01.15.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Last month we delivered our first benchmarks of the Amazon EC2 Cloud, but those initial tests were limited to just a few of their cloud computing instances due to failures with the Ubuntu EC2 operating system on their other compute instances. Earlier this month we then showed how the Amazon EC2 Micro was comparable to a Nokia N900 and Intel Atom, but now we have a more exhaustive comparison complete of all major Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud types.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe while Android overtakes iPhone in the US, and TransGaming transforms Cedega into the GameTree Developer Program. Discover our new section and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
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Ballnux
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We recently received a tip from someone who claims to work internally at T-Mobile. The information in the tip has just confirmed everything we have ever thought about Samsung, OTA’s and new devices.
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Kernel Space
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Daniel Poelzleithner has announced to the Linux kernel world his new project named ulatencyd. The focus of ulatencyd is to provide a script-able daemon to dynamically adjust Linux scheduling parameters and other aspects of the Linux kernel.
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Applications
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The GIMP dev team has made some clarification on the current state of GIMP 2.8 and also commented on the future of the GIMP project and its aims.
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Puddletag is an awesome mp3tag-like audio tag editor for Linux about which we’ve talked about last week.
Puddletag comes with Ubuntu .deb files but it doesn’t have a PPA for easy updates so thanks Mrbig2000 and RobJN’s suggestion, I’ve created a PPA.
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I delayed a bit ReSiStance development during last months because we had a lot of work in Igalia’s WebKit team. But I managed to find some time during Xmass to advance some work and to review a couple of pending patches. The most important ones were by far, the Google Reader support ones.
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Y PPA Manager is a GUI tool to add, remove, purge, list and search for Launchpad PPAs.
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In last month’s article we talked about how this free software graphics program missed its anticipated release date and one of the core developers, Martin Nordholts, said it was about a month and a half away still if it’s just a single developer working on the release full-time. Martin said the key item missing from GIMP 2.8 was the single-window interface mode and that there were less than three dedicated developers working on this critical free software project.
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With the number of bugs being filed on compiz recently and the fact that doing the triaging for all of them is a *little* bit overwhelming, David Barth, the DX Team Lead and Didier Roche who is our packaging master spoke the other day about ways to handle the flood of bugs in compiz 0.9 for unity, I decided to write a little tool for compiz which spews as much internal state information as possible – everything about OpenGL, the paint state, the exact state of every X window, the exact X11 state, etc etc to try and find bugs or things that don’t look right without having to have access to your particular machine. That tool will land tomorrow morning (US Time, since I’m in Dallas with the rest of the DX and Platform team).
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Good news for all the Orta fans: a new version of this beautiful theme has been released today with a new Nautilus Elementary style (configurable from the Orta Settings Manager) as well as many bug fixes.
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Pandora radio is a personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites. You can create custom web radio stations and listen free – available only in the US.
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Instructionals/Technical
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gThumb is an image viewer / photo manager for GNOME. It includes options to edit photos, transfer photos from digital cameras, upload photos to websites such as Facebook, PicasaWeb, Photobucket, or Flickr and so on.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.
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Vincent Untz has announced the first GNOME release of 2011, which is one of the final development snapshots leading up to the long-awaited release of GNOME 3.0.
GNOME 2.91.5 is today’s development release after the 2.91.4 release was previously skipped from making it out there due to blocking bugs during a collision with the holidays.
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Xfce
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REMnux is a lightweight Linux distribution for assisting malware analysts in reverse-engineering malicious software.
REMnux is designed for running services that are useful to emulate within an isolated laboratory environment when performing behavioral malware analysis.
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Reviews
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For a straightforward, lightweight, command-line based Linux — whether a server, an older desktop or laptop, or if you just want to learn the Linux command-line better — it’s hard to beat Arch Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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Today Red Hat has released RHEL5.6 after a beta period of ~2 months. There is no official announcement (yet), so the release highlights are unknown. Probably they are the same like the beta version.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Installer team has announced the Debian Installer 6.0 Release Candidate 1 release. Read about all the changes and improvements at their announcement.
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This release candidate includes the new SpaceFun artwork for Squeeze. You can preview this artwork on the wiki page and watch a video of it in action.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Google recently-announced an online science fair for 13-18 year-olds, tasked with finding the next ‘Sergey Brin’.
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Canonical underlined its focus on attracting partners and commercial software developers to the Ubuntu platform when it announced the creation of a “developer relations advocate” position. Here’s the scoop, and what it says about Ubuntu and Canonical in the long term.
The announcement, posted on Canonical’s website by vice president of business development Steve George, describes the role of the developer relations advocate as “evangelizing the platform and assisting developers as they develop software for Ubuntu.”
George also emphasized third-party commercial code, rather than contributions to Ubuntu itself, as the main point of interest for the new position: “Our focus is on commercial software developers since we believe that it’s important to create a sustainable ecosystem around the platform.”
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Ladies and gents, I’m pleased to announce the next Ubuntu Translations videocast tomorrow from Dallas, Texas, where this week we are holding the Canonical Platform Rally for the next version of Ubuntu, the Natty Narwhal.
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Ubuntu Software Centre developer Michael Vogt and designer Matthew Paul Thomas tour ratings and reviews in Ubuntu 11.04 in this latest instalment of ‘Ubuntu developer diaries’.
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That’s what we want the Ubuntu desktops in Natty to feel like. We’re changing things a little bit for the coming release too. We’ll still feature some fantastic photography sourced from our Flickr group but this time we’re reserving at least 3 places for non photographic wallpapers, so things that are rendered or drawn.
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Ubuntu 11.04 is to ship with ‘at least 3′ non-photographic wallpapers, a move many designers within the community have been longing for.
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This is all good. However, the issue is not restricted to our Ubuntu developers. We should not forget that, in the wider opensource community, many developers do not have access to the Canonical, or any other, design team or to anyone with solid design training. They are the developers who work on their own free time and produce amazing software. They have to wing design. Many wish they could access such skills to help beautify and enhance the user experience of their products. These contributors deserve our support.
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Flavours and Variants
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Elementary project refined Linux desktop like no other. And now, the much anticipated Elementary OS codenamed Jupiter is all set to have its first ever official release. The official tagline goes like this – “Its gonna be huge”. Considering the sheer amount of changes and improvements Elementary OS is going to bring with it, the release of “Jupiter” is going to be huge indeed!
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At the end of last year, to demonstrate my company’s swiftBoot service, I put together a rather impressive demo. Using a Renesas MS7724 development board I was able to achieve a one second cold Linux boot to a Qt application. Here’s the demo…
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The XDA developers are too quick to bring these hacks. Here they wo with another one. Stroughtonsmith named hacker has successfully ported MeeGo operating system on Google Nexus S smartphone. The developer used rootfs images on the internal memory to boot Meego on Nexus S without flashing the phone.
For those who are unaware of this, MeeGo is an open source Linux based operating system designed to target mobile devices, notebooks, tablets, embedded systems etc. MeeGo was aimed to merge the features and work of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin.
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Several days ago, I bought my new cellphone, which is an Android device. It is Moto Quench XT502, only available for China Mainland. But you can find out XT5 is the same with XT502. As we know, All the cellphones need to be modified something as Chinese edition. Google Services have to be removed in China and added some localized applications due to the relationship between government and Google.
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Android
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At least on Millenial’s network, however, Android is getting a lot of attention from advertisers. Android ad requests grew 141% from Q3 to Q4 of 2010 while Apple requests grew 12% and RIM requests grew 60%. Android apps also dominated, accounting for 55% of revenue from application platforms.
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Tablets
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What a lot of tablets. Around 80 were launched, almost all of them running Android. Motorola wowed the show by announcing its 10-inch (1280×800) Xoom, which will run Android 3.0 (aka “Honeycomb”). You couldn’t actually see it running Honeycomb, though; all the stand had was a sort of video demonstration running on the device. Battery life? Price? Ship date? “Competitive”, “competitive” and “aiming for Q1″.
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We are pleased to open-source another piece of infrastructure software developed at LinkedIn, Kafka, a persistent, efficient, distributed message queue. Kafka is primarily intended for tracking various activity events generated on LinkedIn’s website, such as pageviews, keywords typed in a search query, ads presented, etc. Those activity events are critical for monitoring user engagement as well as improving relevancy in various other products. Each day, a substantially large number of such events are generated. Therefore, we need a solution that’s scalable and incurs low overhead.
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But Tindall says it really wasn’t a hard choice. “Some of the better products for ecommerce are open source,” he said. “When you work at a company like Microsoft, it’s all about scale and that played into my decision of what software to use – how could I drive scale without a huge infrastructure? And one of the great things is how well these programs work with search engine optimization.
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Events
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In addition to announcing its event schedule, the Linux Foundation is also opening its Call for Presentations for all of the 2011 events and being offered are special promotions to book their registration for LinuxCon North America and Europe early. Also The Linux Foundation is offering a special promotional discounted registration fee of $200 USD is for the first 50 people who register for each event. The Linux Foundation encourages interested people to register now as those special discounts and promotions will go quickly.
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The Linux Foundation has published its 2011 event schedule and confirmed that its premier Linux conference, LinuxCon, is coming to Europe this year. LinuxCon Europe will take place from the 26th to the 28th of October in Prague, Czech Republic. Amanda McPherson, Linux Foundation VP of Marketing and Developer Programs said “As we approach the 20th anniversary of Linux and the operating system experiences increasing adoption throughout Europe, it is only fitting that we host LinuxCon where Linux originally took root”.
The Foundation has also announced the Call for Presentations for its entire 2011 event line-up – this includes its LinuxCon conferences in North America, Japan, Brazil and Europe, as well as other events focusing on embedded Linux in both North America and Europe. Following the announcement in October of last year that the Linux Foundation and the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) would be merged, the Foundation will organise and host the Embedded Linux Conferences (ELC) in North America and Europe.
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The Europen edition of the Open Database Camp 2011 will take place in Sardinia, hosted by the Sardinia Technology Park, a local scientific and business institution with international links.
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Web Browsers
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Good news today for open Web proponents: Google has announced it be pushing WebM and Theora for the HTML5 video element in Chrome as well as the open source Chromium project. Potentially bad news for the majority of the Web, which is going to have to ride out a years-long standards format war. Again.
Here’s the scoop so far in a nutshell. Once upon a time, the HTML5 video element was going to specify what format(s) should be supported by the browser, and the leading contender was Theora. Then that changed to a comment that it would be “helpful” if browser vendors could all support the same codecs, but “no known codecs… satisfy all the current players.” Here “players” refers to the vendors participating in the spec.
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A large number of commentors on the Google blog said that the move was unjustified “because H.264 is now free”. This is a complex topic that it’s hard to explain concisely. But as I said last August, H.264 is not the kind of Free that matters. The MPEG-LA patent consortium taxes the H.264 standard so that the patent holders don’t have to get their hands dirty or be identified as information highwaymen, and their fee waiver delivers some flexibility to some people.
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You might not think that’s a big deal considering that IE is still by a fairly large margin the most-used browser overall. But as long as we’ve been keeping track of stats for TechCrunch, it has never been the top browser here. In fact, it has been number four for quite some time. And it’s normally about five percentage points behind number three: Safari. So for it to surge to number one is a real oddity.
So what happened?
One word: AOL.
We’ve written about this before; being on AOL’s homepage can lead to a massive surge in traffic depending on where you’re featured. And if we’ve learned one thing from our new parent, it’s that its users love IE. I mean, really love IE. Digging further into the data, almost all of them were using IE (with nearly none using Chrome).
Read into that what you will. The aging giant, etc. But clearly much of the rest of the web is going the other way.
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If open source projects like WebM and Mozilla – and the open Web – are the big winners here, the loser is clearly the H.264 codec that Google is no longer supporting in Chrome. Until now, H.264 has been the undisputed standard for video on the Web – and off it: it’s widely used in many video consumer devices.
In fact, it’s so widely used that Google’s move might seem quixotic. Even though WebM and Theora codecs are freely available, while H.264 requires a licence (free for some but not all uses), surely most content developers and hardware manufacturers will remain locked in to H.264 just by virtue of its overwhelming market share?
Well, that might have been a persuasive argument a year, or even six months ago, but things are moving rapidly in this area. Chief among the developments are the rise of Firefox and – in particular – Google’s own Chrome. As I noted last week, Firefox now holds a major chunk of the brower market, particularly in Europe, while Chrome is growing very rapidly there and elsewhere. Put their market share together and you have a very strong argument for Web sites to offer content using the WebM technology that both will be favouring.
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And to conclude, my favorite of the commentary. Simon Phipps tells everyone to relax, calling “this bold move…another step towards an end to the Flash monopoly on rich media” (Google and H.264 – Far From Hypocritical).
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Mozilla
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Thanks to all who entered the Mozilla Labs Game On 2010 competition – submissions are now closed. Come back Wednesday, January 12th to see the entries and vote for the community favorite!
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Back in November, Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team together launched the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. While we set out to discover creative visual answers to the open question, “How do people use Firefox,” we really didn’t know what level of participation to expect from the Mozilla and data analysis communities. In fact, we were overwhelmed by both the number and quality of submissions – so much so that we had to give ourselves an extra few days to thoroughly review them all!
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The goal of this challenge is to create a unique design that captures the essence of Firefox 4. The winning design will be printed as the official Firefox 4 launch t-shirt, a limited edition item featured in the Mozilla store and distributed to thousands of fans and contributors around the world. It will also be highlighted across key web properties like mozilla.com, the Creative Collective homepage, the Mozilla blog, our Facebook page, and more.
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Yesterday I went to London’s Old Street to talk about HTML5 and the web at the Mozilla Labs Gaming Special. Here are the slides, the audio and my extensive notes of what I had to say.
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Mozilla is pleased to announce support for IndexedDB in the upcoming Firefox 4 Beta 9 and recent trunk nightlies. IndexedDB allows web apps to store large amounts of data on your local system (with your explicit permission, of course) for fast offline retrieval at a later time. We’re hoping that webmail, TV listings, and online purchase history will one day be as convenient to access offline as they are online.
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We built the Game On Gallery so that people who use the Web everyday can access and enjoy your games. Starting today, registered users of the Game On website can vote on their choice for the winner of the Community Choice prize category. Over the next couple weeks, our expert judges will be selecting winners for the other prize categories. Winners will be announced the first week of February.
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Firefox 4 is nearly ready for release, a recent post on Mozilla’s developer mailing list suggests.
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The ninth beta version of Firefox, due imminently, is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer.
“IndexedDB allows Web apps to store large amounts of data on your local system (with your explicit permission, of course) for fast offline retrieval at a later time. We’re hoping that Web mail, TV listings, and online purchase history will one day be as convenient to access offline as they are online,” Ben Turner, who develops IndexedDB for Mozilla’s browser, said yesterday in a blog post.
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But it’s fast. Very fast. It’s more stable (I’m one of those idiots who likes having a hundred tabs open at once…) It’s nice.
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Oracle
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Andrew Bayer just posted a blog post on Hudson-labs.org with a proposal for renaming the Hudson project to “Jenkins”. Since Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of and lead contributor to the Hudson project, is part of CloudBees, and I’ve helped Andrew and Kohsuke bounce ideas, I wanted to share some more context and thoughts.
Each and every Open Source project has its own DNA, its own philosophy that gets established over time. Born in 2004, Hudson has had plenty of time to find its cruising altitude. Yet, after Kohsuke left ORCL, ORCL decided they didn’t necessarily liked the way the project was handled and asked for some changes to take place.
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Education
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When we talk about geometry, the vast majority of us are actually talking about what mathematicians now call, more precisely, Euclidean geometry. And why do they call it Euclidean geometry? Because the Greek mathematician Euclid laid out its foundations in a manuscript about 2400 years ago, and mathematicians have been nodding their heads in agreement ever since.
Euclid’s Elements made its way from Alexandria to Athens, to Rome, to Baghdad, back to Europe, and around the globe. In days gone by, one could not be considered properly educated without having studied Euclid. Until the 20th Century, Elements was the second most printed book in the world, ahead of Shakespeare and behind only the Bible. It is said that country lawyer Abe Lincoln carried a copy from town to town so that he could study its proofs by candlelight. Einstein called it “the holy little geometry book”.
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Project Releases
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The Document Foundation is happy to announce the third release candidate of LibreOffice 3.3. This release candidate is not intended for production use! The final release of LibreOffice 3.3, for production use, will be available soon.
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Government
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Open Source for America (OSFA), an organization of technology industry leaders, non-government associations, and academic and research institutions promoting the use of open source technologies in the U.S. federal government, today published the results of a study measuring openness in government.
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Openness/Sharing
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Benjamin Nowack’s review at BNODE of Named Entity Extraction APIs by Zemanta and OpenCalais.
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Open Data
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Chapters 2 and 3 summarize the importance of data in the modern society and some recent developments on the Open Data front in Europe. Chapter 4 explains why raw PSI should be open, while Chapter 5 shows the potential of such data with a few real world examples from several (mostly EU) countries. Chapter 6 looks at some dangers that should not be ignored when promoting Open Data and Chapter 7 proposes some general practices to follow for getting the most out of them.
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Programming
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Wow, I just managed to combine three of my favourite things in a single title! Recently, I’ve been getting further into home brewing, with a book I received as a Christmas present (Home Brewed Beers and Stouts, by C.J.J. Berry). Since I’d never actually measured the Alcohol By Volume (ABV) of my beer I decided to write some Python code to automate the process. The simple modules I came up with work from the command line and also on Android phones via SL4A, which makes them very useful when doing quick measurements.
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Standards/Consortia
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OpenDoc Society, the global association that promotes best practices for office applications, today announced that The Document Foundation has become an organizational member. The Document Foundation joins other companies, Open Source communities, public sector organizations and not-for-profits that are already members organizations of OpenDoc Society, such as Cap Gemini, Google, IBM, CWI and the Netherlands Department of Defense. OpenDoc Society brings together individuals and organizations with a stake or interest in the openness and future of documents, to learn from each other and share knowledge and best practices about core technologies, available tools, policy issues, transition strategies, legal aspects and of course the latest innovations.
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Solace for world leaders trying to enforce painful austerity measures: At least you’re not running Romania.
Angry witches are using cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government who are forcing them to pay taxes. Also in the eye of the taxman are fortune tellers, who should have seen it coming.
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Augmented Reality is a concept that has a lot of potential in the coming years. In particular, technologies like Layar could prove to be very useful as the GPS accuracy and the underlying dataset continue to get more accurate.
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Evgeny Morozov’s new book, The Net Delusion, is an important contribution; its publication has been widely welcomed as an important correction to cyber-utopianism, and greeted with laudatory reviews. I found myself agreeing with the majority of its arguments.
But I write here neither to praise nor bury the book, but to engage it critically. Morozov challenges the intellectual laziness that characterizes so many analyses of the Internet’s impact, which do tend to be on the utopian side. That is well, but just as cyber-utopianism is fashionable in some circles, it’s equally fashionable in others to pooh-pooh the fundamentally transformative impact of the Internet, denying it any great world-historical importance. To some intellectuals, the mundanity of human sociality exposed through the Internet deserves to be mocked, and people’s sincere attempts to express their identity and convictions through online methods are derided as meaningless “slactivism.”
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The anonymous author alleged that the project was hopelessly corrupt and out of control and had been for years. The writer, who claimed to have been employed on the project, went on to name three people he alleged were responsible for that corruption.
The commenter accused a consultant, Mark Mazer, of being “the most crooked person on the team,” and said consultant Scott Berger was building a home in Florida at city expense.
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Most web workers have probably heard that “the Internet is running out of addresses.” In response, The Internet Society, together with such major players as Facebook, has announced World IPv6 Day. What will this mean for web workers, businesses and individuals?
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Settling a 20-year legal battle between teaching hospitals and the federal tax collector and saving the Treasury some $700 million a year in future revenue, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that medical students who have become doctors in training as residents are not students under federal tax law, and thus are subject to federal taxes to cover Social Security and Medicare (so-called FICA taxes). The decision, however, will mean that the taxes are due only on residents’ stipends paid after April 1, 2005. Earlier payments are being refunded by the Treasury’s own choice (see this news release). Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the decision.
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It has become common wisdom that retail stores that carry physical media – CDs, books, movies in particular – are, to use the scientific term, “toast”.
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A device coming from a Rhode Island company this spring promises to shake the publishing industry in the same way CD burners shook the music industry and forever changed copyright laws in the early 1990s.
ION Audio’s Book Saver looks like a miniature overhead projector combined with a cradle and can scan a 200-page novel in less than 15 minutes.
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When AOL bought TechCrunch last September, the first question on everyone’s lips was, “How long could Mike Arrington possibly last as an AOL employee?”
Yesterday, four months after the deal, we may have begun to learn the answer to that question. On Tuesday evening, for no apparent reason, Arrington threw public punches at AOL’s crown-jewel technology blog, Engadget, and Engadget’s editor, Joshua Topolsky.
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The man said he wounded the fox with a shot by a double-barrel gun and tried to finish off the animal with a blow by the gun’s butt. But the fox, which attempted to fight back, hit the trigger with a paw, causing the gun to fire.
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Science
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And the the elderly and disabled will walk again! Thanks to robots of course, specifically a system called “Hybrid Assistive Limb”, shortened to HAL and created by Japanese company Cyberdyne. The powered robot exoskeleton moves in response to nerve signals in a human’s legs. Users only need to “think” and the robot legs will move for them. Think of the legs like an incredibly advanced Segway that is actually sensing your nervous system. The HAL suit is available to hospitals and clinics in Japan to rent for about $1,500 per month.
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Earlier this week we took a look back at 2010 and offered our projections for the coming year in personal genomics. Topic #1, just as it was last year: the $1,000 genome.
In hindsight, it might have been ill-advised to offer predictions about the near-term future of genome sequencing during the same week in which one of the year’s major industry conferences (the JP Morgan annual Healthcare Conference) is taking place.
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Two researchers may have found a way to greatly reduce traffic bottlenecks that could take place in ad hoc networks. Such work may be essential for the future development of sensor networks, they say.
Keren Censor-Hillel, a postdoctoral research student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Hadas Shachnai, an associate professor of computer science at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, presented their work last week at the 2011 Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, held by the Association of Computing Machinery and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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Edsac, the UK’s first fully operational general-purpose computer, is to be recreated at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
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Health/Nutrition
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Women should “get thin or die trying,” and you can “never start too young.” It is better for a girl to “risk [her] life dieting than be sub-par by being a plus-size.” Remember: “Hunger hurts but starving works.” When an ultra-wealthy but forgotten former British reality show Big Brother contestant called Kenneth Tong started Tweeting these sentiments — and worse — a fortnight ago, a Twitter-storm broke. Everyone from Rihanna to Gordon Ramsay told their followers he was a dangerous fool, but Tong gathered tens of thousands of young girls who followed him. He became the most discussed subject on Twitter in the world for three days. His message? “The words lunch, breakfast, and dinner should now mean nothing to you, you have eaten enough for a lifetime. Stop. You are disgusting.”
Then Tong claimed it was all a hoax — just an hour after I interviewed him. In our long discussion he passionately defended every word he had said, but when I told him that his arguments could kill young girls and expose him to serious legal liability, he visibly began to panic. When I spoke to him on the phone later in the day, after his ‘revelation’, he said “it was dangerous ground we were treading on, I can see that now” and begged me not to publish his comments. So I don’t believe it was a hoax at all — but that he was finally scared off by the legal implications of what he was saying and doing. You can judge for yourself.
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Imagine it is 1912, but that the Titanic is fitted with an underwater radar system. Imagine that it senses an iceberg so large that even the captain can understand that by the law of conservation of momentum, the ship will be stopped in its path. Should the captain use the radar information to inform the decision to alter course, or should the captain ignore it because radar is merely an invention of science therefore prone to exaggeration and false findings?
The New Yorker Magazine has just published an immensely popular article titled “The Truth Wears Off — Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” The article reports several examples of scientific findings that appeared to be significant when first published, but when tested over time, demonstrate weaker and weaker results. Zyprexa is a second-generation anti-depressant that showed great promise in clinical trials in the nineteen-nineties. By 2001, Zyprexa earned more revenue than Prozac, and it remains Eli Lilly’s top-selling drug.
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It’s remarkable that SBS isn’t even bigger than it is. When the public sector net debt is about £950bn, why don’t most NHS trusts pay their staff through the SBS shared services model? Why don’t many more trusts give SBS their back-office processing work?
Steria says that SBS will save the NHS £224m over 10 years. It should be more, a point made by John Neilson, SBS’s managing director.
[...]
Media controversy as NHS work is carried out in India
But the media has raised questions about whether any NHS work that involves medical records or appointments should be handled in India, where legislation covering data protection is not as it is in the UK.
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Europe
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MEPs from the European Parliament’s liberal ALDE group have called for the venue of a meeting to be changed from Budapest to Brussels, as a sign of protest against a controversial media law recently adopted in Hungary, the country holding the rotating EU presidency.
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We were therefore disappointed to see that the Commission insists that a non-binding, “soft” “WIPO Recommendation” would be the best sort of international legal instrument to provide for the transfer of accessible books between countries.
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Security
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At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Last November, Roth had already caused a stir when he used Amazon’s EC2 to launch an attack on SHA-1 hashes. Amazon had added “Cluster GPU Instances”, an option for fast calculations, last November and even before that, EC2 had already been used for cracking passwords.
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Gawker is phasing out the use of email-address-and-password login in favour of more modern OAuth authentication and the use of anonymous one-off accounts.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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New York Rep. Peter King, chairman of House Homeland Security Committee, will introduce a bill to ban carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress and federal judges. The measure will also apply to carrying weapons near the president or vice president.
King announced the measure at a press conference today with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who heads a gun control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and who is backing the bill. King’s move may indicate there may be gaining momentum for some sort of gun-control measures in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
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The squad rushed in after a force helicopter picked up a ‘hotspot’ on Pam Hardcastle’s property, thinking it betrayed a lighting system used to grow the drug.
But all they found was a heater for Simon and Kenny, the pets of Ms Hardcastle’s ten-year-old son, Jack.
‘When I opened it up and they saw the guinea pigs, they didn’t say anything,’ said the 42-year-old primary school worker.
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We don’t buy this justification easily. We prod and poke until we get to the truth. So why when it comes to our own harassment and humiliating experiences in the name of “security” do we accept it and shut up?
As female journalists working in this region we constantly find ourselves putting clothes on to please Hamas and taking them off to please the Israelis.
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So, according to Sarah Palin, violent rhetoric plays no role in inspiring violent acts — but criticism of violent acts incites “hatred and violence.”
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Amnesty International has condemned an Israeli military appeal court’s decision to extend the prison sentence of a Palestinian non-violent activist, convicted over his involvement in organizing protests in the occupied West Bank.
Abdallah Abu Rahma, head of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in, had his sentence extended from 12 months to 16 months by the Israeli Military Court of Appeals at Ofer in the West Bank on Tuesday, after the prosecution argued that his initial sentence was too lenient.
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Cuba is currently faced with a crucial dilemma: either it updates, revises and reconstructs its economic model or it runs the risk of succumbing to the combined pressures created by its own errors and the aggression of the US embargo. The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as all of those in Africa and Asia, cannot remain indifferent towards this situation or limit themselves to contemplating how the revolution delivered this decisive battle without any assistance other than their own strength.
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On January 10 one of the most dangerous terrorists in recent history will go on trial in a small courtroom in El Paso, Texas. This is not the venue the Obama administration has finally selected to prosecute the perpetrators of 9/11; it is where the reputed godfather of Cuban exile violence, Luis Posada Carriles, may finally face a modicum of accountability for his many crimes.
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A cross-border kerfuffle over a popular chocolate treat nearly cost a Winnipeg woman a $300 fine and saddled her with a bureaucratic headache.
Lind Bird was recently stopped at the U.S. border and selected for a random search of her vehicle. She was warned she could have faced a fine after the customs official found — and seized — her $2 Kinder Surprise egg as illegal contraband.
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A year ago, the protracted wrangling in Congress over the re-authorization of several expiring provisions of the PATRIOT ACT made plenty of headlines. Most observers expected the sunsetting powers to be extended, but civil libertarians hoped serious and sorely needed reforms might be part of the package. The House and Senate Judiciary Committees held multiple hearings on the topic, and an array of competing reform and reauthorization bills (PDF) were proposed, adding extra safeguards (of varying stringency) to the greatly expanded surveillance powers Congress had approved in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
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But even with that said, to pretend that guns are somehow “safe” because they kill fewer people than cars only indicates that the debate has ceased to be a debate; instead it’s reached the religious level, where idees fixes have completely taken over the minds of adherents and detractors alike, and cannot be budged without the most enormous effort of will. To ask gun adherents to imagine an America without the Second Amendment is like asking a Christian to imagine a world without their imaginary God. From what I’ve seen, there’s a relatively large overlap there. Which ought to give pause for thought. Dogma is dangerous wherever it’s found.
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More than three years after police in West Bloomfield arrested a man and accused him of raping his autistic daughter, the township’s insurance carrier has agreed to pay his family and attorney $1.8 million to settle a wrongful-arrest suit.
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It is an acknowledged trend of modern-day life that young people want to be older, even as it is an undeniable trend that older people want to become younger.
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Over the last few days we have seen some of the bravest people facing down some of the worst.
Armed with nothing more than a revolutionary heart and hopes of a better future they gathered and protested as government forces aimed their weapons and fired live rounds in to the crowds.
But the ammunition and the underlying threats of arrest and torture meant absolutely nothing to the masses – for they had simply lost their fear.
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Cablegate
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Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic MP, writer, artist, activist and former Wikileaks collaborator, spoke to the Globe and Mail’s editorial board on Tuesday. She is in Toronto to kick off the 2011 Samara/Massey journalism seminars. (Samara is a charitable organization that studies citizen engagement with Canadian democracy.)
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It’s not news that WikiLeaks and some of its supporters often find themselves in the hot seat. The website deals in publishing documents and videos that have embarrassed politicians and countries around the world. Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir was an active volunteer for WikiLeaks, and played a central role in publishing the “Collateral Murder” video. Last week she learned that prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by WikiLeaks were doing a little anti-secrecy lobbying of their own.
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Julian Assange’s lawyers will argue he faces the threat of the death penalty in the United States if he is handed over to Swedish authorities following next month’s extradition hearing.
Mr Assange’s legal team released a skeleton report of their case for the February 7-8 extradition hearing in London following Mr Assange’s brief court appearance on Tuesday morning.
In it, Mr Assange’s legal team said it expected the Swedes to “bow to US pressure and/or rely naively on diplomatic assurances from the USA that Mr Assange would not be mistreated.”
Swedish prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Mr Assange following accusations of sexual offences against two women in Sweden during a trip last August.
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A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users’ account details.
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An influential group of European politicians is protesting the U.S. government’s attempt to pry WikiLeaks-related information out of Twitter, saying that EU privacy rules may have been violated.
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On 9 January 2011, the defense filed a demand for speedy trial with the Government. PFC Manning has been in pretrial confinement since 29 May 2010. Since 12 July 2010, the case has been on Government requested excludable delay under R.C.M. 707(c). This delay request by the Government was approved by the court-martial convening authority.
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WikiLeaks will step up its publication schedule of secret documents, founder Julian Assange announced Tuesday, promising more revelations based on the group’s stash of confidential U.S. embassy cables and other leaks.
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In addition, the database also has a separate section devoted entirely to the compilation and classification of all relevant “WikiLeaks” documents, updated and sorted as they are released.
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It will publish documents that will embarrass the Chinese government, according to a supporter of the whistle-blowing website.
Gavin McFadyen, a London-based television producer who has collaborated with WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, said yesterday critics of the website were wrong to say it was obsessed with embarrassing the US government rather than exposing more repressive regimes.
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I recently put the proposition, to a senior frontbencher in Federal Parliament, that the WikiLeaks horse had bolted, and that shutting down Julian Assange could not reverse a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards the citizens and away from the institutions that govern them.
His response was: ”The Catholic Church shut down Galileo for a hundred years. I think we can shut down Julian Assange.”
