Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux on TV: ‘The Glades’ – detectives run GNOME on a Windows-branded PC

  The detectives, no doubt eager to solve their case, save money & get it all done a little bit faster, are running a GNOME-based operating system on Windows branded HP computers.

• Linux News Roundup: Fedora 14 Gets MeeGo, Madriva Is Reborn

• Server

  • Identi.ca and WordPress.com Sharing Service

    As I recently discovered WordPress.com has a pretty neat sharing service support. It essentially adds a bunch of social network links to the bottom of your pages. Which makes a lot of sense, because every content provider (e.g. a blogger) would like their content to be spread to the world and what better way to archive this than by giving the user the means to easily share something they like or find interesting.

    One problem though. Since I am a free software advocate and suppose that you, my readers, are too, I prefer Identi.ca (which is using a free software microblogging software) over Twitter. Yet WordPress.com does not have a share button for Identi.ca…

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 167 – On Her Majesty’s Secret Server

    This week on the show: AMD vice president embarrasses herself, native ZFS on Linux, the Seabird concept phone, the new Ubuntu application review process, the usual Microsoft fun and Dan roots his Desire and reviews CyanogenMod 6.

  • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 369 [Ogg]

  • FLOSS Weekly 137: Plone

    Plone 4 is the latest version of the state-of-the-art open source CMS.

• Kernel Space

  • Kindle 3 Kernel

    I really dig the Kindle 3. The small improvements add up to a significant improvement in usability. As my friend Chris put it, “as soon as I turned it on I realized I did the right thing.”

    For the curious, I got ahold of the Kindle 3′s source code and generated a patch against 2.6.26 (I did the same for the Kindle 1′s kernel).

  • Linux 2.6.32.24 stable kernel update

  • Thoughts on Linux multitouch

    Two weeks ago, I was in Toulouse, France, at a multitouch workshop organised by Stèphane Chatty. After the workshop, in the same week was XDS. The workshop had a nice mix of people, Benjamin Tissoires whom I credit with kicking off much of the multitouch work with his evdev hacks, Pengfei, a PhD student of Stèphane, and Chase Douglas from Canonical, involved with their multitouch efforts. Ping Cheng from Wacom, Gowri Ries and Pascal Auriel from Stantum represented the hardware side. And Zeno Albisser and Denis Dzyubenko from Nokia for the toolkit side (Qt). We talked multitouch for two days and I think we got a lot done – not in code but in concepts and general design questions. The current state is essentially that both hardware and software guys are waiting on us, the X server, to integrate multitouch.

• Applications

  • REDCap: A Tool for Collecting Clinical Trials Data

    In the course of my day job I tend to get drawn into interesting niche projects because of my Linux expertise. Recall that the Mothership (that corporate entity located somewhere on the East coat which pays me fairly well to work for them) is *shudder* a Windows shop, primarily.

    However, Open Source Software is making not-too-subtle encroachments into even this bastion of All Windows All The Time. I got a call one day a couple of weeks ago from a semi-stressed project leader who at the suggestion of the client was being encouraged to use an application built entirely out of open source components. We have it running on a virtual Linux server. It’s called REDCap, and was developed by Vanderbilt University. Basically, it is a web-based interface to an underlying mysql engine. It is a highly specialized database tool developed specifically to support data collection for clinical studies.

  • command line alternatives to wget and so much better!

    Most people including myself are hooked on using wget to do whatever quickies that we need to do on our servers. I use it in my scripts, crontab entries and even site mirroring and web crawling.

  • Proprietary

    • AutoCad

      AutoCad which is frequently touted as a killer app unavailable on GNU/Linux has some new developments:

      * some cloud services which may with GNU/Linux to view drawings via a browser

      [...]

