08.12.11

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Judgment Day

  It is clear to me that retail outlets in North America tend to comply with M$’s wishes when it comes to allowing real competition in operating systems on retail shelves. Here are some compelling evidences:

  1. The standard argument is that retailers should supply what their customers want. Why is it that Walmart.com‘s customers want 70 books on Linux but only 2 PCs, and then only very low-end devices? That other OS finds 470 books and 426 computers. If 7:1 is the ratio of interest, should there not be 60 GNU/Linux PCs on those shelves?
  2. If a customer wants Linux and searches BestBuy’s site they are given M$’s and Apple’s products to install their operating systems and nothing Linux-like at all.

• Desktop

  • Community to HeliOS – We’re Burnin’ for You

    What we don’t have is the time to get the Linux live cd’s burned. Looks like we are going to need upwards of 50 for our immediate needs.

    If you have time and the resources to help us burn these disks, we need to have these disks on hand within the next couple of weeks.

• Kernel Space

  • Does it matter what Linus uses?

  • Graphics Stack

    • AMD Puts Out An OpenGL 4.2 Linux Driver

      While Mesa won’t have OpenGL 4.2 support for some time, NVIDIA released an OpenGL 4.2 preview driver on Monday as soon as the Khronos Group had published the new specification. AMD yesterday has now released a beta Linux driver (of their Catalyst blob, nothing to do with open-source) that provides OpenGL 4.2 support.

    • What Mesa Has Left With OpenGL 3, OpenGL 4

      With the release this week of the OpenGL 4.2 specification (and accompanying GL Shading Language 4.20 revision), the TODO list for the open-source Mesa developers just got a bit longer. Mesa / Gallium3D still lacks full support for OpenGL 3.0 and all of the revisions since that 2008 specification release.

      The OpenGL 3.0 support in this open-source OpenGL library is slowly coming together (see the many Phoronix articles), but the GL Shading Language 1.30 support is incomplete along with other key areas. Some of the functionality is also limited “out of the box” due to patent / IP restrictions.

• Applications

  • Xournal: A Fun Note-taking / pdf Annotating App

    Here is a really fun, kid-friendly application that is not only great for taking notes in class, but it’s also an easy pdf annotator for filling out those fancy forms (college or employment applications) that expect you to fill in tiny little spaces with legible writing. Now when the teacher draws a diagram on the chalkboard and you need to copy it down, you can do it on your laptop or netbook instead of a piece of paper that can blow away when you drop your books (I’m clumsy and lose alot of stuff that way, lol) or get lost among all the other stuff you have to carry around in your backpack.

  • Longomatch a sports video analysis tool

  • Tux Paint Kids Summer Drawing Contest!

    Here’s a chance to show off your talent using a great drawing program made especially for kids. Tux Paint is an award-winning drawing program you can download to your computer. Tux Paint was recently awarded SourceForge.net Project of the Month. It will run on all versions of Windows (including Tablet PC), Mac OS X 10.4 and up, Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. And it’s FREE!

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • The Perfect Server – Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND & Dovecot [ISPConfig 3]

    • Ubuntu 11.10 Will Use Thunderbird as Default Mail Client

• Desktop Environments

  • Some notes from Desktop Summit 2011

    As usual, Desktop Summit 2011 has been a lot of fun. I’ve been to most of the GUADEC and aKademy free desktop events in the past few years, but this was the first time I didn’t give a talk. Even that way, it was definitely worth spending a week in Berlin.

  • Desktop Summit 2011 Thoughts

  • Joining the Game at the Desktop Summit

    Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.

  • Branding stupidity

    One of the last talks I attended on Desktop Summit was “Swimming upstream or downstream? Both!”. Announced as speaker was Vincent Untz, but he didnt the talk alone, there was also Allison Randal, Harald Sitter and our own Jaroslav Řezník.In this talk came up the problem with the branding.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Joining the Game at the Desktop Summit

      Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.

