12.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The number of PCs deployed is likely to be as much as 1.5 million, making it one of the biggest deployments of GNU/Linux.
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I have to admit. I do like the command line and one of my favourite programs is Tilda. A drop down shell which allows me to run commands quicker than any mouse happy click lover. More often than not I run a quick command to do file operations, system operations and remote connections. It’s not pretty, all text and no fancy eye candy but it gets the job done, fast.
However, many proponents of proprietary operating systems ridicule us Linux lovers for our command line commando ways and maintain that it is not possible to use Linux without having to write a command line or two. I have always said pshaw to that and two seconds later found myself immersed in a bash shell. I put it down to my habits and choice of Linux (Gentoo) as well as knowing too much for my own good 
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So I have at least proven to myself, eaten my own dog food that Linux can be used in exactly the same way most people use other operating systems without having to fire up a command line. This was done not on a normal run of the mill pc either. This was done on exotic hardware which if there was going to be a problem, there would have been a problem.
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We have an opportunity to introduce a mainstream TV audience to the great stuff that Linux can do in schools, but we need 25 Linux enthusiasts to commit to show up in order to accomplish it.
I just spoke with a program manager for a TV show called ABC 7 Live. They are interested in having supporters of Linux in schools (and particularly Partimus.org) attend a show. The show airs daily from 3 pm to 4 pm. I need a list of 25 people who will attend. I need the list by Thursday, 12/9/10 at 3 pm. You must be on the list to be admitted to the studio. I am coordinating the list, so please be sure to email me to get on the list. You can email me at einfeldt a t gmail dot com. You can watch shows from the archive here
http://7liveonline.com
They have had famous people like Mark Zuckerberg on this show.
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Of course that “free” system is Linux. Usually some local system builder will be glad to build systems and preload Linux for a church. That same local system builder can likely provide support if asked. Any Linux distribution could serve as a good base on which a church could build its IT operations. On the desktop I would still recommend Mandriva despite its roller coaster history. Mandriva is a very easy to learn, user-friendly Linux distribution. It has easy GUI tools in the Mandriva Control Center to help the Linux novice get started with setup of a Linux system. At this point I would recommend the Gnome desktop for end-users coming from Microsoft that need a full-blown GUI to be comfortable. Once KDE 4.x is back to being at least as good as KDE 3.5.10 I may recommend that again. But I do not recommend KDE at this point.
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Server
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The Top500 is the favorite punching bag of many people in HPC. My beef is not with the Top500, it is with all those who make it out to be something it is not. In my opinion, it is good historical record of those machines that can run a single benchmark. There is of course certain bragging rights for landing on the Top500 and it may help people justify an expensive pile of hardware. I suppose getting your system listed on a web page is good thing™, but there are those who have real work to get done and can brag about minor things like application throughput, optimization, and utilization.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Google
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The long-awaited Chrome OS is finally here, and the first Chrome notebooks are winging their way to happy beta testers as you read this.
So is it the operating system reinvented, or just a nifty way to squeeze more speed out of laptops?
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation publishes an annual Linux report that shows (approximately) who has written and contributed to the Linux kernel. The report is put together by LWN’s Jon Corbet (also a kernel contributor) and kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, with additional contributions from the Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson.
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Applications
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In this article, I’ve come across 30 of the most popular Scientific and Engineering free and open source packages that students, scientists and programmers in the engineering field can greatly appreciate. These packages aren’t categorized in any particular way, it’s just a top 30 list of packages that has been most popular lately.
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Mind mapping applications are a way to sort and outline the various pieces and steps of any particular process or problem. Related ideas are connected, creating a visual web of interrelated concepts. Mind mapping forces both the logical and the creative sides of your brain to work together. Free software can help you through the task with apps like VYM, Labyrinth Maps and Semantik.
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BitTorrent is a fast, reliable and fairly straightforward way to download files large and small. We’ve got a guide right here. Whether you’re regularly downloading meaty Linux distributions or simply prefer to try-before-you-buy, you’ll be needing a decent torrent client to keep your downloads in check.
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With so many security tools available, it can be hard to know what to use. Many users do not want to be bothered with downloading, learning and configuring security software when so many other things need to be done. The good news is tools that system administrators would manually install, and checks that they would write scripts to do as part of a security audit, are available out of the box in Linux distributions.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A few weeks ago LGN reported that Happypenguin aka The Linux Game Tome is back (although it wasn’t possible to submit news).
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Features:
* awesome 2D-graphics with an unique style
* a stunning amount of particles
* single- and multiplayer-support
* an artificial intelligence using an aggro-system, which reacts differently upon varying situations
* many impressive weapons
* several game modes
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Gaming on Linux is alive and kicking. There is a good base of free and commercial games to play with a steady stream being released and enhanced each month, encompassing a wide range of game categories. The purpose of this article is to identify some more remarkable free Linux games which are definitely worth investigating. The article is not restricted to any particular genre, so hopefully there will be something of interest here for any type of gamer.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE is a growing community with growing needs. The KDE Sysadmin team works hard to keep up, but lately the servers have been coming under some strain.
To help ease the situation, Canonical has donated a new server for the KDE Sysadmins to use. The server, named kundong, features an impressive 8 CPU cores, 6 GB of memory, and a 130 GB disk with space for several more disks as needed. It is hosted in Canonical’s data center in central London.
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Part of the big hype over the release of KDE 4 was its new and improved eye candy, mostly due to the Plasma workspace. Those who liked the changes, loved the new KDE from the beginning. Those who did not are still complaining about it. But like any good desktop environment, you are by no means stuck with the default look. In fact, KDE offers more easily customizable features than any other. What follows are 7 ways to get the desktop look you dreamed about when you were a child.
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Many of the changes in the beta are of interest mainly to developers and not directly observable to casual users, although the changes may affect development in future releases.
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GNOME Desktop
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Though we used to talk a lot about Ubuntu desktop eyecandy, Conky is something we never really discussed at all. Conky Ubuntu Lucid theme was the only exception, which is by far the most easy to install Conky theme I have ever used. So as to settle the Conky drought once and for all, here we feature one of the best collection of Conky configurations available.
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Take a peek at some crazy new video effects coming to the Cheese webcam tool in this video by GNOME developers Daniel Siegel & Andreas Nilsson.
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Xfce
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KDE today announced the immediate availability of a second set of beta releases for the upcoming 4.6 series. These releases, codenamed Caramel, bring previews of new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook workspaces as well as introducing major changes to applications and the KDE Platform.
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Yes, there must be something about this time of year that has made tongues more likely to wag and Linux bloggers more likely to think about daily updates. How else to explain the recent rash of rumors and discussions on the topic of release schedules for certain popular Linux distros?
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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After months of careful consideration, lots of contributions, and a set process, the Mageia project has decided upon a logo. Some may find it a bit understated, while other may find it offensive. In any case, the new bubbling cauldron is it.
There were so many beautiful entries in contention for the new face of Mageia, but this simple design prevailed. The winning entry was submitted by Olivier Faurax. He says of the winning logo, “The cauldron with bubbles could imply magic – not really a theme to attract most potential users. Or it could refer to the development process – a sort of inside joke, which wouldn’t be understood by most without explanation.”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is one of today’s notable stocks on the rise, up 2.6% to $48.15.
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Dell is proud to announce the launch of OEM support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RHEL 6) which is certified on 9G, 10G, and 11G Dell servers and is an excellent complement to Dell’s open standards-based strategy. RHEL 6 provides customers with a proven, scalable, manageable and reliable open standards-based operating system that delivers even more compelling reasons for customers to migrate off of proprietary, UNIX-based systems.