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Resize Video In Mac, Windows and Linux

    • Setup Subsonic on Ubuntu to Stream / Access Your Video Collection

    • Install LibreOffice on Fedora and Ubuntu

    • Configuring Static Network Settings (IP address, netmask, and gateway) in Ubuntu Linux

    • Glippy Clipboard Manager Can Now Upload Images To Imgur

    • CLI Companion Makes It Easier To Use The Terminal

    • Weekend Project: Record From Skype Calls and Other Apps on Linux

      Everyone loves the convenience of Skype and other voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, but the official tools still tend to focus on making simple one-to-one phone calls. One of the most common limitations mentioned is how difficult it is to record the digital audio stream on your computer. Podcasters, teams holding conference calls, and reporters doing interviews (among others) all need to record calls for later use. There are a few stand-alone tools built to work with specific applications, but with just a little additional time you can set up a system capable of recording audio from any application — Skype, various Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) clients, group chat tools, and many more.

  • Wine

    • Wine 1.3.4 Adds New Features, Supports ARM

      New to Wine 1.3.4 is support for right-to-left mirrored windows, Winelib now supporting the ARM architecture, a new taskkill.exe built-in application, the Inetcpl control panel being fleshed out, AcceptEx has been implemented, and there’s improved security checks for SSL connections. There’s also the usual translation updates and bug-fixes. The Wine library now supporting the ARM architecture is good for those interested in wanting to run Windows applications on your ARM-based netbooks or other mobile-focused devices.

  • Games

    • Catalyst Deluxe And Anirah Released !

      If you like MahJongg and solitaire card style games then you would be happy to learn that two games were recently released, one is free as a beer, other cost $10.
      Those games are made by the indie company named Lost Luggage Studios.

    • The Linux Box – a conceptual open source gaming platform

      Would you buy an open source gaming console? How about some purpose made open source gaming software that you could install on your computer? Do you think there is a market for this?

      [...]

      The latter two are already familiar concepts, with games already available for download on many platforms (Steam, App Store, Android Market, Ubuntu Software Center etc) and as you should all know, games have been available for purchase from a store since… well… since ever.

    • 10 is the magic number – of Linux gaming compilations

      Welcome to the tenth mega compilation of Linux games. The magic number! … one more … This time, I truly do not have any grand opening. The only thing I’d like to mention is that the games included in the Humble Indie Bundle, as mentioned in my Linux news article, will be reviewed separately, in the eleventh compilation.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GTK+3 Completes Its Rendering Clean-Up

      Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat in a financial-news nutshell

      Those of us who write for the insular world of the open-source-software enthusiast don’t often think about how the rest of the planet looks at Linux and other free software.

    • Money Flow Positive for Red Hat, Inc.; RHT

    • Red Hat near Resistance

    • OSS nets Red Hat prize

      Red Hat says the award recognised OSS as the most successful Advanced Business Partner in the region this year and acknowledges its work migrating datacentres at major corporates locally to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform.

    • Fedora

      • McGrath: Proposal for a new Fedora project

        What am I talking about? HTML5 and javascript. Javascript has gotten significantly faster in just the last two years. In some cases over 100 times faster then just 2 years ago. Who drove that? Google and Chrome. Why did they do it? They realize HTML5 is disruptive technology. What we think of advanced “web technologies” today, are still based on html 4.01. Not changed in over 10 years. Ajax was a nice addition 7 or so years back but the foundations, the primitives are 10 years old.

      • Fedora Updates Policy

        Yes, finally there’s an updated updates policy for Fedora.

        I think it’s worth reading because, as the announcement says, it can be improved, clarified and adjusted; but it’s a very good starting point.

        I was writing a more or less deep review of the document, but my internet connection failed, Chromium crashed (!), and here I am writing this post again, so instead of explaining something that you can read yourself in the policy page, I’m going to focus in the most interesting part: the releases.

        The updates on the branched release are divided into pre beta, beta to pre release, pre release and release. Although the updates policy helps to have a more solid release, the updates after the release are a very important part of the user experience (for example, it’s an excellent way to polish the rough edges of the release).