    • KDE Commit Digest for 31 July 2011

      In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest Artem Serebriyskiy introduces the new Nepomuk Web Extractor in a featured article. The list of changes include:

      * Desktop layout control moves from pager to KWin
      * OwnCloud gets instant search and sees many smaller commits which bring minor new features and work on the user interface
      * An asynchronous Nepomuk resource retriever is implemented in KDE PIM to improve performance
      * Rekonq receives a synchronisation feature
      * Early version of Dolphin 2.0 comitted
      * OpenVPN configuration import/export is now possible in Network Management
      * Kate now supports local folding
      * In Calligra there is work on caching and multiple bugfixes, Krita gets an update of undo support.

    • collect.kde.org

      I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.

    • KWin at Desktop Summit

      Wow, what a week! It’s just great to be at Desktop Summit again and meeting all those KDE people again and also the GNOME people which gives the event a different and pleasant touch.

• Distributions

  • Tails: One more distro for the privacy-conscious

    A couple of weeks ago I posted some information about the Department of Defense releasing its Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux distribution aimed at giving remote workers a more secure way to access government networks — but also available to the public for anyone’s use who wants a little extra security.

  • New Releases

    • Network Security Toolkit (NST v2.15.0)

    • Berry 1.11

    • [Redo] Stable Version: 1.0.1

    • Linux Deepin 11.06.1 发布了

    • Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite

      Well ladies and gents we now have Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite. Please do not make this into what it is not. This is a lite edition made for computers with low resources. It is in no way even close to what the non lite Ultimate Edition 3.0 will be. This is specifically designed for computers with low resources IE notbooks etc. You can read more about that here.

    • ConnochaetOS 0.9.0 released

      I am pleased to announce the release of ConnochaetOS 0.9.0. After one year of development and after three years after the last release of it’s predecessor DeLi Linux, this the first stable release of ConnochaetOS.

  • Red Hat Family

    • PGA Tour partners with Red Hat, CDW on Linux media asset system

      Linux is a godsend for many, including those obsessed about the professional breakup of Tiger Woods and former caddie Steve Williams.

      [...]

      Gredenhag said reliability and suppot for XFS were key factors for selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was implemented on RHEL 5, which does not incorporate XFS per se, but Red Hat offered support for it as an option and CDW did the implementation of the feature. XFS — which is very fast file system for very large video files, such as 40 gigabyte files — is now in Red Hat Linux 6 and will eventually be implemented by PGA Tour, said Gredenhag.

    • PGA Tour partners with Red Hat, CDW on Linux media asset system

    • CentOS 6 review

      CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.

      [...]

      This was just an excursion to determine whether CentOS 6 could be a good candidate as a desktop distribution for non-experts, or new users. The verdict: Unless you do not mind getting digital grease on your hands, there are better RPM-based distributions available. Fedora or any Fedora Spin, makes a better desktop distribution than CentOS 6.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Pioneering live-boot distro gets Chromium and LibreOffice

        Klaus Knopper has released version 6.7 of his Debian-based live-CD Linux distro. Again employing the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), it is also said to include version 3.3.3 of the LibreOffice suite, the Chromium 12 web browser, and a new version of ADRIANE (Audio Desktoop Reference Implementation And Network Environment) for partially-sighted users.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Pint-Size PPA Primer

          Package management in Linux is great, but unfortunately, it comes with a few cons. Granted, most distributions keep all your software, not just system software like Apple and Microsoft, updated. The downside is that software packages aren’t always the latest versions. Whatever is in the repository is what you get. Another frustration is when the software you want to install isn’t in the distribution repositories at all.

        • Bad to worse? New ubuntu unity design ignites heated arguments

          The unity shell and the top panel was always a design headache for those who behind the development. The design in its current form itself was criticized by many and was one of the reasons why many people hated unity. The daily builds of the unity 2D had a new iteration of the design apparently trying to solve some of the issues associated with the desktop shell. The new design now is now causing far more criticism than the current version.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’ Gains Linux 3.0 and Thunderbird

          After all the controversy that followed the release of Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal,” it’s hard not to anticipate with at least some anxiety the upcoming debut of version 11.10, also known as “Oneiric Ocelot.”

        • Mark Shuttleworth on patents, tablets and the future of Ubuntu

          Mark Shuttleworth: The patent system is often misunderstood. It’s sold as a way of giving the little guy an opportunity to create something big … when in fact patents don’t really work that way at all.

