• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Amdocs Benchmark sets new record for Large-Volume Processing of Prepaid Voice, Data and Messaging

  Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), the leading provider of customer experience systems, today announced the results of a benchmark that tested the Amdocs jNetX NextGen SCP (service control point) product, using the Linux operating system on HP ProLiant BL460c servers in BladeSystem c7000 enclosures and Intel® Xeon® processors. The benchmark demonstrated real-time service control for more than 510 million sessions and events during peak calling hours, also known as busy hour call attempts (BHCA). No other industry benchmark publicly reported processing of such a high volume of prepaid voice, data and messaging sessions and events.

Kernel Space

• What’s Going On With Iveland & OpenBenchmarking.org

• Benchmarking ARM Tablets, Smart-Phones

  When writing this morning about what’s going on with Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org, one of the recent items being worked on in this area completely escaped my mind: the mobile benchmarking improvements. Time and money (new hardware) has been spent in providing greater automated testing and performance benchmarking of the Phoronix Test Suite on ARM-based mobile devices.

• trace: Add user-space event tracing/injection

• Graphics Stack

  • Genode OS Now Has A LiveCD Demo With Gallium3D

    Back in July we reported that Gallium3D and Intel’s GEM were ported to Genode OS. Unless you read that article, chances are you never heard of Genode OS. Genode is a unique, niche operating system that is designed for dynamic workloads while being robust and secure. Genode takes a unique approach with frameworks to offer greater security and be a less complex operating system. It’s primarily designed for high-security computing, automotive systems, and other devices requiring high security and/or dependability. Now though a LiveCD of this free operating system is available, which includes support for demonstrating its Gallium3D framework implementation.

    Besides being able to show off Gallium3D on Genode OS (if using Intel graphics!) there are demos included for also showing off the Qt4/WebKit support, improved software integration, and then how even as a browser-plugin to virtualize the Linux kernel booting.

  • AMD Already Has Open-Source Fusion Drivers

    There’s good news for those of you wanting to quickly go out and pickup an AMD Fusion system as soon as it’s available: there’s already open-source drivers for Fusion.

    AMD’s Alex Deucher has now confirmed that there are open-source graphics drivers for Fusion on Linux already in existence, but they’re just waiting for them to be approved for release. Alex (a.k.a. agd5f) mentioned this in our forums. “Open drivers are already written, just waiting for final approval to release.”

    While it’s a bit of a surprise that the open-source drivers are already written and just behind held up by approval (perhaps more legal reviews), it should not come as a complete surprise that AMD has been working on open-source drivers for this CPU+GPU combo architecture.

  • AMD Fusion has ‘open-source drivers ready’

    Hardware hounds early awaiting the release of AMD’s Fusion chip – a combo of CPU and GPU functions on a single die which AMD have dubbed an ‘APU’ (Accelerated Processing Unit) – will surely be excited to hear that open-source drivers are ready and waiting.

  • AMD Catalyst 10.11 Linux Driver Released

    As was pointed out in our forums, the AMD Catalyst 10.11 Linux driver has tipped up today. This driver, with its installer package approaching 120MB in size, is now available for download at AMD’s web-site.

Applications

• Best Linux apps for managing your media

  Not long ago, a digital photo was a rarity, and even if you had a camera that could take them, you couldn’t fit many on your hard drive. It’s a similar story with music.

  These days, it’s almost impossible to believe that the original MP3 player, Audio Highway’s Listen Up from 1997, had a capacity of 32MB, which could hold about an album’s worth of audio with a low enough compression ratio. Most of our TuxRadar podcasts are larger than that, and a typical broadband connection can grab the data in seconds.

• Linux Video Editing Apps: The Simple, the Slick and the Stumbly

  Linux users and other fans of free software aren’t out in the cold when it comes to video editing applications. Avidemux provides a simple set of tools for cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. Moving up to something like OpenShot will give you more features, though the layout can be confusing. And if you try PiTiVi, don’t let the relatively sparse-looking interface fool you — there’s a lot going on in this app.

• Y PPA Manager: Easily Search, Add, Remove Or Purge PPAs In Ubuntu

• gThumb fixes a bug in 2.12.1 (and have I mentioned lately how much I love gThumb?)

  I’m on the gThumb mailing list now, and my current favorite developer Paolo Bacchilega (so favored because he’s working on my favorite application and improving it all the time) recently announced that gThumb 2.12.1 is out and has fixed the one bug I’ve found in 2.12.0, which was a tendency to crash when you monkey around in a file manager with the same directory you’re in with gThumb.

• QMLSaver Is A Nice Clock Screensaver For Ubuntu

  If you had trouble installing the Noflipqlo screensaver or simply didn’t want to go through so many steps to install a screensaver, you can try QMLSaver.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Feedly v4.x Tutorial

  • Cracking Passwords In The Cloud: Amazon’s New EC2 GPU Instances

  • Install Gnome2 Globalmenu In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 10.10)

  • Migrating from GTK+ 2.x to GTK+ 3

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDAB and Partners Build KDE-based Mobile App Suite Using Qt 4.7

    Just a few hundred kilometres from our Oslo office in the Swedish city of Hagfors sits one of the foremost independent sources of Qt consulting and mentoring, training and add-on products – KDAB. KDAB is a Qt Certified Partner and they’re a nice bunch of guys and girls too.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome Shell Overview-Relayout Branch Gets Polished

    Some recent updates in the overview-relayout Gnome Shell branch brought a few very interesting changes:

    * the large black boxes around the currently selected view are gone
    * the controls to add/remove workspaces have been moved to the screen edge
    * and slide out on hover and during drags
    * animation when entering or leaving the overview has been modified to only zoom the window previews
    * it is now possible to add / reorder / remove favorites from the dash using (see the 2 screenshots below)

  • Context Toolbars in The Board

    When I blogged about the new toolbar in The Board, I mentioned that it was part of wider interaction model I would be implementing soon. So, here’s the very initial implementation of what I call context toolbars in The Board. When I started thinking about how I would offer ways to customize the things you add to The Board, I had a few simple goals in mind in terms of UI.

  • How do I feel about Unity and Wayland in Ubuntu?

    There’s been a lot of garment-rending of late about Ubuntu’s decision to steer away from GNOME 3 and GNOME-shell and instead pursue it’s own desktop environment (or is it a window manager?) in the form of Unity, as well as its intent to drop or marginalize Xorg in favor of Wayland for its graphical display.

    In my view, community considerations aside, the moves are risky and bold, and they could either set Ubuntu apart as a technological leader, or they could scuttle the distribution entirely as an inefficient platform that nobody wants to use.

    Yep. Risky.

    I’m not sure how I’ll like an interface meant for mobile clients, and while I do like GNOME 2 and am unsure about the performance penalty of GNOME 3/GNOME-shell and/or Unity, I’ll certainly take a look at what Ubuntu’s doing with its next couple of releases.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Aims For Government-Ready Security

    During Red Hat’s official launch event for their new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6) release, executives from the company focused heavily on new performance gains. While performance and scalability are key elements of RHEL 6, so too is security.

    With RHEL 6, Red Hat is debuting a number of new features into its enterprise Linux, including new virtual security services as well as the System Security Services Daemon. Security services aren’t the only area of RHEL 6 built for security, as all RHEL 6 packages now benefit from a new 4096-bit RSA hardware signing key as well.

  • Fedora

    • A “clarification” from Fedora on the SQLNinja decision

• Debian Family

  • Debian 6.0 Squeeze Release Update

    The Debian Release Team has made a status update on Debian 6.0, “Squeeze”. They are proud to report that Debian is moving towards the release like a glacier: “inevitably and unstoppingly”.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Make it really easy to fix bugs on Ubuntu

      One of the best things that anyone ever said was, “not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap”. Mr Glass was probably talking about writing, but his words could well have been aimed squarely at any well-established software development process.

      Right now, it’s too hard to fix a bug in Ubuntu. There are a lot of things that we can do to make it easier, let me tell you about mine.

    • Ask Ubuntu

      Beyond asking and answering questions, you can also vote (up or down) questions and answers others have provided. Votes go towards a person’s reputation on the site. For example, if you answer a question and someone votes your answer up, you’ll gain +10. If someone votes up your question, you’ll gain +5. That’s right, good questions go towards building your reputation. For more info on reputation and Ask Ubuntu in general, check out the Ask Ubuntu FAQ.

    • Ubuntu Global Jam: Let’s Make This Rock

      So, I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that the date of the Ubuntu Global Jam is 1st – 3rd April 2011. I know it is a way off yet, but I am really keen that everyone has as much notice as possible to get your events ready! Laura has added the Ubuntu Global Jam in the LoCo Directory so feel free to go and add your events there! We will also be having some tutorial sessions about how to organize events soon! When you add an event, but sure to Tweet/Dent/Facebook it and use the #ugj, #ubuntu, and #locoteams tags so others can see them!

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Do you know where you’re going?

  • Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market

    What Palm chief Jon Rubinstein’s appearance at Web 2.0 Summit today lacked in news, it made up for somewhat in perspective–on the mobile space, Palm’s smartphone birthright, its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard and its future under HP.

  • Should HP/Palm Take Legal Action?

    When we first saw video of the PlayBook we were slightly miffed about how closely RIM’s new OS for the tablet copied webOS. Now seeing it in action in today’s hands on with Engadget it just blows our mind how RIM has pretty much made a carbon copy of webOS multitasking. This thing has a launch bar, the same type of gestures, and of course multitasking with webOS style cards.