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JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.1 is the latest piece of the Red Hat open-source middleware portfolio, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, and the first new release of the JBoss BRMS since May 2009. The new release brings additional authoring and management tools for use by business analysts and developers, said Pierre Fricke, director of product line management for middleware at Red Hat, in an interview with eWEEK.
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Fedora
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I found Laughlin to be the most stable and solid version of Fedora I’ve tried in years.
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One of the things that bothers me about Fedora development is that things automatically end up anywhere after being built. I’m a big believer in having to do something to put software in the hands of users, even if they are running a development distribution, and even if they should “be able to fix whatever breaks”. Today, if you build something in rawhide, it’ll land on user machines tomorrow (in the default case). This applies especially if you do a “known good” build and then do “just one more” before the early morning hours when the mirrors get updated with today’s version.
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Debian Family
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Two years ago today my family made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu. This wasn’t an overnight decision, and it wasn’t without complications. At the time we only had one desktop in our home (now we have a couple of laptops as well) and I intended to set it up to dual-boot. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that the version of BIOS on the desktop didn’t recognize USB connections, so it wouldn’t respond to keystrokes from the USB keyboard. And no, there was no other type of port available. By late that evening a couple of years ago we were set up with Ubuntu 8.10 fully installed on our family desktop. Although I did install Windows in Virtualbox for my son’s games, other than that we’ve been an Ubuntu-only household since then.
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Alpha 4 is available. This is a test release not a production release. It is intended for MEPIS Testers only. The ISO files are: SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.82_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.82_64.iso
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A new update for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” has been released. Due to an issue with the preparation, the linux-2.6 packages included in this point release do not incorporate the security fixes released in DSA 2110-1. DSA 2126-1, which has just been released, includes the updates from both DSA 2110-1 and the linux-2.6 packages from this point release. All other recent security updates have been added as well as some fixes for critical issues. New CD and DVD images as well as update CDs and DVDs are available.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today I recorded a short screencast that showcases some of the excellent work going into Unity and that is available in the Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal developer version of Ubuntu.
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A few days ago I decided to upgrade my desktop Ubuntu OS from 10.10(Maverick Meerkat) to 11.04(Natty Narwal) Alpha 1. Previous experience upgrading to such an early alpha release told me that this would be very risky and likely I would have to re-install back to the stable release. But after the lengthy upgrade process was completed(took a few hours because I had Gnome, KDE, and LXDE desktop environments previously installed), I successfully rebooted and was greeted with the familiar GDM login screen.
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The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate Idea #25801: Help the user understand when closing a window does not terminate the app. In other words, figure out to signal to the user that an application will continue to run after all of its windows have been closed.
This is more than a good idea, it’s an important gap in the usability of most of the desktop operating systems in widespread use today.
It’s also come up in our user testing: Charline’s research on Unity identified a lack of feedback to users and she observed the same absence of good feedback in the Rythmbox interface, where Rhythmbox can continue running in the background, playing music, with no windows visible.
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All the leading commercial Linux companies are certified to Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0), including Canonical, Kylin, Linpus, Mandriva, Neoshine, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag and Red Hat.
The Linux Foundation has also released a beta of the LSB 4.1 and is soliciting feedback from the public. The official release of LSB 4.1 is expected in January. The LSB delivers interoperability between applications and the Linux operating system, allowing application developers to target multiple versions of Linux with just one software package. It also allows Linux vendors to demonstrate to their customers that they meet a common set of industry standards and that they work together as an industry on advancing Linux.
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Yes, this helicopter has a Kinect on board, one that’s connected to a Linux box.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Prepare yourself for an all new Nokia experience in 2011. Nokia’s Director of Design Strategy Marko Ahtisaari said that Nokia is planning to launch devices based on a completely new approach to its UI and will be built on Meego. But, Ahtisaari did not not to give any details about the devices which are awaiting us. Ahtisaari revealed this at the LeWeb conference in Paris.
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Android
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A report by Arieso comparing data usage by Android and iPhone users highlights few interesting points. The study shows that Android user are more active online than the iPhone 4 users.
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The technology that drives the ‘wheel’ Mehta, an ex-employee of Siemens AG, is a vociferous supporter of open source platforms. He developed the tool, christened ‘Arpit’s Wheel’, using simple computing hardware and FOSS (free and open-source software) tools and frameworks, which later bagged him the Manthan Award in 2008 in the e-inclusion category.
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Oracle
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Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m95 is available for download.
DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.
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Oracle will port its Enterprise Linux distribution to Sun’s Sparc processor, a move that could help it compete better against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server business.
CEO Larry Ellison made the disclosure in response to a question about Oracle’s Linux strategy at the company’s Sparc systems launch last Thursday.
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Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, has fired back at Larry Ellison and his beloved Exadata for cloud computing, saying that the server fails the cloud test and that Oracle lacks a genuine vision.
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BSD
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Kris Moore has announced two snapshots of PC-BSD work-in-progress: version 8.2 and 9.0. Any feedback (positive and/or constructive) is welcome on the Testing Mailinglist.
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Firstly, my thoughts are with my online friend (and co-host of Techbytes) Gordon, who’s under the weather at the moment and hope for a speedy recovery, certainly if he is absent from the show its going to leave a gap which will be noticeable to all the kind people who tell us they enjoy listening. If Gordon is absent I hope you will stick with us until he returns.
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The merchant, Vitaly Borker, 34, who operates a Web site called decormyeyes.com, was charged with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. The mail fraud and wire fraud charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The stalking and interstate threats charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.
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Pretty much every geek who has ever drawn breath lusts after a “Star Trek”-style replicator. The advent of 3D printing and CNC machines, such as the MakerBot, have started to make that dream a reality. They offer the DIY enthusiast the ability to create pretty much anything their minds can imagine (and render in a CAD program). But for all but the most devoted hardware hackers, the current price points — between $800 and $1,000 for 3D printers, around $600 for a CNC machine — are a little too high for comfort.
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Science
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After 225 days in orbit the Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane touched down Friday at 1:16 a.m. local time at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was only the second fully automated re-entry and runway landing in the history of space flight. The Soviets achieved the first in 1988 with the robotic prototype of their Buran Space Shuttle clone.
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Health/Nutrition
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It persuaded British department store Harvey Nichols to remove foie gras from its fancy restaurant menu.s
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James Bond star Sir Roger Moore is celebrating after persuading bosses at a British department store to remove foie gras from their fancy restaurant menu.
Harvey Nichols chiefs were urged to take action by the former 007 actor as part of his campaign against the delicacy on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
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Security
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On the Full Disclosure security mailing list, Dan Rosenberg presents a small demo program which craftily combines several security holes to obtain root privileges on Linux systems.
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A single licence for Avast security software has been used by 774,651 people after it went viral on a file-sharing site, according to the company.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab couldn’t manage to blow up a plane over Detroit last Christmas, kicking off a year’s worth of high-profile terror-fails. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from freaking out — putting naked scanners in airports and groping passengers. Overreactions like that compelled one of its senior-most counterterrorism officials yesterday to implore the public not to hand al-Qaeda victories from the jaws of defeat.
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SPIES WORKING FOR THE JUNTA of revolting British colonialists in the Americas have started illegally monitoring credit cards.
According to documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations. They have done all this without the nicety of getting a court order.
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Similarly, Wired has an article highlighting how Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is speaking more reasonably about anti-terrorism efforts and security as well, noting (as we have in the past) that “perfect security” is an impossible goal that is, itself, damaging to security.
He points out that the US appears to be playing right into Al Qaeda’s hands by playing up each failed terrorist attempt and then overreacting to it, noting that (like internet trolls), a better response might be to just ignore them publicly, while continuing to do things quietly on the back end to protect the country.