          What they do very well is keep the big guys entrenched and the little guys out. For example, it’s very common in established industries for all of the majors to buy up or file as many patents as they can covering a particular area. They know and accept that the other majors are all in the same industry and essentially cross-license each other to keep the peace within that defined market. But they use that arsenal to stop new entrants coming in and disrupting the market.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 vs Windows 7 vs OS X 10.7 (Lion)

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android keeps growing in U.S. — especially in the south and west

        ComScore’s second-quarter U.S. smartphone study shows that Android went up two percent in June to 40.1 percent share, while Apple’s iOS remained steady at 26.6 percent. Meanwhile, Jumptap released a study comparing usage state-by-state, showing iOS’ strength in New England and the upper Midwest and Android’s greater popularity in the South and West.

      • Android mobile ref platform targets vertical markets

        Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a Android reference platform for vertical-market smartphones and tablets. The EB Specialized Device Platform is available now with a Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor — an OMAP4 version is coming next year — and a 4.0- or 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, plus a wide variety of wireless and sensor options including 4G LTE.

      • Google Wallet, NFC smartphones spur contactless PoS terminals

        Google Wallet and other mobile payment providers, coupled with Near Field Communcation-enabled smartphones, are stimulating the production of contactless technology in cash registers, says ABI Research. Some 85 percent of Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals that ship in 2016 will be “contactless-enabled,” up from 10 percent in 2010, says the research firm.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Getting Plasma Active on your tablet

Free Software/Open Source

• Report Cites Lack of Open Source Skills As a Barrier in Enterprises

  As we’ve reported, free training and documentation resources for open source projects have proliferated in recent years. Likewise, organizations like The Linux Foundation and commercial open source companies such as Red Hat offer substantial training resources, many of them free. Still, InfoWorld cites niche security applications in conjunction with a lack of in-house skills at many companies, and this is a good point.

• Open Source Awards 2011 Now Live

  Last year I was acting as a judge for the e-commerce application category, while this time I’ll be part of the Open Source Business Applications jury.

• Nominate your favourite free software project for Packt’s 2011 Open Source Awards

  The great guys at Packt Publishing just released the details for theirs 2011 Open Source awards.

• Research reveals value of gender diversity in open source communities

  Open source research often paints the community as a homogeneous landscape. I have collected stories from open source contributors to begin constructing a new narrative of diverse experience. These contributors are 20 women and men, living in seven countries.

  Dedicated people have enacted some impressive initiatives, but a deep gender gap still exists. You may have heard recent conference sessions about increasing diversity in open source, seen the anti-harassment policies, or noticed the women’s groups in large open source projects.

• Open Source is Ready for Prime Time

  Welcome to another edition of Take Five. In today’s edition I talk open source software development in today’s enterprise world with Clay Loveless, currently founder at Jexy and formerly of Mashery (where he was a co-founder).

  Stephen Wellman (SW): Hello, Clay, welcome to Take Five, a new feature on the SourceForge blog where we discuss the pressing issues facing today’s IT professionals. It’s a pleasure to have with us. As someone who works with developers, how has the role of open source software development changed in today’s business world? Are larger businesses more amendable to open source now than they were a few years ago?

• NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative

  …like the Javascript Version (pyjs), the “Desktop Version” (pyjd) is actually available for multiple platforms as well: Windows (all versions dating back even to Windows 2000), Apple (tablets as well as laptops and desktops), Android (all versions), GNU/Linux (all versions), GNU/FreeBSD (all versions) – about the only modern platforms the Desktop version isn’t available for is for Blackberry OS and Symbian, because they’re proprietary.

• Events

  • What’s Coming Up For LinuxCon NA 2011

    While the Berlin Desktop Summit is still happening this week, happening next week in Vancouver, Canada is the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon North America 2011 event. This event is special, in particular, for it being the 20th anniversary of Linux.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Google Unleashes Native Client Into Chrome, Next-Gen Web Apps To Follow?

      For well over a year now, Google has been hyping up something called Native Client. It’s an open source technology that allows a web browser to run compiled native code. In other words, it’s a potential missing link between native apps and web apps. And now it’s finally getting baked into Chrome.

