue that Android’s 68 percent share of the mobile market means that users will now be looking for a reliable way to interchange data between Android devices and Macs or PCs.

    The question is, with Microsoft plus Apple plus Android all potentially vying for a slice of the cross-device pie, will we run into a cross-device cross-platform incompatibility problem?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox to make life harder for HTTPS snoopers

        Mozilla has equipped its latest Firefox beta, 17, with a list of domains for which the browser must use HTTPS encryption for all communications. The feature is designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attackers from reading and manipulating plain text data traffic when particularly sensitive pages are accessed. The list complements the Strict Transport Security (HSTS) HTTP header extension that enables servers to force browsers to establish HTTPS connections only.

      • Mozilla Posts New Firefox OS Online Presentations for Developers

        Mozilla is moving quickly ahead with its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets. There have been many updates on the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform here, and Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has posted a Flickr gallery of screenshots of the young operating system.

        Any emerging mobile platform depends heavily on developers becoming attracted to it, and Mozilla Hacks is now reaching out to developers with new videos and slideshows. Here are the details.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation Certification Program

      The Document Foundation has begun certifying premier developers in their quest for world productivity domination. Certification “is not just another piece of paper, or an abbreviation next to the name,” it means recognition for the “ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users.”

  • Business

  • Funding

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

  • Programming

    • Examining Programming Language Framework Popularity

      Having concluded that an examination of the relative performance of programming languages on GitHub and StackOverflow yields interesting results, programming language frameworks are an obvious next step. Given the importance of frameworks in leading programming language adoption, understanding better the traction behind individual frameworks would be useful. With GitHub and StackOverflow representing obvious centers of gravity within the development world, they are clearly in a position to provide some insight into framework-related developer activity.

Leftovers

  • SKorea’s secret: Runaway teen prostitution

    South Korea is paying a high price for its rigorous education system – a major reason for its economic success – with teenagers increasingly turning to prostitution after fleeing home to escape academic pressure.

    An estimated 200,000 youths – at least 60 per cent female teenagers – roam the country’s streets. About half have worked as underage prostitutes, according to the latest government figures.

    Many say they initially ran away to be with friends instead of studying, and later ended up selling their bodies to earn money to survive.

    “In high school, I would say that massive academic pressure is the main driver pushing kids onto the streets,” says a professor at a prominent South Korean university, who requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity in the country.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Over Half a Million Dollars Couldn’t Stop Colorado Community From Banning Fracking

      Despite over half a million dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry in Longmont, Colorado, residents voted Tuesday to make the city the first to ban hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” in the state. The city of 87,000, nestled at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, voted 59 to 41 to ban the controversial method of extracting shale oil and gas, as well as to ban the storage of the toxin-laden wastewater in the city limits.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Democrats Lose Control of Wisconsin State Senate, Leaving Republicans With Full Control Again

      Election night was a good night for national Democrats; President Obama won reelection, and Democrats gained two seats in the Senate. The news was not as good for local Democrats in Wisconsin, though, who lost their hard-fought majority in the Wisconsin State Senate, the only thing standing between Governor Scott Walker and Republicans’ full control of the Wisconsin Legislature.

    • Apparently Attacking A Candidate For Being A World Of Warcraft Player Is Not An Effective Campaign Strategy

      Last month, we were among those who reported on an absolutely bizarre strategy by a candidate for the Maine state Senate to demonize his opponent, Colleen Lachowicz, by highlighting her enjoyment of World of Warcraft and then taking some of her statements about the game completely out of context, to imply they were political statements that had relevance beyond inside the game. Even after this was widely mocked, the folks behind the mailer defended it.

  • Censorship

    • Gawker’s Anti-SLAPP Victory Could Be Good For The Web – But Judge Refuses To Publish The Ruling

      A few months ago, Eric Goldman wrote about a good ruling by a California court to knock out a bogus defamation claim against blog site Gawker. There were a few interesting elements to the ruling, including that it used California’s anti-SLAPP law, and that it was willing to look at the context of the use of certain words like “scam.” But, most importantly, it noted the fact that the Gawker piece included numerous links/citations to sources, which meant that anyone could dig deeper to understand the details themselves.

    • Judge Quickly (But Temporarily) Blocks New CA Law That Takes Away Anonymous Speech Rights

      So, we had just written about the unfortunate (if expected) news that voters in California had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure which (among other things) would take away anonymous speech rights from anyone on the state’s sex offender list (which could include things like people arrested for urinating in public, or consensual sexual activity between teenagers). That seemed both extreme and unconstitutional. We noted that we expected the law to be challenged, though I had assumed it might wait until the law was used. Instead, the EFF and ACLU immediately teamed up to challenge the law, arguing that it was unconstitutional…

    • ACLU and EFF Challenge Free Speech Restrictions in California’s Proposition 35

      Today the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a federal class-action lawsuit to block implementation of unconstitutional provisions of Proposition 35 – a ballot measure passed by California voters Tuesday that restricts the legal and constitutionally protected speech of all registered sex offenders in California.

    • Oakland chief filtered out Occupy e-mail

      People who’ve e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn’t get much of a response.

      That’s because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with “Occupy Oakland” in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases “stop the excessive police force,” “respect the press pass” or “police brutality.” Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.

    • Oakland Police Chief Only Wants to Read Complimentary Email
    • Police Chief’s Custom Spam Filter Blocks Occupy Protestors, Brutality Complaints And (Oops) Federal Monitors
    • Conroy backs away from internet filter

      THE federal government has abandoned its long-standing commitment to introduce a national internet filter and will instead ban websites related only to child abuse.

      Following years of debate about trying to censor the internet, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the government would no longer proceed with ”mandatory filtering legislation”. It would, however, use powers under the Telecommunications Act to block hundreds of child abuse websites already identified on Interpol’s ”worst of” list.

    • Conroy abandons mandatory ISP filtering

      Tells ISPs to filter child abuse material using INTERPOL block list.

  • Privacy

    • Putting a price on our data

      We’ve previously warned that with free services, consumers are no longer the customer – they are the product, to be monitored, profiled and sold on. With 96% of Google’s $37.9bn revenue in 2011 coming from advertising and Facebook’s advertising revenue in Q3 2012 reaching $1.086bn, the value of our data has been the oil to the digital revolution.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • ITU Boss Explains Why He Wants The UN To Start Regulating The Internet

      We’ve written a few times about why we should be worried about the ITU (a part of the UN) and its attempts to regulate the internet, to which some have responded by arguing that the ITU/UN doesn’t really want to regulate the internet. However, the Secretary-General of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure has now taken to the pages of Wired, to explicitly state why he believes the UN needs to regulate the internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pfizer Can’t Keep Its Viagra Patent Up In Canada

      oday, in a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada, Pfizer lost its Canadian patent on Viagra as the result of a long-fought battle with rival pharmaceutical manufacturer Teva, which sought to make a generic version of the popular drug.

    • Trademarks

      • APNewsBreak: Budweiser seeks removal from ‘Flight’

        Denzel Washington’s character in “Flight” drinks a lot throughout the film, but his portrayal of a highly functioning alcoholic pilot isn’t going down well with brewing company Anheuser-Busch or the distributor of Stolichnaya vodka.

    • Copyrights

      • Judge Rejects Fox’s Attempt To Shut Down Dish’s Autohop Feature, But Indicates It May Still Infringe

        Earlier this year, we wrote about the TV networks suing Dish Networks for its new Autohop feature. Dish created a neat bit of innovation, which automatically recorded all prime time shows for people to watch later, and as long as you watched the day after the shows aired, it would auto-skip the commercials. This is the kind of thing that a user could set up themselves, though it’s a bit cumbersome, and too many DVR providers have shied away from automated “commercial skip” features after the TV industry sued ReplayTV over such a feature (despite many VCRs having it already). Ridiculously, the networks, led by Fox, claimed that skipping commercials is a form of copyright infringement.

      • Video About Fair Use, Remix & Culture Taken Down Over Copyright Claim (Of Course)

        A few years back, we had a post highlighting an absolutely fantastic video by Julian Sanchez about the value of remix culture. The video made a key point that often gets lost in these debates: that remix culture is often more about the culture than the remix, but that copyright law makes that difficult. It focused mainly on a viral remix video that took a song from the band Phoenix, called “Lisztomania,” but which was put to video clips of people dancing in various John Hughes films (mainly from the classic scene in “The Breakfast Club.”) That was interesting enough, but what was even more interesting was how it then followed that lots of others recreated the video in their own image. So groups got together in various hipster locations (Brooklyn, San Francisco) and created their own videos recreating the dance moves on their own to go with the new song. It was really quite interesting, and showed how important remixing and fair use was to culture, and how it could take something and make more with it.

11.08.12

Links 8/11/2012: AMD Lays Off Linux Developers, Fedora 18 Delayed Again

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Piwik among winners at open source awards

    Hundreds of people were due to celebrate the achievements of the open source software industry at its biennial awards in Wellington last night.