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I now find myself in the uncomfortable position, as a fairly unreconstructed conservative, of being in furious agreement with the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young. I make no judgment on the merits of the Swedish extradition proceedings that Assange is defending in London. I do regret that this unquestionably gutsy Queenslander is being required to take on the entire global ”establishment” with one hand tied behind his back.
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Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder,” Richardson wrote. He added: “WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.”
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The contents of these files are unknown, but, according to Assange, “They speak more of the same truth to power.” It is not just government that should be worried about the content of these files, however. “There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and News Corp,” he says.
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Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher, Tor developer, and volunteer with Wikileaks, reported today on his Twitter feed that he was detained, searched, and questioned by the US Customs and Border Patrol agents at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 10, upon re-entering the US after a vacation in Iceland.
[...]
• It’s very frustrating that I have to put so much consideration into talking about the kind of harassment that I am subjected to in airports.
• I was detained, searched, and CPB did attempt to question me about the nature of my vacation upon landing in Seattle.
• The CPB specifically wanted laptops and cell phones and were visibly unhappy when they discovered nothing of the sort.
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The whole Wikileaks saga has revealed both strengths and weaknesses. The most obvious choke point is that governments were able to exert political pressure on domain hosts to force them to find a pretext to throw Wikileaks off their servers and so Assange and his colleagues had to play a game of cat and mouse, relocating Wikileaks on different servers. The countervailing strength was and is that they could do this but there is always the danger that the plots will dry up, so to speak, and this whistle-blowing website will run out of hosting space as the American Government pressurises companies and countries to deny it refuge. However, it is a matter of record that it has over five hundred mirrors and closing them all down would be a big task.
[...]
What the Wikileaks story is really about is a clash of world views, about how we handle and process information and who controls it. The political establishments are like Europe before the Reformation and the invention of printing, like businesses trying to impose an outmoded model on top of technologies which threaten to overwhelm them.
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Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early supporter of WikiLeaks, said that despite having had a falling out with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his role in the organization, she is willing to “stand up and stick my neck out for him” and defend the document-leaking entity against attacks by the U.S. government and others, because doing so is her duty. “We must all stand behind WikiLeaks and defend freedom of information and freedom of speech,” Jónsdóttir said in a presentation at the University of Toronto on Tuesday night, in which she also called on media outlets to support the organization. Jónsdóttir also said “even if they chop the head off WikiLeaks, a thousand more heads will come out.”
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WikiLeaks today condemned calls from the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security to “strangle the viability” of WikiLeaks by placing the publisher and its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, on a US “enemies list” normally reserved for terrorists and dictators.
Placement on the US “Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List” would criminalize US companies who deal with WikiLeaks or its editor. “The U.S. government simply cannot continue its ineffective piecemeal approach of responding in the aftermath of Wikileaks’ damage,” King wrote in a letter to the Secretary of the US Treasury, Geithner. “The U.S. government should be making every effort to strangle the viability of Assange’s organization.”
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Yet despite a small market and low profits for the meat, the government of Norway has not shown any willingness to let go of whaling.
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A legal defense fund for the US soldier suspected of leaking secret US documents to WikiLeaks said Thursday it has received a 15,000 dollars contribution from the website.
US Army private Bradley Manning, 23, has been held in a military brig in Virginia since July on suspicion of leaking secret US military documents and State Department cables to WikiLeaks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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I have previously written about The rise of anti-science cyber bullying and the role played by Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano — who believes climate scientists should be publicly beaten:
I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.
Morano has never repudiated those remarks and he’s been widely criticized, including by British journalist Leo Hickman (see “UK Guardian slams Morano for cyber-bullying and for urging violence against climate scientists“).
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It’s a tie: Last year equaled 2005 as the warmest year on record, government climate experts reported Wednesday.
The average worldwide temperature was 0.62 degrees Celsius above normal last year. That’s the same as six years ago, the National Climatic Data Center announced.
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In Borneo’s majestic rain forest, trees are being felled to meet western demand for wood products. The resulting floods are devastating villages, livelihoods and food supplies and further threatening rare species, Tracy McVeigh reports.
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Finance
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Europe has a comprehensive plan to respond to the crisis and to speed up Europe’s economic growth. It now needs to focus its efforts in a coordinated manner and with an eye on priorities. That is what the Commission is presenting today. The Annual Growth Survey charts a clear direction on where Europe should be heading in the next year, with ten pressing actions focussed on macro-economic stability and fiscal consolidation, structural reforms and growth-enhancing measures. The Annual Growth Survey is the start of the first “European Semester” which changes the way governments shape their economic and fiscal policies. Once agreed by the European Council, Member states will reflect these recommendations in both their policies and national budgets. For the first time ever, Member States and Commission will therefore jointly discuss macro-economic stability, structural reforms and boosting growth measures in a comprehensive way.
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Cu această ocazie, cele două părți vor semna un Memorandum de înțelegere care va permite cooperarea consolidată și schimburi de experiență în sectorul TIC, date fiind capacităţile şi oportunităţile României și Chinei în acest domeniu. On this occasion, the two sides will sign a Memorandum of Understanding that will enable closer cooperation and exchanges of experience in the ICT sector, given the capabilities and opportunities for Romania and China in this field.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday that the economy gained only 103,000 new jobs in December–not enough to keep up with population growth–but the rate of unemployment (U.3) fell from 9.8% to 9.4%. If you are confused by the report, you are among the many.
In truth, what fell was not the number of unemployed people but the number of unemployed people who are actively looking for work. Those who have become discouraged and have ceased looking for work are not considered to be in the work force and are not counted as unemployed in the U.3 measure. The unemployment rate fell because discouraged workers increased, not because employment rose.
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In my opinion, the oligarchs and their minions give themselves far too much credit for their success. It may be true that they are clever, industrious, and hard-working, but so too are con men, embezzlers, and a goodly number of thieves and other criminals. Is it clever and industrious to appropriate for oneself (by force, intimidation, bribery, or manipulation), resources that are by nature the birthright of all (“the commons”), or to use one’s “insider” position to abuse a public trust? Far too many fortunes have been made that way.
The Atlantic article concludes “The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this.”
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Murdoch
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The BBC have just revealed that Ofcom thinks there are big problems with Murdoch’s BSkyB power grab. Their report says the Competition Commission needs to be involved.
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News Corp. is seriously considering hanging a “For Sale” sign on its MySpace social networking real estate, the beleaguered company’s CEO confirmed on Wednesday.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is to implement internet pornography filters in Indonesia after being threatened with a blackout for its 2 million users in the country.
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The European Internet Services Providers Association (EuroISPA) has called on the European Parliament to consider permanently removing internet based child sexual abuse content at source, which would be instead of forcing EU and UK ISPs into merely filtering out (blocking) such material. The latter would only provide a merely cosmetic appearance of having done something useful and is easily circumvented.
EuroISPA believes that removing abuse material at source is the “only” effective “technical measure” that can actually work. It proceeds to state that the alternative use of blocking still allows the content to remain online and available for use by those who present a real danger to children.
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One of China’s most prominent human rights activists, Gao Zhisheng, has told of his torture by police during more than a year in secret detention.
The lawyer told the Associated Press he was stripped naked, beaten and pistol-whipped until he feared for his life.
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The European Parliament is currently at a crucial stage in the discussions on the European Commission’s proposals on web blocking. The MEP in charge, Roberta Angelilli, has presented her draft report, other parliamentarians have until 20 January to propose other amendments and an “orientation vote” which will informally set Parliament policy on issues of general agreement will take place on 3 February.
Despite the fact that the original proposal was made by the Commission in March 2009, the level of debate has not developed to any great extent after almost two years of discussion. The fact that the Commission failed to provide any evidence from countries that already block websites has not had any positive impact whatsoever. The fact that blocking is increasingly irrelevant due to the use of P2P and hacked servers instead of static “blockable” websites or the fact that blocking will give criminals immediate warning that they have been detected are of no particular importance in the debate. Indeed, even the actual purpose of blocking – accidental access, deliberate access or something else – is not an issue which has been discussed in any detail.
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Civil unrest in Tunisia prompted by government censorship of internet access and freedom of expression continues to spiral out of control this week as the nation’s officials find even more ways to stifle citizens’ pleas for support. Now, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) has begun rallying support from American technology companies to aid Tunisian residents in making their voices heard.
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Another day, another antipiracy study (or “study”) from a self-interested party. What’s new? This time, one of the named targets is fighting back, alleging “defamation” and reserving the right to sue the study’s authors.
The study comes from MarkMonitor, a company in the business of selling its brand protection services to companies concerned about intellectual property theft and counterfeiting online. The study is tough to take seriously, since it really just amounts to assembling a list of 100 websites and then grabbing traffic data on them from Alexa.
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The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast of the unedited version of the song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits on CHOZ-FM (OZ FM, Newfoundland). The CBSC concluded that the presence of the word “faggot” in the song contravened the Human Rights Clauses of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code.
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A senior French official has called for a new report on online terrorism and pedophilia. French Internet advocates dismissed renewed demands for regulation, pointing to critiques of controversial anti-piracy law.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I don’t know whether the company really holds its customers in that sort of disdain, even though I’ve seen plenty of evidence over the years that it can do. It could just be industry-defining massive stupidity, matched with rancid greed. But I know how it feels – and I know that T-Mobile has done itself a great deal of damage. Could I recommend anyone move to T-Mobile? I could at the beginning of the week. I can’t now.
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A terrible new service plan from MetroPCS — the fifth-largest mobile phone carrier — is the latest round in the phone industry’s war against Net Neutrality.
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Some major back-pedalling over at T-Mobile in the UK this afternoon, and a major win for its customers. The company has said that its new policy, reducing all fair usage data caps to 500 megabytes, will now only apply to new and upgrading customers, not existing subscribers. When T-Mobile had originally announced the changes on Monday, it said it “affects everyone.” But over the last few days, that policy resulted in an avalanche of angry comments on sites like Twitter and threats of a mass exodus of users.
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The giant Internet Service Providers such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon seek to:
1. Abolish the flat service fee. This means that you will pay for the amount of time you spend on the Net and the amount of data you download. For example, you will be charged for downloading a video from You Tube. If you don’t have much money to spend, you will have less access to information than a person who has more money.
2. Make website operators pay for bandwidth. This means that companies with deep pockets like Fox and MSNBC will connect quickly whereas small website operators who can’t afford the high costs will operate “in the slow lane.” The Net result will be an Internet that will become much like cable TV. You will get only the information that the big media companies (and their governmental affiliates) want you to get. You will get a lot less, and you will pay a lot more for less.
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That’s from George Hotz, aka Geohot, here.He’s been hit by corporate MAFIAA mobster Sony.
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Geohot has updated his site again telling people that Sony has filed lawsuits against both him and the fail0verflow german team for jailbreaking PS 3 and allowing packages to be installed.
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Think again! You’re not actually buying something. You’re licensing the use of an ebook. You can’t buy a licence. You pay a fee, they share some of their rights with you. This is a massive, massive difference between the physical books sold today, and ebooks. An ebook is not your property, it remains, at all times, Amazon’s property.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Lawyers representing Jeff Koons, the pop artist known for remixing common objects and other peoples’ art, have demanded that San Francisco’s Park Life stop selling book-ends that look like balloon dogs. Koons’s lawyers argue that since Koons once produced a set of iconic statues of balloon dogs, all representations of balloon dogs are henceforth Koons’s exclusive purview, and anyone who makes or sells a balloon dog infringes on Koons’s copyright.
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Microsoft has said that it has asked US officials to block Apple’s attempt to trademark the words “App Store”.
Apple submitted an application for the phrase – used for its iPhone, iPad and Macintosh download services – in 2008.
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Copyrights
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In terms of visitor traffic Cyberlockers have taken over the file-sharing lead from BitTorrent sites. This trend has been developing over the last few years and has accelerated in recent months to a position where the number of one-click hosting sites that are larger than The Pirate Bay in terms of traffic has grown to five. All signs indicate that file-storage services are becoming the new sharing standard.
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We’ve talked in the past about how there are all sorts of ways that bands and musicians can react to the fact that their music has leaked out into the world (and, yes, it will leak out). There’s a range of strategies from calling your fans “thieves” and getting angry, all the way to a much more fan-friendly approach. Time and and time again it appears that taking the fan-friendly approach seems work much better. The latest example of a band taking a much more fan friendly approach is Eisley, who had one of their new songs debut on a podcast, and people got so into it that they cut it out of the podcast recording and even started playing it on the radio. Rather than freak out about it, the band was happy about it.
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Since late last year there have been rumblings that China would soon carry out another crackdown on piracy. During the last week reports suggested that the country’s actions were mainly in the physical domain but now, alongside reports that 4,000 people have been arrested, it seems China is conducting both a music and video piracy purge. More than 200 sites are under orders to remove music and some of the country’s leading video sites are deleting illicit content and cuddling up to Hollywood.
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Didn’t we predict that the government’s new intellectual property review would see a replay of all the entrenched dogma that was flung in Digital Britain’s direction?
The UK music industry was on Wednesday due to discuss what view it should submit to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills’ (BIS) review of “how the intellectual property system can better drive growth and innovation”, commissioned from Professor Ian Hargreaves in November, MusicWeek reports…
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A court in Israel found that taking CC-licensed pictures from Flickr and publishing them in a book violated the copyright in each and every picture separately. (Source: www.law.co.il, including a link to the decision in Hebrew).
The facts are trivial: Plaintiffs, amateur photographers, uploaded their pictures to Flickr under a CC attribution, non-commercial, no-derivative license. Defendant, a commercial publisher, published the pictures both in a physical format (a book) and some of them also on its website.
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The BSA’s numbers are even more ridiculous than the IPI’s and have been debunked over and over again. Even the company that put together the numbers for the BSA had admitted that the BSA clearly exaggerates what they mean. For example, the BSA still insists on using a 1:1 unauthorized copy = lost sale argument, which anyone with an ounce of common sense knows is laughable.
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Open access is about making copies of publicly-funded research available freely online. This stems from the belief that (a) having paid for it, the public has a right to see it and (b) a general view that access to knowledge should not be restricted to those that can pay for it (not least because it is precisely those that *cannot* pay who need it most).
Against that background, and of the growing success of open access in bringing knowledge to the developing countries, this is disgusting:
/blockquote>
From 4 January Elsevier Journals withdrew access in Bangladesh to 1610 of its publications, including the Lancet stable of journals, which had been available through the World Health Organization’s Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme. HINARI was set up in 2002 to enable not for profit institutions in developing countries to gain access online to more than 7000 biomedical and health titles either free or at very low cost.
Springer has withdrawn 588 of its journals from the programme in Bangladesh and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins 299 journals. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Animal Science have withdrawn access to, respectively, two and three of their journals.
[...]
I do wonder how the well-paid fat-cats running these huge publishing conglomerates (disclosure: I once worked for part of Reed-Elsevier, so I have some experience of these things) look at themselves in the mirror after making decisions like this.
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Last year, we pointed out that Steven Tepp, who worked at the US Copyright Office at the time, and was heavily involved in pushing for ACTA (and downplaying the legitimate concerns of ACTA critics), jumped ship to the private US Chamber of Commerce, which has been one of the stronger supporters of such bad laws. The Chamber of Commerce, which is basically a lobbying organization for some of the world’s biggest businesses, has a history of making up absolutely ridiculous claims about intellectual property, so it’s really not a surprise that it would hire Tepp, who did the same thing from within the government.
[...]
As for the actual report that Tepp was commenting on, it doesn’t actually say what Tepp says it says. You can read the details of the report (pdf) here. It’s almost laughably weak in its methodology. Nowhere does it support any of Tepp’s claims — and you would think that a journalist wouldn’t quote a biased commenter making claims that have nothing to do with the report in question. Specifically, the MarkMonitor report simply looked at some sites that are used for infringement, then assumed that they were used entirely for infringing purposes, and then used Alexa ratings (perhaps the least credible measuring system out there) and simply added up all visits, and seemed to suggest that this was all for infringement. When it came to pharmaceuticals, the researchers did not appear to make much of an attempt to determine which offerings were really gray market importers of generic drugs, as opposed to counterfeits. Instead, it just made some assumptions based on the sites themselves.
Tuxguitar on Gentoo Linux
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
01.13.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The biggest thing Intel brought to the CES table this year was undeniably its Sandy Bridge processor, but the electronics manufacturer also introduced a new way to play with Legos. Using an Intel Core i7 processor and Gentoo Linux, Intel programmers are bringing the digital world of toys into the physical one.
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InfoWorld has put together a Linux IQ test to see just how learned you are vis-à-vis the free-and-open-source operating system that makes the world go ’round. (You do know that Android is based on Linux, right?) Let’s see how well you do!
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Server
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The new system runs a Linux-based matching engine, understood to be developed around Red Hat software. In November the exchange hired 81 additional open source staff to cope with the changes to the system, which operates in a C++ environment. It replaces a Microsoft .Net system, built by Accenture.
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Kernel Space
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For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that the kernel mode-setting page-flipping for the ATI Radeon DRM kernel module has been merged into the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and the respective bits have been set in the xf86-video-ati DDX, we’re in the process of running new open-source ATI graphics benchmarks under Linux. Our initial results (included in this article) show these latest improvements to cause some major performance boosts for the open-source ATI driver as it nears the level of performance of the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Brian Joseph, CEO at Zarafa, explains: “In 2010 we have experienced that many Scalix partners changed to Zarafa. And now we see many Scalix customers checking non-Linux-alternatives because they do not trust the Scalix roadmap promises anymore. We have decided to help these customers to continue to use Linux”.
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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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There are many good reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution – it enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable and stable income. That can be used to plan support for contributors and events that help speed up development of KDE software, enhance our promotion efforts and help grow our community. However, our contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds and their reasons for contributing are likely to be just as diverse. We caught up with our 125th supporting member, Paul Eggleton to ask him why he Joined the Game.
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Reviews
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You’ll find far less hand-holding on the Arch Forums than some of the other distro’s forums, and for good reason. Arch has one of the most informative, user-friendly wiki’s out there. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT ask a question in the forums or on IRC without searching the wiki and the forums first. If you can’t find a solution by searching, include all appropriate log files and as much information as possible in your request. Look at some of the current posts marked “Solved” in the Arch Forums for examples.
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New Releases
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This version fixes some booting issues and Save Session for CD/DVD. There were a few bugs fixed in the new direct ISO booting feature. Super Grub Disk(1/2) has been updated to .9799 and 1.98s1. Some other minor issues…
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13 Jan 2011. New release, new bugs 
I have discovered that the functionality implemented in pelican_config is not working on v2.3. For most people, this is no problem. For those of you who would like to user permanent storage, use the older method – there’s a prompt at boot time. For pelican_config users, mount your $PELHOME by hand.
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We are pleased to announce the Alpine 2.1.4 release.
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Superb Mini Server version 1.5.5 released (Linux kernel 2.6.35.7)
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL).
After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn’t a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren’t in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update.
Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users.
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Phones
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Android
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Android has surged past iOS in ad impressions on Millennial’s ad network for the first time, breaking a two-month tie that suggested a possible lull in the growth of Google’s mobile platform. Android now represents 46 percent of ad impressions in December, compared to 32 percent for iOS after the two OSes were tied at 38 percent in November. Millennial said Android has also widened its lead in ad revenue from applications with 55 percent compared to 39 percent for iOS.
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Google will announce Android 2.4 “Ice Cream” in May, adding fuel to the theory that version 3.0 will fork Android, say reports. Meanwhile, Samsung is rumored to be prepping a “Vibrant 4G” phone for T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network featuring 21Mbps downloads, Samsung and IBM are teaming up on mobile R&D, and the Google Goggles app gets a marketing-focused upgrade, says eWEEK.
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The vast majority of the tablets, however, use the Linux-based Android. At BetaNews, Joe Wilcox quotes a Caris & Co estimate at the start of the show stating that some 69 tablets were expected to be shown or announced. CNET, meanwhile, says the number was more like 75.
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At CES last week, MIPS Technologies, demonstrated a number of MIPS-based Android mobile devices, including two smartphones and several tablets. MIPS also announced that Chinese semiconductor firm Ingenic — whose MIPS-based processors power Velocity’s Cruz Android tablets, has licensed the MIPS32 architecture to develop one of the new Android smartphones — while an Action Semiconductor MIPS SoC powers the other.
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Samsung Electronics has shown off a Google TV-based Blu-ray player and companion box at CES, due to ship later this year. Meanwhile, Vizio unveiled two HDTVs running the Android- and Intel Atom-based Google TV stack, including a 56-inch model.
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Verizon Wireless capped off a week of Android-based smartphone introductions with two new 4G LTE-ready, 4.3-inch models: HTC’s ThunderBolt and LG’s Revolution. The phones will compete on Verizon with Motorola’s similarly 4.3-inch Droid Bionic, announced earlier this week, which ups the ante with a dual-core, Nvidia Tegra-2 processor.
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Around mid-2010, Jonnalagadda started HasGeek, a firm that works for the open source community, and helps support it. He explains: “We have a lot of good software developers in India. They may contribute to open source. But very few Indian projects are able to make it big and retain the lead.”
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One almost starts to question whether open source has been so heavily influenced by its commercial cousins that the true open source maverick will be left struggling to find a voice. So is there still a place for the OSS ‘garage band’ software start up?
Yes – of course there is. But how can we be sure?
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Events
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The Brisbane river was expected to peak today, and the post notes: “We should know the full extent of the floods around this time and will continually keep people updated via the web and social networking sites.”
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A decision on whether to go ahead with the 12th Australian national Linux conference, which is scheduled to be held in Brisbane from January 24 to 29, will be made on Monday, January 17.
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Web Browsers
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We’ve made the point many times that one open source browsers–with Firefox and Chrome leading the way–are setting the pace in browser innovation, but as open source browsers run neck-and-neck, and still compete with Internet Explorer, are we in danger of seeing fragmented standards? On The Chromium Blog this week, Google officials wrote that they are putting more muscle behind the VP8 open source video codec, and that future versions of Chrome will support the WebM Project and Ogg Theora codecs. The upshot: Google is moving steadily away from supporting H.264 video, and that may eventually have a big impact on web publishers and device manufacturers.
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We built RedMonk Analytics to track developer behaviors, and what it is telling us at present is that Firefox and IE both are losing share amongst developer populations to Chrome. Chrome is highly performant, but also benefiting from significant marketing investment (e.g. billboards, site sponsorships) and related product development (e.g. Chrome Web Store). The conclusion from this data is that Chrome will eclipse Firefox from a marketshare standpoint (speaking specifically of developers, not the wider market where Firefox is sustainably ahead), likely within a quarter.
But having tested the 4.0 version of Firefox for several weeks, it’s clear that Mozilla’s browser is responding to the evolutionary threat. Firefox 4.0 is faster and less stale from a user interface perspective, but more importantly differentiated via features like Panorama.
The 4.0 release is unlikely to be sufficient in preventing Chrome from assuming the top spot among developer browser usage, but it is likely to arrest the free fall. Expect Chrome and Firefox to be heavily competitive in 2011.
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1. Virtual appliances become a stepping stone to the cloud: Software vendors eager to offer on-demand application services find a simple solution that doesn’t require the time and expense of re-architecting applications. Enter virtual appliances, which are already being used by software vendors like VMware, IBM and SAP. The need for simpler deployment and the demand for cloud-based options are driving major ISV interest in virtual appliances, which are optimized, pre-configured virtual workloads. In 2011, 25 major ISVs will use virtual appliances as a fast and painless way to meet the demand for cloud-based application delivery (SaaS), and Linux will be a key enabler of this approach.
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Databases
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Oracle has ended MySQL support for several operating systems that either reached the end-of-life or were not in popular demand.
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Healthcare
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A company, EHR Live, has updated the interface to provide a more visually appealing interface that makes OpenEMR marketable in today’s marketplace.
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Funding
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PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-op are the named investors in this round. PHP Fog is the brainchild of veteran developer Lucas Carlson, who was the lead engineer for music-on-demand service Mog and wrote Ruby Cookbook for O’Reilly Media. A PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance.
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Project Releases
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Because Joomla is offered under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0, it requires no hardware investments and no initial spending on software. Ozimek said it also will work with a wide variety of SQL and even noSQL databases, including mySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, so “it can be the glue for Web services.”
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Government
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Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin has paved the way for organizations all over the world by initiating a cost cut. Putin has ordered his federal decision makers to phase out proprietary software-Windows-and adopt free solutions-Linux-by 2015.
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Licensing
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But he was not prepared for the storm that erupted once this news was posted on Slashdot, referencing a post by an open source developer, Philip Paradis. A respondent to the post on Paradis’ blog pointed out some lines of code which were believed to be from the original mtr and which, could, therefore mean that Manac was violating the GPL.
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Standards/Consortia
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This is a 66% growth in HTML5 video user support since December of 2009. With the expected release of Internet Explorer 9 in the near future, 2011 could see a major increase in websites adopting HTML5 video as their primary playback method.
Of browsers that support HTML5 video, Mozilla’s Firefox is the clear leader, with Google’s Chrome in second place. Much of the growth in HTML5 video support can be attributed to Chrome’s success in stealing market share from Internet Explore over the last year.
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Government lawyers had argued there was no discrimination because those same services are provided in other formats, such as on the phone, in person or by mail.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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In the Israel of 2011, it’s no longer legitimate to belong to the left. It’s illegitimate to campaign for human rights or to oppose the occupation or to investigate war crimes. Such actions earn Israelis a mark of shame. A land-stealing settler is a Zionist; a warmongering right-winger is a patriot; an inciting rabbi is a spiritual leader; a racist who expels foreigners is a loyal citizen. Only the leftist is a traitor.
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During the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
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At least 11 people have died in new clashes with security forces in Tunisia after four weeks of unrest, it was reported today. The interior ministry said eight people were killed over the weekend in the western towns of Thala and Kasserine. Rioting against joblessness and other social ills has scarred many cities in the country since 17 December, when a 26-year-old graduate set himself on fire when police confiscated his fruits and vegetables for selling without a permit.Mobs have since attacked public buildings and the local office of the party of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
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When Alina happened upon a group of men—too many to count—raping a girl in the squalid Port-au-Prince camp where she and other quake victims lived, she couldn’t just stand there. Maybe it was because she has three daughters of her own; maybe it was some altruistic instinct. And the 58-year-old was successful, in a way, in that when she tried to intervene, the men decided to rape her instead, hitting her ribs with a gun, threatening to shoot her, firing shots in the air to keep other people from getting ideas of making trouble as they kept her on the ground and forced themselves inside her until she felt something tear, as they saw that she was bleeding and decided to go on, and on, and on. When it was over, Alina lay on the ground hemorrhaging and aching, alone. The men were gone, but no one dared to help her for fear of being killed.
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Cablegate
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The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker’s online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks.
Revelations that the U.S. Justice Department obtained a court order to examine data held by Twitter Inc. on Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who sits on the country’s Foreign Affairs Committee, immediately caused consternation in the tiny North Atlantic nation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in North Yorkshire.
He had come alone on 12 August 2003, in the middle of a heatwave, for a gathering of environmental activists known as Earth First.
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A police officer who for seven years lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations, has quit the Met, telling his friends that what he did was wrong.
PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, infiltrated dozens of protest groups including anti-racist campaigners and anarchists, a Guardian investigation reveals.
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Six environmental activists who faced charges of trying to take over a power station called today for an inquiry into the role of an undercover police officer, who is accused of helping to plan and pay for the invasion.
The trial of the six, who denied conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, collapsed today, after details began to emerge about the role played by PC Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer.
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On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid at Iona school in Nottingham, which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today.
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Along with many others, I was sickened when I discovered that the man I knew as a fellow activist, Mark Kennedy, was in fact an undercover police officer who had been spying on us since 2003. Yet my feelings were nothing compared with those who were close to him. The betrayal and loss they are feeling is a real grief – the equivalent of someone you love dying. I went through this myself a few years ago when one of my best friends, Martin Hogbin, was exposed as a BAE spy. I denied the facts for a long time simply because the truth was too difficult. I still miss my friend, miss the good times, miss him seeing my son grow up; I don’t think this feeling will ever go away.
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The huge quantities of methane gas that bubbled out of BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico were eaten up almost entirely by undersea microbes by the end of August, a new study reports today.
Other scientists cautioned that much oil remained on the ocean floor, where it has penetrated deep into the sediment, as well as in fragile marshlands. Oil is still turning up in tar balls on beaches and in fishermen’s nets.
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The commission also concludes that the government’s efforts to prevent disasters like this were inadequate. “As this narrative suggests, the Macondo blowout was the product of several individual missteps and oversights by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, which government regulators lacked the authority, the necessary resources, and the technical expertise to prevent,” it states.
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Glaciers in the European Alps could shrink by 75% by the end of the century, according to new research into the expected impact of global warming.
The study, published in the journal Nature: Geoscience, concludes that, globally, mountain glaciers and ice caps are projected to lose 15-27% of their volume by 2100, although the extent of the damage varies widely. The analysis suggests glaciers in the Alps and New Zealand will shrink by more than 70% but shrinkage is predicted to reach about 10% in Greenland and high-mountain Asia.
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By the time he left office, President George W. Bush wasn’t exactly known as a friend of endangered wildlife. Over eight years, his administration protected 62 species of domestic animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act. By contrast, Bill Clinton had declared 522 species endangered during his two terms. (See chart below.) On average, Bush added eight new species to the list annually, the slowest pace of any president since Richard Nixon signed the ESA into law in 1973.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The CRTC last week quietly proposed a significant change to the rules on false or misleading news broadcasts on radio or television. The law currently provides that a broadcast licensee “shall not broadcast any false or misleading news.” The CRTC is proposing to amend the law with respect to television and radio by lowering the standard to “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.” In other words, it would perfectly permissible for a broadcaster to air false or misleading news, provided that it not endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.
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The deadline for interventions into the forthcoming CRTC hearing on the Bell – CTV merger passed earlier this week with hundreds of submissions from across the country. Many cultural groups focused solely on the proposed benefits package associated with the transaction (e.g. Directors Guild of Canada, Alberta Motion Pictures Industry Association, the Documentary Organization of Canada) but there are many others rallying to support the deal.
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Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has a lot on his plate: He’s mayor of America’s largest city, owner of one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing news organizations and patron of a $1.75 billion charitable foundation. Critics have repeatedly accused him of blurring the lines between those roles. Is he doing it again with Bloomberg View, his new opinion operation?
David Shipley and Jamie Rubin, the co-executive editors of the new service, will technically be employees of Bloomberg LP, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be necessarily be working in the financial-news-and-data giant’s offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. At least part of the time, they’ll be based in the Upper East Side offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, located on Madison Avenue and 78th Street
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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New legislation currently under consideration by the Hungarian Parliament is the latest government initiative that poses a threat to press freedom, according to Freedom House. Among other things, the measure would impose fines on private media organizations for “unbalanced” news coverage.
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Amid the mock-gothic gilt and stained glass of Hungary’s elaborate parliament on the banks of the Danube, Viktor Orbán oozed charm, humour, and resolve. “I won. We won,” he bragged. “We democrats won our battle.”
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But a lack of evil and stupidity does not eliminate short-sightedness,
foolishness, and priorities run dangerously amok.
The path to Internet-enabled perdition, like the spiritual path to
another well-known rhetorical locale very much to be avoided, can be
paved with seemingly good intentions nonetheless.
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If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan’s religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.
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Perhaps it is not the American Muslim community that harbors growing numbers of people threatening the core principles of our country. Perhaps such threats can more readily be found in certain dark corners of the hearing rooms of the House of Representatives. If we take constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties (that is the Bill of Rights) to be among the core pillars of the American way of life, then how should we judge Peter King’s intent and actions? Are they radical or not? And if they are, then we should all join with those American Muslims who are raising their voices against King and his machinations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Yesterday I tweeted a request for folks to help me compile a list of all the things that are geoblocked in Canada. within minutes, #BlockedUpNorth became a Trending Topic- one of the top ten Twitter conversation topics in Canada. I was genuinely shocked by how aware Canadians are about geoblocking- and how angry!
