05.23.10

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Video post: Hey look, Ubuntu is on tv

  As seen on American TV CBS show on May 18, Ubuntu is shown as the favorite Linux operating system of a physicist charater. While I am greatful for the product placement, people should know “Ubuntu is for human beings too.”

• Move Ubuntu 10.04 Window Buttons from Left to Right with 1 Command

• Red Hat Commercializes deltaCloud, Eyes a More Open Cloud

  Open source vendor Red Hat is betting on a year-old open source effort that it hopes will further open up the Cloud. Red Hat’s deltaCloud project http://deltacloud.org/ started last year as a way of enabling and managing a heterogeneous Cloud virtualized infrastructure. Now, deltaCloud is on a path to commercialization as part of a set of new virtualization products from Red Hat. The potential payoff for Red Hat is that deltaCloud will be positioned as an open source approach to managing nearly any type of virtualized Cloud technology.

  “We’re creating a Cloud management engine based on the open source deltaCloud project,” Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Cloud business, told InternetNews.com. “We haven’t yet issued a delivery date for that product, but it will be sometime next year. We have people using deltaCloud now, but in terms of a fully supported product, it will be incorporated into a family of products for Cloud management that Red Hat will provide.”

• Android

  • Google, Sony and Android: TV and much, much more

    In the wake of Google’s announcement of the Google Android-based TV, Google and Sony have unveiled plans for Android-based entertainment products that go well beyond TV. And other partners have joined the Google TV bandwagon.

  • Amazon jumps into Androidland

    ONLINE BOOKSELLER Amazon will be offering an app that will allow users of Android smartphones to read books in the Kindle format.

  • Android mobile phones get streaming TV

    MOBILE TV OUTFIT Yamgo has released beta software for Android users so that they can see live streaming of high-quality mobile TV and video on demand.

  • Whereis Navigator finds its way to Android

    Whereis Navigator provides turn-by-turn GPS navigation on Android phones such as the HTC Desire and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

Free Software/Open Source

• Don’t be finicky

• Gov 2.0 Week in Review

  “The more open a government agency is, the more it seems that the public trusts it,” mused Chris Dorobek in his post on public trust and government. If so, the creation of a “right to data” under the “Big Society proposals” from the new United Kingdom government could be significant. For those interested, there’s a good overview of European mashups of public data at OurData.eu.

• Google programming Frankenstein is a Go

  “We’re already using Go internally at Google for some production stuff,” Robert Pike, one of Go’s developers and a former member of the Unix team at Bell Labs, said today during a question and answer session at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. “The language is pretty stable.”

Leftovers

• Chomp! Pac-Man, the arcade classic, turns 30

• Crime

  • Lawyers Suspended for Ignoring ‘Warning Signs’ of Partner’s $17 Million Fraud

    An attorney accused of ignoring “multiple warning signs” of a $17 million fraud carried out by his former partner has been suspended from the practice of law for three years.

  • An Old Chip Cartel Case Is Brought to a Swift End

    The European Union fined a group of computer chip makers 331.3 million euros ($409 million) on Wednesday for price fixing in the first use of a new procedure that allows settlement of cartel cases in Europe.

  • Chipmakers fined by EU for price-fixing

  • Kurland to serve 27 months for Galleon case role

    The first Wall Street executive to be sentenced in the sprawling Galleon hedge fund illegal insider trading case was ordered to serve two years and three months in prison on Friday.

  • Tobacco Executive Charged With Threatening Family Court Magistrate

    A high-level executive at an Opa-Locka, Fla., tobacco company is facing extortion charges after allegedly threatening a Miami-Dade family court magistrate who recommended a judge rule against him in a paternity case.

    In a letter to the magistrate, he told her to step down or face a public relations nightmare, according to an application for an arrest warrant filed by investigators.

    Victor M. Gonzalez, comptroller for the family-owned Dosal Tobacco Corp., posted $7,500 bond Tuesday after his arrest at the company’s headquarters the day before. Gonzalez, 50, was charged with one count of extortion, a second degree felony that carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in state prison.

• Science

  • Jupiter cloud belt missing again, scientists say

    Scientists don’t know why, but one of Jupiter’s two main cloud belts has disappeared — again.

    Like a wayward pet, the belt has gone missing before and has always returned.

  • Cell Phone, Cancer Study Inconclusive

    Both of the studies — the WHO report and the new European research — have received some funding from mobile phone industry sources.

  • Study: No Link Between Brain Tumors and Cell Phones

    The 10-year Interphone study of the health effects of mobile-phone use has found no increased risk of two types of brain tumors. Although some of the data shows an increased risk for some mobile-phone users, the possibility of errors prevents researchers from drawing any hard conclusions, the study said.

  • No consensus on study into cancer risks from cell phones

    Say what? Here’s the problem:

    * People who only use their cell phones once in a while had a lower risk of cancer than those who never used them.
    * Those who held phones to their ears at least 30 minutes a day for 10 years had a 40% greater chance of contracting glioma, the cancer that killed Ted Kennedy.