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Reinoehl denied the request, but Allison’s promise to record the proceedings apparently came through loud and clear. Just after he walked through the courthouse door the next day, Allison says Crawford County Circuit Court Judge Kimbara Harrell asked him whether he had a tape recorder in his pocket. He said yes. Harrell then asked him if it was turned on. Allison said it was. Harrell then informed the defendant that he was in violation of the Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it a Class 1 felony to record someone without his consent. “You violated my right to privacy,” the judge said.
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The odds of dying on an airplane as a result of a terrorist hijacking are less than 1 in 25 million — which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively zero — according to Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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A new proposal from the UK government will remove scientists from the advisory council that analyzes and makes recommendations on drug policy, and allow the home secretary to ignore the committee altogether and ban any substance for a year regardless of scientific evidence or advice.
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So the big Thanksgiving airport opt-out opted-in after all. Widespread “regimental” kilt-wearing never materialized. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers were, by and large, spared a plague of True Scotsmen.
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Sometimes you just wonder what folks in our government are thinking half the time. The latest is that Homeland Security, when it’s not busy seizing domains of hip hop blogs, is apparently on a campaign to enlist shoppers at Walmarts in a somewhat creepy attempt to get people to spy on their neighbors. The program is officially called “If You See Something, Say Something” which could be shortened to “Inform on Your Neighbors” if DHS is looking for efficiency.
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Cablegate
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They read like the most extraordinary revelations. Citing the WikiLeaks cables, major Pakistani newspapers this morning carried stories that purported to detail eye-popping American assessments of India’s military and civilian leaders.
According to the reports, US diplomats described senior Indian generals as vain, egotistical and genocidal; they said India’s government is secretly allied with Hindu fundamentalists; and they claimed Indian spies are covertly supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt and Balochistan.
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Living on a continent with such a chequered history of very repressive governments, I am fully aware of the importance of access to information by the everyday people.
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We may never know the whole story behind the recent publication of sensitive U.S. government documents by the Wikileaks organization, but we certainly can draw some important conclusions from the reaction of so many in government and media.
At its core, the Wikileaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both political parties, insist on asking the wrong question. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead, the media focus on how so much sensitive information could have been leaked, or how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.
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Days after Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) caused an uproar by warning its students against linking to WikiLeaks or discussing the secret-spilling website’s latest cache of diplomatic cables online, the prestigious training ground for future diplomats has changed tack and embraced free speech.
Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.
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Glyn Moody points us to a blog post by Brendan Scott that lays out the basic fact that the distributed distribution tools that Wikileaks now relies on were mainly developed in response to constant copyright expansionism at the behest of the US government (on behalf of the entertainment industry).
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As Charles Arthur points out, the Ku Klux Klan’s website points you to a site that takes both MasterCard and Visa — suggesting the pure arbitrariness of both credit card companies’ decision here. It’s a bad idea when firms start making decisions for political reasons. There are all sorts of companies out there that take credit cards to support objectionable (to many) activities. Is it really the credit card companies’ job to pick and choose who they find objectionable to work with — and if so, what basis does it use for saying “KKK is okay, but Wikileaks is not”?
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The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.
Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.
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Between the federal criminal investigation into Wikileaks, Senator Joe Lieberman’s calls for companies to stop providing support for Wikileaks and his suggestion that the New York Times itself should be criminally investigated, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and even the suggestion by some that he should be assassinated, a lot of people are scared and confused.
Will I break the law if I host or mirror the US diplomatic cables that have been published by Wikileaks? If I view or download them? If I write a news story based on them? These are just a few of the questions we’ve been getting here at EFF, particularly in light of many US companies’ apparent fear to do any business with Wikileaks (with a few notable exceptions).
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Ever since whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks began its latest round of document releases, it has found opposition and support in various places. It has hopped around from server to server, had its bank account closed, watched as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all shut down donations to the site, and even had an anonymous group of hackers retaliate in WikiLeaks’ name. One thing that keeps WikiLeaks going, however, is the simple fact that it has hundreds of mirror sites in different languages and locales.
One such listing of these sites hosted on name-in-kind service Wikipedia has been deleted by the collaborative encyclopedia’s editors. Should we cry “Foul!” or is the deletion just more business as usual for the site?
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Sanger is one of the Times reporters who sifted through the leaked WikiLeaks documents and has since written several articles about what the documents reveal about President Obama’s approach to diplomacy with Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, China and other nations.
He explains that the newspaper’s editors and its lawyers had lengthy and deliberate conversations before deciding to publish some of the cables.
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US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to return the leaked US embassy cables, claiming they are “stolen property”.
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Wikileaked is a new foreign policy journal that covers nothing but the stories emerging from Wikileaks’s leaks, including the latest batch of #cablegate leaks.
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Finance
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Oil is at 90 dollars a barrel. The governments of Europe, Japan, and the United States are saturated with debt. House prices in the US are falling again, and there’s no job growth in America. Put it all together, and for some reason, many are still imagining that we’re in an economic recovery.
Today’s horrid jobs report contained some shock value in the sense that it missed expectations. But the novelty of a 39K print misses the larger point that, for a large population like the US, even a print of 100K or 125K would still be very bad news.
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Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently-passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve Become the Central Bank of the world?”
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Private foreign banks also received billions from the Fed in exchange for mortgage backed securities (MBS). The Fed created its MBS program in November 2008 and eventually paid out $1.25 trillion. These facts were known. What we did not know was that approximately half of these purchases were from overseas financial firms, including billions from Barclays Capital (U.K.), Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (England), UBS (Switzerland) and Nomura Securities (Japan). The numbers are huge. Duetsche Bank sold some $290 billion worth of MBS to the Fed.
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The AFL-CIO pressed lawmakers to extend a “lifeline” to unemployed workers by extending benefits for out-of-work Americans.
The labor group pressed Congress to approve another extension of unemployment benefits by featuring a video depicting jobless workers.
“Congress is debating whether to restore this survival aid,” the video says. “This is not a debate. The choice is clear.”
The unemployment benefits expired Nov. 30 and have lapsed since then. Such a situation has played out several times this year due to legislative wrangling.
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A value-added tax, a soda tax, a gas tax, banning earmarks, freezing a portion of federal spending at “pre-stimulus” levels – there’s no shortage of ideas being thrown out to fix the country’s disastrous balance sheet, which threatens not just near-term economic recovery but the possibility of long-term growth. Like last week’s report from the president’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, most of the current plans to fix the country’s finances rely more on increases in revenues than on cuts in spending. In part due to its heavy reliance on revenue hikes, the commission, charged with balancing the budget by 2020, failed to win enough votes of its own members to present its recommendations to Congress.
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Before it began its work eight months ago, one of the main knocks against the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was that it could do no more than recommend changes to Congress. In the end, it could not even do that, falling three votes shy of the 14 needed to officially submit its plan for congressional consideration.
Still, the commission’s report, which was endorsed on Friday by a bipartisan majority of 11 out of its 18 members, is well worth a look. In addition to suggesting some much-needed reforms, including changes to the budget process and simplification of the tax code, it clearly shows, despite its talk of “painful” choices, that eliminating the federal deficit and reining in the national debt does not require radical change. Which is too bad, because even if Congress implemented every cut suggested by the report, the federal government would still be far too big, rife with programs that are unnecessary, unconstitutional, or both.
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For the lucky few on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve sure was sweet.
Nine firms — five of them foreign — were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, which effectively act like cash on Wall Street, for four-week intervals while paying one-time fees that amounted to the minuscule rate of 0.0078 percent.
That is not a typo.