    Technology awards can resemble a Hairy Maclary book, with lots of repetition as the same familiar names doing the same things crop up on every page.

    But Don Christie, managing director of 150-person open source firm Catalyst IT, one of the award’s top sponsors, said these had again attracted a healthy tally of about 100 entries.

  • CloudStack makes first release from Apache incubator

    The CloudStack project, based on Citrix’s CloudStack code which was contributed to Apache earlier this year, has had its first official release from within the Apache Incubator, where it is currently being mentored and matured into a future top-level Apache project. The Apache CloudStack 4.0.0-incubating release offers a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration system. Apache CloudStack competes with other open source IaaS platforms such as OpenStack, the European OpenNebula and the Amazon AWS-API compatible Eucalyptus.

  • Open Source Awards compared, contrasted with US thinking

    Having the Open Source Awards presentation ceremony last night, on the same night as the US election results were announced, allowed some analogies to be made between the spirit of open source and democracy.

    In both systems, everyone is welcome to make a contribution and the profit motive is absent, said Awards judge and senior advisor at the Inland Revenue Department, Austin Sinclair, introducing the award for Open Source use in government.

  • Events

    • Five Favorite Sessions from LinuxCon Europe 2012

      LinuxCon Europe has been buzzing with energy and lively ideas ever since its kickoff on Monday morning. As day two sessions wound down and everyone was gearing up for the much-anticipated Intel-sponsored reception at Gaudi’s Casa Batillo, we took a few moments to check in with attendees. They told us what’s inspiring them at this year’s conference—and how they’ll funnel that inspiration into action when they return to their workplaces next week.

    • LinuxCon Europe: Growing an Open Source Community

      The OpenStack team, a software community collaborating on a standard open source platform, had to solve this dilemma—and solve it fast—when the tech community became “ludicrously excited” about their new project. “We experienced growing pains … I guess I’m supposed to call them ‘opportunities’,” said Monty Taylor, manager of automation and deployment at Hewlett-Packard, and one of the creators of the project.

      In his Scaling an Open Source Community keynote presentation on Tuesday morning at LinuxCon Europe, Taylor explained how OpenStack overcame early challenges to create a truly non-hierarchical environment focused not only on open source, but also on open design, open development, and an open community.

    • ApacheCon NA, EclipseCon and Northeast Linux Fest calling for papers

      Several open source oriented conferences are calling for the submission of papers to their 2013 events. ApacheCon North America (NA), EclipseCon and the Northeast Linux Fest are all accepting talks from interested community members.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google has released Chrome 23 for Windows, Mac and Linux

        The Chrome team has officially announced the latest update for Chrome, which arrives as Chrome 23 and for Windows, Mac and Linux users. More specifically, Chrome version 23.0.1271.64 has been released. This update will arrive automatically for current Chrome users. Or alternatively, those not using Chrome and those feeling like they simply cannot wait even a second — you can grab the latest version by navigating to google.com/chrome.

      • Google Releases Chrome 23 Stable for Linux
      • New Version of Chrome Adds Do Not Track Privacy and Boosts Batteries

        Google is out with the new Stable Release version 23 of the Chrome browser, which is notable for several reasons. Thanks to the way it handles video decoding, users on portable devices such as laptops who are, say, watching YouTube videos will get longer battery life. And, with this version of Chrome, Google has finally adopted the Do Not Track privacy protection scheme that lets users choose not to be followed when online.

      • Google Chrome Adds Support For Do Not Track

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation Announces First Group of LibreOffice Certified Developers

      The Document Foundation has announced the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users.

      Other skills and knowledge needed to become a Certified Developer include, researching and developing solutions to new or unknown issues, designing and developing one or more courses of action, evaluating each of them in a test case environment, and implementing the best solution to the problem. Once the solution is verified, it is delivered to the customer and given back to the community.

  • Education

  • Business

  • BSD

    • LLVM’s Clang Is Finally The FreeBSD x86 Compiler

      After talking about FreeBSD’s transition to Clang as the default C/C++ compiler rather than GCC, the move has finally happened where for x86/x86_64 systems the LLVM-based compiler has replaced GCC.

  • Project Releases

    • FreeMedForms project reaches version 0.8.0

      It is always a pleasure to announce the official release of the new stable version 0.8.0 of the FreeMedForms project. This anniversary version (the FreeMedForms EMR one and its main admin) brings two major innovations:

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • Australian university joins Stanford’s open-source online platform

        Class2Go, developed by a group of Stanford engineers, will be the basis for online courses at the University of Western Australia accessible through mobile devices. The mobile app will then be available for use by Stanford – and anyone else.

        The beauty of open-source technology is that people around the world can build things together. Like bricolage, technology can grow flexibly as developers respond directly and creatively to users’ needs and imaginations.

      • How Stanford plans to teach the world with open-source online classes

        Online classes are nothing new, but the University of Western Australia wants to take the technology one step further with the help of Stanford’s recently launched Class2Go platform. Using an open-source approach to content creation, Class2Go not only allows educators to fine tune their teaching material, but also provides a tool that can be used by anyone regardless of location or enrollment status. As explained by PhysOrg, David Glance, director of the Centre for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia, feels that platform paves way to the new methods of learning used in universities, allowing students to take entire classes using their smartphone or tablet via an app.

      • rSmart to Share Higher Ed Open Source Expertise at the 2012 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference

    • Open Hardware

      • Arduino gets piggyback from Raspberry Pi

        The AlaMode board makes it possible to build a bridge between the Raspberry Pi mini-computer and the Arduino prototyping platform and the many shields available for it. Although the Arduino-compatible board connects to the Pi’s GPIO header, the two boards operate independently, sharing data via the GPIO connectors. The AlaMode board is able to connect standard Arduino shields.

      • Open Source, Soccer-Playing Robots for All!

        What’s cooler than a humanoid robot? Why, a humanoid robot that plays soccer, of course. And you can get one for just 25 grand.

        The robot, developed by researchers at the University of Bonn, is more than just another droid headed for the intensely competitive RoboCup tournament. The little guy features some serious technical upgrades with a simple design and open source code so others can build their own ‘bot. The software and CAD files (.zip) are available on GitHub.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • APIs

      If you’re creating Web apps, you’re designing APIs. Here are some things to keep in mind before you begin.

      The Web was designed for people. When Tim Berners-Lee created the trio of standards that make up the Web—HTTP, HTML and URLs—the intention was for people to browse Web sites, submit information to them and be at the heart of the experience. But for some time now, the notion of the Web as a set of sites that people browse has been somewhat untrue. True, hundreds of millions of people visit an equally large number of sites each day; however, more and more of the visitors to sites aren’t people, but programs.

    • The newsroom’s ally: Ally-Py

      Software architect Gabriel Nistor talks to Trevor Parsons about Ally-Py, the new Free Software framework designed to get the most from web APIs.

Leftovers

11.07.12

Links 7/11/2012: Steam Closed Beta, KDE 4.9.3 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 1:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • The Linux Setup – Brian Proffitt, Writer

      I love Brian Proffitt’s setup for two reasons. First of all, it’s OpenSUSE, my current distro of choice, and I always love to see that represented here. But also, Brian’s setup is shockingly stock. And in more and more of these interviews, we’re seeing people who are able to get an impressive amount of work done without a lot of configuring or manipulating. It makes me appreciate what a great time it is for desktop Linux. And reading some of this week’s Windows 8 reviews, I wonder if a lot of Windows users might be jealous of just how easy Linux has become.

  • Server

    • U.S. panel labels China largest cyberspace threat, report says

      China is increasingly using hackers to infiltrate U.S. military computers and defense contractors, according to a draft of Congressional report obtained by Bloomberg.

    • Brocade Acquires Linux Software Defined Networking Vendor Vyatta
    • Why do super computers use Linux?

      In our last few posts we discussed the fact that over 90% supercomputers (94.2% to be precise) employ Linux as their operating system. In this post, a sequel to our last posts, we shall attempt to investigate the potentials of Linux which make it suitable and perhaps the best choice for supercomputers OS.

    • Brocade to acquire Vyatta

      Brocade has announced that the company is acquiring the privately held Vyatta. Brocade produces a range of data and storage networking products, and considers the acquisition to be a good fit. Vyatta specialises in developing a software defined networking (SDN) and builds that software atop of an open source Debian-based distribution, Vyatta Core, which it commercialises as Vyatta Network OS.

  • Kernel Space

    • New Members Join Linux Foundation

      Componentality Oy is an automotive Research and Development company that builds passenger-oriented devices for public transportation; entertainment and connectivity for cars and road infrastructure; and unique technical solutions for special purposes in the automotive field, focusing on DSRC communications and eCall/ERA GLONASS systems.

      Host Concepts is a software development company specializing in Guest Interaction Experiences. From hotels and restaurants to cruise ships, cars and convention centers, the company designs, develops, supports and hosts custom software solutions. They specialize in universally accessible applications designed and coded for web, mobile and native operating systems.

