08.31.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Linux is also innately more secure than Windows is, whether on the server, the desktop or in an embedded environment. That’s due largely to the fact that Linux, which is based on Unix, was designed from the start to be a multiuser operating system. Only the administrator, or root user, has administrative privileges, and fewer users and applications have permission to access the kernel or each other. That keeps everything modular and protected.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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streamtuner2 Live internet radio browser for Linux
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Version 1.4.0 of Chocolate Doom was released recently; the project aims to replicate the behavior of the original DOS DOOM releases. I’m a bit of a DOOM purist, so this is the source port I use when I want to play single player.
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Gentoo Family
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David: Currently we host condor.gentoo.org, corvid.gentoo.org, and pigeon.gentoo.org. Gentoo is widely used on our network between internal servers and client servers! Match made in heaven =)
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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My overall opinion of PCLinuxOS Xfce is that it works, but has a lot of rough edges. I would not call it a polished release by any stretch of the imaginatioon. At the moment, I rate XUbuntu as a better distro for Xfce. I am not through testing, and am looking forward to testing Linux Mint 9 Xfce, and openSUSE 11.3 with Xfce as the default desktop. Fedora 13 already failed the test, as I could not login with Xfce as the only desktop installed. I am looking for other suggestions.
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Red Hat Family
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Earlier this month, for instance, Linux vendor Red Hat announced a new Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) offering. With ELS, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is extending its seven years of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for an additional three years, to a maximum of 10 years of total support.
In Red Hat’s case, the ELS offering comes as RHEL 3 approaches its end-of-life later this year — a potentially critical event for enterprises still relying on the OS, which debuted in October 2003.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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I am very excited by Peppermint OS. It shows that with only a little work and ingenuity you can make something very different and yet usable.
There are limitations to the technology though, and for your grandma sitting at home there are more practical solutions. For the more tech savvy out and about kind of person who wants to have an online document repository that he can use across operating systems Peppermint OS is a very cool choice.
Because we do not need the cloud app support in our house this one will not go to Elzje or Gramma for daily use.
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Wind River has launched a new community site for Wind River Linux customers, engineers, and embedded Linux community experts. The Wind River Developer Community for Linux is designed as a collaborative site where Wind River Linux users can ask and answer questions using a point rewards system, the company says.
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Tablets
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Japanese reseller Redstar has begun taking pre-orders for an ARM11-based 10.1-inch tablet computer from RealEase that runs the new Shogo Linux distro. The Shogo Tablet runs on a 533MHz Freescale i.MX37 system-on-chip (SoC) with 256MB RAM and 4GB flash, and offers a 1024 × 600 capacitive display, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, plus 3G and Zigbee options, says RealEase.
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Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In the first half of September 2010 Mozilla will deliver a new Beta development milestone of Firefox 4.0 which will contain the same features as the final version of the next major iteration of the open source browser.
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Mozilla has recently released the fourth beta of the Firefox 4 browser. I have been testing it since the first beta and I am happy to see the progress and the addition of new features with each beta. I have held on the review of Firefox 4 because most of the features are still unstable or not in place. With the release of beta 4, things are becoming more stable and plenty of new (and revolutionary) features are added to it, so it would be a great time to do up a review. There will probably be another one or two more beta before we see the release candidate and the final version.
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Healthcare
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An international team of software developers specialising in medical systems is working on a hospital information system. Earlier this month on the OSOR Forge, the project began soliciting others to join the team. “If you are willing to participate of this great community, there are plenty of things to be done, from translation, quality control, adding new functionality to localization.”
The developers, including specialists from Brazil, Germany, Greece and France, aim to build a system for managing electronic medical records, manage hospital information and health information. Services include prescriptions, billing, patient information, managing epidemiological and statistical data and management of medical stock. The entire project is published using the GNU GPL open source licence.
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Solaris
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On paper, StormOS is an excellent technological concept: it is based on Nexenta, which itself is based on Solaris, and packaged with Ubuntu user-land and package management system. In theory, you get Ubuntu-like behavior on top of a UNIX kernel. Sounds like a healthy marriage.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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For better or worse, I can think of no other single tool whose development would do more to give GNU/Linux parity on the desktop. You can tell the priority that many groups in the community place on Gnash from the fact that Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE
Still, the Gnash project has announced this milestone before. In 2007, Gnash announced compatibility with Youtube videos — only to have the goal posts moved by the site’s decision to standardize on a more recent version of Flash. In 2008, Gnash could, in fact, handle Youtube videos, but not small bits of Flash on sites like WordPress, where it is used to give a graphical representation of page hits. So, I was prepared to be disappointed.
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On September 18, it is international Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day aims to celebrate Free Software and the people behind it. It wants to spread the word about Free Software and help people find each other.
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Government
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When big UK government IT-related projects have failed, people have asked: how could such basic mistakes be made and repeated? In some cases it was because of what in the US is called – and I apologise for repeating such a grotesque phrase – the “normalization of deviancy”.
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The European Union’s open source licence, (European Union Public Licence, EUPL) is being used more and more. A third of the projects available on the European Commission’s software development site, the OSOR Forge, 47 out of 147 projects, are published using the EUPL. On Sourceforge, a commercial venture for open source software development based in the US, the licence is now selected by 49 projects. One year ago there were non.
The EUPL was written to be used for distributing open source software applications built for or by the European Commission. No wonder that on the OSOR Forge, many of the projects using the EUPL are published by European Commission and the EU’s member states.
The EUPL was reviewed favourably last month in a document on copyright an licences French Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts and the Civil Service. “The EUPL can be used and produced, in the framework of some litigation, in courts and administrations of numerous EU member states, without the obligation or the risk to call upon a sworn translator. The EUPL is also compliant with the European Member States laws.”
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A UK government’s decicion to use ODF (Open Document Format) for its electronic documents, would help public administrations overcome vendor lock-in for office applications, says Liam Maxwell, councillor for Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead. He says the move will start the process to the billions of savings that British government needs to find in unproductive areas of spending.
According to Maxwell, the borough wants to start using OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools on many of its 1400 workstations. It also wants to increase the use of free Internet-based office tools. “We are slowly moving our councillors over to use Google-docs.”
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Diara, an open source application allowing public administrations to us the Internet to organise polls, referendums, petitions, public inquiries and allowing to record electronic votes using electronic ID cards, is developed with support from the city of Tallin and the College of Technology in Estonia.
A first version of Diara was made available at the OSOR Forge, the OSOR’s software development website last week. Says Hillar Põldmaa, one of the developers, Diara: “We just finished the registration, and we are now starting to upload the code of the application, including the English documentation.” The Estonian version is already available on Google’s forge.
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Openness/Sharing
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The point being: for a long time I’ve been aware of the commons narrative in regard to ideas and for a long time I’ve thought of something as old as patent law as being among the methods we’ve devised for moving potentially private knowledge into the public sphere.
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Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.
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For about an hour on Friday, about 1 to 2 percent of the Internet went higgly-piggly.
The confusion was caused when a major Internet registry — known as Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) — inserted additional information into the database entries used by routers to direct data packets to the correct destinations. The addition, which was part of its research into Internet infrastructure, complied with standards, but many routers — including those made by Cisco — could not handle the change, said a representative for the registry in a statement published Friday.
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Science
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One of paleontology’s most revered fossil sites now has a baby brother. Scientists have discovered a group of astonishing fossils high in the Canadian Rockies, just 40 kilometers from the famous Burgess Shale location.
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Until now, paleontologists had thought one reason the Burgess fossils were so well preserved was because they settled in thick deposits at the bottom of an ancient ocean protected by a submarine cliff. But the Stanley Glacier fossils weren’t formed in the presence of such a cliff, suggesting that creatures can be fossilized in amazing detail in other environments.
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Security/Aggression
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AN innocent man was thrown in jail for three months – because he was carrying a rose.
Cops viewing CCTV thought the single rose Stephen McAleer had in his hand as he walked home was a knife.
He was arrested and sent to Barlinnie Jail on remand. And 28-year-old Stephen’s prison ordeal only ended when he was cleared at a two-day trial this week.
A CCTV expert enhanced the images and testified that the item he was carrying was a rose in a plastic sleeve, which tapers to a knife-like point at the end of the stem.
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Dozens of Israeli actors, playwrights and directors have signed a letter refusing to take part in productions by leading theatre companies at a new cultural centre in a West Bank settlement, prompting renewed debate over the legitimacy of artistic boycott.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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If a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, then an advocate of government intervention in the economy is nothing more than a free market believer who just realized that China dominates an industry with major implications for national defense and renewable energy technology.
That’s the primary conclusion to be gleaned from a review of three recent studies of Chinese dominance of rare earth element mining and processing, “Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain,” a report published by the Congressional Research Service in July, the Government Accountability Office’s “Rare Earth Materials in the Defense Supply Chain,” published in April, and China’s Rare Earth Elements Industry: What Can the West Learn?” published by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in March.
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Finance
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For some Americans, the fog of disbelief surrounding the nation’s epiphany has begun to lift, with many building new lives free from the illusion of money.
“It’s back to basics for me,” Bernard Polk of Waverly, OH said. “I’m going to till the soil for my own sustenance and get anything else I need by bartering. If I want milk, I’ll pay for it in tomatoes. If need a new hoe, I’ll pay for it in lettuce.”
When asked, hypothetically, how he would pay for complicated life-saving surgery for a loved one, Polk seemed uncertain.
“That’s a lot of vegetables, isn’t it?” he said.
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Goldman Sachs is target No. 1 for activist investors looking to shake up corporate boards now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has made it easier for shareholders to nominate directors.
Corporate governance activists are looking to replace Goldman directors at the firm’s annual meeting next spring unless the board strips Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein of his position as chairman.
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Goldman Sachs’ largest investor slashed its stake by more than half in the last quarter as the bank contended with civil fraud charges by US securities regulators and brutal market conditions that crimped its results.
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Goldman Sachs last month disclosed that its profits had slumped 82 percent in the second quarter when the company was hit by a massive US fraud settlement and a new British tax on bonuses.
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Prior to working at Neuberger Berman, Walker was a partner at Goldman Sachs ( GS – news – people ) and part of the company’s partnership committee.
Walker is on the Mayor’s Board for New York City as well as the board of directors of Local Initiatives Support Cooperation. He is also the vice chair of the board of trustees of The New School.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Rotenberg responds that individuals really can’t do much in response, and uses the example of Google Buzz’s privacy screwup as an example. But, the response to that sort of proves Harper’s point rather than Rotenberg’s. Right after Google screwed up with the Buzz launch, in a manner that caused serious privacy concerns, the public and the press responded within hours, calling out Google for what it had done, and forcing Google to backtrack almost immediately and admit that it had screwed up. What more could the government have done? If it was solely up to the government, there would have been a months (years?) long investigation, and finally some sort of wrist-slap and a fine. The public response to Google’s misstep and the concerns that raised among many people about their privacy in using Google seemed to function fine, and should (one hopes) cause Google to think a lot more carefully before making a similar mistake in the future.
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One of the odors emanating from Washington, D.C., these days is from journalists marking their territory.
Whatever awkwardness previously existed as journalists desiring a federal shield law wooed the legislators they’re supposed to be watching, it’s now worse. In recent weeks, the two groups have publicly joined forces to exclude WikiLeaks from possible protection under the bill. In doing so, journalists have managed both to look territorial and to endanger the independence they’re striving to create.
On Aug. 4, Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate sponsor of the Free Flow of Information Act, announced that he intended to include in the proposed law new language specifying that WikiLeaks and organizations like it would not be able to use the act to protect the identities of confidential sources.
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As comforting as it might be to “real” journalists to incorporate editorial oversight into a shield law and to use it to distinguish further between the “us” who are entitled to the law’s protections and the “them” who are not, at least two dangers exist in that approach.
First, does anyone — including the most mainstream of traditional journalists — really think it a good idea that Congress and judges define, analyze and evaluate what is appropriate “editorial oversight”? For decades, news organizations have struggled to resist those efforts in libel cases and, so far, those struggles have succeeded. If those same organizations now invite legislators and judges into their newsrooms to see how worthy their reporters are of protection under a shield law, they shouldn’t be surprised if the legislators and judges decide to stay.
Second, is the free flow of information really served if the act’s protections are denied to those who don’t have or practice editorial oversight? As Schumer acknowledged in his statement, the act already contains language that would limit or deny protection to those who provide or publish classified military secrets. Specifically exempting WikiLeaks and other organizations that might otherwise qualify for protection under the act in at least some cases seems designed not to enhance the free flow of information but to channel that information to mainstream sources.
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The release of the Afghan War Diaries on Wikileaks, with stories published in The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel by agreement with Wikileaks, has made news around the world. Le Monde Diplomatique, in conjunction with Owni and Slate.fr, have also made the documents available online via a dedicated website. The security implications of the leaked material will be discussed for years to come. Meanwhile the release of over 90,000 documents has generated debate on the rising power of digital journalism and social media. Many of the discussions are rooted in what I call internet or digital myths — myths which are rooted in romantic, deterministic notions of technology.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Canada’s largest telecom companies must provide to resellers the same Internet speeds that they provide to their own consumers – which are often prioritized and faster, the federal regulator said Monday.
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The CRTC is sticking to its guns and ordering big phone network owners such as Bell and Telus to offer smaller wholesale companies higher internet speeds, despite previous disagreement from the government.
Network owners will be required to offer whatever internet speeds they themselves sell to retail customers to smaller companies that rent portions of their networks, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission affirmed Monday. The requirement is necessary to maintain competition and reasonable prices for broadband services, the regulator said.
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Independent television producers have vowed to block making BBC iPlayer accessible to UK license payers whilst abroad, just hours after BBC director-general Mark Thompson announced the intention.
“This has not been agreed with the BBC and we will resist this,” John McVay, CEO of the sector’s trade group Pact, told paidContent:UK.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The anonymous poem above was written in protest at the enclosure of common land in England – the process of converting the commons to private property and handing it over to a single proprietor. In two rhyming couplets, the poet managed to sum up the massive resentment felt by the commoners, resentment that has found eloquent expression over the last 500 years at the hands of writers as diverse as St Thomas More and Karl Polanyi.
Economists have told a very different story, however. With a few significant recent exceptions, they portrayed the process of enclosure as benign. Private property avoided the “tragedies of the commons” such as underinvestment and overuse. Thus it allowed an expansion of productive capacity that produced more social wealth – even if unevenly distributed – and helped feed more people. Enclosure, in this story, was a triumph; getting unproductive common resources back into the engine of the market.
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Copyrights
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Consider the lawsuit which forced Internet Service Providers to block The Pirate Bay in Italy. It’s the equivalent of blocking your neighbor’s lane by flooding it, so that he can’t deliver his harvest to market, leaving all of the sales to you, and allowing you to raise your prices to the maximum the market will bear.
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Mark’s speech reminded everyone that copyright was invented to limit the amount of time that a family or estate could lay claim to an idea after the death of that idea’s creator. That it was not created to protect the creator or ensure that their family line could forever control their intellectual property. He suggested that contributing to the greater culture is something artists should consider as important (maybe more important) than making a living as an artist. And then he made the boldest statement of the evening by suggesting that the file-sharing genie was out of the bottle and rather than spend fruitless hours trying to get it back in, we should all just stop being afraid of this new culture and instead embrace it and try to harness its power.
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The Peer 2 Peer University, more commonly known now as P2PU by a growing community of self-learners, educators, journalists, and web developers, launches its third round of courses today, opening sign-ups for “courses dealing in subject areas ranging from Collaborative Lesson Planning to Manifestations of Human Trafficking.”
P2PU is simultaneously launching its School of Webcraft, which is a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and “is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.”
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There are tens of thousands of people out there receiving letters from lawyers which demand payments to make potential copyright infringement lawsuits go away. Those wrongfully accused have been fighting back in a number of ways, and not without success. Now a team of lawyers is offering to coordinate a group action, with the aim of gathering compensation for victims through harassment claims.
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Don’t weep for the movie biz. While still concerned about camcording and P2P piracy, the industry has been hauling in the cash at the box office. 2007, 2008, and 2009 all set new historic highs for movie theater revenue in the US and Canada, and 2010 looks poised to do even bigger business.