On 33 separate transactions, the lucky nine were able to borrow billions as part of a crisis-era Fed program that lent the securities, known as Treasuries, for 28-day chunks to the now-18 firms known as primary dealers that are empowered to trade with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The program, called the Term Securities Lending Facility, ensured that the firms had cash on hand to lend, invest and trade.
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I suggest you talk to the Greeks (now in the International Monetary Fund’s emergency ward) or the Portuguese (who are headed in that direction.) For that matter, listen to any policymaker in the European Union – they are all focused on bringing down deficits in a credible manner. And watch the European financial markets – people there are doubting and testing the fiscal credibility of all governments throughout the euro zone.
In fact, try persuading any responsible policy analyst anywhere in the world outside the United States that cutting taxes in the United States from current levels will boost growth so much that the cut will pay for itself” and end up reducing or at least controlling the fiscal deficit (the proposition of the Laffer Curve). You will be met great skepticism.
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Federal rule makers, long the neglected stepchildren of Washington bureaucrats, suddenly find themselves at the center of power as they scramble to work out details of hundreds of sweeping financial and health care regulations that will ultimately affect most Americans.
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Regardless, officials seem increasingly certain that taxpayers will recoup their investment in AIG – an outcome that seemed highly unlikely last year, when the total government commitment to the troubled company peaked at more than $180 billion.
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The news outlets that insisted Congress approve TARP or world will end have been anxiously touting the prospect of repayments and possible profits for the taxpayers from one-time basket cases like Citigroup and AIG. It is worth noting that the question of the government showing a profit or loss on its loans to these companies has little to do with whether the bailout was a net benefit to taxpayers.
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Seven global banking institutions enabled disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme by “creating and offering derivative investment products linked to various Madoff feeder funds,” a court-appointed trustee alleged Wednesday.
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Raising the direst alarm yet, the Obama administration warned fellow Democrats on Wednesday that if they defeat the big tax-cut compromise detested by many liberals, they could jolt the nation back into recession.
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Spending Remains Lower than Pre-Recession Levels State general fund spending is forecast to rise 5.3 percent in fiscal 2011 as 35 states enacted a fiscal 2011 budget with general fund spending levels above those of fiscal 2010. However, declines of 7.3 percent and 3.8 percent in state general fund spending in fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2009 respectively mean that state general fund spending remains nearly $42 billion, or 6.2 percent below its fiscal 2008 level. The fiscal 2010 general fund spending decline of 7.3 percent is the largest decline in state spending in the history of this report. See chart below.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A banquet of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) grossed $1.47 million at the Waldorf-Astoria Nov. 23 with the profits going to oppressed reporters and their families throughout the world.
It is a noble effort supported by many blue chip corporate and media companies. Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, chaired the banquet. It was held on the first anniversary of the massacre of 57 people, including 32 journalists, in the Philippines. A video commemorated the tragedy.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The first, via Glyn Moody is a long and interesting opinion piece in Pravda, of all places, pointing out the hypocrisy of the US government’s response to Wikileaks and comparing it to the government’s response to the release of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent. It also runs through a nice history of the US’s back-and-forth battle with free speech issues, such as with the Alien & Sedition Acts and the McCarthy era. It also highlights how the Wikileaks’ release shows evidence of the US government covering up all sorts of politically motivated acts.
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The redesigned profile, launched earlier this week and due to be rolled out gradually over coming weeks, is designed to encourage punters to expose even more information about their day to day lives to the dominant social networking site, net security firm Sophos cautions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Happy Thanksgiving. I’m grateful for your continued support and interest in Internet Cases. It truly is a pleasure to write these posts and to get your feedback and engagement. And it’s also a pleasure to bring you news of this ultra-timely new copyright lawsuit.
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Five advisers have been appointed to Ian Hargreaves’ review into intellectual property growth, the IPO announced yesterday. Two of the choices may cause consternation among creators’ rights representatives.
One is Scottish legal academic James Boyle, founding board member of Creative Commons, and co-author of two rabble-rousing comic books. One portrays Lawrence Lessig as the Statue of Liberty, the other Theft: Musical Borrowing from Plato to Hip-Hop, due to be published next year, portrays copyright holders as totalitarians.
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Looks like someone liked our authentic Ristretto for iPad so much that they decided to copy it. This email was forwarded to us by a customer in Norway. Can any of you translate it for us? Our best guess is that this product is made in somewhere in Asia (not Norway) though we don’t know for certain. Are we mad? Not really. We’re too busy designing the next generation of laptop bags — the copycats will just have to keep up with us.
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The entertainment industry’s newest legal tactic, the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA), sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. While Senator Ron Wyden exercised his right to place a hold on pending legislation — which will stop the bill from traveling to the Senate floor immediately — proponents of COICA can (and most assuredly will) reintroduce the measure the next time Congress convenes in 2011.
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As you might imagine, I rarely agree with the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) on its positions. While there are plenty of “IP” lawyers who I know well and talk to frequently — many of whom seem to agree with my position on things — it’s no secret that the belief that “IP is all good” and “more IP is better” tends to be a bit more common among such practitioners than the views in the other direction. In fact, if you asked me, I would have just assumed that the AIPLA was 100% behind Viacom in its lawsuit against Youtube/Google. So, consider me quite surprised that the main part of the AIPLA’s amicus brief in Viacom’s appeal of the YouTube case is actually siding with YouTube and saying that Viacom’s argument (as we’ve said) goes way too far.
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Copyrights
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In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It’s a win for free expression and for art, but it’s a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.
I don’t celebrate those losses: it’s terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren’t greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It’s sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday’s winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).
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This, of course, is pure nonsense. That isn’t the way royalties with modern day recording contracts work. Through the magic of recording label accounting, the average musician makes roughly $23 for every $1000 in music sold — and that’s only if they actually recoup, which is difficult to do, thanks to the way the record labels account for things. For those of you who share my math skills and don’t want to reach for a calculator, that’s barely 2%. Some of that result stems from necessary things the bands may need to spend on: managers, lawyers, taxes. But a good deal of it also comes from neat little, and sometimes recoupable, charges from the record label, things like independent radio promotion, tour support, roughly fifty percent of the music video costs, etc. Other times, the record labels flatout don’t pay the royalties from truly successful albums. Bottom line is, at the end of the day, record labels make money off of selling music, musicians do not.
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In the last few months, there’s been a growing movement by the entertainment industry to blame Google for “piracy.” One of the favorite talking points is the claim that Google is “profiting from piracy,” by linking people to sites that point people to unauthorized infringing copies of content, and then placing ads on those sites. Of course, this ignores the fact that the standard “pirate” out there isn’t exactly the sort of person who goes around clicking on ads either — and is probably a hell of a lot more likely to ignore the ads entirely or use something like Adblock. Either way, it seems like Google has decided to try to end this argument for the industry by announcing some basic changes in how it deals with copyright complaints.
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Michael Geist writes in with new leaks relating to the New Zealand government’s deep skepticism about US pressure to change its copyright law. The US wants New Zealand to add protection for “technical protection measures” (also called TPMs, DRM, or digital locks). This would follow the US law that makes it illegal to jailbreak an iPad, rip a DVD, or move your Kindle or Sony ebooks to competing devices (interestingly, the US copyright office just suspended the restriction on jailbreaking iPhones for three years, having concluded that the US law that’s being pushed in NZ does more harm than good).
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Andrew Crossley, owner of the now infamous anti-piracy lawfirm ACS:Law, has always insisted that he has no fear of taking contested file-sharing cases to court. Now it has emerged that he recently tried to get a court to issue default judgments against individuals who offered no defense, but the hearing failed on so many levels its difficult to know where to start. Nevertheless, we’ll have a go.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that the newspaper lawsuit factory Righthaven pay the EFF’s costs for its successful defense of the website Democratic Underground from one of Righthaven’s many copyright lawsuits.