    • Google’s Chrome operating system gets a much needed update

      I quite like Google’s Chrome operating system (OS)–a Linux variant that use the Chrome Web browser as its interface–but as it’s being shipping today, Chrome OS has problems. Fortunately, in the latest Chrome OS stable channel release, Google is finally addressing some of these rough spots.

      To put it to the test, I installed the new Chrome OS, Chrome version 13.0.782.108, to my Samsung Chromebook. It took a while to install-not the installation itself, that took about a minute-but to get it going. I had to click the update button several times to get things going. I’m not the only one who found that to be the case.

• Funding

  • Open-source PaaS startup gets $8 million in funding

    Cloud-based PHP “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) vendor AppFog on Thursday announced an $8 million round of venture funding.

  • Economy up or down, can open source come out on top?

    We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.

    What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, where open source is prevalent and disruptive, and also mobile computing, which continues to be impacted by openness.

• Project Releases

  • Samba 3.6 now available

  • Getting Plasma Active on your tablet

    This is to announce diffutils-3.1, a stable, bug-fix release. There have been more than 50 build, test and portability-related changes in diffutils proper, as well as over 2100 in gnulib. In spite of all that, there have been only a few bug fixes, and only one that was worthy of a NEWS entry (below).

• Public Services/Government

  • Bristol Council open source: the allegations in full

    Bristol City Council’s failure to deliver on its open source strategy is beginning to make the coalition government’s manifesto commitment on open source look incontinent.

    The council’s own open source strategy is looking ineffectual. Bristol Council cabinet committed to an open source infrastructure a year ago – as long as it was doable. It ordered a pilot but that was discredited by an allegation that it had been fixed. Now the council has refused to release the suspect pilot reports under Freedom of Information, it is time to look at those allegations in full.

    Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius, told MPs in May how, left to establishment suppliers Capgemini and Computacenter, the open source strategy got caught in a thicket of indifference and vested interests.

    Bristol set an original deadline for its open source strategy to be costed and risked by November 2010. They told Capgemini to get on with it, said Taylor, but Capgemini did nothing. Bristol told Capg to work with Sirius, who were experienced implementing open source infrastructures for companies like SpecSavers. They ignored Surius, said Taylor in a letter to MPs on the Parliamentary Administration Select Committee (PASC).

    The council meanwhile tendered for an open source infrastructure using the £6bn Buying Solutions Framework for Commodity IT Hardware and Software (CHITS). Thus it would be ready to roll when the pilot produced its recommendations.

• Licensing

  • When Your Open Source Code No Longer Belongs to You

    Unfortunately, the way to answer this question is to follow the money. Most companies have coders sign intellectual property-focused and Fair Use-focused agreements that make clear that code produced while working for (and being paid by) the company belongs to the company. If the coder was being paid a salary while contributing to an open source project, the company almost always has the right to claim ownership of the code.

• Standards/Consortia

  • ODF Plugfest, Berlin

    I attended the 6th ODF Plugfest took place in Berlin a few weeks ago, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). It followed the pattern of previous events, a two-day event, with the first day dedicated to technical interop activities among implementors, followed by a day of public presentations.

  • Gnumeric 1.10.17 aka “TBD” is now available.

    The Gnumeric Team is pleased to announce the availability of Gnumeric version 1.10.17. This should be used together with the concurrently released goffice 0.8.17. This is most likely the last release in the stable 1.10.x series.

  • One-to-One VP8 Video Calling Now Supported in Skype

    Our friends at Skype have added support for one-to-one VP8 video calling in Skype 5.5 for Windows. If both users in a Skype video call are using Skype 5.5, the call will use VP8 to encode the video streams for optimum transmission across the Internet. Skype also uses VP8 for group video calling.

  • Amazon Escapes the App Trap Too

    Apple’s inflexibility and greed has forced Amazon to release an HTML 5 Kindle that you’ll love.