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A US professor of computer science is prodding electronics giant Sony with the stupid stick by hosting a copy of the PS3′s private key on his univeristy’s web servers.
Professor David S Touretzky, who specialises in robotics and has been known to try to replicate the spacial awareness of rats in his spare time, has poked his head above the parapet as Sony’s lumbering legal team grinds into action in an attempt to stop people spilling its secrets.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Later this year, the court will hear at least one case that examines the scope of the Copyright Act’s fair dealing provision. At issue is whether “research” within fair dealing can be extended to song previews that are made available on sites like iTunes where a consumer can freely listen to roughly 30 seconds of a song.
The Copyright Board of Canada ruled in 2007 that a broad and liberal interpretation of fair dealing meant that it could be included since the preview was effectively consumer research on whether to purchase the song. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the Copyright Board’s interpretation last May, opening the door to many other consumer research possibilities under the current fair dealing provision.
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Back in August we debunked the administration’s Korea FTA stats, but the Obama administration has continued to tout these bogus figures. Regarding the alleged $11 billion rise in exports, the crux of the issue is that the factsheet is quoting the wrong section of the USITC report (the administration is citing Table 2.2 on page 2-8 of the report). The USITC study predicts that U.S. exports will increase by only about $4.8-5.3 billion, as Table 2.3 on page 2-14 of the report indicates. In addition, the study predicts that U.S. imports will increase by $5.1-5.7 billion due to the Korea FTA. This large increase in imports completely wipes out the benefits of the increase in exports and turns the predicted effect into a net negative.
The $10-11 billion figure that the administration is citing is merely the change in the U.S. bilateral exports to Korea itself, which tells only part of the story. As the USITC study acknowledges, bilateral tariff reductions induce significant “trade diversion” effects, which means that implementation of the Korea FTA will “rob” from the volume of U.S. exports that currently go to third countries and shift those exports to Korea, leading to little net increase in U.S. exports. The diversion occurs because many exporters of U.S. goods will stop exporting their goods to other countries like Germany and instead start exporting to Korea, just because the tariff that they face for exporting to Korea is lower than the tariff that they face when trying to export elsewhere. The shift in the destination of exports alone does not increase U.S. economic output or employment. Only net export gains matter for American workers.
Wikipedia
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With the biggest “partner” of Wintel criticizing the developments of the mother-ship, how long can the Wintel monopoly last? Intel will find that GNU/Linux runs well on Intel as on ARM and Intel will find it profitable to be partner of GNU/Linux. It’s all good.
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The Spanish Ministry of the Interior has expressed its regret that an international crackdown on IT masterminds inside the violent Basque separatist group ETA was dubbed “Operation Linux”.
Apparently, penguin-loving outfits are complaining that the antiterrorist operation sullies their good name.
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Server
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Dubbed the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), it will be available from Dell this week as the Dell Canonical UEC Solution. We hope that it does not mean that the servers will be all wet.
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Mark Shuttleworth, the ever gracious founder of Ubuntu, stopped by Dell this morning to talk to various folks about various subjects. I was able to grab some time with him between meetings and get his thoughts on a few topics.
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Shuttleworth said that he is encouraged to see standardization taking place in the cloud computing space, and clearly remains positive about both OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Clearly, Shuttleworth also likes the idea of open cloud standards.
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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit (Server version is supported, desktop version will also work but not supported by Zimbra.) This tutorial uses Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop System.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe while Android overtakes iPhone in the US, and TransGaming transforms Cedega into the GameTree Developer Program. Discover our new section and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Some “older” Linux distributions don’t even recognize it. And it’s not that new, I understand. In both OpenBSD and FreeBSD I have to “conjure” it to life by setting the media type. Otherwise it stays dark.
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Applications
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In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.
Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.
We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it’s working out of box as expected for everybody.
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One key area of frustration for newcomers to the Linux OS is using document scanners. Most hardware makers do not provide Linux drivers on discs that accompany their scanner models. So Linux users have to struggle to find solutions on distro-specific help forums.
Linux does not support the TWAIN-compatible drivers popular in the Windows world. So the trick in obtaining scanning success is to use a scanner device that is compatible with Xsane, a scanner interface that uses the Scanner Access Now Easy driver.
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Few weeks ago we did show you apt-fast, a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. Thanks to sourceslist Team , apt-fast got an interface named 1blink-updater to simply install apt-fast, to integrate it with Synaptic and to perform updates.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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New winetricks 20110105: improved download error recovery, added first-run optin dialog. New winetricks 20110105-alpha: menu divided into categories, added 35 games.
Another month, another Winetricks – or, rather, two new Winetricks.
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Bordeaux entered the Wine services market in early 2008 and gained a foothold through its strength in marketing, branding and the technology expertise of a limited partnership with Wine-Reviews Inc.
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Games
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Hexen: Edge of Chaos is a new game that is based on popular game Doom 3. Developed by fans of the Hexen series the game is a hack ‘n’ slash game inspired the original Hexen game.
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Ubuntu Gamer reader ‘Cliff’ hit up our tip form to let us know about a game called H-Craft Championship, a sci-fi racer developed by indie developers Irrgheist.
H-Craft is a futuristic hovercraft racing game which sees players compete in championships to level up and unlock new vehicles to race with.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I know that some people bemoan the fact that these precious Linux jewels are now available for Windows users. They think that it lessens the need for people to move to Linux. However, I think that Linux is still a better OS for most people.
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While digiKam doesn’t allow you to publish photos directly to a WordPress blog, you can work around this limitation. Enable the Post by Email feature on your WordPress blog, and you can use the SendImages Kipi plugin in digiKam to email photos directly to your blog.
To make this workaround work, you have to prepare your WordPress blog first. If you host your blog on WordPress.com, navigate to Dashboard | My Blogs and press the Enable button to activate the Post by Email feature. This will automatically generate a unique email address where you send your photos.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will keep its corporate headquarters in Wake County and add more than 500 jobs in the next five years, officials said Monday.
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Red Hat Inc. has decided to keep its trademark fedora hanging in North Carolina, declining the overtures of other states Monday as it announced it will build its next corporate headquarters in the Raleigh area and create more than 500 new jobs over the next decade.
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Fedora
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I was initially a KDE user, but for a long time, I’ve been using GNOME on Ubuntu. This is because there has always been some serious bug or the other in KDE, ever since the team overhauled the desktop. I have waited with eager anticipation for a bug-free KDE and a distro that would serve it in a nice package, but have had no luck. Even when KDE became usable again with version 4.3, no distro did it right. But when Fedora released version 14 on 2nd November, I had an uncanny feeling that this would be the distro I was waiting for. Yes, it was!
However, what bowled me over first was not KDE—it was the new Fedora website. Never have I seen such an outstanding presentation of free and open source software, or of an operating system, done so meticulously.
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Debian Family
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I did a full review earlier of Linux Mint Debian Edition and loved it. Now there’s an update to it and I couldn’t resist doing a quick look. If you aren’t familiar with the Debian version of Linux Mint, you’re in for a real treat. LMDE has quickly become my favorite Linux distribution. It’s a great blend of Debian and Linux Mint.
[...]
As I noted above, I really enjoy Linux Mint Debian Edition. It really has become my distro of choice, for now. It combines the power of Debian with all of the Linux Mint tools & features. Of course, I will still continue to distrohop because you never know when another distro could tickle your fancy just a bit more.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I can recommend Ubuntu. But I cannot recommend Gentoo. Why? Because all of this trouble and downtime was caused by an update. An update that Portage did at some point earlier. It was part of a whole system update. If the system had never been rebooted, I would still not know it. I would have no clue that the thing would not have booted up in the event of a power failure or whatever.
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And that’s the problem. Linux was created by geeks, grown and nurtured by geeks, and unless something is done fairly soon to change the presentation and the image, it will remain a system for geeks. The only one doing very much about that at this moment is Mark Shuttleworth, who has invested his fortune, his time, and his vision to create SOMETHING that can present a real challenge to the Windows hegemony.
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And Canonical’s emphasis on customization is an important point. So far, much of the hype surrounding the cloud has centered on the efficiency, ease of deployment and accessibility of cloud-based machines, with relatively little attention afforded to the extent to which users can customize software running in the cloud. cloud-init’s chief selling point, meanwhile, is the customizability it guarantees for Ubuntu-based cloud images.
In this sense, Canonical’s strategy for the cloud seems to stand out in unique ways. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, but this is a topic to watch closely as the cloud develops.
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Ubuntu Control Center is a nice simple application to sort things out easily and intuitively in Ubuntu. It is originally inspired from Mandriva Control Center and aims to centralize and organize the main configuration tools available in Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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In my quest to make Linux Mint 10 by sole operating system, I needed to bring over two contact lists into Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the default email software installed with Mint 10. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird on my Windows 7 system and I found that I like T-bird very much. I exported both of my contact lists from Outlook 2007 and T-Bird and copied the files over as .csv format. Before importing the files, I opened both and trimmed down the majority of fields, since I just wanted the names and email addresses of my contacts. The import went well and after merging both contact lists, I had the names and email addresses I needed.
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MoonOS, an Ubuntu based Linux distro, recently hit version 4, codenamed “Neake”. This last release certainly marks a turning point for MoonOS, for it includes several drastic changes that set it appart from previous releases and even from other Linux distributions.
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I’ve had a couple of encounters with #! before, starting with this review of version 9.04.01 and including this review of version 10 “Statler” Openbox (Alpha 2). I was pleasantly surprised by the features and minimalistic beauty of version 9.04.01, and I was later slightly let down by the relative lack of polish and removal of some features in version 10 (Alpha 2). Now, the #! developers have come out with a (actually, two) post-alpha release(s) of version 10 “Statler”.
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Barry Kauler, the father of Puppy Linux, announced earlier today, January 6th, the immediate availability of Puppy Linux 5.2, a major version that is compatible with the popular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system.
Puppy Linux 5.2 features lots of updated and improved applications, the new Quickset dialog to easily setup your system (language/locale and keyboard settings, timezone, video resolution), Browser Installer, Browser-Default, Quickpet, improved Puppy Package Manager, and a lot more for you to discover.
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Phones
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Android
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Yes, Apple’s iPhone is popular, and yes it looks like Verizon is finally going to release an iPhone, but Android phones have turned out to be even more popular.
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Well, now we know. You can’t sell software using the General Public License (GPL) on the Apple App Store& because it conflicts with its Terms of Service (ToS) . The popular VLC media player, was the first major GPLed software to be pulled from Apple’s App Store, it won’t be the last. But, what about Google’s Android Market? I asked the experts and they tell me that, in general, GPL developers can offer their wares on Android.
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In year 2007 The Open Handset Alliance was formed, which includes Google and other 33 companies. The aim of The Open Handset Alliance is to bring innovation into mobile devices and thus giving consumers a much better user experience.
At the same time, mobile application developers are given an opportunity to freely participate in Android application development using alliance’s Android Software Development Kit ( SDK ) which is released through Google’s developer website. Developers are therefore, free to develop any Android application they see fit and are free to market it to all Android mobile phone owners. This article will consist of four main sections:
1. Installation of Eclipse IDE, Oracle Java JRE, Android SDK and Android Developer Tool (ADT) a special Eclipse plug-in
2. Setting up Eclipse IDE with Android SDK and Android Developer Tool
3. Writing a simple Android Application: “Hello Android”
4. Testing Android application using Android Virtual Device
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Honeycomb, Android 3.0, is the star of CES so far.
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The GTVHacker dev team has won a cash bounty for being the first to successfully root and enable third-party application support on a Google TV device before Google – Google will reportedly be bringing support for Android applications to the platform some time later this year. According to developer Howard Harte, who originally announced the bounty at the end of November last year, the GTVHacker team used a hardware hack, adding serial console support to the UART1 header on the Logitech Revue, to enable root and install third-party apps on Google TV.
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Cisco Systems unveiled a suite of Linux-based “Videoscape” IPTV hardware and software that blends TV and web content a la Google TV. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless plans to ship 4G LTE versions of Cisco’s Android-based, enterprise-focused Cius tablet and Linux-based ISR routers.
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Tablets
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Not that tablets makers will have an easy ride. As the plethora of models on display show, for every Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, Dell Streak 7 and Asus Eee Pad Slider, there are countless no-name offerings. Of these a fair few are poor, some good, but all run the same operating system with the same UI, sport the same ports, and have the same basic look.
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Intel’s Oak Trail platform consists of a Lincroft-based processor and Whitney Point chipset, targeting mainly tablet PCs and netbooks and is able to support any operating systems available on the market including Android.
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Dell announced a seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet called the Streak 7, featuring a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, dual cameras, and compatibility with T-Mobile’s 4G-like HSPA+ network. The company also announced an unlocked, GSM-ready “Dell Venue” smartphone that runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, with a 4.1-inch AMOLED display and eight-megapixel camera.
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While the United States seemed to move from a possible OpenID login to more of a “secure” intranet approach, Russia has moved from commercial software to open source. The two moves may not seem to have much in common, but they do. Control.
Under the banner of security, the U.S. has announced the creation of a “verified” ID program that looks for all the world like a walled, or at least fenced, section of the Internet. Russia has moved to open source not out of a philosophical belief in free software, but out of fear of American software hegemony.
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Events
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Australia’s annual Linux.conf.au conference in Brisbane will go off as scheduled, despite massive floods bearing down on the Queensland, Australia city, according to the conference’s website today.
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Web Browsers
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Google on Tuesday said that it plans to drop support for the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser and to embrace WebM, the video codec that it acquired in 2009 and released last year as open source software.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 is nearly ready for showtime, according to a recent post on Mozilla’s mailing list.
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Programming
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There is one thing PHP desperately needs — an easy to use built-in web server. Every semester, as I face a new room full of hopeful newbies, I deal with one of the major pain points of PHP development — that PHP is worthless without a web server. I end up spending valuable time talking about Apache, when I should be talking about PHP.
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I use Subversion in my day job as a technical writer for a software company. I use Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) and connect to the subversion repository via the shell. This is pretty much how the book was written, so all of the commands and tasks really fit my personal situation. Not only that, but the level of complexity (or lack thereof, if you’re a total subversion guru) is right at my level.
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We are excited to announce that ActiveState is the proud recipient of an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award! Komodo IDE has been named Best Python IDE, coming out on top against nine other Python IDEs tested. Komodo specifically got top points for ease of installation, documentation and ease of use–things that we pride ourselves on as well.
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AMD starting to develop display processors to support ARM architectures is correct in terms of marketability and market potential, but its pace is too slow compared with Nvidia’s success with Tegra 2, according to Taiwan-based notebook makers.
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Indecision by Haiti’s government and international donors’ single-minded pursuit of their own goals have crippled progress in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, a highly critical Oxfam report says.
“This has been a year of indecision and it has put Haiti’s recovery on hold,” said Roland Van Hauwermeiren, country director for the aid agency in Haiti.
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The Obama administration said Friday it could support throwing out the disputed results of Haiti’s first-round presidential election if that step is proposed by a panel of experts examining the vote.
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The international response to the earthquake that struck Haiti nearly a year ago was immediate and massive. The devastation was massive as well: The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured more than 300,000, destroyed more than 250,000 homes and displaced more than 1.5 million people, 1 million of whom are still living in makeshift shelters in hundreds of camps.
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The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled [PDF] that Novell under the 1995 APA transferred to Santa Cruz “only the UNIXWARE product business and the portion of the UNIX source-code business that Novell retained following the Licensing Agreement — which did not include the UNIX trademark”, which went to X/Open.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Christina Taylor Green’s life has been ripped away from her. Her family and community will be devastated by the loss of this beautiful nine year old child. They need the opportunity to grieve in peace.
There is nothing stopping protesters from holding their own public memorial service, or rally. Then it would be an appropriate public thing.
Protesting at a private funeral can do is to further harm the people who are already harmed, exploiting the tragedy. Some people seek to do that. Even though it harms the public good.
Human society allows government the facility to enact laws so that it can support the public good. And sometimes it happens that governments do just that.
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We are still being fed “The Governments version of the TRUTH” about incidents in Iraq. Sadly today’s “Media Mafia” seems to be content to let Big Brother control the flow of information.
A full one-third of women veterans report rape or attempted rape during their time in the military. The investigation into these incidents are often more like a cover-up story than a fully transparent investigation. A good example of the cloaked “government truth” type of investigation is illustrated by what happened in Pfc LaVena Johnson’s case.
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I have just come back to France this Wednesday afternoon 22 December after being expelled in the middle of the night by the Israeli government, after being interrogated for 30 hours, detained and an attempt to forcefully ship me into planes, before I was able to meet with a female lawyer and warn the French Consulate.
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Nick Clegg today promised to end virtual house arrest, contained in the current anti-terror control orders regime, but for the first time admitted that the government will retain restrictions for a small group of terror suspects who cannot be prosecuted in the British courts.
The former Labour home secretary John Reid, a supporter of control orders, said it was clear the deputy prime minister was backing off from plans to abolish the central thrust of the measures.
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Israel is sliding down a slippery slope. A country that imprisons its Jonathan Pollaks will end up with jails filled with ‘opponents of the regime.’
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Cablegate
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Throughout 2010 whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were making headlines with the release of classified documents. Both the leaks and the controversy surrounding Assange have been covered extensively by the media.
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I am writing to request that you undertake an immediate review to determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in accordance with Section 210 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). In addition, I urge you to work with the Swedish government to determine the means by which Mr. Julian Assange can be brought to justice for his actions while recognizing and respecting Swedish sovereign law.
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Since WikiLeaks released the US embassy cables on 28 November 2009 it has come under pressure on several fronts, from DDoS attacks to frozen bank accounts. We list the companies, politicians and organisations making life difficult for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange
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WikiLeaks: Swedish government ‘hid’ anti-terror operations with America from Parliament by Andrew Hough, and Christopher Hope in the Telegraph.
The Swedish government asked American officials to keep intelligence-gathering “informal” to help avoid Parliamentary scrutiny, American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show.
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In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange’s negligence has caused “hypertension”, “depression” and “living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke” as a result of living “in fear of being on the brink of another nucliar [sic] WAR”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig, ablaze 50 miles off Louisiana last week, is spilling an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil a day in what may be the US worst environmental disaster. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP
BP is more likely to escape the potentially ruinous charge of gross negligence, according to City analysts, after a powerful US commission blamed “systemic” causes for the Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Barack Obama’s national commission released part of its final report into the disaster last night on Wednesday night. The report, to be published next week, could influence several other parallel investigations into the spill that are yet to finish.
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Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.
Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.
The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would “guarantee security in the seas” – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.
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Dirty Business, the new documentary from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, began its nationwide screening tour last night in Berkeley, California, with the aim of debunking the myth of “clean coal” and kick-starting a debate on the future of energy in the US.
The film shows scarred mountains, abandoned family homes on remote hillsides, water courses toxic with sludge, respiratory fatalities and children whose growth has been stunted by pollution as some of the side effects of coal extraction and the power stations that burn it. And, of course, it shows the effect of coal combustion on global temperatures.
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Gasoline prices are rising, averaging 41 cents higher a gallon than last year, so once again we are hearing the familiar refrain that this means we need to drill more.
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A federal judge’s decision today to allow a state agency to move forward with a plan to open a Texas dump to radioactive waste from at least 36 states is bad news for Texans.
After a lengthy hearing, Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas voided a Dec. 30 temporary restraining order issued by a state court in Austin. That order would have kept the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission (TLLRWDCC) from voting Tuesday on a plan to allow a low-level waste dump near Andrews Texas to take radioactive waste from 36 or more states.
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Finance
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I believe that economic theory is merely a construct of “man” (not woman) and that there are alternative views of economics (all purporting to be an answer to something or other) but these concerns are not necessarily mutally exclusive. Man makes the theory; man makes the rules that govern the theory; and man changes the rules as he sees fit. Economics is not scientifically based in the way that the theory of evolution is. If it were (scientifically based) it would take into account the economic value of a woman who stays home and looks after her children. In fact, a good economy would pay that woman a living wage.
I do not think it matters if the average person like me thinks that if the deficit is huge that future generations will have to pay more taxes or that my check to pay my health care taxes is actually torn up by the government when they receive it. In fact, I get a great deal of satisfaction thinking that I am paying my health care expenses through the earnings from my own labor and by paying my taxes. I am also, incidentally, helping society as a whole as my tax dollars will assist those less well off to receive health care too. It is my commitment as a citizen of my country.
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Higher unemployment and foreclosure rates, especially in South Atlantic and Mountain states, raised the nation’s economic stress in November, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis.
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Federal prosecutors portrayed a California financial research firm as an incubator for insider trading as an eighth person connected to the company pleaded guilty Tuesday to securities fraud charges.
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Big banks and other financial players are gearing up for new regulations in the next few weeks on the “Volcker rule” that are designed to curb “proprietary trading” by banks using their own cash without depriving the financial system of needed capital.
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In recent months, as Goldman has fended off widespread accusations that it has become the leading example of the gambling culture permeating Wall Street — placing bets for its own profit rather than engaging in old-fashioned banking services — the company has insisted that trading made up no more than one-tenth of its revenues.
During a conference call last year, the firm’s chief financial officer, David Viniar, described the company’s private trades as comprising “10-ish type of percent” of its total revenues.
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The rich treated themselves like royalty this holiday season. That spun the holidays into gold for Tiffany & Co. and other high-end retailers.
Wealthier shoppers traded up to more expensive gold and diamond jewelry from silver charms. Designer clothing and purses were back.
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Barack Obama has begun a major overhaul of his inner circle, lending the White House a more business-friendly face with the appointment of an outsider banker, William Daley, as his chief of staff.
Daley continues the heavy Chicago bent of Obama’s White House. He is the son of the late Richard Daley, who was mayor of Chicago for two decades, and brother of the even longer-serving outgoing current mayor of Chicago, also Richard.
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Unlike bankers, US labour unions had nothing to do with the economic crisis – yet they’re the ones now being scapegoated
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Today, with unemployment in almost the double digits and foreclosure unabated, President Obama decided that America needed more of the same. The President announced the appointment of JPMorgan Executive William M. Daley as White House Chief of Staff, replacing Rahm Emanuel. Tomorrow, news reports indicate that he will announce that Goldman Sachs adviser Gene B. Sperling will be appointed head of the National Economic Council, replacing Larry Summers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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If you get arrested in California, better hope there are no incriminating texts or e-mails or sensitive data stored on your phone.
On Monday, the California Supreme Court ruled that police in that state can search the contents of an arrested person’s cell phone.
Citing U.S. Supreme Court precedents, the ruling contends that “The loss of privacy upon arrest extends beyond the arrestee’s body to include ‘personal property … immediately associated with the person of the arrestee’ at the time of arrest.”
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Seeing her frail figure, looking much older than her 38 years, one wonders “Why is she doing this?” This is a lost battle, because the state is stronger than she is. She could be India’s Aung San Suu Ki – but because India is a “democracy”, not a dictatorship, hers will never be an international cause célèbre. Irom Sharmila lives in Manipur, in the north-east, and has been on a fast-unto-death for the past decade as a protest against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. AFSPA was imposed in Manipur decades ago as a bulwark against insurgency.
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Venezuelan lawmakers on Monday imposed broadcast-type regulations on the Internet, barring some types of online messages under measures that opponents say are a threat to freedom speech.
President Hugo Chavez’s allies in the National Assembly approved the revised “Social Responsibility Law,” which extends rules for broadcast media to the Internet.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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It seems that Sony executives either hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, or simply discounted them as another easily-corrected security hole, as they had not released any type of statement regarding the discovery until today.
After reading the statement that Sony provided to Edge Magazine, it appears that it is more likely the latter scenario.
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It looks like Sony has found its much-needed solution to the recent breaking of the DRM key in its PlayStation 3 console, and it’s not very technical: the company has filed suit against those responsible for highlighting its security ineptitude.
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We have seen a lot of wasted energy in the legal system over the years but Sony takes the cake. They are suing folks who revealed Sony’s utterly inept use of encryption to lock down the PlayStation3. They also sought an injunction blocking release/distribution of the encryption key that was found by reverse engineering. On the farm, we called that closing the gate after the horse had left.
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This apparently allows unauthorised parties to decompile, modify and renew the signature of the PS3′s firmware. It allegedly also allows any type of software to be signed for non-modified PS3 consoles, which causes this software to be recognised as legal and enables it to be played back on such consoles. The first PS3 games that were copied illegally, based on the hack, have allegedly already appeared and are circulating. The motion says that this has caused SCEA considerable economic damage and loss, although no figure was stipulated.
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Also known as GeoHot, George Hotz, familiar to many from his iPhone and Playstation 3 hacks, has released source code for a piece of software which can allegedly be used to sign homebrew programs so that they will run on Sony’s Playstation 3. The code is reported to run under the current PS3 firmware version, version 3.55, modified using jailbreak software (direct download), also released by Hotz.
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So maybe that is the only, real reason why “Save as WWF” is so touchy: the people they are trying to dismiss as one handful of software-obsessed nerds only gave even more reasons why this whole campaign was a bad idea from the start. Let’s just admit it and go on (but using, of course, Free Software to reduce the environmental impact of computing!).
“Jailbroken” PS3 3.55 with Homebrew
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.12.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this special episode, Dan reviews Linux Mint 10 and CyanogenMod 6.1 in detail.
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This episode is mostly about Linux and competition. We look at our challenge and the winning image and we have a look at the challenge at gimpusers.com. There you have to design a new splash screen for GIMP.
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Kernel Space
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For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors.
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Graphics Stack
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While VIA defenestrated its open-source Linux graphics driver strategy, there has been some recent work under-way on providing a GEM/TTM + KMS driver for VIA’s integrated graphics processors by the community. In particular, this work is being done by James Simmons, the former Google Summer of Code student developer who was working on 3Dfx kernel mode-setting support a few months back.
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With the Linux 2.6.38 kernel DRM update having been pulled into the mainline tree last night by Linus Torvalds, AMD’s Alex Deucher pushed the page-flipping support from the DDX X.Org driver side into the mainline xf86-video-ati tree.
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Applications
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Aside from providing some of the most promising applications available for the Linux desktop (“Linux iLife” anyone?) they are also incredibly hard workers; barely a month has passed since the release of Shotwell 0.8 yet today sees the release of Shotwell 0.8.1.
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I started working on a chapter for the Ubuntu Developers’ Manual. The chapter will be on how to use media in your apps. That chapter will cover:
* Playing a system sound
* Showing an picture
* Playing a sound file
* Playing a video
* Playing from a web cam
* Composing media
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Proprietary
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Highlights:
* Fresh batch of mail improvements
* Experimental changes to the crash logger on Mac (more)
* Changed how Opera is detected during widget start-up on Mac (more)
* Slow DNS responses due to IPv6 fixed on Linux/FreeBSD (more)
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Mathieu Weschler has toiled away for the last two years on his opus, The Trashmaster — a feature-length film created entirely in GTA IV about a rogue garbageman who’s looking to take out the human trash.
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Ville Heijari, Bird Whisperer, Rovio Mobile Ltd. told Muktware, “Ubuntu is another one of the platforms we are investigating, but we don’t have any details regarding any development on Ubuntu yet.”
So, sadly we may not see Angry Birds on Ubuntu any soon. But, we do wish to see Angry Birds on the world’s third most popular operating system. Let’s think of economics. If the game is paid, will you buy it? What other games do you want to see on Ubuntu?
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Zero Ballistics is a 3D tank shooter, a mix of FPS and “tank” (if that’s a genre) that is actually rather addictive, although unrealistic.
[...]
Overall the game is pretty damn fun for a quick thrill, everything comes together rather nicely and presuming you can find others to play with, I’m sure some strategies would emerge.
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I could off course suggest the more then comparable Unigine engine, but then I would be passing the MacOS users.
There are many FOSS tools like Ogre3D, but I’m not a programmer to say what suites for their game.
Yet, there is a lot to expect this year from Winter Wolves Games, I wish them a fruitful year with lots of new titles !
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Be aware that some of the software may be unstable on Windows, but chances are good that you might find yourself quite comfortable in using some of these applications.
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There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE.
You can’t blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.
Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.
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Perhaps the best part of all, of course, is that–as with most Linux distributions–there’s no commitment involved in trying it out. Particularly if you have old hardware lying around, it will be worth your while to take Puppy Linux for a tour.
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I have been waiting for this day for so long! Great to see it finally happen! Thank you to everyone who has donated and may our path to world domination continue.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Initial release of Mandriva fork Mageia is still on track for release later this month. Numerous preparations continue behind the scenes to facilitate this highly anticipated release.
A previous report of an earlier packagers’ meeting outlined some of the procedures and personnel in place and still needed to begin the process of building Mageia software. Hardware and temporary hosting was secured and the build system was being implemented. In a more recent blog posting, Mageia representatives stated that “packaging tasks have been launched.” While the build system isn’t fully operational, the first 40 packages are expected in the coming days as letters describing the SVN upload process, which is ready, have been sent. Mentors are being paired with new developers who did not previously have an account so they can begin their work as well.
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Red Hat Family
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On January 7, the Administration issued a succinct, clear message to Executive Branch IT leaders: Don’t discriminate between proprietary and open source solutions when it currently spends almost $80 billion dollars to buy information technology (IT). In fact, in its message on Technology Neutrality, it goes even further, urging agencies to “analyze alternatives that include proprietary, open source, and mixed source technologies. This allows the Government to pursue the best strategy to meet its particular needs.”
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Editors’ rating:
8.2 out of 10
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Sadly I never kept that original e-mail, but I tried to replicate it from memory for Canonical’s 5th birthday:
Dear Friend,
How are you and your family hope fine?
I am Mark SHUTTLEWORTH, from the great country of SOUTH AFRICA.
Due to good fortune mine in business, I have come into money of the sum $575,000,000 (US).
I would like to with you discuss BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction.
Pleased to discuss by phone at your earliest convenience.
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Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon discuss Unity, the new desktop environment for Ubuntu with David Barth, one of the key developers behind the interface on everyone’s lips.
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Nor is Unity a complete departure from GNOME. As Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon emphasizes, “Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME.” If anything, Shuttleworth insists, Unity is part of the diversity that “makes GNOME stronger.” Users will even be able to select another GNOME-based interface if they prefer.
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3 months after the successful launch as permanent Q&A site in our new Ubuntu design, we have reached the 6000 question threshold. Those 6000 questions have been asked and answered to 91% almost 14000 answers by 8600 users. 60000 votes have been cast for the questions and answers.
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Flavours and Variants
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The first release of elementary OS – a new Ubuntu-based operating from the elementary-project – has been made available for pre-order ahead of its March release date.
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Given that ZaReason already offers a variety of different Linux distributions — including the big names like Fedora and Ubuntu — as OS options, it’s not too surprising to see Trisquel added to the lineup. What is worth noting, however, is that Ubuntu-based Trisquel stands out as a brand of Linux whose main mission is to remain 100 percent free of “binary blobs” and other bits of proprietary software that most mainstream Linux distributions use, often because they’re essential for supporting certain hardware.
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wattOS R3 has been released. The lightweight Linux distro is now based on the latest Ubuntu 10.10 and also comes with updated packages for most of its core applications.
Some changes include a new lightweight music player, foobnix, and a new photo editor, Fotoxx. The usual selection of LXDE, OpenBox and PCManFM continues to be the basis of wattOS.
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Phones
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The world will see one billion mobile broadband subscribers this year, doubling from the 500 million mobile web users in 2010, according to Ericsson, a provider of global telecom equipment. An increasing rate of smartphone adoption is the key driver, although connected laptops, tablets, USB data sticks and mobile hotspots will also add to the mobile subscriber numbers to a lesser extent. By the end of 2011, Ericsson estimates 400 million mobile broadband subscribers will be from the Asia-Pacific region, while Western Europe and North America will follow with 200 million each.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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While we’ve seen MeeGo running on devices such as the Nokia N900, we haven’t had a play with it on a netbook – until now. Here it’s running on an MSI unit.
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Here is one brilliant application created by Dany-69. You can download it from the Maemo.Org. It’s called MaeModder and basically one can modify a whole bunch of things on your N900 with very little effort. In a way Dany-69 has made modding your N900 a lot less stressful because beforehand one would need to run a lot of scripts via the x-terminal window. There will still be a lot of people who prefer to run scripts (myself included), but this application makes life a lot easier.