      Micware is software integrator and is developing Linux-based software stacks for reference hardware systems for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).

      MIRACLE LINUX (an apt name) is a Linux distributor for enterprise and embedded market based on Japan. It is also co-owner of Asianux Co. Ltd. which is based in China . The company has more than 13 years of experience in the field of Linux business.. It is joining to participate in the Long Term Support Initiative and the Automotive Grade Linux workgroup.

    • AMD Closes The Operating System Research Center

      AMD has indeed shutdown its Dresden-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) in the latest round of cost-cutting efforts.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Marek Continues Improving Radeon Performance

        There’s been another improvement to Mesa with the Radeon Gallium3D R600 driver by Marek Olšák that can improve the OpenGL performance in certain situations for this open-source AMD Linux driver while also conserving memory usage.

      • Radeon Driver Is Now KMS-Only, 7.0 Released

        Alex Deucher announced the release of the xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 driver this morning, which is the first open-source ATI Linux graphics driver release that is strictly KMS-only.

      • NVIDIA 304.64 Driver Fixes Performance, New GPUs

        The NVIDIA 304.64 Linux graphics driver was released today with support for new graphics cards, address performance issues related to recent Linux kernels, and provide other fixes for those relying upon this closed-source driver.

      • Clock-For-Clock, Nouveau Can Compete With NVIDIA’s Driver

        Similar to last week’s testing of comparing the open-source vs. closed-source Radeon Linux driver performance from a stock Ubuntu 12.10 installation, the tables have now been turned to look at NVIDIA hardware on this latest Ubuntu Linux release. Benchmarks were done of the stock Nouveau open-source graphics driver, the official NVIDIA proprietary driver, and the proprietary driver when it was underclocked to match the clock frequencies as used by the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver.

      • XWayland Gets Updated

        Daniel Stone has updated the XWayland patches for supporting X.Org/X11 applications on Wayland.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012 dons “Moondrake” disguise

        The second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012 has been released under a new name: “Moondrake GNU/Linux 2012″. In the release announcement, Mandriva Linux Project Leader Per Øyvind Karlsen says that “The name of the distribution used for this release isn’t actually the final name chosen, but only one of the likelier candidates under consideration, which we’re taking out for a test drive to try it on for now and prepare for a rebranding process.” While a possible new name has yet to be chosen for the distribution, last month it was announced that the foundation for the open source project would be called “OpenMandriva”.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Linux Top 3: Fedora 18 Delayed, Tiny Core Advances and a Shot in the ARM

          There are some Linux distributions that hold steadfast to their release schedules no matter what. That’s not the case with Fedora, which is aiming for quality and stability and will often delay a release and its milestone components for that reason.

          Fedora developers decided to push back the Fedora 18 beta release by at week during a go/no go meeting on Thursday November 1st. The decision to delay the beta release was due to a number of blocker bugs as well as issues with the upgrade tool.

          The anaconda installation tool currently has 7 blocker bugs listed for it that will need to be addressed for the release to go forward.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Valve opens Steam for Ubuntu to first wave of beta testers

            After receiving over 60,000 beta applications since last week, Valve has begun sending out the first wave of invites for the Steam for Linux beta today.

            The Linux version of Steam currently only works on Ubuntu 12.04, reflecting what Steam for Linux team member Frank Crockett said in a statement was “an overwhelming majority of beta applicants [reporting] they’re running the Ubuntu distro of Linux.” Other popular Linux distributions will be supported in the future, Valve said. The service will be opened to more beta testers going forward, then expanded to all Linux users “once the team has seen a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems.”

          • Open Source Ubuntu OS Makes Strides in Emerging Markets
          • Steam for Linux Beta Arrives, Only For Ubuntu

            Valve has launched a limited access beta for its new Steam for Linux client. There was an encouraging excitement around Steam for Linux. Valve received over 60,000 responses to its request for participants in the Steam for Linux Beta within its first week. The company has selected the first round of beta participants from those early adopters.

            The arrival of Steam for Linux owes a lot to Microsoft which has started to turn Windows from a platform for OEMs and developers into a Microsoft only product inspired by Apple’s walled garden.

          • Day 1 of LinuxCon Europe 2012 in Pictures

            The event started with keynotes from Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth…

          • Ubuntu 12.10: Unity Just Sort of Grows on You

            The Unity Launcher shows a hefty finessing — this is the icon bar that is hard-wired to the left edge of the screen for launching frequently used applications. Its displayed icons are more appealing visually with their rounded, uniform appearance. The ability to hide the Launcher bar until the mouse pointer touches the left screen edge makes the Unity icon row less annoying.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Here Comes Newebe, A New Kind Of Distributed Social Network

    Diaspora was one such project, which has become a community venture recently. Dispora stores user information in pods, which are servers where information and data of the users are stored. As its open source, user can run a pod in his own server and invite friends and co-workers to use it. Thus he may form a private social network without relying on other third party social site.

  • MIT Develops Open Source Game A Slower Speed of Light

    Are you a science buff who is curious how the world would look like if you travel at the speed of light? Will it twist everything around you as the light from different objects reach you at a different interval as per the special theory of relativity? How will everything look like if the speed of light is slowed down? This is what an open source game developed by MIT Game Lab tried to do.

  • New Open Source data storage solution coming soon
  • Contribute to an open source project no matter your experience level

    Okay, that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but when I tweeted out a request for suggestions for an opening line, that was the most interesting response (thank you, @kantrn). I got others that were a lot more helpful (thank you, @justinlilly)—that’s the power of community, right?

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Foundation to Pay $1.5 Million to Settle Up with the IRS

        For years now, a lot of people have misunderstood how the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation works. It is, of course, one of the most influential entities in all of open source, but Mozilla gets the vast majority of its revenues from Google, in exchange for favorable search placement in the Firefox browser, which benefits Google. According to the nonprofit law blog, last year the Mozilla Foundation got 88 percent of its revenues from Google.

        The IRS has been investigating the Mozilla Foundation with an eye toward the taxes that it pays, and the good news for Mozilla fans is that Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla is getting off with a very light $1.5 million tax bill.

      • Firefox vs. the Web

        One of the most hotly debated topics in years is now bubbling up in the Mozilla community as people debate the position of Web vs. Firefox.

        There was a time when Firefox was just a browser, the view by which freedom loving people could see and interact with the web. The primary brand was Firefox as an enabler of the Web. That’s now sliding a bit as Mozilla brands Firefox as its own operating system and ecosystem of app.

        “To what extent, if any, are we willing to promote ‘the open web’ or ‘HTML5′ over ‘Firefox’, when the success of one and the success of the other are in tension?” Mozilla staffer Gervase Markham wrote in a mailing list message.

      • Have some Mozilla with that Windows

        The only way I can describe this to you is that it’s the most idiotic ruling ever handed down by any group or judge anywhere. I’m shocked that it’s really come to this. OK, the story is this: The European Commission (EC), whoever they are and whose real purpose and power is questionable, handed down a ruling that stated that Microsoft has to give Windows users in Europe a browser choice. And, the fact that they didn’t in Windows 7 Service Pack 1, means that Mozilla lost millions of downloads of its Firefox browser. Mozilla estimates that loss in the range of six to nine million downloads during the non-compliance timeframe.

  • Education

    • Hampshire College distributes free software bundle to all incoming students

      Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira’s organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Compiler Development Is Over

      Recently I reported that GCC 4.8 was nearing the end of stage one development — the period during which features and new development work can be merged — and will be moving to stage three. As of this morning, GCC 4.8 / the trunk code-base is now into this next stage where only bug-fixes and new ports not requiring changes to other parts of the compiler can be made. New functionality/features are not allowed during this period that will last for approximately two months until the official release happens.

    • LibreWRT: What we use for wifi at the FSF

      I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the FSF’s office.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • UK Government finalizes Open Standards Principles: The Bigger Picture

      Last week, the UK Cabinet Office released its Open Standards Principles: For software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT specifications. It became effective November 1, 2012, and applies to IT specifications for software interoperability, data, and document formats for all services delivered by, or on behalf of, central government departments, their agencies, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), and any other bodies for which they are responsible.

      For the open source community and advocates of open standards, the UK’s Open Standards Principles policy is a welcome and positive development. It follows a lengthy, and often tumultuous, consultative process that began in 2011.

Leftovers

  • Looking Past Search

    Can we make search organic again? Or should we look past search completely?

    Searching has become shopping, whether we like it or not. That’s the assumption behind the results, and behind recent changes, at least to Google’s search features and algorithms. I’m sure this isn’t what Google thinks, even though it is a commercial enterprise and makes most of its money from advertising—especially on searches. Credit where due: from the moment it started adding advertising to search results, Google has been careful to distinguish between paid results and what have come to be called “organic”.

  • Science

    • Why Conservatives Turned Against Science

      A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives.