  • Amazon’s Answer To Apple’s Terms: A Web-Based Kindle Cloud Reader — Brilliant On PC, Better On iPad

Leftovers

• “8″ Headed South

  “8″ has not even been released yet, but Phoney “7″ which has and is the model for “8″ has lost two thirds of its share of the smart phone market.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Drug Companies Conduct Fake Studies as Marketing Tools

    Pharmaceutical companies are carrying out fake, pseudo-studies on humans as a marketing devices to get doctors familiar with new drugs. In such studies, called “seeding trials,” drug companies invite hundreds of doctors to take part in a research study by asking them to recruit patients to serve as subjects.

  • Doctors Warn Of U.S. Cancer Drug Shortage

  • Censorship?

    They consider banning the sale of cigarettes a form of censorship, and they hide themselves behind the legality of the product.

• Security

  • State Department Spent $1.2 Billion On An Asset Monitoring System… That Ignores All Non-Windows Equipment

    We just wrote about a GAO report showing how the Defense Department is somewhat incompetent at dealing with online threats. Of course, it’s not clear that anyone else in the government is any better. The GAO is back with yet another report, dinging the State Department for its dreadful computer security monitoring program. In this case, it’s talking about threats to the State Department’s network, rather than to third parties. And while the State Department spent a whopping $1.2 billion of taxpayer money on a fancy computer system, called iPost, to monitor everything, it turns out that it only works on Windows machines:

    But the iPost service only covers computers that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system, not other assets such as the roughly 5,000 routers and switches along State’s network, non-Windows operating systems, firewalls, mainframes, databases and intrusion detection devices, GAO auditors said.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • London riots: Lidl water thief jailed for six months

    Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, carried out the “opportunistic” theft at a Lidl supermarket in Brixton as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house.

    Robinson threw away the water and ran when he was confronted by police but was arrested and quickly admitted what he had done.

  • How America turned poverty into a crime

    Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” — formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.

    In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.

    How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.

    Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

  • Police allow public to hit protesters

    London Metropolitan police has allowed the public to use weapons against suspected rioters and looters if households or businesses “honestly” believe they pose a threat.

    In a document sent to businesses in the British capital, the Scotland Yard authorized the use of what is known as “reasonable force” saying people can defend themselves in their homes or businesses by weapons if they believe they could be attacked.

  • Rich Executives Spend Millions For Bodyguards To Guard Them From Populist Anger

    Perez and his partner Mike Gomez, a bodyguard resembling The Sopranos’ Silvio, finally track down their client at a Barnes & Noble. Two of the countersurveillance guys go back to scouting for menaces, while Perez and Gomez, both of whom are trained sharpshooters and martial-arts experts, step in as the Primary’s “close protection” team. Shoppers stare at the entourage, straining to recognize someone famous.

  • Aggression during G20 rally ‘perpetrated by police,’ judge rules

    A Toronto judge has ruled that “adrenalized” police officers acted as aggressors at a peaceful political rally that led to dozens of arrests during last year’s G20 summit.

    “The only organized or collective physical aggression at that location that evening was perpetrated by police each time they advanced on demonstrators,” Justice Melvyn Green ruled on Thursday. He was referring to a demonstration at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

    Green stated police criminalized political demonstration, which is “vital” to maintain a “viable democracy.”

  • Tories on riot policing: too few, too slow, too timid

    David Cameron is on a collision course with the police after the government used an emergency Commons debate on the English riots to issue a point-by-point dissection of the police’s “insufficient” tactics during the week.

  • Big Brother isn’t watching you

    The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan’s death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I’ve heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they’re the real victims) saying the behaviour is “unjustifiable” and “unacceptable”. Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet’s fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that’s been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies’ man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?

    However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable” it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.

  • Police tell of life during riots: fatigue and hunger under hail of missiles

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Arctic Ice Thinning 4 Times Faster Than Predicted by IPCC Models, Semi-Stunning M.I.T. Study Finds

    According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends….

    After comparing IPCC models with actual data, [lead author Pierre] Rampal and his collaborators concluded that the forecasts were significantly off: Arctic sea ice is thinning, on average, four times faster than the models say, and it’s drifting twice as quickly.