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This slate would be the first MeeGo/Android dual boot and dual core tablet and that it can also boot with Winodws 7.
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Other analysts have pointed out that, now that AT&T has lost its exclusive, they’ll certainly be promoting Android phones more.
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Android
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The list of sensors and gizmos and odds and ends inside of mobile devices keeps growing, and the latest addition might have you scratching your head in terms of usefulness. It looks like Android 2.3 and higher supports a hardware barometer, and the Motorola Xoom tablet with Honeycomb (3.0) features one inside. The use isn’t immediately clear, but let’s speculate.
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Android 3.0 is not just another version of Android like the recently released Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”. Instead, Android 3.0 codenamed “Honeycomb” is built from scratch to suit the needs of devices with bigger screen sizes, tablets to be specific(in the current context). Google officially previewed Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. And from the initial looks of it, Android 3.0 powered tablets are going to be spectacular. Here is nice little video preview of Android 3.0.
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Google didn’t have a booth of its own at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year in Las Vegas, but signs of the search giant’s broad reach were apparent throughout the event. It seems as if practically every major consumer electronics company has adopted Google’s Android mobile operating system in some capacity.
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F4A 1.3 is now avaiable for download, with two significant updated (unrEVOked 3.32 and AlphaRev 1.8), plus some other under-the-hood tweaks.
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Sub-notebooks
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The XO-3 will have a larger screen when it comes out in 2012, and will shave off another significant fraction of power – possibly up to another full Watt.
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People outside the free software movement frequently ask about the practical advantages of free software. It is a curious question.
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These are numbered for reference and not for priority.
1. Charles Smutz recently announced his Ruminate IDS, whose goal is to “demonstrate the feasibility and value of flexible and scalable analysis of objects transferred through the network.” Charles is also author of the Vortex prohect, a “a near real time IDS and network surveillance engine for TCP stream data.”
2. Doug Burks just released a new version of SecurityOnion, an Ubuntu-based live CD to facilitate network security monitoring. You’ll find many of the tools on this list in SO and I expect those missing will be included at some point!
3. Over at Berkeley, development of the Bro IDS project is kicking into high gear with Seth Hall’s new role as a full-time developer. We miss you Seth!
[...]
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During the ‘Integration’ phase, source code and assets from various contributors are integrated into a deployable build which is then tested as a single unit. Issues are logged, fixed, and retested, all in the open source platform. The ‘Implementation and Improvement’ phase closes the loop and provides feedback to the entire lifecycle.
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Web Browsers
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Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
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How I rank ‘em
From best to worst, this is how I rank the above browsers:
1. Google Chrome (actually Chromium)
2. Konqueror
3. Firefox
4. Arora
5. Opera
6. Lynx
7. Midori
8. NetSurf
9. Dooble
10. Epiphany
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Mozilla
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As Firefox 4 Beta 9 enters the freeze phase, Mozilla is posting the first nightly builds of Firefox 4 Beta 10 , which is expected to be the final beta of the new browser.
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SaaS
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More seriously though, I’ve been growing increasingly alarmed by stories like this: the US government subpoenaing Twitter (and reportedly Gmail and Facebook) users over their support of Wikileaks. The casual use of subpoenas, including against foreign citizens is worrying enough – the New York Times says over 50,000 “national security letters” are sent each year – but even more concerning is the fact that often these subpoenas are sealed, preventing the companies from notifying the users they affect.
It used to be that if the US government wanted access to documents or letters in my possession they’d have to subpoena me directly. As a foreign citizen there are all sorts of ways I could fight the request – and it was at least my choice whether to do so. As someone living in the US I also had the whole weight of the 4th Amendment on my side. Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands. And unless, as happened with Twitter, the company storing my data decides to fight for openness on my behalf, there’s every possibility that I won’t even hear about the request until it’s too late. That’s just not how things should work in a free society.
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Oracle
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Since the java.net migration problems, Oracle and representatives from the Hudson community have been involved in talks on the future of the project in a number of areas. The Hudson representatives have been myself, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, and Sacha Labourey (CEO of CloudBees and Kohsuke’s boss), who was brought in to help provide experience with discussions on a corporate/executive level which neither Kohsuke nor I have, with Alan Harder and R. Tyler Croy advising on the side.
[..]
First, we rename the project – the choice for a new name is Jenkins, which we think evokes the same sort of English butler feel as Hudson. We’ve already registered domains, Twitter users, etc for the new name, and have done our best to verify that there are no existing trademarks which would conflict with it. Kohsuke will be registering the trademark for Jenkins in his name, with the intent of transferring ownership of the trademark to the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy once the Jenkins project has been admitted to it (which, I should add, is very much our plan, hopefully in their next round of new projects in a few months – we’ve already had preliminary contacts with SFC). We still invite Oracle to remain involved with the project, on equal terms with all other contributors, and hope they’ll take us up on this invitation.
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Over the next few months I saw the community start to grow at a decent pace. The first opensolaris books (OpenSolaris Bible and Pro Opensolaris) were published, Solaris internals was updated to take Solaris 10 and opensolaris into account and every major trade magazine was writing something about opensolaris. Additionally, our local OpenSolaris users group was starting to grow in size, and I was beginning to make a number of good friends in the community. All of these things got me crazy excited about the opensolaris community, and I wanted to jump in and start helping out any way I could.
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Education
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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on a workshop by the Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder (VREP) programme. VREP is an educational initiative to teach high school students how to use virtual reality.
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Business
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This looks like a really foolish move by Salesforce. If we have learned anything in the last 15 years, it is that having an enthusiastic, vibrant community behind a product brings all kinds of benefits in terms of feedback, bug-fixing, marketing and so on. To throw that away, as Salesforce seems to be doing, is shortsighted and retrogressive – even Microsoft is moving to embrace free software and its communities.
It also tends to confirm my suspicion that Salesforce is not actually a modern software company, despite its claim to be in the currently-trendy category of “enterprise cloud computing company”. It’s more of an old-style, closed-source, command-and-control outfit that happens to deliver its wares over the Internet. I’d be interested to know if it supports/contributes to any open source at all – I can’t think of or find anything (anyone else know?)
I suspect that in the light of the company’s recent indifference towards its community, culminating in this sale and the abandonment of the free software version altogether, Dimdim will become a by-word for how not to build a sustainable business around open source. At least they chose a good name…
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BSD
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As you all know, PC-BSD is a free, open-source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD, focusing on ease-of-use and and double-click package installation (PBI). The PC-BSD project is now part of iXsystems, a company that builds storage solutions, pre-configured servers, and customised servers utilizing open source hardware and software.
Today Kris Moore, the project’s founder, announced PC-BSD 8.2RC1 and with regards to his plans for 2011 he writes:
“For 8.2, it is mainly a release to include the latest FreeBSD 8.2 / KDE 4.5.4. Also some
bug fixes are present for advanced partitioning, letting the user select between MBR/GPT,
and easily toggle between UFS+S/ZFS.
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The PC-BSD Team has announced the availability of the first Release Candidate for PC-BSD 8.2.
Version 8.2-RC1 contains a number of enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes in response to previous 8.2 testing snapshots. Some of the notable changes are:
* Updated to FreeBSD 8.2-RC1
* Fixed issue detecting the proper video card driver
* Fixed some crashes when adding new users / groups
* Added /sbin/nologin as a shell choice in the user manager
* Let created users have a homedir of /nonexistant via the GUI
* Fix customizing desktop languages when using a () in the description
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Project Releases
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The Mule team is very pleased to announce the general availability of Mule ESB 3.1. This release packs a lot of new shiny awesomeness.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Cassandra v0.7, the highly-scalable, second generation Open Source distributed database.
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Programming
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Sometime later today some very exciting new code is going to show up in the e4 git repository at Eclipse. “Orion” is a brand new adventure for Eclipse, and one which we hope will interest and excite a whole new community: web developers.
Orion is not a set of Java plug-ins which run in the existing Java IDE. It is browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the web, in the web. Tools are written in JavaScript and run in the browser. Unlike other attempts at creating browser-based development tools, this is not an IDE running in a single tab. Links work and can be shared. You can open a file in a new tab. Great care has been taken to provide a web experience for development.
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Standards/Consortia
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HTML5 needs spokespeople to work. There are a lot of people out there who took on this role, and here at Mozilla we thought it is a good idea to introduce some of them to you with a series of interviews and short videos. The format is simple – we send the experts 10 questions to answer and then do a quick video interview to let them introduce themselves and ask for more detail on some of their answers.
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The following chart shows the percentage of documents on the web that are in OOXML format, as a percentage of all MS Office documents. Note carefully the scale of the chart. It is peaking at less than 3%. So 97+% of the Microsoft Office documents on the web today are in the legacy binary formats, even four years after Office 2007 was released.
[...]
Of course, for any given organization these numbers may vary. Some are 100% on the XML formats. Some are 0% on them. If you look at just “gov” internet domains, the percentage today is only 0.7%. If you look at only “edu” domains, the number is 4.5%. No doubt, within organizations, non-public work documents might have a different distribution. But clearly the large number of existing legacy binary documents on government web sites alone is sufficient to prove my point. DOC is not going away.
I call “FUD” on this one.
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Funded by the Research Information Network (RIN), the aim of this project is to investigate the extent to which Web 2.0 tools represent useful means of communicating, sharing and disseminating research ideas and outputs for researchers across different disciplines, with a view to exploring implications for the future of scholarly communications.
-
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Leaders of the opposition National Liberal Party (PNL) and Conservative Party (PC) Crin Antonescu and Daniel Constantin respectively on Monday will sign a protocol by which the two parties set up the Centre-Right Alliance (ACD), which they might register in court that very day.
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Over the weekend many news organizations reported, erroneously, that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was dead. These reports don’t seem to have originated on Twitter. But many spread there — and now they’re occasioning a round of head-scratching over how to handle retractions and corrections in this new communications format.
[...]
This might be a useful tactic to curtail the spread of bad info. But it still flattens the record a bit, since the original message’s timestamp (and possibly other contextual data) would vanish.
-
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We asked readers last week whether what influential bloggers said was true—that Google was losing the war against search result spam. Your response? More than three quarters found Google prone to spam, with one-third tagging the decline as significant.
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I saw this link pop up on Twitter today. Now, Syed is a great guy, and he works hard to make money and to teach others how to make money, but sometimes, even he is wrong.
To start with, go to WPBeginner.com and read his article. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Did you see it? He’s talking about creating a viral campaign. A viral campaign is not created. It takes off on its own. It is like an infection that hops from person to person. So every article you read about creating viral campaigns is automatically wrong. What they are talking about is a fungal campaign.
What is a fungal campaign, you may ask. A fungal campaign is based around trying to create an infection, the way that rubbing your wet athlete’s foot infected toes on my wet feet is your attempt to infect me. Commonly, a fungal campaign will use youth-oriented imagery, fonts, and graphics. It will go to great pains to try to conceal its pushy character, but as you can read in the article, the idea behind it is that friend A will inadvertently help push friend B, who will inadvertently help push friend C. In the article, the topic is the Facebook “like” button and its privacy-invading feature of telling one’s “friends” where you clicked the button.
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Science
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At the same time, as we’ve written previously, the goal is not inexpensive genomics, but personal genomics. What matters is not how much it costs to generate a genome sequence (i.e., raw data), but what you can do with that genome once you have it. Thus, genomics is only personal once both the data and the interpretation are individually tailored.
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Health/Nutrition
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Plastic surgery may look pretty good to us who are unbeautiful. Maybe plastic surgery is a conduit to a pleasant, superficial life. But what lies behind the dark doors of that profession?
There is no undo button on plastic surgery. If you get an operation you might have some scars. If you try to undo the operation you might look the same as you started only with two operations worth of scars.
That’s looking at it from your perspective. Perhaps there’s an undo button from the surgeon’s perspective. There just might be but it’s macabre. I don’t believe I’m the first to think of this. I believe many surgeons have thought of what I’m going to relay. And the human species being what it is, it’s even probable that some surgeon has acted on the idea.
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This is a big win for law enforcement and the prison industry. Look for even more restrictive cold medicine laws in the future.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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‘Much of the delay in concluding asylum and other immigration cases stems from poor quality decision-making when the application is initially considered,’ says Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee whose latest report on the UK Border Agency’s work is published today.
Two cheers for Vaz and the HASC! It might be three if only they were clearer and more forceful in their criticism of an agency whose deficiencies are systemic and rooted in a culture characterised by denial and deceit.
The automatic disbelief that greets asylum seekers from their first moment of arrival, coupled with a shocking disregard for human rights, compounded by the lack of legal services that might check official incompetence have created a Kafkaesque nightmare for vulnerable people who come to these shores seeking sanctuary.
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Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy has rejected reports in the weekend press that she had “led calls” for the DNA testing of the entire 1-million-resident-strong Bristol area.
A reporter on the Sunday Express, where the story originated, also wrote that McCarthy had said that men should be singled out for testing.
Click here to find out more!
This resulted in a barrage of online criticism, with questions raised about the practicality of such a measure, its impact on civil liberties, as well its target. Yesterday, Avon and Somerset police told El Reg that they were not considering such measures at this moment in time.
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UPDATE: I just got an email from some fellow Dems I work with who are wondering if this was satire. I have no idea. If it is, then it shows as big a lapse in judgment as the Palin Facebook page comment that I posted here.
I put this out on Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth a post, too. Please run over and read all of it, but essentially, it’s a remarkable post about the speed with which only certain comments were deleted from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:
A commenter posted the following at 18:12:
“It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”
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Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more — presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.
[...]
Terrorists have been stopped since 2001 and plots prevented, but always by other means. After the Nigerian “underwear bomber” of Christmas Day 2009 was foiled, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed “the system worked” — but the bomber was caught by a passenger, not the feds. Richard Reid, the 2001 shoe bomber, was undone by an alert stewardess who smelled something funny. The 2006 Heathrow Airport plot was uncovered by an intelligence tip. Al Qaeda’s recent attempt to explode cargo planes was caught by a human intelligence source, not an X-ray machine. Yet the TSA responds to these events by placing restrictions on shoes, liquids, and now perhaps printer cartridges.
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It is ironic that a major anti-secrecy reform was thwarted by a single senator’s secret “hold” just before Congress adjourned in December. Perhaps some good will come of this double-edged attack on the public’s right to know — if it sparks reform.
The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act — which would have offered expanded protection for federal employees against retaliation for reporting waste, fraud and abuse — had passed unanimously, first in the Senate and then a week later, on Dec. 22, in the House. The White House had made an unrestrained effort to deliver on this campaign pledge. It was supported by more than 400 organizations of all political stripes, with 80 million members. The National Taxpayers Union announced that support for the act would receive the highest priority on its legislative scorecard. Republicans had just changed the political landscape with election victories based on a mantra of cracking down against deficits, fraud, waste and abuse — the point of whistle-blower laws. Congress was poised to give the taxpayers a major legislative Christmas present.
So what happened?
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After the lame duck session of Congress ended a few days before Christmas, watchdog groups were disappointed to learn that a bill expanding protections for government whistleblowers died in the Senate.
The bill was a product of a 12-year lobbying effort and had bipartisan support. An earlier form of it had passed the Senate unanimously, and it passed in the House after undergoing some changes. When the bill went back to the Senate for a final vote, a lone senator put an anonymous hold on the bill, effectively killing it. Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project explains how the manuever worked…
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Cablegate
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The private sector has now jumped on board with respect to using the term “responsible disclosure”. Media and US officials attacked wikkileaks for the lack of “responsible disclosure” when the site started releasing US diplomatic cables.
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The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes.
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“WikiLeaks: treat incitement seriously or expect more Gabrielle Gifford killing sprees.”
Wikileaks today offered sympathy and condolences to the victims of the Tucson shooting together with best wishes for the recovery of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords, a democrat from Arizona’s 8th district, was the target of a shooting spree at a Jan 8 political event in which six others were killed.
Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, leading the investigation into the Gifford shooting, said that “vitriolic rhetoric” intended to “inflame the public on a daily basis … has [an] impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.” Dupnik also observed that officials and media personalities engaging in violent rhetoric “have to consider that they have some responsibility when incidents like this occur and may occur in the future.”
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Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of providing documents to WikiLeaks, can’t reasonably complain that the military has him in custody. But the conditions under which he is being held at the Marine detention center at Quantico, Va., are so harsh as to suggest he is being punished for conduct of which he hasn’t been convicted.
Manning has been charged with unlawfully downloading classified information and transmitting it “with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States.” He has been incarcerated at Quantico for five months and has yet to receive the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing.
[...]
Some see Manning as a whistle-blower who deserves leniency for exposing official duplicity; others believe that, like anyone who engages in civil disobedience, Manning, if guilty, should accept punishment for his actions. But regardless of one’s view of his alleged conduct, the conditions under which he is being held are indefensible.
-
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Robertson said Assange’s legal team is collecting evidence from further witnesses in Sweden, but the judge said the Swedish authorities are likely to take the view that the extradition warrant will stand nevertheless.
Media interest in Assange remained as journalists from around the world filled 100 seats in the court and an annex connected by video link. High profile supporters of Assange who turned up today included Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan and Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
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An ex-WikiLeaks volunteer has hired American lawyers to oppose the U.S. government’s efforts to obtain the contents of her Twitter account, CNET has learned.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who helped with WikiLeaks’ release of a classified U.S. military video, is being represented by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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The disturbed young woman who registered the julianassangemustdie.com domain name is Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) acording to her Twitter Profile:
Frazzled mom, alternative health doc, conservative libertarian blogger, columnist, podcaster, radio host, iPhone & Mac lover, fantasy reading geek, #TCOT”
As a mother myself, I have difficulty understanding a mind set that would allow a mother to advocate killing anyone. Is this not also a criminal offense?
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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at “real risk” of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.
In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange’s legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition”, “where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is feeling pretty optimistic this afternoon. His Fish Fight campaign has scored a major victory the day before the first TV programme highlighting it is broadcast; Tesco has announced plans to switch to 100% pole and line caught fish for its own brand canned tuna.
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Critics of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas often say that the acronym ICCAT might better stand for the “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.” At its most recent meeting, ICCAT lived up to that derisive nickname by setting 2011 catch levels for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) at basically the same levels as 2010 — 12,900 tons, down from 13,500 – despite the pleas of conservation scientists and the bluefin’s place on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered or critically endangered species (Western stock and Eastern stock).
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From the Sunshine Coast 150km north of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, an extraordinary week of drenching rains refuses to let up. Thunder and lightning buffet me as I write at 4:30pm on Tuesday January 11. It has been like this all day. The unthinkable is happening.
Unprecedented and fatal flash floods at Toowoomba on the top of the mountain range west of Brisbane is like the first domino for what is unfolding. Then came Grantham and the death toll this morning was officially 9 drowned and 66 missing. But “the missing” is hard statistic to deal with since the weather and the water levels prohibited attempts at discovery all day.
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Go further upstream and you will find this frightening sight. Huge areas covering several mountains have been drilled to prospect minerals here. I hope I am wrong but this is most likely the Qulong Copper Deposit, which was reported by the China Geological Survey in 2009 to contain at least 9 million tonnes of copper, plus molybdenum and silver. The Gyama mine, by comparison, has proven reserves of 2.2 million tonnes of copper. According to the International Mining, February 2010 issue (page 40): “In copper, the most famous deposit is Qulong, according to Chen Renyi and Xue Yingxi of the China Geological Survey. They say “With proved reserves of nearly 9 Mt, Qulong will soon be the largest copper deposit in China, and the perspective reserves are over 14-18 Mt.””
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Tim was almost certainly talking about the Oyu Tolgoi mine, or “Turquoise Hill,” a copper and gold ore deposit in Southern Mongolia that’s larger than the state of Florida. Oyu Tolgoi is the world’s largest mining exploration project, a joint venture between a Canadian company named Ivanhoe and the Mongolian government, with significant financing from Chilean mining giant Rio Tinto. Together, they plan to invest $5 billion into operations in the next few years, making Oyu Tolgoi the largest foreign investment in Mongolian history. Over the forecast 65-year lifespan of the mine, its revenues are expected to become a third of Mongolia’s gross domestic product. It’s a big deal, and the discovery of it and a wealth of untapped deposits of coal, gold, silver, tin, uranium, and “rare earth minerals” used in most of today’s advanced electronics has mining-industry shills proclaiming Mongolia the next “Saudi Arabia of insert-name-of-precious-metal-here.”
Despite projections that the mining boom is expected to triple or quadruple the size of Mongolia’s economy in the next five years, times are tough for most Mongolians, and the relationship between the country’s great natural resources and the wealth of its people is still to be determined. The United Nations estimates that 27 percent of Mongolia’s urban population lives below the poverty line. In rural areas, nearly fifty percent of people live in poverty. During the past decade, a series of unusually severe zuds – storms that turn winter snow cover into solid ice, causing the mass starvation of livestock – has had a devastating effect on a country where a quarter of the people make their living (or attempt to make their living) raising livestock.
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Pollution machine Koch Industries is taking to court to defend its reputation as a cesspool of global warming denial. Brad Johnson has the bizarre story.
The right-wing carbon industry giant, owned by Tea Party billionaires David and Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit in Utah to punish anonymous pranksters who claimed on the company’s behalf that it was discontinuing funding to climate denial front groups.
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Finance
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The Great Depression hit Vancouver like a hammer. The city already suffered chronic high unemployment owing to the seasonal nature of BC’s resource-based economy, and even in the supposedly prosperous 1920s, Vancouver was known as a “Mecca for the unemployed.” After the economic collapse, people who couldn’t find work at home drifted to Terminal City in unprecedented numbers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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* This is a fact-checking operation, not an opinion-checking operation. We are interested only in verifiable facts, though on occasion we may examine the roots of political rhetoric.
* · We will focus our attention and resources on the issues that are most important to voters. We cannot nitpick every detail of every speech.
* · We will stick to the facts of the issue under examination and are unmoved by ad hominem attacks. The identity or political ties of the person or organization making a charge is irrelevant: all that matters is whether their facts are accurate or inaccurate.
* · We will adopt a “reasonable man” standard for reaching conclusions. We do not demand 100 percent proof.
* · We will strive to be dispassionate and non-partisan, drawing attention to inaccurate statements on both left and right.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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When Stephen Harper and his Conservatives first took the reins of government in 2006, it was on an “explicit promise to reform the Access to Information Act dramatically”, says the Canadian Press.
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As I wrote to the Hungarian authorities in my letter of 23 December, the recently adopted Hungarian Media Act raises specific concerns regarding its compliance with the EU Audiovisual and Media Services (AVMS) Directive and, more generally, regarding the respect for the fundamental media freedoms such as freedom of expression and media pluralism.
Since then, the Commission has been active. I went to Budapest already last Thursday to discuss with the competent minister. The Commission President raised the Media law with Prime Minister Orban the following day.
A large number of commentators have alleged that the Hungarian Media Law risks jeopardizing fundamental rights in a number of ways:
* by requiring registration of all media, including online media such as forums, blogs and so on;
* by requiring all media to engage in balanced coverage of national and European events;
* by making the Media Authority subject to political control through the appointment process.
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Schöpflin believes there was no real overhaul in Hungarian politics after the fall of Communism in 1989, and said Fidesz had a “once-in-a-generation – perhaps once-in-a-century – opportunity to recast the entire system of political, social and economic governance”.
[...]
He accused the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), in power from 1994-1998 and 2002-2010, of governing as though the one-party rule of the communist days still existed.
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Internet blocking is a form of unacceptable censorship, and I believe it will do far more harm than good. Censorship inevitably does. But it’s a thorny issue, particularly when it comes done to some heinous perpetrators. It may seem like a good idea, but blocking a domain does not pull the plug, it simply turns out the light.
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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed emergency legislation Tuesday that bars protests within 300 feet of a funeral and within an hour from its beginning or end.
Earlier in the day, the state legislature passed the measure, which targets a Kansas church whose members announced they plan to picket the funerals of the victims of Saturday’s shootings in Tucson.
“Such despicable acts of emotional terrorism will not be tolerated in the State of Arizona,” Brewer said in a statement announcing she had signed the bill. “This legislation will assure that the victims of Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson will be laid to rest in peace with the full dignity and respect that they deserve.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus, calls overage fees an “economic disincentive for internet use” since the charges levied by Bell Canada are “many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.”
Last May, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave Bell Canada, Canada’s largest telephone and telecommunications company, the green light to proceed with the “economic Internet traffic management practice (ITMP),” i.e. consumption-based billing, and there’s a growing consensus that the plan has nothing to do with recovering costs from excessive usage, and rather everything to do with disincentivizing Internet usage.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Record labels finally will have to face an antitrust lawsuit that dates back to the early days of digital music, thanks to a Supreme Court order today. The high court declined to hear an appeal from the four major recorded music labels, asking the high court to throw out a lawsuit that claims the labels broke antitrust laws when they set a “wholesale price floor” of about 70 cents per track for two digital music stores that they created almost a decade ago, Pressplay and MusicNet.
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RapidShare, the file-hosting giant, recently hired a Washington lobbying firm to combat legislative attempts to place penalties on companies that don’t adequately protect domestic copyright. This is its first attempt at adding U.S. legislative muscle to its ongoing copyright fights – which most recently included Atari’s failed bid to combat RapidShare in a German court.
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The dispute concerns something called “pending lists” maintained privately by the major labels. Since 1988, it has become increasingly common for the labels to simply issue CDs (often compilation albums) without actually locking down the copyright permission and pay arrangements with the music’s creators. Instead, the music is offered for sale, the labels collect the money, and they put the songwriters on the “pending list” to clear up the details later.
But in many cases, there was no “later.” The pending lists have climbed to around CAN$50 million in money that was due to artists but never paid out, something that the musicians describe as a “systematic ‘exploit now, pay later, if at all’ approach.”
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Those interested might also be interested these blogs about studies on online copyright enforcement vs data protection/privacy in UK, Netherlands and Poland and in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden.
Bill O’Reilly Enraged Over Giffords & Right Wing Rhetoric Ties
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
01.11.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We’ve talked about the concept of national Linux distributions before, and the Russians are a nation that has engaged in previous attempts to standardize on Linux. Recently, Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, made an announcement of a renewed effort towards open source adoption on a massive, despite the previous failures.
Armchair pundits have had to make do with translated versions of the report and of the announcement, but what seems clear is that under the new plan Russian institutions will undergo a transition to open source software between 2011 and 2015.
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A few days ago the Russian government announced that they were going to transition the government to using Free Software by 2015, starting as early as mid-2011.
In reality, this transition started much earlier. It was in 1997 that I first went to Moscow and attended a Unix Expo, helping to staff the Digital Equipment Corporation booth and giving two talks, one on Digital Unix and one on Alpha Linux. There amidst two-story trade show exhibits were little stands selling distributions of Slackware, Yggdrasil and even “white box” Linux workstations. Copies of the Linux Journal adorned shelves in the exhibit hall.
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Linux.conf.au 2011, set for 24 January through to 29 January, is to be held at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) situated on the banks of the Brisbane River.
Shaun Nykvist, director of Linux.conf.au, told ZDNet Australia today that the buildings intended for use at the conference are well above the level of the Brisbane River.
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Desktop
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We’ve reached a point where the expectations — and the stakes — are higher now than they’ve ever been. And bad interfaces, are, well, bad. It’s often unpleasant to watch as someone makes the sausage, but in this case it can go a ways toward explaining how this technology is developing.
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Server
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The London Stock Exchange’s delayed Linux-based trading system has finally been given a go-live date of 14 February, for the exchange’s main cash markets.
The LSE also confirmed speculation that it had to work on greatly increasing the Millennium Exchange system’s capacity in order to cope with high volume trading.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation has announced that GoAhead Software has become its newest member. Based in Bellevue, Washington, GoAhead Software is a global commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions specialist targeting network equipment manufacturers. Discussing the announcement, GoAhead Sales and Marketing Senior VP Bill Yaman said, “Linux has become the primary operating system in the telecommunications market. An increasing number of our customers use it in their network equipment and systems.”
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David Airlie has just called upon Linus to pull in his DRM tree for the Linux 2.6.38 kernel. With this being the first 2.6.38 DRM pull request and with the merge window still open, this code brings in a fair amount of exciting work.
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Graphics Stack
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With our big AMD Linux GPU / driver comparison we found its open-source Gallium3D driver to be noticeably faster than the classic Mesa DRI driver across an array of Radeon hardware from multiple generations. However, the official Catalyst driver was multiple times faster (roughly 5.18x faster) than the Gallium3D driver, not to mention its lack of proper support for OpenGL 3/4, VA-API/VDPAU/XvBA video playback, and many other features only found within the proprietary Catalyst driver. Now though it is time to see how the Gallium3D Nouveau performance compares to that of NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux driver across different GeForce graphics cards.
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We’ve been getting some requests recently about what is the best make of graphics card to buy for use with Ubuntu, and although we aren’t a benchmarking site, and so can’t recommend specific models, what we can do is give people a brief overview of the current state of graphics drivers (both open and closed) from the different manufacturers.
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Applications
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Sandbox started as a quick hack I wrote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL back in October.
Since then it evolved quite a bit, getting a decent user interface and even a nautilus plugin.
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Diodon is a lightweight clipboard manager for Linux written in Vala which “aims to be the best integrated clipboard manager for the Gnome/GTK+ desktop”. It doesn’t have as many features as Glippy, Pastie and so on but it’s a lot lighter and only uses around 2.7 mb of RAM on my system.
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The Parcellite (one of the best Linux clipboard managers) development stopped a while back and for a year there were no new versions. But Vladi pointed out in a comment that a new developer took over the project back in December and a new version has already been released: 0.9.3.
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Software installation in Linux can confuse new users, while it pleases and irritates more experienced campaigners in equal measure.
Here are 20 things we’d change about it.
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Stay up-to-date with the latest news from your favourite feeds directly on your desktop with News – an Open Source RSS ticker for Linux.
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Proprietary
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It is a sincere hope that GIMP finds itself in the near future. Current and, more importantly, future Libre artists rely on it extensively.
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Now here are my two cents: last summer I tried for some months the development branch and this is what I have to say, the biggest and most anticipated feature, the single window mode is expected as the holy grail by those wanting a Photoshop clone on Linux, but are simple users, with no interest in contributing back (many times, they are not even users, making it as an excuse to stay with Photoshop). Trying it, I found it cute (it has an “Inkscape feeling”, good for consistency) but not something I want to use, it wastes screen estate and makes harder to work with multiple documents at the same time. This coupled with a number of smaller annoyances made me return to the 2.6 branch with the upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14 and want to look again at it only after the release.
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Recently something came up with one of the other sites I write for. I proposed an article about the Hamachi VPN client which had an outstanding version for Linux. The setup was incredibly simple, the software ran well, it was free, and it could save many a admin a lot of headaches in the setup of VPN servers. Problem was, the software was proprietary. Although there was no cost attached to the software, it wasn’t possible to download the source and do with it what you will.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Commercial Wine software ‘Cedega’ is to “cease operation” at the end of February, parent company TransGaming Inc. have today announced.
The proprietary fork of WINE, which proved popular with Linux users thanks to its enhanced support for Windows gaming titles, will instead live on as a free service under the new name of ‘GameTree Linux’.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Last week KDE 4.5.4 was released for Windows. It was a late Christmas present from the KDE on Windows team and we were immediately interested in learning more about the project. In the first interview of the “Platforms” series, Pau Garcia i Quiles talks with Patrick Spendrin, the current release manager of KDE on Windows and asks, well, everything.
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GNOME Desktop
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So far, voice recording in GNOME has been an obscure feature because the sound recorder app is not easily accessible and it doesn’t provide a convenient way to organize and access your voice memos. The Board makes it extremely simple to record voice memos. No need to care about saving files or anything. You can easily label your tapes for later reference. Just add a sound element and start recording!