  • Debian Family

    • Is Linux Mint Debian Edition All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

      There are a number of different operating systems today based on the latest Linux kernel, and because Linux itself happens to be open source, anyone can monopolize on the concept and create their own Linux distribution, Ubuntu being one of the distros that rose from the dust of the once great Debian. Debian was an excellent distribution in it’s day, but it fell out of favor for a number of reasons…

    • SimplyMEPIS 8.5 [Review]

      MEPIS is a Linux distribution (a.k.a “distro”) that is designed to give new users a no frills experiece when trying it for the first time. It is based on Debian and gives users the option of either running it as a LiveCD or installing it permanently on your hard drive. When run in the LiveCD mode, the OS gives users the ability to test drive the OS from either their USB stick or a DVD and explore all the available features without making any permanent changes to the filesystem of the host machine. This would mean that you could try this distro on your MAC or Windows PC and then install it later if you so choose.

      [...]

      Eventually, it comes down to you, the user. With MEPIS 11 in the pipeline and Linux distributions available dime a dozen for you to test, MEPIS or any other popular distro would be ideal for you if you want to break free (literally `0) from the shackles you are wearing while using proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows. The community fourms are always there to help if you do have any questions and the least you could do is try the LiveCD for yourself and see if it suits your needs.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Gives Maverick a shot in the ARM

        Amongst the many improvements the Ubuntu ARM team have made happen this cycle are support for the community-driven, high-performance, embedded Dual-core ARM Cortex A9 mobile development OMAP4 Panda board and the forthcoming Beagle board XM which boasts 512mb of low-power RAM and a nippy 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor.

      • Spreadubuntu Logo

        Spreadubuntu is a repository for marketing material by and for the community, with the goal of increasing the market share of Ubuntu.

        It will see a theme update soon, to match the new visual identity of Ubuntu. I have been kindly asked to help with the logo.

      • This week in design – 1 October 2010

      • Ubuntu emoticons

      • New t-shirts

      • Observations On Long-Term Performance/Regression Testing

        At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.

      • Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” RC Comes Out With a Ton of Improvements

        Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release candidate is here and it’s packed with a slew of new features. The amount of changes happening with Ubuntu lately is quite overwhelming. Here’s a quick look through the improvements in the new Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android 2.2.1 Update Appears for Nexus One

        Google’s flagship device, the Nexus One, is always the first phone to receive the latest software updates. It was the first to obtain the initial over-the-air update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) and this update provided the basis for much development and discussion across the site.

      • Android IM apps: which one should you use?

        I’m a big fan of instant messaging apps. They’re fun and easy—plus, like Google Voice, they’re sometimes a money-saving alternative to texting via your mobile number. Living on the west coast, they’re one way I keep in touch with my east coast family, especially my busy brother and my mom, who loves her iPad’s expandable, easy-on-the-eyes fonts. Plus, I sometimes ping Ars’ staff on their IM accounts to work out stories (hey Nate, Eric!).

  • Tablets

    • StarNet Brings Fast, Secure Linux Desktops to iPad

      StarNet Communications of Sunnyvale, California, a leading developer of X11 connectivity solutions, announced iLIVEx, a fast, secure and fault-tolerant X11 client that turns the Apple iPad into an X terminal for powerful Linux and Unix mainframe and supercomputers.

      iLIVEx is available from the App Store for $14.99. It allows iPad users to connect to Unix and Linux desktops and applications hosted on remote Unix and Linux servers. iLIVEx features an ultra-thin data transfer protocol allowing for LAN-like performance, even over 3G connections. iLIVEx connections also run over securely encrypted SSH tunnels. Built-in session persistency allows users to reconnect to their remote desktops should the iPad get disconnected, turned off or the user temporarily switches to another iPad app.

Free Software/Open Source

• The 7 principles of successful open source communities [Flash/Video]

• Lightspark May Work Towards A Gallium3D State Tracker

  We have previously reported on Lightspark working on a new graphics engine for this open-source project to implement the Adobe Flash/SWF specification. This new graphics engine leverages OpenGL and Cairo, but now the lead developer is considering a different approach.