    It’s all going into the International Journal of Epidemiology, where it will be safe behind a pay firewall.

  • Experts Call for Changes in Cell Phone Design, Warnings, Ban on Use by Children

    Institute for Health and the Environment, University at Albany, Rensselaer, New York: Ten-Year INTERPHONE Cell Phone Study Reports Increased Risk for Brain Cancer

  • The Interphone Cell Phone Study Press Conference [MP3]

  • Interphone Points to Long-Term Brain Tumor Risks – Interpretation Under Dispute

• Security/Aggression

  • Chelsea fans hack Man Utd phone systems

    Chelsea fans mocked their rivals at Manchester United last weekend by hacking into the Old Trafford club’s phone system and changing its recorded message.

  • Man accused of DDoSing conservative talking heads

    Federal prosecutors have accused a man of carrying out a series of botnet offenses including attacks that brought down the websites of conservative talking heads Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rudolph Giuliani.

• Environment

  • Sweet success for Kit Kat campaign: you asked, Nestlé has answered

    A big ‘Thank You!’ to the hundreds of thousands of you who supported our two-month Kit Kat campaign by e-mailing Nestlé, calling them, or spreading the campaign message via your Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles. This morning, Nestlé finally announced a break for the orang-utan – as well as Indonesian rainforests and peatlands – by committing to stop using products that come from rainforest destruction.

  • Bad days for bluefin

    And on this side of the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, the odds aren’t much better, even without a catastrophic oil-spill. The bluefin’s days are numbered. In just a couple of days the month long bluefin purse-seining season opens. It only lasts a month, a restriction that has come into place in the past few years because there are simply too many fishing boats chasing too few fish. But it happens to be the very time the fish spawn.

  • SNL’s Alec Baldwin Season Finale: 5 Funniest Moments

    Cold Open: “A Message From the People Who Ruined Our Ocean.” BP, Transocean, and Halliburton outline some of their proposals for cleaning up the mess.

  • Furious Louisiana officials accuse BP of destroying fragile marshes

    Crude oil oozed into US wetlands Friday as furious Louisiana officials accused BP of destroying fragile marshes and leaving coastal fishing communities in ruin.

    As delicate marshlands in the Mississippi Delta faced an environmental nightmare, BP conceded after days of pressure that it had underestimated the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.

  • Link Roundup: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

  • One Drill Too Far

  • Hopes pinned on BP’s ‘dynamic kill’ to stop oil spill

    BP, which leased the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on April 20, hopes to stop the noxious flow with a so-called “dynamic kill” operation, in which heavy drilling fluids would be injected into the well to stem the oil flow, followed by a cement operation to seal it up permanently.

  • The snakes we lost in the fire

    Some 80,000 snakes and several thousand spiders and scorpions were lost, including several specimens that had never been cataloged. Beyond simple scientific curiosity, the collection played an important role in helping scientists understand and prevent extinctions. You could always collect another 100K creepy crawlies, but they wouldn’t cover the same significant historic ground.

  • Nuclear News: BP’s Radioactive Liability Cap

    ‘As BP destroys our priceless planet, its lawyers gear up to save the company from paying for the damage. The same will happen — only worse — with the next atomic reactor disaster. By law, BP may be liable for only $75 million of the harm done by the Deepwater Horizon. Ask yourself why the federal government would adopt legislation that limits the liability of an oil driller for the damage it does to us all. Ask the same question — on another order of magnitude — about nuclear power plants. By any calculation, BP did more than $75 million in harm during the first hour of this undersea gusher. That sum won’t begin to cover even the legal fees, let alone the tangible damage to our only home. Now imagine a melt-down alongside the blow-out. See the Deepwater Horizon as a nuclear power plant. Think of the rickety Grand Gulf, a bit to the north, or the two decaying reactors at South Texas, a ways to the west. Imagine that apocalyptic plume of oil ravaging our seas as an airborne radioactive cloud. Feel it pouring like Chernobyl over the south coast, enveloping all of Florida, blowing with the shifts of the winds up over the southeast, irradiating Atlanta, then Nashville, then New Orleans, then Houston, all through Mexico and the north coast of South America, the Caribbean, then around again across Florida, through the Atlantic and all over Europe, then around the globe two or three times more. The instigators of such a nightmare are currently on the hook for a maximum of $11 billion. Ask yourself why the federal government would limit the liability of a reactor owner for the damage it imposes on the public.’

  • Nightmare scene as oil smothers Louisiana wetlands

  • BP Disaster: Oil reaches Louisiana marshlands

  • The Gulf oil slick has a tail, and that’s bad

  • The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference Greenpeace urges delegations to recognise proliferation risks of nuclear energy expansion

  • Free nuclear advice for the Polish Energy Group

    So Poland has declared its intention to launch a nuclear ‘renaissance’ of its very own. They’ve appointed analysis teams and signed ‘memoranda of cooperation’ with nuclear reactor builders. It’s a very serious business.