  • Hardware

    • ARM, Imagination Technologies Take Over MIPS

      MIPS Technologies has announced today that their patent portfolio is being bought out by a company largely backed by ARM while Imagination Technologies will be taking over the MIPS company.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Iran Sanctions Take Unexpected Toll on Medical Imports

      Sitting on one of the many crowded benches in the waiting room of the International Red Crescent’s pharmacy in central Tehran, Ali, 26, was working his phone. After nearly six weeks of chasing down batches of Herceptin, an American-made cancer medicine, Ali, an engineer, was wearing out his welcome with friends and relatives in other Iranian cities, who had done all they could to rustle up the increasingly elusive drug.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Human Rights Defender Brutally Attacked by Moroccan Police

      Washington) RFK Human Rights Laureate Aminatou Haidar is the latest victim of systemic violence and police brutality by the Moroccan government against the Sahrawi people. The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (RFK Center) has received multiple reports in the last week that indicate dramatically increased police presence, repression, and assault against civilians in El Ayun, the of capital of Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, coinciding with Ambassador Christopher Ross’s arrival in the area.

    • Israeli soldiers arrest son of detained Palestinian activist at West Bank protest

      The 16-year-old son of Bassem Tamimi, a detained Palestinian rights activist in the occupied West Bank, was himself arrested by Israeli soldiers today during the regular weekly protest against the encroachment of Israeli settlers onto Palestinian land.

      Wa’ed Tamimi was arrested along with four activists during the demonstration on Friday afternoon in the West Bank village of al-Nabi Saleh, 21km northwest of Ramallah.

    • The Kafkaesque World of the No-Fly List

      Is there a good reason that Long is on the no-fly list? I have no idea. There might be. But what’s outrageous about this, aside from the sheer number of people we’ve placed on the no-fly list over the past decade, is the lack of judicial oversight. Someone has put you on the list, but you don’t know who. There’s presumably a reason for being put on the list, but no one will tell you what it is. There’s a procedure that provides you with a “redress control number,” but it often appears to be meaningless. If you go to court, a judge will tell you it’s a national security issue and there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s a cliche to call this kind of system Kafkaesque, but what other word is there for it?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Neil Barofsky on the Need to Tackle Banking Reform

      Between President Obama’s ineffectual proposals and Mitt Romney’s loving embrace, bankers have little to fear from either administration, and that leaves the rest of America on perilously thin economic ice. Neil Barofsky, who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, joins Bill to discuss the critical yet unmet need to tackle banking reform and avoid another financial meltdown.

    • Liberals fear grand bargain betrayal if President Obama wins

      Labor unions and liberal interest groups are going all-out for President Barack Obama’s reelection — but they’re just as ready to turn that firepower back on him if he betrays them with a grand bargain.

  • Censorship

    • Media freedom at home and abroad

      I’m shortly off to Baku for the Internet Governance Forum. Azerbaijan is a country with serious issues of media freedom – where journalists regularly face arrest or imprisonment, and the suppression of very basic human rights. While I’m there I’ll be raising a number of concerns about how protection and promotion of human rights.

    • It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote

      Ninety-three years ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote what is perhaps the most well-known — yet misquoted and misused — phrase in Supreme Court history: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

      Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, “the law”–as some have curiously called it–can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes’ quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.

    • Harry Fox Agency Claims Copyright Over Public Domain Work By Johann Strauss

      The Harry Fox Agency (HFA) is the main licensing agency for mechanical licenses (i.e., actual reproductions of recorded works — which is different from things like ASCAP who handle licenses for performances). While it doesn’t get into as many ridiculous copyright scrapes as others, it still has been known to insert itself where it doesn’t belong at times. The latest, courtesy of BoingBoing is that HFA made a copyright claim on a YouTube recording of Thailand’s Youth Orchestra (Siam Sinfonietta) playing the Radetzky March by Johann Strauss. The work is 164 years old and clearly in the public domain. Furthermore, since HFA only covers mechanical licenses, and this is a new performance, not a use of a recorded song that HFA has rights over, the whole thing is completely ridiculous.

    • Oakland chief filtered out Occupy e-mail

      People who’ve e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn’t get much of a response.

      That’s because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with “Occupy Oakland” in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases “stop the excessive police force,” “respect the press pass” or “police brutality.” Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.

    • Russia’s secret internet blacklist

      The Russian state has created a blacklist of blocked websites and internet addresses – but the list itself is secret.

      It was drawn up following the enactment of a statute called the “law to protect children from information detrimental to their health and development”, which is ostensibly aimed at protecting minors from harmful content.

  • Privacy

    • FTC to apply pressure on Do Not Track

      The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC ) is planning on increasing the pressure of the participants in the W3C standardisation process for the Do Not Track (DNT) header. “If by the end of the year or early next year, we haven’t seen a real Do Not Track option for consumers, I suspect the commission will go back and think about whether we want to endorse legislation” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz talking to Politico.

    • Why Privacy Is the Future of Competition

      Data protection legislation may protect our data locally, but internationally privacy is not just a personal issue, it lies at the heart of ensuring competitive markets.

    • Why We Need New Rights to Privacy

      Thanks to the real state website Zillow, it’s now super easy to profit from your neighbor’s suffering. With a few easy clicks, you can find out “if a homeowner has defaulted on the mortgage and by how much, whether a house has been taken back by the lender, and what a house might sell for in foreclosure,” as the Los Angeles Times recently reported. After using the service, you can stop by the Johnsons’ to make them a low-ball offer, perhaps sweetening the exploitation with a plate of cookies.

  • Civil Rights/Voting

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • End Of Bogus Trademark Lawsuits Over AdWords In Sight

        For years, we’ve pointed to the series of ridiculous trademark lawsuits filed against Google over Adwords, and wondered when it would finally be settled and understood that advertising on a third party site against a competitor’s trademark is just good marketing, not trademark infringement. To bring up an analogy, many of us are used to supermarkets that display coupons near competing products — or where you get handed competing coupons printed out at checkout. This is the exact same concept. It’s perfectly reasonably that if you’re searching for a certain brand name, a competing company may seek to buy clearly marked advertisements that attempt to offer you a better deal. There’s no confusion by the consumer and no “dilution” of the original brand. It’s just good competition. Even more bizarre is the fact that these lawsuits targeted Google, rather than the advertiser directly. After all, Google just provides the platform. If an ad is actually confusing to users, then the only trademark claim would be against the company who actually created the confusing ad, not the platform that hosts it.

    • Copyrights

      • Epic’s ‘Music First’ Approach: Delay Album Release; Drop Band When They Leak It

        Last month, we wrote about how the band Death Grips, an indie sensation who had signed with Epic Records (owned by Sony Music), had decided to release their latest album for free all over the internet, after some sort of dispute with Epic over the release date. The band was already considered one of the top authorized downloaded bands on BitTorrent due to earlier releases it had put online for free itself. However, with Epic trying to take a standard “slow down and wait” approach, the band posted its new album to various file lockers and started tweeting out links, noting that “the label will be hearing the album for the first time with you.”

      • Will Disney Block Star Wars Fan-Made Content?
      • EU backs away from copyright sanctions in Canada trade deal

        Following a meeting of the European Union member states on 5 October, leaked documents have shown this week that the EU plans to back away from criminal sanctions in its copyright agreement with Canada.

        CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, is currently being negotiated. It initially included many paragraphs lifted directly from the controversial ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) pact that was shot down spectacularly by the European Parliament earlier this year. ACTA triggered widespread protests from citizens concerned that it would breach their online civil liberties.

      • Kim Dotcom loses new domain in preemptive strike by government
      • Response to the CMS committee inquiry on the creative economy
      • Kink.com Owner Inoculating Against Piracy By Selling The Scarce

        Usually when I have the godly duty of writing about porn on this site, it has to do with a pornographic company acting (shockingly) nefarious. Maybe they’re reaping millions in a judgment over a handful (unintentional innuendo) of films. Or else they’re attacking speech using IP laws to silence critics of their jack-ass-ery. It might be very easy for readers to assume that pornographers as a whole (still unintentional, I swear) would be aligned against the philosophies and economics that we discuss every day. They’re an easily painted “bad guy” for a host of social reasons.

      • Author Explains The Joy Of Helping Russian ‘Pirate’ Translate His Book

        It was about five years ago that we first wrote about best selling author Paulo Coelho revealing that he was eagerly helping create pirate foreign translations of his books, and noting that sales of legitimate copies always seemed to increase whenever he did this — initially pretending to be someone else, under the username “pirate coelho.” The first time this happened was in Russia, where the Russian translation resulted in his books — which had almost no market previously — suddenly shot up into huge sales (from less than 1,000 to over 100,000). While he’s seen similar success stories elsewhere, it really seems like the Russian ebook market is an interesting one to observe.

11.06.12

Links 6/11/2012: OEMs Explore Linux (HP Included), Linux 3.7 RC4 is Out, Red Hat Explores China, GNOME 3.8 Features Outlined

Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • British have invaded nine out of ten countries – so look out Luxembourg

    Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world in its long and colourful history, new research has found.