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo conference: momentum intact despite lack of hardware

      The MeeGo Conference in Dublin has attracted over a thousand attendees from all over the world. The diverse audience includes Linux hackers, engineers from prominent hardware manufacturing companies, mobile technology enthusiasts, third-party application developers, and software consultants. The conference-goers exhibit a powerful sense of optimism about MeeGo–despite the fact that the emerging platform doesn’t ship on practically any mainstream devices, yet.

      Nokia discussed its product strategy during the opening keynotes, but did not disclose the roadmap. The company initially planned to announce its first MeeGo-based device this year, but has pushed it back to 2011. Its handset lineup is still dominated by the struggling Symbian platform, which lacks a competitive user experience and falls short of key rivals. Nokia has been slow to execute its MeeGo strategy, but has recently started to refocus and pick up the pace. Intel has also been slow to fulfill its mobile ambitions, too. The chipmaker has not yet delivered an Atom processor that is suitable for smartphones, though the tablet-friendly Oak Trail chip is expected to arrive next year. The next MeeGo Conference is scheduled for May, and could possibly bring some of the hoped-for announcements.

  • Android

    • 12 Open Source Android Applications Worth Checking Out

      There are Android users who don’t have the vaguest idea of what open source is or what it stands for. Then there are those open source evangelists who bought Android phone primarily because of the reason that it is open source and based on Linux. This post is especially meant for those who are included in the second category.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • 100 Million Adblock Plus Downloads

    Today we’re very happy to celebrate a huge milestone: Adblock Plus became the first browser add-on to be downloaded 100 million times!

  • Awesome test day for the new SUMO KB

  • Agent 008 Ball – Creating an HTML5 Game

    I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a long time! Over the summer we created Agent 008 Ball, a spy-themed HTML5 pool game. Creating it was a blast! We put a little video together to talk about the design process. You can check it out below. Also, here’s the case study for the project.

  • Mozilla Labs Night “Gaming Special” comes to London

    Mozilla Labs Gaming is hosting a Labs Night Open Web Gaming Special – in London this time, together with Six to Start!

    This Labs Night will be all about games being developed and played on the Open Web – expect lots of cool demos, talks and interesting people to hang out with. You can register for the event on our Eventbrite page.

Oracle

• Oracle submits specs for Java 7 and 8

  An Oracle official detailed on Tuesday the submissions of upcoming Java releases to the formal specification process, including versions 7 and 8 of Java’s standard edition.

  The technologies under consideration have been formulated as JSR (Java Specification Requests) for consideration by the Java Community Process, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle’s Java platform group, said in a blog post: “These JSRs have been a long time coming. They’re now — finally — on the JCP ballot for approval; results should be available in two weeks.”

Education

• Three unspoken blockers that prevent professors from teaching open source community participation

  One of the hardest things about trying to bridge two worlds–for instance, open source communities and academic institutions–is all the stuff you don’t hear on a daily basis when you’re working remotely. Sometimes it takes several rounds of garlic bread and pasta for people to begin articulating what’s blocking them from teaching their students how to participate in FOSS communities. Sebastian Dziallas and I sat down last weekend at the 2010 Frontiers in Education conference with a group of professors from the Teaching Open Source community. “What are the biggest blockers that you’re facing in doing this,” we asked, “that people in the open source world just don’t know about or understand?” Here are their answers.

• STEM education: Live chat at noon with Al Gore, Dean Kamen, Sally Ride, and the Mythbusters

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fellowship Jabber meeting about FSFE’s education activities – Wednesday 17 November 20:00 CET

Licensing

• The Internet blacklist (COICA) is back: Take action before Thursday

  Now that the elections are over, the bill is back — and could pass out of committee this Thursday.

  S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), would create a blacklist of domain names that the government thinks are involved in copyright infringement, which the Attorney General can then add to with a court order.

• The Case Against COICA

  To recap, COICA gives the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, in particular the ability to make entire websites disappear from the Internet if infringement, or even links to infringement, are deemed to be “central” to the purpose of the site. Rather than just targeting files that actually infringe copyright law, COICA’s “nuclear-option” design has the government blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system — a reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech.

Openness/Sharing

• Background on the Icelandic Constitutional Assembly

  The electorate is the roughly 228000 voters in Iceland, and there are 523 individual candidates running in the election, all as individuals although some have known connections with special interest groups, political parties, and such. These relationships have been mapped by various websites. Various other websites provide filtering mechanisms of various sorts in order to help people weed out the best 25 candidates to vote for.

  After the elections the assembly will convene in February 2011 and operate for 2-4 months during that year to draft a new constitution and propose it to parliament, along with suggested adoption mechanisms and protocols. If parliament accepts the new constitution it will be put to a referendum.

  There has been an alarming amount of P2P activity in relation to this election. Campaigns are primarily being operated through social networking sites, with a lot of pressure on candidates not to advertise in traditional media. A lot of individuals and organizations have been in direct contact with the various candidates in order to provide their own arbitrary filters, and in general there is a lot of buzz, but also a lot of uncertainty, as the number of candidates and the equidistribution of the attention is the source of great confusion.

• Open Data

  • new york times: the next big idea in humanities is data

    The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.

    Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.”

• Open Access/Content

  • Reclaim our Scientific Scholarship (Beyond the PDF)

    We do not own our scholarship. The Antaran Stellar Society runs the communication of scholarship for the personal gain of it and its officers. The Sirius Cybernetics Library Corporation has copyrighted the Library of the Galaxy cataloguing system. It also runs it for itself and officers. The motto of these organizations is:

    * Embrace
    * Control
    * Exterminate

    The only way forward for scientific publishing is to reclaim it. That’s not easy when scientific societies have sold their journals to Whitehole publishing. Major societies have abandoned their role as stewards of scholarship and turned it to maximising income.

Programming

• Google Code to stop checking SourceForge names

  Google open source and public sector programs manager Chris DiBona has announced that, from the 22nd of November, names for new projects created on the company’s Project Hosting service will no longer be checked against SourceForge to see if the project name is already in use. Up until now, new projects created on the Google Code project hosting site were automatically checked against SourceForge to see if the name already existed and, if it was already in use, the Google Code developers would email that project’s administrator to see if the name could be used again.

• The version control timeline

Crunch time for upgrade of internet addresses that are running out

With cyberspace almost full, Samantha Amjadali finds out it’s going to take half a trillion dollars to avoid a global squeeze.

IPV6. It is the ultimate case of procrastination; a problem so big, so complex and so expensive, the world has ignored it for two decades.

The problem: the internet is full. Well, almost.

Welcome to My World, Mr. Zuckerberg: Facebook Forays into Email with Fmail

Welcome, Facebook, to my home of the last thirty years — the wild, wonderful, wacky, wheels-within-wheels world of modern email!

It sounds like you plan to be here for the long haul, so I hope you brought everything you need: good programmers and deep pockets shouldn’t be a problem for you, but you also need people who understand the many important email standards (including the new and emerging ones for domain-based email signatures and non-western character sets for email addresses and domains), the complex interplay between spammers and spam-fighters, and the remarkable variety of ways that email composed on your system will appear on the hundreds of other platforms in the world that might receive it.

From the outside, email seems pretty simple — there’s a To, a From, and a few other relevant fields, right? But almost every aspect of email harbors a “gotcha” — some fundamental, some a legacy of email’s evolution, but all critical if you want to “play nice” and have your email interoperate well with everyone else’s.

Ancient road uncovered in Luxor

Science

• Bill Nye of ‘The Science Guy’ fame collapses during speech at USC [Updated]

  Popular TV personality Bill Nye collapsed onstage Tuesday night in front of hundreds of audience members during a presentation at USC, campus officials said.

  Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics and USC’s department of public safety responded to the scene about 8:40 p.m., but it was unclear if Nye was treated or required transport. There was no information available on his condition late Tuesday.

• Intel pares 45nm Cores to prep for Sandy Bridge

  Intel is reportedly phasing out 21 different 45nm processors, paving the way for the release of its second-generation, 32nm Core CPUs code-named “Sandy Bridge.” Due in early 2011, the new CPUs will feature a revised microarchitecture, “next-generation” Turbo Boost technology, and visual performance rivaling discrete GPUs (graphics processing units), the chipmaker says.

• US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds

  US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

  [...]

  The fakes were more likely to appear in leading publications with a high “impact factor.”

• Antimatter atoms produced and trapped at CERN

  Antimatter – or the lack of it – remains one of the biggest mysteries of science. Matter and its counterpart are identical except for opposite charge, and they annihilate when they meet. At the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. However, we know that our world is made up of matter: antimatter seems to have disappeared. To find out what has happened to it, scientists employ a range of methods to investigate whether a tiny difference in the properties of matter and antimatter could point towards an explanation.

• Nvidia chief scientist: CPUs slowed by legacy design

  When it comes to power-efficient computing, CPUs are weighed down by too many legacy features to outperform GPUs (graphics processing units) in executing common tasks in parallel, said the chief scientist for the GPU vendor Nvidia.

  CPUs “burn a lot of power” executing tasks that may be unnecessary in today’s computing environment, noted Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research for Nvidia, during his keynote Wednesday at the Supercomputer 2010 conference in New Orleans.