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The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to mimic the efforts of its music industry counterpart and put pressure on universities to curb student piracy. The organization notified its partners this week that it would begin sending out letters to college and university presidents in the US “calling their attention” to the anti-infringement provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The letter—copied to the campus CIOs—asks universities to cut off infringing students or face potentially crippling consequences.
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Las Vegas-based newspaper copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now doing business with Media News Group and has sued a blogger for alleged copyright infringement involving a column from the Media News-owned Denver Post.
An attorney for Righthaven filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Charleston, S.C. This appears to be the first lawsuit Righthaven has filed in a federal court outside of Nevada, where since March it has filed 179 copyright infringement lawsuits.
Big Explosion in Blender
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Google
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Because Chrome OS is open source, it has been available for people to explore for some time, which means that it’s not really possible for any elements of it to be a surprise, rather deflating any attempt to launch it in the traditional sense. But in yesterday’s, er, confirmation, there were a number of new announcements separate from the underlying operating system.
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Kernel Space
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Last month we reported on the 200 line Linux kernel patch that does wonders for improving the desktop responsiveness of the system. There was certainly much interest (over 100,000 views to both of our YouTube videos demonstrating the change) but this patch really didn’t speed up the system per se but rather improved the desktop interactivity and reduced latency by creating task-groups per TTY so that the processes had more equal access to the CPU. There is though an entirely different patch-set now beginning to generate interest among early adopters that does improve the kernel performance itself in compute and memory intensive applications and it’s the Transparent Hugepage Support patch-set. Here are our initial tests of the latest kernel patches that will hopefully be finding their way into the mainline Linux kernel soon.
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Graphics Stack
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What Andy basically said is that they do have some plans for “larger scale architectural projects”, but there isn’t anything specific to mention or when we might see such changes. Some of these larger projects for the proprietary NVIDIA driver include improving video memory usage, rendering synchronization, and improving the window system interacitvity. Though due to the size of the NVIDIA Linux team, they are uncertain when such advancements may arrive.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE community has announced the formation of the Calligra Suite, as a “continuation of the KOffice project” to reflect the larger KOffice package rather than just being an office and productivity suite. Calligra is meant to breath new life into the contained KDE programs after an unresolvable dispute by KOffice developers.
Making up KDE’s Calligra Suite are productivity, management, and graphics applications. On the productivity side this includes Words (formerly KWord), Tables (formerly KSpread), Stage (formerly KPresenter), Flow (formerly Kivio), and Kexi. Calligra’s management application is Plan to replace KPlato and on the graphics side there is Krita and Karbon.
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Two weeks after the Thanksgiving Day release of KDE SC 4.6 Beta 1, the second beta is now here for this desktop environment update to be officially released next month. KDE SC 4.6 Beta 2 has fixed nearly 1,200 bugs while more than 1,300 bugs were reported in the past two weeks.
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GNOME Desktop
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Take a peek at some crazy new video effects coming to the Cheese webcam tool in this video by GNOME developers Daniel Siegel & Andreas Nilsson.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This is Unity running, and a recent addition is intellihide in the launcher. This is where the launcher will only show if a window is not obscuring it (just like in GNOME Do). As such, in the screenshot above we can see the launcher as Gwibber is a smaller window, but if I maximize Gwibber so it takes up the full space of the desktop, the launcher slides into the left of the screen so I can access the Gwibber window easily. To then access the launcher I just hover over the Ubuntu button and it slides into view. It looks and feels really fast and sleek.
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Could Unity’s application over-view look better for Natty?
Discussions currently taking place on the Ayatana mailing list certainly think so and the mock-up below is one such proposed solution.
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What do I mean by a Signal? If you’ve done any programming in Qt, GTK+ or even just used D-Bus you’ll probably already know exactly what I mean. They’re pretty much like good old fashioned UNIX signals too, except that they’re not predefined. If you’ve done programming in ObjectiveC, the analog is Notifications.
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About five years ago I was hired by a software company that specialized in database security. Some of our software was used to protect databases in military assets and major banks. But a lot of development was very remote from top-secret weapons or classified information. For example, we wrote a small command line utility for driving virtual machines for integration testing. It helped us eradicate failures during installs and upgrades. Was I going to have to write that again at my next job? How could I share it with my friends working at other organizations?
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This month’s Computing Now theme compiles a variety of articles that show the many current faces of open source. “Choosing an Open Source Software License in Commercial Context: A Managerial Perspective” provides some useful perspectives on how an enterprise should be aware of and properly use open source licensing (for both the components it might use in developing software and the release of software it produces). “Security in Open Source Web Content Management Systems” is an excellent overview (and reminder) about keeping up with plugging the known exploits in commonly used open source CMS tools. Don’t let the title of “Open Source Software Considerations for Law Enforcement” stop you from discovering principles, concepts, constraints, and ultimate uses of open source that are applicable to any organization. “Open Source Data Collection in the Developing World” is a wonderful article about an actual (and very influential) use of the Google Open Data Kit in saving lives in Africa. It might provide inspiration on how to solve data collection challenges you may be facing. If you’re looking for a strong overview of open source use outside of the US, “A Comparative Analysis of Open Source Software Usage in Germany, Brazil, and India” will give you a solid perspective on how three leading nations are employing open source in government, business, and education. “Commodification of Industrial Software: A Case for Open Source” provides some interesting theories, concepts, case studies, and visual models on how to properly value and employ open source in various business contexts. Lastly, “A Stage Model of Evolution for Open Source Software” discusses the 3 generations of open source evolution through the maturity curve (IEEE login is required to view the full text of this article). In addition to these articles, we’re providing a few links to open source sites to extend your research and learning on open source.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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When Chrome was launched, everybody termed it as Firefox killer (after all, Google used to fund Firefox development). But then, IE turns out to be the biggest loser. I decided to share Pluggd.in’s browser usage statistics and compared the current data with last year’s data (December 2009).
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Recently we posted our annual “State of Mozilla” which describes what we have been working on and plans for the immediate future. I want to make sure that the plans laid out in the State of Mozilla reflect and inspire the people who identify themselves with Mozilla and our mission. I am asking that you help me make sure of this.
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Oracle
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Tim Peierls, one of two independent Java experts on the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee (EC), has announced his resignation from the standardisation body. His decision to resign was taken shortly after the committee rubber stamped Oracle’s plans for the forthcoming Java 6 and Java 7. Peierls’ vote was one of three to oppose Oracle’s proposal. Google, the Apache Software Foundation and Peierls all voted against, in response to Oracle imposing restrictions on the availability of Test Compatibility Kits (TCKs) for Java.
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Education
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In 2008 the Linux User Group of Naples had already defined Free Software in the Federico II University “a missed opportunity”, because “students are forced to buy expensive proprietary software and… there are online service like the ESIS exam booking website that are only accessible with Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer… A partial compensation is given by the academic tradition of the CSI (the University ICT service) of adopting Free Software for the main University services” (Note from Marco: that’s good, even if in November 2010 the CSI still called “Free Software” what is simply gratis proprietary software from Microsoft, while we all know that Free is about freedom, not price).
In 2010, according to a press release issued on March 13th, 2009 “inside the Federica Campus visitors are free to stroll around the tridimensional spaces of the virtual University”.