• Keeping Free Software/Open Source Vendors Honest

  I really like the recent trend of communities forking free software projects when they become unhappy with the direction that the parent company or organization is taking. The first example of this in my memory was when the creator of MySQL, Michael Widenius, created a fork called MariaDB due to his unhappiness with the purchase of Sun Microsytems by Oracle. Widenius feared that Oracle would damage or destroy MySQL, the free software database that his blood, sweat, and tears created and that Sun faithfully supported. Recent events have shown that his fears were valid. More recently, former members of the OpenOffice.org Foundation created a fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice due to similar fears. Today, it was announced that some members of the Madriva community have created a Mandriva fork called Mageia because they no longer trust the direction in which Mandriva is being taken.

• Forking Time

  MySQL alone has had at least four forks (Percona, Our Delta, MariaDB, and Drizzle).

• Integration Watch: The myth of open-source forking

  Core developers of large projects are almost always paid developers. This is true for Eclipse, JBoss, Red Hat, most Google projects and, notably, OpenSolaris, among many others. These developers are either employees of companies that have a commercial interest in the finished product, or that derive revenue from ongoing support of the product. These developers, then, don’t have any reason to join a fork. In fact, they have strong reasons not to.

• Events

  • The European way of open source

    One thing I have learned at the Open World Forum is that Europe’s approach to open source is highly political, but not in the way you think.

  • Connecting the Social Web with OStatus at Future of Web Apps in London

    Sometimes late, but always on time, Future of Web Apps added me as a speaker this week to the Carsonified-powered Future of Web Apps London event. After some swapping my schedule around since I’ve been speaking about the Federated Social Web at Joi Ito and Digital Garage’s New Context Conference in Tokyo, I’l be speaking mid-day in London about connecting the social web.

  • Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

    The last decade has seen many open source activities run for the benefit of a single company, but the roots of software freedom can be found in the synchronisation of part of the interests of many equal participants. The next phase of open source should embrace “open-by-rule” and have the liberties of every participant respected equally. We have already seen OpenStack and The Document Foundation arise; I believe there will be more.

    The benefits that businesses derive from open source – especially flexibility, vendor independence and the cost savings that result from both through accelerated and simplified procurement – arise from Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Jeffrey Hammond presented research showing lower barriers to adoption of open source software in enterprises as their understanding of and comfort with open source improve.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • So how on earth did Firefox reach 70% market share in Indonesia?

      Mozilla is paying special attention to Indonesia these days because Firefox has become the leading browser in the country with up to 70 percent market share. Exactly why, we’re unfortunately as baffled as Mozilla is.

      On Sept 27, the Mozilla Foundation’s chairperson, Mitchell Baker, and its director of Asia business development, Gen Kanai, and id-mozilla, the Indonesian Mozilla community, held a public talk at Blitz Megaplex at Pacific Place in Jakarta about Mozilla’s market-leading position in Indonesia.

    • Firefox says Swiss Consumer Protection office not to be trusted

      I’m not sure if my hat is going off to Firefox for being a good watchdog, or to the Swiss Consumer Protection office, ironically, for slipping up on this one. I wanted to see their new web page on how to find out where your wooden furniture (and other objects) comes from.

    • GNUzilla – News: GNU IceCat 3.6.10 released

      This new version includes all changes made upstream in Firefox 3.6.10.

      Now the privacy extension gives an alert everytime a bookmark containing javascript code is stored.

      Now, by default, HTML5 local storage is disabled. If you desire it, then it must be manually enabled.

    • Mitchell Baker on This Week in Asia podcast

      Mitchell was interviewed by Bernard Leong and Daniel Cerventus, two of the hosts of This Week in Asia podcast.