• Designer bacteria can heal cracks in concrete buildings

  Researchers have designed bacteria that can produce a special glue to knit together cracks in concrete structures.

  The genetically modified microbe has been programmed to swim down fine cracks in concrete and once at the bottom it produces a mixture of calcium carbonate and a bacterial glue. This glue combines with the filamentous bacterial cells, ultimately hardening to the same strength as the surrounding concrete and essentially “knitting” the building back together.

Health/Nutrition

• Top chefs back curb on soy imports to protect rainforest

  Chefs at some of Britain’s top restaurants are backing a parliamentary bill to reduce the UK meat and dairy industries’ dependence on imported soy, which they say is contributing to the destruction of the South American rainforest.

  Michelin-starred Raymond Blanc of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Oxfordshire, and Michael Wignall of Latymer, Surrey, are among leading chefs to support the Sustainable Livestock bill, to be debated tomorrow.

• BMJ Lobby Watch – The Stockholm Network

  Earlier this month, UK health secretary Andrew Lansley announced that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) would be stripped of its power to halt the purchase of drugs not considered cost effective for the NHS. He argued that the new system would be one where the “price of a drug will be determined by its assessed value”.

  The Stockholm Network, a pan-European think tank network, agreed with the proposed change to NICE’s remit. In a press release its chief executive, Helen Disney, argued that the move showed that, “even at a time of austerity, the British public does not want or accept rationed healthcare”.

  The network, which produces research for “market-oriented policy ideas in Europe”, has long had NICE within its sights.

  [...]

  In 2006, the same year that Pfizer made £8bn (€9bn, $13bn) in annual sales for its cholesterol drug Lipitor (atorvastatin), the bestselling drug in the world, the Stockholm Network published its report Cholesterol: The Public Policy Implications of Not Doing Enough. The report concluded there is “evidence of wide-scale under-prescribing and suboptimal dosing of effective lipid-lowering agents in Europe” and promoted “greater use of strong statins or the addition of cholesterol absorption inhibitors to statins” to avoid a health and welfare crisis in Europe.

  Last year two members, the Liberalni Institute and the Centre for European Reform left the network after the publication of a 2009 Stockholm Network report entitled The UK Pharmaceutical Industry: Current Challenges and Future Solutions. The report argued that “[a] lack of government investment is another factor adversely affecting the UK pharmaceutical industry.” Writing in the Telegraph blog Alex Singleton accused the network of “calling for government funding of the pharmaceutical industry”, although Helen Disney contended that the report had been misrepresented in the article.

• Drug companies ‘exploiting rules to make exorbitant profits from NHS’

  Drug companies are today accused of making exorbitant profits from the NHS by exploiting arrangements designed to encourage them to develop new drugs for rare diseases.

  Twenty consultants and a patients’ group are publishing an open letter to the prime minister, calling for an inquiry. They tell David Cameron that, far from inventing new drugs, companies are in effect repackaging them to get a licence, enabling them to hike the price hugely.

  Legislation was brought in by the EU to encourage companies to devise and seek licenced for new drugs for what are called “orphan” diseases – those for which there is not a huge market because they are relatively rare.

  But the letter’s signatories say the change in the rules has had unintended consequences. They cite a drug which has been used for the last 20 years to treat two rare muscle diseases. Although it did not have a licence for that use, doctors could prescribe it – and did – on their own authority. It used to cost around £800 to £1,000 per patient per year.

• Cholera reported in Florida as Haiti death toll climbs

  Haiti reported more cholera deaths Wednesday as chaos reigned in this country’s second-largest city, and cases among people who had traveled from Haiti were reported in Florida and the Dominican Republic.

Security

• Red Hat warns of hole in OpenSSL

• An OpenSSL race condition

• Wednesday’s security updates

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Obama’s missed opportunity in Jakarta

  Unlike British Prime Minister David Cameron in his determination to challenge China’s human rights record (albeit in carefully crafted diplomatic language), President Obama’s failure to raise human rights issues with Indonesian’s President Yudhoyono was disappointing. Just a day before Cameron’s speech to students in Beijing, the US president made a comparable keynote speech at the University of Indonesia. But instead of focusing on bilateral relations between the US and Indonesia, Obama used this stage in the world’s most populous Muslim nation to set out his vision of rebuilding ties with the Muslim world.

• Marketing War to Children, Paid for by American Taxpayers

  In the gap between a boy’s passionate fantasies and the smell of dead bodies in a mass grave marches . . . America’s Army.

  “He wonders if God is punishing him because before he joined the Army he thought of war as something fun and exciting.”

  We couldn’t wage our current wars without the all-volunteer military whose recruitment goals get fed every year by idealistic young people, who continue, despite all counter-evidence bursting off the front pages, to buy into the romance and excitement of war and armed do-goodism that the recruiters, with the help of a vast “militainment” industry, peddle like so many Joe Camels.

• NJ, ID legislators ready to ban airport pornoscanners – your help needed!

  Aaron Swartz sez, “Bold legislators in New Jersey and Idaho have introduced bills stopping the new porno-scanners, but that’s not enough — we need to pass these bills in every state! So I set up a thing to make it super-easy to contact your state legislator about it. Just add your name and zip code to our petition and we’ll automatically email your state rep.”

• Opting-out of Advanced Imaging Technology and the Pat-down Doesn’t Fly

  And finally, the $10,000.00 question of the day… Will you receive a $10,000.00 fine if you opt out of screening all together and leave the checkpoint? While TSA has the legal authority to levy a civil penalty of up to $11,000.00 for cases such as this, each case is determined on the individual circumstances of the situation.

• Has Airport Security Gone Too Far?

  In May, Transportation Security Administration screener Rolando Negrin pummeled a co-worker with his government-issued baton. The feud began, according to a Miami-Dade Police Department report, after Mr. Negrin’s training session with one of the agency’s whole-body imagers. The scan “revealed [Mr. Negrin] had a small penis,” the disgruntled co-worker told police. After a few months, he “could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind.”

  Now the TSA is rolling out these ultra-revealing imagers across the country in an attempt to uncover hidden threats like the so-called underwear bomb found on a Detroit-bound flight last Christmas. The agency and the scanners’ manufacturers insist they’ve installed features and instituted procedures that will make passenger embarrassments impossible.

• Your Guide to Navigating Airport Security With Ease

• Amid airport anger, GOP takes aim at screening

  Did you know that the nation’s airports are not required to have Transportation Security Administration screeners checking passengers at security checkpoints? The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period. Now, with the TSA engulfed in controversy and hated by millions of weary and sometimes humiliated travelers, Rep. John Mica, the Republican who will soon be chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is reminding airports that they have a choice.

• TSA pats down a screaming toddler

  You might think a 3-year-old would whiz through security. A child is non-threatening, wears slip-on shoes, and carries little luggage.

• Websites publish advice to student protesters on how to avoid arrest

  More than 70 websites today published guidance to student protesters about avoiding arrest, in defiance of a police ruling that doing so was unlawful.

  The anti-police blog Fitwatch was suspended yesterday after detectives from C011, the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the company hosting its website that it was “being used to undertake criminal activities”.

• Blogger faces terror charges for ‘naming MPs’

  A West Midlands blogger has been charged with terrorism offences for allegedly using a blog to list members of parliament who voted in favour of the Iraq war.

  Bilal Zaheer Ahmad, a 23-year-old man from Wolverhampton, was arrested a week ago by West Midlands Police.

• Is the American public about to toss Israel?

  Some opinion analysts, like the 2009 Zogby International poll of American attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians, express surprise with what they are learning from the American public and detect significant changes in American public attitudes favoring US disengagement from Israel.

  Such changes in attitudes are not yet evident in Congress or in the Office of the Vice President. But then, as one of Biden’s Democratic Congressional colleagues from Cleveland Ohio just recently reelected and now planning to force a Congressional vote on withdrawing from Afghanistan, noted this week, “Joe’s a nice fella but a God awful slow learner! Cracks and fissures are shooting around and inside Joe’s great American pro Israel public opinion vase etched in gold with the words: ‘US Support for Israel Must Continue Forever!’

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Biofuel plan will cause rise in carbon emissions

  Britain’s promise to more than double its use of biofuels by 2020 is “significantly” adding to worldwide carbon emissions, the Government admitted yesterday. Britain is signed up to a European guarantee to source 10 per cent of its transport fuel from renewable sources, such as biofuels, within the next 10 years.

• Extreme weather forecasts: web users unite to power climate change project

  From today, anyone with a computer and internet access can be part of a huge, pioneering climate change experiment, probing the controversial question of whether extreme weather events will become more or less common as the world warms.

• A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice

  This week marks the one-year anniversary of what the anti-science crowd successfully labeled ‘Climategate’. The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink, like the Guardian’s piece — focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science, which is precisely the kind of miscoverage that has been going on for the whole year!

  I’ll save that my media critiques for Part 2, since I think that Climategate’s biggest impact was probably on the media, continuing their downward trend of focusing on style over substance, of missing the story of the century, if not the millennia.

• Tory senators kill climate bill passed by House

  The Conservatives have used their clout in the Senate stacked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to kill an NDP climate change bill that was passed by a majority of the House of Commons.

  Without any debate in the Red Chamber, Conservative senators caught their Liberal and unelected counterparts off-guard on Tuesday by calling a snap vote on Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act introduced by Bruce Hyer, a New Democrat who represents Thunder Bay-Superior North in the House.