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I’ve spent several days playing with LucidWorks Enterprise and I have to say I am impressed with what I have seen thus far. The system requirements are low, the system is flexible and fast and there are lots of example scripts for developers who wish to expand on the functionality. The documentation is well put together, the admin GUI is easy to use and the end-user interface is familiar. Aside from stepping out of the GUI to change the admin password, I found the whole experience to be smooth and friendly. LWE is built from open source components and, in my opinion, offers an excellent solution for organizations who need to keep track of large numbers of documents in a wide range of formats. If you have any interest in search technology, I recommend you give it a try.
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I’m glad to see their is interest in the project and I’m constantly working with it and testing it to make sure things are working. I see I need to switch slocate out for mlocate since slocate went bye bye from portage. I suspect it will from Sabayon soon also. The KDE version is something I need to get back to. I was able to create and test a KDE version, but there are issues with KDE and the menus getting updated. Some of the programs were missing from the menu. Of course they worked from konsole, but that’s kinda lame. I need to try it again with the latest KDE version and see if it is better. The problem is, I am swamped. Life is very stressful for me at the moment as I try to get to the surface for a fresh breath of air. My full time job is in the toilet and I need to make the right decision as what to do with that. I just wish things didn’t have to revolve around the mighty dollar, which isn’t even mighty at all in reality.
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Reviews
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To conclude, I wish I could suggest Arch Linux to Linux newcomers instead of these ‘buntu, mint stuff. It’s a quite easy to learn and use. You just should not be afraid to use command line. The process of installing and configuring all parts of your operating system might be a bit time-consuming yet it’s a very rewarding and valuable experience. Just give it a go!
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I also want to add that Puppy 5.1.1 and 5.2 uses some of Ubuntu’s binaries. This in some way makes it easier and more compatible to make .pet packages out of Ubuntu’s packages (.deb). If I have this wrong please correct me!
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Red Hat Family
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Gov. Bev Perdue is expected to announce Monday that Red Hat will keep its corporate headquarters in the Research Triangle area and add jobs, sources tell WRAL and WRAL.com.
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As 2011 begins, Red Hat Inc. is mapping out details for how its acquisition of Makara will fuel the next generation of open source options for cloud computing. Makera, a provider of deployment and management solutions for cloud-based apps, will simplify app deployment and management, according to Red Hat execs.
Makara’s technologies will accelerate the build-out of Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio. Makara provides tools to deploy, manage, monitor and scale applications on both private or public clouds. Red Hat will integrate Makara’s tools and Cloud Application Platform with JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
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Marten Mickos – the former MySQL boss who now runs build-your-own-cloud startup Eucalyptus Systems – has hitched his new wagon to Red Hat. In more ways than one.
Last month, Mickos and company announced a pact with Red Hat that will see Eucalyptus embrace the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) hypervisor as well as the Red Hat’s deltacloud project, an open source effort to provide a common API for all “infrastructure clouds”. Eucalyptus Systems is the commercial outfit that sprung up around the open source Eucalyptus platform, a means of building infrastructure clouds behind the corporate firewall.
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Red Hat has decided to keep its trademark fedora hanging in North Carolina.
The Linux software developer announced Monday it would keep its corporate headquarters in Wake County and create 540 new jobs over the next decade as it expands current operations and targets new technology.
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Fedora
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I finally sat down on the weekend to try and get some OS other than Android running on the Toshiba AC100 I bought off ebay on a whim. The AC100 doesn’t look that different to your average 10.1 inch netbook except its extremely thin and and light and on the inside it has a Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC based on the dual core ARM Cortex A9. My initial plan was to get Ubuntu running on due to the instructions about doing that to be found on the net. After doing some reading and while part way through the process I decided that I would try Paul Whalen’s Fedora 13 ARM rootfs instead as the process of creating a linux rootfs is similar across all distributions! There’s still quite a way to go.
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You might be wondering why I chose to derive Kororaa from Fedora.
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Debian Family
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All during this SimplyMEPIS 11 development cycle boot problems have stopped many users from testing. Unfortunately, and probably the root of problem, is that this occurs for only some of the users with little hardware in common. To compound the issue, the boot issues haven’t been caused by the same reason to the same people each release either. With so much variation, it can be very difficult to nail down corrections.
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Scott James Remnant, the Ubuntu Developer Manager is quitting Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu to join Google. Remnant is known for authoring the new Upstart initialization system and the popular Planet weblog aggregation system. In addition to his work on Ubuntu, Scott served as a long-time Debian developer where he maintained libtool, the dpkg package management system, and several other important packages. Scott resigned from Debian in 2006.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I started working on a chapter for the Ubuntu Developers’ Manual. The chapter will be on how to use media in your apps. That chapter will cover:
* Playing a system sound
* Showing an picture
* Playing a sound file
* Playing a video
* Playing from a web cam
* Composing media
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There’s no doubt at this point that the Nexus S from Samsung, which out of the box runs Android’s latest version of Android (2.3), is a versatile device. We’ve already seen the handset boot up MeeGo, and now the developer is at it again. This time, though, we’ve got Ubuntu loading up on the device. The XDA developer forum member, stroughtonsmith — or Steven Troughton-Smith– has gone through the same method of bringing MeeGo to the device, but focusing his attention on Ubuntu this time around.
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Flavours and Variants
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Screencast tutorial style examination Edubuntu Linux 32Bit 10.04 DVD Lucid Lynx is an operating system of education that is part of the official Ubuntu Linux derivative. It is Ubuntu, the most popular system Debian Linux-based operating an excellent choice for computing needs of children, students, parents, teachers, and schools. I show you all the features of this software free of awesome computing. original video production by www.OSGUI.com Tech Show.
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I must admit that it has been just about 12 months since I had last tested a Linux distribution. During my past experiences, I normally uninstalled whatever distribution I tried, because I either had issues getting a wireless connection or was unable to print to my HP laser Jet via a print server. Either of these is a deal breaker for me. I also spent way too much time trying to configure either the wireless connection or printer and basically just gave up. I won’t bore you with the installation details, since you have one of three choices. You can install as a standalone OS, dual-boot [this was what I opted to do} , or run as a Live CD.
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Additionally, “[Tamir Berliner] said the company was making the source code for the PrimeSensor available to give developers the freedom to play around with it. “It will all be open source so you can take it and port it to any device,” he said.
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The promise of a hardware companion for the popular open source media centre Boxee has interested us since its original announcement. Let’s see how the final product stacks up against expectations…
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Pros, this is a heads up. If you’re into the whole installing of one OS on a competing brand’s hardware, this news is for you. It seems that some folks including XDA Developers Forum member stroughtonsmith (aka our friend Steven Troughton-Smith,) and a crack team of other smarties have booted MeeGo unto their Nexus S phones from a rootfs image on their internal memory.
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Android
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Motorola has managed to come up with a very good concept. Its essentially a very powerful phone, which can be converted into a PC or a netbook. This will provide a serious competition to the iPhone4 and also provide a single device which can double up as a PC or a netbook.
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Rejoice newer myTouch users! Months after original myTouch owners had their Froyo delivered, T-Mobile has just announced that the myTouch 1.2 (3.5mm headphone jack version) and the myTouch Fender LE are the next in line for the tasty treat. MyTouch Slide users still have to wait a little bit longer, though, due to two specific issues.
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Android is a long way from being overrun with security threats but that hasn’t stopped Trend Micro getting its retaliation in early with a new security app for the platform.
Trend’s Mobile Security for Android features a number of layers of security, mobile users might or might not deem necessary for the modest $3.99 (£2.50) fee.
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Last summer, Hulu announced the “Plus” subscription service bringing premium content to mobile devices such as the iPhone 4 and iPad. Unfortunately, the millions of Android users, which just passed the total number of iPhone U.S. subscribers according to comScore, were left out in the cold. At the Samsung CES 2011 Press Conference, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar brought some good news announcing that Hulu Plus was heading to Android phones.
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Tablets
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The Xoom is listed as “due in soon,” with the obvious caveat that we don’t know what Handtec’s concept of soon is. As previously reported the information that we received from Motorola indicated a February launch with a tentative circle around Valentine’s Day. Assuming that launch date holds we’ll probably be seeing more of the usual suspects putting up pre-order pages soon enough so unless you are particularly anxious to be first in line or have a special place in your heart for Handtec you should be safe to wait.
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There seems to be no stopping the current avalanche of Android tablets — just look through the CES announcements for a not-so-small sampling — and that’s undoubtedly a good thing for Linux.
A shadow was recently cast upon that otherwise sunny landscape, however, in the form of a report examining said tablets’ GPL compliance.
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I think there are two major classes of threat to freedom: one that has been present for many years now, and the other that is relatively new.
The first is from intellectual monopolies – copyright and patents – or rather, attempts to preserve their power in a world of digital abundance. That’s not possible, of course, which is why we have Draconian legislation like the DMCA, and the increasingly-insane fines awarded against people for sharing copyright material online.
[...]
The other threat has been accelerated by Wikileaks, but was not caused by it: the introduction of online censorship by nations that have traditionally prided themselves on their support for free speech. In some ways this is even more dangerous than ACTA, since the latter is bound to fail. However, governments are very adept at dressing up repressive measures as “necessary” to protect someone from something – us from “terror”, or children from paedophiles etc.
But of course the powers that they arrogate to themselves never stop there: they are gradually used and abused for a far wider range of cases. Unless people fight back now against these moves – which, incidentally, mean that the West loses what little moral leverage it has when criticising countries like China – I think that things could get very bad here.
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Matt Asay’s recent article in The Register If you open source an old market, are you doomed to fail? highlights the need for open source specialist vendors to innovate, as well as commoditize.
This is an issue that has been discussed regularly by CAOS practice – most recently in our Control and Community report into open source software-related business strategies.
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The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?
Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?
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Most of the programming and scripting languages used on the Web, like PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, are open source projects.
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In this economy, employees who can save their employers money are highly regarded and will potentially be in line for advancement. Using open source technology is one great way to help your company cut down on costs across the board.
In this article, I’ll share twenty great open source applications that can help save your employer some money.
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The most receptive audience, I usually find, are activists. The idea that you should take control of your computing seems a natural extension of beliefs to people who already believe that you should take control of your government by getting involved, or of your environment by recycling and encouraging green technology solutions.
Yet, even here, difficulties arise. For the most part, activists are not technically oriented, and are as accepting of proprietary lock-in as anyone else. The idea that they should apply the beliefs that they operate by in the rest of their lives to their computing is new to most of them. Here and there, you may find a Green Party that has a pro-FOSS policy, or a Pirate Party whose ideas may echo those found in FOSS, but such groups are rarely in any position to promote — let alone enforce — FOSS ideas.
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Open source software offers a great many potential security benefits. Few, if any, of them offer any guarantees, but the potential is often realized as a strong probability of greater security. The power of dilettantism, also known as the principle of “many eyes”, is of particular interest when considering the complexity of your software design.
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When online investigative journal ProPublica wanted to figure out just how much doctors are being paid by pharmaceutical companies to promote their drugs, reporters Dan Nguyen, Charles Ornstein, and Tracy Weber naturally turned to the internet for research. They quickly realized that, though the data exists on the Web, fashioning it into a comprehensive and useable format was nothing short of headache-inducing. Rather than give up, the journalists created their own data-scraping software using open source tools.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Developer Tools is the area of the site that deals with submission and management of hosted add-ons, and is among the most complicated parts of AMO. Our rewrite brings these tools into our new codebase, which should result in faster performance and better cache invalidation, a common annoyance over the years.
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In line with the predictions we had here before, IE has not only fallen below 50% market share for the first time ever, it has now become the second most popular browser in Europe. Firefox has taken the lead and is now the most popular browser in the whole of Europe. Is that what you call as the great circle of life?
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One of the best options on today’s Internet to listen to a song, any song for that matter, is to search for that song on Youtube. Chance is there is at least one video with that song on the video portal. Some web users use Youtube more or less exclusively to listen to music.
The Firefox add-on Youtube Music Player tries to make this more comfortable to those users by offering them comfortable features such as playlists and an external player.
The extension supports multiple playlists which can be played, created and edited directly in the browser. Several controls are added to the browser which some users may not like.
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SaaS
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Whereas Rackspace offers public compute and storage services, NASA is building its own private cloud, known as Nebula. This was originally built atop Eucalyptus, another open-source platform. But according to NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp, Eucalyptus didn’t scale as well as NASA hoped, and it wasn’t as open as the agency would have liked.
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Databases
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Continuent is hiring. The business is growing, the opportunities are piling up nicely, and we need to beef up the team with the addition of some new professionals.
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Oracle
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Companies usually wind down the week before Christmas, so you don’t usually see them make a lot of strategic moves or announcements. And so it was with some marked astonishment that I received an anonymous tip that Oracle ceased development of Lustre right before the holidays. Not out of a job quite yet, Lustre engineers have reportedly been encouraged to apply for other positions within the company.
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CMS
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The House worked with a number of Drupal experts for this project, including Acquia, Phase2 Technology and Ingalls Information Security. The team developed, validated, and delivered the Drupal 7 platform that will be used by both individual House Member sites and Committee sites. Here are some examples of recently deployed sites (a complete list can be found at http://house.gov/house/news.shtml): http://sewell.house.gov, http://hanabusa.house.gov/, http://womack.house.gov/.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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So, the question is: Are commercial open-source software and Free and Open Source Software at odds with each other, or is the relationship more symbiotic?
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BSD
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The RC1 release brings with a number of enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes in response to previous 8.2 testing snapshots. Here are the changelog as shown in the website:
* Updated to FreeBSD 8.2-RC1
* Fixed issue detecting the proper video card driver
* Fixed some crashes when adding new users / groups
* Added /sbin/nologin as a shell choice in the user manager
* Let created users have a homedir of /nonexistant via the GUI
* Fix customizing desktop languages when using a () in the description
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Project Releases
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This new version of Joomla, version 1.6, has been in development for about three years, said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit organization providing legal and financial support to the Joomla project. The project has about 80 volunteer programmers, including 10 who manage the code-base.
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The XBMC project released version 10.0 of its integrated media center software just before the holidays, and if you haven’t test-driven it in a while, do yourself a favor and grab the new build now.
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Licensing
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Over the past 48 hours it seems the Great Persian Firewall is updating to attempt to block a number of circumvention tools, including Tor. Iranians and their diaspora have been reporting to us that Tor, Hot Spot Shield, UltraSurf, and Freegate are all experiencing connectivity problems from inside Iran to the outside world.
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Openness/Sharing
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Canadian documentary filmmaker Todd Harris gets up close and personal with the communities he films. He is especially attracted to stories that involve an underdog fighting for justice against government and corporate interests, where he can cover a side of the conflict that is usually untouched by mainstream media. Until a few years ago, he restricted himself to issues that were particular to Canada. Now he plans to extend his research into the international realm.
I first noticed Todd two years ago at the infamous Dump Site 41 protest in the Georgian Bay area of Ontario, Canada, as he casually surfed the crowd, sometimes talking, sometimes filming. But it wasn’t until his film aired at Georgian College one blustery night in December 2010 that I realized who he was.
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has launched an Open Internet apps challenge, inviting the public to produce research and create apps that empower consumers to monitor and protect Internet openness.
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Open Data
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For schmoozing between 2004 and 2006, “departments should cite the cost threshold” (an exemption from disclosure if it would take more than 3.5 days to find the information). Since departments are required by the civil service code to keep registers of hospitality and the Cabinet Office could not foresee departments’ time costs, this was always a deceitful and arguably illegal ploy.
It duly hit a snag when an official in the Department for Work and Pensions reported an official in his bosses’ private office having “collected this [information] from hospitality logs where they exist without exceeding the disspropriate (sic) cost limit. I therefore cannot see how we can cite this exemption,” even though, said the official, “I am sure that [redacted name] would not want to break ranks.” All other departments simply said what the Cabinet Office had told them to, almost certainly untruthfully.
There then seem to have been attempts to persuade officials in the DWP to relent and tell a porkie, a frustrated internal Cabinet Office email reporting the DWP official as “adamant that he won’t say disproportionate cost as he’s looked into it”. A Yes Minister-style compromise was eventually agreed: the response to Private Eye would simply ignore the excuse – but not provide the information anyway.
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The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project’s next State Of The Map conference will take place from 9 to 11 September 2011, in Denver, Colorado. Founded in August of 2004 by Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra.
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Programming
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Of the languages listed in the TIOBE index, Python was the fastest growing programming language of 2010. The scripting language was therefore crowned language of the year in the January edition of the index of popular programming languages. Objective-C, used to develop iPhone and iPad apps, had long been the favourite to take the award, but its popularity appears to have dwindled a little in recent months. Its growth rate of 1.6% was only enough for the runner-up spot behind Python (+1.81%).
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As more hospitals and clinics plug patient monitoring equipment and other devices into traditional data networks, the closer the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) comes to regulating the networks as medical devices.
Currently, most hospitals and clinics manage medical devices on discrete networks to better ensure the safety and security of those systems. But there is a trend toward consolidation, particularly onto wireless networks, for easier management.
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Manonamission.blogspot.com is a great collection of corporate mission statements. I recently used its search function to find examples of companies that prominently and publicly state something close to “people are our most important asset.” Here’s a partial list: Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Land O’ Lakes, Danaher, Archer Daniels Midland, Valero, Performance Food Group, Norfolk Southern, and Border’s Group. And here’s a group of companies that similarly value “empowerment:” Caremark, Sara Lee, Heinz, Dow Chemical, GE, and Alcoa.
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Why does a comfortably middle-class youth in Australia, such as myself, profess his political views to be socialist in orientation? Surely, many would think, for what reason would I advocate for such a radical position? It’s simple, really. Socialism is a political representation of my value system as it currently exists.
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Most of our thinking about how to influence human behavior — how to get people to pay taxes, to obey laws, to not steal from each other — rests on the model of homo economicus.
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Children’s clothing store Orchestra has apologized to a 36-year-old mother who was recently told to stop breastfeeding her five-month-old daughter at its Montreal location.
In a letter dated Jan. 7, the president of the company’s Canadian arm, Jean-Claude Yana, apologizes for the actions of a “new” employee who told Shannon Smith and another nursing mother, “you can’t breastfeed in the store.” After protesting, Ms. Smith said she left feeling upset and uncomfortable.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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If it turns out that a poisonous variant of free speech is partially to blame for the shootings in Tucson, we will most certainly be struck by the fact that Gabrielle Giffords was seen last week in Congress, reading part of the Constitution that allows an American citizen to say just about anything.
But as Rep. Giffords herself also pointed out, in March when she was a target because of her vote on health care reform, free speech does have a cost.
“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” said Giffords. “Crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences.”
Giffords had already felt a blunt edge of opponents’ rage — a window in her Tucson office was shattered after she voted to expand health care for other Americans.
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The shootings over the weekend of a US congresswoman and 19 others in Arizona prompts German commentators to urge the Americans to tone down the rhetoric and take a step back. Some say Europeans, too, could learn a lesson from the violence in Tucson.
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In a story covered very well in a witty post by our friends over at TechEye, it has emerged that the Home Office hid the parlous state of its Identity Card Scheme from the public – it withheld publication of a report by the project’s oversight board in the run up to the 2010 general election (when, you’ll remember, some sort of card remained Labour policy).
Disgracefully, the Home Office only slipped out the final report of the Independent Scheme Advisory Panel (ISAP) this week, more than a year after it was written, after the scheme had finally bitten the dust under the Coalition.
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Police should look beyond the available intelligence and take a broader view of potential threats, a report into an attack on a car carrying the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall has said.
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When the Messiah comes, the first sign will be a gag order. A coded report on a high-profile news website will be made to disappear. It will reappear on a blog from Seattle, and then in The Guardian.
The government will put off responding, eventually issuing a statement ascribed to sources in Jerusalem and reading “We have no knowledge of this.” The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit, quoting an unnamed senior military official, states that there is no evidence that a Messiah of any kind has come. It will later soften the denial, saying it is checking the report and directing reporters to the Defense Ministry, which turfs them to the Prime Minister’s Office, which cannot be reached for comment.
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Cablegate
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This has never happened before, never been heard before and never been told before. People across the oceans are complaining that they are consistently having a common dream. In their dreams they see an around 90 year’s old person who identifies himself as Mahatma Gandhi and ask the people to convey his message to President Barack Obama. He says that Barack Obama who calls himself a follower of Mahatma Gandhi needs to be told that his actions against whistleblowers specially in the case of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Wikileaks and participation in wars across the globe do not go along with the basic philosophy of truth, non-violence and freedom for which Mahatma Gandhi sacrificed his live. Mahatma also briefs people a message that he wants to be delivered to the President. When people argue how they would contact the President, he replies as “just pass the message, just pass the torch to the next deserving person and the torch would definitely reach where darkness exists”. Mahatma also said that he wanted the message to be delivered before January 30th (i.e. his death anniversary) People say they are disturbed by this consistent dream they are having and have decided to come together to serve this common cause. We have decided to pass the torch as fast as we can so that it reaches the destination as soon as possible. Mahatma also asked us to be non violent, democratic and peaceful in our endeavor.
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I have no doubt at all, if I put out the same documents now, they would call me a terrorist, because that’s the bad thing now.
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Assange said he might base himself in Switzerland or Australia, and that WikiLeaks has been losing more than 600,000 Swiss francs ($622,000) a week since releasing a collection of diplomatic cables, the newspaper said. He also said he hasn’t made a request for political asylum in Switzerland, and declined to say if he would, according to the Tribune.
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Can the leak phenonomen sustain the continued assault by the corporate sector to prevail in the first ever cyber-war?
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Guardian Books today confirmed the publication next month of WIKILEAKS: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy.
With rights having already been sold in eight territories*, WIKILEAKS: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy, is the first in-depth account of the WikiLeaks phenomenon. From the website’s launch in 2006, to the latest developments in this epoch-defining drama, it exposes the real story behind the headlines, a compelling and revelatory account that brings the reader right up to the present time.
The authors, top Guardian journalists led by David Leigh, Investigations Editor, and Luke Harding, Moscow correspondent, have been at the heart of the Guardian’s coverage of the biggest leak of secret information in history. Working alongside the Guardian’s New York correspondent, Ed Pilkington, they have had unprecedented access to all the major players, from diplomats and politicians to the former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Julian Assange himself.
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Elmer’s release of files from the Swiss-based bank Julius Baer’s offshore operations in the Cayman Islands prompted a U.S. judge to temporarily shut down WikiLeaks in 2008. The order was lifted following complaints from free speech groups and media organizations.
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Amid the sound and fury of the reaction to WikiLeaks, something is missing. Whether hostile or supportive, politicians and commentators on all sides have managed to miss the real point. The contents of the leaked cables should demand a deep reflection on our foreign policy. That this has not happened tells a sorry story about our very democracy.
On the right, and indeed center, the reaction has been hysteria. Politicians have lined up to decry the threat to US national security and even American lives, without offering a shred of evidence to confirm this claim.
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Twitter introduced a new feature last month without telling anyone about it, and the rest of the tech world should take note and come up with their own version of it.
Twitter beta-tested a spine.
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[UPDATE 2011-01-11 11:44 CET: Seems the domain julianassangemustdie.com has been deleted by its owner. See Godaddy WHOIS entry]
[UPDATE 2011-01-11 11:33 CET: Seems killjulianassange is down ATM. Could be simple change though.]
[UPDATE: I send an updated mail with the doamin julianassangemustdie.com added and clarified some aspects. New version reproduced here, old version archived in this same post.
I have just sent this mail to abuse@godaddy.com and urge you to do the same…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Greenpeace and a broad swath of civil society groups in Australia and Europe have successfully prevented solvents and explosives maker Orica from sailing tonnes of extremely harmful chemical waste from Australia to Denmark for incineration. In response to massive public pressure, the Danish Government announced on December 23, 2010 that they wouldn’t accept the shipment after all – just 24 hours before it was due to be loaded with the toxic waste in Australia.
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More sarcasm came over coffee in the form of a photograph splashed over many a frontpage the world over: the giant bluefin on a cart in Tokyo. The headlines said it was such a remarkable feat, a business coup at almost US$400,000 for a 342kg endangered bluefin tuna.
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Peak Coal. Some folks have begun eagerly researching this topic and writing about its timing, now that talk of Peak Oil is all around. The different outlooks on how and when the peak will occur are disparate, ranging from next year to a time many decades in the future. This post tries to view this debate in a different, wider perspective, and deals with the following issues:
* Applying the Hubbert Method to Coal;
* Looking at Ultimate Reserves for Coal;
* Coal and its place in the Olduvai picture;
* Implications for stakeholders;
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Thank you for visiting www.againstinternetsurveillance.org. I created this website because I value my own privacy and believe that every internet user in the world is entitled to their own privacy also. I am an American citizen and it is my opinion that the overwhelming majority of internet users are having their civil rights violated by private companies every day. On this website I have information that will A) broaden knowledge of internet surveillance that takes place each and every day, right under your noses, and B) help you, the internet user and citizen, browse the internet safely and effectively. Honestly, it really does not take a lot to accomplish both of these things and it is my hope that with this website I can spread the word and create a world of more informed citizens who are able to browse the internet safely and effectively.
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Finance
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Obama is replacing his chief economic adviser – Larry Summers – with Gene Sperling.
Sperling is currently a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and is now being appointed as Obama’s chief economic adviser. He’s been there before: Sperling will hold the exact same post he held under Bill Clinton – National Economic Adviser to Clinton and director of the National Economic Council.
In that post, Sperling was principal negotiator with Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in finalizing the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act Financial Modernization Bill which repealed Glass-Steagal.
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Former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins says Goldman’s $500 million Facebook deal is every bit as risky for investors as the subprime debt deals that blew up the economy.
Facebook and Goldman Sachs unleashed a tech investing mania this week compared far and wide with the euphoric 1990s dot-com run-up. By arranging a $500 million private investment, at a staggering $50 billion valuation, Goldman at once delayed a Facebook public offering (now expected in 2012), prompted a likely LinkedIn IPO, and thrilled its clients, who clamored for a piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth.
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After a year of hard work, South Africa has formally joined with the four major emerging powers that form the BRIC cooperation mechanism. South African media said it is an important milestone, signifying South Africa is becoming a major emerging economy in the world.
The prime motivation for South Africa’s entry into BRIC — short for Brazil, Russia, India and China — is to create conditions for the country’s economic development. Before the outbreak of the international financial crisis, South Africa had experienced the fastest economic growth since 1994, with the economy growing at a rate of more than 5 percent for three consecutive years. But the financial crisis drastically slowed economic growth and pushed unemployment higher.
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Today’s Telegraph reports that David Cameron hopes relaxed employment laws will help to boost the private sector and encourage firms to take on thousands of new workers.
The theory appears to be that if it’s easier to sack and mistreat workers then employers will be more likely to create jobs.
But, as last year’s comprehensive TUC research (undertaken by Landman Economics) showed, this assumption is false.
Macro and micro evidence from across the globe shows that there is no significant relationship between employment levels and employment protection legislation and that countries with very different levels of regulation have equal levels of success in generating employment.
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Germany and France want to push Portugal to seek a bailout from the EU’s rescue fund in order to stop the debt crisis from spreading to countries like Spain and Belgium, according to reports from SPIEGEL and Reuters. Portugal on Sunday denied any such pressure, but the euro is falling on fears of contagion.
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Now those lobbyists are pushing hard to undo their mistake — and progressives, led by AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka, are pushing back.
The winner won’t be clear until later this year when the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal watchdog agency over Wall Street, releases the final regulations that will enforce the Dodd-Frank legislation.
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Goldman Sachs Subprime Mortgage Meltdown and Financial Crisis The investigation, being conducted with the Securities and Exchange Commission, comes as Wall Street and major banks around the world are attracting scrutiny from regulators who are looking at transactions that occurred in the run-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown and financial crisis. The source said the investigation includes mortgage-bond deals, that it is in an early stage, and that it might not necessarily lead to criminal charges against all of the firms.
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The last few months I’ve been busy trying to ignore the minutia of the daily media and look at the big picture. I was listening to this interview with 4 conservatives talking about how the economy works and questioning whether these politicians and policy makers are actually subversives (!).
Imagine my surprise when our good friends Goldman Sachs is mentioned by Mike Norman who says that Goldman understands that “government deficits add to savings”(around 24 minutes into the interview).
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Goldman Sachs, after a nine-month review of its business practices, has concluded its operations need only a fine-tuning, not a complete overhaul.
The Wall Street investment bank, which has been criticized for putting its own interests ahead of those of clients, plans to detail new rules on disclosure and financial reporting on Tuesday, as suggested by the study. The rules are aimed at bolstering internal controls, improving transparency and burnishing its reputation.
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BANK investors cheered the announcement last week that Bank of America would pay $2.6 billion to buy back mortgages it had improperly sold during the housing bubble to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beleaguered mortgage finance giants. It seemed a sweet deal for the bank, whose Countrywide Home Loans unit had peddled tens of billions of dollars in risky loans to the taxpayer-owned companies.
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The military authorization law signed by President Obama on Friday contains a little-noticed “Buy American” provision for the Defense Department purchases of solar panels — a provision that is likely to dismay Chinese officials as President Hu Jintao prepares to visit the United States next week.
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A coalition of seven major public pension systems called on the boards of directors of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), Citigroup (NYSE: C), JP Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) to immediately undertake independent examinations of the banks’ mortgage and foreclosure practices.
Led by New York City Comptroller John C. Liu on behalf of the five NYC Pension Funds, the coalition also includes the Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, the Illinois State Board of Investment, the Illinois State Universities Retirement System, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the North Carolina Retirement Systems, and the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund.
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Laverl “Nick” Nicholson used to look out of his kitchen window at the weeping willows that mark the burial place of two of his daughters. Then a debilitating car wreck left him unable to pay the $220,000 he owed on his northwestern Montana home.
He tried for a year and a half to lower his mortgage payments through a loan modification, but the government-insured loan that he took out three years ago came with restrictions. The best the bank could offer him was a reduction of $124 per month, leaving Nicholson with a $1,585 payment that he still couldn’t afford.
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Earlier this week, I had a few choice comments in Colin Barr’s Fortune column about Volcker’s retirement…
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To gaze upon the world of American corporations is to see a sunny place of terrific profits and princely bonuses. American businesses reported that third-quarter profits in 2010 rose at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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At the beginning of February 2011, the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament will hold its first crucial vote on whether mandatory EU-wide web blocking should be introduced – time is running out.
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About a month ago, custom domain Blogger blogs have been blocked in Turkey by mandate of the Turkish Government and since WebUpd8 is hosted on Blogger, it couldn’t be accessed from Turkey.
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Last Spring, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, presented a proposal for a directive to combat child exploitation. Unfortunately, this very important and sensitive matter is used to introduce dangerous provisions regarding Internet blocking, which could pave the way for a wider censorship of the Internet in Europe. The EU Parliament must absolutely reject this Trojan horse and uphold the fundamental rights of EU citizens.
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A lawyer has played down the significance of the Twitter data mining sparked by the US’s clampdown on WikiLeaks, saying that anyone using sites hosted in the United States had to accept that their data could be made available to authorities.
The US security forces have come under fire after it emerged that officials had subpoenaed Twitter demanding it released information from five accounts in connection with its WikiLeaks probe – including the account details of an Icelandic MP and a Dutch computer programmer.
The move has sparked outrage among civil liberty campaigners, and the Icelandic government has called for an explanation of the situation, but the basic concept of sovereign states accessing data hosted on their territory is well documented.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Credit Suisse media analyst Spencer Wang and team just released the results of their video-streaming study dubbed “Project Canada,” conducted to assess the affect of broadband consumption based pricing (CBP) on Internet-delivered video from an “over-the-top” non-cable or telco service (e.g., Netflix). The U.S. does not have consumption-based pricing, in which you pay more as you use more, but it has been rolled out widely in Canada since 2008. The investment bank wanted to see what the affect of this pricing is on broadband usage and the TV bill. It tested Netflix Canada streaming service for one month over Rogers cable system.