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Maine has been a leader in adopting educational technology in support of its students. In 2002, through the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), the state began providing laptops to all students in grades 7-8 in a one-to-one laptop program. In 2009, Maine expanded the project to high school students. The one-to-one laptops paved the way for open education initiatives like Vital Signs, empowering students to conduct their own field research in collaboration with local scientists, and make that research available online. Recently, Maine has been engaged in some interesting and innovative projects around OER as a result of federal grant funds. For this installment of our series on open education and policy, we spoke with Jeff Mao and Bob McIntire from the Maine Department of Education. Jeff is Learning Technology Policy Director at MLTI, and Bob works for the Department’s Adult & Community Education team.
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Project Releases
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While GCC 4.6 is nearing release, Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other H1’2011 Linux distributions will continue shipping with GCC 4.5, which was released in April and so far has been succeeded by just one point release. A second point release, GCC 4.5.2, is however being prepared for release shortly.
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The next version of the widely used Python programming language will offer greater support for writing multithreaded applications, a challenging duty for an increasing number of programmers in this age of multicore processors.
This week, the developers behind Python have released the first beta version of the 3.2 version of the language. For this version, they have concentrated on bug fixes and general improvements while maintaining the language syntax and semantics defined in Python 3.0.
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Official specifications for upcoming releases of Java have been approved by an executive committee of the JCP (Java Committee Process), although the votes were not unanimous.
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Programming
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Apart from conflating Ruby on Rails the development framework with Ruby the programming language, something which many Ruby developers hate, but which its easy to slip into (so easy i slipped into it yesterday) Benioff was clearly not talking the language of the line of business, but rather of technology.
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We all know that the Internet’s supply of Ipv4 addresses is running ever lower. What you may not know is that IPv4 exhaustion, when we’re completely out of available IPv4 addresses, is approaching even faster than the experts expected.
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Verizon’s professional services arm has introduced a service to convert networks to IPv6, anticipating that large organizations will soon need help with such projects.
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Amazon’s Kindle books will soon be readable as content embedded on Web pages and Web page publishers will be able to land affiliate fees for Kindle books they sell to their own audiences, the company announced today.
You too can now pay $9.99 to read text on a Web page, in Amazon’s proprietary format, with the graphically limited format of a printed text-only book of yore. Sure, your bookmarks and notes will carry over from the Web pages you’re reading on to other devices – but could that possibly be enough to warrant paying for Web-embedded eBooks? I don’t think so. Once it hits the Web, premium content is only sellable because of scarcity or a superior user experience. I don’t see either of those being true in this case.
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EU candidate country Serbia and four other nations on the Union’s periphery – Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco – have disappointed the European Commission by deciding to boycott a ceremony awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
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In “the first-ever survey reading from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that exclusively examines Twitter users,” the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has found that 8% of US adults that use the Internet use Twitter.
The survey found that Twitter users are more likely to be young (18-29), African-American or Latino (“twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users”) and are twice as likely to be urbanites. Women and college-educated are also slightly more likely than average to be using Twitter.
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Science
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Under the guise of keeping federal spending under control, Republican congressmen have launched yet another attack on the basic scientific research that could lead to useful, potentially job-creating discoveries.
House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) announced last week that the YouCut Citizen Review, a crowdsourcing tool for identifying “wasteful spending that should be cut,” would make its very first target the National Science Foundation.
One would expect science-targeting politicians to have learned caution from Sarah Palin’s fruit-fly debacle, in which the 2008 vice presidential candidate mocked the methodology of research into neurological disorders like Down syndrome and autism, both of which afflict members of her family.
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Health/Nutrition
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Can you imagine how it feels to cross the finishing line of a marathon race… the smile, the thrill, the excitement, the urge to hug the fellows athletes, and also the exhaustion, the feeling of just sitting down to take several breaths before articulating a word? Well, this is exactly how I feel because we just finished an amazing race to get 1 million people calling for safe food and stopping genetically modified (GM) crops in the EU. But this is not your average petition. For the first time we’re using our citizens rights under the EU Lisbon Treaty.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The most interesting thing I learned that day was that if we had to hit anyone with an asp (a metal extendable baton which is more commonly used than the side-handled batons) it was best to do it as hard as possible on the first occasion, as repeated strikes “look bad on YouTube”.
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She’s not the only bargain basement celebrity to seek some sort of currency from the whole TSA body scanning thing. Former Baywatch meat model Donna D’errico claims she was subjected to a full-body scan simply because she is attractive, and that agents were laughing and whispering as she went through. Which, if that happened, it is awful and those employees should be fired. If D’errico is just exaggerating for an excuse to bring attention to how pretty she is, well she was fired by the court of public opinion many years ago, so who really cares.
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The spying game wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Craig Monteilh, a convicted criminal recruited by the FBI to investigate the march of radical Islam into Southern California. His endless talk of violent “jihad” so alarmed worshippers at the local mosque, that they took out a restraining order against him.
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The number of requests from the Metropolitan Police for Oyster data have reached new highs this year, according to the Green Party. As any good tinfoil-hatter knows, this data can be used to track an individual’s movements and while it’s great for catching criminals and those seemingly omnipresent terrorists, concerns have been raised over the passing of sensitive data.
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Cablegate
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The release of funds follows a number of denial-of-service attacks earlier this week that were aimed at the document-leaking site’s providers. Most of the providers are now refusing to work with WikiLeaks after the U.S. government accused it of being in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law.
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Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.
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Since August, when Wikileaks first published 91,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, and in October, when they published approximately 400,000 more relating to the War in Iraq, many conservative commentators have been clamoring for the Justice Department to prosecute Wikileaks for publishing classified information.
But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime.
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I want information so that I can hold my government accountable. If my country acts improperly and in my name, I want the proof. I want to know if there actually is no evidence proving weapons of mass destruction. I want to know if America is working with Israel to overthrow Iran’s leadership. I want data that has not been spun by reporters that work for publishers and broadcasters with political and business goals that conflict with the facts. I want to know.
I am Julian Assange because I know unfettered information is valuable to democracy and a peaceful world. I can make the best decisions with the most knowledge. I can vote for the best candidates. I can support the smartest policies to help my country and the world. I am not naïve; I know that not every operation can be transparent but I have a right to know its outcome and how it has affected my country and me.
I do not believe Julian Assange has done anything wrong. The cables that have been published have all been printed in newspapers and redacted to protect individuals at risk. I do not want my country to prosecute a man whose actions are changing the way we get information and how we make critical decisions. I now know that my president and my country’s military have not been honest about the war in Afghanistan. I know that my country has killed civilians and that we have refused to acknowledge our mistakes. I have learned that our allies are secretly consorting with our enemies.
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Also calling for an assassination? Mr. Evangelical, Mike Huckabee! Oh, and of course Sarah Palin.
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There was a time when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s voluntary surrender to the British authorities might have put an end to the crisis created by the Internet provocateur’s dissemination of tens of thousands of state secrets. But in the upside-down world of transnational crowdsourcing unleashed by WikiLeaks, in which thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange’s arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization.
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Facing a booing crowd in Europe, a PayPal executive tried to explain why his company blocked donations to Wikileaks. He cited a letter from the State Department calling the secrets-sharing site illegal. Sadly for him, no such letter exists.
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The British government’s deep fears that Libya would take “harsh and immediate” action against UK interests if the convicted Lockerbie bomber died in a Scottish prison are revealed in secret US embassy cables which show London’s full support for the early release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, made explicit and “thuggish” threats to halt all trade deals with Britain and harass embassy staff if Megrahi remained in jail, the cables show. At the same time “a parade of treats” was offered by Libya to the Scottish devolved administration if it agreed to let him go, though the cable says they were turned down.