  • Republicans target three Florida Supreme Court justices
  • Trial lawyers who frequent the Supreme Court also financing pro-justices ads

    The three Florida Supreme Court justices had angered lawmakers and voters, embarrassed the high court and faced uncertain futures.

    In 1975, Justices Joseph Boyd, Hal Dekle, and David McCain were accused of giving behind-the-scenes favors to friends and writing opinions to benefit campaign-contributors. Boyd eventually was reprimanded after lawmakers required he take and pass a mental exam. Dekle and McCain resigned before the Florida House of Representatives could impeach them.

  • Why Don’t We Know How Much “Dark Money” Groups Have Spent On the Election?
  • The next president of austerity

    THE PRESIDENTIAL election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is incredibly close.

    It’s close in the way you read about every day in the media: Opinion polls show the two candidates are neck and neck, with just days to go. But it’s also close in ways you never hear about–not from the press, nor the candidates, nor their supporters. On important political questions, Obama and Romney stand so close to each other that their similarities outweigh their differences.

  • Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Brings Ann Coulter to Madison in a Last-Minute Push to Stop “Obama’s Failing Agenda”
  • Cops Raid Free Poker Tournament, Because in Florida Gambling Does Not Require Betting

    For years the Nutz Poker League, along with several competitors, has been running free tournaments at bars and restaurants in the Tampa Bay area. It makes money by taking a cut of what players spend on food and drinks. The players accumulate points based on their spending as well as their poker performance and can ultimately win prizes such as vacations, cruises, laptops, cameras, and “various unique poker gifts.”

  • Woman Utterly Pillaged via Airbnb

    What was missing was nearly as disturbing as what was scattered; a Passport, credit card, cash and Emily’s grandmother’s jewelry were missing from the locked, smashed up closet; also missing were an external backup drive containing “my entire life,” and an iPod, camera and old laptop; Ugg boots and a Roots cap. Also creepy was how the vandal emailed her repeatedly during his or her week long stay, “thanking me for being such a great host, for respecting his/her privacy, telling me how much he/she was enjoying my beautiful apartment bathed in sunlight.”

    Emily has been working with the San Francisco police — they reportedly have a suspect — and with her banks and the credit bureaus. She says she hasn’t slept or eaten in days.

  • Do bans on texting while driving actually increase accidents?

  • Hardware

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • UK supreme court says rendition of Pakistani man was unlawful
    • Hillsborough survivors: police bullied us to change evidence
    • Teargas fired at protesters in Kuwait City

      Kuwaiti security forces have fired teargas to disperse a banned demonstration by about 2,000 opposition supporters against new voting rules for parliamentary elections due on 1 December.

      Kuwait, a US ally and member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has so far avoided the mass pro-democracy unrest that has toppled rulers in four other Arab countries since last year, but tension has mounted this year in a long-running power struggle between parliament and the government which is dominated by the ruling al-Sabah family.

    • Cop used Taser gun on 10-year-old boy
    • Supreme Court is asked to be skeptical of drug-sniffing dogs

      Aldo the German shepherd and Franky the chocolate Lab are drug-detecting dogs who have been retired to opposite ends of the ultimate retiree state.

      But their work is still being evaluated, and on Wednesday it will be before the Supreme Court. The justices must decide whether man’s best friend is an honest broker as blind to prejudice as Lady Justice, or as prone as the rest of us to a bad day at the office or the ma­nipu­la­tion of our partners.

    • Girl gets a year in jail, 100 lashes for adultery

      The District Court in Jeddah pronounced the verdict on Saturday after the girl confessed that she had a forced sexual intercourse with a man who had offered her a ride. The man, the girl confessed, took her to a rest house, east of Jeddah, where he and four of friends assaulted her all night long.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Ridiculous: Vietnam Sentences Musicians To Jail For Songs That Protest Government Actions
    • Vietnam Sentences 2 Musicians to Prison Terms on Propaganda Charges

      A court in Vietnam has sentenced two musicians to prison for writing and distributing protest songs, a decision that drew fire from the United States and international human-rights groups, The Associated Press reported. The musicians, Vo Minh Tri and Tran Vu Anh Binh, were convicted on Tuesday of spreading propaganda against the state after a half-day trial in Ho Chi Minh City, a defense lawyer said. Mr. Tri received four years in prison, Mr. Binh six.

    • First Ever ‘Withheld’ Tweet Was Faked By F-Secure Researcher

      According to reports this morning, Twitter has withheld the first Tweet from one of its users on copyright grounds. Normally, disputed Tweets will simply disappear if there is a complaint, but one belonging to F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen has now been replaced with a copyright notice. While Twitter has indeed introduced a welcome policy change that will lead to more transparency, the first ever “withheld” Twitter comment was faked by a rather mischievous F-Secure employee.

    • DMCA Censorship: ‘Revenge Porn’ Site Owner Tries To Censor Criticism With Bogus Takedown Notice

      Now, Craig Brittain, the owner of “revenge porn” site “Is Anybody Down” (whose first skirmishes with Marc Randazza were covered here) is trying to remove posts criticizing his site, his inability to keep his story straight, his likely extortionate “photo takedown service,” and, well, pretty much everything, actually. He’s sent a DMCA notice demanding the removal of three posts at Popehat, claiming that these posts contain copyrighted material.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Stupid Lawyer Tricks (And How the PTO Could Help Stop Them)

        We’ve seen some absurd trademark threats in recent years, but this one sets the bar at a new low: The Village Voice is suing Yelp for trademark infringement based on Yelp’s creation of various “Best of” lists. Yes, that’s correct, the publisher behind the paper (as well as several other weeklies around the U.S.) has managed to register trademarks in the term “Best of ” in connection with several cities, including San Francisco, Miami, St. Louis and Phoenix. And it now claims that Yelp’s use of those terms infringes those trademarks and deceives consumers.

    • Copyrights

      • Dotcom lawyers move to dismiss charges, again

        Internet millionaire Kim Dotcom’s American lawyers have launched another bid to dismiss charges against his file storage company Megaupload.

        His lawyers today filed documents in the United States Federal Court in Virginia, arguing Megaupload is being denied due process by not having been granted a court hearing, ten months after Dotcom was arrested at his mansion in Auckland.

      • U.S. says Kim DotCom swore not to recreate MegaUpload

        Kim DotCom, the flamboyant founder of the now defunct MegaUpload, made news today by announcing the coming of Mega, a new cloud storage service that is similar to MegaUpload.

      • MPAA: No MegaUpload data access without safeguards

        The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files risks “compound[ing] the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation” unless proper safeguards are taken to prevent the further dissemination of illegally copied material. (See the MPAA’s brief embedded below.)

      • DUPLICITY – Copyright parasites stay silent?

        There’s nothing like the smell of duplicity in the morning and maybe that stench is strongest around the annals of the copyright parasites that seek to lobby, legislate and fine, those “evil” people they call “Pirates”.

        Of course over the years there has been much pillaging and plundering, but I’d suggest thats more from the large corporatations selling you second rate entertainment products under the false promises of big budget advertising. ”Piracy” has a nasty habit of exposing the rubbish, whilst highlighting the good stuff (which seems to make healthy profits). So maybe Piracy is responsible for highlighting the poor, low quality products that people dump onto the market? No wonder some people in the industry are scared.

      • How to get your readers to love paywalls

        Okay, maybe “love” is too strong a word, but a new study suggests that newspapers enacting paywalls should emphasize financial need, not profit motives, when announcing them to readers.

        The study, “Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall,” is by Columbia University associate research scientist Jonathan Cook and Indiana University assistant professor Shahzeen Attari. They surveyed 954 New York Times readers shortly after the paper announced, in March 2011, that it would enact a metered paywall, and then again 11 weeks after the paywall was implemented. In the post-paywall survey, participants read one of two “justification” paragraphs, one emphasizing a profit motive and one emphasizing financial need (that paragraph concluded, “if the NY Times does not implement digital subscriptions, the likelihood that it will go bankrupt seems high”).

      • The Public Apparently Isn’t Interested In Sound Economics

        So I hear there’s some sort of election happening this week (have you heard anything about it?). Earlier this year, we wrote about an awesome effort by the folks at NPR’s Planet Money to bring together a group of five different economists, from all over the political spectrum, and see if they could find points that all of them agreed upon. They came up with a list of six things that all of them agreed would be smart ideas for a President to implement — and what was striking about all six was that not a single one of them was anywhere near politically tenable. Every one of them would be argued down immediately.

      • Kim Dotcom now plans to give New Zealand free broadband pipe to US

        On the heels of the announcement of Megaupload’s pending resurrection as Me.ga, Kim Dotcom has come up with a yet another way to promote himself, annoy the US and New Zealand governments, and rally public support in his battle to stop his extradition and end the copyright infringement case against him: he wants to give everyone in New Zealand free broadband service.