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As digital book publishing continues to expand at a rapid pace to meet reader demands, piracy rears its head at the forefront of many a discussion in publisher circles. Many publishers respond to the perceived threat with strict digital rights management (DRM) software. But is this the best solution? And does it even provide protection from piracy?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit. ‘The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies “exploited” music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments. The record companies knowingly did so and kept a so-called “pending list” of unlicensed reproductions, setting aside $50 million for the issue, if it ever arose, court filings suggest.
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The four major record labels that comprise the Canadian Recording Industry Association – EMI Music Canada Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. – have agreed to pay $45 million to settle one of the largest copyright class action lawsuits in Canadian history. The settlement comes after years of fruitless efforts to get the industry to pay for works it used without permission.
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The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the country’s four largest music labels, refusing to block a suit accusing them of conspiring to fix Internet song prices.
Units of Sony Corp., Vivendi SA, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group Ltd. argued unsuccessfully that the allegations in the consumer complaint aren’t sufficient to suggest the companies engaged in misconduct. A federal appeals court in New York said the allegations were enough for the case to go forward, and the Supreme Court today left that ruling intact.
The suit centers on MusicNet and pressplay, two services the music companies started in 2001 to sell songs online. The complaint alleges the services charged unreasonably high rates – - a combined $240 per year in subscription fees — and imposed unwarranted restrictions, barring customers from transferring songs to iPods and other portable digital music players.
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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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Last week the BPI released their overview of 2010 sales volumes in the UK. As always, their press release was filled with claims that piracy is ruining their industry and most mainstream media was quick to republish this propaganda. However, we can use the very same data to show that more music is being sold than ever before, and argue that piracy is likely to have had very little impact.
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The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a ruling that reinstated an antitrust lawsuit alleging major record labels conspired to fix prices and terms under which music would be sold over the Internet.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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The coalition is not looking to repeal the controversial act.
The government has again said it has no plans to repeal the Digital Economy Act (DEA), despite complaints from BT and TalkTalk.
These two broadband providers have been granted the right to a judicial review of the piece of legislation, with each insisting it infringes the basic rights and freedoms of internet users in the way it seeks to clamp down on illegal filesharing.
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The maximalist lobby has now shifted its attention internationally. Pushing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was its global summer project, and the Open Rights Group’s latest FOI requests show the BPI pushing the new UK government to lobby the European Union on its behalf.
The UK is still waiting to see what will be done with the Digital Economy Act. The Lib Dems have called for its repeal; BT and TalkTalk have won the right to a judicial review of the Act; Ofcom is struggling to ready a legitimate and fair ‘Initial Obligations Code’ through which the Digital Economy Act is expected to be enforced.
This Act, as ever, remains infuriatingly unpredictable. Stay tuned.
gNewSense 2.3 deltah i386 GNU Libre version of Ubuntu Linux Review Tutorial
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
01.10.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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‘The low-end laptop market in particular is so hard fought that manufacturers will grab for any dollars they can save,’ explains Elmar Geese, chairman of the Linux association in Berlin. In place of Windows, the laptops come either without an operating system or use a pre-installed variant of the typically no-cost alternative operating system Linux.
For the user, that means a bit of extra work and acclimation. Simply installing Windows from the old computer is generally not an option. Most Windows installations are tied by license to the computer with which they were sold.
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CES 2011 saw a veritable armoury of Ubuntu powered devices all ready to make a serious impact amongst competitors.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In the first Linux Outlaws for 2011: Our listeners make it possible for Dan to fly to FOSDEM, the PS3 is resoundingly cracked, Google open sources Eclipse tools, Paul Allen sues the world again and Vladimir Putin orders Russia to adopt free software.
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Kernel Space
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Eariler today, January 5th, none other than Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, proudly announced the release of Linux kernel 2.6.37.
Among the new features includes in Linux kernel 2.6.37 we can mention support for PPP over the IPv4 protocol, lots of enhancements to various important file systems, such as EXT4, XFS and Btrfs, support for I/O throttling, Perf probe improvements, and a Ceph-based network block device.
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Applications
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Puddletag is a Linux audio tag editor similar to Mp3tag (a popular Windows audio tagging tool) that supports ID3v1, ID3v2 (mp3), MP4 (mp4, m4a, etc.), VorbisComments (ogg, flac), Musepack (mpc), Monkey’s Audio (.ape) and WavPack (wv).
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4Pane is a multi-pane, detailed-list file manager for Linux. It is designed to be fully-featured without bloat, and aims for speed rather than visual effects. In addition to standard file manager things, it offers multiple undo and redo of most operations (including deletions), archive management including ‘virtual browsing’ inside archives, multiple renaming/duplication of files, a terminal emulator and user-defined tools.
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VortexBox 1.7 has been released. This release is based on Fedora 14 and comes with many new features and improvements. The big new feature for the latest release is the possibility of ripping DVDs along with audio CDs for streaming. This feature has been highly requested and is now included in VortexBox 1.7. The new version also brings an updated SqueezeBox server 7.4.2 along with the usual array of fixes and smaller updates.
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Proprietary
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Linux fans are second only to Appleheads for their undying, and often blind, support for their beloved operating system. So, how can these two warring factions peacefully coexist in the same support space? If you can turn your attention away from Angry Birds for a moment, you might learn that your iPad is more than an expensive slab of electronic crack and that it’s possible to work with and manage Linux systems by tapping and raking your digits on its fingerprint-prone surface. This article describes how to do just that using SSH and VNC.
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Instructionals/Technical
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A user of the limbo repository that is helping test limbo packages that is. Some big updates in limbo lately and we would like to hear from those that are using the limbo repository. Any issues, such as graphical, like the screen isn’t refreshing properly or as Joost says, painted artifacts or x freezing? If so, we would like to know what your hardware is. I’m not noticing any problems with my nvidia card yet on the gnome side. I just finished updating my KDE x86 install, 534 updates for that install. It doesn’t matter which kernel you are using. Joost noticed things with .36 and .37.
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Or scp VS tar+ssh VS rsync+ssh VS tar+netcat
In a previous article in which i’ve show some uses of tar, I made an example of how to use it to move large amounts of data between two computers, but many people have said that it is better, or at least they prefer to use rsync, others prefer to use netcat. I remain convinced that a tar+ssh is faster than rsync+ssh is correct then do a test on the field and see some numbers.
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We explain FTP – technology that makes it possible to send huge files between PCs, upload images to a website, and bypass your email client’s file-size restrictions.
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This week-end, after passing too much time to try to understand contact management in KMail (which was workign quite well in KDE 3.x but is completely flawed IMHO in KDE 4.x), I decided with my wife it was time after 8+ years to try another mail reader.
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Wine
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Games
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On the right, Tyrian, which is a top-down shooter in the vein of Spy Hunter or 1942 or Ikaruga or … there are too many to mention.
I’ve played both of them before, probably because BASS is in the repositories for Ubuntu, and because somewhere along the line I heard about the OpenTyrian project. And the game has been freeware since 2004, I believe.
The funny part is, since one runs via scummvm and the other via dosbox, “installing” the games through the gog.com installer means you can run them directly from within Linux, using those tools straightaway. Kind of wacky.
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The Frictional Games Dev Blog mentions that Amnesia: The Dark Descent has now sold nearly 200,000 units, which gives them new confidence in the PC platform.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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First of all, the GNOME Foundation board of directors would like to express a huge thank you to all you volunteers who help to make the GNOME community possible. To all those who use the GNOME desktop and understand the value of free software on the desktop, it is you that makes the GNOME community both rich and rewarding. Thank you to our advisory board members and sponsors for providing much valued direction for the community.
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I have, on a number of occasions, stressed to new Linux users how crucial the right distribution is. Choosing the distribution that suits your needs is the single most important key to success when attempting to migrate from another operating system. But how do you know which one to choose out of the hundreds of variations? Believe it or not, there are some key questions to ask yourself when making this decision. It has been my goal for more than a decade to help prospective Linux users make the plunge with ease and success. Let’s see if I can do the same for you with these five tips.
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Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Before this wisdom dawned on the Linux community, Red Hat, Debian and Slackware had spawned several dozen distros. Some died a single-release death, but a lot survived and a vibrant community grew around them.
That, along with all the distros designed to meet specific needs, means there’s a lot of variety in the Linux world. While community is key to a good desktop distro, it also needs thorough documentation on wikis and blogs, and ample support.
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There are some things that you can expect with a new installation of a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora that you would not get with an OS such as Windows 7 or OS /X.
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I got a call from one of my amateur radio associates who wanted help reinstalling the OS on his old Compaq desktop. I offered to download a distro for him to try. I only installed the first: Linux Mint 9 LXDE. And therein lies a (short) tale.
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Inspired by the round of interviews that Raphael Hertzog has started with people in the Debian project, I wanted to do the same with people in the Skolelinux project . The hope is that those who every day helps to promote free software in schools and develop a Linux distribution designed specifically for skolebruk may be better known and perhaps inspire many to contribute to the Skolelinux project.
First is the newly elected leader of the association FRISK that organizes the development of the Skolelinux distribution.
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I’ve had ten days or so to look at Pinguy now, so I want to write a sort of “wrap-up” for my own purposes at this time. I will not be using it as the default or preferred distribution on any of my systems, because there are a few too many things about it that I don’t care for. The biggest of those is the fact that it is heavily dependent on Mono, for the “docky” package and a few others. By the time I extract mono and the packages that depend on it, I’m left with something that is certainly no better than Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS or SimplyMEPIS. That is not to say that it isn’t a very good and very interesting distribution, and those who do not have moral or philosophical objections to Mono could very well find it extremely attractive. However, another area where I think it falls short is netbook support, so that is what I will examine here.
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Reviews
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Linux is commonly de-famed as an operating system for computer gurus and, in the Linux world, many people believe that the only user-friendly distribution that exists is named after African fauna. However, there is a very nice Linux distribution that, despite being relatively unknown (as it comes from Turkey), can spare users many a headache: Pardus 2011.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Drupal 7 will be the most user-friendly version of Drupal yet as a result of tremendous amounts of work overhauling the user interface to create a far more intuitive user experience. Among the goals of this redesign was to minimize the notorious Drupal learning curve and make Drupal site building more accessible to a larger number of people.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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This discussion started when someone related a story where a person approached the storyteller and mistook a Fedora button on a backpack for a Facebook button. I thought it was fairly innocuous at the time — yeah, they’re both F’s, but still, you have to be kind of — oh, I don’t know — lacking some basic observational skills to confuse the two.
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Debian Family
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The long anticipated and oft delayed Debian Squeeze just might be ready for release. Last year those in the know predicted that Squeeze could be ready by Christmas 2010. Well, that time period recently passed, but eagle eye Sid users have just seen another clue that Debian developers might be preparing for release.
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Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) has finally got a 64-bit version. And it’s pretty good, actually. In fact, that’s the distro I am going to recommend to GNU/Linux newbies from now on. It has all the advantages of Linux Mint Ubuntu Edition (LMUE) such as being simple and GUI-oriented and having most things working out of the box, but less bloated and with Debian’s superior stability (yes, even if it is based on the testing branch) and performance.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The great part about this new feature is that if a bug like the one in “add-apt-repository” occurs (the bug adds a “n” on a line in the .list file), the line causing the error is disabled but the repository is not so everybody using Ubuntu Tweak should be “n” error free from now on.
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If you’re fed-up with first person shooters and mid-aged graphics games, then searching for a decent free game for your Ubuntu can be quite difficult.
This compilation of five quality, free of charge, Ubuntu games may help you finding some. No detailed descriptions, just some screenshots to make your drool, along with installation details. Enjoy 
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Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.10 is released, this is a bug fixed version of Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.x., 2 new features were added to this version of ubuntu tweak: The source validation feature and the option to make the Launcher hide automatically, this will give you a wider screen space.
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Flavours and Variants
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When you first boot Bodhi, a configuration window will be displayed where you can select your language as well as the theme color and layout…
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Phones
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The real value of a mobile phone is not the shiny icons that comes with it, but it’s ability to transform lives, add value to the lives of the less fortunate. The following videos show when real phones, not expensive iPhones or Androids, but very low cost phones, help transform lives.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The N900 has a Texas Instruments OMAP3 microprocessor with an ARM Cortex-A8 core. Unlike all of the Nokia models which preceded it – 770, N800 and N810 – the N900 has full phone functionality (quad-band GSM and 3G UMTS/HSDPA). It is quite interesting therefore to get Ubuntu running on it. Be aware though that Kubuntu Mobile is *not* yet ready to replace Maemo on an N900. Unless of course you really know what you are doing or even better you really know what you are doing and want to help out – either upstream or with the actual distro itself. Our current target is to have Kubuntu Mobile fully working on the N900 in time for the 11.04 Natty release.
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So, looks like the Nexus S can run MeeGo too :o) have a custom kernel going and booted the OS from a rootfs image on the internal memory (didn’t have to flash!), but as you can see the display output is fscked (maybe due to the AMOLED?) and the touchscreen isn’t working either.
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Android
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Motorola unveiled its new Android-based Atrix 4G smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week in Las Vegas. The device has extremely impressive hardware specifications and a strong feature set, but its most compelling characteristic is the ability to provide a desktop-like computing experience when it is docked in a unique netbook shell.
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We always joke about how Android can and will be used for any and every thing – who doesn’t want to look forward to rooting toasters and microwaves for whatever reason? This year more than ever, we’re seeing more of these whacky combinations. This time, Nox Audio has introduced an Android-based set of headphones – dubbed the Admiral Touch.
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Back a week or so ago when you saw us running through the leaked Honeycomb Music player, you may have noticed a couple of aquatic sea creatures popping up on a list of possible options for searching for a music track: Dolphin Browser HD and Dolphin Browser Mini. Both of these apps are super fantastic web browsers, and today the mini version comes out of Beta for a full release. This lovely little lady is officially titled Dolphin Browser Mini V1.0, it’s free, and it’s available in Android Marketplace now!
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The combination of the Android platform and the gaming catalogue of Sony seems like a good idea, but then consider the titles already available on Android and ask, is the average Android Smartphone user wanting a pull out keypad?
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Asus unveiled three Android based tablet devices running Android 3.0, due to ship this spring. The tablets include a Snapdragon-based, 7.1-inch “Eee Pad MeMo” tablet, and two 10.1-inch keyboard convertible tablets running on dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processors: the Eee Pad Slider, which offers a slide up design, and an Eee Pad Transformer with a fold-up, detachable design.
The Asus (Asustech) tablet announcements were tipped last week via a leaked Asus video and other reports, but with minimal details. Specs are still pretty basic, but one stands out loud and clear: Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).
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Sub-notebooks/OLPC
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Other than the fresh ARM CPU, the new model is identical to the previous versions — it has an outdoor readable PixelQi display, Flash storage, a rubber keyboard, and runs Sugar OS.
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A spokesperson for Marvell Technologies has confirmed that the OLPC tablet, which is known as the XO-3, will be available in the first half of 2012.
Speaking to ITProPortal.com, Reuben Caron said that the device would move away from the current VIA Nano processor architecture to adopt a Marvell system-on-chip, the Armada 610. Swapping the x86-based Nano to the Marvell ARM-based architecture, will cut power consumption to around 1W during use.
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To be sure, we did see plenty of Android innovations in the smartphone and tablet realms, in particular–more, in fact, than I’ve been able to keep track of. But Android is only partly open, of course, and–as it was recently noted–most Android tablet devices fail miserably at complying with the GNU Public License.
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Commercialisation in the open source space appears to be spreading downwards by virtue of the big vendors’ OSS interests at the moment doesn’t it? Yes Oracle is publicly pushing certain open initiatives (at the same time as it is severing others), yes Microsoft has been very vocal on open interoperability with the likes of Novell and others of late — but the weight of the “paid for services and management” element of open source has become more visible than ever during this past year.
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Envato is a startup based out of Australia with people around the world and sites serving pages every second. We started in a living room in 2006 and have been steadily working to build our company into a world-class contender. Our background is creative, we love open source, we believe that work is about way more than just making money, and we’re totally committed to making products that are awesome!
Our mission is to help people to earn and to learn, online. We operate marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of people buy and sell digital goods every day, and a network of educational blogs where millions learn creative skills.
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10 – Gimp
Although it is obvious, no list of open source software would be complete without Gimp. The Gimp is an image editing tool that looks and works like Photoshop but doesn’t cost a cent. If you’re a professional graphic artist you probably already use Photoshop, but for the rest of us Gimp does more than enough to meet our daily image editing needs. Which is not to say it is underpowered. It’s not. If you take the time to learn all of Gimp you could be producing professional-quality graphics in no time.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 beta rain continues full throttle. Only 1 week after 5th beta version Beta 6 released.
Beta 6 did not have any extra changes apart from getting rid of few bugs that the previous beta release embraced. One of the most important of these bugs was the problem of crashing that windows users encountered.
Majority of us thought that Mozilla would only bring out another beta release and then announce the final release. However now that Mozilla Firefox beta 8 is out that Firefox is going to guarantee its place at the high end of the browser league.
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Education
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An impression that schools and even tertiary institutions are not producing the software developers New Zealand needs has led Wellington open-source specialist Catalyst IT to pilot an “Academy”.
This aims to give a limited number of school students a basic grounding in ICT and some experience of real program development.
The Academy’s initial intake comprises 17 students from nine Wellington schools. They will spend the latter two weeks of January at Catalyst attending classroom-style workshops and applying what they have learnt to some real open-source projects.
“We do place an emphasis on encouraging young women into IT careers, and we’re please to have eight female students participating,” says Catalyst director Mike O’Connor.
The students will learn some of the basics of IT, including how to set up a development machine and how to participate in an open-source project. They will be working on some of Catalyst’s own projects, using an environment including PHP and MySQL on Linux – which Catalyst describes as “the sort of software that got Facebook off the ground.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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While my web app was completely free, contained no adverts, existed solely as a public service to commuters and was written carefully to follow NRE’s instructions on querying their service, National Rail Enquiries assert I was using the data illegally.
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A new study ranks Canada dead last in an international comparison of freedom-of-information laws — a hard fall after many years being judged a global model in openness.
The study by a pair of British academics looked at the effectiveness of freedom-of-information laws in five parliamentary democracies: Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Canada.
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Open Access/Content
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Hence, the term „open access commons“ leads to confusion and misunderstandings, since it can easily be construed as an open-access common pool resource as described by Garrett Hardin who coined the famous metaphor of the Tragedy of the Commons („Imagine a pasture open to all…“). This metaphor is deeeeeply rooted in (neo-)classical political economics and in people’s minds. Despite it’s numerous analytical errors.
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The city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet, a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40,000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it’s not just fiber, it’s open access fiber—any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access.
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Standards/Consortia
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My big accomplishment of 2010 was finishing the first edition of Dive Into HTML5 and working with O’Reilly to publish it on paper as HTML5: Up & Running (as well as several downloadable DRM-free formats). I also accomplished a few minor personal things, but in this post I’m going to focus on the book.
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Ask a European if the E.U. government could ever consolidate power from the state governments and you would probably get a “nope (or nein, or non), we identity with our respective countries.” The problem is, such attachments can change. Europeans would do well to look at the first hundred or so years of the U.S. to get a sense of how the E.U., too, could change.
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The inescapable fact of life is that we die. Yea, even Facebookers: one estimate puts the number of US Facebook users who die annually at around 375,000. What happens to all those photographs and wall-posts and status updates? Will their authors have given their password to someone close to them? Or taken out an account with Entrustet, which will enable them to specify which of their digital assets will be preserved and which destroyed?
Again, the answer is: probably not. Some people may not be all that bothered by the thought that no personal records of them will endure.
But many of us would regard it as intolerable. Think of the pleasure we get from old family photographs or the delight that comes from clearing out an attic and finding boxes of love letters, school reports, our first exercise books and old appointment diaries. The contemporary versions of these personal documents are mostly stored either on obsolescent PC hard drives or on the servers of internet companies, protected by a password.
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Setting aside my views on a journalist putting her family through a temporary ban of the internet and writing a book, I think this highlights perfectly the commonly held view that in someway the Internet is bad. The Internet is not bad, it’s some services/products that make it so. There is no “Digital Detox” since the Internet can be an excellent learning tool and a great social experience, it’s called responsible parenting and instead of banning something, maybe a better approach to parenting is to encourage ones children into other interests (both on and off-line) rather than letting them getting totally engrossed in an online world then taking it away.
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The conflicting reports upset many people, blaming Twitter/reporters/people sharing the news that they messed up. That, to me, wasn’t the case – news organizations were doing their best to get the story as straight as quickly as possible, and many on Twitter were also doing their best to constantly pass on the correct and most up-to-date information. In fact, if anything, it reminded me that news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was handled in quite a similar fashion by Cronkite – trying to sort through all of the conflicting reports as an anxious world watched in the real-time of the day.
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At the very same moment, Facebook’s only real competitor –NewsCorps’ waning social networking site, MySpace — is shedding employees and expenses, most likely in hopes of a fire sale.
But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.
Indeed, 11 years ago this week, when AOL announced its $350 billion merger with Time Warner, I was asked to write an OpEd for the New York Times explaining what the deal between old and new media companies really meant. I said that AOL was cashing in its over-valued dotcom stock in order to purchase a stake in a “real” media company with movie studios, theme parks and even cable. In short, the deal meant AOL knew their reign was over.
The Times didn’t run the piece. Of course, the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL’s revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly.
Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s 2005 purchase of MySpace for $580 million coincided pretty much exactly with the website’s peak of popularity. People blamed corporate ownership for the social network’s demise, but the cycle had already begun.
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However, after listening to my two illustrations, my friend shook his head and said that I was going about it the wrong way. Using my numbers of 15 minutes a day lost for 1.25 billion people currently using desktops, it means that for a world economy it is like 39,062,500 people had died due to software bugs and poor service. “This”, he said sadly, “is about half the number of people that died in World War II, but unlike the number of World War II dead, this number keeps growing.”
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Science
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Brute bigness will be a defining feature of architecture in 2011. The way large buildings occupy space, and even the way architecture will become the threshold to outer space (thanks to Norman Foster and Richard Branson) has put supersizing firmly on the menu.
Last year, the hot news was that the vilified ex-banker Fred “the Shred” Goodwin was going to turn the Edinburgh-based practice RMJM into a Godzilla of world architecture. But now we learn that the equally hard to pronounce Aecom has acquired more than 30 practices and, with a jumbo-pack of 1,488 architects, has become the biggest practice in the world, after a mere 20 years in the business.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has prompted an outpouring of sympathy from politicians, including Sarah Palin.
In the hours after the shooting Saturday, Palin issued a statement in which she expressed her “sincere condolences” to the family of Giffords and the other victims.
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Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.
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Today we found out that the Department of Justice is conducting a secret investigation (you can download the document in PDF format here). One of the targets of that investigation is a member of the Icelandic Parliament, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and the only reason she is aware that Twitter was served the subpoena, is that Twitter actually had the guts to argue the subpoena in court, and get permission from the judge to tell her about it!
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It’s been seven months since the surreal G20 weekend that saw nearly 1,000 citizens arrested, most of them unjustly, but answers and accountability seem to be nowhere in sight.
And some Torontonians are now demanding the city’s top cop, who was at the helm of the debacle, do the honourable thing and resign.
“Hey-hey, ho-ho, Bill Blair has got to go!” roared a throng of protesters in front of Toronto Police Headquarters Saturday afternoon.
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A judge has ordered Toronto police and the special investigations unit to produce all records pertaining to two officers investigated in the alleged beating of G20 protester Adam Nobody.
On Friday, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Clark ordered the two organizations to hand over by Jan. 31 all their material, “however recorded, arising indirectly from the complaint by Adam Nobody” in which either Det.-Consts. Luke Watson or Todd Storey are mentioned.
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In this week’s New Yorker, Peter Maass — who was in Iraq covering the war at the time — examines the iconic, manufactured toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, an event the American media relentlessly exploited in April, 2003, to propagandize citizens into believing that Iraqis were gleeful over the U.S. invasion and that the war was a smashing success. Acknowledging that the episode demonstrated that American troops had taken over the center of Baghdad, Maas nonetheless explains that “everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television — victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq — was a disservice to the truth.”
Working jointly with ProPublica on this investigation, Maass describes the hidden, indispensable role the U.S. military played in that event — which has long been known — though he convincingly argues that the primary culprit in this propaganda effort was the Americans media. That is who did more than anyone to wildly distort this event. As usual, the Watchdog Press not only happily ingests and trumpets pro-government propaganda, but does so even more enthusiastically and uncritically than government spokespeople themselves.
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Police have said they received new leads after questioning people at a number of locations around Bristol on Friday night, but have not yet indicated if they are considering a mass DNA screening.
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Rebecca Mansour joins me for a 30-minute special podcast addressing the horror in Arizona today, and the obscene efforts by many of the left to politicize mass murder by a clearly deranged individual.
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Jared Lee Loughner has now been formally charged for the Saturday afternoon shooting in Tucson, AZ. Many tips are showing this may have been a premeditated event with clues leading up to it.
In a series of disjointed thoughts, videos on a YouTube account registered to a Jared Lee Loughner of Tucson, AZ, take aim at the national government and refer to a “new currency.”
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Bulldozers have demolished a hotel in east Jerusalem to make way for a new Israeli settlement, the latest in a wave of new buildings globally seen as an obstacle to the now stalled peace process.
The Shepherd Hotel was razed by three Israeli bulldozers, early on Sunday, as part of a plan to build a new settlement of 20 units in the heart of the occupied city.
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Cablegate
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Icelandic politicians have blasted US demands for Twitter to hand over a member of parliament’s account details. Birgitta Jonsdottir faces investigation as one of several people connected to the website WikiLeaks.
Politicians in Iceland have hit out at a US request for Twitter to hand over details of a member of the country’s parliament because of her connections with WikiLeaks.
A subpoena for parliamentary representative Birgitta Jonsdottir’s details was issued as part of an investigation involving several individuals associated with the whistle-blowing website.
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4. Twitter. The bigger story here, IMHO, far more interesting than the government request for wikileaks related info, is the fact that Twitter has gone out of its way to fight for its users’ privacy. The company went to court, and was successful in asking the judge to unseal the order (something it is not required to do), and then promptly notified its users, so that they could seek to quash the order. Twitter could have quite easily complied with the order, and would have had zero legal liability for doing so. In fact, many other Internet companies routinely hand over their users’ data in response to government requests, and never take steps to either have the orders unsealed, or give their users notice and thus an opportunity to fight the order.
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Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Member of Althingi for the Movement, says that the request for information about her from the web-service Twitter shows how desperate the American government has become by trying to dig up personal information on MPs in other countries. She says on pressan.is that she has received a thousand e-mails and dozens of phone calls.
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Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is suspected of leaking the Army video to WikiLeaks earlier this year. In chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned him in to authorities, Manning indicated that he had first contacted WikiLeaks sometime in late November 2009. This corresponds with the time period mentioned in the government’s request for Jonsdottir’s tweet history.
Jonsdottir was instrumental in getting the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative passed in Iceland’s parliament that supports creating legislation to make Iceland a legal haven for journalists and media outlets.
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Society finds itself at a crossroads. In our increasingly connected world, many seem to think that our constitutional rights are fit for reevaluation. As was demonstrated by Jessica Yellin’s performance on CNN, even some journalists seem to think that is now a crime to publish confidential information, ignorant not only of the important role that documents such as the Pentagon Papers have had in shaping modern government, but also of the First Amendment.
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The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker’s online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks.
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The order asks specifically for names of those attached to selected accounts, user and screen names, and any registered mailing or postal addresses. It also asks for email addresses, credit card details where possible, and even content relating to connected mobile phones.
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WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of any US subpoenas they may have received after it emerged that a court in Virginia had ordered Twitter to secretly hand over details of accounts on the micro-blogging site by five figures associated with the group, including Julian Assange.
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Finance
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Who needs sound public policy, when we can depend on the generosity and largesse of the elite? Who needs a social welfare system, when we have charitable giving from the wealthy? This attitude permeates virtually all elements of the Fords’ policy approach — whether then–mayoral candidate Ford’s offer to personally help buy street drugs for a sick constituent, his belief that an arts and culture plan can be replaced by selling tickets to galas, or the belief (articulated at a Latino-organized mayoral debate) that youth-oriented social programs could be replaced by football teams and cheerleading squads.
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Royal Bank of Scotland should not be “leading the way” when it came to bankers’ bonuses, the prime minister, David Cameron, said today.
However, Cameron warned against “banker-bashing”, saying it was too easy to make banks the scapegoats for the recession.
His comments came after it was reported that the RBS chief executive, Stephen Hester, will take home an estimated £6.8m in bonuses, salary and other payments this year.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Anonymous has joined with Tunisian activists to call for end to the government’s stifling of online dissent.
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Tunisian netizens are working around the clock to show the rest of the world the ongoing carnage in their country. What started as a protest against unemployment when a 26-year-old Tunisian man set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid last month has ignited the country, sparking a wave of protests across it.
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Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love. The issue is fundamental. What a blessing that Watergate has been uncovered to teach us the primary lesson. The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication-fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear, symptoms of the inability to love. Secrecy means that you think love is shameful and bad. Or that your nakedness is ugly. Or that you hide unloving, hostile feelings. Seeds of paranoia and distrust.
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The US Commerce Department is reportedly preparing to assume authority over a nascent cybsecurity initiative that would create a unique Internet ID for American citizens and residents.
According to White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt, the department is “the absolute perfect spot in the US government” to build an online “identity ecosystem.”
However, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke insisted that the initiative would not result in the mandatory assignment of a national ID card.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The CBC ran this report about increasing broadband costs. This is a sign that this issue is gaining traction.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Copyright law is subject to international variations. In Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan, the term of copyright runs for 50 years after the author’s death; in the Yemen it’s 30. In the UK, which has a fairly standard ruling (complicated occasionally by EU directives), copyright applies for 70 years from the death of the author. In America, the copyright term is also 70 years, but this only applies to works published since 1978.
Even so, in the age of “free content”, not everyone accepts these norms. In California, there’s a radical movement that regards copyright law (of all kinds) as a grotesque – even sinister – restriction on the unfettered traffic of knowledge. Led by James Boyle, author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, the Free Culture Movement wants to toss copyright legislation into the dustbin of history.
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CBC Explains Usage Based Billing
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.09.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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What if someone ported a graphical version of Apt and/or Yum to the two proprietary operating systems, and used to it distribute GPL/LGPL applications? There would be certain costs involved, but by using the original projects repositories, the costs could be limited. This is the sort of project that the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation would both have strong philosophical reasons to back. And there’s no reason that it couldn’t cover both Desktop and Server applications.
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The change, the result of a trademark dispute with a European company, led to the the developers turning their ears towards the linguistic worlds of Tolkien for some inspiration.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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This morning we reported on the soft announcement that TransGaming would be replacing Cedega with something known as GameTree Linux. Not much information was available at the time, just that it was built upon Cedega technology, would replace the subscription-based Cedega Gaming Service, and would be distributed as a free program. Now though a few more details have come to light.
TransGaming hopes to rejuvenate itself by offering GameTree as a centralized game distribution/management platform for Linux PCs and like systems, including set-top and mobile devices. Basically it’s set to be similar to Valve’s Steam Content Delivery Platform or the new alternative, Desura. Steam is still coming to Linux with the Source Engine, which will immediately jump to the front, and Desura is also looking at possibly offering a Linux client too of its digital distribution system.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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It has been several months now since the previous set of major releases by KDE and it is time for some more! KDE’s Plasma workspaces and the KDE Platform will all reach version 4.6 on 26 January and many of KDE’s application teams will also be unveiling new versions of their software on that day.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The bad news is that it is currently default off, so unless Ubuntu changes that default this enhancement remains hands off for Natty users out of the box even if 2.6.38 makes it into Natty (PPA solutions likely to become available though).
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Screenlets, the desktop widget framework for Linux, was once the apple of eye-candy fans everywhere. Sadly over the last few years a lack of development and direction has lead to the project falling out of favour with users.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Rob Wray, from mp3Car, speaks with Mikael Soderberg, from Pelagicore, to discuss two new vehicle hardware setups.