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Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatened to cut trade with Britain and warned of “enormous repercussions” if the Lockerbie bomber died in jail, Britain’s Guardian newspaper said on Wednesday, citing U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
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But there’s a second spokesperson for WikiLeaks who has been coming into the spotlight over the last few months: Icelandic investigative journalist and WikiLeaks staffer Kristinn Hrafnsson. Hrafnsson has been working with the whistleblowing group since April, and as Assange has become more reclusive and had his travel restricted by legal threats, Hrafnsson has become an increasingly visible spokesperson.
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Journalists cover wars by not taking sides. But when the war is on free speech itself, neutrality is no longer an option.
The WikiLeaks releases are a pivotal moment in the future of journalism. They raise any number of ethical and legal issues for journalists, but one is becoming paramount.
As I said last week, and feel obliged to say again today, our government — and its allies, willing or coerced, in foreign governments and corporations — are waging a powerful war against freedom of speech.
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Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the intrepid young reporters working for The Washington Post when they broke the Watergate scandal which brought down the Nixon administration.
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This further underscores that the removal of a domain is an ineffective tool to suppress communication, merely serving to undermine the integrity of the global Internet and its operation.
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What Wikileaks has done is provide us with plenty of examples where the political and corporate elite will do anything and everything to maintain the status quo. We see various suspicious compiled binary announcements from companies who claim to spot “Wikileaks broke the terms and conditions of our product or service”. What we do not see is the source code, which many rightly suspect to include calls from US officials threatening everything from tax audits, blacklists from governmentt circles and contracts, being painted as “unpatriotic” to lose them money from “patriotic” consumers and so on. Those same companies like to claim on one had that they do not judge their clients, while several have deemed Wikileaks guilty without any trial. Both Mastercard and Visa happily allow the KKK as customers, but not Wikileaks for example.
Given how governments and corporations are desperately trying to silence and smear Wikileaks, it simply adds fuel to the fire, it spreads the motivation of free thinking people around the world to stand up and defend what Wikileaks is doing against it’s detractors. Whilst I do not agree 100% with everything Wikileaks put out, I am 100% behind the need for them and others like them to exist. They are playing the role that the news outlets are supposed to play and all too often fail miserably at.
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Then there are many war criminals who ought to be in jail and who are not. Most prominent of these are Bush, Blair, Cheney, Straw and their crew.
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WikiLeaks shrugged off the jailing of its founder by publishing a new tranche of secret diplomatic cables on Wednesday, heaping more embarrassment on the United States and some of its closest allies.
After Julian Assange spent his first night behind bars as a remand prisoner in London, his website revealed Washington had branded Australia’s ex-premier Kevin Rudd as a “mistake-prone control freak” and that the British government was relieved when its Scottish counterparts freed the Lockerbie bomber.
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Instead, I want to explore the impact that the WikiLeaks brand name is having/will have on brands closely identifying with the word “wiki”, and analyze whether WikiLeaks will impact the acceptance of collaboration and transparency initiatives within corporations.
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I watch my friends root for the attackers and think this is the way wars always begin. The “fighting the good fight” spirit. Let’s go over there and show them who we are. Let’s make a symbolic statement. By the time the war is underway, we won’t remember any of that. We will wonder how we could have been so naive to think that war was something wonderful or glorious. People don’t necessarily think of wars being fought on the net and over the net, but new technology comes to war all the time, and one side often doesn’t understand.
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LOIC (“Low Orbit Ion Cannon”) is an application developed by 4Chan-affiliated hackers designed to—when used en masse by thousands of anonymous users—launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites. Like Visa.com and Mastercard.com, for instance.
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It’s hard to even begin to summarize coverage on Wikileaks-related stuff today. But if you read one thing, read Marc Thiessen’s fresh item at the Washington Post.
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Bedier also said that PayPal’s decision was influenced by the fact that the State Department deemed WikiLeaks illegal in a letter sent on November 27th, a statement that was not followed up on by Yiannopoulos. It is still unclear what exact US laws WikiLeaks is breaking.
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A Toronto woman says she felt threatened by an email she says she got from a former Stephen Harper adviser concerning WikiLeaks.
Janet Reymond says she was “outraged” after Tom Flanagan recently suggested the founder of WikiLeaks should be killed.
Flanagan, now a University of Calgary professor, has since apologized, but Calgary police are investigating the comment.
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The U.S. government indicated today that WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange could be in legal jeopardy for disclosing classified information because he is “not a journalist.”
When asked whether “traditional media” organizations that republish secret documents could be prosecuted, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said that the administration applauds “the role of journalists in your daily pursuits.”
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Over the past few weeks, we here at EFF have watched as whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has fueled an emotionally charged debate about the secrecy of government information and the people’s right to know. We have welcomed this debate, and the fact that there have been myriad views is the embodiment of the freedom of expression upon which this country was founded.
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If nothing else, the massive amounts of traffic they are attracting, and the efforts of actors unknown to shut them down, have created a unique laboratory for studying Internet resilience.
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The US government is clamping down on scientists’ ability to discuss and surf freely as part of its response to the release of classified cables by Wikileaks.
Today at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, moderators who run an environmental science discussion group called Coral-List have begun deleting any posts that make reference to Wikileak documents. On Friday, at Fermilab in Chicago, access to Wikileaks was blocked by the IT department to “help prevent someone from inadvertently downloading a classified document to a machine on our network” The same day at NASA, employees were told not to use their computers to download information from Wikileaks.
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Consider: Your mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” You thumbed your nose at Wall Street, and you proved them wrong. You’ve stood up to the entire media industry by purchasing YouTube and defending fair use in the face of extraordinary pressure. You’ve done the same with the political and economic giant that is China*. And you’re hanging the entirety of your defense against European monopoly charges on the premise of free speech.
So why not take a bold step, and stand with Wikileaks? The world’s largest Internet company taking a clear stand would be huge news, and it’d call the bloviating bluff of all the politicians acting out of fear of embarrassment, or worse. The Wikileaks story may well be, as pointed out by many, the most important and defining story of the Internet age.
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Below is the text of the U.S. State Department’s letter to Wikileaks’ attorney – which includes/groups Wikileaks’ founder (or the well known of its founders) Julian Assange, together with his attorney Jennifer Robinson. The mere act of treating attorney and client together as one (guilty) party, according to international law, is subject itself to legal ramifications. Good job State Department. You’re nothing if not consistent – and we know this from the cables don’t we?
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Silencing Mastercard.com with pingfloods or malware isn’t going to do much to advance the cause of liberating those who would be silenced. But what exactly should be done? Normally I’d dismiss tweets describing this as “the world’s first great infowar” as hyperbole. But this time, everything really does feel unprecedented.
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According to the Associated Press, Wikileaks gave four news organizations (Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel) all 251,287 classified documents.
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In the Houston Press, an extensive blog post untangling an alarming story from the state department cables: “another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp, the private security contractor tasked with training the Afghan police,” and apparent proof that the company procured male children for bacha bazi (“boy-play”) parties.
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Berkeley City Council members are considering a resolution that would declare the Army private suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks a hero and call for his release.
The council is expected to vote on the resolution in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is being held in a military brig, on Tuesday.
It has already been approved by the city’s Peace and Justice Commission.
Bob Meola, the peace and justice commissioner who authored the resolution, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that Manning is a patriot and should get a medal.
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A former extradition specialist for the Crown Prosecution Service today predicted it would be “very difficult” for Sweden to get the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, sent back to face sexual assault allegations.
Raj Joshi, a former head of the European and International Division at the CPS, said Sweden’s lack of a formal criminal charge against Assange increased his lawyers’ chances of success in blocking the extradition attempt.
Assange’s lawyers are scheduled to visit him tomorrow in prison for the first time since he was jailed on remand yesterday after Sweden requested his extradition.