“Theater owners have gotten away with the biggest year-to-year increases in ticket prices ever,” says Hollywood-focused publication The Wrap, “with average admission costs spiraling upward more than 40 cents in 2010, or over 5 percent.”
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ACTA
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The ghostly spectre of the Telecoms Package that has stood behind ACTA, is becoming more clearly discernible. And a devious PR move by the ACTA negotiators is bad news for Internet users.
Following the Washington meeting of the ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) negotiators in August, it is now emerging that the requirement for secondary liability on ISPs could be dropped. Apparently, this is at the request of the US.
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It’s been said that “all good things must come to an end.” That phrase certainly holds true now. It seems like it’s only been a month since the changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) were passed by Congress, allowing us to jailbreak our phones as well as other things that should have always been part of our rights as consumers. No longer could we be told what we could or could not do with our own property. However that brief reprise has basically come to an end thanks to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Now on the surface ACTA actually doesn’t sound like a bad idea. At it’s core its an international institution similar to but seperate from organizations like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. It’s purpose, “to establish international standards on intellectual property rights enforcements.” Which in itself isn’t such a bad thing, the U.S. alone loses around $200 billion each year as a result of the fake goods being traded on the global scale and plenty of artists have had their work stolen and used for profit without any hope for legal action. The problem however comes with semantics, and what’s being specified as intellectual theft in this agreement.
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It’s blatantly obvious that our privacy and freedom is at stake but what else is actually being threatened? Below we have compiled a very surprising list.
1. Your Privacy – Think going through the airport is violating now? Wait until they search EVERYTHING you own for pirated data. And we haven’t even gotten to ISPs being required to monitor ALL of your online activities in order to enforce these laws, since they will be responsible for “allowing” you to download not-so-legal things.
2. Your Money – You’re ISP watching you is more work for them. So they will charge you for it (and those nasty little legal fees they incur when you download illegal things or someone sues them for violating their no-longer existent rights.)
3. Your Health – How can that happen? Well generic drugs are contraband under ACTA. So increase that insurance premium (assuming you have insurance, if you don’t just don’t get sick) and if you happen to be traveling with your medication… try not to die when they confiscate it.
4. Your Video Quality – Under ACTA free and open source media software such as VLC, MPC & the CCCP project would be illegal since all purchased media must be DRMed (any non-purchased media must be piracy) and open source software can’t use DRM technology.
5. Your Freedom – ACTA gives governments and ISPs the right to block websites deemed “unsuitable” (a word that isn’t defined in the agreement). That opens the doors to your government acting like China and banning anything they don’t want you to see. (Note: There is no YouTube, Facebook, Blogspot in China.)
Firefox 4 Beta 4 Panorama
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08.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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My advice? Don’t dual-boot. If you need to run that other OS, do so in a virtual machine so that it can clobber its virtual boot-loader and not yours. VirtualBox makes this very easy and you get the added benefit that you can run both OS simultaneously without having to re-re-reboot.
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Those in the list are not PC-bound issues, but OS problems. The press should start reporting them as what they really are: the intrinsic flaws of Windows, not of PCs. My Mandriva desktop has none of those. Nor does my Mandriva netbook. As far as I have heard, the other members of the Linux family (Mepis , Pardus, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Sabayon, Arch, and the rest) that run on PCs stand solid against viruses.
However, before you migrate to Linux, you must know that, as in any change of OS, a successful migration depends on intelligent choices and understanding of the situation.
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You can be assured that no matter how many people around you are using Linux, your computer is a reflection of yourself and not of some faceless marketing mogul. This is because Linux is open source and open source is all about freedom. Freedom is choice and anything which tries to limit our choice is trying to reduce our freedom.
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Kernel Space
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For those not familiar with the GPL-licensed Linux FUSE module, it is a Linux kernel module that has been living within the mainline kernel since the Linux 2.6.14 release and it allows non-privileged users to create their own file-systems in user-space with the FUSE module then providing a bridge to interface with the Linux kernel. FUSE is also available for BSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X operating systems too. With FUSE file-systems living in user-space, they do not need to comply with the GNU GPL since only the FUSE module is loaded against the Linux kernel, but there is an overhead associated with this approach. Besides ZFS-FUSE, there are dozens of other FUSE file-systems including ClamFS, httpFS, ChunkFS, vmware-mount, and GnomeVFS2 FUSE. The most recent release of ZFS-FUSE is version 0.6.9 and is based upon Zpool version 23 (much better than Zpool 18 being used by LLNL/KQ Infotech at this time, with post-18 revisions adding features like de-duplication support) and supports NFS sharing, PowerPC architecture, a multi-threaded ioctl handler, and other improvements. ZFS 0.7.0 is the release presently under development and is expected for release in early October. For our testing of ZFS-FUSE, we used both the latest stable 0.6.9 release and a 0.7.0 Git snapshot as of their latest official code in their Git repository as of 2010-08-28.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. The project is highly ambitious, involving state-of-the-art 3D graphics, detailed artwork, sound, and a flexible and powerful custom-built game engine.
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We at Frictional Games are happy to announce that Amnesia: The Dark Descent has gone gold. We are extremely pleased with our creation and cannot wait to unleash our bundle of madness on the 8th of September. We feel that we have taken a giant leap forward compared to our previous games, the Penumbra series.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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There are several ways of being part of the KDE game: you can develop, translate, be an artist, help users, take care of our infrastructure, organize developer sprints. A lot of ways right? But some people just lack the time to join the game in any of the areas that I just listed but still want to contribute in some way to the project.
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And you? What are you waiting for? Help KDE and be part of it: Join the Game!
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The above combination was never a painless experience, still at some point in past it seemed to be better to have a NVidia card on Linux then anything else, so I continued to buy them whenever my system was upgraded. Lately although it started to make me rather bad.
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Reviews
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Of the three distributions mentioned here, I don’t think any of them are likely to become mainstream in the Linux community. Puppy is well established in its niche and seems happy there. The Me-OS project, I feel, has some potential if the developer can keep up with the work which goes into maintaining a distro. Like Puppy, Me-OS is taking a slightly different path and it’ll be interesting to see where they end up. ImagineOS felt like the odd one out of these three. It doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, I didn’t find anything in its approach to be eye-catching. It sits on a strong Slackware base, but I think the project needs to add something if it wants to attract new members.
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Today I want to talk about a specialist Linux distro which has saved me from pretty nasty situations more than once, Parted Magic 5.3. I believe that the best introduction to this fabulous distro is its feature list (extracted from the Parted Magic Official SITE).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) traded in a range yesterday that spanned from a low of $34.25 to a high of $35.27.
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“I’d love to have iContact based here 25 years from now, to be the next Red Hat,” referring to the publicly traded Raleigh software company.
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The managing board of enterprise open-source software company Red Hat has elected a retired U.S. Army officer, General Henry Hugh Shelton, to serve as chairman, the company announced Monday. Shelton takes the place of Matthew Szulik, who was the former CEO of Red Hat.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Creating the default wall paper for Ubuntu is not an easy task. No matter the outcome there will be some who like it and others who won’t.
So why does it matter? Throw something together and call it good.
The answer is the default wall paper in many cases is the first expression of quality. To illustrate; if I am viewing a high quality automobile but hate the color or some other design detail what impression do I walk away with?
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As many of you know, I tend to be the first to criticize anything in this community of people who are often afraid to voice their opinion about something. This time, however, I’m not going to do the talking, I’m just going to share some comments.
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This month we begin using the new Ubuntu font and a new FCM logo created by Thorsten Wilms!
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 14, Virtualize Part 3 – OpenSolaris, and ADSL Modem As A Switch.
* Review – SOFA Statistics.
* Top 5 – Favourite Apps.
* plus: MOTU Interview, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and now with all new LoCo and Translation Team interviews!
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A story I share at every Ubuntu Developer Summit is that when I started working as the Ubuntu Community Manager I got a lovely email from a kid in Africa who would walk two hours to his local town where he would spend his own money to buy Internet time in an Internet cafe to contribute to Ubuntu and then walk two hours back home. This story was powerful to me. It told me that my job is to help that guy get the most out of his hour, to justify his investment of energy and expense to just get involved in the first place. His story was inspiring, encouraging, and an impressive example of commitment. I always share this story at UDS as an inspiration for us to get the most out of each one-hour session.
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Phones
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Android
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Incredibly, I got the incredible** chance to review the Droid Incredible and see if it lives up to its reputation of incredibility of putting out incredible video, picture quality, sound and more. I was incredulous, so you will see how the Incredible fared by after my incredible amount of video scrutiny. Incredible!
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Sub-notebooks
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Haiti Partners participated in a pilot with Waveplace and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) of 200 xo laptops in April and May of this year. Last week I (John Engle) visited with about 20 students from our various partner schools to see how they’re progressing. Respecting one of OLPC’s principles, all students in our partner schools keep the laptops so that they can continue learning.
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If open source folks know anything, and they do, it’s how to build tools that enable collaborative development. Case in point: ticketing and issue tracking systems. If your shop needs a reliable, flexible, and scalable ticketing system take a look at Bugzilla, Request Tracker (RT), or Trac to find the best tool to keep your projects on track.
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Michael Tiemann is the brain behind Cygnus, the first company to offer support to Linux and other assorted Free Software programs. He is now involved in open source ‘affairs’ at the OSI. Swapnil Bhartiya discusses the past, present and the future with Tiemann in this exclusive interview.
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Oracle OOo
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My best wishes to all my friends attending the OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest this week.
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The installation is painless…now the true test will be time. If the end-users can get used to a different office suite to handle their templates. But ultimately what this little experience taught me was that as much as people like to claim how cheap the TCO of MS products are to business, there is always a situation that begs to smack that assumption upside the face. This was one of those. Not many business have 10,000 dollars to drop on a software update – especially one that will only serve to solve a printing issue. Yes the printing was a critical aspect of the users’ jobs, but not enough to force the hand to upgrading to Office 2007 on terminal server.
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CMS
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A few days ago, we noted that Diaspora was three weeks away from unveiling their open-source Facebook alternative. But a small update today clarifies one important point. On September 15, Diaspora will release the open source code for the project. But it won’t be until October that the first consumer-facing alpha is available.
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The Drupal community has notched up another win with the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) joining the ranks of organisations implementing the open source content management system (CMS) for its web presence.
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Project Releases
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Rails 3.0 has been underway for a good two years, so it’s with immense pleasure that we can declare it’s finally here. We’ve brought the work of more than 1,600 contributors together to make everything better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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A while back I listed 10 of the most promising real world Open Source projects on this blog, and today I want to add one more contender to that list: Apertus, an Open Source cinema camera project.
Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce “an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment”. Let’s take a quick tour of the hardware and software components that constitute Apertus, before moving on to address some concerns about the overall viability of the project.
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Programming
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Of course, as Luke Welling, Web Team Lead at Message Systems, a digital messaging management company and co-author of the “Bible” of commercial PHP/MySQL programming, PHP and MySQL Web Development, pointed out at an OSCON seminar in Portland, OR, that’s true of many corporate programming projects.
So what can you, as IT management, do about this? Well, for starters, Welling suggested that managers fight the attitude that sloppy programming is acceptable because IT can always “throw more and faster processors” at any performance problem. Sometimes, you can’t fix performance problems with hardware. You need to convince developers and their team leaders that writing to the minimum hardware requirements, rather than the maximum, is the smart thing to do.
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Standards/Consortia
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The other issue to keep in mind are the “Hollywood” interests. They saw what an open format like MP3 did to their music buddies and are not interested in that kind of disruption. People who own movies and TV are going to want as much DRM as possible, and new video formats that don’t satisfy those requirements are going to be tough to spread. Sure, there’s piracy, but once Hollywood gets it’s act together and figures out a Netflix/Hulu model, I think most people will pay. Most people already pay $80+ a month for cable which a bunch of crap no one wants to watch, so there’s a tolerance for a subscription budget, esp. if it’s for shows you actually want to watch.
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It was just earlier this month that we were talking about Lightspark now rendering faster and supporting H263/MP3 video when the first Lightspark 0.4.3 release candidate was made available. This open-source project that only reached beta in May aims to provide a completely free software implementation of Adobe’s Flash/SWF specification, continues to advance rapidly. Lightspark 0.4.3 was already released and this morning the 0.4.4 release has even made it out the door.
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You’ve been extremely helpful, so bugger off: What started out as a routine study of group behavior ended up turning a bit surreal. According to the authors of a new paper, they started out trying to find out how long a group would tolerate members that abused the common good. In the process, they found that members who put the most into the common good were quickly expelled from the group. Not entirely believing it, they replicated the findings—twice. Some of the hate comes from the overly officious group members, who viewed those who gave more than they needed to as breaking the rules. But some of it also comes from people who think that altruistic behavior like this simply raises expectations unnecessarily.
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Bergen County, N.J., Superior Court Judge Ellen Koblitz doesn’t seem too worried about sparing the reputations of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Lowenstein Sandler. In June, you’ll recall, she found that the two firms had filed a frivolous suit on behalf of billionaire Ronald Perelman in a family dispute over hundreds of millions of dollars. On Friday she issued a final opinion (pdf), rejecting the firms’ arguments for mercy and ordering them to pay $1.96 million in legal fees to the defendants, Perelman’s former father-in-law and brother-in-law.
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U.S. H-1B, L-1 visa reform under a new border security appropriations act also discriminates against offshore outsourcing providers, critics and advocates alike say, as it penalizes Indian IT service providers while ignoring US IT service providers who are also heavy users of H-1Bs like IBM, Accenture and UST Global.
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Conrad Black’s ongoing legal fight in the United States has attracted considerable attention in Canada, yet my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) there is a side courtroom battle at home over alleged defamatory content on the Internet that merits closer attention. The case, named Black v. Breeden, involves postings such as press releases and reports on the Hollinger International, Inc. website that Black claims were defamatory. Several Ontario media organizations published the allegations contained in those releases.
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For going to court with an argument referenced from Wikipedia, the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal to reverse a decision nullifying a couple’s 19-year marriage on the ground of psychological incapacity.
“The Republic, with all the resources and manpower at its disposal, has all the means with which to counter the expert testimony offered by [the ex-wife]. Most certainly, the Republic has access to government institutions, i.e., National Center for Mental Health, which has qualified psychiatric experts whose opinion it could have sought to evaluate [the woman] and her spouse,” the Court of Appeals special 15th division said in a 13-page decision.
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Late last week, there were a ton of press reports about how Blockbuster was preparing to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September. It’s not shutting down, but just trying to restructure its debt, get out from under a bunch of store leases and try, try again. That said, this is yet another example of the fallacy of the claim of many that if you have a good idea some big company will just come along, copy it, and be successful. It also demonstrates the huge difference between idea and execution.
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Vivian Schiller, president and chief executive of NPR, came to the public-radio organization in 2009 after 25 years in media, including stints at NYTimes.com and CNN. She talked with Kara Swisher about the rise of Internet radio, getting programs on Apple Inc.’s iPad and forming partnerships with other nonprofit news organizations. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.
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This wouldn’t be the first brush with big cap tech interest, as Skype had been operating under eBay’s (EBAY) ownership from 2005 to 2009. eBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion and sold most of the company at an estimated valuation of $2.75 billion to a group of private equity investors in 2009. Ebay, to this date, maintains a 35% ownership interest.
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Don’t you love that remarkable moment when roSenQatlh and ghIlDenSten exit the stage and Khamlet is left alone to deliver the immortal words: “baQa’, Qovpatlh, toy’wl”a’ qal je jIH”?
No? Well, it always kills on Kronos. That’s the home planet of the Klingons, the hostile race that antagonizes the Federation heroes of “Star Trek.” We learned back in ’91 in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” that the Klingons love them some Shakespeare. Or as he’s known to his ridged-foreheaded devotees in the space-alien community: Wil’yam Shex’pir.