First, the ARM processor of the Beagleboard C4 is paired with a daughterboard from Pelagicore to enable easy communication with systems in the vehicle including the MOST, CAN, & LIN protocols. AM/FM radio integration, Bluetooth and power management capabilities are also integrated.
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Sub-notebooks/OLPC
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Finally, OLPC has realized that ARM uses less power than x86… They are producing XO-1.75 that can be recharged with a couple of hours on the crank. Still, their price is about $165, too high for many of its target-users. I expect by next year they could be within the original $100 range. The next model, XO-3 should run for 1 watt.
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Edward McNierney, chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child showed off the XO-1.75 XO laptop at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to ComputerWorld. The XO-1.75 has two innovations:
1. The XO-1.75 is the first OLPC laptop to use ARM chips, an 1GHz Armada 610 chip from Marvell Technology, reducing power consumption by half – to just 2-watts
2. The XO-1.75 will have a 8.9-inch touchscreen, so children can use their fingers instead of a jumpy mouse or delicate keyboard to interact with the XO
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Academics are worried that the surge in popularity of ebook readers could lead to a catastrophic loss of children’s basic Google search skills. According to a report published today, a whole generation is becoming seduced by the convenience and reliability of ‘books’ available on their Kindles and iPads, meaning that many have only the vaguest understanding of the learning methods used by their parents.
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According to Matt Asay setting the world Free amounts to “losing”. My pet market is the desktop. It may be a mature market but forever there will be a market for personal computing where individuals partake of creating, finding, modifying, storing and presenting information. Freedom in that market is important for billions of humans and their software and hardware. How is freeing that market losing? It is lazy business that insists on operating in a growing market only. Real businesses that work for a living can succeed in a mature market.
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The Apache Software Foundation is extending its breadth of open-source software projects to include a package of data-management middleware developed by NASA.
The Apache Object-Oriented Data Technology (OODT), first developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, is now an Apache Top Level Project, the organization announced Wednesday.
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SaaS
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RMS warns that clouds (Software As A Service) can be non-free. SaaS can essentially subvert Free Software by exploiting Free Software but because software is not distributed, cloud services are exempt from freeing the modified source code. For example, Google, which uses and contributes a lot to Free Software, does not reveal its code for search, kernel tweaks etc. So, using Google’s services switches us to using what is essentially non-free software, all the modifications Google has made to Free Software but has not been forced to reveal by the GPL.
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Business
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Government
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At the end of 2010, the “open-source” software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks, found an unusual ally: the Russian government. Vladimir Putin signed a 20-page executive order requiring all public institutions in Russia to replace proprietary software, developed by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with free open-source alternatives by 2015.
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Openness/Sharing
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For the past 5 years, I’ve haunted the halls of the U.S. Congress with a geeky ask: broadcast-quality video from all congressional hearings should be posted on the Internet. I gave a tech talk at Google, drew up business plans (pdf) to start a new nonprofit, enlisted the help (pdf) of the Public Printer, and harassed my friends in the mainstream media and my friends working for the former Speaker (pdf).
My motivation has been a deeply felt belief that one should not have to live inside the Washington, D.C. beltway in order to observe the proceedings of the U.S. Congress. No matter what our political beliefs, no matter how much we disagree on the issues, we must all agree that the business of the Congress is the business of the People. Today, that means that business must be conducted so that it is visible on the Internet.
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Open Access/Content
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This post explores data strongly suggesting that open access journal PLoS ONE is now the world’s largest journal. According to Pete Binfield (personal correspondence), in 2010 PLoS One published 6,749 articles. Based on listserv discussions in 2008, the world’s largest journals at that date were PHYS REV B (5782 articles) and APPL PHYS LETT (5449 articles). As of today, a search for 2010 articles at the APS website yields 6,206 articles. A search for 2010 articles for APPL PHYS LETT in IEEE’s xPLore service yields 4,381 articles.
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Open Hardware
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The U.S. social and economic landscape is rapidly changing. Inequalities in wealth, which began an upward ascent back in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s. Now they are flying off the charts, thanks first to the tax cuts ushered in by Bush II and second to Obama’s recent continuation of those tax cuts, plus more, which have the effect of taking from the working class and poor in order to give to the rich.
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Two weeks we published this article, in which we looked at the status of IPv6 deployment worldwide. We saw that by looking at the number of networks (Autonomous Systems) that announce both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes, the global IPv6 deployment rate is around 8%.
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One editorial note before we begin: The Onion and South Park are not on this list. Both are fine practitioners of satire, but I couldn’t find an example from them that fit neatly into our theme. After all, morons who actually believe Onion stories to be true usually just get outraged by the events rather than hating the paper. South Park has certainly pissed people off, but those who were angered were typically the people being satirized. When South Park satirized Islamic militants for threatening death at the depiction of Allah, and then received death threats from Islamic militants, no one missed the point.
These following satirists, however, were confronted by those who simply didn’t get it.
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Science
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An article published early this month in American Sociological Review confirms what many in the religious community have known for some time: participation in religious organizations may lead to a more satisfying life.
Active church-goers report they are more satisfied with their lives than those who do not regularly visit churches.
This sense of satisfaction comes more from the interactions that church-goers share than the actual theological activities and discussions that occur at churches, the article says.
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Health/Nutrition
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For 2 years, GOP leaders in Congress fought tooth and nail to oppose health care reform. They did their best to keep tens of millions without coverage, decrying any effort to help citizens as “socialist,” “fascist” or some other equally baffling “ist.”
And incredibly, now that they are the majority, their first act will be to vote to repeal health care reform that gives affordable care to 32 million Americans.
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Fluoride in drinking water — credited with dramatically cutting cavities and tooth decay — may now be too much of a good thing. Getting too much of it causes spots on some kids’ teeth.
A reported increase in the spotting problem is one reason the federal government will announce Friday it plans to lower the recommended levels for fluoride in water supplies — the first such change in nearly 50 years.
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Security
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THE personal details of millions of Vodafone customers, including their names, home addresses, driver’s licence numbers and credit card details, have been publicly available on the internet in what is being described as an ”unbelievable” lapse in security by the mobile phone giant.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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As the one-year anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake approaches, a brutally frank account of the plight of its people has been delivered by a highly placed diplomat. Ricardo Seitenfus, the representative to Haiti of the Organization of American States, delivered a hard-hitting assessment of the foreign role in that country in an interview published in the December 20 edition of the Swiss daily Le Temps. i
The interview also appeared in the right-wing, Haitian daily, Le Nouvelliste. For his words, he was immediately recalled from his posting.
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Commission of inquiry into groups monitoring activities of the Israeli military in occupied West Bank denounced as ‘McCarthyite’
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A Palestinian woman died Saturday morning after suffering intense tear-gas inhalation during an anti-wall rally in Bil’in on Friday, medics said.
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Soldiers from the Karmei Tzur settlement/military base invaded a civilian house this afternoon in Beit Ummar using live ammunition and sound bombs. During the raid, woman and children were injured as the soldiers harassed one of the Popular Committee leaders of the village.
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Israel-bound submarines will no longer be allowed to undergo tests in Norwegian territory, as part of the country’s ban on security exports to Israel, Norway has informed a German shipbuilder.
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Blau returns to Israel from London this week after signing an agreement with judicial authorities committing him to present himself for questioning.
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A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.
That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.
Ognjen Milatovic, 35, was flying from Boston to Washington D.C. on US Airways when he was escorted off the plane for disorderly conduct following the incident.
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FORMER Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib will use the money received from an out-of-court settlement with the federal government to start an international lawsuit against the US and Egyptian governments.
Mr Habib, who reached an agreement last month in which he received a secret sum in exchange for absolving the government of liability in his torture case, says he has fresh evidence, including film footage.
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Put things into perspective. In the 1970s, hardly a day went by in Britain without the threat of bombing campaigns by the Provisional IRA. Reacting to the 7 February 1991 Downing Street IRA attack, British Prime Minister John Major said coolly, “I think we had better start again, somewhere else.” Somehow Britain survived without the paranoia and fear characteristic of our time. Today, the extensive security apparatus in place cannot even tolerate a joke sent over Twitter. Paul Chambers was arrested for the tweet: ‘Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!’, which was deemed to constitute a bomb threat to Doncaster Sheffield’s airport in the UK.
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Gulet Mohamed is an 18-year-old American citizen whose family is Somalian. His parents moved with him to the U.S. when he was 2 or 3 years old, and he has lived in the U.S. ever since. In March, 2009, he went to study Arabic and Islam in Yemen (in Sana’a, the nation’s capital), and, after several weeks, left (at his mother’s urging) and went to visit his mother’s family in Somalia, staying with his uncle there for several months. Roughly one year ago, he left Somalia and traveled to Kuwait to stay with other family members who live there. Like many teenagers who reach early adulthood, he was motivated in his travels by a desire to see the world, to study, and to get to know his family’s ancestral homeland and his faraway relatives.
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Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was among the estimated 15 or more victims of a shooting outside a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona within the past hour. So far, 15 are reported wounded, 6 dead. Details are still coming in, but what has been reported so far: she was “shot point blank in the head,” the assailant(s) fired some 15 or more shots into the crowd, and this took place at a “town hall” sort of event during where Giffords was speaking to her constituents. One shooter is reported to be alive and in custody.
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Arizona Central talked to Gonzales in 2009 after Roll allowed a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit to proceed against a local rancher. The case was filed by illegal immigrants and drew the ire of local talk radio hosts, who “spurred audiences into making threats.”
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Cablegate
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A few of the writers who champion Manning have, to be fair, mentioned in passing the widespread use of solitary confinement in the United States. A very few have gone further: One powerful piece by Lynn Parramore on New Deal 2.0, for example, uses the Manning case as an opportunity to document and denounce the brutal realities of solitary confinement. She urges readers to “remember the thousands of people being tortured in American prisons, including Bradley Manning, and let us send our own message back to our government: We are Americans…Most assuredly, we will not accept torture in our name. Not of the accused. Not of the mentally ill. Not even of convicted criminals.”
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A member of parliament in Iceland who is also a former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has ordered Twitter to hand over her private messages.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the “USA government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?”
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Since late November, the whistleblower website Wikileaks has been in the process of releasing in waves over 250,000 leaked United States diplomatic cables. Known as “Cablegate,” this is the largest publication of confidential documents by any organization. (Catch up on Wikileaks developments by reviewing EFF’s page on this issue).
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A member of parliament in Iceland who is also a former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has ordered Twitter to hand over her private messages.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the “USA government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?”
She said she was starting a legal fight to stop the US getting hold of her messages, after being told by Twitter that a subpoena had been issued. She wrote: “department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info – I got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over.”
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Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir — a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament — announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information “about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir’s announcement.
What hasn’t been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter — which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested — seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account.
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The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of 63 members of Iceland’s national parliament, said this afternoon that Twitter notified her of the order’s existence and told her she has 10 days to oppose the request for information about activity on her account since November 1, 2009.
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It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that somewhere, far away, people are thinking about you. Last night I received this rather interesting e-mail from twitter…
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The US Department of Justice has served Twitter with a 2703(d) court order to reveal information about accounts related to people associated with WikiLeaks.
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He’s appointed London public relations firm Borkowski, owned by master publicist Mark Borkowski – which has a four-member team dealing with media enquiries about him – and an online weekly media conference to deliver messages from him and WikiLeaks.
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WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of any US subpoenas they may have received after it emerged that a court in Virginia had ordered Twitter to secretly hand over details of accounts on the micro-blogging site by five figures associated with the group, including Julian Assange.
Amid strong evidence that a US grand jury has begun a wide-ranging trawl for details of what networks and accounts WikiLeaks used to communicate with Bradley Manning, the US serviceman accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables, some of those named in the subpoena said they would fight disclosure.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades, according to the most comprehensive national census of the insects. Scientists said the alarming decline, which could have devastating implications for the pollination of both wild and farmed plants, was likely to be a result of disease and low genetic diversity in bee populations.
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There’s been nothing quite like it in the ancient Forest of Dean since the last time a Conservative government tried to privatise Britain’s largest oak forest.
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Naryamaswamy Naik went to the cupboard and took out a tin of pesticide. Then he stood before his wife and children and drank it. “I don’t know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn’t say,” Sugali Nagamma said, her tiny grandson playing at her feet. “I’d tell him: don’t worry, we can sell the salt from our table.”
Ms Nagamma, 41, showed us a picture of her husband – good-looking with an Elvis-style hairdo – on the day they married a quarter of a century ago. “He’d been unhappy for a month, but that day he was in a heavy depression. I tried to take the tin away from him but I couldn’t. He died in front of us. The head of the family died in front of his wife and children – can you imagine?”
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The body which certifies that fish have been caught sustainably has been accused of “duping” consumers by giving its eco-label to fisheries where stocks are tumbling.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) manages the labelling system that tells consumers which species of fish they can buy safe in the knowledge they aren’t destroying stocks.
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At a market in central Tokyo this week, a bluefin tuna the size of five Japanese men fetched £250,000 at auction. It was partly a show of New Year ostentation but proof, too, that Japan has not lost its appetite for an endangered species.
Whales, however, are no longer so popular. At refrigerated stores across the country, thousands of tonnes of whalemeat lies unsold.
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Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
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Finance
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According to the latest poll conducted by CBS “60 Minutes” and the magazine Vanity Fair, 61 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy as the primary way to cut the budget. The same poll finds that the second most popular first choice for cutting the nation’s budget deficit, at 20 percent, is cutting the military budget. That is, 81 percent of us–four out of five–would cut the deficit by taxing the rich and/or slashing military spending.
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Soaring prices of sugar, grain and oilseed drove world food prices to a record in December, surpassing the levels of 2008 when the cost of food sparked riots around the world, and prompting warnings of prices being in “danger territory”.
An index compiled monthly by the United Nations surpassed its previous monthly high – June 2008 – in December to reach the highest level since records began in 1990. Published by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the index tracks the prices of a basket of cereals, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar, and has risen for six consecutive months.
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Hungary is due to assum the six-month rotating presidency of the EU on Jan 1, the same day that the government plans to reintroduce state censorship for all media.
But several European nations have voiced concerns over the sweeping new laws, taking the unusual step of publicly criticising a fellow EU member.
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Hundreds of thousands of people may have been charged twice by taxpayer-backed Lloyds TSB for items they bought with their credit and debit cards on Hogmanay, it has emerged.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The author of an ebook that gives details on how easily Amazon’s bestseller rankings can be manipulated has accused the online retail giant of “hypocrisy” after the title was temporarily removed from the website over the new year.
In The Day the Kindle Died, Thomas Hertog claims it is possible to get your own book to the number one bestseller spot in its category on Amazon simply by posting fake reviews, voting on them favourably and downloading copies of the Kindle ebook yourself.
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Everyone is fast to make judgements about Hungary although no translation of the Hungarian law was available, just the angry curses of Hungarian civil society groups and the laughter of rapper Ice-T, the first “victim” of their “illiberal” media regulation
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Despite compelling evidence that they never committed a crime, three Iranian Baha’is today begin their fourth year in captivity.
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Hi all. A new release of arm is available, including enhancements targeted at performance and cross platform compatibility.
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The month-long initiative is meant to help homeless citizens of Delhi to tide over the coldest part of the winter with additional nutrition. Many homeless people die every year in Delhi and other parts of northern India due to severe malnutrition during winter months.
The initiative is part of a larger campaign calling for the immediate release of Dr Sen, who has was unjustly sentenced on 24 December 2010 by a local court in Chhattisgarh to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ and ‘conspiracy’.
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“It has become increasingly clear,” claimed Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor, in a statement released last month, “that the system of classification in Australia needs to be modernised so it is able to accommodate developments in technology now and in the future.”
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“Europe whole and free” owes a great debt to the decision by a courageous Hungarian government to open its frontiers to Austria in the summer of 1989, allowing thousands of East German refugees to escape. Twenty-one years later, and just as it takes over the rotating European presidency, Hungary is a frontrunner once more. The difference is that this time it appears determined to reverse its course. And the risk is that it might take Europe with it.
Normally, the six-month EU presidency is a staid and low-key affair, all the more since the creation of a full-time European President and a foreign-policy czar by the Lisbon Treaty just over a year ago. Few Europeans even noticed that Belgium, Hungary’s predecessor, didn’t have a government for the duration of its tenure. But that is clearly too tame for the pugnacious government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Budapest chose to open the year with a display of political fireworks, featuring two showstopping zingers: a set of new laws restraining the media, and a “crisis tax” on investors.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After being tracked as the original uploader of at least six pornographic movies to various torrent sites, an East Coast man found himself in the middle of a lawsuit last month. Then, just four days later, it was all over. Without putting up any kind of a fight he agreed to pay a record settlement of $250,000. Unusual? You bet. But the devil, as they say, is in the detail.
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The British painter and video artist “Stanza,” has spent a couple of decades traveling around the world. Every place he’d stop, he’d grab audio tape (then digital recordings) of the sounds of that place. In 2000, he started posting sound-maps online and in 2004 he made the database available. Now, Soundcities is an extensive, open-source sound and mapping site that users can freely take from and contribute to. There are even on-site mixing decks to allow anyone with a computer to remix the world.
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Says that “comparing sales numbers only reveals part of the story,” and notes that in 2010 the music market “saw enormous growth” in online streaming music services like Vevo and Pandora where music fans don’t make any music purchases at all.
The music industry has long made it seem that P2P is solely to blame for the overall decline in legal music purchases, but by its own recent admission this isn’t true, there are many more reasons why revenues are still in decline.
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ZeroPaid has just learned that multiple web activists and members of the Pirate Party have been arrested in the midst of free speech protests in Tunisia recently. The arrests come as the war over free speech heating up in the country.
In the midst of the Tunisian government crackdown on online dissent, multiple members of the Pirate Party, along with free speech activists within the country, have been arrested. Al Jazeera recently profiled the online wars detailing some activists being hit with phishing sites, hacking and government censorship.
OLPC XO-1.75, ARM Marvell Armada 610 version of the XO Laptop!
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.08.11
Posted in News Roundup at 2:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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What better time to create your own calendar for 2011, even better if based on the Linux world ?.
I saw this idea on the site http://cursorlibre.com/ where they made a nice dodecahedron with a Ubuntu theme.
In the download package, there is a pdf version ready to print and assemble, plus a pdf version of a guide in which is explained what parts should be cut and how to bend the paper to obtain the dodecahedron.
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LPI is pleased to introduce another great resource for LPI exam preparation available on YouTube: screencasts from Paul Paulito.com
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Topics for this podcast:
*Our preview of open source highlights for 2011
*Progress spins off open source middleware company FuseSource
*Sonatype Professional highlights Apache Maven commercialization
*Neo Technology updates Neo4j open source graph database
*2011 to be year of Linux in cloud computing
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Kernel Space
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A new longterm 2.6.34.8 kernel has been released. This release contains security fixes and all 2.6.34 users are encouraged to update. This continues the 2.6.34 stable series under the new “longterm” name.
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The developer behind the grsecurity project, Brad Spengler, has pointed out that most of the privilege control capabilities implemented under Linux carry a significant potential for compromising a system and wreaking other havoc.
The intended purpose of capabilities is to prevent precisely that by restricting services and processes to certain operations and specific resources. Among other things, they aim to reduce the effects of successful attacks and can, for example, prevent an exploit for an office tool from installing a back door because the office tool doesn’t have the capabilities required for binding services to network ports. Capabilities can also make it unnecessary to use SUID – Ubuntu and Fedora are considering this approach. OpenWall has reportedly already implemented it in version 3.0, which was released towards the end of December: The standard installation doesn’t contain a single SUID program.
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This week most of the world did not notice Linus Torvald, the creator of Linux, releasing the next generation of the Linux kernel, since everyone who is anyone is either at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, or watching every bit of news surrounding it.
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Graphics Stack
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One of the points that Linux users commonly say in lobbying hardware vendors to provide open-source drivers and/or documentation — particularly for GPU drivers — is that the open-source community will take the released code or documents and from there develop it into a reliable, working open-source Linux driver. However, that isn’t exactly true.
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A limitation though of today’s open-source push is that it only supports the Radeon HD 6000 “Northern Islands” GPUs as in the Barts, Turks, and Caicos GPUs, but not the newest GPUs under the Cayman codename, which are the Radeon HD 6900 graphics processors. There’s significant enough differences in the ASICs that the support couldn’t be delivered at the same time. When this Cayman support is delivered, it will come only atop the Gallium3D driver and not the classic Mesa driver.
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Yesterday afternoon AMD released the Radeon HD 6000 series open-source support for all non-Cayman GPUs. We covered the initial information regarding this kernel DRM / Mesa / DDX code drop well, but there’s a few more tid-bits of information to pass along now that we have received additional feedback from AMD’s John Bridgman and Alex Deucher and have also had time to look at the code patches ourself.
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Following a challenging week for Intel’s Sandy Bridge Linux support in other publications getting the open-source graphics drivers working, Intel came forward to supply us with a Sandy Bridge processor so we can carry out the tests using the needed Linux Kernel / Mesa / DDX / libva Git code. We don’t even need to wait for Intel to send out any hardware, as it was hand-delivered today during a meeting with them.
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After over four years of hoopla, AMD has finally announced the low-power Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit chips. These Fusion APUs incorporate multi-core x86 CPU, DirectX 11 capable graphics with parallel processing engine, dedicated HD video acceleration block and high-speed bus for speedier data processing across the cores. Intel had just announced the Sandy Bridge CPUs and to complement them in the CPU game, AMD rolled out the new low-power platform Brazos based Fusion APUs for notebooks and desktops. The low-power Fusion APU loaded Tablets and embedded devices would be made available in the first quarter of this year.
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Applications
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Appindicator was first introduced in Ubuntu karmic as a replacement for the Gnome panel applet. It is a small applet to display information from various applications consistently in the panel. It can also be used as a access point to access (and control) the application without having to open the application. if you are running Ubuntu Lucid or Maverick, you should see the messaging menu (the applet that contains Empathy, Evolution and Gwibber icons), which is a good example of an appindicator.
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As I’ve mentioned before, my multimedia skills and taste probably cater to the average medieval user, but even so, my choice of programs should be decent enough. Without bombarding you with too many options, you have an adequate selection, whether you like KDE or Gnome, whether you prefer free or slightly proprietary software, or better yet, care nothing for things of that sort.
This compilation is a good starting point. Pick any among the top listed candidates and you will enjoy your media experience. If you’re a fresh Windows convert or just someone looking for more information on media players in Linux, you have a solid baseline, now.
Amarok is probably the best KDE player, Totem is the best Gnome player, VLC and MPlayer are the best all-around programs. Banshee has music stores, Amarok displays lyrics, Totem can stream Youtube, VLC will play subtitles, and XBMC is a complete media center. Your oyster has just turned a pearly one.
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Currently there are some features that need to be completed and some bugs that prevent GIMP 2.8 from being finally released. Martin Nordholts just posted something about that on the official mailing list. There is also a discussion about spending money for fixing bugs (so-called bounties), which could be a good way to speed things up. However in the past the devs didn’t like the idea of bounties, because it is difficult to determine what bugs are eligible of being bountied, and of course it isn’t so easy to get a good workflow for a bounty-system in place.
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Proprietary
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This is a snapshot of Opera 11.01, a possible future minor/bugfix release for Opera 11.
In addition to mouse gesture fixes and various other things, we have also looked at the top crashers in Opera 11, and several of them have been fixed in this snapshot.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’ve recently seen a screencast by gotbletu about setting up hot corners for the Compiz Grid plugin which is not hard to set up but it requires a lot of copying and pasting so I though I’d make a script to do everything automatically so to achieve exactly what you see in the video, all you have to do is run the script I’ve created.
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Wine
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While unrelated to one another, the Wine development community has released their newest development build (Wine v1.3.11) following TransGaming’s announcement earlier this morning of GameTree Linux replacing Cedega for running Windows games under Linux.
The Wine 1.3.11 release isn’t too interesting. Its changes include using PO files for translations, JavaScript improvements, fixes to the Wine debugger, translation updates, and various bug-fixes.
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I’m happier than a pig in mud today, after getting copies of three of my favorite games off gog.com, and finding that they all work flawlessly in Arch Linux and wine.
I’ve mentioned my unnatural affection for Neverwinter Nights, and I have an original boxed copy of the Platinum edition. I even “maintain” (if I can call it that) a quick step-through for a script that installs it.
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Games
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Here’s something interesting, but all of the details are not yet known at this time as the official announcement doesn’t seem to have been issued yet. TransGaming, the company behind the Cedega software for running Windows games on Linux, is going to be replacing the Cedega Gaming Service with something now called GameTree Linux.
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I thought I’d be nice to make a little list of some of the GNU/Linux games I’ve tried out this past year. I’ve tried to keep the list heterogeneous (different game genres, all from different producers, some freshly released and some quite older…).
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Bioware’s Infinity Engine was home to many great games in past that totally defined RPG game genre with deep storyline, engaging gameplay, isometric graphics, and dungeons and dragons rules based gameplay. Almost all the games under infinity engine became hugely popular and are even today considered to be best games in their genre with huge dedicated fan base.
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Developers can take the engine and use it as they please, without having to pay the creators any money for the licence. This has helped the Spring engine build up a roster of games that will please even the most seasoned RTS fan.
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Hedgewars, a popular open source Worms-like strategy game, has received a winter update which brings a variety of new features.
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Looking for something to while away the hours? Try some of these open source games
Gaming has never been a strong point in the open source world, but gradually things are getting better and more open source games are emerging for Linux, as well as other non-open source platforms. Here we look at some of the better open source games, most of which run on multiple platforms.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Today, KDE has issued a series of stable updates to the Plasma workspaces, the various applications and the KDE development frameworks, versioned 4.5.5. Between 4.5.4 and 4.5.5 there have been 54 commits to the codebase, so the somewhat meagre changelog does not include all the fixes.
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Packages for the release of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6 RC 2 are available for Kubuntu 10.10 and Natty.
These are beta packages for beta software, expect bugs.
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GNOME Desktop
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Persistent and resident notifications enable complete interaction between the user and the application using only notifications. In GNOME 2, authors would use GtkStatusIcon to anchor the information shown in the notifications, but this is no longer necessary and the applications should move away from the GtkStatusIcon usage. The suggestions for individual applications and system components can be found in these compatibility guidelines. Please find us on #gnome-shell IRC if you would like to discuss the use of the notifications by your application in GNOME 3 or help out with the message tray features.
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Features:
inside the pack there is a customization script that give the possibility to change between:
* 84 distributor logos (this number is growing according to the requests)
* 34 folder types
* 4 trash types
* 5 computer icons
* 5 gome icons
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This is a nice pack of themes for Gnome shell, the pack contains 6 nice themes : deviantart theme that is based on the deviantART website, Gaia theme based on gaia style, a site raising awareness of climate change, Dark Glass, Elementary -Based on the GTK theme, Equinox Ambiance Light theme ,Ambiance – (Based on the GTK theme in Ubuntu 10.04), Sonar – Based on the GTK theme in openSUSE and finally Tron Legacy.
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Arch Linux is a distribution for advanced linux user. The basic goal of Arch Linux is to provide users with a fast & smooth linux experience. I’ve been using Arch Linux for over a month now & I’m quite liking it. If you’re a seasoned linux user & want to try out a new distro then maybe Arch Linux is for you. Here are five reasons I feel Arch Linux rocks.
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Reviews
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Aside from those quibbles, I quite like Zorin OS 4. I’m going to leave it on this laptop and use it for work indefinitely. When the next Ubuntu comes out in April, I may need somewhere to go to still have Gnome available, and right now it’s quite possible Zorin OS will become my default choice.
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Barry Kauler created Puppy Linux, bringing out version 0.1 in June 2003. Now Puppy Linux
reached its Lucid 5.2 version, an independent, minimalist Linux distribution for the desktop.
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New Releases
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OK, this is the list of final releases I’m waiting for (im)patiently during this year…
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) closed Thursday’s trading session at $46.25. In the past year, the stock has hit a 52-week low of $26.51 and 52-week high of $49.00. Red Hat stock has been showing support around $45.64 and resistance in the $47.02 range.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Community is a deeply personal experience. While write communities such as Open Source get together to make things (as opposed to read communities who consume content together), the attraction and thrill is only partially in the collaboration. What really makes write communities fun are the personal relationships that develop; what starts as nicknames on a screen shortly burst with life and become friends who we enjoy spending time with, sharing our ideas with, and in many cases relying on to help us through tough patches of our lives. The very reason Open Source and community attracted me in the first place is that this is not just boring, cold, and unfeeling computing, it is computing driven by people who share their humanity to make the world a better place.
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Everyone knows I love web apps. You have two extremes. Old school “native apps and in control of my data” and then the other which is basically ChromeOS; No local state, all web. Most people are in the middle. You might love Gmail but the thought of having a remote word processor might not work for you.
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Its that time of the year again! We’re having the Ubuntu User Days!
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Another day and another device finds itself capable of running Ubuntu.
This time the device in question is Barnes and Noble’s ‘Nook Colour’ eBook reader.
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Chinese company Nufront has announced a series of laptops powered by ARM chips and running Ubuntu. It is good to see Ubuntu’s presence at CES through a Chinese vendor, but it’s also disheartening to see that the entire tablet market that could have been Ubuntu’s forte has gone to Google’s Android. None of the major brands are considering Ubuntu on the machines.
Brands like Sony don’t have issues with GNU/Linux; their love for Android proves that. Then what are we missing here? Why we don’t get Ubuntu running popular brand? What’s stopping the same companies which adore Android to keep a distance from Ubuntu? Only Canonical can answer, we can only speculate.
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Two Nufront laptops were actually unveiled at the show, according to reports: one 10-inch and another 14-inch version. Both are powered by a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 running at 2GHz, and both are displayed running Ubuntu. Either 1 or 2GB of RAM is expected.
A reference design of the 10-inch model, for instance, features HDMI output, full-size VGA, two USB hosts, and an SD card. It is reportedly “very light” and offers lengthy battery capability, but no further details were available.
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I originally wrote this script for myself to simplify the installation of Ubuntu 10.10 on multiple computers, it includes the Medibuntu repositories and all multimedia codecs, restricted, multiverse and others to play all audio or video files. A friend suggested that I should make this available to a wider audience by putting it on Infowars Ireland – Basically it involves installing an Ubuntu ‘command line system’ and then running a Bash Script which downloads and installs everything for you.
Not included in this installation are most of the default applications normally bundled with Ubuntu, there is no Totem media player – VLC and Gnome Mplayer do the job very nicely instead, GMplayer provides the functionality for Mozilla browsers to play absolutely all multimedia content on the internet, all the plugins are configured, including the Flash plugin which gets installed during initial set-up.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Amino Communications is to launch an “add-on” set-top box to add new functions to existing pay-TV services.
Based on the Cambridge-based company’s Freedom media centre, the Freedom Jump is powered by the Intel Atom processor CE4100 and the MeeGo Linux operating system for TV.
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Independent iPhone and Macintosh developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been able to get MeeGo Linux running on the HTC HD2 smartphone.
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In a quiet corner of the giant Intel booth at CES there’s a not-so-crowded demo stand with the the label MeeGo. There you’ll find the WeTab tablet, the first MeeGo tab already shipping in Europe. From this underwhelming beginning the Intel/Nokia-sponsored effort, now under the direction of the Linux Foundation, hopes to offer a better open source alternative to Android.
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Android
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The report, which takes into account smartphone subscribers over the age of 13, puts RIM at the top of the smartphone platforms with a 33.5% market share over the three month period – it did however find its market share drop 4.1% from 37.6%.
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Most people with an Android phone remember the first time they used Shazam to tag a song they heard on the radio. It was one of the coolest apps in the early days of Android and probably one of the most used when people wanted to show off what their new smartphone could do.
VideoSurf hopes to recreate that same magical experience, but this time with video.
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AV equipment maker Parrot has stuffed Android into its newest in-car entertainment system, bringing a 3.2″ touchscreen and Google features to your car stereo. It is a significantly more elegant solution for Google Maps and GPS than licking a suction pad and sticking a cheap car dock to your windscreen.
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AT&T gave us a sneak peek at the Motorola Atrix 4G this morning, but it was up to Motorola to announce the full details of the device at its CES press conference that ended a few minutes ago.
As we told you, the Atrix’s biggest draws will be its dual-core processor and support for AT&T’s 4G network. Yet, a deeper dive shows some equally impressive features plus a unique accessory. We’ll start with the device first.
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Motorola kicked off the Verizon 4G extravaganza that was promised this week when it introduced the Droid Bionic, one of the first few phones to run on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. If that wasn’t enough to have the tech enthusiasts drooling, it even boasts a dual-core processor, with each core running at 1GHz for a total of 2GHz. And from what little we saw of it, we have to say we’re impressed.
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Asus introduced four tablets today, the Eee Pad Slider, a 10-inch Android tablet with a slide-out keyboard, the Eee Pad Transformer, another 10-incher with a breakaway keyboard, a 7-inch Android tab and a 12-inch Intel Core i7-powered Windows 7 “slate.”
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Tablets
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Maybe the shiny videos of Android 3 have whetted your appetite, or perhaps you’d rather have a full-on Linux installation with all the Gnome/KDE bells and whistles. Alternatively, you could be getting tempted by Apple’s famed Reality Distortion Field, or you just think that tablets are a silly fad that will go away soon.
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New York-based consulting and research firm GROUND Lab has come up with one of the most creative implementations of open source technology I’ve ever seen. As part of a collaborative effort with Lion Guardians and Living With Lions, the GROUND Lab development team is building an open source lion tracking collar system. At first glance, the idea may seem a little odd, but once you understand the reasoning behind it, it’s actually quite awesome.
The Maasai tribe in Southern Kenya raise and herd cattle as a primary source of income and sustenance within their community. Unfortunately, the local lions find their livestock to be a pretty tasty buffet so the Maasai keep the lions at bay by killing them. Conservationists estimate there are only about 2,000 lions left in Kenya and they may disappear entirely within the next two years if the Maasai continue to hunt them.
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GROUND LAB is a research and development company focused on designing and fabricating prototypes and solutions for a wide range of clients, ranging from large organizations like UNICEF to smaller NGOs, conservationists and artists. We use the open source approach in our development not only for the benefits and context described previously, but also for the advantages it provides for our clients.
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Reporting to the Operations Manager of the Open Source Lab, the Analyst Programmer will contribute in-depth knowledge of open source software development using languages such as Python, Ruby and Java.
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Events
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The fifth ODF plugfest will take place at Maidenhead town hall, in the Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, on February 24/25th 2011.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Greg Jopa, an Illinois State University grad student studying web development, built a web-based guitar tab player using Firefox’s Audio Data API and Vexflow (HTML5 music notation rendering API). Here is some details from Greg. You can also read more about this experiment on his blog.HTML5 Guitar Tab Player with the Firefox 4 Audio Data API
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Today was my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I’m leaving to work at the law firm of Greenberg, Traurig. This was not an easy decision for me to make, but I’m pretty sure that it is the right one, both for me and for Mozilla.
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Desktop Firefox added native support for a subset of the window.console API. It’s a subset in that only the following API methods are supported:
* console.log(arguments)
* console.info(arguments)
* console.warn(arguments)
* console.error(arguments)
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Oracle
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Yesterday and today there’s been patches published by Oracle’s Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk that make it possible for open-source GPU Linux drivers that use the TTM (Translation Table Maps) in-kernel memory management to work within Xen virtualization. The TTM drivers include the open-source Radeon and Nouveau DRM drivers, among others.
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Of course, the devil’s in the details, and the details aren’t at all apparent. Perhaps Oracle is saying that, among other things, you can open a Word .doc or .docx file with Oracle Open Office, then share that opened (and converted) document via Oracle Cloud Office. That’s a little bit different than collaboratively editing a native Office document.
The Oracle Cloud Office data sheet [PDF] mentions that Oracle Cloud Office has browser-based collaboration capabilities using Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It also says that you can “view documents on smartphones and tablets” — implying that collaborative editing can’t take place on a mobile device.
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Sometimes, relatively small things can make a big impact. Take the case of the MySQL database. First released in 1995 and purchased by Sun in 2008, MySQL has quickly graduated from the realm of hobbyists to the world of business, becoming the leading open source database for many Web applications and an integral part of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Web application stack. Almost a year after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, MySQL plays an even bigger role in enterprises of all sizes worldwide.
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CMS
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Yesterday I started playing with Drupal 7 since it hit final, and it’s different. I am far too used to Drupal 6, so it’s a case of unlearning some things to use Drupal 7. To be honest, I’m still kinda lost at times in the UI but that’s just familiarity. I have a few obvious changes to relearn.
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Showing how social networking was a hot trend in 2010, open-source project Diaspora topped Black Duck’s third annual “Rookies of the Year” list, which distinguishes the most “buzz-worthy” open-source projects started last year.
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That means Drupal 7 is adding native support for the W3C’s RDFa – a set of XHTML attributes that are designed to turn human readable data into data that’s readable by machines. That could be data such as a location’s map coordinates. RDFa is already being used by Google (see here).
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Business
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A few years back, a host of open-source businesses raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the promise that they would commoditize old, dying markets, and make a bundle of money in the process. Missing from this thesis, however, was its logical conclusion: winning in a fading market is tantamount to losing, as the commoditizing vendor goes down with the sinking ship.
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In the wake of the news that open source online conferencing and collaboration provider Dimdim is being swallowed up by cloud CRM provider Salesforce, one conclusion seems clear: Many long-standing open source applications are low hanging fruit for powerful proprietary software companies to acquire and metamorphosize for their own purposes. It’s easy to be lulled into thinking that this is happening at the same rate that it used to, but the rate at which well-known open source technologies are being flipped under the wing of proprietary software companies is in fact picking up pace exponentially. In Dimdim’s case, there are positive and negative aspects of the buyout.
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BSD
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The most common Linux file-systems we talk about at Phoronix are of course Btrfs and EXT4 while the ZFS file-system, which is available on Linux as a FUSE (user-space) module or via a recent kernel module port, gets mentioned a fair amount too. When it comes to the FreeBSD and PC-BSD operating systems, ZFS is looked upon as the superior, next-generation option that is available to BSD users. However, with the DragonFlyBSD operating system there is another option: HAMMER. In this article we are seeing how the performance of this original creation within the DragonFlyBSD project competes with ZFS, UFS, EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs.
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Project Releases
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Blender is an incredible open source cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation. And if you are unaware of the capabilities of Blender, you should watch these stunning Blender made short films and animations you probably haven’t seen ever before. Blender 2.56 beta is the fifth beta release of Blender 2.5. Blender 2.5 is undergoing massive changes and the final release date is still quite uncertain.
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Government
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The application can be used seemlessly out-of-the-box allowing users to begin reaping ROI from the very beginning, or customised to suit the specific needs of a business and its users. It’s unique in so far users can choose to host the application either in the cloud or on-premise, and gives users the flexibility to access their data in whatever location they are.
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White House officials on Friday sent agency chief information officers and senior procurement executives a memo directing them to weigh open source options when buying technology.
Open source refers to technology based on nonproprietary parts, which allow third-party developers to improve and modify the product without having to pay the technology’s maker. Advocates have said a move toward open source in the government could save taxpayer dollars and bolster security.
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Openness/Sharing
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There has been a big response to Dave Briggs’s blogpost, Is there a need for a local government skunkworks?, some of which Dave summarises here. Dave’s point goes beyond the traditional technology-prototyping skunkworks, familiar from companies like Lockheed Martin, and I think he is really asking “do we need to have a machine/structure that will create and implement innovation in local government?”.
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In this exclusive interview, Susan Spencer Conklin tells Linux Pro Magazine how she re-entered the open source world with a project that combines her programming skills with her interest in fashion. Susan explains how her vision for an open source fashion tool has expanded since she first introduced the Tau Meta Tau Physica application at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels last fall.
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Open Data
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New plans to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to open up government and other bodies to public scrutiny, were unveiled by the Ministry of Justice today.
The changes will make it easier for people to use FOI to find and use information about the public bodies they rely on and their taxes pay for, by:
* increasing the number of organisations to which FOI requests can be made, bringing in bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Financial Services Ombudsman, and higher education admissions body UCAS; and also all companies wholly owned by any number of public authorities
[..]
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We want to give a short update on the announcement of the winners of our first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. We originally planned to announce these winners tomorrow, but will now make the announcement on Tuesday, January 11th.
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Below are some of the edits in two NPfIT Gateway Reviews that officials published after removing all useful information.
The published portions of the reviews exclude all information on the progress or otherwise of the projects under scrutiny. All of the findings and recommendations in each review have also been excluded.
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Jon Stewart Calls Out Facebook, Goldman Sachs for Their Shady New Deal
On Monday, news broke that Goldman Sachs had invested $500 million into Facebook, valuing Mark Zuckerberg’s social network at $50 billion. Tonight, Jon Stewart laid bare the real—and hypocritical—reason for the investment: an avoidance of government-regulated transparency. Uh-oh.
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Open Access/Content
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Nature Publishing Group has long been a leader in scientific and medical publishing. The company’s flagship publication, Nature, has been publishing across a broad range of scientific disciplines since 1869 and is the world’s most cited interdisciplinary journal. In the past several years, Timo Hannay as head of web publishing and Annette Thomas as CEO of MacMillian (NPG’s parent company) successfully brought NPG into the digital age with a wide variety of new scientific journals and projects that leverage the power of the Internet.
As part of this program, NPG has made very clear its support of open access publishing. Last month, the company announced that an additional 15 of its journals now offer open access options. And this week, the company announced a brand new online open access journal called Scientific Reports. With this launch, a full 80% of NPG academic and society journals and 50% of all journals the company publishes offer open access options to authors.
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Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG? And why oh why does NPG keep insisting on a non-commercial licence? I think those merit separate posts so here I’m just going to deal with the big issue. And I think this is really big.
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Open Hardware
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Arduino The Documentary is finally out. We have been waiting for long, but now you can see it at Vimeo (EN, ES) and download it from Archive.org (links coming soon). The file is licensed under CC-SA 3.0 and can be redistributed.
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All broadband technologies are suffering badly from bufferbloat, as are many other parts of the Internet.
You suffer from bufferbloat nearly everywhere: if not at home or your office, then when you travel, you will find many hotels are now connected by broadband connections, and you often suffer grievous latency and jitter since they have not mitigated bufferbloat and are sharing the connection with many others. (More about mitigation strategies soon). How easy/difficult to fix those technologies is clearly dependent on the details of those technologies; full solutions depend on active queue management; some other mitigations are possible (just set the buffers to something sane, as they are often up to a megabyte in size now, as the ICSI data show), as I’ll describe later in this sequence of blog posts.
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I don’t want to join the sheer hate campaign against Nick Clegg. Not because I want to be generous to him on his birthday, even though I’m a humanist. But for three reasons: it is driven by Labour scapegoating that displaces the way they screwed up onto the Lib Dems; because it displaces attention from the Prime Minister who is the prime mover and architect of government policy and goes along with his use of Clegg as a heat shield; and because Nick Clegg is not a cynical, wicked politician. In fact his problem may be that he does not know how to be a politician at all.
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The No. 1 most-pirated show—that would be ABC’s Lost, which was illegally downloaded nearly six million times—had a strange characteristic about it. It was available, for at least several months of 2010, for free via Hulu.
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It’s commonly accepted that widespread national television helped smooth over many local US accents and standardized “proper” English usage; will services like Twitter, where people use more colloquial language, have the same effect on regional slang? A new study from Carnegie Mellon University finds that, so far, regional variation is alive and well on Twitter. All yinz in Pittsburgh and all yous in New Jersey can still find plenty of support on the microblogging service.
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Plans for a new ‘Free school’ in Wandsworth will include pupils from households from rich households, but deliberately exclude students from poorer households, even though the latter are 0.2 km nearer to the selected site.
The ‘Free schools’ policy has been loudly championed by Conservative minister Michael Gove. It allows practically anyone to get state funding to set up a school.
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Superstar Supreme Court litigator Thomas Goldstein — who has argued 22 cases before the high court, racked up numerous honors from legal and general-interest publications, and, most importantly, served as a judge of ATL Idol — is leaving Akin Gump.
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Science
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The Deepwater Horizon oil leak released far more than just crude oil; prodigious amounts of methane gas also spewed out of the well. This gas was responsible for many of the problems associated with the disaster. While the well was uncapped, all of that methane ended up being released into the ocean. A study in today’s issue of Science, however, suggests that it never made it to the surface. Instead, a large bloom of methane-eating bacteria seems to have thrived during the leak. The authors of the new paper suggest that their results have implications for some future climate change scenarios.
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The Sun’s core is millions of degrees, while the solar surface is a balmy 5800 kelvin. But travel to the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and it heats up to millions of degrees again. The corona is a wispy plasma envelope extending millions of miles above the Sun’s surface. Why the tenuous atmosphere above the sun is hotter than the actual surface has remained a mystery. One generic explanation has been that magnetic fields must be involved, but getting beyond this superficial understanding has required more detailed observations.
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In an example of Republican obstructionism rendered beautiful by its simplicity, the GOP yesterday killed a House bill that would increase funding for scientific research and math and science education by forcing Democrats to vote in favor of federal employees viewing pornography.
Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the ranking member of the House science committee, introduced a motion to recommit, a last-ditch effort to change a bill by sending it back to the committee with mandatory instructions.
In this case, Republicans included a provision that would bar the federal government from paying the salaries of employees who’ve been disciplined for viewing pornography at work.
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AS a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere — think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods — has its limits.
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Health/Nutrition
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This data mining is a multiple-billion dollar business, and drug makers say it is invaluable in helping them promote new drugs to physicians. Last year, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said this data helps the industry “properly educate doctors about prescription drugs and their characteristics…in a more targeted and expedited manner.”
But lawmakers in three New England states moved to halt the practice. They said the tracking of prescriptions “really interferes with the doctor-patient relationship and leads to more spending on expensive drugs,” according to Sharon Treat, a Maine legislator and executive director of the National Legislative Assn. on Prescription Drug Prices.
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Security
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How much spam you get depends on three main things, how many spammers know (or guess) your email address, how good your spam filtering is, and of course, how active the spammers are.
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On 3 January 2011, RIPE NCC officially ushered in a new era in internet routing. 73 of RIPE’s 7,000-odd members have already certified IP address blocks. The practice is intended to prevent future internet routing ‘hijacks’, but should also help prevent incorrect addressing. In practice, the latter is more frequently responsible for sites temporarily disappearing from the web than hacking.
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This feature allowed owners to install their own Linux OS onto the console, giving them the ability to create and run their own applications, and to load apps developed by other users.
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With phones falling into the wrong hands every day and California residents subject to warrantless cellphone searches, now’s a pretty good time to think about protecting your smartphone.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Narco gangs have opened a new front in South America’s expanding drug war by seizing control of parts of northern Guatemala, prompting the government to suspend civil liberties and declare a state of siege in the area.
Hundreds of soldiers have reinforced police units in an offensive against a Mexican cartel known as the Zetas which is said to have overrun Alta Verapaz province.
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Nineteenth-century anarchists promoted what they called the “propaganda of the deed,” that is, the use of violence as a symbolic action to make a larger point, such as inspiring the masses to undertake revolutionary action. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, modern terrorist organizations began to conduct operations designed to serve as terrorist theater, an undertaking greatly aided by the advent and spread of broadcast media. Examples of attacks designed to grab international media attention are the September 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the December 1975 raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. Aircraft hijackings followed suit, changing from relatively brief endeavors to long, drawn-out and dramatic media events often spanning multiple continents.
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2010 was not a particularly good year for airline safety. Data put together by Ascend, which provides information to the aviation industry, show that the year’s rate of one fatal accident for every 1.3m flights compared poorly with one per 1.5m in 2009 (the safest year ever). Similarly, the number of fatal accidents rose from 23 in 2009 to 28 in 2010. And passenger deaths on passenger revenue flights rose from 609 to 726, of whom 472 died in four main accidents.
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Federal restrictions will be relaxed on the export of open-source software that incorporates strong encryption, the US government announced on Friday in a lengthy disclosure.
The effect of the changes announced in the US Federal Register is that cryptography software now may be exported to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan as long as the source code from which it was derived is already “publicly available”. To qualify for the exemption, exporters must first notify the federal government exactly where the code is located.
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female jail guard’s strip search of a male inmate was a “humiliating event” that violated his rights, a divided federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Wednesday.
Such searches of a prisoner by a guard of the opposite sex are unconstitutional except in an emergency, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 6-5 decision.
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Civil and human rights advocates filed an emergency petition [pdf] this week with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in an effort to halt the imminent deportation of hundreds of Haitian nationals by the U.S. government, calling the move a “death sentence.”
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Cablegate
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But among the more interesting revelations in this piece: at one point, VF reports that Assange threatened to sue The Guardian because he was upset that the newspaper secured an unauthorized copy of one leak “package” from a Wikileaks volunteer, and was considering breaking the embargo.
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For the past seven months, 22-year-old US Army Private Bradley Manning, first in an army prison in Kuwait, now in the brig in Quantico, Virginia, has been held 23 hours out of 24 in solitary confinement in his cell, under constant harassment. If his eyes close between 5am and 8pm he is jolted awake. In daylight hours he has to respond “yes” to guards every five minutes. For an hour a day he is taken to another cell where he walks figures of eight. If he stops he is taken back to his other cell.
[...]
Accusations that his treatment amounts to torture have been indignantly denounced by prominent conservatives calling for him to be summarily executed. After the columnist Glenn Greenwald publicised Manning’s treatment in mid-December, there was a moderate commotion. The UN’s top monitor of torture is investigating his case.
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I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab.
Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That’s what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).
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The letter was signed by David Jaris; and outlined some very interesting quotes stated by Obama himself.
“We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk. . . Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.”
~ Senator Barack Obama, 2008
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Until Cablegate, this situation, while theoretically problematic, was something that most geeks accepted as some kind of necessary evil inherent to capitalism. It seemed unlikely that Amazon or PayPal would bow down to pressure from the governments of Vietnam, Azerbaijan, or Tunisia (the moral resolve of Facebook and Google, which had ads to sell in these very markets, was a different case). Likewise, it seemed unlikely that democratic governments would want to bully the intermediaries rather than pursue their grievances via the legal system.
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The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of 63 members of Iceland’s national parliament, said this afternoon that Twitter notified her of the order’s existence and told her she has 10 days to oppose the request for information about her account since November 1, 2009.
“I think I am being given a message, almost like someone breathing in a phone,” Jónsdóttir said in a Twitter message.
The order (PDF) also covers “subscriber account information” for Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private charged with leaking classified information; Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum; Dutch hacker and XS4ALL Internet provider co-founder Rop Gonggrijp; and Wikileaks editor Julian Assange.
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Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir — a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament — announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information “about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir’s announcement.
What hasn’t been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter — which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested — seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account.
The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present. A copy of the Order served on Twitter, obtained exclusively by Salon, is here.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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*
Republicans have wasted no time in using their new majority in Congress to try to block the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to act on climate change.
In their first full day in the new Congress, Republicans outlined three different bills – encapsulating three different strategies – aimed at limiting the powers of the EPA. It also shut down a house committee that had tackled energy and climate issues.
The first, introduced by Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, would declare that greenhouse gas emissions are not subject to the Clean Air Act – even though supreme court ruled in 2007 that they are.
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Federal and Louisiana officials got into a heated argument Friday over the cleanup of oiled marshes during a tour of an area that remains fouled 8 1/2 months after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.
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THOUSANDS of dead crabs and mysterious deposits of black sand have littered the Thanet coastline.
Environmental experts belive the cold weather is again to blame for the deaths of velvet swimming crabs, which have been found at Palm, Walpole and Westbrook Bays.
In January 2010, the dead bodies of 30,000 to 40,000 of the crabs – also known as devil crabs – came ashore.
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Finance
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This is, in many ways, the exact opposite of what was intended with things like SOX — which was designed to increase oversight. But, instead, it’s done the opposite. The end result is that wealthy clients of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms can invest in these companies, but others cannot. Now, some might claim that this is a “good” thing, in that the general public shouldn’t be investing in highly risky stocks that could easily collapse. But, it’s also creating a tiered system where these companies are able to avoid going public for much longer, but the wealthy and well-connected can get in at about the same point that the public used to be able to get in. And, they are buying. Goldman has already announced that it’s already oversubscribed.
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As lawmakers and the White House engage in another game of economic chicken, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says hitting the debt ceiling would cause ‘catastrophic damage to the economy.’
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Ex-Labour MP David Chaytor has been jailed for 18 months for fraudulently claiming more than £20,000 in expenses.
Chaytor, 61, the former MP for Bury North, last month admitted three charges of false accounting.
He submitted bogus invoices for IT consultancy work and claimed rent he never paid on homes owned by his family, the court was told.
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A small network of hedge fund executives pumped at least $10 million into Republican campaign committees and allied groups in last year’s elections, helping bankroll GOP victories that changed the balance of power in Washington, according to a review of campaign records and interviews with industry insiders.
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Just as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. prepares to unveil business standards aimed at improving its reputation after settling fraud charges last year, the Facebook Inc. stock sale to clients shines new light on the firm’s potential conflicts of interest.
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The S.E.C. is interested in several issues surrounding Goldman’s Facebook deal, including its structure and news media reports about the offering, which was supposed to remain private, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
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From a high level:
2009 REVENUE: $775 million
2009 PROFIT: $200 million
2010 REVENUE: ~$2 billion
2010 PROFIT: ~$500 million
So, based on this, is the company WORTH the $50 billion that Goldman’s clients are desperate to buy it for?
The answer, as always, is “It depends.”
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The Supreme Judicial Court has upheld a Land Court judge’s decision in U.S. Bank v. Ibanez invalidating foreclosure sales conducted by two plaintiff banks to which mortgages had been assigned.
“We agree with the judge that the plaintiffs, who were not the original mortgagees, failed to make the required showing that they were the holders of the mortgages at the time of foreclosure,” Judge Ralph D. Gants wrote for the SJC. “As a result, they did not demonstrate that the foreclosure sales were valid to convey title to the subject properties.”
The banks claimed that “securitization documents” they submitted established valid assignments that made them the holders of the two mortgages before the notice of sale and the foreclosure sale.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The new chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been sending letters to various companies and industry groups asking business leaders what regulations they think should be stricken — and among those whose ideas he solicited are companies with a history of serious wrongdoing.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Need to get around a Chinese government firewall? Burning to smuggle your samizdat writings past Iranian Internet censorship? Hoping to blog with impunity in Burma? Uncle Sam wants to help. The US government has a $30 million pot of money to spend on “Internet freedom” programs around the world, and it’s not afraid to make a few enemies.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year gave a major speech on Internet freedom and the new “Information Curtain” of censorship that has fallen in some parts of the world. In that speech, she said that State would support development of tools that can bypass Internet censorship. She also outlined a program in which State would fund mobile phone apps that allow people to rate government ministries on responsiveness and efficiency and that can ferret out corruption through crowdsourcing. The hardware is already in the wild, she said; all what’s needed is some money to make it worth developers’ time.
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According to This is Derbyshire, Conservative MP Heather Wheeler wants police to be able to access raw Streetview footage without needing a court order because proper checks on what the police are up to are “a waste of public money”. This is despite the fact that the UK already tops the Google snoopers chart when measured as a number of requests per person in the country.
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Unless you’ve been under a rock the past week, you probably have heard about Ted Williams, the homeless guy in Columbus, Ohio, who panhandles off of a highway, but whose panhandling sign noted that he had an amazing radio voice. Someone from the Columbus Dispatch shot a short video of the guy showing off his voice, and after it went up on YouTube it went viral. Within days there were over a million views, and people were talking about how the guy really deserved a voice over job. The Cleveland Cavaliers offered him a job and apparently MSNBC has hired him to do some voiceover work. All that sounds good.
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Dr Binayak Sen — a man who has now become a cause célèbre across the country — was sentenced to life imprisonment by a sessions court in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, for “conspiracy to commit sedition”. Sen had worked for 30 years with the tribal poor in the state both as a doctor and a human rights activist. According to the Chhattisgarh state, however, Sen is a dangerous Maoist leader who is a serious threat to national security.
There was a spontaneous surge of outrage in civil society and the media over this scandalous miscarriage of justice. But there was little that could be done. The State had timed itself well. It was a day before Christmas. The high court and Supreme Court were on vacation; most lawyers were away. It would be at least two weeks before Sen’s family could appeal. Enough time for the dread to sink in; the message to go out.
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Facebook CEO Makes the Rounds With Tech Executives, Fueling Speculation Over Effort to End Ban
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China has made steady progress in containing the spread of illegal publications and cracking down on the dissemination of lewd content through the Internet and mobile phones in 2010, according to the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications.
The office has recently disclosed the following facts and figures about the related efforts China has made so far this year:
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Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.
Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.
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Delving into privacy concerns in the age of the smart phone, the California Supreme Court determined today that after police take a cell phone from a suspect during an arrest, they can search the phone’s text messages without a warrant.
The majority in the 5-2 decision reasoned that U.S. Supreme Court precedents call for cell phones to be treated as personal property “immediately associated” with the suspect’s person.
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There is a delicious irony in the reluctance of Facebook to go public. Mark Zuckerberg may not care for your privacy but it seems he can see some advantages to his own; hence the company’s preference for private share placings and the use of Goldman Sachs to create a secondary market for its shares
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Marketers are tracking smartphone users through “apps” – games and other software on their phones. Some apps collect information including location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex. Apps routinely send the information to marketing companies that use it to compile dossiers on phone users. As part of the What They Know investigative series into data privacy, the Journal analyzed the data collected and shared by 101 popular apps on iPhone and Android phones (including the Journal’s own iPhone app). This interactive database shows the behavior of these apps, and describes what each app told users about the information it gathered.
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The only solution is actually quite simple. In order to gain more control over your privacy and data, you should keep it under your control whenever possible. Handing your data to Facebook, twitter or gmail however is the opposite of that. You hand over your data under typically broad terms of use that give Facebook, Twitter, Google a lot of rights and leave you in the dark about what actually happens with it.
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Greetings. At this moment — as I type this — the Obama administration is pushing forward with its horrendous DHS-linked “Trusted Internet Identity” scheme (formally – “NSTIC”: “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace”) via a meeting and announcements today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
As I’ve discussed in Why the New Federal “Trusted Internet Identity” Proposal is Such a Very Bad Idea and postings linked within that article, NSTIC is an incredibly dangerous concept fraught with all manner of major direct and collateral risks to individuals, organizations, freedom of speech, and civil rights in general.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intel’s Sandy Bridge line of processors is impressing the tech community with its power, but a sneaky little feature designed to appease Hollywood has some concerned about Intel’s intentions: Intel Insider.
The new technology, which ships as standard with Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs, is designed to offer a trusted computing platform for high-definition video streaming over the Internet – a sort of HDCP for TCP/IP, as it were.
Taking the Intel Insider technology at its face value, it seems like a win-win scenario for publishers and consumers: it provides a way of turning the humble desktop or laptop PC into a ‘trusted’ device in the same way as a Blu-ray player or HDMI-connected TV, meaning that video streamed over the Internet can be encrypted and piracy made significantly more challenging.
With such technology, studios are significantly more likely to offer streaming services for new-release feature films to PCs – and the fact that the Intel Insider security can be layered over existing Digital Rights Management (DRM) implementations means that Hollywood stays in control of the video the entire time.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Over on Twitter, Brenda Wallace asked me a very good question:
do you know a good umbrella term for things like ACTA, TPPA, 3strikes, guilt on accusation etc. ?
Since I couldn’t think of one, I naturally turned back to Twitter to ask people what they thought. And since I’ve recently joined the all-too trendy Quora, it occurred to me that this was just the kind of thing it was designed to answer: what is effectively a “new” question whose answer is not available elsewhere, but which the collective efforts of qualified people might successfully address.
Literally within minutes, I had dozens of witty suggestions from people on Twitter, which you can see by scrolling this list of tweets; here’s just a small selection:
copygreed
IP enclosure
legislative o’erweening
LRM (legislative rights management)
Corsair Laws
neo-mercantilism
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23andMe, which was founded in 2006, aims to help individuals understand their own genetic information through DNA analysis technologies and Web-based interactive tools. DNA analysis helps participants find information about their ancestry and their risks of getting certain diseases (Michael has tried the service).
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Apparently, Australia has a new rule coming into effect that says all such products must soon be offered in plain packages — and some lobbyists in support of the tobacco companies have been claiming that plain packages violate trademark, and go against Australia’s treaty obligations — including its free trade agreement with the US. For years, we’ve noted that when lobbyists break out the “international obligations” claim, you know that they’re really full of it, but this seems especially ridiculous.
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Copyrights
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Wearing “Piracy is Illegal” T-shirts and carrying several boxes of complaints against file-sharers, a group of movie industry representatives showed up at the Attorney General’s Office doorstep in Portugal this week. By clogging the judicial system they hope to raise awareness of widespread online movie piracy. However, this ideal may backfire as the local Pirate Party believes that the actions of anti-piracy activists may very well be illegal.
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A plagiarism case brought against author JK Rowling has been dismissed in the US, after a judge ruled that comparing the two books involved “strains credulity”.
The estate of British author Adrian Jacobs, who died in 1997, had claimed that Rowling plagiarised part of his book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard for the plot of her fourth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. A PR representative for the Jacobs estate claimed in February that it would be a “billion-dollar case”.
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While many continue fretting over whether and when Spotify will open up Stateside, another digital music company from Sweden is going ahead there – and may even become a beachhead for its better-known compatriot.
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A little noticed statutory instrument that came into force on 1 January, the snappily entitled “The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (Amendment) Regulations 2010″ – SI 2010/2694.
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The Atlantic says it turned its first profit in decades in the fourth quarter of 2010, driven by double-digit revenue increases year-over-year in digital (up 70 percent), events (up 37 percent) and even print (up 27 percent). Overall advertising revenue grew 37 percent.
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Last year when thousands of Internet users had their privacy breached due to the actions of ACS:Law, watchdog Privacy International said it would pursue the anti-piracy law firm for breaching the Data Protection Act. Now, in PI’s 2010 report, there is a suggestion that BSkyB “contaminated” subscriber information it sent to ACS:Law, which led to someone being accused of piracy who had no broadband account with BSkyB.
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Rates of intellectual property infringement in the EU are “alarming”, according to the European Commission. It says that an EU law on IP rights has had some effect, but that the legal measure was not designed to deal with online piracy.
Current laws are not strong enough to combat online IP infringement effectively and powers to compel internet service providers (ISPs) and other intermediaries to take more proactive steps should be examined, the Commission said.
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. What I didn’t realize is that there’s a whole bunch of folks with similar titles. Hillicon Valley has an article about how the MPAA’s content protection staff is shuffling roles, and it mentions how Suh has been promoted from VP of Content Protection to Senior VP of Content Protection (congrats, btw). But the article also points out that his boss, Mike Robinson, has been promoted to Executive VP of Content Protection and his boss is “Chief Content Protection Officer” Daniel Mandil.
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If you watch our website carefully, you’ll notice a few changes today. Some of those changes are small, and some are fairly significant, and we’ll be making more changes later in 2011.
We’re making these changes because we’ve received feedback — from our community of users, friends, supporters, and more — that the current set of web properties we have here at Creative Commons isn’t working as well as it could. Our websites have always emphasized using Creative Commons tools, or finding Creative Commons-licensed works. But we haven’t always made it easy to understand exactly how we are making possible the full potential of the internet via open licensing.
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Amaretto Ranch Breedables v. Ozimals, Inc., 2010 WL 5387774 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 21, 2010). The Justia page. The complaint with exhibits. Ozimals’ C&D to Amaretto and its blogged statement on the case.
Here’s a line you don’t see every day in judicial opinions: “The gist of the copyright dispute between the parties is whether Plaintiff’s virtual horses infringe on copyrights associated with Defendant’s virtual bunnies.” This reminded me a little of that great line from Ghostbusters: “dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”
Debian Squeeze Artwork
Credit: TinyOgg
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