• Finance

  • Rising Up Against Brutal Austerity

    The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Nonpartisan “Truthtelling” at ALEC

    A “radical, possibly deranged, truthteller” will be the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said political commentator Tucker Carlson at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in New Orleans. Speaking between workshops on the benefits of carbon emissions and task force meetings where corporations and politicians vote on “model bills,” Carlson joined right-wing leaders who sang the praises of the Tea Party and “sticking to your guns,” cursed Obama and other “big government liberals,” and praised the same “cut, cap, and balance” agenda manifest in the ALEC bills and pushed by national politicians in Washington D.C.

  • Top Companies Claim To Fight Global Warming, But Sponsor ALEC’s Climate Denial

    The fight against global warming pollution requires the investment of everyone, including the world’s multinational corporate giants. Many companies have taken official stances on climate pollution, pledging to reduce their greenhouse footprint in order to reduce the threat of a destabilized climate.

  • ALEC Exposed: Warming Up to Climate Change

  • 3 Tips on Exposing ALEC’s Influence in Your State

  • Big Business Woos ALEC Legislators in the Big Easy

  • Journalist Kicked out of ALEC Conference, Threatened With Arrest

  • Protesters Spotlight Corporate Influence in State Politics at ALEC Annual Meeting

  • What is ALEC Hiding? CMD Reporter Kicked Out of ALEC Hotel

  • Diageo’s New Hispanic Strategy Includes Big Buy on Univision

    Seeking to boost Hispanic consumption, liquor giant Diageo is turning to TV, making a major upfront buy on Univision Communication’s Galavision cable network as well as on every owned and operated Univision station.

    The year-long deal represents the first time a liquor company has bought upfront time — the period in which marketers buy up available commercial inventory from networks before the fall season — on every Univision station, Univision told Ad Age. The piecemeal purchase was necessary because Univision does not accept national liquor buys on the network.

  • D.C. firm inks lucrative public-relations contract with Bahrain

    Bahrain is in the news again, this time for what appears to be the comically evil persecution of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.

    So, naturally, the ruling monarchy of the Gulf nation has hired a top Washington public relations firm to burnish (or attempt to salvage) its image, according to a new foreign agent registration filing. Qorvis Communications will be paid $40,000 per month, plus expenses, for the public relations work, according to a contract submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

• Censorship

  • Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online

    Take a moment and let that sink in. Randi Zuckerberg doesn’t just think that you should be using your real name on Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn — she thinks pseudonyms have no place on the Internet at all. And why should we take the radical step of stripping all Internet users of the right to speak anonymously? Because of the Greater Internet F***wad Theory, or the “civility argument,” which states: If you allow people to speak anonymously online, they will froth at the mouth, go rabid, bully and stalk one another. Therefore, requiring people to use their real names online should decrease stalking and bullying and generally raise the level of discourse.

  • Oppose Attempts to Censor the British Public

  • British Prime Minister Does a 180 on Internet Censorship

    After several days of destructive riots throughout the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron is practically tripping over himself in his eagerness to sacrifice liberty for security.

  • Google’s Chrome operating system gets a much needed update

    Here’s another one for our lists of government-less Internets: MondoNet. According to the MondoNet website: “The purpose of this project is to study the technological, social and regulatory feasibility of developing a peer-to-peer mesh networking protocol.”

    MondoNet was founded by academics at Rutgers University, and the university is supporting the team’s research. The project is close to being able to test its mesh networking protocol in actual, real-life communities.

• Civil Rights

  • Prime Minister’S Attack On Social Media Unwarranted

    Some people have called for temporary suspension of services; David Cameron appeared to suggest suspension of Facebook and Twitter in some circumstances (TBC). We do not believe this should be given any serious consideration. Clearly, a service will be used by people for legitimate activities, some of which will in fact be to mitigate or deal with the problem encountered. In any case, innocent people should not be punished for the actions of others.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Geeks Without Frontiers Pursues Wi-Fi for Everyone

• DRM

  • Linux users can now read Kindle ebooks on their desktop with Amazon Cloud Reader

    If you are a Kindle user disappointed by the lack of a dedicated desktop application for Linux, there’s good news for you. Amazon.com has just launched their new HTML5-powered cloud-based web app called Amazon Cloud Reader. The webapp runs flawlessly on Linux with support for offline reading and much much more. Here’s what it has to offer.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • The Trade Committee operates like Navy Seals

    The European Parliament Trade Committee operates as secretive as Navy Seals. In the last year, the Committee commissioned a study and requested a Legal Service opinion on ACTA. While these were official decisions the Committee made, there is no record on this at all. The Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) seems to make a distinction between public minutes and non public coordinators’ notes. The Register maintains everything is published. See our letter to the Parliament’s Register.