      • Slovakia: Protesting SOZA’s Newest Copyright Fees

        Recently, the Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society (SOZA) has once again tried to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable.

      • Biden Takes Part In MPAA Board Meeting; Suggests Studios Tell Paying Customers They’re Thieves

        For all their talk about piracy and yearly losses measured in billions, the big movie studios sure do seem to enjoy smacking their paying customers around with anti-piracy warnings and ads. Consider the poor sucker who actually went out and paid cash money for the latest shiny disc and now has to watch a multitude of eagle-laden logos and horrible analogies parade unskippably across his or her screen before finally being allowed to watch the unskippable trailers before finally being allowed to watch 15 seconds of unskippable animation before they can actually watch the movie they’re now regretting having shelled out actual retail price for.

11.04.12

Links 4/11/2012: KDE Brazil, Android Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Help Wanted: KhanDesktop, TrafficSqueezer, Extreme Tux Racer, MathBench
  • CoreBreach now open source!
  • TLWIR 48: Revealing the Hidden Biases Against Free Software

    The problem is that people often take what writers say as fact without realizing that there is a lot of intentional disinformation being used to gain a certain objective. Sometimes the author is not spreading disinformation, but putting information in the wrong context to get the desired result. In the old days, news used to be disseminated by journalists who were trained to at least look objective. Now, any skillful writer has to power to inform or misinform people.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice: A Continuing Tale of FOSS Success
    • LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims: Part 2, Community Size

      In a previous post I looked at how LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats, claiming to have far more users than it actually has. Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives were peddling anything other than the plain, honest truth. No one seemed to noticed that the claims did not pass the” sniff test”. No one investigated more deeply. Until now. I hope that after reading these posts that you, gentle reader, will exercise your brain the next time you read a press release or blog post from LibreOffice, and try harder to separate fact from fiction. It will not be easy.

  • Funding

    • Maia shows early success on UK Kickstarter

      Maia is a colony management simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux from indie developer Simon Roth. Launched on Kickstarter the day the service became open to projects based in the UK – October 31st – the game has already received £26,721 over 1,500 pledges at the time of writing. With a goal of £100,042 to be pledged by November 28th, that means the game is already 27% funded.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 Battles Against Linux For Speed

      DragonFlyBSD 3.2 brings kernel scheduler improvements, updates to the GCC compiler, and a port of the FreeBSD USB stack. It’s the kernel work though that’s interesting since in multi-threaded benchmarks it has been shown to do much better than DragonFlyBSD 3.0 and to compete with Scientific Linux 6.2.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • RaspberryPi Secure VoIP access points with GNU SIP Witch

      I have recently been working on RaspberryPi GNU sipwitch servers. I actually have two things in mind for this. The first is a simple and complete stand-alone secure free software voip “switch” anyone could deploy and use, much like a FreedomBox for VoIP, as a kind of wallwort with ethernet you can plug into any router. A low cost and general purpose secure VoIP server does I think have appeal, and producing complete pre-configured and assembled servers would certainly be more interesting than selling project t-shirts. The second idea is a sipwitch VoIP public wifi access point to enable anonymous secure calling, like pictured here.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source blueprints for a modern off-the-grid civilization

      Marcin Jakubowski dreams of living off the grid. Over the past few years, he’s been working on a set of 50 machines he believes necessary to found and sustain an independent, modern community. He wants to “take everything that civilization has learned to date” and use it create a blueprint for a “Global Village Construction Set” that others can use to follow in his footsteps. His Factor e Farm has already developed and built a tractor, brick press, table saw, and bread oven, as well as many other machines. The farm hopes to have the complete set of 50 ready in 2015.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • The AuroraUX Operating System Is Dead

    While figuring out what niche operating systems to benchmark on Phoronix next, I realized the AuroraUX operating system project quietly disappeared.

  • Dark Money Rises

    About a week before election day, a young girl, maybe 10 years old, confronted Colorado House candidate Sal Pace in a pew at his Pueblo church. “She said, ‘Is it true that you want to cut my grandmother’s Medicare?’” Pace remembers.

  • Election 2012: They Will Steal It!

    Back in 2000, Republican election officials in Florida led by then-Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris kicked nearly 60,000 mostly African American voters off the rolls just ahead of the election.

    They said that these people – who comprised 3% of the entire African American electorate in Florida – had been convicted of felonies and were thus ineligible to vote.

  • EXCLUSIVE: Romney Campaign Incorrectly Trains Iowa Poll Watchers To Check For Photo ID

    Earlier this week, ThinkProgress released internal documents from the Romney campaign detailing how it is training poll watchers to mislead voters in Wisconsin. Now, according to new documents, Wisconsin may not be the only state where Romney’s campaign is equipping volunteers with deceptive information.

  • Be an Expert Voter

    With Election Day on the horizon, most voters have settled on their choice for the oval office. But let’s not forget about the all the other choices on the ballot, many of which will have a great affect on the lives and livelihoods of Americans — Congressional and State representatives, local officials, and referenda.

  • Google targets confused Windows 8 users with new ad

    The just-launched Windows 8 has been nothing short of polarizing, in both the online community and users at large. But we can all agree it’s new, and a little bit confusing. Google wants to help — help you get your old Google back, anyway.

  • Review: Microsoft’s Surface RT will make even a fanboy cry

    After using a Surface tablet, it became crystal clear that the Surface is really an Office appliance, not a tablet à la the iPad. But it’s not a very good Office appliance. One reason is that the hardware doesn’t work well for Office, even with the bundled keyboard cover, because the Office apps are nearly unusable with the touchscreen and just so-so with the keyboard’s trackpad. You’ll want a laptop’s superior input hardware if you do a lot of Office work. Even then, you’ll suffer from the poor Windows touch environment, where text selection is difficult, gestures are limited, and the heavy reliance on menus is interruptive.

  • Security

    • Facebook flaw allowed access to accounts without authentication
    • A Day In Court? Maybe Not In America

      Over the last decade, judges have repeatedly told torture victims that they don’t have the right to a day in court when they seek compensation. Even when victims have substantial publicly available evidence to support their claims, our government and its private contractors have remained above the law.

      Under most circumstances, these plaintiffs would have their day in court. Our constitutional and civil rights demand that. But when it comes to national security, the Bush and Obama administrations asked courts to toss these cases, even before plaintiffs have a chance to share their side of the story, invoking the state secrets privilege and other procedural hurdles.

    • For sale: Windows 8 zero-day vulnerability

      Vupen occupies a gray area of computer security research, selling vulnerabilities to vetted parties in governments and companies but not sharing the details with affected software vendors. The company advocates that its information helps organisations defend themselves from hackers, and in some cases, play offense as well.

    • Judge Orders DOJ to Justify Secrecy of Watergate-era Wiretaps

      A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.

      Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”

    • Feds Ordered to Disclose Data About Wiretap Backdoors

      The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered.

    • Megaupload and the Government’s Attack on Cloud Computing

      Yesterday, EFF, on behalf of its client Kyle Goodwin, filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload’s service and denied third parties like Mr. Goodwin access to their property. The government also filed a brief of its own, calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require third parties—often individuals or small companies—to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings, just to get their own property back.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Leaks

    • Team GhostShell leaks 2.5M records from Russian govt, firms

      eam GhostShell, the hacker group responsible for the recent leak of some 120,000+ records raided from top universities around the world, has done it again.

      “GhostShell is declaring war on Russia’s cyberspace, in ‘Project BlackStar’. The project is aimed at the Russian Government. We’ll start off with a nice greeting of 2.5 million accounts/records leaked, from governmental, educational, academical, political, law enforcement, telecom, research institutes, medical facilities, large corporations (both national and international branches) in such fields as energy, petroleum, banks, dealerships and many more,” the wrote in the statement accompanying the leak.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • James Hansen: ‘Neither Party Wants To Offend The Fossil Fuel Industry’

      There’s been a noticeable shift in the way that prominent figures talk about how to deal with climate change. Many advocates have shifted from a more accommodating “let’s all join together and develop clean energy” message to directly targeting the fossil fuel industry as a villain. This effort, embodied in 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour, has become a central piece of messaging in the environmental community.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Kuwait: Charges against Musallam al-Barrak must be dropped

      The Kuwaiti authorities must drop charges against Musallam al-Barrak, who faces prosecution purely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression with remarks he made that have been deemed to undermine the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah, Amnesty International said.

    • Netizen freed for lack of evidence in lèse-majesté case

      A Bangkok court acquitted the netizen Surapak Phuchaisaeng two days ago of charges of insulting the king (lèse-majesté), for which he had been remanded in custody since September last year.

      Reporters Without Borders is satisfied with the outcome of this case. “This case, involving a year in custody, underlines the failings of the Thai judicial system, particularly concerning allegations of lèse-majesté,” the press freedom organization said.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Election predictions: The candidate in favor of GMOs, bankster bailouts and corporate domination will win!