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Science
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Those of you who have spent time staring at a periodic table are undoubtedly aware of the large insertions that are typically stuck below the chart, since they’d make the table unreasonably wide otherwise. The top of these two rows is typically called the Lanthanide series, and it contains the rare earth metals, like dysprosium, holmium, and praseodymium. Although these exotic-sounding metals find their way into displays and lasers, they’re primarily notable for their use in powerful magnets that appear in everything from electric motors to disk drives. And, according to a new Congressional analysis posted by the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, the world is using them up faster than it can produce them.
The report itself doesn’t really have much information that couldn’t be obtained elsewhere, but it puts it all together in a very readable package. Right now, we’re using about 134,000 tons of rare earth metals a year, but mining only 124,000 tons; the difference is made up using ore stocks that have been mined but not yet processed.
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Health/Nutrition
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Responding to a court order issued a week ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this morning ordered intramural researchers studying human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to shut down their experiments.
NIH’s action—probably unprecedented in its history—is a response to a preliminary injunction on 23 August from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos.
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Security/Aggression
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FLASH: 4:47 a.m. EDT August 28 — Indian e-voting researcher Hari Prasad was released on bail an hour ago, after seven days in police custody. Magistrate D. H. Sharma reportedly praised Hari and made strong comments against the police, saying Hari has done service to his country. Full post later today.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The highlands of southwestern Ethiopia should be ideal for growing coffee. After all, this is the region where coffee first originated hundreds of years ago. But although coffee remains Ethiopia’s number one export, the nation’s coffee farmers have been struggling.
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Finance
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In a half-empty/half-full ruling for KPMG, a New Jersey appeals court on Thursday found sufficient evidence that the accounting giant was negligent in its audits of the books of a ceramic collectibles company but inadequate proof to support a $38 million damages award to another company that acquired it.
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“Central bankers alone cannot solve the world’s economic problems,” Mr. Bernanke said in what became a theme of the annual Fed policy symposium here, organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
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The gathering, at a historic lodge in Grand Teton National Park, brought together about 110 central bankers and economists, including most of the Federal Reserve’s top officials. In 2008, the symposium occurred weeks before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy nearly shut down the financial markets. At the symposium last year, officials congratulated themselves on weathering the worst of the crisis.
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The question is this: Will regulators give Wall Street’s big dealers what they want in a second bite of the apple?
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THE American economy is once again tilting toward danger. Despite an aggressive regimen of treatments from the conventional to the exotic — more than $800 billion in federal spending, and trillions of dollars worth of credit from the Federal Reserve — fears of a second recession are growing, along with worries that the country may face several more years of lean prospects.
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The federal budget is in worse shape than Roger Clemens’s reputation.
It ran a deficit of $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009 and is on track to nearly match this red ink in 2010. Going forward, there is no relief in sight.
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With couples like the Kordasiewiczs taking advantage of incentives like free breakfast, restaurants and shopkeepers selling items like T-shirts, taffy and jewelry say travelers seem to be thinking twice before opening their wallets, if they do at all.
“They are coming in the door more,” said Belinda Schmitt, the manager of Guertin Brothers Jewelers on Main Street in Hyannis on Cape Cod. “But I am finding that tourists are not interested in buying jewelry as much. We have started carrying jewelry that can maybe more meet the needs of people on a tighter budget.”
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Amid all the junk mail pouring into your house in recent months, you might have noticed a solicitation or two for a “professional card,” otherwise known as a small-business or corporate credit card.
If so, watch out. While Capital One Financial Corp.’s World MasterCard, Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank CitiBusiness/AAdvantage Mastercard and the others might look like typical plastic, they are anything but.
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Cue the credits: the era of financial thuggery is officially over. Three hellish years of panic, all done and gone – the mass bankruptcies, midnight bailouts, shotgun mergers of dying megabanks, high-stakes SEC investigations, all capped by a legislative orgy in which industry lobbyists hurled more than $600 million at Congress.
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The president proudly called the new law “the toughest financial reform since the one we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.” What Obama left unsaid was that his administration had argued against many of the toughest amendments in the bill. And Wall Street, in the end, didn’t complain about it all that much.
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What did the chairman of the Federal Reserve say in Jackson Hole? According to much of the reaction, Ben Bernanke said the “Fed stands by to boost US growth” (FT), or that the “Fed is ready to prop up economy” (NYT) or even that the “Fed stands ready to support recovery” (WSJ).
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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RIM to provide access to encrypted data from Sept. 1; company given 60 more days to finalize security fix
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Justice Department is focusing in on how Comcast Corp.’s bid to purchase control of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal television and movie unit could affect the emerging Internet video market, people familiar with the matter say.
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If customers don’t find Hulu Plus is worthwhile at $10 a month, especially with Netflix offering considerably more streaming content at $9, maybe Hulu Plus needs more commercials to drive the price lower.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It looks like we’ve got yet another study highlighting exactly the same thing — and this one coming from a guy who is an advisor to the UK government. Gautam John points us to this new bit of research by Professor David Wall which was funded by the EU, which found that counterfeiting isn’t really that big of a problem. The findings were quite similar to the study we reported on last year. It says that there’s a consumer benefit to buying knockoff designer goods, and that the “losses” claimed by companies are way out of line with reality. Furthermore, perhaps most surprisingly, the report says that law enforcement should not waste their time trying to stop the bootleggers. The report also debunks the popular claim from the industry that counterfeit goods fund terrorism and organized crime.
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There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” post.
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Copyrights
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Janis had posted a long article on copyright titled ‘The Internet Debacle: An Alternative View‘. In this article, and it’s follow up, ‘Fallout: A Follow Up To The Internet Debacle‘, Janis covered many of the same arguments I and others had been making since the copyright debate in Canada started to heat up (note that I am not claiming to be the first to have made these arguments – in fact I came late to the game).
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The largest copyright pirates are the large corporations, particularly in the content distribution business. Yes, those companies who scream the loudest that their customers are ‘pirating’ movies, songs, books, etc. In this series, we are going to look at cases where these companies have engaged in large scale copyright infringement, or in other ways have been ripping off artists.
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wo prominent lawyers in the fight against RIAA P2P lawsuits have taken their battle to the Supreme Court. Today, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and “Recording Industry vs. the People” blogger/lawyer Ray Beckerman joined with a few other law professors to ask the Supreme Court not to gut copyright law’s “innocent infringer” defense.
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The most significant issue for art like the jazz recordings is that they are considered “orphan works,” still under copyright but for which the artist can no longer be located. In 2008, the Senate passed a bill that would limit the copyrights on such orphaned material. Under the bill, if a good-faith but unsuccessful effort is made to locate the owner, someone else can publish the work. An artist who later steps forward is entitled to reasonable compensation but not the heavy damages now in the law.
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A federal judge on Thursday questioned Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC about the litigation costs it’s expecting defendants to pay.
Righthaven since March has retroactively sued at least 103 website owners around North America after determining copyrights to Las Vegas Review-Journal stories were infringed on, and then obtaining the copyrights to those stories from the Review-Journal’s owner Stephens Media LLC.
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A court declined to issue an emergency order forcing Google Inc. to block German access to some music videos on its YouTube website in a dispute over monitoring files on the Internet.
Still, the Hamburg Regional Court said it might ultimately rule in favor of a group of music-collecting societies, including the German agency GEMA, if a new suit was filed under standard court procedures.
The case is part of a dispute over who is responsible for detecting illegal files on YouTube. Google, the owner of the world’s most popular search engine, in June won dismissal of a $1 billion suit brought by Viacom Inc. in a U.S. court for unauthorized use of content from programs on YouTube.
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In federal court on Monday, Midcontinent Communications filed a motion to quash a subpoena received from Voltage Pictures, the film’s producers, who allege some of the ISP’s customers used peer-to-peer services to pilfer unauthorized copies of its movie. Voltage seeks to require Midcontinent to identify those customers as well as turn over their home addresses, phone numbers, and other data.
Midcontinent’s lawyers told the court that the subpoena was improperly issued and doesn’t offer to compensate the ISP for gathering the information. In addition, Midcontinent, which has 250,000 customers in North and South Dakota and parts of Minnesota, is skeptical that a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where the subpoena was issued, has jurisdiction over it. Midcontinent told the court that its own policy prevents it from providing “customer information to third parties without a valid court order.”
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On August 5′th I received an email that was “From: min.moore@pch.gc.ca”. It had no content, but two file attachments – one HTML and one GIF. Thunderbird warned that it was most likely a scam, given this is a common technique used by spammers to avoid SPAM detection software.
I extracted the file attachments, and I wasn’t all that surprised to learn that it was a form letter originating from the Heritage Minister’s office. This isn’t the most technologically literate Minister or department in Canada, and it was unlikely that ensuring emails wouldn’t be confused as SPAM or scams would be something they would know much about.
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Mark Waid’s keynote speech at the Harvey Awards at Baltimore Comics Con last night started by pointing out that copyright was all about putting work into the public domain, rather than preserving it for company ownership, and the concept of public domain should be embraced again. That illegal downloading is inevitable leading to a new culture of sharing. Lines such as “culture is more important than copyright” and “there are more ideas in one week at your comic shop than three years in Hollywood.”
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Nicely timed at the start of the new college year, a new BitTorrent site dedicated to sharing knowledge in the form of textbooks has surfaced. Torrent My Book – a project run by two college students – aims to become the world’s largest BitTorrent index of textbooks, following in the footsteps of the late TextBookTorrents.
YouTube SUCKS…again, and such
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Send this to a friend
08.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The demand for Linux administrators is on the rise, but CIOs have trouble finding IT pros with all of the qualities needed to run an open source environment.
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There is a finite supply of developers in the world, and app developers don’t grow on trees. Specifically, I think desktop Linux application developers are soon going to be in short supply: an unintended consequence of the fact that Android and MeeGo are each Linux-based.
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Sony today took quick action to shut down PS3 modders with legal action against PS Jailbreak. The console maker was granted a temporary ban on PS Jailbreak in Australia that will prevent the USB mod, which ‘unlocks’ the PS3 to allow unapproved software, from being sold in the country until a final decision from courts on whether it remains legal. The terms discovered by PS3Hax also give Sony control over current inventory and will likely see it reverse engineer the hack to patch against it as well as destroy the stock.
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However, when IBM broke out data for “Critical and High Vulnerability” disclosures, Microsoft is king of the heap, with 73% of disclosures involving Windows. Linux was #216%, and Apple was #3 with 9%, as you can see in the figure below.
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As the Smartphone Summer of 2010 lurches to a close, Verizon Wireless and Motorola have refreshed their product lines with the Droid 2 ($200 with a two-year contract), an update to the 10-month-old popular Droid slider phone.
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Kernel Space
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The problem was discovered by Rafal Wojtczuk of Invisible Things Lab (ITL) while working on Qubes OS, ITL’s virtualization-based, security-focused operating system. ITL’s CEO Joanna Rutkowska describes the flaw on the company’s blog and Wojtczuk released a paper [PDF] on August 17 with lots more details. In that paper, he notes that he reported the problem to the X.org security team on June 17, and by June 20 the team had determined that it should be fixed in the kernel. But it took until August 13 before that actually happened.
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Applications
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Aluratek’s Libre e-reader comes in different colors and is priced at $169 on the company’s website. The device can open e-books in the PDF, ePub, MOBI, PRC, RTF and text electronic book formats.
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But how many Kindles have you sold, Amazon? Strangely enough, the company won’t say. It never has.
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Phones
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Now that Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to release a webOS tablet early next year, its next big goal–in addition to building the device–is to persuade software developers to write apps for the mobile gadget. Given the early popularity of Apple’s iPad, as well as the imminent arrival of numerous tablets running Google’s Android OS, that task could prove challenging.
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Since the recent HP buyout of PALM we have been waiting for what HP may have in store for us. Well HP’s CTO Phil McKinney has tweeted some pictures of 3 new devices that could be released in the near future. The picture has the devices blacked out so we can only see their outlines but 1 seems to be a tablet, other a phone, and 3rd is something on his wrist maybe a media player? The second link on his twitter status leads us to a SXSW panel that he will be speaking at about devices of the future. So these devices may be further off than we think, or he might bring the future to us now.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Early this year, the MeeGo project was introduced by Intel and Nokia and brought the market a distinctive concept of using the Linux platform in the mobile device.
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Android
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While developer interest in Android is finally starting to catch up to iOS, the open-source OS is far from the most convenient system to work with. Joe Hewitt, the extremely talented developer behind the iPhone’s Facebook app, recently switched over to Android due to his frustration with the restrictive nature of App Store policies.
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Dominating the front of the 7 is a resistive 16 million colour 800 x 480 7in LCD screen with a matt finish. Archos has a tradition of quality displays and the 7 Home Tablet doesn’t disappoint; it’s crisp, bright and colourful although the viewing angle is not exactly robust in the vertical plane.
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I’ve written before about the challenges of making money on Android apps.
Well, Arron La, maker of the Advanced Task Manager app has released some interesting data that suggests that, even with its problems, Android can make a decent amount of money for someone. No, it’s not crazy iPhone app money, but it’s a start.
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U.S.-based Android users are an active (and likely multiplying) bunch, according to new data from a mobile payment specialist called Bango. The company’s determined that, between the first and second quarters, the volume of Web browsing conducted on Android devices increased by a whopping 400 percent.
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Tablets
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Apparently, the Taiwanese component makers have it pegged for an early Autumn release with between 40,000 to 50,000 units forecast.
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Despite recent economic improvement, 82% of organizations are facing flat or falling IT budgets in 2011, up from 78% in 2010. As a result, implementation success comes from providing strategic value while minimizing both capital and operational expenses. Alternatives such as cloud-based services and open-source derived products have the potential to reduce these costs while meeting business application requirements.
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Events
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We have an awesome schedule line-up with Free talks: Jon Maddog Hall to deliver the kick-off keynote Friday September 10, Stormy Peters to answer the AM keynote question Who is stealing your desktop and closing keynote of Christopher “Monty” Montgomery on the The Digital Media Frontier.
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Maybe you need some time learning Linux on the desktop skills. Even if you have always used Windows, by the end of the Ohio LinuxFest Linux Basics class, you will be savvy enough to install Linux and transfer your daily work into the GNOME desktop environment with Ubuntu. This class is a great too for anyone who wants an overview of Linux to broaden your IT knowledge. Either way, you will have a hands-on experience which will turn you into a bug-one crushing warrior.
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Web Browsers
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Google OS spotted a new addition to the Chromium browser: an about:labs page. Load it up, and you’ll see experimental browser features which you can enable — like side tabs on Windows and tab expose on Mac.
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Bugs are nothing new to the developers version of Chrome, which is intended to be a rougher version of the browser than the beta or stable channels. A new bug indicates that the new developers version is incompatible with streaming Netflix movies, while another appears to be affecting the rendering of extension fonts. Some users are reporting that the search function in the location bar is no longer working for them, although that doesn’t appear to be affecting all users at this time. Because these bugs are in the developers version, it’s expected that they’ll get fixed before the beta and stable versions receive updates.
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Oracle
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Oracle MySQL end users say it’s still too early to see how Oracle will invest in the open source database platform, but they won’t hesitate to migrate to other MySQL forks if Oracle MySQL hits a dead end.
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In November 2007, Jonathan Schwartz wrote on his blog “Congratulations Google, Red Hat and the Java Community!” praising Google’s use of Java in Android.
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CMS
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The Android build, now at version 1.3.5, has a longer change list, including: more stable preview of blog posts, a fix regarding multi-language support which made long strings of text break the interface, a patch for an issue which caused the option to turn off the Mobile Theme to randomly disappear, and another one for the occasional adding of random extra paragraph HTML tags when editing a blog post.