    It may seem silly to compare the work of a parliamentary committee to Navy Seals operations. Of course, it is silly. The EU foreign intellectual property policy is much more deadly.

  • Does IP slow down growth by throttling innovation?

    The fantasy depends on unlimited energy and the Star Trek replicator which produces an unlimited supply of whatever goods are desired. The dream becomes a nightmare when intellectual property is introduced, followed by lawyers, and bureaucrats to enforce these rights.

    The fantasy originated in Peter Frase’s blog, where he writes, “In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.”

  • Drug prices to plummet in wave of expiring patents

  • Federal Circuit: Isolated Human DNA Molecules are Patentable

    In a much anticipated decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has rejected the Southern District of New York’s court’s holding that could have rendered invalid all patents claiming isolated forms of naturally occurring DNA molecules. However, the decision is somewhat nuanced and will be appealed.

  • Monsanto to be prosecuted for biopiracy

    In an unprecedented, though much delayed, decision, the National Biodiversity Authority of India (NBA) has decided to initiate legal action against M/s Mahyco/Monsanto and their collaborators for accessing and using local brinjal varieties in developing Bt Brinjal without prior approval of the competent authorities. The official resolution giving effect to this decision was taken in the NBA’s meeting of 20th June 2011, the minutes of which were released only on 11 August 2011.

    http://www.nbaindia.org/meetings/meeting.htm

    The decision of the NBA reads as follows:

    “A background note besides legal opinion on Bt brinjal on the alleged violation by the M/s. Mahyco/M/s Monsanto, and their collaborators for accessing and using the local brinjal varieties for development of Bt brinjal with out prior approval of the competent authorities was discussed and it was decided that the NBA may proceed legally against M/s. Mahyco/ M/s Monsanto, and all others concerned to take the issue to its logical conclusion.” (Emphasis supplied)

  • Copyrights

    • Despite What So-Called Legal Experts Tell You, Copyright Protects IDEAS As Well As Expression

      Rhianna and Def Jam Music must stand trial for being inspired by David LaChappelle’s ideas regarding photographic images.

      They didn’t copy a damned thing. They were only inspired by someone else’s work which influenced they way in which they created a new work – the same way all creation happens on some level.

    • Copyright and Me

      Canadian copyright law prevents me from posting examples of my ‘published’ work, that is to say, produced television episodes that I wrote, on my own web page on the Internet.

      Because I don’t control the copyright.

      The same holds true for all the other creative professionals whose creative input went into the work, because a corporate entity holds the rights to all of our combined creativity. As near as I can tell, the corporation owns these rights by virtue of picking up the tab.

    • Medvedev to make internet copyright proposals ‘soon’

      Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday he would soon submit his proposals on intellectual property rights and copyright regulation on the Internet.

      “I have commented on intellectual property right issues more than once recently,” he said at a media briefing at the RIA Novosti newsroom.

      At the G8 summit in France last month and the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week, Medvedev said the advent of the Internet means that traditional approaches toward intellectual property rights need to be changed.

    • ACTA

      • Trade Committee not interested in fundamental rights

        The European Parliament Committee on International Trade requested the Parliament’s Legal Service an opinion on ACTA (pdf). Compared with the request US Senator Wyden made, and seen the European academics Opinion on ACTA, the questions are very narrow. The questions seem carefully designed to minimize damage to ACTA.

        Senator Wyden has asked in an October 8, 2010 letter that the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress undertake and provide to Congress: “a written, independent determination of whether the commitments put forward in the agreement diverge from our domestic laws or would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. I ask the Division pay particular attention to the provisions relating to injunctions, damages, and intermediary liability.” It is an open question and includes whether ACTA would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. This is important for finding a solution for access to orphaned copyrighted works and patent reform.