  • Climate change ‘no excuse’ for failure to beat malaria

    A team of UK and American scientists say that – assuming global warming proceeds in line with mainstream expectation – there is no reason to fear a global malaria outbreak.

  • Costa Rican elbows out South African as UN climate boss

    A Costa Rican bureaucrat is set to take the top job at the United Nations climate convention after a mini-revolt from small island states.

  • Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010

• Finance

  • Goldman Sachs Revolving Door: The New Edition

    Since then, the scrutiny of Goldman has risen to a whole new level, with the SEC alleging that the firm committed securities fraud, federal prosecutors probing its subprime-mortgage-related activites and lawmakers grilling the firm’s top executives.

    And the revolving door continues to turn — plenty of former Goldman staffers now work at a range of agencies from the SEC to the Treasury Department. To win friends and influence people in Washington — and sway the pending financial reform legislation — Goldman fields a deep bench of lobbyists with plenty of experience in politics, as noted by CBS News and the HuffPost Investigative Fund.

  • High Frequency Trading Is A Scam

    No. The disadvantage was not speed. The disadvantage was that the “algos” had engaged in something other than what their claimed purpose is in the marketplace – that is, instead of providing liquidity, they intentionally probed the market with tiny orders that were immediately canceled in a scheme to gain an illegal view into the other side’s willingness to pay.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Clegg promises liberties restoration

    Nick Clegg promised government that will restore individual liberties and value dissent this morning, as he set out his Deputy Prime Minster’s brief to repeal Labour laws this morning.

  • Feds to step up monitoring of global press freedom

    President Barack Obama is set to sign legislation Monday expanding the federal government’s role in monitoring global freedom of the press, according to the White House.

    Obama will sign the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, which requires a greater examination of the status of press freedoms in different countries in the State Department’s Annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

  • The secret life of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

    Julian Assange, the man behind the world’s biggest leaks, believes in total openness and transparency – except when it comes to himself. Nikki Barrowclough tracked him down.

    Julian Assange has never publicly admitted that he’s the brains behind Wikileaks, the website that has so radically rewritten the rules in the information era. He did, however, register a website, Leaks.org, in 1999. ”But then I didn’t do anything with it.”

  • Pakistanis shout ‘Death to Facebook’, burn US flags

    Pakistani protesters shouted “Death to Facebook”, “Death to America” and burnt US flags on Friday, venting growing anger over “sacrilegious” caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed on the Internet.

    A Facebook user organised an “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” competition to promote “freedom of expression”, inspired by an American woman cartoonist, but sparked a major backlash in the conservative Muslim country of 170 million.

    Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and the row has sparked comparison with protests across the Muslim world over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006.

  • ‘Draw Mohammed’ call prompts Pakistan Facebook ban

  • ‘Draw Mohammed’ page removed from Facebook

  • Pakistan extends Web site ban to include YouTube

  • Everybody panic!

  • Twitter gets subpoenaed

    In his subpoena, Corbett has requested that the micro-blogging service appear as a witness to “testify and give evidence regarding alleged violations of the laws of Pennsylvania”. It will also be required to provide, “name, address, contact information, creation date, creation Internet Protocol address and any and all log in Internet Protocol address”.

    [...]

    In Oregon, privacy is also high on the agenda, as three lawyers have filed a class action suit against Google and its Street View vehicles, which we now know were cruising around sniffing up wireless data.

    Google executives have admitted that its survey cars mistakenly acquired information during the creation of its updated mapping tools. However, it looks like this candour could cost it dearly, and not just in terms of its reputation.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Europe outlines plan to boost broadband by 2020

    All European households will have broadband speeds of 30Mbps (megabits per second) by 2020, the European Union has pledged.

  • Cops back in on BT/Phorm case

    The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has called in City of London Police to assist as it decides whether to go to court over BT’s covert trials of Phorm’s web interception and profiling system.

    [...]

    It was claimed by privacy campaigners and legal commentators after The Register revealed the secret trials that BT and Phorm had committed offences under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which restricts covert wiretapping and interception of communications.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Wall Street banks lose court ruling on hot news ban

    Three Wall Street banks suffered a legal setback when a federal appeals court in New York put on hold a ban on financial news service Theflyonthewall.com Inc from quickly reporting “hot news” about their analysts’ research.

  • Copyrights

    • Worst Week for Album Sales Since 1991

      Without any major releases and amid overall decreasing record sales, this past week has the dubious distinction of seeing the fewest number of total album sales in a single week — 5.3 million — since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking in 1991.

    • Is YouTube’s three-strike rule fair to users?

      “Until I lost 900 videos, I never actually considered there was anything unsafe about trusting a company such as Google to protect my data. After all, who keeps photos in a shoebox anymore?”

    • EC plans stronger data protection and copyright laws

      The European Commission will strengthen legal protections for personal data, reform copyright law and ensure that device and software makers embrace standards, it said when outlining its new digital policies.

      The Commission will also consider forcing companies to tell users and customers when their systems have been breached and personal data has been lost, stolen or exposed.