    • The Future of the Web: How Firefox Panorama and Aza Raskin will shape the Web

      When you are designing and creating a browser that’s used by 400,000,000 users of the Web, it goes without saying that a lot of responsibility lies in your hands. A crippling bug or fundamentally flawed user interface not only turns people away from your browser, but from the entire Internet. When a geriatric user with Window Me and IE6 announces that they can’t make a website work, it’s not their fault. It’s not the Web’s fault either: it’s the browser! Fortunately, a rather gifted designer is at the helm of Firefox.

• Databases

  • MySQL fork Drizzle goes beta

    With the release of Build 1802, Drizzle, the community driven fork of MySQL, is now officially “beta” software. The new version includes an enhanced version of drizzledump which can now be used to migrate databases from MySQL to Drizzle without any intermediate files. When connected to a Drizzle server it will perform a normal dump, but it it detects a MySQL server it converts all structures and data into a Drizzle compatible format which can be sent directly to a Drizzle server.

  • MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

    MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.

    The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don’t expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.

• Oracle

  • Oracle is an open source of concern

    BY VIRTUE of its purchase of Sun Microsystems last January, Oracle has acquired not just a venerable computer hardware maker but some of the open source community’s best-known applications and building blocks, ranging from database MySQL to the Java platform to operating system Solaris.

    Even the free and popular Microsoft Office challenger Open Office now belongs to Oracle.

    Oracle isn’t a newcomer to open source – software that is community-produced by developers, often made available at zero or nominal cost, with the software code freely available to anyone to examine or modify. It has long supported many open-source applications and has been a champion of open-source operating system Linux for years.

    [...]

    To kick things off, James Gosling, the eminent Sun engineer who created Java – a computing platform that was designed to enable developers to write a program once then run it in any computing environment – quit Oracle soon after he became an employee by virtue of its purchase of Sun.

• CMS

  • Learning Drupal Fundamentals

    Since many of you have your own open-source projects to promote and support, but may not be as well-versed in web development, I will create an open-source project site for the Billix distribution to demonstrate site building. When you’d like to expand beyond your SourceForge page, you can turn to Drupal.

  • The Awesome Croogo – Free and Open-Source PHP CMS

    Croogo is a free, open source, content management system for PHP. It is built on top of the popular MVC framework CakePHP and is targeted towards developers, designers and administrators. It was first released on October 2009 by Fahad Ibnay Heylaal, and continued to see 6 more releases in less than a year. The project is currently at version 1.3.2 beta, and is being actively developed.

• Education

  • RMS and I, Teaching the Kids

    I had an interesting class with my grade 9 students today. Usually it is very hard to keep their attention long. Today, I played a video of Richard M Stallman speaking in a college lecture theatre about Free Software. They gave him rapt attention. They got it. I followed up with a bit of history of GNU, Linux and the SCOG v World saga.

• Government

  • UK Adopts Open Government License for everything: Why it’s good and what it means

    Yesterday, the United Kingdom made an announcement that radically reformed how it will manage what will become the government’s most important asset in the 21st century: knowledge & information.

    On the National Archives website, the UK Government made public its new license for managing software, documents and data created by the government. The document is both far reaching and forward looking. Indeed, I believe this policy may be the boldest and most progressive step taken by a government since the United States decided that documents created by the US government would directly enter the public domain and not be copyrighted.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Video Labs: P2P Next Community CDN for Video Distribution

    As Wikimedia and the community embark on campaigns and programs to increase video contribution and usage on the site, we are starting to see video usage on Wikimedia sites grow and we hope for it to grow a great deal more. One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.

  • Data

    • Open Source Policy Map: suggestions for getting started (student project)

      Thanks for your reply – it inspired me to go back and do a little more poking around, in the hopes of giving you more resources to get started. How to do everything is ultimately up to you – consider these notes as options you can choose whether or not to take, possible pointers for places to look if you’re unsure where to begin.

      On the technical side, I’d suggest looking at the OpenGeo stack, in particular the OpenLayers javascript library, for implementation. It’s an open source mapping library and they have very supportive core developers and a growing community. Some documentation:

      http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers-intro/

      http://docs.openlayers.org/

      http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/

    • How to be a data journalist

  • Open Hardware

    • On Feminism and Microcontrollers

      Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad’s appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.