    • Copyrights

      • Government: “Innocent” Megaupload user uploaded pirated music

        When the Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to vindicate the rights of Megaupload users who used the locker site for non-infringing purposes, they put forward Kyle Goodwin. The Ohio videographer used Megaupload as a backup service, but he lost commercially valuable footage thanks to the unlucky combination of the government’s January raid and a personal hard drive crash. Since May, he has been seeking the return of his files.

      • Publishers Ordered to Pay $3 Million in GSU Copyright Case

        Not only did publishers not get the injunctive relief they sought in a closely watched case over e-reserves, last week they paid the tab. In a final order in the Georgia State E-reserves case, Cambridge University Press vs. Patton, Judge Orinda Evans directed the publisher plaintiffs to pay the defendants nearly $3 million in legal fees and costs, including $2,861,348.71 in attorneys’ fees and $85,746.39 in other court costs. And, last week, on October 26, records show that the publishers deposited more than $3.2 million into the Commercial Registry of the Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The money, however, isn’t gone yet—publishers have appealed the case, and the money will stay in escrow under a stay order until the appeal is settled.

11.03.12

Links 3/11/2012: Fedora as Rolling-Release Distribution Amid Delays?

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Progressives: Defeat Romney/Ryan in Swing States

    I agree with nearly everything Jill Stein of the Greens and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party say: except when they say “vote for me” in swing states.

  • Privatization of Public Services and Natural Resources

    The privatization of public goods and services turns basic human needs into products to buy and sell. That’s more than a joke, it’s an insult, it’s a perversion. It generally benefits only a privileged group of businesspeople and their companies while increasing inequality and undermining the common good.

  • Can You Take Fact Checking Too Far?

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Libya mission was CIA operation: report

      THE US mission in Benghazi that came under attack by militants on September 11 was mainly a secret CIA operation, the Wall Street Journal reports, shedding new light on the deadly assault.

    • On the run with Murdoch’s pirates

      What happens when one of the biggest media groups in the world sets up its own private security force? What happens when part of this operation goes rogue? Fairfax reporter Neil Chenoweth’s new book, Murdoch’s Pirates, investigates News Corporation’s links to worldwide piracy. Here is an extract from the book.

    • Spy Stories From The Murdoch Empire: News Corp Fights With Itself In Grand Game Of Espionage

      The story is complex, but I’ll attempt to summarize. In the late 90s, NDS (the branch of News Corp that deals with private security and anti-piracy activities) sent top hacker Oliver Kömmerling undercover to Toronto, under the pseudonym Alex, with a mission: pose as a satellite pirate and infiltrate the rings selling hacked DirecTV smartcards. Oliver was also one of the hackers directly involved in the hacking of competitors’ smart cards, but in this case he was being put to work defending News Corp’s own satellite operation. But NDS made one big mistake: they never told DirecTV, which had its own security/anti-hacking division led by a former FBI agent, and they believed Oliver was still a bonafide satellite pirate at large. They had no idea he was now working for NDS—and one of the Canadian hackers Oliver met with turned out to be working for DirecTV, and ratted him out to them. Moreover, no matter NDS or Oliver’s intentions, he was breaking the law by hacking and selling smart cards to track down the “real” hackers—so he ended up facing potential arrest or detainment at the border.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Hurricane Sandy Endorses Obama: Storm Provides a Counter-Narrative to the Hundreds of Millions in Fossil Fuel Campaign Contributions

      The fossil fuel industry has paid a hefty price for the privilege of framing the political discourse about America’s energy future. Hundreds of millions have flowed into campaign coffers from energy companies attempting to purchase complete freedom to drill, frack, and burn. Huge “dark money” groups, the Koch’s, Karl Rove, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, join dozens of oil and gas industry associations in pouring money into television ad campaigns demanding “energy independence,” while trashing wind and solar.

  • Finance

    • Effective Economic Policies Neither Candidate Advocates

      Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama even mentions six alternative economic policies that, deployed together, would reduce unemployment, increase workers’ real earnings and decrease the federal deficit.

    • World Bank’s Anti-Labor Analysis Is a Dirty Business
    • Greek editor Kostas Vaxevanis acquitted over Swiss bank list

      Kostas Vaxevanis hates being the centre of attention. On Thursday moments before taking the stand in one of the most sensational trials to grip Greece in modern times, the journalist said he was not in the business of making news. “My job is simply to tell the news and tell it straight,” he averred. “My job is to tell the truth.”

      Truth in the case of Vaxevanis has been a rollercoaster that has catapulted the 46-year-old from relative obscurity to global stardom in a matter of days. But , after a hearing that lasted almost 12 hours – with a three-member panel of judges sitting stony-faced throughout, he was vindicated: the court found him not guilty of breaking data privacy laws by publishing the names in Hot Doc, the weekly magazine he edits, of some 2,059 Greeks believed to have bank accounts in Switzerland.

    • Israel’s greatest fear – its diamond trade exposed

      The stakes couldn’t be higher for the $60 billion global diamond industry, and Israel’s burgeoning diamond industry in particular, as the dynamic forces of economics, human rights, and politics careen towards a major showdown in Washington. The fallout is likely to blow the lid on a cozy cartel that has kept the scandal of cut and polished blood diamonds hidden from public scrutiny.

      In November members of the Kimberley Process (KP) diamond-regulatory system, ostensibly set up to end the trade in blood diamonds, will come under severe pressure to adopt a US proposal, rejected last June, which would slightly broaden of the definition of a “conflict diamond” to include rough diamonds linked to violence by government forces associated with diamond mining.

  • Censorship

    • Bahrain activist gets prison term for Twitter posts critical of king

      A civil court has sentenced an online activist to six months in prison on charges of insulting the Gulf nation’s king in Twitter posts, the official news agency said Thursday.

    • Kuwaitis protest after activist held for insulting emir

      Kuwaiti police used teargas and smoke bombs on Wednesday to disperse thousands of protesters marching on a prison where an opposition leader is being held on charges of insulting the emir, witnesses said.

    • IAC volunteer tweets himself into trouble, faces three years in jail

      Does a tweet on reports of corruption, sent out to 16 followers, deserve a possible penalty of three years of imprisonment? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to Congress leader and Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s son Karti, who filed a complaint against small-time Puducherry businessman Ravi Srinivasan, and the Puducherry police which charged Mr. Srinivasan under Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act, 2008.

      Section 66-A deals with messages sent via computer or communication devices which may be “grossly offensive,” have “menacing character,” or even cause “annoyance or inconvenience.” For offences under the section, a person can be fined and jailed up to three years.

    • Russia launches internet blacklist to protect the kiddies

      The Russian government has opened a blacklist of websites that will be blocked from domestic internet users to avoid them harming themselves with too much information.

      The new rules mean that ISPs will automatically block websites that the courts have deemed inappropriate. The law was introduced with the usual caveats about it being to protect children from online predators and to stop drug distribution, but political websites that criticize Tsar President Putin have already been blocked by the courts.

    • Amazon Removes Reviews

      I’ve been buried in a book deadline for all of October, and haven’t been paying much attention to anything else. When I finally took some time to catch up reading email, I noticed I had many authors (more than twenty) contacting me because their Amazon reviews were disappearing. Some were the ones they wrote. Some were for their books. One author told me that reviews her fans had written–fans that were completely unknown to her–had been deleted.

      I took a look at the reviews I’d written, and saw more than fifty of them had been removed, namely reviews I did of my peers. I don’t read reviews people give me, but I do keep track of numbers and averages, and I’ve also lost a fair amount of reviews.

    • Amazon Freaks Out About Sock Puppet Reviews And Deletes A Bunch Of Real Reviews

  • Privacy

    • Facebook admits error in censoring anti-Obama message

      Larry Ward will concede that he “poked the bear.” As president of the D.C.-based Political Media Inc., Ward administers the Facebook page of a group called Special Operations Speaks (SOS), an anti-Obama group consisting of “veterans, legatees, and supporters of the Special Operations communities of all the Armed Forces.” Essentially hard guys who want the president out of office. “These are the toughest sons of a guns out there and they say what they mean,” says Ward.

  • Civil Rights

    • ORG is ready for legal action

      Today ORG have launched a new campaign to fund a legal project which will allow us to create new case law and lead on bringing digital rights issues to the courts.

    • A Bit Of 1984: Biometrics Used In Argentina Today

      When I read and translated that post, I immediately thought of what happened and is happening in my home country, Argentina. I was about to start my vacations in Europe and I thought that particular trip would help me write this. I was not wrong.

      We Argies are not new to biometric data. One of the existing fingerprint-recording systems was invented in Buenos Aires and used as a tool during the military dictatorships the country suffered (particularly during the last). In fact, thanks to a law enacted during one of those dictatorships, every citizen must have a government-issued ID, consisting of his/her name, last name, address, date of birth, sex, fingerprint and photograph.

    • Is it Time to Police the Police?