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Healthcare
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At VA Hospitals nationwide, the government was deploying VISTA. No, not Microsoft Windows Vista, VISTA – the open source medical records system. It keeps track of all of information concerning a patient’s care – no matter where in the country they go. Medications, pharmacies, doctor visits, dates, diagnosis.. it is all there. Nurses recommended that VISTA work with scan-able wrist bands. Now patients’ wrists are scanned prior to medicating and procedures with immediate feedback for the medical professionals who are providing the care as the care is administered. It saves lives and the government money. This is change that I can believe in.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Earlier this month, the National Archives of the United Kingdom launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens. Legislation.gov.uk covers more than 800 years of legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
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This is not the first chunk of geo code that SimpleGeo has opensourced (just go check Github). They are in the business of selling geodata and geo cloud services. By releasing these tools they make it easier for companies without geoexpertise to get hooked on their services. As SimpleGeo opens up it’s market and takes on more customers we’ll see that happening. Along the way it’s a great benefit to the mapping and mobile commmunity.
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After launching just over a year ago with only 47 data sets, the “Raw Data Catalog” catalog on Data.gov now has 2,326 entries that have been collectively downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times. Of course, even these sizable download counts understate the actual impact of this data, which is being embedded in a variety of sites and apps, like those being developed for the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.
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Standards/Consortia
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Panvidea™, a global leader in on-demand video encoding, preparation, processing and distribution for entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced broad and comprehensive support for Google’s new WebM project, along with Adobe, Microsoft, and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. The new WebM open web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, is immediately available to all users of Panvidea’s cloud based video encoding and processing service (www.panvidea.com) at no additional charge as part of the company’s already extensive list of the highest quality video and audio codecs and containers.
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MOBILE HTML5 VIDEO is now accessible at Youtube through a website dedicated to the format for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
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But if you use Google’s new, free phone-calling option (http://gmail.com/call), that figure drops to zero.
On Wednesday, the Web giant announced that American users of its Gmail Web service could call numbers in the United States and Canada for free from within their browsers. Calls elsewhere cost less than many traditional long-distance domestic calls: You pay 2 cents a minute to call Ireland, Korea, Argentina and many other countries. (Google’s rates top out at 99 cents a minute for those calling the island nation of Nauru.)
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There is very little evidence, if any, that Sarah Palin hates teachers, or that Andrew Breitbart is a racist. Yet a recent flood of viral stories propagated by internet journalists allegedly catch prominent conservatives red-handed in acts of hate.
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A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.
Many readers say that’s happening with The Post. This summer, and especially over the past month, there has been a spike in complaints about inexcusable “little” mistakes.
[...]
Many complaints involve mistakes online, where editing sometimes seems minimal. Several readers have said inaccurate information has remained even after they alerted writers or the Web site.
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What Digg may benefit from is the new seamlessness of the submission and consumption processes. Users that are looking for a curated stream alongside the popular content can do it on Digg. The majority of Digg’s userbase will likely find the new design refreshing and it very well may gain some traction among users that feel overwhelmed with the real-time news stream or the pontifications in their news feed. Better yet, Digg may attract a whole new audience looking for a place to discover news through curated sources.
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The former BBC and ITV chairman Michael Grade has called for the corporation to be reduced in size, claiming it is “almost unmanageable now” and “too big”.
Grade, who was BBC chairman for two-and-a-half years from May 2004, also said he thought that some of the licence fee should be shared with Channel 4.
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Already explorers have documented caved-in roofs, weakening decks, a stern perhaps on the edge of collapse, and the disappearance of Titanic’s crow’s nest—from which lookout Frederick Fleet spotted history’s most infamous iceberg. (Watch an animation of Titanic’s iceberg collision, breakup, and sinking.)
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obert Moffat, once tipped for the top job at IBM, has blamed his mistress for encouraging him to give her information which she used for insider dealing.
He is facing securities fraud and conspiracy charges, and prosecutors are asking for a six month prison sentence.
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Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, is close to an agreement to buy Infineon Technologies AG’s wireless business, three people with direct knowledge of the discussions said.
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The former chairman and founder of Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services was released on bail on Wednesday by the High Court in Andhra Pradesh, state of south India.
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Three people were sentenced to prison terms Thursday for their roles in a multimillion-dollar scheme targeting payments to IT and consulting services vendors from four state governments, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
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Science
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Imagery from a NASA spacecraft has revealed that the Moon has shrunk significantly in recent times: indeed, instruments placed by the Apollo astronauts are thought to have recorded the rumbling, crunching sounds of lunar shrinkage carrying on in just the last few decades.
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The Mars Hoax is once again showing up in emails all around the world. It states that the planet Mars will appear in the sky as large as the Moon on August 27, 2010. This will not happen! It is all a hoax! And, many of you are perpetuating this email falsehood.
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A third impact of a body onto the planet Jupiter in thirteen months has been recorded by two amateur astronomers in Japan. The resulting flash is shown on a video taken by one of the Japanese astronomers.
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Good news today for sufferers from jet lag, bipolar depression, interstellar or interplanetary colonists and others plagued by disorders relating to the circadian rhythm – or body clock.
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Security/Aggression
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The leak is the third to hit Wikileaks since Assange faced a storm of allegations in Sweden, just four days ago.
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Proving there’s not much new under the sun, McAfee is warning travellers to the US to be aware of the danger of fake visa waiver websites.
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Japan’s justice minister Keiko Chiba has invited the press to enter the Tokyo Detention Centre execution chamber, shortly after she personally attended the hanging of two convicted murderers.
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More than 40 percent of the world’s spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec’s MessageLabs’ division.
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Rustock’s use of TLS is now averages between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all spam, peaking at 0.5 percent, a tiny fraction of the levels seen in March when it reached averages of around 25 percent with a peak of as much as 77 percent.
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British Airways has apologized for telling 275 passengers en route from London to Hong Kong that their Boeing 747 was in imminent danger of crashing into the sea.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Regardless of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or not, nuclear programmes breed mistrust and constitute a major proliferation threat. The international community is failing to address this problem. A lasting solution to the spread of nuclear weapons should include an end to enrichment, the phase-out of nuclear power and complete disarmament by all nuclear weapon states.
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Unfortunately for the Gulf’s fishing and shrimping economy, many of us will choose not to feed ourselves from its supply for a while, but the decision to stop feeding our voracious addiction to petroleum with deep sea deposits is more controversial. Even as the fishing industry, wildlife, and wetlands that were hit by the Gulf spill remain in a desperate condition, offering a bleak reality check on the consequences of our oil dependence, one can still hear “Drill Baby, Drill!” echoing through the halls of Congress.
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Kristina Hill, PhD, Affiliate ASLA, is Chair of the Landscape Architecture department at the University of Virginia. Recently, the American Society of Landscape Architects interviewed her about how best to manage the effects of climate change, especially in designing cities.
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U.S. energy use fell in 2009 and Americans used more wind and solar power and less electricity generated by burning coal and natural gas, according to a survey by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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A team of economists from the University of Munich recently released a study examining the effects of mandatory parking minimums on development in urban and suburban Los Angeles. The team found that parking minimums “significantly increase” the amount of land devoted to parking, to the detriment of water quality, pedestrian safety and non-automotive modes of transportation.
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A group of scientists have found that up to 79% of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico may still remain, contradicting earlier findings by a U.S. government study that found nearly 75% of the oil had dissipated.
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People who make an effort to be eco-friendly – for instance by recycling glass bottles, turning off lights and unplugging cellphone chargers – have no idea what they’re on about, according to a new survey. Those who don’t bother are more likely to know what actually saves energy and what doesn’t.
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More than four out of five Australian IT departments have never seen their power bill – a stark example of how a lack of metrics has led to Australia falling behind the UK and US when it comes to greening ICT.
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In case you’ve ever wondered just how far a Mars rover might have wandered if it had set out from your front door, or indeed the exact area covered by the Chernobyl radiation cloud, if that ill-fated nuclear facility had been built at your mum’s house, then look no further than BBC Dimensions.
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Louisiana fishermen’s activist Kindra Arnesen says dock owners are asking fishermen to sign waivers that put the full responsibility for toxins found in the catch on the fishermen themselves.
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Spanish fishermen who took part in a clean-up operation after the Prestige oil tanker spill in 2002 have shown symptoms of chromosomal damage and respiratory problems, a study released Tuesday said.
The study, conducted by Spanish researchers between September 2004 and February 2005 on 501 fishermen who helped clean up Europe’s worst oil spill, was published in the American review Annals of Internal Medicine.
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Finance
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As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created — and ultimately provided most of the money for — new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.
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QE in 08/09 has been applied. Basically the FED prints money and buys stuff. Note that this is no different from how the modern banking system works. Banks create money out of thin air (that is the money multiplier) and PEOPLE buy stuff with it. Market centric wisdom says that markets will allocate that money to the most productive use. SO let the banks create money, lend it and let the people make the smart decisions.
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That’s where the Cringely Startup Tour stopped recently to visit Maverick Software Consulting and find out where’s the beef. This Maverick (the consulting company) has come up with an amazing business model for software consulting services — one that employs American programmers yet meets or beats the cost of using programmers in India or China. But it is much more than just a price-competitive service: Maverick Software Consulting also gives prospective technical employers a newer and better way to directly recruit good programmers.
[...]
While Maverick looks only marginally profitable on paper, the business has no debt, is completely bootstrapped, is keeping dozens — eventually hundreds — of jobs in America. And if they can scale the business the way they think they can there’s nothing that says the founders won’t soon be paying themselves a bootload of money while remaining mavericks — unbranded.
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Saturday was Invisible People.tv day at YouTube. InvisiblePeople.tv is a site/project that utilizes social media tools like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to spread awareness about the growing homelessness problem.
The channel was featured on YouTube’s home page over the weekend, and YouTube discussed it in a company blog post, speaking with Founder Mark Horvath.
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Sales of previously occupied homes plunged last month to the lowest level in 15 years, despite the lowest mortgage rates in decades and bargain prices in many areas.
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Former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld hit out on Saturday against the “corrupt” US judiciary which sent him to jail even though he was the whistleblower who led to the US tax fraud case against the bank.
“The Department of Justice’s corruption is evident today — why am I the only one in prison when I had revealed everything?” the US banker asked in a French-language interview with Swiss newspaper Le Temps.
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Lobbying
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A new U.S. law that increases visa fees to pay for border security is a national issue for India rather than one that only affects Indian outsourcing companies, according to India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Are you a privacy lawyer? Would you take pride in working for a company with “a real soul”? Is your brain impervious to cognitive dissonance? Could you grow a brass neck?
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The Australian Sex Party has charged that anti-filter corporate campaigner Google censored its lampoon advertisement “Jerk Choices,” reclassifying it as Adult Only despite the parody already having been played in prime time on free to air television.
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The Greens propose spending the $40.8m the Labor Government has budgeted for cyber-safety initiatives on range of measures including mandating the supply of PC-based filtering by ISPs, further research into cyber safety risks, strengthened law enforcement, and net literacy education.
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MSNBC rejects ad from liberal MoveOn.org calling for Target boycott over political donation
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A Facebook account established by a North Korea-linked Web site was deleted by the social networking service on Friday, but a new group sprang up over the weekend to take its place.
The account belonged to Uriminzokkiri, a Web site that provides Korean-language news and propaganda from North Korea’s central news agency. The Web site appears to be run from servers in China but is ultimately controlled from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
The Facebook group appeared on Thursday and carried links to articles on the Uriminzokkiri Web site and videos on the site’s YouTube channel. In its short life the Facebook group managed to attract a handful of Facebook friends before becoming unavailable during the Friday U.S. business day.
“The page in question was removed because it violated our terms of use,” said Kumiko Hidaka, a Facebook spokeswoman by e-mail.
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For the second time in less than a week a Facebook account created by a North Korea-linked Web site has been deleted by the social networking site.
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“It is clearly a smear campaign,” Assange told Arabic news network Al-Jazeera in a live telephone interview Sunday. “… The only question is, who was involved?”
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CUSTOMER DATA IN SKIPS has been PC World’s idea of secure financial information disposal and it has got the retailer into a spot of bother with the authorities.
DSG, which owns PC World, has been found in breach of the Data Protection Act by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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In a TV advert, a voice-over said BT is “rolling out up to 20 meg speeds” to give “consistently faster broadband”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Epson has been pursuing the alleged patent infringement since 2006. It has issued cease and desist demands to Medea International to no avail and now wants its day in court.
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“It is likely to be more than a decade before the full edition is published and a decision on format will be taken at that point,” she said.
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Copyrights
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Founded in 2006 as Project Playlist, the revenue-lite operation made widgets for social network sites as Facebook and MySpace, and in its heyday boasted almost 40 million users.
The largest amount, $16.6m, is owned to Universal Music; but independent network Merlin is also owed $1.68m, with songwriters’ association ASCAP out of pocket by $377,323, according to Chapter 11 documents.
A Profile on Linus Torvalds
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The government of Andalusia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, is preparing to use a complete open source desktop environment. The analysis of requirements of such a desktop system is nearly completed, the next step will be a few small scale tests, according to a presentation by José Félix Ontañón, one of the software developers involved.
Ontañón talked about the plans by the Andalusian government at the Guadec conference that took place in The Hague, Netherlands, last month.
For the first test, several work stations in the administration will be running a number of open source applications on the proprietary operating system currently used by the administration. In a second phase, a limited number of these desktops will be converted to run a locally tailored version of a Linux distribution.
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I was in the Digital booth, which was near to the “Magic Software” booth when two men came up to the Magic booth and asked to see the penguins. The handler explained that the penguins were “resting” and the two men should come back in a couple of hours to see them. As the two people started to leave, I walked up to the group and said to the penguin handler “See that guy?” pointing to one of them, “None of this event would be here if it was not for him…..his name is Linus Torvalds. Show him the freaking penguins.” The handler then brought the penguins out, and Linus saw them and went on his way.
The next day a lady showed up with her two small children, one in a baby carriage, and asked to see the penguins. She was also told to “come back in a couple of hours”. The small entourage started to leave, and once again I wandered over to the booth:
“Remember that guy who was here yesterday who was the architect of the Linux kernel? This is his wife and two daughters, and my godchildren……get out the freaking penguins!”
About a month after Linuxworld I got a call from the show management. Apparently someone had written to the San Francisco Chronicle about how horrible it was that live penguins were “taken from the wild” and made to perform at the event, their “eyes open wide with fear”.
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This behavior seems to be more and more common. The more specialized the software is, the more this seems to take place, too. The software vendors know their leveraging capabilities, and seem to adjust their pricing accordingly. They also lock in customers and use the same type of scheme that Microsoft does, thus forcing them to upgrade and pay over and over again.
As I have stated before, practice like this can be completely avoided by using open source software, which is immune to upgrade pricing, licenses, and other flaws of proprietary software. In the case here, I already know of an open source software package that could be used in its place, it’s called gLabels. But this would involve a lot of migration that is difficult to overcome. The options need to be weighed out, and action taken.
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Desktop
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My new laptop is a machine which ZaReason was carrying until recently. It seems they have massively upgraded the version I currently have which provides me with a bit of jealousy and awe. For being an inexpensive machine it is plenty powerful for what I need. It is actually really damn powerful! It boasts an Intel Core 2 Duo T7100, 4 GB of memory, 160GB SATA drive, a NVIDIA GeForce 9200M, a 15.4″ widescreen display, camera, DVD burner, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, and the lists goes on. Hell, this thing even has HDMI, which I am proud to say, it is the only device in my house with such an option. Anyone have a high definition TV for me so I can test it out? 
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Oh yeah, I always see people comment on blogs where Linux-laptop vendors are mentioned that they wish there was a company in their country selling these. Guess what? ZaReason ships internationally!
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On the last show for a few weeks: Steam not coming to Linux, new Ubuntu release name announced, Intel buys McAfee, Linux gets Google Voice and Video Chat, Dan’s review of the HTC Desire and much more…
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Kernel Space
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About one month ago we reported on the emergence of patches that may fix the Linux desktop responsiveness problems, which is an issue that’s been experienced by many Linux desktop users in recent years. For Linux users it may take many seconds for a menu to appear when clicking on it or a half-minute to do a VT switch, but fortunately it’s becoming a thing of the past with these patches working well for many users and has since been integrated into the mainline Linux kernel. The story though is not over as even more patches have just been published to further improve the Linux desktop responsiveness.
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Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. The EXT4 file-system was the clear winner in terms of the overall disk performance while Btrfs came in second followed by Sun’s ZFS in FreeBSD 8.2. It was a surprise that in our most recent testing the EXT4 file-system turned around and did better than the next-generation Btrfs file-system, but it turns out that Btrfs regressed hard in Linux 2.6.35 as to be found in Ubuntu 10.10 and other soon-to-be-released distributions. However, regardless of where Btrfs is performing, its speed can be boosted by enabling its transparent zlib compression support.
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DRBD is a kernel loadable module, and as of kernel 2.6.33 it is included with the mainline kernel. If you are running a Linux server that has any level of kernel revision past 2.6.33, you already have drbd available, and at most will need to load the management tools. If your server is older than that, you will need to download the tools and the loadable module to get it running.
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Graphics Stack
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What this driver update though does provide is a fix that previously prevented XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) from initializing (but if there’s anyone still using XvMC in NVIDIA’s binary driver, you should really update your application and driver to utilize the much superior VDPAU API), support for the xorg-server 8 video ABI used by X.Org Server 1.9, a bug that caused extremely slow OpenGL rendering when on X screens other than screen zero when a compositing manager was in use, stability problems on select GPUs such as the GeForce GT 240, a slow kernel virtual address space leak with OpenGL/CUDA/VDPAU applications, and lastly is a bug-fix for hangs when using two or more VDPAU applications simultaneously.
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Applications
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New GTKUI interface and new visualizer for blue scope plugin it’s all now embed inside GTKUI.
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We have reviewed a number of free email clients before. There is the ever so popular Thunderbird, there is Evolution for Linux and then there is Outlook for Windows. An area where Outlook scores fair and square over the other email clients out there is the fact that it integrates common email-related tasks and thus takes care of many chores. You have tasks, calendar, email and social networking (via plugins) all built in into one interface and they all gel together.
[...]
All in all SpiceBird works well and does a good job of providing a single interface for tasks that you need to perform daily. The tabbed interface to track your tasks, calendar and emails all in one application is a big plus. The ability to add Google Gadgets to the start page is awesome.
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Psensor is a graphical hardware temperature monitor for Linux.
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VLC 1.1.4 is released, this is the fourth bugfix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch. This release comes especially to fix important security issue that was discovered in most windows application, Linux in general is not affected by this security bug. So this new release is targeted for the windows platform.
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The Apache Software Foundation, best known for the self-named popular open source Web server, has a variety of other technology that can help enterprises with databases, search, development, and more. Here’s an overview of the best.
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Proprietary
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With Ubuntu 10.10 in the process of bringing a number of changes into Ubuntu Software Center including a proposal to provide support for commercial Linux applications, the significance of LinApp becomes even more important. The way they organize and manage their mammoth list of commercial Linux applications is something to be looked at for inspiration.
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Pianoteq is an effort to model, rather than sample, acoustic pianos and other instruments on the computer. Now in its third major release, its interface and sound generation have each matured. Using mathematical models in place of recorded sounds, an entire grand piano fits in just a few megs of space, rather than requiring several DVDs, and the software maker claims the results can be more natural and playable.
Pianoteq, which runs as do its rivals on Mac and Windows, is also unusual in providing support for the Linux operating system – something some developers have claimed isn’t practical with commercial music software. And a new “Player” addition, announced this month, makes it more affordable. In addition to software development, the team has even launched an extensive piano restoration effort:
http://www.pianoteq.com/kivir
I’ve been impressed with my time playing with Pianoteq’s software. That’s especially meaningful to me, as my background in music has been on acoustic pianos, back to when I was literally old enough to reach the keys for the first time. But I also wanted to know more about how this software developed. Its rigorous approach to modeling has attracted a lot of attention in the virtual instrument world, and the fact that it targets Linux alongside Mac and Windows challenges notions that commercial software can’t make it on the free operating system.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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This new version comes with a lot of new features and fixed many bugs, some plugins are now integrated in this software, adding a lot of features like for example: Capture – a new feature that allow you to record your games while playing, Other new features are wine import,PlayOnLinux_016 Cedega import, Offline wine and more.
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Games
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Gaming On Linux resumed it’s competition after the failed attempt last time.
LGN and GOL made competitions back then, asking for news/articles – but sadly it didn’t go well for both of us.
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One of my favorite GNU/Linux games is Tux Racer, a game where the famous Linux penguin, Tux, races down the ski slopes on his belly at dangerously high speeds. I was also a big fan of the Playstation race car series, Gran Turismo. I decided to skip the Playstation 3, but I used to play Gran Turismo a couple of years ago before I got rid of my trusty PS2.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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So of course, while I’m spending a glorious and relaxing week hanging out in Boulder, Colorado, the KDE community is working overtime fixing a few showstopper bugs. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Collection (also known as KDE SC) was released Tuesday, a week late from the original release plan, but it looks like a pretty good one.
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Playing with dataengines I started to hack on another topic: sharing of articles on Akregator. I started to feel too much dependent on Google’s infrastructure and decided to move some of my stuff “out of the cloud”. I started with Google Reader and put all my feeds on Akregator. Kudos for Google for allowing me to export my list of feeds and kudos to Akregator that imports the file. Everybody is happy and Google is not evil trying to hold my data.
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Fast-forward to now and Microsoft claims to have innovated a new feature. Soon after that KDE refines the same feature and ads it into 4.4. Of course 4.4 was still suffering from numerous bugs. Fast-forward a little bit further into now and you have 4.5 which squashes tons of bugs and offers an amazing desktop that includes a bug-free tiling experience!
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Overall, I would say that SliTaz is the best fit. Seeing as most things worked fairly well right away, and no closed-source code was needed (this is an opensource blog after all) I would rate SliTaz an 8 of 10. The only reason for point docking being that overall performance left something to be desired. The best performance goes to Slackware. The boot time was bad, but once booted Slackware was a charm.
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Probably 95 percent of the Arch screenshots you see include a nifty logo and rundown on the guts of a system. For example …
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New Releases
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Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring is available in three editions: One, Powerpack and Free, for architectures i586 and x86-64. One and Free can be free downloaded from official Mandriva mirrors and via BitTorrent. To download these versions, visit this page. A Community version (community supported) based on Xfce of the One version will also be available. You can also download directly via BitTorrent from this page. The Powerpack version is a commercial version available for purchase on the Mandriva Store site. For more information on differences between versions, visit this page.
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Just a few days after Parted Magic 5.3 came out, an update was released, mainly to fix an issue affecting the previous release. Parted Magic 5.4 fixes an issue which caused keyboard input to slow down. Despite the short time between releases, several other issues have been fixed as well and some packages updated.
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It was time for a change and we at NetSecL realized that, the new version of NetSecL 3.0 is a live DVD + installation based on OpenSuse. Once installed you can fully enjoy the features of GrSecurity hardened kernel and penetration tools OR if you like to do some penetration testing you can directly run all tools from the live DVD. NetSecL firewall is included as always and most of the penetration tools are ported to the new platform. Also we’d like to mention that we’ve got many other programs up and running with GrSecurity enabled, which is great success especially when it comes to programs like wine, OpenOffice, Vuze, Qemu and many gnome applications. The password for both admin and root user on the DVD is linux.
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The Lunar team proudly announce the final release of Lunar Linux 1.6.5 codename ‘Mare Ingenii’!
The last known issues with the ISO have been resolved. We added support for hybrid ISO in the last minute, which mean it’s a lot more easy to install lunar from an usb-stick from now on. The developers are currently brainstorming and voting on ideas to further improve the state of Lunar, an announcement about this will be made later. We also plan to let our users, yes you, to chip in with ideas that will be up for voting within our community, but more on that later. Enjoy the release of Lunar 1.6.5!
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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One highlight is the Wired Dreams party on Friday, 2010-09-17, after the first event day just next to the primary event location featuring free (as in creative commons) live music and delicious free beer (with some mugs in form of free as in free beer).
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Fedora doesn’t suck, but it could be a lot more useful to a lot more people. And either I am right, or I am wrong. Policy, feedback, goals, all of these things will determine how many of the things I would like to see are feasible, in line with Fedora’s longer term vision, and so forth. So let’s see a very specific vision and direction and all be much happier for it.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical uploaded today the new wallpapers and default theme for the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system. Seventeen new beautiful wallpapers and a lightweight and eye-candy theme will please every existing and future Ubuntu 10.10 user!
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Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” and it’s called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language. That same day as announcing UTouch for Ubuntu that will support devices like the Apple Magic TrackPad and Dell XT2, Canonical proposed the X.Org Gesture Extension to the X.Org development community. While it’s good to see Canonical making more contributions to upstream projects that it depends upon for Ubuntu Linux, the X.Org Gesture Extension is already being re-evaluated and may in fact not be needed.
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According to In Media, an existing version of the !ROFL is running an In Fusion software stack, — presumably based on another version of embedded Linux — that is said to be already shipping in handheld devices in China.
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ARM Holdings has provided new details about its next-generation Cortex-A series processor core, currently code-named “Eagle.” In a presentation at this week’s “Hot Chips” conference, the company described relevant extensions to its ARMv7-A architecture, including hypervisor extensions and the ability to address more than 4GB of RAM.
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Phones
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According to Engineering for Change blogger Rob Goodier, cell phone carriers could cut costs and pass savings on to customers by taking advantage of the open source technology created by a team of engineers in the telecom industry.
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Android
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Members of the Android community have done it again by gaining root access on the unreleased Samsung Epic 4G. This device is not yet available to the public, but as you can see, some lucky folks who already have the device have already done it. Those of you who plan on rooting your Epic 4G on launch day, the method already works. That makes 3 out of 4 Galaxy S devices rooted so far. Let’s see if the Fascinate can meet the same fate before launch.
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This first Alpha release of Fennec for Android is an exciting first step in bringing browser choice and customization, along with a seamless Web experience across devices, to a leading open mobile platform. Now, developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach many millions of devices.
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Along these same lines, it’s also interesting to note that Google recently added video chat features for Gmail users on Linux. Remember that Chrome OS is positioned to work with applications and data in the cloud. It’s not positioned as an OS for local apps. If users can make VoIP calls that cost nothing or nearly nothing from their Chrome OS devices, and use all their cloud apps too, Chrome OS netbooks instantly become interesting phone/computer hybrids—as do potential Chrome OS tablet devices.
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Tablets
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The Google Nexus One experiment was a success in showing the market what Android phones could do, and how competitive they could be. Having similar flagship tablets would have the same results by creating a controlled environment for development and optimization. This would accelerate adoption of the platform, which is what Google really wants. It’s not a hardware company, after all.
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Projects
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The heavy lifting of subtitling a video is done via a browser-based javascript widget with tools that help users add on-screen text without re-uploading or re-transcoding the original video. The project’s Web site serves as a collaborative space where community members can work together on larger video projects, get advice, and track which captioning and subtitling requests have the greatest need. Both the widget and the Web site are licensed under the AGPL license.
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Whether you want to display an interactive map of local farmers’ markets on your blog or you’re trying to put together a clickable map displaying branch offices on your corporate Web site, there’s a good chance Polymaps can help you get the job done. It’s a free, open source JavaScript library for making dynamic maps in a Web browser.
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Online Twitter archive service Twapper Keeper has just released yourTwapperKeeper, an MIT-licensed, server-based app that functions essentially the same way as the Web-based version. Once downloaded and installed, yourTwapperKeeper lets users define Twitter searches by keyword or hashtag and stores results locally for later retrieval.
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Oracle
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What do the programmers and companies that depend on the Java software family make of Oracle suing Google? To find out, we asked them.
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A quick look at the JavaOne conference schedule reveals some sessions that were to be conducted by Google, including one entitled “Cloud Cover: Testing Techniques for Google App Engine,” presented by Google software engineer Max Ross. Google also was to participate in a panel session entitled “Taking Java to the Sky: Cloud Computing 2010 Expert Panel,” as well as another session, “High-Performance Java Servers at Google,” featuring Google software engineer Dhanji Prasanna.
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Healthcare
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Two day weekend format and much lower price! The third edition of Introduction to VistA System Administration with Astronaut will be held in Houston, Texas, September 25-26th.
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Astronaut VistA training September 25th-26th
AMIA CMIO boot camp Sept 29th-October 2nd
Open Source Health Conference September 29th-30th
Texas Health IT Summit September 30th-October 2nd
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The h-node project aims at the construction of a database of all the hardware that works with a fully free operating system. The h-node.com website is structured like a wiki in which all the users can modify or insert new contents.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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My old friend Serge Wroclawski has been working on OpenStreetMap.org (OSM) for a number of years now. He’s done this because he sees this as a worthwhile project — an open source, user-editable worldwide map — rather than as a way to make money. And that’s good, because Serge has made exactly $0.00 so far from his OpenStreetMap.org work. But this may change before long.
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Security/Aggression
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One of the interesting aspects of the original version of Pushdo is that its creator was using it not just to send spam, but also to spread other pieces of malware. This has become a more common business model in recent years as bot herders have looked for new ways to make money from the millions of compromised PCs under their control.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Like the Greenpeace protesters who occupied Kingsnorth power station three years ago, we argued that any crimes we committed paled in comparison to runaway climate change.
Like them, we aren’t robbers, kidnappers or terrorists. We are secretaries, parents, cooks, community workers, architects and saxophonists. We are part of a growing movement of concerned citizens who are prepared to put our bodies in the way of dangerous high-carbon developments.
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The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is preparing to issue a report announcing that 90% of the oil spills in Ogoniland, Nigeria, are caused by the locals stealing crude from pipelines – and that Shell’s aged pipelines and ill maintained installations account for a mere 10% of the spills. Why so little, we might ask?
The UNEP has now admitted this figure is based on data from the oil industry and the Nigerian government. It’s not surprising that this is in line with what Shell used to claim in the 1980s – that about 80% of the oil spills were caused by vandalism or sabotage. This claim that infrastructure has been sabotaged is particularly attractive to oil companies, because they are then exempted from paying compensation for any resulting spills. Why accept responsibility for polluting the locals’ creeks, swamps and farmlands and destroying their livelihoods when you can blame the very same people for the mess now coating their own backyards with a toxic gloss?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Ah, well! But, here I am… using a cheap laptop and running a bunch of Free Software apps written for the sake of peace and love by some hippies to write this blog post. Funny, as it might sound, I somehow feel this is the right thing to do. I mean anyone with a sane mind would rather be on the Grateful Dead’s side than Britney Spears’. What about you?
Oops! I hope the MAFIAA doesn’t come after me for illegally linking to mp3 files in my blog post.
Ironically, Facebook would have gone out of business if all its users stopped sharing.
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Copyrights
EEE 1000H Upgrading: How to upgrade Hard drive & RAM
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08.28.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Microsoft is laggard in everything except desktop operating systems, Office and gaming. Internet Explorer has not been able to pass the Acid 3 test which signifies that it is not standards-compliant.
What Mr Scott would fear to accept publicly is the rise of the Ubuntu operating system and how the future release (Meerkat) is being adapted to netbooks (where Win 7 has not been ported). Mobile applications have been hammered and its newer version was greeted with a big yawn. It’s difficult to compare search engines in terms of content but Microsoft-funded agencies have been claiming Bing’s “meteoric rise”. The fact is that Google does not need to shout about its offerings.
There is a serious lack of choice from OEMs while buying new hardware. Mr Scott may not be aware that Linux has been ported to almost everything under sun. I run my entertainment servers attached to Wi-Fi that streams music and is connected to the web on 10-year-old legacy systems ported to Unix which does not need a reboot. Windows does not provide “support” to old hardware.
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Applications
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It’s built entirely in C++ and already runs on Windows and Linux, with test versions already running on mobile devices and web browsers. Definitely looks like something to keep an eye on.
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Better known for its beaches and passion for soccer, Brazil also happens to be the world’s second-leading open source country (just behind the U.S.) and boasts an IT services sector that rivals China and India. The South American country is now putting its digital leadership on display by carrying out its first-ever paperless, all-digital population census.
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Achieving significant efficiency savings and more from IT is possible – Peter Dawes- Huish, CEO, LinuxIT, considers how open source based systems and outsourcing can provide the solution
I attended a seminar the other day and I was amazed just how much misinformation there was around the adoption of open source based software and the services surrounding it. The reasons, the strategies, the options, the benefits it offers both the private and public sector today.
I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because open source (OS), by its very nature with such a developer led resource is such a fast moving field, or those within the OS community and providers of Enterprise Open Source, like LinuxIT, just need to work harder at getting across the ability of OS to transform the management and performance of IT environments. Its ability to contribute towards IT innovation, interoperability, reliability, flexibility, return on investment and so on.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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“We believe the Amazon API is becoming the industry standard, and that many companies will follow it,” Mickos said.
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Oracle
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In 2005, Sun released the source code to Solaris, described then as the company’s crown jewel. Why do this? The simplest answer is that Solaris had been losing ground to an open source competitor in Linux. Losing ground was a symptom of economics. Students who had once been raised on Solaris were being inculcated with Linux knowlege. The combination of Linux and x86 were good enough and significantly cheaper; new companies for whom the default had once been Sun/Solaris/SPARC were instead building on x86/Linux. OpenSolaris along with x86 support were specifically intended to address this trend. Indeed, the codename for OpenSolaris was “tonic” — the tonic for Solaris’ problems.
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CMS
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Probably the most compelling reasons to deploy an open source solution instead are price and flexibility. The licensing costs of SharePoint, plus Windows Server, plus SQL Server and the rest of the bundle are not insignificant. If you’d prefer to avoid becoming too deeply entrenched in Microsoft-based solutions, you’ll find several open source alternatives — and three I personally recommend: Alfresco, MindTouch, and Drupal.
Why those, and not some of the other open source CMSes? Alfresco and MindTouch are two of the most feature-compatible replacements for SharePoint. Drupal is not a direct replacement for all of SharePoint’s features, but handles many of the use cases for which SharePoint is popular. All three not only enjoy a strong user and developer community, but also have strong commercial support, making them much more suitable for enterprises that choose open source but still seek support and training services.
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Diaspora, an open-source social network describes itself as “privacy-aware, personally-controlled”, will be launched on 15 September, according to the developers.
The project is considered as an alternative to Facebook, but many believe that it is difficult to challenge the world’s largest social network, which has 500 million users and is estimated to be worth $33bn currently.
A team of four US students built up Diaspora trying to solve some of the problems appeared in Facebook, when it was criticised for being overly complex and confusing, as well as privacy concerns. “We want to put users back in control of what they share,” Max Salzberg, one of the founders said.
Diaspora made headlines earlier this year when Facebook was in intense criticism.
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A new version of the popular open source social networking CMS, Elgg has been released! 1.7.2 is primarily a bugfix release.
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Business
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Jaspersoft, the world’s most widely used business intelligence platform, today announced the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite has been selected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), to bring more cost savings and flexibility to their BI deployments.
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In 2007, Danny Windham left Adtran, and came to Digium to be its new CEO. Mark Spencer opted to return to a technology focus and holds the roles of CTO and Chairman. The company is private, but seems positioned for continued growth. In January of 2009, NoJitter reported Open Source had grown to 18% of the North American Market. Digium moved from its startup digs into a custom-built 60,000 sq ft new headquarters. The company enjoys partnerships with several established players including Polycom, IBM, even Skype.
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Cappuccino is an open source framework aimed at making web software comparable to a desktop equivalent—an expertise Motorola will presumably apply to their own apps.
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It’s an exciting move for do-it-yourself video publishers: LongTail Video, home of the popular open source JW Player, has acquired the rights to the Open Video Ads (OVA) project. OVA is also open source, and was created to help content creators deliver IAB-standard video ads.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) will announce the opening of its new international branch in India at the upcoming Software Patents and the Commons conference in New Delhi. The expansion will allow the SFLC to continue its mission of promoting and defending Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) on a global scale.
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Government
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The U.K. government has just released its first contribution to the Drupal community.
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Government reluctance to use open source software is creating problems for cost savings at a local level, a councillor has said.
The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead has been trying to move away from Microsoft software options in favour of moving towards more cost effective open source software.
Computer Weekly reported that this could save up to one third of the council’s IT costs.
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Openness/Sharing
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4. Don’t be Tom Sawyer.
Here stood the board fence which tom sawyer persuaded his gang to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing. Tom sat by and saw that it was well done.
Tom Sawyer is interesting because Tom, by being a smooth talker, convinced everyone to do his work for him. Many companies approach their community strategies as having other people painting their fences. The popular term now is crowdsourcing. In this model, a company says “I have a lot of problems. Maybe I can convince a bunch of people to do my work for me.” Sometimes it works, like Dell’s IdeaStorm. But it works only for big, powerful brands. It doesn’t work when a company asks for help, and everyone ignores them. And it doesn’t work because as a company, you can’t build a community around yourself.
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The future of pharmaceutical R&D may lie in open-source research, with key data being made available to a number of people, including college students and university researchers, in an open and collaborative process. Open-source drug development would leverage an online community of computer users worldwide.
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Open Hardware
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The Menlo Park, Calif-based company, founded in 2006, develops open-source hardware and software for the robotics industry. Its robot PR2 (Personal Robot 2) is being sold as an example of what software developers can do with an open-source robotics platform.
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Programming
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Ruby on Rails 3.0, a major upgrade to the popular open source Web development framework, is due in a final release this week, the founder of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson, said on Tuesday.
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A porcelain lavatory which John Lennon told a builder to use as a “plant pot” has fetched £9,500 – nearly 10 times its guide price – at an auction today.
The loo was used by the music legend when he lived at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire between 1969 and 1972.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The military’s flagship hospital acknowledged Thursday it mishandled two packages of radioactive material last spring in an incident regulators said may have exposed staff and patients to elevated radiation levels.
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The system, called Seaswarm, is a fleet of vehicles that may make cleaning up future oil spills both less expensive and more efficient than current skimming methods. MIT’s Senseable City Lab will unveil the first Seaswarm prototype at the Venice Biennale’s Italian Pavilion on Saturday, August 28. The Venice Biennale is an international art, music and architecture festival whose current theme addresses how nanotechnology will change the way we live in 2050.
Richard M. Stallman Speech Patents Calgary Canada 2005
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you find that running Windows makes a GRUB 2-based system unbootable (Debian bug, Ubuntu bug), then I’d like to hear from you. This is a bug in which some proprietary Windows-based software overwrites particular sectors in the gap between the master boot record and the first partition, sometimes called the “embedding area”. GRUB Legacy and GRUB 2 both normally use this part of the disk to store one of their key components: GRUB Legacy calls this component Stage 1.5, while GRUB 2 calls it the core image (comparison). However, Stage 1.5 is less useful than the core image (for example, the latter provides a rescue shell which can be used to recover from some problems), and is therefore rather smaller: somewhere around 10KB vs. 24KB for the common case of ext[234] on plain block devices. It seems that the Windows-based software writes to a sector which is after the end of Stage 1.5, but before the end of the core image. This is why the problem appears to be new with GRUB 2.
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Kernel Space
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Og reached into his bag marked with a big “35″ and tossed a plump, jucy kernel at this final group, who instantly grabbed it up, thanked him for providing it (unlike those self-absorbed 32 and 27 people) and ran off to help spread the good news of a new kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced last evening, August 25th, yet another improved version of its ATI Catalyst Linux display driver, available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. ATI Catalyst 10.8 introduces final and stable support for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1 operating systems, and official OpenGL ES 2.0 support.
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Applications
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Apart from cleaning a long list of popular apps, it can perform some more advanced tasks too, like clearing the memory and swap partition, delete broken shortcuts, delete languages you don’t use, and some other application-specific functions. Windows users may be underwhelmed, but Linux users will find this a welcome tool for freeing up a bit of space.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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More details about the release can be found in the release announcement. Version 1.4.0 of digiKam is available to download from the project’s web site and is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. rose past the upper end of a month and a half long trading range Thursday and closed at a new high for the year.
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SAP executives have pointed to Red Hat’s use of Linux operating systems, among other things, as proof that the move may not make much sense.
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The program for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe has been announced. The conference will be held October 26-28 in Cambridge, UK, and will be co-located with the GStreamer conference on October 26.
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It is running on a custom Linux operating system, designed by Kobo.
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The Media Flow technology comes by way of Juniper’s acquisition of software vendor Ankeena earlier this year. Media Flow provides customers with content caching and acceleration capabilities. With the new VXA Series Media Flow Engines, Juniper is now expanding the Ankeena technology with a set of dedicated Linux-powered hardware appliances, complementing Media Flow’s availability as a Juniper software product from earlier this year.
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Operating system support is listed for Linux 2.4 and 2.6, as well as FreeBSD.
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TrygTech, a leading provider of software and hardware solutions for enabling embedded systems, has announced the release of their Linux board support package (BSP) for Device Solutions Topaz i.MX25 CPU Module.
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Phones
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Android
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The Dell Streak isn’t in a great position right now. It’s got that old Android 1.6 on it, and then there’s that SIM lock. But what’s really irking people is the lack of a micro USB port, or even a mini USB. It’s hard to imagine not being able to connect a mobile device to your PC to transfer songs and whatnot onto it. But that’s where John out at Linux Slate comes in–he made his own adapter.
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Sub-notebooks
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Google has registered a trademark application for the name ‘Google Speedbook’, prompting suspicions that this will be the brand name of some new Chrome OS hardware. Could Google be looking at expanding out of smartphone hardware to release a Google Tablet or Google netbook? Read on to find out more about the Google Speedbook…
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Tablets
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French publication Les Echos has reported that French carrier Orange will be selling three own-branded Android tablets by Christmas. Allegedly, the tablet will be sold for under 250 Euros, and be subsidized even more when 3G contracts are taken out.
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Heard of Redstar before? Perhaps not, as we haven’t till today, but the Japanese-based company has begun to receive pre-orders of their own Shogo Linux-powered tablet.
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Events
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Thanks to the efforts of summer campaigns intern, Steve DuBois, we have all the video and audio from the conference ready for your viewing pleasure.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Labs, Mozilla’s research and development section, has announced that, based on the popularity of the Git distributed version control system, it is now offering an experimental fork for all Mozilla Labs projects and experiments on project hosting service GitHub. Since 2006, many Labs projects have been hosted on public Mercurial instances.
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The Mozilla Labs developers have announced Jetpack SDK 0.7, the latest revision of the HTML/CSS/JavaScript based extension system for Firefox. The new release includes a panel API, which allows developers to float popup windows over web content, a clipboard API to give extensions access to the system clipboard and a notifications API which allows extensions to get the users attention with toaster or Growl-style messages.
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An early, pre-alpha version of Mozilla’s Fennec mobile browser has been around for months, but the Firefox developer has today released an official full alpha for download. And it’s not just Android that’s benefitting—the mobile browser has also been released for Nokia’s N900 smartphone.
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SaaS
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Last week, Mickos stopped by our offices for a conversation that covered a variety of topics:
* The rise of cloud computing and its impact on open source movement.
* Will there be a LAMP stack for the cloud?
* Will Oracle destroy MySQL and how does NoSQL movement impact MySQL?
* Philosophical aspects of open source.
* The open-source business models.
* Most common mistakes he has seen startups make, especially open-source startups.
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Two months after the commercial Eucalyptus Enterprise version, Eucalyptus has released the open source variant of its Amazon EC2-compatible cloud software. Eucalyptus 2.0, which forms the basis of the Enterprise version, is said to offer improved scalability and a more convenient user interface than its predecessor. Insufficient scalability was reportedly one of the reasons why NASA chose not to use Eucalyptus and, together with Rackspace, launched the OpenStack initiative instead.
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OpenGeo, the leader in open source geospatial web services, announces the release of OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition in collaboration with cloud technology innovator Skygone Inc. OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition is optimized for cloud infrastructure, with special features preconfigured for scalability, and performance enhancements already installed.
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Oracle
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There is much anticipation of Ellison’s keynote, since Oracle’s stewardship of Java has been regarded as unsatisfactory by many Java developers and user groups. A lack of a concrete roadmap, the lack of detail on the relationship between open source and commercial products, and the future of OpenJDK7 and JDK7 are all issues many would like to see clarified. These issues have become more critical in the aftermath of Oracle’s announcement that it was taking legal action against Google for patent and copyright infringement over Google’s implementation of the Dalvik virtual machine in Android, which is based on the open source Apache Harmony implementation of Java.
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CMS
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The Diaspora team has put out an update on their progress in creating a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network”.
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In a recent blog post, the Diaspora team say they have the nascent social networking software up and running, and are happy with the near-final result. Despite these proclamations, however, it’s unclear what Diaspora will look like or how it will function when Diaspora finally launches.
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Project Releases
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Audacious its origins as a fork of Beep Music player and as it matured has been the media player of choice for me for a long while. The latest release is 2.4.0, doesn’t fail to impress with updates to its GUI and a plethora of features that you’ve come to expect from the creators of what to many is the defacto music player on their distro.
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Version 2.0.0 has a new persister for storing messages in transit, which is now only bound by disk capacity and a server which optimises memory usage by paging these messages between disk and RAM. This change gives the server higher and more consistent performance and faster start-up; previously these both degraded with higher volumes of persisted messages.
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Licensing
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Clearly copyright assignment is integral to the dual licensing and open core licensing strategies in enabling those vendors to sell closed-source licenses to the core project and extensions, and it does restrict developer communities in those situations.
However, as Simon briefly explains, copyright assignment is equally used by other organisations, such as the Free Software Foundation, to protect the core project. Glyn Moody described the potential benefits of such an arrangement earlier this week, while Tarus Balog provides another example of copyright assignment protecting an open source project.
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The choice of an open source license for a project code release is not clear-cut, and depends on several factors; in general, when reusing code that comes from external projects, license compatibility is the first, major driver in license selection. Licenses do have an impact on development activity, depending on the kind of project and who controls the project evolution.
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Google
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More details about this years Google Summer of Code can be found on its open source programs web page. Lists of student projects and organisations that were accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010 are also available. In the coming weeks Google will publish more extensive program statistics and reports to the Google Open Source Blog.
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Acre is available under an Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded from its Google Code project page along with instructions on how to get started with the server.
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Early adopters running Linux will be able to download and start testing Build 7.0.503.1.
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It’s no secret that social link sharing community Reddit isn’t singing the praises of its corporate parent Condé Nast, which acquired the company in 2006. Earlier today the two sparred over running ads in support of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in the state. And Reddit has previously written about the shortage of resources that Condé Nast is willing to provide. Now Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger network, is offering to take Reddit off Condé’s hands.
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Science
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A Court in Hawaii has just rejected a new lawsuit brought against the Large Hadron Collider. The plaintiffs failed to produce any evidence that the machine is dangerous, the ruling says.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Media campaigning gone weird. MSNBC reports on a BP sponsored study that the oil cleanup is like pacman and the bacteria solve the oil spill problem. Reality distortion can be so easy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A company that worked with sites that linked to copies of Hollywood blockbusters has become the target of a new lawsuit. The legal action filed by Disney and Warner Bros. says that Triton Media was guilty of both contributory and inducement of copyright infringement when it assisted several sites with advertising and referrals.
Lawrence Lessig talks with the Booksmith – Part III
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Fear #1 (Linux what?): OK, here is an extremely short history lesson and I’ll provide links for those who can’t help that inner burning desire to know all you can know about every topic. Linux is commonly pronounced /li’nuks/ and refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems using the Linux kernel and are primarily used for servers. Basically, a guy named Linus Torvalds in 1999 rewrote Unix from scratch and made it “Open Source”. Open source in its very basic terms means it is free for anyone to use. Keyword here is free. Yay! right? Well, yay if you were a University or College or some government organization like NASA. That is about the extent for which Linux was used for many years. Only the most geeky (yeah, that’s right) of computer geeks started to adopt Linux into personal use and eventually into business.
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Desktop
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The kicker? The “MyLab” courses are rendered using Javascript and Flash. Those are both cross-platform technologies last I checked (that both ran perfectly fine in Firefox).
Now I understand that it can take a lot of time and resources to support another operating system/browser. Even if Pearson isn’t willing to “support” Linux/Firefox users on their website they could at least let us login using the operating system/browser of our choice after seeing their warning message.
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Kernel Space
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ZFS
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Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun’s ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time. While ZFS support has worked its way into OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, ZFS had not been ported to Linux as its source-code is distributed under the CDDL license, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL barring it from integration into the mainline Linux kernel. Next month, however, a working ZFS module for the Linux kernel without a dependence on FUSE will be publicly released.
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Brian Behlendorf, the lead developer of this Linux ZFS port at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, shared the following information with us about their work and that of KQ Infotech on their ZFS module to be released in mid-September.
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At the end of the day, all of this excitement means nothing. Who cares if this ZFS port for the Linux kernel comes out next month? I don’t. Don’t misunderstand me. I love ZFS as I use it all the time on Solaris and OpenSolaris. It is a wonderful file system. This Linux port is also extremely limited in functionality. Today, the GPL’d Btrfs, a competitor to ZFS, is considered “generally stable“. Why not use that instead without all the concerns listed above?
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Applications
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Online collaboration with Feng Office
This article originally appeared in issue 90 of Linux User & Developer magazine.buy_online Subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.
OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office, Feng Office – which is the odd one out? Yes, it’s Feng Office, but not because most people have never heard of it, and not because it lacks the extreme feature set of the other two. Feng Office is not about sitting at your desk writing office documents, it’s about collaborative working.
Feng still allows you to create text documents online, but that’s just a small part of running projects, taking notes, tracking tasks, passing milestones, keeping contact with your organisation and perusing reports of how the projects are progressing.
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The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” refers to the idea that a solitary still image can provide as much information as a large amount of descriptive text. Essentially, pictures convey information more effectively and efficiently than words can.
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I hope you guys do remember the awesome little preview application called Globus Preview. Here is another beautiful application from the same team. It’s called CoverGloobus. It displays cover art and lyrics in your desktop and it supports almost all popular linux media players. Also, the supported themes are really good in my opinion.
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There was no new Guayadeque version in a long time but the development was actually very active and today we finally have a new version. Here are the highlights of Guayadeque 0.2.7:
* libre.fm support
* implemented crossfading between tracks
* record from streams
* a file browser (play files by browsing them on your HDD)
* option to delete files from library and hard drive
* lyricsplugin.com as lyrics search engine
* you can now save the lyrics in a local folder
* the last.fm panel can now search for tracks in your library
* implemented reading/writing images into m4a files
* library search covers scan now into audio files too
* live search
* and a lot more features and fixes
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.8 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.8 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated firefox to 3.6.8, Added support for Apples Safari 5.0 Web Browser, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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At the moment I maintain System Settings and the Device Actions control module. I am also an Administrator of KDE’s own forums, where I help sort out problems users have encountered, in addition to the sysadmin tasks.
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GNOME Desktop
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SP: I’ve been involved with free software since 1998 or 1999. I was managing the CDE desktop team at HP and started investigating GNOME …
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Gaming not what it used to be? Bored by the plethora of 3rd person shooters which seem to dominate the games market?
Well there has been no reason to say that ever since Puppy Arcade had it’s first release – Puppy Arcade caters for probably every platform of yesteryear you could want and then some more.
Puppy Arcade is a distro I have covered numerous times in the past, in fact it is one of the few which I try keeping up to date with. An excellent distro which is a testament to not only the hard work of its creator (Scott Jarvis) but also his genuine love of the emulation scene. Redundant hardware in need of a new life? Use Puppy Arcade to turn it into a retro console!
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Reviews
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As the name suggests, Jolicloud is a cloud-based operating system. It is derived from the desktop edition of Ubuntu 9.04, and is the first stable and publicly downloadable, Linux, cloud-based distribution that I am aware of. Version 1.0, the first stable edition, was released several weeks ago. This review, the first for Jolicloud on this site, also marks its listing in the Mobile & Cloud category.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This piece, due to appear in the next issue of Linux User and Developer, takes a look at the Ubuntu Platform Rally held in Prague, Czech Republic. The linked article has all the details. What caught my attention was the Apple Macs in the room. Are they also running Ubuntu or perhaps some design ideas are being taken from them?
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What about a free, open-source Ubuntu One client that could be used in any Linux distribution?
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Canonical uploaded today the new wallpapers and default theme for the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system. Seventeen new beautiful wallpapers and a lightweight and eye-candy theme will please every existing and future Ubuntu 10.10 user!
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 (“Isadora”), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements, says the team.
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Competition stepped up in June when a price war broke out. First Barnes & Noble slashed the price of its Nook by $60, down to $199; the company also started selling a Wi-Fi-only Nook for $149. Within hours Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle by $70, to $189. And ten days later, Sony cut the price of each of its three Reader products by $30, bringing its most expensive 3G version down to $249.
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Phones
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Android
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As the title of this article (and blurrycam shot above) indicates, the guys over at ModMyMobile.com have gained root access to the MotoBlur-packin’ Motorola Backflip.
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BoyGenius is reporting this evening on a 4.3 inch, kickstand packing, HTC Monster that is said to be launching on Verizon. BGR is describing it as a Nexus One with a 4.3 inch screen. The device is said to have an 8 megapixel camera, 3.5 mm headphone jack, as well as a front facing camera (boo-yah!). Oh, and get this, it might even be global!
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Tablets
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I’m a huge Linux and Free Software advocate, and I do want to see it succeed in a general sense in the tablet market. I think that Android is the best bet to make that happen. People see “Apple iOS” marketed on iPhones and iPads, and most people have at least passing familiarity with an iPhone, so they think to themselves “Oh, the iPad is like a gigantic iPhone. I can handle that.” People see the word Ubuntu and either say “What’s that?” or they say “Oh yeah, I remember when Wal-Mart was pushing those crappy $200 desktop PCs with Ubuntu.” Either way, they have a strong negative reaction.
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My title might cause some controversy I know, but no matter how you look at it, virtually all the new tablets coming out are more or less better featured iPad clones. We need originality, something that is powered by Android and not based on what Apple has. Will this tablet take off at all? Only time can tell.
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Of course, the concept of Linux-based operating systems going on tablets is nothing new. There already are tablets based on Android, which is Linux-based, and many people expect sophisticated tablets to run Google’s upcoming Linux-based Chrome OS. But Ubuntu is Ubuntu. Its interface has become steadily easier to use over the years, it’s familiar to a lot of people, and it could eventually find its biggest market on niche devices such as tablets.
Of course, success on tablets doesn’t necessarily have to outrule continued presence on desktop computers. I have no doubt that Ubuntu and other distros will continue to evolve on desktops. It’s interesting, though, to consider the potential for Linux-based operating systems on non-standard computing devices—or at least devices that we have historically thought of as non-standard.
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A year ago netbooks were the one must-have mobile device. This year it is the tablet PC that is an essential accessory.
Apple’s iPad wasn’t the first tablet PC available but it is the best-known of these devices. But it will face stiff competition in the coming months as most hardware makers switch on to Android-based tablet devices.
Chief among the Android tablet makers is Asus. The company which kick started the netbook market with its Linux-powered EEE PC, is now getting ready to launch an Android-based tablet. The device will be known as the EEE Pad and will begin shipping in March 2011. The tablet is expected to sell for under $400 (under R3000) and will have a 10-inch screen. Under the casing the EEE Pad will run an ARM processor.
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The challenge with increasingly complex SETI search techniques is that the resources and expertise of the SETI community is fairly limited. “The number of people in the world actively involved in SETI could fit into a phone booth,” said Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute.
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Databases
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC and GNU Emacs are the two facets of the GNU operating system that have probably done more than any other to take GNU and free software from idealistic concept to a utilitarian reality. Having previously looked at GNU Emacs and the Hurd, Richard Hillesley looks at the history and progress of GCC.
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I found Gnash 0.8.7 to be more than a bit problematic. In general it worked on something less than half the websites I tried which required Flash. YouTube videos worked exactly once. If you tried to watch a second video you received this message: “An error occured, please try again later”. The workaround was to prevent YouTube from setting cookies or clearing your browser of all YouTube cookies between videos. Finally, Gnash 0.8.7 was incredibly resource hungry, often driving my CPU to 100% usage and bringing things on my system to a crawl. All in all, this was still far from a decent solution.
Early this week Gnash 0.8.8 was released. Despite the small increment in version number, which would make this seem like a minor maintenance release, the difference between version 0.8.8 and the earlier 0.8.7 is like night and day. First, alot of websites that did not work with Gnash before seem to work just fine now. My thoroughly unscientific sample indicates that roughly two thirds of the sites I visit which use Flash are now functional. In addition, YouTube now works 100% of the time without having to clear or restrict cookies.
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The Commodore 64 will rise from the grave before Christmas, according to the tiny company determined to reanimate the long-dead 80s icon.
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Science
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Federal boffins in the States say that the brave new future in which today’s ‘leccy-guzzling lights are replaced by efficient LEDs may not, in fact, usher in massive energy savings.
This is because, according to the scientists’ research, people are likely to use much more lighting as soon as this becomes practical. The greater scope for cheap illumination offered by LEDs will simply mean that people have more lights and leave them on for longer.
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Security/Aggression
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Note that the Pentagon’s orchestrated screaming has not been about technical data that might in fact get GIs killed, but about revelation of the ugly things the US is doing to people. Consider the footage of an American helicopter gunship killing pedestrians in a city street, and apparently having just a swell time doing it. This didn’t reveal military secrets. But it showed the gusnip crew as the butchers they are. Bad juju for the military. PR is all.
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McAfee researcher Francios Paget found a Russian site selling, among other things, fake passports for dozens of countries. The operation is not inexpensive for the buyers, however. The cheapest passport is for Azerbaijan and costs $870 (USD). A French passport costs $5,530. To get it, a customer must send the forgers personal information plus a signature and photo, according to Paget.
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Make no mistake – these cars not about road safety. They’re about the thrill of power that petty bureaucrats get when they can turn the screw on you in a culture of “we caught you” – regardless of whether what you were doing was actually in any way a problem or dangerous. And of course, most of all – they’re about revenue-raising.
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Just received a third CCTV car image – what a day!
I know that it’s only a single yellow, so I suppose that it might have been parked lawfully – but those who know their 1984 will appreciate the delicious irony of this brute being captured in this spot…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A report released today by the Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.
The report, authored by five prominent marine scientists, strongly contradicts media reports that suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remains.
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A new report authored by five prominent marine scientists provides a powerful contradiction of the government’s recent report that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster remains in the Gulf of Mexico. On August 4, the government issued a news release that stated, “The vast majority of the oil from the BP oil spill has either evaporated or been burned, skimmed, recovered from the wellhead or dispersed using chemicals — much of which is in the process of being degraded.”
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Third, General Motors has announced that they plan to produce 45,000 Chevy Volt extended range electric vehicles in 2012, up from the original plans to produce 30,000 cars. However the number of cars General Motors plans to produce is small compared to Nissan’s plans, the Nissan plant in Smyrna Georgia will be capable of producing 150,000 cars per year, for only that one plant!
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Finance
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On March 5, 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court declared New York shopkeeper Leo Nebbia to be a criminal because he sold two quarts of milk and a 5 cent loaf of bread for the combined low price of 18 cents. As Justice Owen Roberts explained in his 5-4 majority opinion in Nebbia v. New York, the state’s Milk Control Board had fixed the minimum price of milk at 9 cents a quart to eliminate the “evils” of price-cutting.
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Yesterday I bought a copy of Li Delin’s (李德林) latest book-“高盛阴谋” (Goldman Sachs Conspiracy). Li is a well-known financial journalist and author who has written several other books, including the November 2009 “干掉一切对手——看高盛如何算赢世界 (Eliminate All Competitors–How Goldman Sachs Wins Over the World”. You can read Li’s blog (in Chinese) on Caijing here.
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Li’s book takes ample license in its attacks on Goldman Sachs. The company’s ultimate goal, he says in the first chapter, is to “kill China.”
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Basis Capital, an Australian hedge fund, urged a New York judge to allow its $1 billion lawsuit over the marketing of credit default swaps by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to proceed, calling Goldman’s request for a dismissal a “distraction.”
The lawsuit by Basis Capital’s Basis Yield Alpha Fund focuses on Goldman Sachs’s sale of the “Timberwolf” collateralized debt obligation. The complaint, filed June 9 in Manhattan federal court, says the fund was forced into insolvency after buying mortgage-linked securities created by Goldman Sachs, in what one of its own executives described internally as a “shi**y deal.”
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“Goldman is struggling a little bit here,” said Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities in Lutz, Florida. “It has to overcome some pretty sizable public relations issues, which are related to the way it does business and the products it creates. The company is good enough to overcome all of this stuff, but it would be hard for me to imagine that there’s no impact as a result of what we’ve seen over the last 12 to 18 months.”
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But the SEC threw the case when it came to fraud- as covered by the Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. It is here that the reader must understand that fraud is not only a civil offense but also a criminal offense- and that the company or the individual found guilty of violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act can be charged with the criminal count of fraud in a criminal proceeding. So by refusing to charge Goldman with violations of Section 10(b) of the SEA, the SEC was playing to lose- and allowing Goldman to win. Not only that but damages in Section 10(b) are not limited to the loss, which the aggrieved party has incurred; there are penalties.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The new documentary “Psywar,” featuring CMD founder John Stauber, explores corporate and government use of propaganda and public relations to manipulate American people. The movie explores how the U.S. government staged events to manipulate public opinion about the Iraq war, like the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, the supposedly spontaneous mob that pulled over the larger-than-life statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The system was introduced Tuesday. When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children’s whereabouts, attendance and even whether they’ve eaten or not.
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As regular readers will know, Google is the subject of probes from data-protection regulators in Germany, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Metropolitan Police (although our own Information Commissioner has given them a free pass).
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Sony has won a temporary ban to prevent Australian distributors selling a hardware hack for the PlayStation 3 (PS3).
The PS3Jailbreak “dongle” allows gamers to play homemade and pirated games on the game’s console.
The ban prevents OzModChips, Mod Supplier and Quantronics from importing, distributing or selling the device.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The New York Times now carries a lot of stories that are of interest to anyone concerned about the high cost of intellectual property protection. The first story today is a debate over who is right AARP or the industry. AARP says the cost of branded drugs rose 8.3% in 2009 link here. Last year the industry complained that the figure was based on wholesale prices, not the retail prices consumers actually paid. Responding to that criticism, AARP switched to retail and still got a big increase. The industry countered that they should use the consumer price index figure which includes generic drug prices–which showed a much lower price increase and argues that the US has the lowest prices for generics in the world.
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“Authors are only motivated to write if they know their rights will be protected.”
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
The second of these quotes, from Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” is very familiar, I think, and demonstrably false. Indeed, even Boswell acknowledged its falsity as he recorded it, and attributed the comment to Johnson’s “indolent disposition.” The first quote comes from this fascinating article in the online version of the German magazine “Der Spiegel” reporting research that suggests that German’s 19th century industrial expansion may have been at least partially driven by the absence of strong copyright protection.
That authors must have strong copyright protection in order to create is presented in this article as a conventional belief, the kind of thing that everybody knows and accepts as a matter of course. Such bromides are almost always false, like Johnson’s remark, or at least incomplete. Perhaps the greatest value of the Spiegel article, short as it is, is that it demonstrates that a complex situation, such as the cultural impact of printing, copyright and the distribution of books, cannot be reduced to truisms. Complex analysis is required, and Eckhard Hoffner’s research is an example of such analysis.
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Take-Two is the developer behind the successful BioShock video game series. The first-person shooter game was announced in October 2004, two months before the domain name Bioshock.com was registered by Name Administration Inc, a Cayman Islands-based company that makes money from trading in and displaying adverts on its massive network of domain names.
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The suit alleges trademark infringement, false advertising, trademark dilution, unfair competition and other claims. It does not specify damages but asks the court to order the defendants to pay restitution of their profits from any sales, as well as award any other monetary relief.
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Teachbook filed a trademark application in March 2009, and Facebook opposed the registration last year. There were “ongoing discussions” over use of the name and Shrader believed “we were working constructively with (Facebook),” but is now expecting to file a response to the California-based technology company’s lawsuit in court.
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Copyrights
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So what about James Gannon? James recently posted an article on Facebook, in which he argues for stronger digital locks. James does not mention that he works at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, a law firm that does work for The Canadian Recording Industry Association, which has a vested interest in digital locks.
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The EU election last June was a surprise for many, as the Piratpartiet got a seat with over 7% of the votes. Then when the Lisbon Treaty passed and they were awarded a second seat in the European Parliament. However, it wasn’t without drawbacks as the second seat has yet to be filled. That may happen soon.
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Remember back when Rupert Murdoch acted like fair use was a myth that would be “barred by the courts” when challenged? Yeah, that’s been coming back to bite Murdoch. Earlier this year, we noted that a former advisor to Michael Jackson was suing News Corp. over Fox News’ decision to air interview footage without a license, and the complaint highlighted Murdoch’s anti-fair use statement. Of course, when it came time to defend itself (guess what?) News Corp. lawyers relied heavily on fair use.
Looks like that’s happening again. News Corp. has been sued yet again for copyright infringement, this time for airing a video (without licensing the clip) of Brad Pitt having trouble driving a motorcycle. Instead, Fox News folks simply downloaded it from TMZ, a property owned by AOL. Wait a second… so with Rupert Murdoch running all over the place claiming that Google News linking to his content is “theft,” yet Fox News has no problem downloading a video from a competing media organization and using it? Fascinating.
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The controversy arose when Raymond Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, expressed her desire to publish these stories because Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, had dramatically changed their character and style. Indeed, she claimed that these unedited stories represented the “real” Caver, whom she wished to reveal to the world. However, Carver’s estate no longer owns the copyrights to these stories.
The issue is particularly interesting because the “original” versions of the stories are considerably different from the published versions as edited by Lish. Thus, there is some ambiguity as to whether they are covered by the copyright of the published stories; in essence, they are the building blocks of the published versions, and thus it is unclear whether they would be considered derivative works.
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My first reaction was to be surprised. After all, when was the last time you saw a music collection group support the public domain or the idea of widespread shared culture? Hell, in the US, we have ASCAP telling us that things like Creative Commons are dangerous and must be fought.
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ACTA
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According to Inside U.S. Trade (August 27, 2010), the U.S. has adopted “a major policy shift” and “proposed removing controversial language from the Anticounterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that would have required signatories to impose secondary liability on Internet firms for intellectual property rights infringements by individuals.” On closer read of the ACTA text as we know it, the truth may be that secondary liability is not going away at all.
There has been no official text of the ACTA agreement released since April 2010. The latest leaked text is from July 2010, after the Lucerne but before the Washington D.C. round of negotiations. Neither of those options indiacte any US position proposing to take out internet service provider (ISP) liability. USTR is refusing to comment on the proposal reported by Inside US Trade. It is therefore impossible to say with any certainty what the U.S. is proposing to change. My best guess is: nothing.
The July leaked text of ACTA contains a chapter on “Enforcement Procedures in the Digital Environment” composed of seven major subsections. Sections one through three identify obligations of countries to enforce copyright law on the internet, and sections four through seven mainly require punishment of people who evade digital rights management hardware or software or define the exceptions to such obligations.
The digital rights management provisions do not depend on ISP liability and therefore the best interpretation of the news is that these sections still remain as US priorities, and they have their own problems.
Unite Against ACTA – To Arms!
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08.27.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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One of the challenges of being a Linux desktop user is the difficulty in finding systems that ship with Linux pre-installed. Major OEMs often offer a handful of Linux offerings, but to get a wider range of hardware and choices of Linux distributions you have to look to smaller vendors that are really interested in promoting Linux — like ZaReason.
ZaReason sells a full line of Linux machines, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and servers. They also sell peripherals and some other gear, but what I was most interested in was a laptop with Linux. Specifically, a laptop with muscle. So I asked ZaReason to send me a review unit, the Verix 1656 with Intel’s Core i7 and maxed out RAM.
[...]
The Verix gets two thumbs up. It’s not perfect, but it’s a really good laptop and one I’d recommend to anyone who wants a solid and speedy Linux laptop. My main complaint with the Verix? It’s a review unit, which means I have to send it back. If you buy one, though, you won’t have that problem.
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Kernel Space
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Since at least 2008, the Btrfs Linux filesystem has been talked about as a next-generation technology one day potentially rivalling or supplanting the current dominant Linux filesystems.
According to Chris Mason, founder of the Btrfs effort and now director of software development at Oracle, Btrfs is today generally stable and usable even though it’s yet to be finalized. And although he admits the filesystem still has some issues to overcome as development continues, Mason said he would like to see Btrfs ultimately replacing existing Linux filesystems like the popular Ext3 and Ext4 systems that are often the default on enterprise Linux distributions.
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A while ago we were telling you there are 20% chances to get BTRFS support in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Well, it didn’t make it.
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Applications
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When you hear the word “backup,” what do you think? Critical? Complicated? Costly? When you think of backing up Linux desktops or servers what do you think? You don’t? You run screaming? Thankfully that is not necessary. There are tons of tools in the Linux-verse capable of running a multitude of backs. From the overly simple to the overly complex, in Linux you can find a tool for just about every situation and every experience level.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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With all of this talk about KDE 4.5 lately, I thought I should take a moment to mention a tool that hasn’t had much (or any) talk here on Ghacks. That tool is Kontact. But what is Kontact? Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that includes more tools than your standard suite, has a lot of pluses, and a few minuses. But even with its minuses, Kontact is a spot-on tool for anyone needing a solid groupware suite to keep them as organized as possible.
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With all the many reasons to use Linux today–particularly in a business setting–it’s often a relatively easy decision to give Windows the boot. What can be more difficult, however, is deciding which of the hundreds of Linux distributions out there is best for you and your business.
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Red Hat Family
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Jefferies & Co. maintained its ‘buy’ rating on business software company Red Hat Inc. with a price target of $35.
“We believe Red Hat continues to be well-positioned to capture share in Federal IT, but the new 8 year, $2 billion social security administration (SSA) claims processing contract is likely to be spread across many vendors. If Red Hat does win a portion of it, they could be displacing International Business Machine Corp.,” said Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies.
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Debian Family
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Debian kicked off when Linux distributions were still a relatively novel concept. The only older surviving distro is Slackware, Red Hat didn’t enter the picture until 1994. Depending on how you look at it, Debian either enjoys a very small niche user base, or one of the largest of any Linux distribution. Strictly speaking, Debian is widely (though it’s hard to say how widely) deployed on servers and not quite as popular on desktop systems compared to Fedora, Linux Mint, or Ubuntu.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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OpenOffice 3.2.1 (bug-fix release) was released almost 3 months ago but only now is available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx users, in the lucid-proposed official repository.
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Following its launch as public beta in January of this year, the Boxee developers have announced the release of a new beta – version 0.9.22.13692 – of their popular part-open-source cross-platform media centre with social networking and community features. According to Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen, the latest public beta adds “the foundations of a new Movie Library to complement the TV Show Library”.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In May, Mozilla and the Shuttleworth Foundation announced a new Education for the Open Web Fellowship. The aim is to support practical ideas that help people learn about, improve and promote the open nature of the internet, as part of our commitment to supporting leaders working at the intersection of open education and the open web.
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Mozilla pumped out a release candidate version of Firefox 3.6.9 yesterday.
The pre-beta update is intended only for brave souls willing and able to have a poke around in the unfinished code.
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Oracle
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Once upon a time (1984), Sun created an RPC implementation for Unix, with the intent of implementing RFC 707 (High-level framework for network-based resource sharing). Now, in those days, a good way to ensure that people used code that you wrote was to upload it to usenet, and in 1985, Sun did that. (Google has one of the posts archived here: Sun RPC part 8 of 10)
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Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won’t be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we’ve participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.
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Licensing
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A collaborative activity dubbed Project Harmony is now under way between corporate and corporate-sponsored participants in the free and open source software communities (not to be confused with the Apache Java project of the same name). The project seeks to harmonise the various participant and contributor agreements – collectively termed “contributor agreements” by some – used by many open source projects.
The goal of the project’s initiators is to reduce the legal costs of analysing paperwork faced by companies contributing to open source projects. Initiated and sponsored by Canonical, meetings have already been held several times under the Chatham House Rule, including one recently during LinuxCon in Boston. The participants also number several people who are skeptical of the value of copyright aggregation, myself included. At the meeting I was asked to write about my skepticism; this article is the result. I’m by no means the first to tread this ground; you’ll also want to read the earlier article by Dave Neary, and the comprehensive article by Michael Meeks ends with a useful list of other articles.
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My post this week on several writers groups objections to Bill C-32 has generated considerable discussion, with some taking me to task for focusing on their letter’s warning of “unintended consequences,””years of costly litigation,” and “serious damage to the cultural sector.” Instead, they argue that I should have focused on the call for additional “legislative guidance” on the fair dealing reforms. After all, who could be against greater clarity in the law?
In the discussion that has followed, I believe that it has become increasingly clear that the “legislative guidance” is not really about the fair dealing reforms found in C-32, but rather fair dealing more generally. Unfortunately, the writers’ letter only speaks of their concerns and does not provide any specific policy or legislative reform recommendations that would clarify their intentions. However, with the government having opened up the fair dealing provision, those groups may see an opportunity to reverse the Supreme Court of Canada’s CCH decision that characterized fair dealing as a user right and established guidelines for its interpretation.
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USA Today, the nation’s second largest newspaper, is making the most dramatic overhaul of its staff in its 28-year history as it de-emphasizes its print edition and ramps up its effort to reach more readers and advertisers on mobile devices.
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Security/Aggression
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We’ve already noted that various government officials have been engaging in a massive hype campaign about “cyberwar” threats, in an effort to get more control over certain networks. But there’s also a bit of an inter-departmental battle within government agencies over who should get to control these new powers
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A failure of servers at Virginia’s centralized information technology superagency has left several state agencies unable to do their work.
At least two dozen agencies were affected by the Wednesday afternoon crash at the problem-plagued Virginia Information Technologies Agency.
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Kyle Cassidy traveled 15,000 miles over two years photographing Americans in their homes and asking one question: “Why do you own a gun?” A good question, particularly since most of these guns are not easily reconcilable with the notion of self-defence and their true place should be somewhere in the Armed Forces.
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I was pretty bummed this year when I found out that a previous engagement would prevent me from traveling to Las Vegas for the annual back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon security conventions. But I must say I am downright cranky that I will be missing MalCon, a conference being held in Mumbai later this year that is centered around people in the “malcoder community.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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We saw it more recently in the NY Times piece we wrote about claiming that cable TV was winning against the internet by purposely keeping authorized content offline, based off of a single anecdote of a guy who ditched his cable subscription only to go back a year later… just a day or so before the stats came out showing that people are actually ditching their cable connections.
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What was most interesting about the situation in North Carolina, however, was how blatant state politicians were in highlighting that it was really the broadband companies who were calling the shots. In our story from April of 2009, it was noted that when the state representatives sponsoring the bill were asked questions about it during a committee hearing, they asked Time Warner employees to answer for them. Think about that for a second. The sponsors of the bill couldn’t answer the questions, so they asked industry folks to answer instead. We had thought that was about as blatant as a politician could be in admitting that the bill was actually written by the industry and that the politicians didn’t even understand what they were sponsoring.
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One local on-ramp to the Internet just got a lot bigger and lightning fast.
The city of Salisbury begins beta testing of a brand new fiber-optic cable system next month.
Salisbury and North Carolina’s Municipal League have overcome strong objections from a powerful state senator, Sen. David Hoyle of Gaston County, who supports the cable companies who say local government competition is unfair.
After the implosion of the textile industry, Salisbury is trying to weave a new future with new fibers; fiber-optic cable.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A leaked draft of the new Czech Copyright Act was obtained by Pirate News at the beginning of August 2010, after the Ministry of Culture has initially declined the request of Czech Pirate Party to have access to the document three days after the draft was sent out for feedback to organizations affected by the proposal. The draft presents a storm of “improvements” which grant millions of euro from public sector budgets to collecting societies.
[...]
That means that in order to achieve free distribution of copylefted work, the author has to notify the collecting society and he carries the burden of proof, that is, he has to prove that license has been provided, or if you like, the user of gratuitous license has to prove the collecting society has been notified, which is even harder. The amendment draft thus violates the declared support of public licenses.
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If you ever thought that no one would ever actually legally attack Creative Commons and, if they did, you’d hear about it, consider this the article you “hear about it”. A draft copyright bill from the Czech Republic has leaked online and it may be one of the most disturbing copyright bills ever created.
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The founder of the small software company Coding Robots was shocked when he found out that one of his works had been cracked and shared on The Pirate Bay. However, instead of asking The Pirate Bay to remove the torrent the company’s founder did quite the opposite. He sent a ‘Notice of Ridiculous Activity’ because the crack didn’t live up to his expectations.
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Now called simply Playlist, the site allows users to create and share playlists using either song files that are hosted by the company itself or on third-party servers. When it plays the files that live on playlist.com, the service racks up millions of dollars in royalty costs. When the files play from external servers, the site functions, in a sense, as a playable search engine.
As the screenshot from its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing shows (right), Project Playlist now owes millions of dollars in royalty costs to each of the major labels for playback of the music it hosted, having finally reached licensing agreements with all four major labels by May of this year. Those hard-won licensing agreements may well spell doom for Playlist.com, as they have for so many other start-ups.
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Before the days of the Internet when computers with 48k were deemed sufficient, I was one of a few who were accessing Micronet. Little did I know at the time (when I was downloading lawfully free software onto tape) was that I was taking the first steps into what would be a global phenomena and eventually something which would become so large, even the best of ISP’s could buckle under the demand to feed their end users hunger for data.
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It is unlikely that online copyright infringement would ever stop, no matter what was done, however it’s like smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes was once socially acceptable. It no longer is socially acceptable. Or drunk driving – at one time everyone did it, now it’s so socially unacceptable that very few do so anymore.
The curious thing is that all of the laws which have been enacted, appear to have had virtually no effect on online copyright infringement. What has had a huge effect was legal options. People love to show their appreciation for value, especially when they can show that appreciation directly to the artist, or software developer.
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This is incredibly laughable if you know anything about the Copyright Office, which has been the leader in pushing for ever more draconian copyright law and has a history of almost always siding with content creators over the public. The 1976 Copyright Act, which completely flipped copyright on its head in this country came out of the Copyright Office, and some of the same folks are still there (including the boss, Marybeth Peters) — and haven’t changed their opinion much. Peters, in particular, has always been a staunch supporter of copyright holders over the public.
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So, the websites themselves are already pretty far removed from the actual infringement. The files are hosted on other sites. They’re shared by other people. These sites just allow users to post links. And… then on top of that the studios aren’t even suing these sites, which are a few steps away from the actual infringement: they’re suing this ad firm, which is another degree of separation away. Wow.
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ACTA
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Dutch political party Green Left (Groen Links) is completely fed up with the ACTA Treaty’s haziness, reports Webwereld. One of Webwereld’s readers tipped off Mariko Peters (GL) about ACTA’s continuing secret negotiations as well as contradictions in communications about possible changes in Dutch law as a result of the Treaty. Maria van der Hoeven, Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs replied.
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ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is currently being negotiated, largely in secret, between the United States, the EU and 9 other countries.2 This draft agreement seeks to regulate a wide range of copyright, patents and trademark issues, including, most controversially, providing for additional regulation of the Internet. There have been a number of leaks (here, here, here and here) and the European Commission published an official draft text on 22 April.
ACTA is a covert attempt, at the global level, to further reduce the public interest element in copyright, patents and trademarks, in the balance between the rights of creators, users, and the public at large, without proper debate and scrutiny in each nation state. The current form of ACTA is a threat to future innovation and freedom of citizens. ACTA is primarily driven by the US and the EU. Developing countries such as India and Brazil have been shut out of the process from the start.
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