      We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).

• Standards/Consortia

  • Google JPEG alternative aims to speed up the Web

    In its continuing attempts to make the Web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65 percent of the bytes on the Web.

    Google announced late Thursday afternoon that it’s releasing a developer preview of a new image format, which it’s dubbed WebP. An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for Web pictures and images, WebP should “significantly” reduce the byte size of images, Google promises.

  • Pytextstat 1.0

Leftovers

• Explore the world with Street View, now on all seven continents

  To clarify, the Street View imagery for Antarctica includes panoramas of an area called Half Moon Island – such as this view of penguins and this one of the landscape. The blue dots you see throughout the continent when dragging the pegman are user-contributed photos.

  We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities. We were excited to share a virtual reflection of the real world to enable armchair exploration. Since then, we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to many more places, allowing you to check out a restaurant before dining there, to explore a neighborhood before moving there and to find landmarks along the route of your driving directions.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Ancient giant penguin unearthed in Peru

    The fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago has been discovered in Peru.

    Scientists say the find shows that key features of the plumage were present quite early on in penguin evolution.

    The team told Science magazine that the animal’s feathers were brown and grey, distinct from the black “tuxedo” look of modern penguins.

• Finance

  • Top 10 Ideas for Goldman Sachs New Ad Campaign

    Top 10 Ideas for Goldman Sachs New Ad Campaign

    10. Under Buffett’s protection since 2008

    9. Putting the zero in zero-sum game.

    8. Government Bailout: $29 billion
    SEC Settlement: $550 million
    Doing God’s work? Priceless.

    7. Helping you forget about Bernie Madoff one CDO at a time

    6. Goldman Sachs: America’s Counterparty

    5. Let us do for you what we did for Greece.

    4. Like we give a fuck what you think about us . . .

    3. Goldman Sachs: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s JPMorgan.

    2. The Rothschilds were Pussies

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • The stench of dictatorship

    The raids carried out by the FBI against antiwar activists last week are an ominous warning to the entire working class. The police-state tactics show the extent to which basic democratic rights—including the right to free speech and political association—have been undermined in the US.

    The Obama administration ordered the invasion of the homes of several individuals—primarily members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)—and the seizure of documents, computers, cell phones, cameras and other personal and political material. Those targeted have been summoned to appear before a grand jury on October 12 and may face criminal prosecution for “material support” for terrorism.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Web founder warns of Internet disconnect law ‘blight’

    Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, warned Tuesday of the “blight” of new laws being introduced across the globe allowing people to be cut off from the Internet.

    “There’s been a rash of laws trying to give governments and Internet service providers (ISPs) the right and the duty to disconnect people,” he told a conference on web science at the Royal Society in London.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • [CC Labs] October 2010 Tech Update

      Inspired by the Wikimedia Foundation, I wanted to give a brief update on the past month’s technology work at Creative Commons.

    • Boy Scout Magazine Says Don’t Listen To Legally Burned CDs, As They’re Too Similar To Piracy

      Four years ago, the MPAA worked with the local Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America to create a special “activity patch” for Boy Scouts to repeat propaganda about how evil file sharing is. For some reason, that story got renewed attention earlier this year, when a few sources came across the 2006 story without checking the date on it. While there’s really nothing new on that story, it does appear that the Boy Scouts are making some absolutely ridiculous suggestions to parents about how to talk to your kids about copyright issues.

      That link is to an article in the latest issue of Scouting Magazine, supposedly about the “ethics” of file sharing, and how parents should talk to their children about it. And, yet, it’s entirely one-sided, quoting the RIAA’s claims about “losses,” but oddly leaving out the stacks upon stacks upon stacks upon stacks of research showing that musicians are making more money these days, via alternative business models. You would think that would be a relevant part of the discussion… but it’s totally absent. Someone, apparently, failed their “research the facts” merit badge.

      But where the article goes totally off the rails is in telling parents that their children are too stupid to understand the nuances of copyright law, and because of that, they should take an extreme position: one so extreme that they shouldn’t even listen to legally burned CDs…

    • Anti-Piracy Lawyers Face DDoS Before Pivotal Court Decision

      Undeterred by the online destruction of ACS:Law, UK lawyers Gallant Macmillan will head off to the High Court on Monday to demand the identities of hundreds more people they claim have been detected sharing files online. While the ISP that holds the identities says it will resist the demand and ask for the hearing to be adjourned, the judge and jury of Operation Payback will pass down their verdict tomorrow, sentencing Gallant Macmillan to a DDoS attack.

    • ACTA

      • Danger of international accord on repressive policies in final ACTA talks, says RSF

        As the 11th round of negotiations for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) gets under way in Tokyo, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its opposition to the way these talks are being held behind closed doors without democratic consultation and to the potentially repressive positions being taken by the countries involved. The negotiators aim to conclude the accord or at least finalize its main points, but the latest draft is unacceptable and must be changed if not abandoned altogether.

        According to the latest leaks, on 25 August 2010, the wording of the section on the Internet entitled “Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment” has been softened but it still gives governments a lot of scope to introduce repressive provisions including filtering and a “graduated response” leading to the disconnection of illegal downloaders.

      • Deal or No Deal?: Japan ACTA Round Ends With Near Agreement

        The Tokyo round of ACTA negotiations concluded earlier today with countries saying that they “resolved nearly all substantive issues and produced a consolidated and largely finalized text.” Earlier reports from Reuters indicated that the latest round of ACTA negotiations in Tokyo, Japan has failed to produce an agreement. That report indicated that there is still disagreement over scope, including geographical indications and patents. A later report indicated that there was a basic agreement.

      • Joint Statement From All The Negociating Parties to ACTA

        The 11th and final round of the negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was concluded successfully in Tokyo, Japan on October 2. The Government of Japan hosted the negotiations.

      • Global anti-counterfeiting agreement still weeks away

        Negotiators for an international anti-counterfeit accord failed to reach agreement after more than a week of talks on Saturday, but European Union officials said a final deal was just weeks away.

      • ACTA Truth or Pravda?

        ABC reports that Agreement Reached in Tokyo Anti-Counterfeiting Talks

        I tried to comment on the article, but even after jumping through hoops, it wouldn’t let me. If it has to pass a moderator my comment is certainly dead in the water. Which is a good reason to have a blog, so I can comment on articles full of misinformation like this one.

        Why shouldn’t Kraft be prevented from calling their product “Parmesan” or have to pay royalties to Parma, Cognac, Roquefort or Champagne for infringing on these legally trademarked names? Isn’t that the point? REAL Parmesan cheese comes from Parma. Kraft’s Parmesan Cheese is COUNTERFEIT. That’s what ACTA is all about… stopping piracy, right?

        Isn’t that why they want these laws? So THEY get paid every time. But paying someone else is a problem. They don’t want to have to pay others, I guess they like the RIAA/CRIA music business model where everything possible is done to avoid actually paying the artists.

    • Canada

      • Audio column: Why are Canadians stuck in an AM/FM world?

        While the rest of the world is walking down the street to the beat of a breathtaking 21st century soundtrack—from free music streaming on their cellphone, thanks to online music services like Pandora—we Canadians are stuck shuffling along in 20th century AM/FM land.

      • Publisher Association Seeks Three Strikes and You’re Out for Canada

        The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers has written to the Canadian government to criticize Bill C-32. In addition to criticizing virtually every new exception – including many that are far more restrictive than those found in the U.S. – it argues for a system that could lead to permanent termination of Internet access.

      • Moore would like to see C-32 at legislative committee by November

      • Review of the Revised Foreign Investment Policy in Book Publishing and Distribution