      Every week, somewhere in the US, there’s a story of some kind of police activity that leads people scratching their head, or saying ‘That isn’t right’. It’s an issue that’s been around as long as police officers have and has become a cliche, accepted without question. The problem is that it’s a problem that’s only getting worse, not better, and it’s a problem that’s not being addressed.

    • Iran: Female detainees begin hunger strike after degrading treatment

      The Iranian authorities must protect all detainees and prisoners from harassment and degrading treatment, Amnesty International said today, after nine female political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, started a hunger strike in response to alleged abuse by prison guards.

      The women, who are all held in Tehran’s Evin Prison include activists and journalists. They say they were subjected to humiliating and degrading body searches by female guards from the Prison Security Section who subsequently confiscated some of their personal belongings on Tuesday

    • Israeli Authorities Must Release Palestinian Prisoner of Conscience in West Bank

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EFF Reminds Us That Open WiFi Isn’t A Bad Thing… And Should Actually Be Encouraged

      We’ve had plenty of stories concerning open WiFi, and there seems to be a general opinion among some that open WiFi is “a bad thing.” Some have even tried (and failed) to argue that having an open WiFi network makes you negligent. In some areas, law enforcement has even gone around telling people to lock up their WiFi. Those who argue against open WiFi are generally conflating different issues. It is true that if you use an open WiFi network without securing yourself you do open up yourself to snooping from others. Similarly, if others are using your open WiFi, it it could lead to at least an investigation if your access point is used for nefarious purposes. But combining those to claim that open WiFi itself is bad or illegal is a mistake. It is entirely possible to secure your own activities, and to set up an open WiFi network in a reasonable manner that minimizes any such threat.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Any Hint Of Evidence Based Copyright In The UK Seen As Nefarous Plot By Parliamentary Copyright Maximalists

        The laws governing intellectual monopolies in the UK are in a state of flux at the moment. After the previous government in its dying hours rammed through the shoddy piece of work known as the Digital Economy Act, the present coalition government took a more rational approach by commissioning the Hargreaves Review into the impact of digital technologies on this area. One of its key proposals was that policy should be based on evidence, not “lobbynomics”; the fact that this even needs to be mentioned says much about the way laws have been framed until now.

        As a result, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has been trying to gather evidence in order to help politicians draw up new policies that correspond to the data, not just dogma. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those that have done well under the previous evidence-free approach have been mounting a rearguard action against the changes.

      • LeakID And The DMCA Takedown Notice Farce

        The third party DMCA patrolbot featured today first made its name known by claiming malware uploaded by a computer security researcher as its own, resulting in a shutdown of the researcher’s Mediafire account. LeakID, the “company” (and we’ll explore those scare quotes in a moment) behind the takedown practices what many other sketchy content enforcers do — bulk keyword searches. This results in false positives that get swept up with all the actual infringement, such as in the case linked above. LeakID also ordered a Microsoft Office patch (freely available at Microsoft’s website) be removed from this user’s account.

      • BitTorrent Pirate Ordered to Pay $1.5 Million Damages For Sharing 10 Movies

        A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case. In a default judgment defendant Kywan Fisher from Hampton, Virginia is ordered to pay $1,500,000 to adult entertainment company Flava Works for sharing 10 of their movies on BitTorrent. The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law. It’s expected that the verdict will be used to motivate other BitTorrent defendants to settle their cases.

      • No Copyrights on APIs: Help Us Make The Case

        Earlier this year, we applauded District Court Judge Alsup for getting it right and holding that, as a matter of law, one could not copyright APIs. The case, Oracle v. Google, is now on appeal to the Federal Circuit, where a three-judge panel is going to revisit Judge Alsup’s ruling.

11.02.12

Links 2/11/2012: Fedora Delays, LibreOffice 3.6.3, OpenBSD 5.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • 4 millions Windows 8 upgrades, that’s not much!
  • Microsoft’s New Cloud and Mobile Approach Uses Same Old Lock-in Strategy
  • Think cloud computing saved you from Sandy? Think again.

    It makes little sense for any Internet business to be dependent on a single data center. With server virtualization it is possible to put images of your server here and there to cover almost any failover problem. Not just multiple servers but multiple servers on multiple backbones in multiple cities supported by multiple power companies and backed by multiple generators. We do that even here at I, Cringely and we’re known to be idiots.

  • Abacus adds up to number joy in Japan
  • FTC Declares Rachel From Cardholder Services ‘Enemy Number 1′; Files Complaints Against Five Scammy Robocollers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • OPINION: Who wins with Medicare Advantage?

      The big five health insurance companies have begun reporting their third quarter 2012 earnings and so far, they are pleasing their shareholders with profits that are better than Wall Street expected, in large part because they are doing especially well in one key area: Medicare.

      [...]

      A Romney-Ryan victory likely would be the equivalent of winning the lottery for the big institutional investors that own the majority of health insurance company stock. Citigroup analyst Carl McDonald predicts that should Romney win and the GOP take the Senate, the value of health insurers’ shares would rise 10 to 20 percent.

    • Is the Junk Food Industry Buying the WHO?

      The US Food and Drug Administration is notorious for bowing to food-industry interests at the expense of public health. Consider the case of trans fats—whose damaging effects the FDA ignored for decades under industry pressure before finally taking action in 2006, a story I told here. Then there’s the barrage of added sweeteners that have entered the US diet over the last two decades, while the FDA whistled. This week, Cristin Kearns Couzens and Gary Taubes, who has been writing hard-hitting pieces on the dangers of excess sweetener consumption for a while, have a blockbuster Mother Jones story documenting how the FDA rolled over for the food industry on added sweeteners.

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Why are there no famous financial whistleblowers in this crisis?

      This column discusses one of the more subtle issues raised by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) civil fraud action against Bank of America (B of A). The issue was so subtle that of the three articles about the lawsuit that I choose to review the night after the suit was filed, only the NYT article mentioned one of the most important aspects of the suit – the key role that the whistleblower played in making the action possible. The AP and the WSJ articles ignored the fact.

      The lawsuit threatens to impose steep fines on the bank. The Justice Department filed the case under the False Claims Act, which could provide for triple the damages suffered by Fannie and Freddie, a penalty that could reach more than $3 billion.

      The act also provides an avenue for a Countrywide whistle-blower, Edward J. O’Donnell, to cash in. Under the act, the government can piggyback on accusations he filed in a lawsuit that was kept under seal until now.

      Mr. O’Donnell, who lives in Pennsylvania, was an executive vice president for Countrywide before leaving the company in 2009. The government’s case in part hinges on the credibility of his claims.

    • Sharp admits ‘material doubt’ on survival
    • Welfare cuts will lead to shortfall in affordable homes

      Decrease in government spending set to leave low income families with a stark choice: buy less food or move out

    • Barclays faces record £290m penalty

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Getting the facts straight in the parental controls debate

      It’s useful to note that Westminster Hall debates aren’t particularly formal interventions or statements of the Government’s policy. They are secured by MPs who want to discuss something important to them, and can indicate MPs feelings and signal to the Government what Parliamenarians’ priorities might be.

      But even though it’s just a Westminster Hall debate, it seemed important to note that I spotted Claire Perry MP citing a statistic that I haven’t seen before, and which got my spidey senses tingling. She suggests that the number of parents installing network filters at home has dropped ten percent over the past three years, standing now at 39%.

    • Syria Using US Gear to Block Web

      A U.S. company that makes Internet-blocking gear acknowledges that Syria has been using at least 13 of its devices to censor Web activity there—an admission that comes as the Syrian government cracks down on its citizens and silences their online activities.

    • Journalist Attempts To Silence Criticism Of Her Ethics By Brandishing The Club Of UK Defamation Laws

      Defamation is only supposed to apply to cases where there’s a factually false statement made about someone. It shouldn’t apply to cases where the facts are accurate, or the statements are opinions. But while the US’s defamation laws generally deal pretty well with this, it’s not as clear elsewhere. The UK, unfortunately, is somewhat famous for its bad defamation laws, where the burden is generally on the accused to prove they didn’t defame someone — which can be an expensive process. Over the past week or so, video gaming journalists and industry watchers have been dealing with a bit of controversy. Eurogamer columnist Rab Florence wrote a column questioning the close relationship between some gaming journalists and the companies they cover, where it sometimes seems like the journalists are pitch people, rather than objective journalists. This is not a new concern, especially in video game journalism, where such accusations tend to show up pretty regularly (sometimes more accurately than others).

    • Lost Humanity 18: A Table of Doritos

  • Privacy

    • The Kremlin’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today
    • CJOnline ordered to release poster’s information

      A Shawnee County District Court judge has ordered The Topeka Capital-Journal to relinquish identifying information of a CJOnline.com commenter claiming to be a juror in a high-profile murder trial.

      District Judge Steven Ebberts on Friday denied the newspaper’s request to quash the district attorney’s subpoena for the information. As a result, CJOnline will have to release the poster’s name, address and Internet Protocol address to the district attorney.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts