04.20.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux becomes dominant OS
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Server
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For many companies, Linux just makes strategic sense.
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Ballnux
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KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung will build a smartphone with a 2GHz dual core processor by the end of the year.
Speaking to the Korean website daum.net, a spokesperson for Samsung said, “We are planning to release a 2GHz dual core CPU-equipped smartphone by next year.” This is an improvement of 800MHz on the 1.2GHz dual core processor that’s found in the Galaxy S II smartphone, which is currently the fastest chip in a phone.
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Sprint’s Kyocera Echo smartphone is a unique Android 2.2 gadget that converts from a standard smartphone to a 4.7-inch tablet formed from dual 3.5-inch displays. If the abysmal battery life doesn’t faze you, the Echo is an enjoyable phone that may give you all the tablet you really need, says this eWEEK review.
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Kernel Space
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Last month I noted some of the problems facing embedded Linux on ARM SoCs in terms of graphics drivers with regard to the variety of memory management APIs available (for graphics there’s primarily TTM and GEM within the kernel but also there’s other options: HWMEM, UMP, CMA, VCM, CMEM, and PMEM). There’s also other graphics driver problems in the ARM world, but the Linaro group has announced they’ve taken up the issue of embedded Linux memory management for graphics and other areas. They’re forming a working group to hopefully work towards resolving this issue for their next six-month development cycle.
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Libelium announced an updated version of its Debian Linux-based multi-protocol mesh router and sensor network gateway, now including dual database servers. The Meshlium Xtreme includes Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and GPRS, offers local or external database options, and enables the transmission of SMS alarms to GSM-enabled mobile phones, says the company.
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Just hours ago a new Linux KMS driver entered the world for the Cirrus GPU.
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So things have sadly not continued to calm down even further. We had more commits in -rc4 than we had in -rc3, and I sincerely hope that
upward trend doesn’t continue.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Igalia is its newest member.
Igalia is an open source development company that offers consultancy services for desktop, mobile and web technologies. Igalia developers maintain and contribute code to a variety of open source projects, including GNOME, WebKit, MeeGo, the Linux kernel, freedesktop.org, Gstreamer and Qt. Igalia has experience helping other companies contribute to upstream projects and take advantage of the open source development process.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD has announced today they have open-sourced Tapper from their Operating System Research Center.
What is Tapper? It’s basically their version of the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. “Tapper is an open source infrastructure originating at AMD for all aspects of testing including Operating Systems and Virtualization. Its goal is to help QA departments to maintain a complete test life cycle from planning to execution and reporting. It provides independent modules to adapt to different levels of QA requirements, from simple tracking and presenting test results to complete automation of machine pools multiplexing complex virtualization use-cases with detailed data evaluation.”
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Last week, while I was away skiing in the Swiss Alps, Opera released version 11.10 of my favorite browser. The major change in this release is even more flexibility in “Speed Dial”. It has now progressed from a fixed 3×3 grid, to a selection from a number of different grids, to the point in this release where you can select the number of columns, or leave it on “Automatic” and it will adjust the rows and columns to fit the number of items you use.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Primary target is to get virt-install supporting options “–graphics spice”,”–video qxl”,”–channel spicevmc”. One drawback has been noticed. Virt-manager requires “Add hardware”->”Graphics”->”VNC Server” before you can proceed with normal VNC installation. Obvious workaround is via option “Customize configuration before install”.
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Wine
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Welcome Mac and Linux users. You have probably stumbled upon this page because you want to run Power Bible CD for Christian Bible study, but Power BibleCD is widely known as an easy-to use Windows only application. And you don’t have Windows. Well fear not. With CrossOver you can get the most out of your Bible study time by running your Power BibleCD on Mac and Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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Cairo Dock (also known as GLX Dock) is a launcher / task manager like Avant Window Navigator or Docky and its major advantage is the huge list of applets it comes with: menus (MintMenu, Cardapio, etc.), Drop to Share applet, Ubuntu Me Menu and Messaging Menu applets, keyboard indicator, netspeed, network monitor, notification area, power manager, stacks, terminal, weather, weblets, system monitor and many many more. Also, unlike other docks, Cairo Dock also comes with stand-alone applets meaning the applets don’t have to be attached to the dock and you can use them like Screenlets / Desklets.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The T-shirt Design Competition for the Desktop Summit has just opened. We are looking for designs that go beyond your typical conference shirt which finds its final resting place in the closet or drawer once you have returned home. The winning design should reflect the passion and energy of the Free Desktop communities that The Desktop Summit represents.
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Over the last week we received quite some complaints about blur not working after an upgrade to the latest beta of Kubuntu Natty. So far we could not make anything out of it. All users had already been using Plasma Workspaces 4.6.2 in Maverick and were often using the Xorg Edgers drivers. So you would assume that they had more or less the same software versions like before the upgrade.
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GNOME Desktop
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Half-left (who has created the amazing Smooth Inset Gnome Shell theme) has created yet another beautiful theme for Gnome Shell called Atolm (based on Atolm by SkiesOfAzel).
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Back in June 2005, I noticed that we were lacking some “tarballs due” mails for the GNOME 2.11 release cycle and I sent a small mail to get this fixed. This is how I got trapped: after this mail got read by Mark McLoughlin, he suggested I could replace him on the GNOME release team. A few years later, in September 2007, Elijah chose to pass his GNOME release manager hat to me. And now, in April 2011, it’s time for me to pass the baton: Luca Ferretti is replacing me on the release team (he joined as a trainee in the past few months), and my good friend Frédéric Péters becomes the new GNOME release manager.
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KDE 4 and Trinity KDE
Traditionally, KDE has been the first choice for those who are looking for an alternative to GNOME. That remains broadly true, but the KDE 4 release series has a set of innovations that, if anything, are even more radical than GNOME 3′s, including such things as containments (shells for a workspace) and Folder Views (collections of icons that can be swapped in and out).
By setting a Folder View to cover the entire screen, you get a desktop experience very similar to that of the GNOME 2 series. However, I suspect that anyone impatient with GNOME 3 is unlikely to satisfied with the latest KDE.
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Reviews
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Pardus Kurumsal 2 was a rather interesting respin of a great distribution. I decided I would give it a try on the VIA ARTiGO A1100. Overall, it’s a great experience. If you own an ARTiGO, this would be a distribution to try on it.
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Phil Miller proudly announced the last milestone for Chakra the GNU/2011.04 a powerful Arch Linux distro last week. The Chakra Project, today, remains a milestone for Arch Linux and is as important as Ubuntu has become for Debian. It was born out of need for an Arch Linux distribution but with simple project principles combing the
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New Releases
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From June 2011, We will start working on version 7. It will feature great improvements on both the architectural structure and the included applications.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Despite the last-minute problems discovered last week which resulted in a 1-week delay, Mandriva 2011 beta2 should finally be hitting the mirrors in some hours. Make sure to check the devel/iso/2011 directory on your favorite mirror for the latest .iso images.
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Besides the UI and KDE changes, Mandriva 2011 beta2 features LibreOffice 3.3.0, and comes with the latest kernel 2.6.38.3, systemd 24, gcc 4.6.0, besides smaller package versions updates.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project has made the first and only beta of Fedora 15 available for download. This should signal the end to major changes for the Linux distribution, which is scheduled for release in late May. The focus is now on rounding off any rough edges and bug fixing.
Fedora 15 will be the first major Linux distribution to include GNOME 3, which was released two weeks ago. Fedora 15 will not include GNOME 2; the KDE Plasma Desktop will be a member of the 4.6 series. The Fedora Project has also undertaken a major behind the scenes change, so that Fedora 15 will see a switch from Upstart to the sysvinit and Upstart alternative systemd, which was first introduced just under a year ago. The kernel in the beta is based on Linux version 2.6.38. LibreOffice will fill the office suite shoes and the C and C++-Compiler will be the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.6.
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With Canonical ditching the GNOME 3.0 Shell in favor of their custom-developed Unity Desktop, one of the first Linux distributions where you’ll see GNOME 3.0 shipping in full “out of the box” is Fedora 15. Fedora 15 is set to be released at the end of May, but a beta release happens to be coming out today. Additionally, this Thursday they’re looking for your help in testing out GNOME 3.0.
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The Fedora developers are particularly interested if you use multiple displays, many storage devices, optical media, WiFi/Bluetooth adapters, and various other non-standard configurations.
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Debian Family
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But first let me reiterate this: GNOME 3 is in Debian experimental because it’s a work in progress. You should not install it if you can’t live with problems and glitches. Beware: once you upgraded to GNOME 3 it will be next to impossible to go back to GNOME 2.32 (you can try it, but it’s not officially supported by Debian). Even with the fallback mode, you won’t get the same experience than what you had with GNOME 2.32. Many applets are not yet ported to the newest gnome-panel API.
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Welcome to this year’s sixth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include…
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Neil McGovern sent some bits from the Release Team calling for feedback on the recent release. He also addresses various subjects that are currently under discussion: time-based freezes, transitions, release goals, sprint organisation and 0-day NMU policy.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Technical Board has voted not to install the non-free extras package by default during a standard Ubuntu Install. This an option that, if selected, installs proprietary software including hardware drivers, media codecs and the Flash player. It has been opt-in rather than opt out since its first appearance.
When considering the issue, bear in mind that the fact that many proprietary technologies “just work” is often cited as a superiority of distributions such as Mint. Also bear in mind that Ubuntu targets the “typical desktop user” who needs things like DVD and YouTube playback. However, it’s arguable that a user who is sufficiently clued up to carry out an operating system install would be able to decide if he or she needed to tick the box.
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Also of note: Canonical VP Neil Levine in March 2011 provided some deeper perspectives on where Ubuntu was heading in the cloud. Now here’s the twist: Assuming Ubuntu 11.04′s software works as advertised, Canonical should be well-positioned for cloud computing. But the real challenge for Canonical resides in the company’s channel partner and service provider relationships. Generally speaking, Ubuntu is widely used within cloud environments. Rackspace sources, for instance, tell me Ubuntu is among the most widely deployed operating systems in the Rackspace Cloud.
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Ubuntu’s 11.04 release is now on the horizon and unless you have been living under a rock then you know that their big change is going to be the move to the Unity desktop. Personally I found this move to be odd when I first heard it, I mean after all it was Ubuntu that allowed the Gnome desktop to initially take off and beat out the KDE desktop. There have been piles of different articles about Unity, so I’m not going to bore you with the same details you can find lots of other places.
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Flavours and Variants
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This is a nice system. I would say it is best then any other Mint system I’ve ever seen before. It is not overloaded with Mint specifics like Mint menu. It is quick and responsive. It is easily customizable, although not all the options are obvious.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Android
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The explosion of Android handsets has kept Sony Ericsson in profit, to the surprise of the markets, which were expecting a significant loss for the first quarter of 2011.
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I don’t say this very often, but some days Google is stupid. Until recently, Google’s biggest blunder was Google Wave. But now Google has announced that it won’t release Android 3.0, the tablet version of its mobile operating system, until it has made it “better.”
In a statement, Andy Rubin, head of Google’s Android group, said, “Android 3.0, Honeycomb, was designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes and improves on Android favorites. … While we’re excited to offer these new features to Android tablets, we have more work to do before we can deliver them to other device types, including phones.” In other words, Google will release the Honeycomb source code as soon as it’s ready. Just don’t ask when that will be.
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The delay in releasing the code has some mobile product developers worried that Google might recant and keep Honeycomb out of the open source inventory altogether. A more likely outcome could be a rift in the Android ranks. That scenario would see newer products running a restricted or closed source Android OS with better functionality than the existing open source Android devices.
So far, Google has remained tight lipped about how it views its obligations to the FOSS community. This silence could raise more questions about what the company’s expectations are for a continued free access relationship with mobile device makers.
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The Guardian Project is an open source initiative which aims to take advantage of Google’s Android operating system to bring smartphones the same sort of security and privacy that savvy users have come to expect from laptops and desktops. Featuring capabilities like full-disk encryption, secure instant messaging, and anonymous Web browsing, the project hopes to give people better control of their personal information on mobile devices.
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Sonos today released several enhancements to its Linux-powered streaming audio player devices. The new capabilities, all delivered via free apps and software upgrades, include the first Android app for remote control of Sonos gear, new support for Apple AirPlay audio sources, and the introduction of iOS 4 multitasking capabilities into the remote control apps.
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Tablets
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The Asus Eee Pad Transformer won the race to be the first tablet on sale in the UK to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb on 6 April. Asus has said that the initial batches of stock that were shipped to the UK are now entirely sold out.
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Motorola Xoom is probably the first ‘real’ Android tablet to be released since it was the first to come pre loaded with tablet optimized Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. Motorola Xoom comes with a 10.1 inch display with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, 3G/4G/Wi-Fi connectivity, 1080p video playback, dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 2 MP front facing camera, a rear facing 5 MP camera, 1GB RAM, and 32GB on board storage[SD card slot is a plus]. Amazon US price for Motorola Xoom hovers around $800.00(based on service type you select).
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For the first ten years of my open source life, I spent tens of thousands of hours pouring over hundreds of thousands of lines of source code across perhaps a dozen or fewer projects, mostly GCC, G++, GDB, and various other parts of the GNU toolchain. If there were a PhD in open source software, I was definitely specialist enough to have earned one. I was vaguely aware of the mountains of source code in the BSD distribution, and obviously Linux, but didn’t really pay much attention to that until I joined Red Hat.
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Events
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Once again this year I’ll be traveling down to the Southeast Linux Fest for a weekend full of informative talks, social fun, and exceptional collaboration opportunities with fellow Linux geeks from around the region and the nation. SELF has been an enormous hit since its inaugural outing in 2009. I’ll be joined by fabulous people from across the Fedora friendsphere, and of course there will be lots of free goodies at the Fedora booth for everyone. I hear tell of a tasty grilling event that will honor our favorite meaty champion of free software, and I expect to catch up with wonderful friends from all around the open source world.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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According to the company, Firefox 5 Aurora will become Firefox 5 beta on May 17 and go final on June 21. It is unclear which new features will make it into Firefox 5 and it appears that Mozilla will use the new release schedule to simply release new features when they are ready, independent from the initially targeted version.
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Wladimir Palant – the man behind the most famous of Firefox add-ons, AdBlock Plus – has pushed back against Mozilla’s recent efforts to rate the performance of his and other add-ons, claiming the outfit’s testing methods were flawed.
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SaaS
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We’ve covered the open source Apache project Hadoop before from many angles, and it continues to make its way into many enterprises and smaller businesses who want to sift and analyze large data sets. We’ve also covered Cloudera, a startup that focuses on support and services surrounding Hadoop. Now, Cloudera has announced that Groupon–the hot daily deals site–is using its Cloudera Distribution for Apache Hadoop (CDH) to get more value out of the massive data sets it maintains. It’s yet another sign of Hadoop’s success as a cutting-edge, sophisticated open source phenomenon.
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Given our most recent efforts to track open source software in the enterprise, it is relevant to note that we see a continued, symbiotic relationship between open source and cloud computing. In fact, in many ways, the future of open source depends on the future of cloud computing and vice-versa. One of the symbiotic relationships between open source software and cloud computing is also one of the main reasons I believe both will continue to be a big part of enterprise IT and a big opportunity for vendors and investors: customer enablement. The lessons, practices and community of today’s enterprise IT that have been ushered in by open source – more transparency on the plans for products and code, more flexibility in working with both legacy products and software as well as newer open components, add-ons and combinations, faster development and fewer dead ends via vendor death, acquisition or strategy shift — are being applied to cloud computing. We also see evidence of this customer enablement in the makeup of today’s communities, both open source and non, which include both developes and users/customers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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OOo 3.4 Beta includes a much-requested change to the way AutoFill works if there are filtered rows. The new behavior, based on a patch from the IBM Symphony team, is illustrated by the following three screenshots…
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Oracle announced on Friday that it is to discontinue its commercial interest in the OpenOffice.org project, prompting a barrage of criticism from the open source faithful with regards to its approach to the open source applications project, and community in general.
The company was accused of being community-hostile, for example, and comparisons were also made to Colonel Gadhafi, while a translation of the press release into “plain English” apparently shed new light on the announcement.
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Either way, the question now appears to be who, if anyone, will really want to pick up OpenOffice and continue working on it at this stage in the game.
Now that the community has fairly unanimously moved on to LibreOffice, in other words, Oracle’s move could well be too little, too late for the software suite. In a conversation this morning, for instance, Canonical spokesman Gerry Carr told me that, while OpenOffice is still available through its repositories, Ubuntu will continue to offer LibreOffice by default for the foreseeable future.
So, while it may be nice to see Oracle turn the software over to the community–whatever its motivations–it’s going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. Now that we have LibreOffice, I’m just not sure there’s a place for OpenOffice anymore.
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Education
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Frederic Muller, president of Software Freedom International, was flaunting two things at the Gnome Asia Summit in Bangalore — his passion for free software, and his newly acquired beard. We try to capture both in this interview. Frederic has lots of hands-on experience of promoting free software in education and offers wonderful advice for others who want to do the same.
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Healthcare
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Tea Party members who railed against health care reform because of the spin they were sold about how “Obamacare” would affect Medicare played a big role in returning the House of Representatives to Republican control.
I’m betting that many of them, if they’re paying attention to what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) wants to do to the Medicare program, are having some serious buyer’s remorse. If Democrats are wise, they’re already drafting a strategy to remind Medicare beneficiaries, including card-carrying Tea Party members, just how fooled they were into thinking that Republicans were the protectors of the government-run program they hold so dear.
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Business
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free Software Foundation Europe has provided the European Commission with input on modernising the way in which public bodies buy software and related services.
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Government
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The enterprise portal technology product that CAST has used for this project combines the benefits of Open Source software with guaranteed support services, which offers greater assurances. These services are currently being offered by the company’s engineering team in Spain.
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The German political party Alliance ’90/The Green wants the Federal government to do more to support the use of free software. The parliamentariens disapprove that the ministry of Foreign Affairs is moving back to proprietary desktop software and proprietary office applications.
The party sent a list of 39 questions to the government. Some of their questions are general, the MPs for instance are asking for the Federal policies on open source, open standards and vendor-independence. Yet they also want specified the estimated costs involved in developing open source drivers for specific hardware use by the Foreign ministry, and want to know in detail the costs involved in writing proprietary modules for fingerprint readers used by that ministry.
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Since 1 April 2011, there have been no mandatory requirements for the format in which public authorities shall provide editable documents.
This is the conclusion of a meeting between Danish Science Minister Ms. Charlotte Sahl-Madsen and the Danish Parliament’s spokesperson for IT on 30 March 2011.
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Openness/Sharing
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ioBridge, Inc. (http://www.iobridge.com) releases ThingSpeak, the first open source solution for “Internet of Things” products and services. Much like WordPress allows people to create blogs easily, ThingSpeak (http://www.thingspeak.com) allows developers to interact with devices using standard Web technologies. ThingSpeak can be run via its free hosted service or on personal servers.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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A tussle between different designs of plugs used in prototype electric cars has derailed an attempt to create a common European standard, highlighting industrial jealousy as the sector attempts to go mainstream.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Plans to exploit Iraq’s oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world’s largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In keeping with this pro-business tone, NOAA’s draft policy fails to acknowledge that the marine environment is a public commons that should be managed and regulated for the overall public good. The policies don’t mention that aquaculture should not restrict public access to the oceans, or a require that aquaculture businesses submit an Environmental Impact Statement prior to obtaining an aquaculture permit. The policy fails to define or describe what constitutes “sustainable” aquaculture — a term now so overused that it has lost clear meaning in many contexts. In fact, the draft policies assume all aquaculture will be of benefit regardless of the circumstances, and doesn’t acknowledge any responsibility to assure that aquaculture products — including genetically-engineered seafood — don’t pose a threat to human health.
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Portland, Oregon is now far enough along in its transition away from oil that by 2015 one can imagine this city being able to market and sell its own example to the rest of the world. Most of Portland’s longstanding initiatives, from public transport and the integration of the bicycle, to city agriculture, water and waste management, and use of technology are solutions that will be seen not as discretionary but necessary by mid-decade.
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European authorities have impounded 5m portions of fish destined for tables across the continent following allegations they were caught by illegal “pirate fishing” off west Africa using child labour.
The block on catches of octopus, squid, sole, shrimp and grouper landed in the Spanish port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands represents the biggest action yet against the landing of illegally caught fish in the European Union following the introduction of new Brussels regulations last year that ban the practice.
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Finance
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NATIONAL Australia Bank is believed to be considering legal action against its one-time house broker Goldman Sachs after a US Senate report found the bank was apparently misled when it was sold an exotic security that quickly turned toxic.
Senior NAB executives yesterday were reviewing the bank’s legal position following a wave of revelations contained in a report on the financial crisis by the US Senate that draws on internal documents and private communications of bank executives and regulators.
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It makes my blood boil when I read an opinion article like the one Robert Lenzner (Streettalk, Forbes) wrote entitled, “There Can’t Be A Criminal Prosecution Of Goldman Sachs.” Oh, yes, there can be; there just isn’t the will to follow the rule of law and prosecute where corruption occurs. To my mind, it is corrupt not to prosecute.
According to Mr Lenzner, a criminal prosecution of Goldman Sachs would threaten Goldman Sachs’s status as a dealer in government securities. To which I reply, GSs’s status already threatens the work of the government, and in the future that may include securities. We still do not know what the end will look like.
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The Derivative Project is a non-partisan taxpayer advocacy organization that seeks to ensure the long-term growth and stability of the U.S. economy through equitable enforcement, for both individuals and corporations, of financial laws and regulations.
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At Monday’s public hearing in Milwaukee on Governor Walker’s budget, Wisconsin Republicans once again resorted to anti-participatory tactics to avoid criticism of their far-right agenda. Despite these efforts, strong criticisms were squeezed-in by longtime Milwaukee school choice advocate Howard Fuller, calling GOP efforts to lift income limits on school vouchers an “outrageous” program “that subsidizes rich people.”
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The AP just fell for a hoax press release, which claimed that GE would repay the government the $3.8 billion tax loss carryforward it received. The hoax was designed to correspond with last month’s controversy originated by the New York Times about how GE, despite its huge profits, was paying no taxes.
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At a rally held in front of Chase Bank on Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin today, a few dozen people gathered to air their grievances against Chase and other U.S. corporations who will pay no taxes for 2010. Jeff Kravat of MoveOn hosted the rally along with Gene Lundergan, who gathered a group of four or five people to present a tax bill of almost $2 billion to the branch bank manager. This bill, for $1.988 billion, was drawn up using Chase’s 2010 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a December 2008 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (pdf). When Lundergan, Steve Hughes of Young Progressives and several others approached the front entrance of the bank, they were refused admission by the security guard, so they left the bill propped in the front window.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Leading organic gardening and food safety advocates who oppose growing food in sewage sludge are attending the national BioCycle magazine conference Tuesday, April 12, 2011 in San Diego to demand an apology and retraction from Sally Brown, a columnist and editorial board member of BioCycle magazine, and from Nora Goldstein, the executive editor of BioCycle.
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On April 14 the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Darrell Issa (R-California), held a hearing on state and municipal debt where the key question was State Budget Cuts: Choice or Necessity?
Chairman Issa started off by framing the issue in a manner that was thrilling to Wall Street barons and corporate big wigs. He said that states will face a shortfall of $112 billion in 2012 and the reasons for this were “obvious.” The primary reasons, according to Issa, are reckless spending and unfunded or underfunded pension funds. The 2008 Wall Street financial crisis and the staggering job loss, which caused state and federal tax revenues to tank, were not mentioned.
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Sarah Palin graced Wisconsin with her maverickness on a cold, wet Saturday where counter-protesters outnumbered Tea Party supporters. Wisconsin Wave held an early rally on the opposite side of the capitol, giving progressives a platform for the day but ending in time for attendees to march in opposition to Palin’s speech.
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Censorship
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Terry Jones, the crackpot Christian cultist with the Lemmy Kilmister mustache, was “hateful” and “intolerant” when he burned the Muslim holy book last month, said Gen. David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Afghanistan. Mark Sedwill, NATO’s ambassador to Afghanistan, denounced Jones’s stunt as “an act of disrespect to the Muslim faith and to all peoples of faith.” Faced with crowds of braying and baying religious fanatics, it’s doubtless true that countless soldiers and diplomats feel the same.
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Privacy
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Dropbox, the online backup and file sharing service claims to have hit 25 million users in a single year. Big news for any start-up. A change in its terms and conditions received a lot less attention because it seemed like adding a common term for online services.
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Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised.
The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.
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Civil Rights
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Freedom on the worldwide Internet is in danger, according to a new report by Freedom House.
In a survey of 37 countries, only 8 qualified as having completely “Free” Internets, while 11 were designated “Not Free” and the remainder were “Partly Free.” The survey measured Internet freedom by studying obstacles to access, such as governmental efforts to block technologies or control over Internet access providers, limits on content, including the blocking of websites and other forms of censorship, as well as violations of user rights including privacy, online surveillance and real world repercussions for online activity. The U.S. scored second on the list as ranked by most to least free, with Estonia taking the lead as the nation where the Internet was most free. Germany, Australia and the UK were ranked just behind the U.S.
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Last week, Congress and the administration refused to seriously consider the problem of government spending. Despite the fear-mongering, a government shutdown would not have been as bad as claimed.
It is encouraging that some in Washington seem to be insisting on reduced spending, which is definitely a step in the right direction, but only one step. We have miles to go before we can even come close to a solution, and it will involve completely redefining the role of government in our lives and on the world stage. A compromise was struck at the last minute, but until Democrats agree to rein in entitlement spending, and Republicans back off the blank checks to the military industrial complex, it all amounts to political gamesmanship.
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Don’t like the way airport screeners are doing their job? You might not want to complain too much while standing in line.
Arrogant complaining about airport security is one indicator Transportation Security Administration officers consider when looking for possible criminals and terrorists, CNN has learned exclusively. And, when combined with other behavioral indicators, it could result in a traveler facing additional scrutiny.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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The need to ensure that citizens and businesses are easily able to access an open and neutral internet has been underlined by the European Commission in a report adopted today. The Commission will be vigilant that new EU telecoms rules on transparency, quality of service and the ability to switch operator, due to enter into force on 25th May 2011, are applied in a way that ensures that these open and neutral internet principles are respected in practice. For example, the Commission will pay close attention to the existence of generalised restrictions of lawful services and applications and to EU citizens’ and businesses’ broadband connections being as fast as indicated by Internet Service Providers’ advertising. The Commission has asked the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) to undertake a rigorous fact-finding exercise on issues crucial to ensuring an open and neutral internet, including barriers to changing operators, blocking or throttling internet traffic (e.g. voice over internet services), transparency and quality of service. The Commission will publish, by the end of the year, evidence from BEREC’s investigation, including any instances of blocking or throttling certain types of traffic. If BEREC’s findings and other feedback indicate outstanding problems, the Commission will assess the need for more stringent measures.
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Bobbie Johnson at Gigaom worries: Is France Plotting to Kill the Free Internet?, and “can’t help be concerned at what the summit might mean, given it’s essentially a closed shop of governments and corporations discussing how best to carve up the online world for us.”
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DRM
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As promised, all left over legal defense money, plus a little to bump it to a nice number, has been sent to the EFF. Thank you all so much for your support, without it, things could have been much worse.
This money goes to the EFF in hopes that America can one day again be a shining example of freedom, free of the DMCA and ACTA, and that private interest will never trump the ideas laid out in the constitution of privacy, ownership, and free speech.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Once again a move to extend copyright is making its way through the European Parliament. The move to extend the copyright on sound recordings (and other “neighbouring rights”) began in April 2009 when, under intense pressure from the music publishing lobby, the European Parliament agreed to increase the duration of this copyright from 50 years to 70 years (compromising on the Commission’s and lobbyists’ demand of 95 years). However, before this could be implemented, elections were called and a new Parliament was voted in, including one member from the Pirate movement. Now, nearly two years later, this process has been resurrected following a change of heart within the Danish government.
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New copyright law could hinder the uptake and use of ultra-fast broadband networks, says an international industry analyst.
Ericsson’s director of government and industry relations, Rene Summer, said the enforcement of copyright does not encourage the growth of markets that will drive the demand for high-speed internet.
“We have done three global studies [over the last four years] – the bottom line of it is that media regulation and copyright impact the prospect of take-up on new ultra-fast broadband services,” he said.
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Last March 22 Brazil’s Ministry of Culture made public the “March 2011 Copyright Draft Bill” (PDF file, in Portuguese), an amended version of the 2010 Draft Bill, after it was sent by the former administration, i.e. in late 2010, to the Inter-Ministerial Group on Intellectual Property (GIPI, under the Portuguese acronym).
Parsix 3.6r0 RC Linux (u virtual boxu)
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.19.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Fans will tell you that Linux is one of the most dominant operating systems in the world and is showing signs of being a clear winner.
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Kernel Space
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Kernel development has lots of aspects – performance, stability, transparency, modularity, etc. Each of these aspects is addressed at one time or another while the kernel evolves. However, there are a group of us that are more performance oriented than others. Sometimes we are referred to as “performance junkies” or what I like to think of as “performance challenged”, but regardless of our label, we like to see more storage performance from Linux, particularly the kernel. The 2.6.38 kernel introduced some changes that helped performance making all of us performance challenged people very happy.
[...]
In addition to the VFS patches, there were a number of file systems improvements in the 2.6.38 kernel.
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Applications
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But rather than dwell on the obvious downsides to revisiting one’s hindsight in losing data, I’ve decided instead to focus on the best backup utilities available for Linux on the desktop – software you’ll need before the big crash.
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GIMP 2.7.2 was released last week as a development stop in the road to GIMP 2.8, which itself was supposed to be released last December. But with the single-window user-interface lagging behind along with other work, GIMP 2.8 development dragged along with its limited number of core developers. It looked like it would just be a few more months until 2.8 was released, but with v2.7.2 just arriving, that’s not likely to happen. Based upon a new tool developed by one of the GIMP developers, the 2.8 release isn’t estimated to occur until the end of November.
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The following is a guest post by my friend Asheesh Laroia, who is one of the people behind OpenHatch.org and other awesomeness on the internet and in real life.
Are there contributors on project mailing lists sitting on the sidelines, waiting to get involved? For GIMP and Vidalia, at least, the answer is Yes.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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What about the distros that could have been in my zoo but are not there because they were discontinued before I got the chance to know about them?
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Release of new linux distributions based upon existing major and well known distributions is a common day happening in the linux world today . Ubuntu is known for having countless forks . Recently Arch Linux has gathered lot of spotlight and some distributions based upon Arch Linux have come forwards . LDR is one of those Arch Linux based distributions which was added to the “Distributions on the Waiting List” of DistroWatch.com on 2011-04-11.
[...]
As LDR is in the early stages of development…
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Debian Family
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I chose the “desktop” software selection, and that meant 700+ packages. They continued installing into the night. It looked like there were both GNOME and KDE in the mix.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With all the upheaval around Unity and Gnome Shell and not having used Ubuntu since ‘Breezy Badger’ (that was 5.10) I thought I take a fresh look at the upcoming version and the new desktop. Well, it’s not that bad, and at least to me seems more accessible than the new Gnome because it works in a more traditional manner.
Also, Unity actually got up and running where Gnome 3 via the Fedora live CD just dropped me into fallback mode every time, with barely functional panels and no right click shell menu. I only got ATI cards here, but it is a huge blunder to get such an impression right from the start. I can only assess Gnome Shell from what I’ve seen in desktop recordings, but Unity for me has already won here.
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Flavours and Variants
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D-Link announced a Linux-based surveillance camera for homes and small offices that offers VGA-quality video streaming at 20fps plus infrared video for night vision. The $150 Wireless N Day/Night Network Camera (DCS-932L) offers Ethernet and 802.11n connections, and enables video streaming to LAN or web-connected PCs as well as Android and Apple iOS mobile devices, says the company.
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Here’s a web site with a lengthy sermon on how D-Link’s Boxee Box device is allegedly violating the GPL. Such violations are not generally noteworthy, but this one, if true, is interesting in that it involves GPLv3-licensed software and a user’s ability to install new versions.
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Phones
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Android
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Second up is the Shenzhen GS30, a Chinese designed and built IPad 1 clone. It claims to use the same processor, screen, battery, and a bunch of other components as the original IPad, which is good. That translates to the Samsung S5PC11o running at 1Ghz. It will be running Google’s Android operating system, but here’s where we hit a problem. We don’t know which Android. The reported price is 2000 Yuan ($306.00 US) to OEMs. Volume pricing would be lower, so we might see them on the North American market for as little as $400.00 in the shops, or on Amazon. We hope these guys did their cold weather testing unlike the first Iphone clones that died in northern China.
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SaaS
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The open source OpenStack cloud project is out with a new release this week codenamed ‘Cactus.’
The Cactus release follows the Bexar release which debuted in February. In the new Cactus release, OpenStack is now taking the Glance image creation service, which debuted in Bexar and renaming it the OpenStack Image Service.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Fast forward to today, and Oracle has decided to wash its hands of OpenOffice (mostly). Control will be handed over to a community group, and Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven says Oracle will work with supporters in order “to further the continued success of Open Office.”
As Ars Technica points out, it’s little more than a symbolic gesture at this point since the bulk of the OOo community has already moved on and pledged support to the LibreOffice fork. There’s no word yet on whether Oracle will give up the OpenOffice.org branding, though it seems unlikely given that it refused to let the LibreOffice crew have it once already.
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Today The Document Foundation published an announcement putting that speculation to rest. In a short but firm statement Charles-H. Schulz said that the foundation would be continuing on as planned. He further stated, “The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation, created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community and we are always willing to include new members and partners.”
Also included in the statement was the key points that The Document Foundation “continues to build on the foundation of ten years’ dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community.” It “was created in the belief that the culture born out of an independent Foundation brings the best in contributors and will deliver the best software for the marketplace.”
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Latest Faenza Icon Theme 0.9.2 update brings in a new set of icons for LibreOffice, Workspace-Switcher, Wine Notepad, Winetricks, Stellarium and Mypaint. Faenza PPA now works with Ubuntu 11.04 as well.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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We must work to understand what good citizenship and ethical behavior means in open data projects. The nature of communication, copying and competition in the space of open data is very complex. Yes, it’s not just about Google, but about raising the awareness of these issues among the people organizing open data projects, and especially the communities where we want to have an impact. The best idea I’ve heard this week (in a week of amazing ideas in Cambridge) was from Jeffrey Warren. We need a clear set of principles and ethics to guide the practice of open data initiatives in new communities. Open data collection should have: open and clear explanations of the purpose of data collection and the license of data; effort to find existing sources of data, rather than replicating and resurveying, and lobbying for the sharing of that data; effort to give the communities that collect data every opportunity to use that data in their own work, however they see fit; etc…
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Programming
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STREST is a new open source protocol and server from Wiredset, the company behind the real-time social media analytics service Trendrr. STREST is HTTP-compatible and is designed for real-time data streaming. Wiredset has released the protocol spec, a server implementation and drivers in Java, Python and JavaScript.
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Having served an appropriate 7 years apprenticeship at the hip of former Novell chief Eric Schmidt, Google co-founder Larry Page has taken the helm of the SS Google. It is thought that Page will be able to supply the much needed entrepreneurial energy that Google has been unable to muster over the last few years.
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Orlowski is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, who sneers at anything even remotely virtuous. He hates Wikileaks with a passion, and environmentalists, and Free Software advocates (or “Freetards” as he likes to call us), and … well, pretty much anything else on the “us” side of the “them and us” argument. Astute El Reg readers will note that Orlowski’s articles are the only ones on the site with comments disabled, and with good reason, given his right-wing extremist views.
So on the one hand I want to keep reading El Reg, but on the other I don’t want to get even the vaguest whiff of Orlowski’s sick propaganda. Well surely the answer is simple, I hear you say, just don’t read his articles. But that’s easier said than done, given that it’s not always obvious who’s written an article until after I’ve already started reading it. Even if I don’t immediately notice the attribution line, the tone of an Orlowski article is unmistakable. I’d easily know one of his articles even if he submitted it anonymously, just by reading it. But frankly I’d rather not. Ever. Not if I can help it.
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Privacy
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European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström finally presented her devastating evaluation of the data retention directive transposition in the European member states. She wants to move on with a review of the directive via stakeholder consultation, a move to win time.
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In 2006, the EU passed a Directive requiring traffic details* of our phone calls, text messages, internet (IP) addresses and emails to be recorded and stored across Europe. Today, that Directive is being officially reviewed, in a widely leaked report expected to whitewash concerns about its basic incompatibility with human rights.
This Directive – the “Data Retention Directive” – was pushed by the UK at the height of New Labour’s push for intrusive surveillance and lack of respect for fundamental rights, in the wake of the 2005 London bombings. The UK persuaded the EU that data retention was necessary and had to be applied across the EU to combat terrorism and serious crime.
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Civil Rights
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Today the European Commission adopted an evaluation report of the data retention directive. EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström presented the report at a Brussels press conference.
“Cecilia Malmström artificially delays an overdue revocation of the data retention directive and only presents an evaluation report instead”, comments FFII network expert Stephan Uhlmann.
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MEP Kósa Ádám prepares a report on Mobility and inclusion of people with disabilities and the European Disability Strategy 2010-2020 Have a look at the draft report, you don’t find it on OEIL.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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The European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, has submitted her long-due report on Net neutrality to the EU Parliament. This extremely disappointing document rules out any immediate measures against telecoms operators who continually restrict EU citizens’ access to the Internet. Hiding behind false free-market arguments, Mrs Kroes gives way to anti-competitive practices harmful to freedom of communication and innovation in the digital environment.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The protection that projects have from trademarks can often seem to be a weapon used to remove the freedom of hackers to change the source code and redistribute.
Examples include the Firefox trademark agreement, where Mozilla will not allow a re-distributor to call their package ‘Firefox’ unless all code has first gone upstream. This policy is used to make sure everybody get’s Mozilla’s Firefox and not someone else’s Firefox that they couldn’t control the quality for.
Programmer under oath admits computers rig elections
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.18.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Here in the world of technology, it’s an everyday occurrence to see new companies and organizations spring up out of nowhere and begin to play an active role.
What’s far less common, however, is to see one disappear — particularly one that has been an extremely productive and well-respected part of the community for years upon years.
That, however, is essentially what happened a week ago, if a blog post over at Groklaw is anything to go by.
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Server
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Computing is an invaluable resource for advancement of scientific breakthroughs. Today we’re announcing an academic research grant program called Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty, which provides 1 billion hours of computational core capacity to researchers. That’s orders of magnitude larger than the computational resources most scientists normally have access to.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Full Circle Podcast is also a proud member of the Tech Podcasts Network.
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This week on Linux Outlaws: The RIAA wants $75 trillion from LimeWire, Groklaw is closing shop, Symbian not open source anymore, Geohot settles and Steve Ballmer is the worst CEO in tech.
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Kernel Space
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It was also to Linux’s advantage that its license, the Gnu General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) made it possible both to share the efforts of many programmers without letting their work disappear into proprietary projects. That, as I see it, was one of the problems with the BSD Unix family–FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.–and its BSD License.
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Graphics Stack
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Jeremy Huddleston has tagged the first point release in the X.Org Server 1.10 series.
X.Org Server 1.10 was released in late February after RandR 1.4 was pulled from the release. X Server point releases don’t add in any new features, however, but just correct outstanding bugs.
The xorg-server 1.10.1 release has bug-fixes for XQuartz, X Input, XKB, and various other areas, but no single change jumps out as being too prominent.
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When running the Warsow game at 1920 x 1080, its frame-rate is slightly up from the first Lion developer preview and Mac OS X 10.6.6, while the NVIDIA blob on Ubuntu 10.10 was the slowest of the bunch. Of course, if using the open-source Nouveau driver on Gallium3D its performance would even be worse for Linux.
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Applications
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The number of files stored on the average desktop PC keeps increasing. Our needs change as we do, and every year we depend more on digital documents while our storage devices get bigger to keep pace. In short, the way we proudly arranged our files just a few years ago has become obsolete.
The upshot is that you not only need an efficient assistant for the common task of dealing with your files, but also a workhorse for the next time you want to do some serious cleaning.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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So today I had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Bok of The Zod Engine via google talk. This is the most fun I’ve had chatting to developer so far (mainly because it was live and not via email, not to say the others haven’t been awesome).
[...]
MB: Knowing linux and c/c++ has been a great combination for me and I recommend it for any aspiring computer scientists. Also I do feel that it is very important to make more games available for linux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Trinity KDE is mostly nostalgia. While KDE3 had its merits, with the latest version of KDE4, it’s really hard to argue against the technological and ergonomic advancement introduced into the desktop environment.
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One of the results of the UX sprint in Berlin which I’m really happy with is that it helped me frame some of the bigger ideas behind in my mind behind Plasma Active, and make it digestable for someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time yet thinking about it, and digesting these ideas.
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The Marble Team has just released Marble 1.1. This release is special! With many new features being developed during Google Code-in, the Marble Team decided to get it out between the usual KDE application releases. The new version provides several new features and improvements…
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GNOME Desktop
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This is the team that set the general plan for the GNOME 3 release and I feel very proud of having been part of it. I especially remember a couple of very long conversations with my evil twin about GNOME 3 and the team discussions during our meetings at GUADEC and FOSDEM…
Leaving the release team means that I now have no official roles in GNOME anymore. I’ve left a few other positions recently—among others that I haven’t really announced. This is actually an explicit decision of mine to gradually free some of my (rare) spare time for other personal projects. You probably know one of them. But there’s probably more coming, stay tuned!
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Writing on his blog, Zeitgeist developer Stefano Candori has shown off the beginnings of a feature addition to the semantic-tracking engine which allows users to specify what Zeitgeist can log – and what it shouldn’t.
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Some people think that GNU/Linux is only one Operating System. Others think that “Linux” is the only UNIX Operating System derivative but BSD must not be forgotten. Both GNU/Linux and BSD include a lot of different OSs in their respective families. While Linux has Tux (a penguin) as its mascot, BSD has Daemon (a little devil). Interestingly, many of the OSs in both families are identified by logos representing animals. Thus, I made this little zoo with the logos of as many distros as I could find to illustrate the great variety of Operating Systems available to choose.
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After a full week of usage, I can’t say that Puppy Linux 5.2.5 Lucid is quite ready to compete with industrial-strength distros such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or openSUSE. It does come very close and I was able to get most of my work done, but the collection of PET packages is still insufficient to meet my heavy demands. The addition of the Ubuntu repository is potentially a solution, but the package collection is far from complete, and the issue of “dependency hell” is a source of frustration.
Furthermore, the wisdom of running as root continues to haunt Puppy. In this era of online shopping and online banking, users expect ironclad security, and it should not require command-line hacks to get it. Discussion of this issue often gets heated, even rabid, turning into an all-consuming flamefest at times. I wish people wouldn’t get so emotional about it, but it is what it is. I don’t expect the raging debate to end any time soon.
On the other hand, perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. Is Puppy meant to be blockbuster OS, built to withstand attacks like a server farm? Or is it just a lightweight fun OS that we can use to revive old hardware, or run from a USB stick when we need portability? A lot of people like Puppy – it’s in the top 10 of the DistroWatch page-hit ranking. I enjoy Puppy too, and it’s what I run exclusively on my netbook. Maybe the only thing wrong with Puppy is that users’ expectations tend to exceed the developer’s intentions.
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Red Hat Family
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I confess that when I read some weeks back about the state’s giving Raleigh-based Red Hat almost $17 million in incentives not to move, I was predictably agitated. After all, for over 15 years as a judge, candidate and lawyer, I have criticized and opposed this type of corporate welfare. My change of heart when it comes to Red Hat has nothing to do with our governor’s donning a red fedora set at a jaunty angle to announce the giveaway. Nor do I own any Red Hat stock. It’s really all about the fact that local businesses have finally figured out how the game is played.
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Fedora
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One of the other “big names” in the Linux world is Red Hat’s community driven Fedora. Beyond Fedora itself, there are also a small number of derivatives out there based off of this Yum+RPM powered distribution. The following is a round up of some of the better ones.
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Debian Family
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The winner of the election is Stefano Zacchiroli.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I liked Meerkat, in fact I loved it. But, its existence in my life has reduced to a couple of DVDs which are laying in some dark corners of the drawers of my office desk. They will never be put in CD drives again, they will never be used to install anything again. They might remain there as memories or be thrown in trash to be taken care by Brussels waste management department.
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This blog posting is strictly my opinion of the two interfaces in Ubuntu 11.04.
I tried both of these interfaces when that I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2. Unity did not stay installed very long. This interface has matured to a stable state however the interface did not appeal to me. Unity is plagued with overly large icons and lots of blandly bright colors. It’s like the screen was designed by Crayola and not Canonical.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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In yet another sign Intel is moving quickly into Android, its embedded Linux software subsidiary Wind River launched a new mobile technology development center in Stockholm focused on Android. Meanwhile, the Intel-backed MeeGo project appears to be gaining some new life for its handset development, with LG Electronics, ZTE, and China Mobile filling the gap left by Nokia, says an industry report.
Wind River’s addition of an engineering team in Stockholm, Sweden, represents its “concentrated effort to grow its Android expertise for a wider range of Android-based devices including tablets, media phones and other device classes,” says the
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The forum discussion surrounding TransGaming’s GameTree Linux and Cedega Technology continues, with some Linux gamers regretting that they ever even supported TransGaming. One user also brings up the past from when — back in 2000~2001 — TransGaming had pledged to open up their code-base once they reached 20,000 subscribers. They believed in an open-source philosophy at that time, but they never ended up opening up their code once hitting that milestone. Even though Cedega as we know it is now dead, this former fork of the X11-licensed Wine is still closed.
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With FLOSS, the licence usually costs $0 so business running on FLOSS could save all of that $12billion and it would only take a small effort to migrate to FLOSS. Business has made mistakes along the way by not migrating sooner and buying licences instead of making their own software but it is never too late and $12billion annually saved forever will pay the total cost of migration in a few months or years, leaving all of eternity to spend the money on other things that bring value.
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The reason is clear: Open source licenses are designed to allow users to revise, fix, and extend their code. The barber or cop may not be familiar enough with code to contribute, but programmers sure know how to fiddle with their tools.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The ODF 1.2 specification allows for stronger encryption algorithms, and Blowfish is declared as the legacy encryption algorithm.
The new version of the standard allows the encryption algorithms listed in §5.2 of xmlenc-core.
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April 15 brought some interesting developments in the office suite front. Oracle’s press release announcing its intention of halting commercial interest in OpenOffice.org came hours before The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1.
[...]
LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1 received lots of bug fixes and a few new additions. Some include:
+ added navigation buttons to writer
+ Replaced unhide text button by icon buttons
+ Mouse wheel scrolls whole slides
+ Updated slide sorter icons
+ allow ‘select as you type’ aka ‘quick selection’
+ new ‘animated images’ for Throbber controls
+ enable human icon theme
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Programming
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The Supreme Court took up a case involving ownership of computer technology in this 1996 case.
Lotus Development Corporation copyrighted a computer spreadsheet program called “Lotus 1-2-3.” Borland International, a competing software company, released a similar program called “Quattro,” that contained a program called “key reader.”
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On Tuesday I held an exciting meeting with a dozen high-flying young Europeans involved in science, start ups, government and civil society, whose insights are can really help us with the Digital Agenda.
I was very impressed with their clear views and with what they’ve achieved using technology in their careers.
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Science
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Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionising quantum communications and computing.
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Security
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A computer programmer who once volunteered for Perverted Justice, the producers of “To Catch a Predator,” was sentenced Friday to two years in prison for launching a botnet that attacked the organization’s web site.
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Censorship
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Yesterday, YouTube redesigned its copyright help center to help educate its users about the ins and outs of copyright law. Copyright law can be complicated and, in light of that, the site now sends offenders to the YouTube Copyright School where they can watch explanatory cartoons in an experience that our own Audrey Watters isn’t too sure arrives at education.
If you agree, then you might want to get in on YouTube’s next effort – a Q&A with legal experts it will be holding on the video site at the beginning of May.
Fair use, YouTube explains, “is a legal term that grants creators an exception to the strict copyright that the original content owner controls — in layman’s terms, it’s the idea that as long as the use is ‘fair,’ someone can reference part of someone else’s work for parody, scholarly reasons, or more.”
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Privacy
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Julee Morrison has been obsessed with Bon Jovi since she was a teenager.
So when paid ads for fan sites started popping up on the 41-year-old Salt Lake City blogger’s Facebook page, she was thrilled. She described herself as a “clicking fool,” perusing videos and photos of the New Jersey rockers.
Then it dawned on Morrison why all those Bon Jovi ads appeared every time she logged on to the social networking site.
“Facebook is reading my profile, my interests, the people and pages I am ‘friends’ with, and targeting me,” Morrison said. “It’s brilliant social media but it’s absolutely creepy.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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The professional shakedown artists otherwise known as Canada’s cultural industries — telecoms, broadcasters, TV networks, filmmakers — are gearing up for another operatic hit on Canadians. They want the Internet controlled through new rules and new charges that would expand their existing protection racket that now funnels billions into their hands and limits the freedom of Canadians.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In theory, those engaged online would be the most concerned by an iPod tax. It’s an unproven theory since I can’t say for sure the folks contributing to election chatter on Twitter are also the most likely to have iPods or be affected by the controversial (and possibly non-existent) iPod tax. However, since it’ll make this post more interesting, I’m going to make the assumption Tweeters are also most likely to be worked up into a frenzy (cue ass-u-me jokes now). Let’s call this campaign a safe bet with an expectation of a good ROI.
HTC Sensation Promo Video
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.17.11
Posted in News Roundup at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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According to Zorin, its PC has a rotatable touch screen display that is optimized for electronic note taking and drawing. Zorin tailored the hardware and software to work 100 percent with Linux and is available in three editions: Home, Educational, and Business.
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I was directed to this great program from a random stranger on identi.ca. I had posted a dent asking thoughts on a good Linux OS to run on a live USB. One of the replies asked, “Why run just one? Check out MultiSystem.” A quick search revealed the MultiSystem web page. The page http://liveusb.info happens to be in French, but fortunately for me there is a Google translator gadget.
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A few weeks ago I mentioned friends-in-the-biz who don’t put anti-virus software on their PCs.
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Kernel Space
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If you think about it, most of us have grown up using Linux. Linux was not how software was done, 20 years ago. There was only paid software, as Stallman so famously said in 1983 and went on to lay the foundation of the Free Software Foundation with the GNU Project that was compatible with all available software. However, the GNU took its time to evolve and had basic structures-compilers, text, Unix shell etc. but elements daemons, device drivers including the kernel were stuttering to completion.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this week Sapphire launched the Radeon HD 5830 Extreme using the well-supported “Cypress LE” graphics processor at a very competitive price relative to the NVIDIA competition and the Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards from other AMD partners. With it being part of the HD 5000 series and not one of the newer HD 6000 series graphics processors, the Linux support is already spot-on for both the official Catalyst Linux driver and within the open-source stack. In this article are the open-source Gallium3D benchmarks for the Radeon HD 5830 along with other recent ATI/AMD GPUs to show where the latest Mesa/Gallium3D code is at today.
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Applications
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So, let’s explore the 6 MAC/RBAC tools at hand. For each tool we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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Instructionals/Technical
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THE TERMINAL: THE TRUE POWER OF LINUX!
I opened the terminal, typed SU, entered my root password and executed the command
rd –ignore-fail-on-non-empty lost+found
With that powerful spell, the folder was gone!
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Games
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Angry Birds works on iOS, Maemo, Android, and Windows – yet they refuse to make a general Linux installer. Now I could see if they only had an Android client why there might be some hold up, but the game runs on Maemo – which is a full Linux OS. Thats right – the game already compiles and runs on an ARM Linux platform. If the pile of FOS applications that have been ported to the N900 are any indication this means that getting the code to run on an x86 or 64bit version of Linux is just a recompile away. Yet still no Linux client for Angry Birds!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Over the April 1st – 3rd weekend, the first Calligra sprint took place at the KDAB office in Berlin. With a total of 31 people from 14 nations, the room was crowded to the bursting point! It was a very successful sprint, and the first KDE sprint for many of the attendees.
While hacking continued unabated at all times, a sprint is primarily an opportunity to meet face to face, create new bonds, and discuss current and future issues. As usual, Friday was free-form, with hacking and chatting until it was time to go out to dinner. After dinner we crashed the breakfast room of the hotel because the lobby was too small, and continued hacking.
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The new Plasma Active and Contour projects were developed for a new user experience for tablets, smartphones and set top boxes.
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GNOME Desktop
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Would you believe that at NCHC 41 computers cloned 5.6 GB simultaneously in 10 minutes? Multicasting or what? Clonezilla is a new age multicasting and unicasting solution from OpenSource Clone system for massive and large-scale cloning.
Cloning content is an essential process of computing where contents from one computer hard disk need to be transferred/imaged/cloned to another or multiple computer hard disks. Rebooting, restoring, new computer provisioning, hard disk upgrades, full system backup , system recovery and transfer to other users are some of the main areas/reasons where cloning is used.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat thinks so, and today submitted a new request to the Java Community Process (JCP) to push their data caching ideas forward into Java EE 7. The JCP approved JSR 342 last month, getting the ball rolling for the full creation of the Java EE 7 specifications.
“The themes of Java EE 7 are all about continuing to ease development and making Java cloud ready,” Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat’s Middleware Business Unit told InternetNews.com.
Muzilla noted that the new data caching specification is being submitted in the same spirit of cloud enablement that is at the core of Java EE 7. He exp
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Red Hat engineer Gavin King, the creator of Hibernate, is developing a new programming language for enterprise software development. His team at Red Hat has apparently been working on the grammar in secrecy for two years and is finally opening it up for scrutiny.
The new language, which is called Ceylon, is intended to remedy what King views as fundamental shortcomings of the Java programming language. It’s more succinct and expressive but is designed to be easy to read and learn. It will run on existing Java virtual machines and draws on many of Java strengths while addressing some key limitations.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint team, led by Clement Lefebvre, has released a Linux Mint Xfce edition for 32- and 64-bit based not on Ubuntu but on Debian Testing.
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MontaVista Software announced that MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0 has been registered as compliant to the Linux Foundation’s Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 5.0 specification. MontaVista appears to be the first Linux distro to have registered for CGL 5.0, which was announced at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit last week, offering advancements in everything from streaming media to security.
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Texas Instruments (TI) announces the OpenLink project which focuses on providing a wide range of wireless connectivity solutions for Linux.
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Habey announced an EPIC-format SBC (single board computer) that features a 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z510P processor, 512MB of onboard memory, plus PC/104, PCI, and Mini PCI expansion. The EMB-4650 also includes CompactFlash and SD slots, dual video outputs, and eight USB 2.0 ports, according to the company.
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T3 Motion announced a two-passenger electric vehicle that comes complete with a detachable Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet in its dashboard. The Galaxy Tab will act as the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) computer for the three-wheeled R3 series plug-ins, offering navigation, entertainment, and vehicle diagnostic monitoring, says the company.
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MIPS Technologies has launched a developer community website designed for Android and Linux developers working on MIPS-based hardware, including handsets and tablets. Developer.mips.com features open access to MIPS-tailored Android and Linux source code, an Android native development kit, debug and development tools including MIPS Navigator, plus resources including tutorials and support forums, says the company.
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MIPS Technologies has launched a developer community for software developers working with the Android platform.
The online community will also be relevant for anyone developing Linux operating system based applications on MIPS-based hardware.
“This new community demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the vibrant open source effort around the MIPS cores and architecture,” said Art Swift, v-p of marketing and business development at MIPS Technologies.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Intel is establishing a joint innovation center with Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet firms, to develop products and services around the chip maker’s MeeGo mobile operating system and devices using its Atom processors.
The new partnership could help Intel to promote MeeGo in China, along with its Atom-based microprocessors, both of which have yet to be widely adopted.
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Android
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As if to back up the contention by Google’s Android boss that the tablet version of Android isn’t being penned in so Google can keep control, PC-maker Asus released part of the source code yesterday.
Asus posted a link on the product page for its Eee Pad Transformer tablet that lets readers download a 97MB file with the source code for v8.2.2.6 of the Android kernel.
Google released the software developers kit for Android v3 in February, but only to a few OEMs and selected other partners.
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Doing its part to fight Android fragmentation, Cyanogen and his band of mobile hackers have released a modified version of Android 2.3.3 optimized for some 30 devices still awaiting carrier updates. CyanogenMod 7 (CM7) adds to Gingerbread with power-user features found in the previous Froyo version (CM6), and supports its first two tablets: the ViewSonic G-Tablet and Barnes & Noble Nook Color.
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Motorola is reportedly preparing a ruggedized, seven-inch Android tablet, while an Archos division in China has tipped the Archos 7c Home Tablet and an updated capacitive version of the Archos Arnova 10 — both running Android on the ARM Cortex-A8 Rockhip RK2918 processor. Meanwhile, Amazon is offering a 10-inch, $500 Viewsonic gTablet in a “deal of the day.”
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Intel is planning to pay a $10-per-device subsidy to encourage the creation of Android tablets using its “Oak Trail” Atom processor, a DigiTimes report has claimed. And a relevant port of Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) will be available later this year, a company executive has been quoted as saying.
The Apr. 14 DigiTimes report by Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai says Intel wil “pay a subsidy of $10 for each Intel CPU-based tablet PC to attract first-tier notebook vendors.” It will promote the Android 3.0 platform “to save costs from Windows licensing fees for downstream vendors,” the story further adds.
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You can download the latest build from here and follow these installation instructions to get it running on your phone.
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VMware is accelerating its cloud efforts today with the announcement of its new Cloud Foundry project. Cloud Foundry is an open source application platform for the cloud.
“Cloud Foundry is about expanding a PaaS engine across multiple clouds, frameworks and application services,” Jerry Chen and his title is Senior Director of Cloud and Application Services at VMware told InternetNews.com.
Chen noted that with Cloud Foundry, VMware (NYSE: VMW) is aiming to lower the barriers to adoption for the cloud.
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The new Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 web service provides flexible Amazon cloud hosting and backup capabilities for web application software appliances, says this eWEEK review. The Ubuntu-based software is said to offer an “excellent” backup and restore utility that makes it easy to migrate appliance instances.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Flock Web Browser was once a darling of the web. It was among my favorite web browsers out there until a few years ago. But then Google Chrome happened which raised the bar much higher eventually changing the whole internet space once and for all. Mozilla Firefox suddenly became *old* and had to re invent itself to survive[read Firefox 4.0]. Unfortunately, that was not the case with Flock ‘Social Media’ Browser.
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SaaS
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The recent announcements of Facebook’s Open Compute and VMware’s Cloud Foundry address the hardware architecture and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layers, respectively.
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Databases
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Deploying a MySQL database today to meet modern infrastructure demands isn’t as easy as it used to be.
In an effort to help enterprises deploy the open source database, MySQL services vendor SkySQL is launching a new MySQL reference architecture that includes services and components. A decade ago, MySQL was typically deployed as part of the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, but that’s not enough anymore.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The OpenOffice.org open source office suite has long had a commercial version. Under Sun it was called StarOffice.
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Education
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Back in February, I wrote about Instructure’s risky move open-sourcing their Canvas LMS. The product was great, an easy-to-use, robust LMS with solid social features and a spectacular user interface. It was highly scalable and suddenly anybody (or at least anyone with a bit of Ruby on Rails experience) could fire it up on their own server. The question was, would anybody pay for Instructure’s hosting and support when they could host the LMS themselves?
The answer turned out to be an overwhelming yes. As Devin Knighton, Instructure PR Director told me, “Instead of the hundreds of leads their sales team was expecting from the announcement, we received thousands.” See, Oracle? You can make money from open source!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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You can read the announcement on Groklaw. I personally read the site regularly to help keep abreast of legal news related to free software. PJ’s especially good about posting articles that may not directly discuss the latest issue, but provide useful context for the more focused material. And the site’s collaborative research has been so helpful to free software developers that Groklaw won the FSF’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit in 2007.
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Project Releases
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After several years of redesign and development work, the Blender Foundation and its associated online developer community have announced the arrival of version 2.57 of their open source 3D content creation suite, the first stable release in the 2.5 series. According to the developers, this major milestone is not only stable because it’s “mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1,000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.”
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Programming
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In my last blog entry, How Effective Is Your Software Development, I discussed the three pillars of development effectiveness: Process Optimization, Quality Optimization and Technology Optimization, including architecture, leveraging the cloud, social media, smart devices, etc. This post will focus on Process Optimization.
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The media’s telling of the Japan story has been inexcusably bad. I can’t count the number of pieces about confinement breaches and radiation surges; where they are not information-free they are wrong, and where they are not wrong, they bypass what matters. Here are a few specifics.
* The real story in Japan, by any objective measure, is the sustained post-tsunami desperation among those whose lives were swept away, and the narrative about the rescue and cleanup workers all over the Northeast. Read much of that? Me neither.
* Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They’re writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don’t specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don’t understand enough to explain.
* People across oceans from Japan should fear radiation? Um, what was the half-life of 131I again?
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Finance
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Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the BRICS group of fastest growing economies – Thursday signed an agreement to use their own currencies instead of the predominant US dollar in issuing credit or grants to each other.
The agreement, the first-of-its-kind, was signed at the 3rd BRICS summit here attended by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, China’s Hu Jintao, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.
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Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. appears to think technology gadgets — including tablet computers like the iPad — are the reason this country is shedding jobs. Really? The Illinois Congressman went on one of the more outrageous anti-technology rants on Friday on the floor of Congress. We transcribed the remarks below, since we couldn’t really believe what we were hearing.
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DRM
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With a list of controversies like that you start to wonder how they survived. Well, very easy: by having a very good PR department. Whenever a controversy pops up WWF acts like a turtle. It minimizes communication as much as possible and hopes the whole thing blows over. It tries to silence, marginalize or intimidate its critics, but in such a clever way that it doesn’t make too many waves. Disputes between its chapters are kept indoors as much as possible. Bluntly lying – if required – is an accepted practice.
Being one of the opponents in their latest controversy – the infamous WWF format – I experienced these tactics first hand. This is my story.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A problem with monopoly laws, such as the copyright monopoly and patent monopoly, is that their text is usually written by the lawyers that maintain them. This creates a vicious circle with circular proof that the laws work as intended.
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On a rational basis, the music industry’s concerns would be dwarfed by those of the computer world, which is not just far larger, but vastly more important in strategic terms. But instead, the former gets to make all kinds of hyperbolic claims about the alleged “damage” inflicted by piracy on its income, even though these simply don’t stand up to analysis.
But that throwaway comment also raises another interesting idea: how about if Google *did* buy the music industry? That would solve its licensing problems at a stroke. Of course, the anti-trust authorities around the world would definitely have something to say about this, so it might be necessary to tweak the idea a little.
How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. – jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis?
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Angered at Righthaven’s behavior, a Las Vegas federal judge unsealed the company’s heretofore confidential agreement with the Las Vegas Review-Journal late on Friday. The contract reveals that the controversial copyright-enforcement company and LV R-J parent company Stephens Media are splitting their net earnings from suing hundreds of bloggers on a 50-50 basis. It also shows that the LV R-J is still largely in control of Righthaven’s litigation strategy—a fact that could end up being ruinous for Righthaven’s campaign of copyright lawsuits.
Penguin being tickled
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.16.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux
* February 2011 – 2.47%
* February 2010 – 1.65%
Change = +.82% Rate of growth = +50%
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Google
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One of the key aspects of the latter has been its support for open source, which has been at the heart of Google’s infrastructure from the earliest days. Its adoption of free software played an important part in allowing the company to offer a range of free services – search, email, video content etc. – that could scale globally, Something that would have been much harder for a startup to achieve with traditional licensed software, where costs would have risen far more steeply.
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Applications
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A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how I may build an advanced search utility for my own email archive. One way to make complex queries on the archive seemed to be to put it all into a relational database. Since the Dbmail system stores email in that way, I asked its developers and Harald Reindl (an email administrator at The Lounge who already uses Dbmail: I found him in the PostFix Mailing list archives) if Dbmail could be used in that way.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Following last week’s release of the stable Wine 1.2.3, it’s now time for a new development snapshot of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.18 is a particularly interesting release since it finally takes advantage of raw mouse events with X Input 2.
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At the beginning of January, TransGaming rolled out GameTree Linux. GameTree Linux is basically the successor to their Cedega Technology that in turn formerly was known as WineX and was based upon an early X11-licensed version of Wine. Cedega hasn’t been updated in a long time prior to this announcement and its support has fallen behind that of CodeWeaver’s CrossOver software and upstream Wine in many regards, but unfortunately, GameTree Linux hasn’t yet improved the situation at all.
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Games
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The ability to talk with the Frozenbyte developers via the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle chat has granted me another mini interview and a few insights of things to come…
Here is another mini interview I’ve made with Niina from Frozenbyte…
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It looks like Garry’s Mod, the sandbox physics game built atop the Source Engine that began as a Half-Life 2 mod, is working on Linux. Garry Newman himself explicitly mentions the Linux code is now compiling.
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Humble Bundle is back with its collection of Indie games once again. The latest Humble Frozenbyte Bundle comes with 5 indie games with the usual pay what you want offer which means, you can purchase the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle for the price you decide. Not only that, you can even choose exactly how your purchase is divided: Between Frozenbyte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF), or the Child’s Play Charity.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This is the final entry in a series of five posts covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. In this closing article, we look at the track that aims to help bring out work to actual hardware.
On Monday, I will be writing a quick overview of some of the “big picture” goals and aspirations represented in Plasma Active, and on Friday of next week I will be sharing a preview of a new interaction feature that I’ve only referred to cryptically as “SLC” so far. Today, however, I hope you enjoy the outline of the fifth track in Plasma Active: Vendor Interaction.
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As KDE developers continue to build the device-independent Plasma Active Linux environment, other pieces of the UI puzzle are falling into place as well. Pieces like Contour, which the team bills as a “context-sensitive user interface that adapts to…current activities and behavioral patterns of the user.”
As you can see in the screenshot, part of what Contour does is recommend additional actions based upon what it thinks you’re doing at any given time. By taking a look at a number of different sources of data — like GPS coordinates, accelerometer data, time and date, ambient sound and light, recently accessed files, and recent user actions, Contour will attempt to adjust the device’s UI to automatically meet a user’s needs.
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Red Hat Family
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This distribution is built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is an excellent choice for small server implementations or businesses.
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Fedora
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I’ve been keeping up with the virtualization related developments in the upcoming Fedora 15… but even if I weren’t… Fedora offers a fedora-virt-preview repository that makes it easy to ckeck out the new stuff on Fedora 14.
Adding SPICE support to virt-manager is one of the upcoming features in Fedora 15 and as of 2011-03-28 it appears to be 100% done. I decided to use the fedora-virt-preview repository to check it out on my Fedora 14 workstation.
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Debian Family
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SimplyMepis 11.0 RC 2 was released last week and the annoying thing about that project is that their release announcements say nothing about the release. So, if one wants to keep up they have to download each developmental release and test it. So, I did.
The basic look and feel hasn’t changed since my last test. It’s possible it could receive an update before final. What I did notice soon after boot was that the graphic driver setup assistant is gone. It was inoperative my last test, but it’s completely gone now. Instructions in the Mepis Manual have the user going back to the old-fashioned manual procedure. This isn’t a big deal for most of us old goats, but for a distribution known for being “user-friendly,” this isn’t a plus. Will it be back before final?
Fortunately, I didn’t have to play around with any settings or boot flags to get a graphical desktop. The boot to blank locked-up screen was somewhat fixed last test, but I did have to talk it into a graphical interface.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Yesterday I upgraded my personal laptop (well, one of them) from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.4 beta 2. I have a knack for finding bugs, but this time the upgrade was smooth sailing. I was reminded of what my friend said when I first installed Ubuntu for her: This feels like a really expensive system.
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With Natty Beta2, the Ubuntu 11.04 Server Installer received a little bit of the same aubergine love that the Ubuntu Desktop has enjoyed now for the last few releases. Moving away from that 1980s MSDOS/PCDOS VGA blue look, the our Server installer now sports a distinctively Ubuntu color scheme!
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In a previous post I described the certification release of Ubuntu pre-install for the Dell Latitude 2120. This post seems to have drawn some interest on the process from both internally in Canonical and externally. I decided that I needed to experience myself what a user buying a Certified “Pre-Installed only” system would go through from buying the system to getting the bespoke image from the manufacturer and ultimately upgrading to the latest “stock” Ubuntu release. The Dell Latitude 2120 seemed like a good companion for this adventure.
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Flavours and Variants
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Hopefully the final release of Kubuntu 11.04 is as good as it is in its current beta. Since I used to be a huge fan of Kubuntu before its downward spiral that caused it to become bland, I’m actually quite happy to say that this release is shaping up to be the best in over two and a half years. Considering that all of my hardware is detected and works great, the developers must have tweaked something to make this happen. I would really like to know what it was they did, though my guess is they probably included the next generation of Intel drivers into the current kernel. Good job!
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Like I said, overall I am really impressed with what I am seeing here.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Technology firms such as LG Electronics are moving toward adopting the Linux-based MeeGo operating system after Nokia abandoned it, one of the project’s leaders said.
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Tablets
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In order to better understand how people are using tablets we ran a survey of over 1,400 tablet users and found that:
* 68% of tablet users spend at least 1 hour a day on their tablet
* 77% of respondents report that their desktop/laptop usage decreased after they started using a tablet
* 82% of respondents said they primarily use their tablet at home
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CSV (plain text) files are a popular way of exchanging data with a broad range different programs. But whereever different programs are involved, there’s some disagreement about the details. One such detail is the presence of quotes (text delimiter character) around fields. The usual consensus (spelled out, for example, in RFC 4180) is that fields “may or may not” be enclosed in quotes.
As long as the field delimiter doesn’t occur in numbers (for example as decimal separator), it can be useful to quote all text content, so the distinction between text and numbers is preserved. See issue 37856 for an example. This is what Calc CSV export has always done, and with the new import options in 3.3, we can optionally make use of that distinction when importing.
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Programming
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If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you’d have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better.
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Finance
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America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.
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Goldman Sachs misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.
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The big banks look to be setting up for another weak day, after a Senate panel divulged salty emails from employees at Goldman Sachs (GS) and other top financial institutions detailing their efforts to dump doomed mortgage securities in the laps of investors.
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A Senate panel released a damning report accusing the likes of Goldman Sachs of engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminating the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermining public trust in U.S. markets in the months leading up to the financial crisis.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.
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We can’t say we’re surprised that a Senate report released yesterday, that details what caused the financial crisis, focuses on Goldman Sachs. A lot.
The findings of a two-year analysis “trains much of its ire on Goldman Sachs, which Sen. Levin said deceived some clients by betting against home loans in 2006 and 2007, while simultaneously selling mortgage securities,” the WSJ reported.
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Privacy
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On Tuesday, Senators John McCain and John Kerry introduced the long-awaited Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights, a sweeping bill that covers online and offline data collection, retention, use, and dissemination practices. Unfortunately, the bill may fall short of what’s needed to protect our privacy.
This bill fails to address many of the issues surrounding pervasive online tracking that have been raised by privacy advocates, explored in the Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series, and highlighted by the FTC’s recent Privacy Report. The bill’s most glaring defect is its emphasis on regulation of information use and sharing, rather than on the collection of data in the first place. For example, the bill would allow a user to opt out of third-party ad targeting based on tracking – but not third-party tracking. The consumer choice provisions in Section 202 apply only to data use—not collection—unless that data is both “sensitive” and “personally identifiable.” Moreover, Part III of the bill, which imposes lax limits on collection, cannot be enforced by state Attorneys General. This is backwards: the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers’ online activities. Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information – which leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers.
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Civil Rights
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IN THE odd way these things work in China, word has trickled out that on April 7th an appeal court in Zhejiang, a famously entrepreneurial coastal province, conducted a five-hour hearing on a death sentence handed down to Wu Ying, a prominent 29-year-old businesswoman, on fraud charges. Before her arrest Ms Wu had seemed to personify the miraculous business success that could be achieved by people from even the most humble background in modern China.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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While America’s heartland is being wired for 3Mbps DSL service, residents in Pakistan are getting ready for speeds up to 50Mbps thanks to a major broadband expansion in the country.
Pakistan’s PTCL, the country’s state-controlled phone company, is working on a major upgrade to bonded VDSL2, the next generation of DSL, which can deliver more than five times the top speed of the country’s highest level of service, at a construction cost of just $200-300 per home passed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Facebook has filed a few different trademark lawsuits against sites it doesn’t approve of, like Teachbook and humor site Lamebook. Some of those cases might be considered close calls legally, and both of those sites are still up. But now a much bigger company is messing with Facebook’s name: adult social networking company FriendFinder Networks, which has launched a (very NSFW) website called FacebookOfSex.com.
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Copyrights
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Remember the Cliff Richard directive proposal for a copyright extention of sound recordings also known as 2008/0157(COD)? The extention was fiercely debated in the European Parliament and by consumer groups. Our MEPs adopted a plenary report and then… Then our EU-Council with all the member states at the table went into wait-and-see mode. They noticed that the Commission proposition was quite a bit over the top. Meanwhile we have a new parliament, the Lisbon Treaty regime, a new Council. Now it’s back on the agenda, just before the children born when the Commission started to draft its proposal enter school, rumours say Hungary suddenly changed its mind in the Council, we learn from an alarmist Boingboing call to action, that we, the people are asked by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow to
1. Phone our MEP
2. MEP does for us ???
3. Win!
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Google Inc.’s online video behemoth YouTube toughened its enforcement of copyright laws, requiring violators to attend “copyright school” and pass a test before they can resume uploading videos to the site.
The changes come amid calls — both in Hollywood and in Congress — that YouTube do more to combat piracy. Google General Counsel Kent Walker recently defended the search giant’s commitment to content protection in testimony this month before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property.
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It seems that the original licensing deals which enabled Spotify to get off the ground a couple of years ago are coming to an end – and some of the labels in some European countries are getting restless about how much of their content is being given away for free, with minimal fees in return. Yes, 15% of Spotify’s users are now paying customers, but as the service grows, millions of tracks are being played for nothing.
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With no known founder, the Pirate Party UK is rather more unconventional than traditional electoral offerings.
The UK group is part of an international movement of Pirate Parties, which lobbies against copyright and software patent laws.
The very first party was founded in Sweden in 2006.
Doctor Who: 47 Years in 6 Minutes
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.15.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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YouView has posted the technical specifications set-top box and TV makers will need to follow in order to support the would-be standard IPTV platform.
The specs will please punters who favour the Linux operating system – it’s the mandated OS for YouView-compatible devices – but will annoy anyone who hopes to shift recorded HD content onto their computers or Nas boxes.
For hardware companies, the key product ‘must haves’ include 10/100Mb/s Ethernet – 802.11n Wi-Fi is optional; WPA and/or WPA 2 must be used – at least 320GB of hard drive capacity, 30GB of which will be reseved for material pushed to the device by content providers; 512MB of memory; two USB 2.0 ports; DVB-T and DVB-T2 tuners; HDMI 1.3 output; and an RGB Scart connector.
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Desktop
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Last time I tried to use Windows, there was a blackout, so I, logically, got a black screen asking me if I wanted to boot Windows normally, or with the last configuration that had worked, etc. I selected “normal” and saw with hope the XP logo…but the computer rebooted unexpectedly and threw me again to the same black screen. “OK, let’s go ‘last good config’ this time,” I mumbled and chose. And XP, for its part, chose to do something wonderful: it got me into a cute loop and refused to start. Isn’t that wonderful? I have been using my PC all this time without even knowing that Windows XP had fried! Thus, my return to Windows was colored by the inevitable reminder of its many weaknesses.
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I would venture to say that not only is Mageia promising as a distro, but that it will also fulfill the dream of keeping the Mandrake/Mandriva legacy alive. I, for one, will save a partition for Mageia.
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The past few months on Phoronix and OpenBenchmarking.org you may have noticed several Intel Core i7 “Sandy Bridge” mobile benchmarks. This Linux mobile SNB testing was being done from a System76 Serval Professional notebook. Here is a look at this Linux-friendly notebook that ships with Ubuntu 10.10.
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Jolicloud, the leading cloud-based netbook and ‘recycling’ OS, has undergone another point release to address problems and add features. Russell Barnes reveals all…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Gnome 3.0 has been released while Nokia takes back its Symbian operating system. Red Hat is approaching $1b in revenue and Groklaw is calling it a day. Share in our discoveries, hear our responses to your emails and letters and join us in welcoming a new member to the team.
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Kernel Space
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Windows has been predominantly the OS of choice for most of us. Linux too has been around and it has struggled on the desktop space. Things haven’t turned out as well as Linux hoped. I have been on both sides for long periods of time. There is no denying Linux’s success on the server side of things. Many expected Linux to be an easy replacement for Windows, but for a number of reasons, it hasn’t been so.
[...]
If all of the popular mobile and tablet OS’ are offshoots of the Linux framework, and if we go by figures, Linux could very well be much bigger than Windows.
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Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and hero to many Open Source users, might not be the first person one might think would be honored by an organization of lawyers, but that’s exactly what’s happening. The International Technology Law Association will award Torvalds its ITechLaw Achievement Award at their upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.
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Applications
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The University of Portsmouth has deployed what is being branded as a “cost effective” high performance computer (HPC) to analyse data from telescopes around the world, and simulate and test current theories about the universe.
The Dell-based computer will enable the University’s scientists to analyse the very large volumes of data needed for their research much faster than conventional systems.
[...]
10TB of NFS storage
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Like almost any piece of software with rudimentary drawing capability, Gimp includes simple brushes like squares, circles, and fuzzy circles. While they get you by for many basic needs, there’s a lot more you can do. Everything from flowers and vines to flames and bubbles can be created by brushes, and today we’re going to show you some of the coolest ones out there.
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About an hour ago the developers have released a long-awaited new development release which is another step towards GIMP 2.8. GIMP 2.7.2 comes with all the changes that were made after GIMP 2.7.1 was released in June 2010. There’s really a LOT of new stuff. The new release comprises layer groups (which were introduced after 2.7.1), an almost done text-on-canvas feature, the all-new brush engine and of course the new single window mode.
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As I’ve mentioned in the blog before, I use The Gimp for all my photo editing. I use it exclusively when creating/editing all my cartoon features.
The Gimp is every bit as powerful as other graphics applications and absolutely free! You can download Gimp for Windows or Mac. If you decide to give Linux a try, The Gimp, in most cases, is already installed. If not, it’s an easy matter of downloading and installing via the particular Linux distribution’s repository.
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If you have worked as a system administrator at an enterprise, you might be familiar with Norton or Symantec Ghost, a great network-enabled system cloning solution. It allows you to create an image of a computer’s hard drive and store it to a location on your network. If the computer in question has a failure you can restore it from the image and be back in business pretty quickly and easily. Although this may not always be a solution that small organizations use often, it is quite popular with larger ones.
Symantec Ghost is a commercial software and comes with a pretty hefty price tag. However, there are several free alternatives for it in the open source world. Let’s take a look at a few of my favorite ones.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The games that i’ll show to you in this article are: Atom zombie smasher, violetland, Ultimate Zombie Fighters, project zomboid and Zombpocalypse, have a good day with them !
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In the first 24 hours of the Humble Indie “Frozenbyte” Bundle going live, it surpassed $250k USD in sales, but since then the pace has slowed down a bit. It just crossed $500k USD with just under 100,000 unit sales. The average purchase price is $5.12 USD while Linux users on average continue to offer an average amount of $11.72, which is significantly above the $4 Windows price or $6 Mac OS X user-set pricing.
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The folks over at HumbleBundle are currently running their third amazing game sale. It’s a package deal from Frozenbyte, a Finnish game developer, that contains several computer games. What makes the sale amazing? Several things:
All Games Are Linux Compatible
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This is the fourth in a series of five daily blog entries covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. Today we’ll be looking at how we plan to distribute the fruits of our labor for use on devices. As we will discover, this is rather new ground for a KDE initiative. It will bring many challenges, but also open new opportunities.
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GNOME Desktop
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Now that Canonical has adopted Unity for its next Ubuntu release, it seems likely that no desktop environment in history has ever launched to as much scrutiny as the new GNOME 3.
Indeed, the GNOME project’s latest contender made its long-awaited debut last week, and the reviews have been coming fast and furious ever since.
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In an ongoing mailing list thread, the Ubuntu Technical Board is discussing whether the new Unity environment is a suitable default for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 release, codenamed Natty Narwhal. The prevailing view seems to be that Unity is still on track, but there are a number of technical issues that are still being addressed.
Unity is a new user interface shell and window management system that is designed to improve Ubuntu’s ease of use and visual sophistication. A previous version of Unity served as the netbook user experience in Ubuntu 10.10. The plan for 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal, is to ship the much-improved new version of Unity as the standard user experience across desktop and netbook form factors.
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So GNOME 3 was released. I don’t know why, but my excitement levels were quite low, until today when I pushed myself into trying it out. Rather than installing the new version on top of some other distro running GNOME 2, I decided to get the intended experience by downloading one of the “official” systems on the GNOME 3 webpage. There were two options: openSUSE and Fedora. As I haven’t checked on openSUSE for quite a while now, I chose it.
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There’s been a lot of hype and angst and discussion in the world of Linux lately. Actually, for several months; since Mark Shuttleworth announced that when Ubuntu 11.04 is released at the end of April it would use Unity as the default desktop manager, instead of Gnome 3. And we’ve also been gearing up for the release this week of Gnome 3, and Gnome Shell, which is the new GUI for Gnome.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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By introducing a Java specification for its own Infinispan data grid technology, open-source software provider Red Hat has generated a lively debate within the ranks of the JCP (Java Community Process) over the best way to add distributed caching to enterprise Java.
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CentOS has been a valuable part of the Linux ecosystem for some time. It’s even been beneficial to Red Hat by helping it maintain its status as the de facto enterprise Linux, without competing too fiercely for support dollars. But the extreme delays in the release of updates for 5.x and the total absence of 6.0 after almost six months gives me little confidence in the CentOS project as it’s run today. It’s neither a community project in any real sense, nor suitable for enterprise or even small business use. It doesn’t have to remain that way, but as it stands now it’s not good business sense to rely on the project even if it costs nothing in support fees.
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Fedora
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Gnome 3 feels very sleek, unobtrusive, extremely solid, and intuitive. There may be (deliberate) functional omisions through its design mandate, but give it time – a few things feel more natural after a few hours of using the environment. Such as the lack of a maximize button… For a start, I’ve been a KDE user for the last 3 years, and I’ve always used the ‘drag-to-edge’ function for doing this. And this behavior just feels `right’.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2 has been released today that brings many new updates and fixes. This is the last beta before the final Ubuntu11.04 release on April 28. There will be no release candidate.
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Today the results of the Default Desktop User Testing for Ubuntu 11.04 was published by Canonical’s Rick Spencer. The test was done using 11 participants from different backgrounds to test the new Unity interface that that Ubuntu 11.04 will have.
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A couple of days after the first beta was released of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), I posted my “First Impressions” on what I thought of Canonical’s ‘Unity’ desktop environment after some light usage. At that time, all of my experience was limited to a notebook that I only use for the lightest of duties, so with 11.04 beta 2 just released, I decided to install the OS on my home machine and take it, and Unity in general, for a real spin.
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Flavours and Variants
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Since this is a 1.0 release, there’s no “what’s new” to include. However, here are a few more details about what Bodhi Linux is based on and what it includes.
Based on Ubuntu 10.04
Enlightenment .16
Kernel 2.6.35
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Tablets
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Kogan’s new netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity pre-loaded
Kogan’s new netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity pre-loaded
* Kogan’s new netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity pre-loaded
* Kogan’s leap of faith with Unity
* Android on TV with Kogan’s new PVR
* The new Kogan budget tablet PC also runs Android 2.2
View all images
After becoming famous more than two years ago for promising to bring an Android smartphone to the Australian market, Kogan Technologies has released and Android tablet, PVR and new notebooks running Ubuntu Linux.
Unfortunately the original Agora handset was a flop, but the new range of Agora devices are tangible and for sale on Kogan’s website from today.
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One of my biggest pet-peeves in the free software world hit me again. Whenever I asked my friends what are their biggest blockers against switching to Linux, I get two questions. The first one is “Will my Word documents work? Will I get something equivalent to MS Office?” And I am happy to say that I can point to Libre/OpenOffice and with a kind help from our friends in Redmont, I usually can persuade them that we have a good alternative here.
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Events
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Last week, The Linux Foundation held its 5th Annual Linux Collaboration Summit which included a number of events and announcements. A new High Availability working group was formed, the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification was released, a 20th Anniversary Video Contest was unveiled, and Yocto Project Release 1.0 became available. Here are the details.
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Today we announced our keynote speaker line up for this year’s LinuxCon North America set in beautiful Vancouver, BC in August. I am especially proud of this year’s slate as I believe it captures the current Linux zeitgeist.
Enterprise Linux? We have the CEO of the largest and most successful Linux and open source company, Red Hat, opening up the conference.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced the launch of Aurora, a new Firefox release channel that is intended to open up experimental Firefox features to a broader audience of testers. The Aurora channel will serve up a stream of Firefox builds that are less fragile than the nightly builds but not as stable as official pre-releases.
Mozilla is transitioning to shorter release cycles and a more incremental development model. The organization aims to deliver three more major Firefox releases this year, bringing the open source Web browser’s version number up to 7. As we explained in our previous coverage of Mozilla’s 2011 roadmap, the transition will require much more intensive testing throughout the development cycle.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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we are happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.4 Beta is now ready for download.
This Beta Release is available in English and 69 additional languages which can be installed as language packs (localizations are still ongoing).
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Oracle will no longer be offering the paid-for version of Oracle OpenOffice and the development of the open-source version at OpenOffice.org will be a purely community-driven project, the company has said.
Oracle announced the plans to hand development of the software to a community-based process on Friday.
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Oracle has announced that it intends OpenOffice.org to become a “purely community-based open source project” and that it plans to no longer offer a commercial version of OpenOffice. Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends “working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.”
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Oracle likes to demonstrate. More specifically, Oracle tries hard to demonstrate commitment to open source in its various manifestations since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Many GNU/Linux users spend time working at the command line. The GNU Screen utility can be of great use if you work with multiple shells at a time. We could also call Screen the “virtual terminal manager”. It allows you to handle multiple shell sessions within a single window/console, and view multiple sessions at the same time too. If this sounds interesting, read on!
The Screen utility is provided by the GNU Foundation; take a look at www.gnu.org/software/screen/ for more details. It comes pre-installed in most Linux distros—if not, you can use sudo apt-get install screen (or your distro’s package manager) to install it from the distro’s package repositories. I‘m using Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit, which has Screen pre-installed—version 4.00.03jw4.
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Project Releases
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The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.57. This is the first stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.
We name this version “Stable” not only because it’s mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.
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Licensing
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The goal isn’t to eradicate open source software from the organization — it’s to use it properly in the pursuit of the company’s goals. The legal department should be part of the group that is applying the policy, and assessing and monitoring its effectiveness, but there should be equal stakeholders in engineering/development and IT, so the policy is not viewed as merely an onerous legal requirement.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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As mentioned a couple times recently in our news and content, we’re in the process of completely overhauling our suite for motherboard testing, to help assure that we’re delivering the more relevant data possible. Taking into account the fact that not all NICs are built equal, one introduction we’ll be making is Ethernet testing, to see which integrated card will deliver you the best networking experience.
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Anybody who got sucked into the glamour/darkness of the Facebook story that culminated in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network movie will probably be familiar with the name Paul Ceglia.
Ceglia is the guy who filed a lawsuit last August claiming that he owns 50 percent of Facebook and, therefore, is entitled to 50 percent of the revenue. There were, however, reasons to seriously doubt Ceglia’s claims. Facebook has understandably been keen to hammer the point that Ceglia is a convicted felon who allegedly defrauded customers of his wood pellet company of $200,000. Being a convicted fraudster doesn’t look good when attempting to convince a court that you are owed billions of dollars. Then there is the fact that Ceglia waited a full seven years before filing his suit, by which time, of course, his potential winnings had sky-rocketed. On first glance, Ceglia appears to be a small-time con man gambling on one big payout.
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Health/Nutrition
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The legal requirement to put biofuels in petrol and diesel sold in the UK and Europe is unethical because their production violates human rights and damages the environment, a major new inquiry has concluded.
“Biofuels are one of the only renewable alternatives we have for transport fuels, but current policies and targets that encourage their uptake have backfired badly,” said Prof Joyce Tait, at Edinburgh University, who chaired the 18-month inquiry by the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCB). “The rapid expansion of biofuels production in the developing world has led to problems such as deforestation and the displacement of indigenous people.”
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Finance
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The 14 largest U.S. mortgage servicers must pay back homeowners for losses from foreclosures or loans that were mishandled in the wake of the housing collapse, the first of a set of sanctions regulators are seeking against the companies.
The settlement announced today between servicers and banking regulators could help the U.S. Justice Department determine the size and scope of fines for the flawed practices, regulators said.
Officials from the Justice department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and 10 state attorneys general met with banks today, the second such meeting to negotiate a global settlement, Associate U.S. Attorney General Tom Perrelli said. The group is discussing potential fines and whether servicers should be required to reduce the principal on some home loans.
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Right to work came to Louisiana in 1976 and drastically changed my family’s work for the worse. I am a third-generation member of the Operating Engineers, Local 406 in Lake Charles. My grandfather, great-uncle, father, brother, cousins, and I have all worked in the heavy equipment industry. While previous generations ran a wide range of equipment (dozers, draglines, and cranes), my father, brother, and I have only worked with large, heavy-lift cranes.
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Privacy
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Data privacy is one of the hot legal issues of the day. Companies can not gather enough information about consumers’ interests and spending habits.
But one-time political foes John Kerry and John McCain are trying to put some limits on secretive data gathering.
The Johns yesterday filed the august-sounding Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011.
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Civil Rights
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Earlier this year, we wrote about computer security expert, Tor developer and Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, who was regularly being detained and intimidated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials each time he (a US citizen) traveled into the country. If you follow Jacob’s Twitter feed, you get detailed descriptions each time he flies back into the country of the hassles he has to go through. Every time he’s detained and never once given an explanation for why or what is being searched for. He’s often lied to and frequently told that it’s a “random” search. He certainly knows enough that he wipes all of his electronic equipment before traveling across the border.
In the latest case, upon returning from a conference in Europe by flying into Houston, Appelbaum again asked his detainers why he was being detained, and was once again not given a straight answer. He knows that there’s something on the screen that they pull up on their computers, but they refuse to provide him with any info. This time, they even went so far as to redefine detainment, telling him that he wasn’t being detained, but that he just couldn’t go until they were done with him. Perhaps he should send Homeland Security a copy of a dictionary with the definition of “detained” highlighted.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Despite being in the midst of a $39 billion merger with AT&T, T-Mobile is still moving forward with business as usual. The carrier announced Thursday a new cheaper unlimited plan, however with some important caveats, including throttling for heavy data users.
The plan will cost $79.99 per month, and included unlimited voice, data, and text and picture messaging. On average, the carrier says subscribers will save up to $350 yearly when compared to competitors’ plans. Customers will only have a limited time to to sign up for the new plan, although an end date was not provided. Both new and existing customers will be eligible.
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The trans-partisan parliamentary mission led by Laure de la Raudière and Corinne Erhel just released its report on Net neutrality. This encouraging report calls for preserving the Internet’s universality and protecting end-users’ fundamental freedoms, and should be considered a template for other European public authorities. That said, while this document offers an important reflection on the evolution of our legal framework to protect fundamental rights and foster the digital economy, it must be followed by actions. La Quadrature du Net publishes an unofficial translation of the report’s introduction.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Today, the European Court of Justice gave a preliminary opinion that will have far-reaching implications in the fight against overaggressive copyright monopoly abusers. It is not a final verdict, but the Advocate General’s position; the Court generally follows this. The Advocate General says that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly.
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Today, the advocate general of the European Court of Justice rendered his conclusions in the Scarlet/SABAM case, in which a Belgian judge ordered an Internet access provider to filter its subscribers’ communications to block unauthorized transmissions of copyrighted works. He concludes that such filtering measures are way too restrictive of freedom of expression and privacy, thereby reasserting the importance of fundamental rights online and stressing the disproportionate character of filtering measures to enforce copyright on the Internet. This should compel the EU Commission to revise its copyright enforcement strategy, as it undertakes the revision of the anti-sharing IPRED directive.
GP2X Shop – Small tour through the dragon’s lair
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
04.14.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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63% use Debian, 18% are found to use an assortment of other Linux Desktop, closely followed by 15%using Fedora / Red Hat
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Desktop
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An email arrived earlier today announcing the new Zorin PC. Just as it sounds, it’s a computer shipping with Zorin OS. Kyrill Zorin said, “Zorin OS is our Linux distro that aims to be the gateway to Linux for Windows users to grow the popularity of Linux. We have recently launched the Zorin PC’s website and are now taking pre-orders.”
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I started my Linux Adventure a bit late in life. I’ve always had an interest in all things technical. My career for the majority of my working life was as an electronics technician (component level repair). I had aspirations at one time of gaining an engineering degree in electronics; other paths were taken, though.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This episode is a recording of Karen’s talk, Sign on the Dotted Line: NDAs, Employment Agreements and Free and Open Source Software from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit.
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper
Selenium is a suite of tools used to automate web app testing across many platforms.
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Kernel Space
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The addition of ipset support makes it easier to run a firewall, as it means that only one table needs to be modified in order to block a specific IP address. The situation with regard to drivers for WLAN chips continues to improve, with Ralink and Realtek now actively involved in developing the Linux kernel drivers.
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SJVN: “What’s Linux real birthday?” You’re the proud papa, when do you think it was? When you sent out the newsgroup post to the Minix newsgroup? When you sent out the 0.01 release to a few friends?
LT: I think both of them are valid birthdays.
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Graphics Stack
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The NVIDIA crew working on their proprietary Linux driver have just pre-released a new build, NVIDIA 270.41.03. This Linux driver update mainly adds support for a number of new GeForce / Quadro GPUs.
The list of newly supported hardware is huge: GeForce GT 520, GeForce GT 525M, GeForce GT 520M, GeForce GT 445M, GeForce GT 530, GeForce 405, GeForce GTX 590, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, GeForce GT 420, GeForce GT 440, GeForce GTX 470M, GeForce GTX 485M, GeForce GT 550M, GeForce GT 555M, NVS 4200M, Quadro 1000M, and Quadro 2000M.
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Applications
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After using and covering the Linux operating system for more than a decade, I have seen plenty of applications come and go. Many of the applications that go are those that wind up either too broken to work or that lack the features users need. The applications that stay are solid, reliable, up to date, and offer plenty of user-friendly features. And user-friendliness is the key for modern Linux — especially on the desktop.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I travel a lot with my laptop, and it can contain private information that shouldn’t get disclosed if it’s ever lost or stolen. For this reason, I’ve been using various types of disk encryption over the years, such as Ubuntu’s encrypted home directory feature, to reasonably assure that my data remains private.
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Games
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One of the most addictive online shooter for Linux, ‘Teeworlds’ 0.6.0 has been released that brings many new features and fixes.
Teeworlds is a retro, cartoon-themed shooter where up to 16 players fight each other online. The game have huge fan following with hundreds of players playing the game daily.
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Hammerware has released a demo version of their game family Farm for Linux. They have said the release date will be April 15th for the final product. Family farm is currently available to pre-order with 20% off at €11.99.
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The number of truly free and open source games available for download is small in general, but in terms of genre, first-person shooters (FPS) have plenty of representation. This is largely due to the 3D engines that have been released into the free software community, which lend themselves well to FPS games. The Cube Engine 2 is one such 3D system, and Red Eclipse is the latest FPS to utilize it. Version 1.0 of Red Eclipse was just released a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try. It is free to download for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows
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Desktop Environments
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This post is not intended to represent complete ideas or possible solutions. It is rather a post relating to the thoughts that I have had concerning the upcoming changes in Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity and KDE 4.6.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Finally, for the first time I’ll meet in person with Nuno in a couple of days, and we’ll take this opportunity to revisit (and hopefully improve) the last few UI elements with which he is not so happy today. In the process of doing so, we will notably incorporate some quite useful input from Dolphin dev, Peter Penz.
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Sometimes the number of choices the Linux operating system provides can be overwhelming. I am starting to look at other options for my preferred desktop environment as GNOME 3 and KDE 4 go in directions that might be unsettling to my computing routine. One obscure yet interesting replacement candidate is Bluetile.
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This is the third in a series of five daily blog entries covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. Today we’ll be looking at a concept we call “Active Apps”. Where Plasma Quick is mostly (though not entirely) about infrastructure and Contour is a project with a Plan(tm), Active Apps is where we are really looking to the broader community of developers, designers and dreamers to help Plasma Active achieve its full potential.
[...]
If you are unsure if your app is “ready” for Plasma Active, it won’t hurt to ask for feedback and start a discussion. We have many months, several sprints and conferences and a major KDE release day in the summer between now and the first Plasma Active release.
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Well, Camp KDE 2011 has come and gone. Some of you attended in person. Others may have listened to the live audio stream in Amarok. Maybe you missed it completely, but fear not! Because while time travel is not yet feasible, all of the talks were recorded and are posted for your viewing and listening pleasure. In addition, we have a bunch of interviews with the organizers, speakers, and attendees.
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GNOME Desktop
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Wow, I’m dazed with geek-pleasure right now. I just saw the latest screenshots of GNOME 3 Linux Desktop emailed by my brother-in-law in Europe. He is a certified linuxhead and he was the first one to inform me that GNOME 3 is now finally available for download. He raved and showed me his new GNOME 3-draped Ubuntu 10.4 laptop and I can only say – Wow, this new Gnome 3 update looks like an iPad 2 iOS screen! I might as well post my Gnome 3 review after testing this new Linux desktop environment, I said to myself so here it is (plus new features).
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For a while Foresight Linux users had no graphical interface for managing their systems packages and/or updates, mainly because the development for the conary backend fell out of scope and our radar (this is a nicer way to say that we didn’t have someone to maintain it). But thanks to the work of zodman, jesse and others PackageKit is making its way back to our desktop.
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Reviews
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Zenwalk is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution originally based on Slackware. The latest stable release is Zenwalk 7. It was made available for download on March 25, 2011, roughly ten months from the last prior stable release – Zenwalk 6.4. The Zenwalk project makes four editions available – The Standard Edition, Core Edition, GNOME Edition, and the Openbox Edition. This article presents a detailed review of the Standard Edition.
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New Releases
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Parted Magic 6.0 has been released. The latest update gets a new major version number, due to some underlying, structural changes, and comes with a number of updated, as well as downgraded, packages.
Several changes have been implemented which should make booting significantly more reliable. Many booting issues should be fixed now, though, since this is a new system, others may have creeped in.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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However, to resurrect this blog with something fancy, why not posting a screenshot of how my Mandriva 2011 desktop currently looks like?
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is developing a new Java Virtual Machine-based programming language intended to overcome the limitations of Java itself. Unveiled earlier this week by lead developer Gavin King at a conference in China, the effort is known as Project Ceylon.
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Because of its nature, it is very clear that CentOS is mostly oriented to server market. But CentOS can also be used on desktop computers and laptops.
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Fedora
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Fedora Core 5′s Bordeaux — a wine region in France, but also a comic book character — begat Fedora Core 6′s Zod, another comic book character. One of my favorites is Fedora 11′s Leonidas — which comes from Fedora 10′s Cambridge (Cambridge is a ship in the Navy, and so is Leonidas) — because it allowed some fun with the name with “300″ memes. Ubuntu? THIS! IS! FEDORA!
As an aside, it’s unfortunate that Barona was not chosen as the Fedora 16 name, which would lend itself to rewriting the lyrics to The Knack’s “My Sharona.” Such are the things that go into consideration in Fedora circles regarding what name to choose in the ranked voting.
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Debian Family
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All my notebooks till today have been ThinkPads from the T series, sadly Lenovo decided (or, maybe, were persuaded) to go with nVidia GPUs for their current designs (T5xx). That’s sad, because nVidia doesn’t cooperate with the FLOSS world. I still wanted a ThinkPad with up-to-date parts. That left me with the Edge series, which is designed to be the bridge between consumer and business models. After some searching I settled on the NVLJ6GE model (the last two letters just indicate, that this is the “German” variant). The key specs are Intel Core i5-480M, 4096 MB RAM, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5145, Intel WLAN module and a non-glare display.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We have recently created a few bits of public documentation that I wanted to share with you. The first is a general guide to the certification programme. It explains what we are aiming to achieve and what our processes are. This can be found at:
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Flavours and Variants
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Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 provides cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the Web application software appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux project.
[...]
Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organizations looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop popular open-source stacks: There are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among others.
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Looking for a beautiful, functional operating system? Check out the first Elementary Jupiter OS. This Linux-based operating system is designed from the ground up to stay out of your way so you can simply use your computer. Whether you’re a long-time Linux user or a complete beginner to open source operating systems, Elementary’s elegance is impressive and more than worth checking out.
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Phones
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It is common knowledge amongst my friends that I am a Linux gadget freak, especially in regards to mobile phones. I have been using Linux-based mobile phones for nearly 6 years now. I was an early fan of the Motorola Linux phones owning 4 of them along the way. I have owned 2 iPhones in the past before selling them and one Windows Mobile-based phone as well. None of them equalled to my love affair with Linux phones.
For me, a mobile phone must be able to take good pictures, and recently, make some good video shots including night scenes. My mobile phones have helped me come up with the content for many of my postings at SaigonNezumi.com.
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It seems like only yesterday that Palm announced its brand new Linux-based WebOS and Palm Pre, ready to shake up the world with awesomeness and Linux in a little package. They matched that announcement up with a nifty little SDK that emulated the entire OS in VirtualBox, and was released as a .deb package for Ubuntu. Someone even posted a HOWTO on the Linux Journal web site about it!
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Android
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Sony Ericsson created a minor controversy on Wednesday with the launch of its own brand-specific channel in Android Market. The category both includes official apps but also recommended titles and occasional exclusives. It will also be used as a sales pitch area and will be a “highlighted market space” for chosen developers’ apps.
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Here’s the most typical scenario. You fight a fierce battle, and migrate your entire organisation to FOSS. After a few initial hiccups, you’ve got all systems and people humming along just fine. One fine day, you decide it’s time to move on in your career. Once you’re out of the organisation, it takes just a few seconds for everyone to gleefully reformat everything and go back to their slavery under proprietary software. You just shrug your shoulders and try not to think about it.
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Events
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We had a great time and the discussion was vigorous! The last year has continued the expansion of open source use, confirmed recently by Laurie Wurster’s March 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=619. In particular, Android has been spectacularly successful and was a significant factor in Nokia’s recent failures in the handset market. The new Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, described Nokia as being on a “burning platform” and identified Android as one of the major sources of their problems.
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Leaders of the technology industry will come together in Boston next month for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, says customers, partners, visionary thinkers, technologists and open source enthusiasts will take part in a series of discussions to learn, network and explore open source. The full agenda is available here.
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A few years back, Argentina’s government looked at mandating the use of all open-source software in its offices, largely to save on software costs.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Creative team here at Mozilla has been growing rapidly lately, so it feels like a good time to share a quick update on who we are and what we’re doing.
[...]
The group includes two veteran Mozillians…
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Mozilla has taken the first major step in its new browser release schedule and transitioned Firefox 5 from its initial mozilla-central to the new aurora channel where the browser will be brought up to beta status.
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Since, its an experimental prototype of an upcoming firefox feature(Yep! this is what it says under the developer comments :D), I shouldn’t expect much. But this comment seems to be a few months old. I wonder why it wasn’t included in Firefox 4 but it indeed deservers to be an integral feature.
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Many of the mockups of Firefox’s new interface, dating all the way back to August 2009, have featured a small home tab. But up until now, I haven’t had a chance to explain the various ideas surrounding Home, elaborate how it fits into our broader cross platform and cross device strategy, and answer some really basic questions, like what will happen if the user has already customized their home page.
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Firefox 5 has been moved into the aurora release channel, the second of a total of four release stages. Firefox 6 alpha 1 has been moved to mozilla-central and is available for download.
Mozilla currently labels the Aurora releases in fact as “Aurora” browsers with a new logo and the mozilla-central versions as “Nightlies”, also with a new logo. The transitions appear to be mainly testing the new rapid release cycle procedure and there isn’t much to see for Firefox users yet. Firefox 4 will get the 4.0.1 (Macaw) security update in May before we will see any changes in the preview releases of Firefox 5. Among the key changes will apparently be the integration of the Home button, which will be built into Firefox as an app tab that will hide the Home desktop application for Firefox.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Long story short, the proprietary Adobe Flash was blacklisted in the GNOME 3.x releases of Epiphany because it uses Gtk+ 2.x (or 1.x) while Epiphany uses Gtk+ 3.x. An unwanted side effect of this is that it also disables Gnash, depriving me of my daily dosage of Youtube, Rebecca Black and crappy, obscure Bollywood songs.
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Government
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Another suggestion is to spend more time explaining the benefits of open source. “A desktop refresh doesn’t have to mean a Windows upgrade,” Silber says. Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal agrees that education is key. “There is still a perception that Linux isn’t ready for frontline use. This is nonsense. Linux is ready. It’s the project managers who are not,” he says.
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Licensing
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The Sabayon Foundation has just had an official sub-license granted for our use of Linux(R) as part of “Sabayon Linux” & “SabayonLinux”, covering goods and services on every corner of the planet (including Antarctica!).
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Programming
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Finance
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According to Cnet, one US Senator is preparing to introduce legislation that would radically alter online commerce. The bill would end the ability of Americans to buy goods from online retailers free from state sales tax. Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois is expected to present the bill shortly after the Easter recess.
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Civil Rights
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Mike Lazaridis the co-CEO of Research In Motion, the Canadian firm behind the Blackberry, refuses to answer a question about problems the company has had in India and the Middle East.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Nearly 18 months since the CRTC adopted its Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) policy, industry experts are divided on its effectiveness in securing net neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It was supported by all parties except the Greens and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira.
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Arch Linux Installation Tutorial Part 1: Initial Installation
Arch Linux Installation Tutorial Part 2: Setting up Xorg, Gnome and Pulseaudio
Arch Linux Installation Tutorial Part 3: The Arch User Repository
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.13.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Ballnux
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HTC announced a 4.3-inch, dual-core 1.2GHz Android phone — initially heading for T-Mobile and Vodafone before going global. The HTC Sensation features a unique, contoured display, 768MB RAM, a full range of wireless features, a new HTC Watch video service, and an updated version of the HTC Sense featuring a “active lockscreen.”
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Applications
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Earth science (also known as geoscience) is the focus of understanding the sciences related to the planet Earth. It includes a wide range of fields such as geology, geography, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology. Some people are surprised to learn that astronomy is also regarded to be an earth science. Geology is generally considered to be the primary earth science.
Earth scientists plays an important role in helping nations minimise risks that are posed by climate change and natural disasters (such as floods, tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes).
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Proprietary
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DraftSight builds are available in both Debian and RPM packages on the product’s home page. The beta weighs in at a beefy 68.8 MB, with a prodigious list of dependencies, but it is a real, native Linux application and not a WINE port. The dependencies are standard GUI fare — Freetype, Cairo, GTK+, D-Bus, and so forth, so any up-to-date system should have no trouble installing it. Still, it might have been nice to have the dependencies listed on the web site, although that is par for the course — Dassault’s DraftSight site has an annoying habit of providing the majority of its content (including the FAQ and Getting Started Guide) as downloadable PDFs rather than simple HTML.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Since the launch of Linux Magazine TV (LMTV) in February of this year, my interest in video has increased beyond any reasonable limits. I’m obsessed with video and our efforts in this new area for us. For weeks I’ve tried to find a way to use my new Panasonic HM-TA1 pocket video camera for new LMTV entries and my own projects. Last week I discovered Cheese Webcam Booth (Cheese), which is the topic of this week’s article. Using Cheese is intuitive and closely resembles the Apple iPad2 Photo Booth app. The difference in price between Cheese (free) and Photo Booth ($499+ for the iPad2) is significant, which definitely gives you something to smile about.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Looking for a way to get involved in the Ubuntu Community? Ahmed Kamal of Ubuntu Community Team at Canonical as posted a call for help for anyone who want to Help Shape Ubuntu.Maps.Com.
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Make Linux Software posted a video showing the “fastest ever embedded Linux boot.” The video shows a BeagleBoard equipped with a 720MHz TI OMAP3530 processor booting Linux 2.6.32 in an impressive 300 milliseconds from boot loader to shell — although the jury is out on just how useful the stripped-down 1.5MB image might be.
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Texas Instruments (TI) announced an “OpenLink” project, which has released a battery-optimized, open source Linux wireless driver stack for mobile devices. The initial release will support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM communications on TI’s WiLink WL1271/3 and WL1281/3 chips, running on the ARM Cortex-based BeagleBoard and PandaBoard boards under Ubuntu, MeeGo, and Android, says the company.
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Phones
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Android
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The web browser portion of the Android market is one of the most fiercely competitive markets since all users at one point or another need to browse the Internet on their devices. Although Android ships with a default web browser, the increasing demands users place on surfing the Internet has lead to the launch of more advanced browsers that offer added features and usability.
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Events
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“I am excited for this, the third Community Leadership Summit – the last two events have been a great success, and this year is sure to be the best event yet for bringing together community leaders to share best practice in a truly independent environment” – Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and Founder of the Community Leadership Summit
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Project Releases
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Google has announced the availability of two open source hash functions for producing 64- and 128-bit hash values from strings. The company states that these functions are suitable for such applications as hash tables – eg. indexing a database – but are not suitable for cryptography.
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Programming
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Many traditional media entities have embraced social-media services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs — at least to some extent — as tools for reporting and journalism, using them to publish and curate news reports. But newspapers in particular seem to have a hard time accepting the “social” part of these tools, at least when it comes to letting their journalists engage with readers as human beings. A case in point is the new social-media policy introduced at a major newspaper in Canada, which tells its staff not to express personal opinions — even on their personal accounts or pages — and not to engage with readers in the comments.
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Zunguzungu’s got an excellent, nuanced piece on the creation and attribution of value in newsgathering and reporting. Zz reminds us that the current arrangement is perfect arbitrary and contingent: no underlying universal principle reifies certain news-related activities (writing the story), ascribes no ownership stake to other activities (sources quoted and unquoted, tipoffs, references); and damns yet another set of activities (curating, aggregating and commenting upon the news).
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You head down to the local government office to pick up your check. But when you get there, the clerk says you can’t have the refund — unless you pay him a bribe. So you pay the bribe, and the clerk gives you your refund.
Both you and the clerk have just committed a crime, according to Indian law.
Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to India’s Ministry of Finance, wants to change that.
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Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tried to get the Senate to adopt candidate Barack Obama’s core principle of presidential warmaking powers.
Paul added an amendment to a bill that would adopt as the “sense of the Senate” the following quote from candidate Obama: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
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We just wrote about how Max Davis, who’s trying to create a silly and totally pointless compulsory licensing system for MMS content was more or less laughed out of court in the lawsuit he filed against the mobile operators, claiming that they were running illegal P2P file sharing programs in the form of their MMS capabilities. It apparently took him all of a few days to come up with a new, perhaps even more ridiculous strategy: he’s suing AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and TracFone for supposed antitrust violations over the same basic issues. Once again, it seems clear that this is an incredibly weak (and almost certainly unproductive) attempt at getting these companies to agree to his pointless licensing scheme.
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Science
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Fast-moving chunks of space debris zipped uncomfortably close to the International Space Station twice in the past week — cosmic close calls that will likely become more common over the next several years, experts predict.
For one thing, after 50 years of spaceflight there is just more junk up there than there used to be, sharing space with vehicles and their human crews. And this debris can snowball — as when satellites collide, spawning thousands of new pieces of orbiting junk.
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Private spaceship maker SpaceX announced plans Tuesday (April 5) for a new heavy-lift rocket, a vehicle that would be the most powerful commercial rocket ever built and haul much heavier loads than the company’s previous boosters.
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Health/Nutrition
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In 2003 Paul Ryan was one of 207 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted for the Medicare prescription drug benefit championed by President George W. Bush—a reckless expansion of a huge program that was already heading for bankruptcy. Yesterday Ryan, who now chairs the House Budget Committee, did partial penance for that budget-busting blunder with a plan that includes ambitious Medicare reforms as well as $5.8 trillion in spending cuts during the next decade.
At a time when Democrats and Republicans are squabbling over whether to cut $33 billion or $61 billion in spending this year—neither of which would make much of a dent in a deficit that is expected to hit $1.6 trillion—Ryan’s plan may seem breathtakingly bold. But while it is admirably forthright in some respects, it dodges several important questions. It’s too bad there is no opposing party to keep the Republicans fiscally honest.
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The CTIA is arguing that a San Francisco ordinance demanding radiation levels be displayed on phone packaging breaches the First Amendment of the US constitution, and is thus illegal.
Speaking to CNET, the wireless telecommunications organisation claimed that forcing shops to reveal the specific absorption rate (SAR) of phone handsets infringes on the retailers right to free speech by compelling them to mention it. The ordinance requires all San Francisco retailers to provide the information at the point of sale, though it hasn’t yet come in to force.
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San Francisco’s board of supervisors has agreed to put its Right-to-Know Ordinance under further review after the wireless industry’s lobbying arm claimed the legislation infringes on the First Amendment rights of cell phone retailers.
In an interview with CNET, CTIA spokesman John Walls said the city cannot force retailers to distribute materials that warn consumers about the possible negative effects of cell phone radiation. “You can’t compel speech,” he said. “Telling retailers to give out that information violates the First Amendment.”
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Security
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The head of INTERPOL has emphasized the need for a globally verifiable electronic identity card (e-ID) system for migrant workers at an international forum on citizen ID projects, e-passports, and border control management.
Speaking at the fourth Annual EMEA ID WORLD summit, INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said that regulating migration levels and managing borders presented security challenges for countries and for the world that INTERPOL was ideally-placed to help address.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Transportation Security Administration administrator John Pistole defended controversial full-body scanning techniques that have endured withering criticism from Republican leaders in Congress.
Speaking at a Department of Homeland Security conference in Washington Friday, Pistole said the body scanners that have attracted attention in recent months were TSA’s best option for preventing non-metallic explosive devices.
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The authorities may seize laptops, cameras and other digital devices at the U.S. border without a warrant, and scour through them for days hundreds of miles away, a federal appeals court ruled.
The 2-1 decision (.pdf) Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes as the government is increasingly invoking its broad, warrantless search-and-seizure powers at the U.S. border to probe the digital lives of travelers.
Under the “border search exception” of United States law, international travelers, including U.S. citizens, can be searched without a warrant as they enter the country. Under the Obama administration, law enforcement agents have aggressively used this power to search travelers’ laptops, sometimes copying the hard drive before returning the computer to its owner.
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Cablegate
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Back in January, we noted the somewhat ironic fact that a US Senator had put a “secret hold” on a bill to protect government whistleblowers. We wondered if someone would blow the whistle and out that Senator. Thankfully, the folks from On the Media stepped up, and set up a project to find out who put that secret hold on the bill. Last we had checked in, they had narrowed it down to three possible Senators: Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions and James Risch.
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Finance
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In September 2008, Bernard von NotHaus donned prison stripes at the Silver Summit at the Best Western Coeur d’Alene Inn.
Von NotHaus, 67, was at the summit pitching his own “Liberty Dollar” coins, but dressed the part of a convict to stick a symbolic finger in the eye of the federal authorities. They had seized records, dies for casting coins, and Liberty Dollars from three Coeur d’Alene businesses linked to his currency. Sunshine Minting Inc. in Coeur d’Alene made coins for von NotHaus.
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When Bill Kristol endorsed America’s intervention in Libya, the Weekly Standard editor was being completely consistent with everything else he has said about American foreign policy. He just wasn’t being consistent with his pose as a proponent of fiscal restraint. It’s bracing to watch Kristol twirl so easily from denouncing “the Democrats’ orgy of spending” and complaining about Republicans who “don’t have a credible plan to deal with the debt or the deficit” to jubilating that the president “didn’t shrink from defending the use of force.” But the pundit’s gyrations can’t obscure a basic reality: You can pay your bills or you can be a global policeman, but you can’t do both. Not in 2011.
According to ABC, the cost of Obama’s kinetic spending reached $600 million in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800 million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be lowballing. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has told The National Journal that the price tag could “easily pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things go.” And if things don’t go well…
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Censorship
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Here’s yet another ridiculously bad ruling for search engines in Italy. Glyn Moody points us to the news of a blog post by a lawyer involved in the case (against Google) who is happy that his side prevailed and that Google is liable for search autocomplete suggestions. The case involved someone who was upset that doing a Google search on his name popped up “con man” (“truffatore”) and “fraud” (“truffa”) as autocomplete Google search suggestions. We’ve seen similar cases elsewhere, and France has (most of the time) also ruled against Google.
Of course, this is ridiculous for a variety of reasons. Google is not “creating” this content. It’s accurately suggesting results based on what users are searching. Clearly, people are searching on this particular individual along with the two terms. That’s not Google’s fault. Yet Google is liable for it?
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Civil Rights
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As we go through this brief extension in three of the more controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, which give law enforcement tremendous leeway in spying on people with very little oversight, there have been some hearings about those provisions. At a recent Senate Judiciary Hearing about this, FBI director Robert Mueller was asked if any of the three provisions had been found to be abused. Mueller responded, “I’m not aware of any.” However, as the EFF notes, it has clear evidence of the roving wiretap being abused, which it found via some FOIA documents. Tellingly, when it requested info about Patriot Act violations, it received heavily redacted info. However, via a different FOIA request, it received other information that, when combined with the first FOIA request, reveals a clear abuse by the FBI.
[...]
This raises some pretty serious questions.
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DRM
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That particular war has already been lost, pretty much. Conventional wisdom among the tech savvy is that DRM is bad, and few of the indies use it. Nontechnical ebook buyers will figure it out when they decide to move to another reader system and can’t take their purchases with them. (The ebook business is so new that most people are still on their first reader and their first forty or fifty ebooks.) The day will come in the next few years when Big Print will be a lot less big, and competing against a lot more ebook publishers who have long understood that DRM does no one any good.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Innovation has emerged as a key means by which the US can pull itself out of this lackluster economy. In the State of the Union, President Obama referred to China and India as new threats to America’s position as the world’s leading innovator. But the threats are not just external. One of the greatest threats to the US’s ability to innovate lies within: specifically, with the music and movie business. These Big Content businesses are attempting to protect themselves from change so aggressively that they risk damaging America’s position as a world leader in innovation.
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WASHINGTON–The tone of a congressional hearing held today on antipiracy was set early when Rep. Bob Goodlatte suggested that Google was falling short in its antipiracy efforts.
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Seeing as he’s a Senator, it would help if he were familiar with the law. As such, he would know that (1) copyright infringement is not “theft,” and (2) yes, the First Amendment protects all kinds of speech, even speech made by criminals and (3) the Free Speech issues that many of us are concerned with are the takedowns of legitimate non-infringing content, which we’ve seen happen repeatedly by Homeland Security — which is the type of program Leahy is looking to expand with COICA.
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Trademark and copyright holders frequently characterize piracy as a legal failure, arguing that tougher laws and increased enforcement are needed to stem infringing activity. But a new global study on piracy, backed by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, comes to a different conclusion. Following several years of independent investigation in six emerging economies, the report concludes that piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one.
The Social Science Research Council launched the study in 2006, identifying partner institutions in South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and India to better understand the market for media piracy such as music, movies, and software. The result is the most comprehensive analysis of piracy to date.
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We’ve been discussing how the FDA has been systematically banning drugs that have been on the market for years, and retroactively granting monopolies to particular pharmaceutical firms. The case that’s drawn the most attention is that of Makena, a drug to prevent early childbirth which is provided on the market by a bunch of different firms, and was competitively priced around $10/dose. Yet, after the FDA stepped in and gave a monopoly to KV Pharmaceutical under the economically-clueless belief that this would help make the drug “more available,” there was a massive public backlash when people discovered KV would increase the price of the drug from $10 to $1,500.
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Copyrights
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We’ve certainly suggested that Chris Dodd was making a big mistake by focusing on the MPAA’s old talking points in his new role as chief of that lobbying organization. Rather than leading Hollywood to a future of new business models and smarter embrace of what consumers want, he’s kicked things off by being anti-consumer, anti-technology and a supporter of previous policies that have failed massively. It’s not exactly a recipe for success.
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We’ve already mentioned how the House’s Hearing on: “Promoting Investment and Protecting Commerce Online: Legitimate Sites v. Parasites” turned into something of a bitchfest at Google for not waving a magic wand and stopping infringement. However, I also wanted to look at the prepared statements of the four participants, which seemed to overflow with ridiculous strawmen.
First up, we have esteemed and respected First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who (it is always said) defended the NY Times in the Pentagon Papers case many years ago. While Abrams is widely respected, it feels like lately he’s been getting quite sloppy in his thinking. Late last year, he published a piece trying to differentiate Wikileaks from the NY Times/Pentagon Papers situation, and was widely criticized for getting many of his facts wrong — undermining his entire argument.
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The latest in the ongoing trial of Joel Tenenbaum, the student who was found guilty of sharing 30 songs online, and told to pay $675,000 for it, until the judge unilaterraly reduced the amount to $67,500. As we noted at the time, it really seemed like Tenenbaum had horrifically bad legal counsel, in the form of Harvard law professor Charlie Nesson, who still seems more focused on making the case a circus, rather than focusing in on the key issues. That does not, however, mean there aren’t key issues here, with the big one being the appropriate standards for determining how much one should have to pay if found guilty of file sharing.
The appeal was just heard on Monday, and you can listen to the oral arguments (mp3) from the court’s website. It’s definitely an interesting hearing and worth listening to. As with most appeals court situations, the bulk of the work is done in the briefs that were filed prior to the hearing, and which everyone is familiar with. The oral hearings get right to the point and drill down on where the panel of judges has questions.
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The estate of Rick James, best known for his song “Super Freak,” filed a proposed class action lawsuit on Friday against Universal Music Group over money owed from digital downloads and ringtones.
The new class action lawsuit comes in wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to review a case initiated by Eminem’s former Detroit-based producing partners, F.B.T. Productions, which won a lower 9th Circuit ruling last September deeming digital music to be more akin to a license than a physical sale of music. The distinction is important: Copyright owners get a 50% share on royalties from licenses but only about a 12-20% royalty rate from sales.
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A coalition of progressive activists and conservative bloggers slammed the bipartisan push to crack down on online piracy backed by organized labor and the entertainment industry on Monday, calling it an encroachment on freedom of speech.
Lawmakers from both parties are scheduled to hold a press conference at the Capitol Monday, where they are expected to renew their push for new online piracy laws that give feds greater authority to shut down sites that host or link to pirated content.
The effort will likely resemble the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which was introduced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and passed the committee last year. The White House has backed the effort and recommended stiffer penalties for online piracy convictions.
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There are thousands of sites that link to video on the Internet and it’s becoming increasingly common for them to be threatened by rightsholders when they link to unauthorized content. However, things have gone a stage further as a site is now being sued by a copyright group for linking to completely legal content provided by official sources.
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So argued Kenneth M. Stern, a California lawyer; no dice, said the district court in Stern v. Does (C.D. Cal., decided Feb. 10, 2011 but just now made available on Westlaw). No dice, said the court, concluding that the message lacked the modicum of creativity required for copyright protection — because it was so short and dictated by functional considerations — and that the copying was a fair use. Both conclusions seem right to me, though the fair use conclusion is especially clear, given the utter lack of any likely effect on the value of plaintiff’s work.
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During the last couple of weeks a heated debate has sprung up around the claimed massive music piracy of a relatively unknown band. One Soul Thrust currently have just 176 followers on Twitter yet according to their manager the group is being destroyed by the pirating masses who have, to date, downloaded their debut album 100,000 times. With the CRIA apparently supporting the band’s position, it’s time to investigate.
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When Zediva launched, we already knew it was going to face a legal fight from the MPAA and the movie studios. The company lets people stream movies they want to see, but tries to get around the legal licensing issues by only streaming directly from internet connected DVD players, playing legitimately acquired DVDs. Their argument is that it’s really no different than renting a movie and bringing it to your own DVD player. And, perhaps, the Cablevision ruling in the US on remote DVRs gives them some support for their position. But, there was no way the industry was going to just let this go by without any sort of fight. And, so, the MPAA has now sued the company claiming that it’s a “sham,” and that Zediva is running an illegal video-on-demand service without the proper licenses. In some ways, this case could also impact the attempts by cloud music players to stream legitimate content without a license as well.
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The movie studios have seen the online movie rental service Zediva and filed their thumbs-down review of the site in federal court Monday, asking for monetary damages and an immediate shutdown.
Zediva.com, which officially launched in mid-March, rents new release movies without permission from the studios by letting its customers rent a DVD player and disc from afar. Only one person can rent a given disc at a time. That, the company argues, puts it in the same legal bucket as a traditional video rental store.
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Hadopi, the French agency charged with handling file-sharers’ copyright digressions, has once again been shamed by a copyright-related blunder. The agency which mandates that all citizens secure their networks to keep out freeloading pirates, has a surprisingly unsecure site itself. Ironically enough, the vulnerability allowed outsiders to change the search engine of the Hadopi site into that of The Pirate Bay.
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Techdirt talks a lot about how to make money in the music biz without actually selling music. Consider this an improvement. With these instructions, you’ll hardly have to produce any music at all, and if you do, you won’t have to go through all that time-intensive and “extremely expensive” production/promotion stuff.
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Over the past several months a series of domain name seizures by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made headlines across the Internet.
Under the flag of “Operation In Our Sites” the authorities shut down a dozen file-sharing and streaming sites, as well as close to 80 sites selling counterfeit goods. After two months of silence on the domain seizure front, the MPAA has now applauded the US authorities for their “successful” enforcement efforts.
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Amazon’s decision to launch its new Cloud Player without securing additional music licenses has been described as a “bold move” by many observers. It takes serious guts for Amazon to simply declare that it doesn’t need licenses — especially when even casual observers know the music industry thinks otherwise.
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Liberty Media/Corbin Fisher continues its somewhat aggressive attempts to blame everyone but itself for failing to put in place a better business model. Remember, we just noted the bizarre claim that it made in the mass infringement lawsuit it filed that anyone who did not secure their internet routers to block all infringing material was negligent. In the comments to that post, someone pointed out that the company also had recently changed its terms of service to say that if anyone with an account had content from that account end up pirated, the user owed $25,000 even if they could prove that the account was hacked…
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ACTA
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You may recall last fall we wrote about one of Dan Bull’s excellent tracks commenting on copyright issues, called Death Of ACTA.
Code is Law: Does Anyone Get This Yet?
Credit: TinyOgg
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