Finance

• Do 3D Printers Bypass Customs?

  There could be several interesting effects on business and society when 3D printers become widespread, and we’ve discussed a few of them in the past, including possible crime, for example. But here’s another one to think about: Customs Control.

  Most countries have some level of customs controls, in which imported goods are inspected for legality and sometimes taxed as well. This approach has worked fine for centuries, but things might get a little different in the near future when citizens have access to 3D printers that can reproduce many types of objects.

• Ireland: the good stuff

  Amid all the talk of bailouts, it’s easy to forget there are parts of Irish life that economics can’t reach. We asked Twitter users to name the things they love about Ireland. Here are 50 of them, in all their unpunctuated glory

• Debt collectors utilize Facebook to embarrass those who owe

  Debt collectors can be relentless and downright rude on the phone, but now a St. Petersburg woman is filing suit alleging the company that financed her car loan began harassing family members over the social networking website Facebook.

  Melanie Beacham says she fell behind on her car payment after getting sick and taking a medical leave from work. She contacted MarkOne Financial to explain the situation but says the harassing phone calls, as many as 20 per day, kept coming. Then one day she got a call from her sister saying the company contacted her in Georgia.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Europe Reimagines Orwell’s Memory Hole

  Inspired by thoughtful pieces by Mike Masnick on Techdirt and L. Gordon Crovitz’s column yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, I wrote a perspective piece this morning for CNET regarding the European Commission’s recently proposed “right to be forgotten.”

  A Nov. 4th report promises new legislation next year “clarifying” this right under EU law, suggesting not only that the Commission thinks it’s a good idea but, even more surprising, that it already exists under the landmark 1995 Privacy Directive.

• 3 More Reasons Not to Use Facebook Messages

  Many good reasons to be wary of Facebook’s newly announced “Messages” service have already been pointed out on numerous occasions throughout the media. Even besides the obvious privacy concerns, other features of the new service also could prove problematic for those who choose to adopt it, as many observers have suggested.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• U.K. Government to Snub BBC, Google Over Web Access, FT Reports

  U.K. Communications Minister Ed Vaizey will say today that Internet service providers should be free to favor traffic from one content provider over another, provided customers are informed, the Financial Times reported.

  In a speech at a London telecommunications conference organized by the newspaper, the minister will say the market should decide the extent to which service providers can charge for preferential content delivery and slow down other traffic.

• UK.gov ignores ‘net neutrality’ campaigners

  ISPs will be allowed to charge content providers to prioritise their traffic, the government indicated today.

  A speech by the communications minister Ed Vaizey confirmed that the concept of “net neutrality” remains irrelevant in the UK under the coalition.

  As long as providers are open about their policies, he said, the competitive market means consumers can take their business elsewhere.

  A potentially lucrative new revenue stream will be opened up for ISPs, with services that depend on speed or other network quality factors, such as video and online games, likely to be first to be asked to pay for delivery guarantees.

• The Open Internet enhances our freedom of speech

  Ed Vaizey’s speech on “net neutrality” misses a vital point: being “open” about “closing” the Internet won’t deliver competition and innovation on the Internet.

  Money and commercial interest can easily over-ride public interest if we do not assert it. In this case, unlike the USA, there is a degree of collusion going on which may lead our governments down a dangerous path.

• UK government proposal to dump Net Neutrality will not create a free market

  You can’t leave government alone for a minute can you? One minute they are heaping garlands on the tech industry with TechCity proposals and the like. The next minute they are proposing to dump Net Neutrality – the entire reason we had a flowering of innovation in the first place.

  UK Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said in a speech at an Financial Times conference today that Internet service providers should be allowed to favour traffic from one content provider over another, so long as the user was aware this was happening. Oh sure, that’s going to happen. Vaizey’s view is that market should decide whether ISPs can charge for preferential content delivery, thus creating a slow lane for those who can’t or won’t pay for the fast one.

• Minister Ed Vaizey backs ‘two-speed’ internet

  Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a “two-speed” internet, letting service providers charge content makers and customers for “fast lane” access.

  It paves the way for an end to “net neutrality” – with heavy bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use.

• ENDitorial: Net neutrality – wait and see the end of the open Internet

  At the joint European Parliament and European Commission net neutrality summit in Brussels on 11 November there was a clear political message – that interference with Internet traffic is permissible as long as companies tell their consumers that it is happening.

  The Commission will “wait and see” if such interferences cause problems for the market and will consider taking action if this is the case. In a whole day of discussions, the fundamental rights aspects of the interference by private companies with citizens’ communications were only questioned by Jeremie Zimmermann from La Quadrature du Net and Jan Albrecht MEP (Greens/EFA, Germany).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Righthaven’s Retreat On ‘Partial Copying’ Cases Shows Firm’s Vulnerability

    In a sign that Righthaven is on the defensive, the controversial copyright enforcement company has offered to permanently drop one of its lawsuits—provided it doesn’t have to pay legal fees to the attorneys defending the website it sued, Democratic Underground. The move shows the startup company’s concerns about the potential for mounting legal bills.

  • AFP Still Not Giving Up On Its Bizarre Claim That Twitpic Images Are Freely Licensed To Anyone

    Earlier this year, we wrote about an absolutely bizarre lawsuit, where the newswire AFP — a company who has claimed that merely linking to its stories is infringement — had sued a photographer whose photograph AFP had used without permission (and with a false credit). The story was so convoluted and filled with confusion that it was really quite amazing that anyone involved is still pushing forward with the case. The “short” version is that a photographer in Haiti when the earthquake happened earlier this year opened a Twitter and a Twitpic account soon after the earthquake, in order to show off some of the photographs he had taken. Another person copied those photos and pretended they were his (also on Twitpic) and offered to license them. The AFP saw the photos from the second person (who didn’t actually have the rights to them) and then posted them on its own stories, crediting the second guy.

  • The artists who still aren’t on iTunes

  • The Pirate Bay, One Year After The Tracker Shut Down

    Exactly a year ago The Pirate Bay team surprised friends and foes when it announced that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker was shutting down for good. The site’s torrent index would remain online, but millions of users had to find alternative trackers or rely on trackerless technologies to share their torrents from then on. In addition, The Pirate Bay suggested a move away from .torrent files entirely in the future.

  • Google strikes deal to scan French books

    Internet giant Google struck an agreement with France’s biggest publisher Hachette Livre to scan thousands of out-of-print French books for Google’s online library, the companies said on Wednesday.

  • CC’s Contribution to Welfare, Field-by-Field: The Separate Contribution to Collaboration & Sharing

    You have probably already noticed that through this series of posts we are proceeding along a trend from general high-level questions to the more practical ones of measurement and evaluation. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that our next nuts-and-bolts step is to start touring the different fields in which CC is active and analyzing its separate contribution to each.

  • Warner Bros. vows to prosecute Deathly Hallows leaker

    Torrent searchers hit pay dirt Monday with the discovery of the Deathly Hallows fragment on BitTorrent sites. The watermarked footage appears to come from a DVD screener sent out by the studio, although Warner Bros. would not confirm this.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

‘Megafon Siberia implements Linux-based video call-centre’

The service is based entirely on open source software: OS Ubuntu Linux and Asterisk, and in the workplace the operator uses the client software Linphone.

Desktop

• The Linux desktop may soon be a lot faster

  The patch by Linux kernel developer Mike Galbraith adds a mere 233 lines of code to the kernel’s scheduler, but it cuts desktop latency down by a factor of ten. That’s impressive — it’s almost like getting a new computer.

• The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders

  In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small — just over 200 lines of code — but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.

• System76 and the World

  System76 has been selling GNU/Linux on PCs for several years now. There are posts on various sites about expansion to the UK. I asked about that and how business was going.
  “We will be shipping to the U.K. very soon. We are getting the final details hammered out.

  We are a privately held U.S. company, and so we do not release financial statements. However, business is growing nicely.” replied Tom Aaron, System 76 Sales and Support.

• Ubuntu-ready netbook moves to dual-core Atom

  System76 is shipping a new version of its Ubuntu Linux-ready Starling Netbook equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, starting at $384. Meanwhile the company has begun shipping to the U.K, and is contemplating developing a tablet PC.

• ARGH!!!

  At a staff meeting today, a staff member who was new but on the job two months and a bit suddenly demanded that her teacher’s PC be put back to that other OS. The fact that this matter was of no concern to the entire staff was a bit annoying but I outlined why we had gone to GNU/Linux and how I had made many offers to help anyone with difficulty. She insisted. I asked whether she had any files to back up. She said none.

  Here’s the log of restoring “7″ which had never been on the PC.

  [...]

  So there we go. After 4 hours of work she has that other OS and less capability with lower speed than before.

Server

• GNU/Linux Terminal Servers Under Heavy Load

  Since the first day I saw a lab full of students happy with the performance of a single-core GNU/Linux terminal server six years ago, I have been quite happy. Of course, I could tell the difference between a heavy and a light load but the end-users generally found performance even then was better than XP on their usual hardware.

Google

• Schmidt: Google Chrome OS ‘a few months away’

  Google boss Eric Schmidt has said that Chrome OS will be available “in the next few months” — which may be an indication that the company’s browser-based operating system has been delayed.

  Since unveiling the Chrome OS project last year, Google has said that systems using the operating system would be available by the end of this year. But the end of the year is a mere six weeks away. As he dropped the “a few months away” line at this week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Schmidt said that Gingerbread, the new version of Android, was “a few weeks away.”

• Google’s Schmidt: Chrome OS is for keyboards, Android is for touch.

  Talking at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt has attempted to settle the confusion between Google’s two operating systems by reaffirming that the upcoming Chrome OS is being developed for devices with physical keyboards where the incumbent Android OS is for touch devices.

• Eric Schmidt: Chrome OS aimed at keyboard based solutions, Android optimized for touch

  Schmidt confirmed that Chrome OS will officially be out in the next few months in Intel and ARM-powered netbooks while also adding that the OS was primarily “designed around something with a keyboard.”

• Chrome OS launch won’t happen this year

Ballnux

• Watch Out Nokia: LG Sells 1M Cheap Androids in 40 Days

  LG today announced total sales of one million Optimus One smartphones, just 40 days after introducing the inexpensive handset in Asia, Europe and the U.S., reaching the million sales mark five days faster than Samsung’s Galaxy S. The high number of device sales in a relatively short time illustrates the growing challenge to handset companies that still sell the bulk of their devices in the low-end and feature phone segment.

• Samsung Galaxy S “Giorgio Armani Edition” hitting Europe in December

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Linux 2.6.37-rc2

Applications

• Navigating and Working in Scribus

  [T]his basic outline should at least begin to help demystify Scribus. The logic may be different from that of office suites, but should be easy enough to learn. Once you have grasped the basic logic, the rest is details.

• Command Line Fun: Magic 8 Ball in Your Terminal

• UI Application for Viewing and Analysing the contents of music audio file – Sonic Visualiser

• Instructionals/Technical

  • GIMP’s Van Gogh filter – Does something that nobody understands

  • Avoiding Catastrophic Backtracking in Apache RewriteRule Patterns

  • Explore Linux /proc File System (/proc directories, /proc files)

  • Sending commands to Xchat from the command line

  • Virtual Users/Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL, SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 10.10)

  • Create a foggy window

  • How to create database on MySQL

  • Navigating and Working in Scribus

  • Decorate Grub 2 boot loader with Burg-Manager (GUI for Burg)

  • Decorate Grub 2 boot loader with Burg-Manager (GUI for Burg)

  • [HOWTO] Get rid of unwanted and duplicate entries in “Open With” in Linux

  • MouseControl, Do More With The Mouse In Firefox

  • OpenOffice Bug– Stuck in Document Recovery Loop

  • Install CHDK on Your Canon Camera Using Linux

  • Use byobu for extended features in your terminal window

  • Create ‘Internet Radio Station’ With Ubuntu And Ampache

  • LatencyTop – Track down the cause of latencies or lag on your Linux system

  • Enhance screen with Byobu’s cool functionality

  • Declaring Variables in Bash Shell Scripting

  • Server monitoring by Monit and Munin

  • Useful PHP date period functions

  • Emacs in the real world – part 3

• Games

  • Make your own games with Syntensity

    How about making your own games? Sounds good. The only problem is that you probably need a ton of resources to get started, including the uncanny ability to write code. Luckily, it does not have to be that way. There are several projects that aim to bridge the gap between the end user and the realm of coding boredom. One such project is Syntensity.

  • ET-XreaL Continues Moving Towards Better Graphics

    A few days ago I wrote about major changes coming to the Urban Terror game that up until now has been a popular ioquake3-powered game that originally began as a Quake 3 mod. Urban Terror is now going to be referred to as “Urban Terror HD” and they are switching from an open-source engine to being an id Tech 3 licensee, which is sad news for those interested in open-source games/engines. While hope may be lost with Urban Terror HD, it seems the XreaL version of Enemy Territory is moving along nicely.

  • Brukkon Puzzle Game is Now Available for Sale in Ubuntu Software Center “For Purchase” Section

    There is a demo version of the game available for download for free. Download Brukkon Puzzle Game Demo. And if you liked it already, you can buy it from Ubuntu Software Center.

  • Vote For Linux Game ‘Steel Storm’ to be The Best ‘Indie Game of the Year 2010′

  • Robombs – Free Bomberman inspired multiplayer game

    Robombs is a free Bomberman inspired multiplayer game in 3D. It takes the basic concept of Bomberman and transfers it into the 3rd dimension.
    It’s free, fun, easy to grasp and a nice addition to your next LAN-party.

  • Garshasp – Looking Good

    Garshasp is a 3rd-person action adventure video game, based on ancient Persian mythology and will be initially available for PC. The game is based on the epic battles of the mythological hero, Garshasp, in the ancient lands against the evil monsters. The main mechanics of the game revolves around melee combat, puzzle solving and exploration.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KNotify Plugins (Or, “What I’ve been working on, now with details”)

    Aaron Seigo pointed out that the behaviour I wanted could be done nicely with KNotify, but that it currently required notification actions to be compiled in.

  • KDE 4.4 on Slackware 13.1

    I recently installed Slackware 13.1 and ditched openSuse (though its still there on another partition) as I was looking for more stability and wanted something more geeky. And yes, slackware does not disappoint when it comes to the geekiness part, whether its package installation or configuration. There is no package manager as such which checks for dependencies etc. So, Slackware comes as a full DVD package by default. The full installation mode installs almost all the required things for the base+enhanced system. There is always an option of downloading the tarball and compiling the sources optimised for your machine (which gives it gentoo like feel which is what I wanted) and then there are many repositories which are specifically built for slackware. The package slapt-get is a package manager like the apt-get for debian based distros. You can download the pre-compiled binaries and install them using it, search for particular packages and you can also download the sources, compile them and the make it install them. So this geeky part I am quite satisfied with.:D

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Foundation is hiring!

    The GNOME project is an effort to create and provide a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop and mobile environment accessible to all users, as well as a powerful application development framework for software developers. GNOME technologies are used in millions of desktops, phones and devices around the world.

    The GNOME Foundation supports the GNOME project by acting as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software, providing business development opportunities for GNOME and its partners, hosting GNOME events and marketing GNOME.

  • GNOME Terminal with Google search support

    Recently I did a hack on GNOME Terminal, added the Google search support for it.

    I think you may like it, so here comes the article.

  • Gnome-Shell Update Nov 16 2010

Distributions

• Sabayon

  • Sabayon Linux Review

    In my quest to replace Ubuntu before Canonical can force me over to Unity, I came across Gentoo. Gentoo is unique operating system. It utilizes a unique bsd like port system called portage. This allows you to compile software around your hardware. Although this adds a layer of complexity during software building and installation, it adds an insane amount of speed and stability.

    Sabayon Linux is a step back from this. It provides Gentoo without the need to compile packages. As a matter of face Sabayon goes out of its way to recommend that you do not compile custom packages under its distribution as it can cause instability. My knee jerk reaction is, “Gentoo is about speed and stability… if you remove compiling from Sabayon, then what’s the point?”

  • Sabayon – Woes and Whoas of Upgrades

    So anyway, if you have problems, please check the forum and see if someone else is having the same problem, maybe a solution already exists. You can also search our bugzilla to see if something has been already reported. If you are submitting a new bug or forum post, please provide as much information as possible.

• Slackware

  • Attn: Slackware 13.0 | Thunderbird Users

    This posting here on Nocturnal Slacker is just an alert, in case you don’t actually read the release notes before updating.

  • A few big changes

    Slamd64 is an exception here: given that Slackware itself now has a 64-bit version, there is no purpose in Slamd64. I’ll be making a post on slamd64.com in the next few days – sorry for not stating this sooner.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2010.2 announced!

    These cold winds have brought some good news for Mandriva users: Mandriva will release version 2010.2 of the distribution as a Christmas present.

  • Two Versions Of Mandriva Coming Soon

    Mandriva was recently forked into a new distribution called Mageia Linux where several Mandriva developers parted ways with this distribution once known as Mandrake due to the uncertainty of the future direction of Mandriva Linux with its corporate backer having underwent some financial hardship. While there isn’t yet a release of Mageia, the Mandriva Cooker Manager has finally been permitted to release details concerning the next two releases of Mandriva Linux.

  • PCLinuxOS LXDE Review and Screenshots

    Some days ago PC Linux OS has destroyed my everything, when I install it on a hard disk. None of any Linux distribution behave bad like this way with me before. Though, I wanted to test the flavour of this so called famous Linux distribution. I download several variant like

    * pclinuxos-lxde-2010.iso
    * pclinuxos-lxde-mini-2010.iso
    * pclinuxos-openbox-2010-07.iso and
    * pclinuxos-ZEN-mini-2010.iso

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Corporate Event Announcement Notice

  • Approaching Resistance – Red Hat

    Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $43.59 with the current price action closing at just $41.96 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.

  • Roaring Penguin Software Announces Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • sVirt: Integrating SELinux and Linux-based virtualization

  • Red Hat Network Satellite 5.4 Offers Support for Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.4, the latest version of Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.4 delivers compliance improvements, greater flexibility in content management and improved subscription management. It also provides support for managing the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating platform.

  • Red Hat Expands Program to Integrate Open Source Software Courses Into Collegiate and University Coursework

    As the use of open source continues to expand globally, the need for graduates with open source software experience is also expected to increase.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Board likely to reconsider SQLNinja, but should they?

      According to a comment today from Tom “spot” Callaway on the SQL Ninja request, it looks like the Fedora Board will reconsider allowing the takeover tool into Fedora. The initial decision drew quite a lot of criticism, but that doesn’t mean the board was wrong.

      I’ve been watching the news and discussions on various Fedora lists responding to the board’s decision not to include SQLNinja in Fedora. It’s typical, but disappointing. The slightest hint of moderation in an open community — whether it’s being picky about the packages included in the distribution or setting policies about civil behavior on communication channels — draws rapid criticism. Predictably, many people have reacted to the decision as if it’s a huge restriction that keeps the freedom-loving masses of Fedora users apart from the full treasure trove of free and open source software.

    • Upgrading to Fedora 14 with yum

      Fedora 14 was released two weeks ago. I normally wait a day or two to install to let the mirrors cool down, but that put the target date right before I left for the LISA conference. Like any good sysadmin, I’m sufficiently paranoid to not upgrade systems right before I leave, even if said system is only my own desktop. So now that I’m back, I decided today was a good day to upgrade my home desktop.

    • Fedora Welcomes in New Management

      Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader, has announced some personnel changes within the Fedora project that show, as Smith says, “every person in the Fedora community is a potential leader.” According to Smith, Fedora’s “policies of rotating leadership help ensure that everyone who is so inclined has a chance to lead and serve.”

    • How do I set up Fedora 14 for audio production?

    • Musicians’ Guide

      The text of and illustrations in this document are licensed by Red Hat under a Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (“CC-BY-SA”). An explanation of CC-BY-SA is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the Fedora Project as the “Attribution Party” for purposes of CC-BY-SA. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the original version.

    • Red Hat Close to the 50 Day

      Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading day at $41.31 close to its 50 day moving average currently set at $40.28. Red Hat’s price action is just above this important support level translating into a trading opportunity.

    • Red Hat (Rht) Breaks Through Support At $40.87

    • Fedora Board Meetings, 12 & 15 Nov 2010

      The Fedora Board meeting schedule works as follows:

      * Every Monday, the Board will meet via phone at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC atm).
      * Every other Friday (the next one is this Friday, 12 Nov), the Board will hold a public ‘office hours’ style questions & answers session in #fedora-board-meeting at 2 PM Eastern time.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Women IRC Training Sessions begins

  • Debian Women IRC Training Sessions

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Cleansweep Update and Laptop Back

      I’m very glad that I can now review patches again after while.

    • Reflections On Respect

      The last week has been pretty intense. Many of you will have seen the discussion surrounding OpenRespect and the different write-ups, comments, and views expressed about it. While I expected OpenRespect to get some attention, I never expected the sheer level of attention it has received, and today I have been reflecting on it all and wanted to share some conclusions.

      While I feel OpenRespect has raised some important points and people have shared some constructive feedback, I have made some mistakes, and I have always believed that mistakes deserve sincere apologies. I started OpenRespect with the best intentions and out of a love for our community and maintaining pleasant and healthy discourse, but honesty goes both ways, both in intent, and in putting your hands up when you screw the pooch and get something wrong. Let me re-cap the story so far.

    • In Defense of Bacon

      Jono Bacon is currently being criticized for the manner in which he launched an initiative called OpenRespect.Org. Much of this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his situation.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Draws More Partners Towards Canonical

      Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has signed several significant partnerships following the release last month of Ubuntu 10.10.

    • Convirture and Canonical to Team Up to Provide Virtual Machine and Private Cloud Management

      Convirture, maker of the ConVirt enterprise-grade software for managing Xen and KVM-based virtual and private cloud environments, is partnering with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu open source operating system, to help organizations effectively manage virtual machines built using Ubuntu. ConVirt 2.0 Open Source is now available in the Ubuntu Partner Repository. It provides a sophisticated set of tools which can also be used to manage virtual machines in a private cloud infrastructure.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Introducing the Hall’s – Developers of Qimo 2.0

        Michelle and Mike Hall, developers of Qimo 2.0, are two of the most friendly, out-going, give you something to smile about personalities I have meet throughout the past year in the FOSS community. They are both active Ubuntu members and I was excited for them when I saw the release announcement this weekend and I hoped I could catch up with one or both of them to ask a few questions about this release and the future of the project.

      • Lubuntu Screencast: Extreme Memory Tuning

        So if you have gone through all this tuning tips you hopefully have saved some memory and have less memory consuming system up and running.

      • Linux Mint 10 review

        Linux Mint has always been a good desktop distribution. It is especially well suited for those new to Linux, and those not needing some of the features that Fedora, Mandriva, and Debian offers. I think more users will be attracted to it if features, like LVM and full disk encryption, are supported by the installer. There is a small, but significant group of users who will not use a distribution if they are unable to encrypt the whole system, and I think more users will choose to encrypt if they know what it is and understand the benefits.

        Since it is doubtful that those features will find their way into Ubiquity any time soon, Clement Lefebvre and his team could just adopt another, better installation program. Fedora Project’s Anaconda, and YALI, the installation program on Pardus, are two good candidates.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Sprint’s Palm Pre marked for End of Life?

    We don’t quite know how to break it to you, but if PreCentral sources are correct, Palm’s hit a very interesting landmark: its comeback device, the Pre for Sprint, has reportedly reached End of Life (EOL).

  • Android

    • Android 2.2 now available for Samsung Galaxy S users on Vodafone

      We have yet more Android 2.2 update news courtesy of Vodafone today, with the Samsung Galaxy S now receiving the full Android 2.2 upgrade via the network. If you have a branded Galaxy S bought through Vodafone, you might be about to have a very exciting few minutes.

    • Nexus S confirmed by Google – Android 2.3 due within “weeks”

      Schmidt didn’t give much away about the phone itself, either, save for announcing it will arrive including support for the NFC protocol – the short-range chip-reading tool used to make micro-transactions. He also said Android 2.3 will arrive within the “next few weeks”, presumably on the Nexus S first.

    • Introducing Replicant

      Replicant is a mobile operating system based upon Android that aims to be 100% free software.

• Tablets

  • Folio Follies

    The version of Android Toshiba was using is optimized for smartphones and others are waiting for the next release of Android which is reported to be more suitable for tables.

  • Kmart debuts $180 Android tablet

  • Price Leadership

    Just this month several tablets with quite useful performance with Android 2.1 have been put on the market for less than $200. HP and Dell do not need to give price leadership. Others (e.g. Kmart) will do that. By Christmas time there will be lots of price competition and Apple will decline in share of this market.

Open Source and the Federal Budget Squeeze, Part 1

Local, state, and federal government agencies across the U.S. share the common goal of serving the public. They also share another contemporary fact of life: They are running out of money. As a result, efficiency is becoming a major goal in government at all levels, and information technology appears to be a key target for getting more bang for the buck.

Daniel Pink’s Drive: open source model is key to future development

What continues to surprise me most about open source software (OSS) development is how the particular mindset OSS embodies has seeped into an incredibly diverse range of discussion that transcends software itself. Daniel Pink’s latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is the latest example of how OSS has served to concretely demonstrate truths about human behavior.

Fear of Forking

Bacteria – viruses too – evolve more quickly than do humans. If you’re reading this, that should not be a surprise. The precise mechanisms may be less than clear, but the implications should be obvious. Part of their advantage, from an evolutionary standpoint, is scale. There are a lot more of them than us, and each act of bacterial reproduction represents an opportunity for change, for improvement. Just as important, however, is the direct interchange of genetic material. As Johnson says, it sounds preposterous – absurd, even – because we are used to linear inheritance, not peer to peer.

We see a similar philosophical divide in between those who abhor the forking of code, and those who advocate it.

LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Rethinks the Office Suite

  Asked to explain this declaration, Vignoli writes, “So far software has been focused more on features than on contents, and a good user is considered [one] who is able to use features and not [one] who is able to develop good content.” As a result, modern office suites include many features that users either do not need or do not use. “Of course, this does not mean that software should have less features,” he adds.

  According to Vignoli, one thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the proliferation of hardware platforms. “Editing and reading on a large screen is not like reading on a small screen,” he notes. “In addition, being mobile adds another layer of complexity, because the relationship with contents is different when you are on the road: your attention is lower and your time pressure is higher.”

  To judge from these comments, TDF is apparently using the break with OpenOffice.org to reconsider priorities. My speculation is that something like OOO4Kids, with its different interfaces for different levels of users might be an answer to unwanted features, while the mention of multiple hardware platforms suggests that TDF may be considering the frequent requests for a version of the code suitable for mobile devices. The general nature of the responses suggests that TDF is still developing the details, but would prefer to pay greater attention to usability than OpenOffice.org did in the past.

• LibreOffice: “It is wrong to blame Oracle”

  And then there was this great hope that when Oracle acquired Sun – because Oracle historically engaged well in lot’s of open source communities like with Apache or the Linux kernel – that this expertise would be brought to Star Division and that we’d get a better product. But sadly that expectation – as yet – has not been fulfilled. They more or less left it alone and in this case it would have been better if they’d shown a more hands-on approach.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Top 10 Firefox Add-ons to Make Browsing Safe, Secure and Private Once Again

    We have already seen top Google Chrome extensions to secure your web browsing, now lets talk about Firefox add-ons a bit. Many of the Google Chrome extensions we featured are originally inspired by Firefox’s top notch add-ons. So without much delay, lets start making Firefox a much more secure one.

  • Mozilla develops social skills with F1

    As Flock and RockMelt duked it out for social-networking addicts’ attention, browser kingpin Mozilla quietly introduced last week a new add-on for Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail users. Called F1 (download) and created by Mozilla Messaging, the division of Mozilla that manages the e-mail client Thunderbird, the secure and unobtrusive add-on provides fast sharing of URLs via a dedicated navigation bar button.

  • HTML5 forms, OpenType, F1, NTT mobile, Game On, hardware acceleration, Personas, Thunderbird, and more…

Databases

• Facebook’s New Real-time Messaging System: HBase to Store 135+ Billion Messages a Month

  I wouldn’t sleep on the idea that Facebook already having a lot of experience with HDFS/Hadoop/Hive as being a big adoption driver for HBase. It’s the dream of any product to partner with another very popular product in the hope of being pulled in as part of the ecosystem. That’s what HBase has achieved. Given how HBase covers a nice spot in the persistence spectrum–real-time, distributed, linearly scalable, robust, BigData, open-source, key-value, column-oriented–we should see it become even more popular, especially with its anointment by Facebook.

CMS

• Ebay using Drupal

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fellowship Jabber meeting about FSFE’s education activities – Wednesday 17 November 20:00 CET

  a year has passed since the edu-team went back to work. That isn’t much in light of all the work still ahead of us, but we can also look back at successes and highlights.

Project Releases

• Parrot 2.10.0 released

  On behalf of the Parrot team, I’m proud to announce Parrot 2.10.0 “Pesquet’s”. Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

• Announcing a new utility: ‘trace’

  We are pleased to announce a new tracing tool called ‘trace’.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Open Government Data Camp: 2010

• Open Access/Content

  • PLoS ONE News and Blog Round-Up

• Open Hardware

  • Introducing the Freakduino-Chibi, An Arduino-based Board For Wireless Sensor Networking

    I’m happy to announce the release of my latest design, the Freakduino-Chibi.Yes, there has been mixed reviews about the naming. It’s ranged from “seriously?” to outright laughter. I decided to go with it though because it does express two things that I think are important. The first is that it’s an Arduino-compatible board and the second is that it’s related to my original Chibi boards .

Standards/Consortia

• Initializing an I-Team for the improvement of the ODF-icons

  Since the release of OpenOffice.org 3.2 we received a lot of very qualified feedback for the new ODF icons. We think the icons are a step in the right direction, but we acknowledge that there is room for improvement, specially relating to the usability. So following the recommendation of the community council we would like to make the icons better. That’s why we are creating an i-team that will be responsible for the changes on the ODF icons. Anyone who is interested can take part in the process of improving the icons, we welcome the input of users and experts. So, please join us!

420M People In China Have Internet Access, 99% Use Baidu For Search

So why Google was not as successful in China? “China is a very different market and Google was not close enough to feel the market.” Li also blames Silicon Valley. The proliferation of VC money poured into the local search market was one of the reasons Google failed to reach market share. Before it redirected its Chinese site to Google Hong Kong, that is.

From China to Amazon, NVIDIA’s Tesla is on a roll

This week brings two major pieces of news for NVIDIA, both of which are evidence that the GPU maker is killin’ it in the high-performance computing (HPC) space. First is the latest Top 500 Supercomputer List, which sees China’s NVIDIA-powered Tianhe-1A vault past the US Department of Energy’s Jaguar machine to the top of the list.

Survey of women, men in IT shows differing views

Do men and women who work in IT see their jobs and career opportunities differently? A new survey from IT staffing firm Technisource finds some disparities but also areas of agreement.

Science

• Astronomers may have found youngest black hole

  Astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory may have found evidence for a young black hole: it was born in a titanic explosion just 31 years ago.

  Black holes form when massive stars explode. The core of the star collapses, and if it’s massive enough (more than about 3 times the mass of the Sun), the gravity of the core can crush it down into a black hole.

• NASA’s Chandra Finds Youngest Nearby Black Hole

• Scientists propose one-way trips to Mars

  It’s usually cheaper to fly one way, even to Mars.

  Two scientists are suggesting that colonization of the red planet could happen faster and more economically if astronauts behaved like the first settlers to come to North America – not expecting to go home.

  “The main point is to get Mars exploration moving,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University professor who co-authored an article that seriously proposes what sounds like a preposterous idea.

Security

• China Hijacked 15% of US Internet Traffic-and no one noticed

• Anti-Firesheep Trick Protects Linux Users

• Security advisories for Tuesday

• New OpenSSL vulnerability; Tor not affected

• Rootkits to identify exploits on your Linux system

• OpenSSL Issues Fix For Remote Code Execution Attacks

Defence/Police/Aggression

• One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans

  At the heart of the controversy over “body scanners” is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.

  A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that U.S. Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly-perhaps illegally-saved images of the scans of public servants and private citizens.

Finance

• Fraud-closure biz fizzles out

  Bank lawyers prosecuting the 80,000 foreclosure cases in New York are all but admitting that the cases they have filed over the past number of years have been riddled with fraud.

  In the three weeks-plus since New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman put the foreclosure lawyers on notice that any fraud in foreclosure paperwork would be met with severe penalties — he is making lawyers sign affirmations promising they took “reasonable” steps to make sure the legal papers are true — practically no new foreclosure cases have been filed, The Post has learned.

• GOP’s new target – Bernanke

  Republican leaders who have lambasted the Obama administration for what they say were misguided bailouts and a wasteful economic stimulus plan have been fairly muted in their criticism of Bernanke, who was appointed by President George W. Bush and served as his chief economic adviser. On Monday, however, they lined up behind a new advertising campaign attacking Bernanke for his plan to pump $600 billion into the sluggish U.S. economy, claiming that it risks causing inflation.

• Weaker Dollar Seen as Unlikely to Cure Joblessness

  A weakening currency traditionally helps a country raise its exports and create more jobs for its workers. But the declining value of the dollar may not help the United States increase economic growth as much as it might have in the past.

• Bond Sell-Off in Spite of Intervention by Fed Puzzles Traders and Analysts

  Again on Monday, bond markets sold off aggressively, pushing the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield back up to 2.96 percent. That is close to where the yield was three months ago when the new policy of so-called quantitative easing was first suggested by the Fed.

  The yield has jumped from about 2.55 percent since Nov. 8.

  It is an aggressive sell-off that has left traders and policy makers mystified, and spawned a number of theories.

• An Edge on Dividends for Goldman

  Goldman Sachs’s shareholders have little to grumble about. Sure, the bank’s plan to buy back $5 billion in expensive preferred stock held by Warren E. Buffett appears to have been delayed because of an industrywide debate with the Federal Reserve over how to manage capital. That includes deciding when dividends can go up. But investors in Goldman’s common stock already have an advantage over the competition.

• Four possible deals on the Bush tax cuts

  The Bush tax cuts will not be permanently extended. But they — or at least some of them — will be temporarily extended. That we don’t know which ones, or for how long, should embarrass Congress and the White House. The expiration date for the tax cuts was set into law 10 years ago. Congress shouldn’t still be scrambling to figure this out with less than 50 days to go.

  But it is. And it’s the Democrats — as they still control both houses of Congress and the presidency — who deserve the blame. They still have not settled on a policy or strategy for extending the Bush tax cuts. They waited until after the election, which weakened their hand. And they’ve been unable to get their members on the same page, which has kept them from messaging the issue to the country or forcing Republicans to the negotiating table.

• Imaginary exchange goes poof

  The Chicago Climate Exchange is shutting down at the end of the year.

  Nobody’s buying carbon credits.

  Right now, days go by when not a single trade is done. When trades are done, carbon dioxide sells for just five cents a ton.

  It’s over.

• CDOs: How Self-Dealing Banks Destroyed the Economy

• A Defense of the Electronic Mortgage System

  The American Securitization Forum, a trade group that lobbies for the industry that managed to convert subprime mortgages into a financial crisis, released a report on Tuesday defending how those home loans were made into bonds and more explosive financial instruments.

  The forum says that laws governing the transfer and assignment of mortgages from one owner to another are centuries old, and that they do not need “to be recorded in real property records in order for it to be a valid and binding transfer.”

• Under Attack, Fed Officials Defend Buying of Bonds

  With the Federal Reserve under attack at home and abroad, it is making an unusual public bid to keep itself away from the political crossfire.

• Spending Worries Put Jobless Benefits at Risk

  Congress is unlikely to agree to extend jobless benefits for two million unemployed workers by the time the program begins to lapse in two weeks, as lawmakers struggle with a packed lame-duck session and voter antipathy toward government spending.

• ‘Robo-Signer’ Foreclosure Scandal May Threaten Fundamental Financial Stability, Government Watchdog Warns

  The ongoing “turmoil” roiling megabanks and their faulty home foreclosure practices may represent deeper, more systemic problems regarding the origination, transfer and ownership of millions of mortgages, potentially putting Wall Street on the hook for billions of dollars in unexpected losses and threatening to undermine “the very financial stability that the Troubled Asset Relief Program was designed to protect,” a government watchdog warns in a new report.

  Recent revelations regarding mortgage companies’ use of “robo-signers” when processing foreclosure documents “may have concealed much deeper problems in the mortgage market,” according to the Tuesday report by the Congressional Oversight Panel, an office formed to keep tabs on the bailout.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Serfing the web

  Both Google and Facebook are run like absolute monarchies in which hundreds of millions of users (digital serfs, some might say) have created identities. Rather like mercantilist countries in the offline realm, both companies operate policies to protect this asset.

• Rally to protect satire, hyperbole, exaggeration, humour and flippancy on the Internet

  Ever told a joke that didn’t go down as well as you’d hoped? Paul Chambers did, but instead of just being told to get his coat, he’s been slapped with a criminal record and a £1000 fine (plus costs). We don’t think that’s funny at all.

  Jokes are a matter of taste, of course, but what’s no laughing matter is the chilling effect Paul’s conviction could have on freedom of expression online.

• Searching Your Laptop

  Federal courts have long agreed that federal agents guarding the borders do not need a warrant or probable cause to search a traveler’s belongings. That exception to the Fourth Amendment needs updating and tightening to reflect the realities of the digital age.

• In Data Portability Deathmatch, Users Lose Out

  In the last few weeks, Facebook and Google have been engaging in a public tussle over an issue that is near and dear to EFF’s heart: data portability. The crux of the issue is that when you sign up for Facebook, you can find your Gmail contacts or invite them to join the social networking service with a few quick clicks. But when you sign up for Google, Facebook prevents you from easily inviting all of your Facebook friends to Google, despite the fact that Facebook makes it easy for users to export their contacts to other services like Yahoo!.

  Earlier this month, Google altered its terms of use for API users in an attempt to push Facebook into making contacts more portable. Basically, if services (such as Facebook) aren’t willing to make contact data portable to Google, then Google will stop making Gmail contacts exportable to their sites. Somewhat ironically, Google is promoting data portability by restricting data portability.

• Peruvian Blogger Sentenced To Jail & Fined For Linking To Articles About Politician’s Past

  The Groove Tiger alerts us to the news coming out of Peru, of a blogger, Jose Alejandro Godoy, who has been sentenced to three years in jail and fined over $100,000 (Google translation of the original Spanish) for writing a blog post about a Peruvian politician, Jorge Mufarech. The post linked to various news reports of criminal charges made against Mufarech in the past, and Mufarech claimed that such links were defamatory.

• Humiliated Met police is an enemy of free speech

  It shouldn’t come as a great surprise that a powerful institution like the Metropolitan Police, wrong footed and deeply embarrassed by the student protest at Millbank on 10 November, would throw its resources into a major operation to hunt down the protesters who had humiliated them. Buoyed by the ‘shop-a-student’ campaign organised by the Daily Telegraph and the right wing blogger Guido Fawkes, there have already been more than fifty arrests.

• Location-Based Services: Time For A Privacy Check-In

  Need to get directions when you are lost? Want to know if your friends are in the neighborhood? Location-based services—applications and websites that provide services based on your current location—can put this information and more in the palm of your hand. But navigating the complex web of privacy policies and settings for these services can be far more difficult.

  That’s why the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) has released Location Based Services: Time for a Privacy Check-In, a guide [pdf] outlining privacy considerations for mobile location-based services, and a side-by-side comparison of six popular social location-based services (Foursquare, Facebook Places, Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter and Loopt).

• Stop the Internet Blacklist!

  Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block. (The first vote is scheduled Thursday, November 18!)

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Reverse Engineering the Kinect: The Street Starts to Find Uses for Microsoft’s New Gaming Device

  Microsoft’s initial response was to rattle its sword. A Microsoft spokesperson told CNET, “With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

  Microsoft should keep its sword in its scabbard. The Kinect technology is getting rave reviews and generating a real buzz. Microsoft could blow all of this goodwill if it tries to shut down independent innovation around the Kinect, as Sony learned when it tried to shut down innovation around the Aibo. Fans were so outraged that Sony was ultimately spurred to release a programmers kit for it. Microsoft should learn from Sony’s experience and embrace its role as the creator of a new platform for innovation by supporting efforts like those of AdaFruit and hacker Hector Martin—after all, every hacker and every user of a hacked Kinect will have to buy the technology first.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Monster Cable Gets Classifieds Search Engine Taken Down With Bogus DMCA Notice

    Of course, even more disturbing is the fact that GoDaddy, the registrar for Jaxed, immediately pulled down the entire Jaxed site, over what seems like a clearly bogus DMCA notice. You would hope that a company like GoDaddy wouldn’t be quite so quick to pull the trigger. It’s also pretty weak that Monster Cable apparently went straight to GoDaddy, rather than complaining to Jaxed first (at which point, Jaxed could explain that they were just a search engine). Unfortunately, we’ve been seeing more and more examples of companies going straight to domain registrars with their takedown notices.

  • Hollywood’s Strategy For The Future: Pretending The Government Can Save Them

    A few weeks back, I went to Hollywood to appear on a panel for the Filmmaker Forum event, all about “piracy.” You can see a short clip of the panel here. One of the panelists was Kevin Suh, who has the title “VP of Content Protection” at the MPAA. Of course, just the fact that the MPAA has a position that involves “content protection” suggests that there’s a pretty big problem with how the MPAA views where the market is heading (hint: protectionism is not going to get you very far). Kevin was extremely nice — and we had quite a pleasant conversation prior to the panel. But, at one point, he made some assertions (not in the video) that seemed odd to me. First, he went on and on about how much money these new “digital locker” sites make, and then in the very next sentence said that Hollywood couldn’t offer a competing service because it would make no money.

    At one point, I challenged him on the idea that taking down these sites was effective, and he insisted that the sites that were taken down had stayed down, and no others had stepped up to take their place. While I don’t follow these sites all that closely, I’d already seen that this wasn’t true, as lots of our users like to send in tips about new sites popping up (or where those “downed” sites reappeared). And, in fact, the press is noting that at least one of the sites taken down went right back up days later.

  • The Sound of Silence

    As a supporter of the Royal British Legion (and an ex-serviceman myself) I’m pleased to see the RBL finding new and innovative ways of raising money. This year they have taken the novel step of releasing a single of the Two Minutes’ Silence. You can see a short excerpt from the video here.

  • Letter from featured superhero Gautam John of Pratham Books

    We now use Creative Commons licenses everywhere! We license entire books under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses, we license our illustrations similarly and even photographs and other publicity material too. Over the last year we have been building the foundations for a social publishing model – where we curate communities that are passionate about reading and help us create content. Such a model rests on the idea of a participatory culture and an essential ingredient is a permissive licensing strategy – Creative Commons licenses offers us this, a large community with shared values and an ecosystem to tap in to.

  • True Or False? The Latest Stat: Less Than 30,000 Artists Are Actually Earning a Living

    Digital Music News published and article titled The Latest Stat: Less Than 30,000 Artists Are Actually Earning a Living… which has been causing a lot of excitement. The problem is, that the people discussing the article don’t appear to have actually read it, or if they did read it, they did so while asleep, because they’ve managed to get everything wrong. Let’s take a look at what was actually written, and what it really means.

    [...]

    OK, so the original article got you all excited. As I’ve demonstrated above, without further numbers, the original is effectively useless. Things might be worse, but they might be better too, and we just don’t know.

  • Lawful Access Bills Would Reshape Internet in Canada

    The push for new Internet surveillance capabilities goes back to 1999, when government officials began crafting proposals to institute new surveillance technologies within Canadian networks along with additional legal powers to access surveillance and subscriber information. The so-called lawful access initiatives stalled in recent years, but my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that earlier this month the government tabled its latest proposal with three bills (C-50, C-51, C-52) that received only limited attention despite their potential to fundamentally reshape the Internet in Canada.

  • New Big Brother Laws Would Reshape Canada’s Internet

    The push for new Internet surveillance capabilities goes back to 1999, when government officials began crafting proposals to institute new surveillance technologies within Canadian networks along with additional legal powers to access surveillance and subscriber information. The so-called lawful access initiatives stalled in recent years, but earlier this month the government tabled its latest proposal with three bills that received only limited attention despite their potential to fundamentally reshape the Internet in Canada.

    The bills contain a three-pronged approach focused on information disclosure, mandated surveillance technologies, and new police powers.

  • Bill would nuke Visa cards, Adwords, DNS records for pirates

    Watch out Google, Visa, and the domain name system—Congress has all of you in its sights.

    Now that the midterm elections in the US are over, the Senate this week will again take up S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The bill allows the US Attorney General to target “Internet sites dedicated to infringing activities” both inside and outside the country, obtaining a court-ordered injunction against them if they have “no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than” sharing copyrighted files without authorization.

  • ACTA

    • ACTA to bypass unfinished EU copyright row

      European negotiators of an international anti-piracy treaty are rewriting EU laws on copyright infringement, bypassing an unfinished row in the EU over Internet providers’ role in piracy cases, according to industry lobbyists in Brussels.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • Conor Lenihan, Irish Politician Admits That He Is Bought And Paid For

      Translation:

      My friends and suppliers of campaign fund donations asked me to help them. After Mr. Justice Charleton’s made his unfortunate decision, I tried to use my position to force the Internet Service Providers and the Telecommunications Companies to help my friends. They refused to accept the path my friends had suggested.

      We are not French, and we are definitely not those damnable British. So I’m going to do the Irish thing and threaten the Internet Service Providers. If they cannot come up with a plan that my friends like, I will use my power as Minister to introduce legislation that will force them to do so. I have tried my best to help my friends, and anyone who get’s in my friend’s way shall pay the price.