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One refrain we keep hearing against Wikileaks is that the cable releases aren’t really “whistleblowing,” because they’re not really revealing anything. However, it seems like each day there’s another big revelation of rather horrible things being done (and covered up) by the US government. The latest, pointed out by Boing Boing, involves a report from a cable that US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party.
The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them “foreign mentors”). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a “tribal dance,” rather than a party where young boys wear “scanty women’s clothes” and “dance seductively” before being “auctioned off to the highest bidder” for sex.
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Anna Ardin, one of the two complainants in the rape and sexual assault case against WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, has left Sweden, and may have ceased actively co-operating with the Swedish prosecution service and her own lawyer, sources in Sweden told Crikey today.
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Leaks hurt. Truth hurts, too. But always bother to check who it hurts the most. Therein lies the answer regarding the ethics of a leak.
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1. Encryption isn’t the issue here. Of course the cables were encrypted, for transmission. Then they were received and decrypted, and — so it seems — put into an archive on SIPRNet, where lots of people had access to them.
2. Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them. The more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to be made public.
3. I’m not surprised that these cables were available to so many people. We know that access control is hard, and that it’s impossible to know beforehand what information someone will need to do their job. What is surprising is that there wasn’t any audit logs kept about who accessed all these cables. That seems like a no-brainer.
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The United Nations representative for freedom of opinion and expression says he is now working on a new report on free speech and the internet.
Frank La Rue says he doesn’t think that the United States Government will be able to make a case against Julian Assange. But he warns it would set a very bad example for free speech if it did take action against him.
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THE Australian lawyer for WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has written to Attorney-General Robert McClelland asking him to take formal action against prominent North American figures calling for Mr Assange to be harmed.
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The current chapter in the WikiLeaks saga has finally forced me to come out of my blogging semi-retirement! While I’m still trying to make sense of everything that has happened in the last ten days, here are some analytical notes on Anonymous and the challenges facing the Obama administratio as it mulls an appropriate response to WikiLeaks.
The impact of the recent wave of cyber-attacks launched by Anonymous on a handful of companies that dropped WikiLeaks as their client – Amazon, EveryDNS, MasterCard, Visa and others – is hard to gauge. I’m certain these attacks won’t make any of these firms to reconside, strike peace with WikiLeaks, and offer them some vouchers in compensation. But could the attacks serve as a deterrent to other firms that have been considering dropping WikiLeaks?
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WikiLeaks has not been charged with a crime related to the release of documents, yet the site’s access to the Internet has been disrupted and major efforts are underway to block credit card processing of donations to keep the site running.
Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have called WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a leading Democrat, has proposed that Julian Assange be prosecuted under the Espionage Act — potentially setting a precedent that could expose any journalist working on national security to a credible threat of imprisonment.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The “gigatonne gap” looms large as UN climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, enter their final days without new commitments from big polluters to cut their carbon dioxide emissions. A five to nine-gigatonne gap, to be precise. That is the gap between what has been pledged and what is needed to avoid dangerous global warming.
To keep the world on track to cap global warming at under 2 °C by mid-century, rising CO2 emissions should be kept below 44 gigatonnes a year in 2020, more than a third higher than today. But the UN Environment Programme warned here today that current national pledges would leave 2020 emissions anywhere between 5 and 9 gigatonnes too high.
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Finance
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Visa’s slogan used to be “Everywhere you want to be,” but apparently one place it did not want to be was on Wikileaks. We’ve already covered how both Visa and MasterCard cut off Wikileaks quite quickly, with MasterCard even going so far as to claim that it did so because of illegal activity by Wikileaks — despite no charges or convictions for any actual illegal activity.
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Americans outsmart themselves with fancy security measures to the point where their money is committing suicide on the press.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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“Hyperlinks are vital to the expression and use of the internet,” said Harvey Delaney, one of two lawyers representing the respondent in the case, B.C. resident Jon Newton.
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As we saw during Obama’s election and in others all over Europe, the internet also developed an important role during the 2010 presidential campaign in Brazil, which culminated in the election of President Lula’s candidate Dilma Roussef. While most blogs gave support to left-wing candidate Roussef, most TV networks, radios, newspapers and magazines took the side of the José Serra and his strong political-religious-didactic conservative coalition (who ended up losing the election). If there were any questions about the importance of the internet in Brazil, it is undeniable as of November 24th 2009, when Lula gave, to blogs only, the first online interview in the history of the Brazilian presidency, in a demonstration of respect for the important contrast that they had created against the traditional press.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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You would think that the folks over at Google would know by now what a joke DRM is — especially after the company’s disastrous foray into server-based DRM on its original Google Video platform that required users to “check in” before they could watch videos they thought they had “purchased.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A yet to be released cable from the US Embassy in Stockholm will reveal that the United States Government was very concerned about file-sharing related issues in Sweden. The US Embassy actively worked with the Swedish authorities to reduce file-sharing related threats, which included The Pirate Bay which was raided in 2006 following US pressure.
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Default judgment is a speedy way for claimants to obtain judgment without a trial. In most cases a defendant served with a claim form and particulars of claim is supposed to acknowledge service and then file a defence. If not acknowledgement or defence is forthcoming the claimant can ask the court to give it judgment in default.
This is where ACS:Law start to come unstuck. In 3 of the cases a defence had been filed in court. So default judgment does not apply. In a further 3 of the cases there was no evidence on the court file that the claim form and particulars of claim had been served on the defendant. It is ordinarily the court’s job to serve these documents, but there’s no presumption that it has. In my practice I have come across situations where some administrative mistake has been made and the court has failed to do so. Whatever the reason, it is bad practice to issue requests for default judgment without checking with the court that no defence has been filed. A slap on the wrist for ACS:Law in my view. As the judge said “The requests for judgment should never have been filed.”
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BitTorrent is a great technology to share files both quickly and efficiently, but like all other P2P-technologies it has an Achilles’ heel. The download process relies in part on central servers that can crash or go offline for a variety of reasons. To address this vulnerability the first truly decentralized BitTorrent/P2P client has been developed, meaning that no central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines are required to download movies, software and music.
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Back in 2008, we wrote about how the MPAA convinced Congress to pass legislation to make colleges and universities responsible for reducing copyright infringement on campus or lose federal funding. The law was really a trial run of sorts — an attempt to see how this could work for making ISPs responsible. Of course, in order to get the law passed, the MPAA flat out lied. It made up numbers, saying that 44% of “losses” from file sharing came from college campuses. This number was so ridiculously wrong that the MPAA later claimed “human error” before saying the number was really 15%. But even that was dubious — and when the GAO asked the MPAA to support these numbers, the MPAA refused to provide the data. Pretty telling.
Rooted NOOKcolor with FDroid / FOSS
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.08.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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According to their visitor stats Linux now commands 5% of the Operating System market – the first time it has ever reached this milestone since w3schools records began seven years ago.
This figure compounds the previous three months which saw Linux got from a market-share high of 4.9% in August only to fall back to 4.6% in September.
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Some good advantages that I found in Virtual Box are the following:
VirtualBox 3 is a desktop virtual machine application using a “Type 2″ hypervisor that requires a compatible host operating system (Linux, Windows, Macintosh, or OpenSolaris) and computer hardware based on x86 or AMD64/Intel64 to function
The installation of Virtual Box is pretty straightforward, but there are a few issues that I will describe later.
You can easily install many different Operating systems and the performance is pretty good. You can read a list of the supported Operating Systems at virtualbox.org/
Creating a VM is fast and easy, thanks to a VM creation wizard that takes you step-by-step through creating your guest VM.
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Userful Corporation, the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization, has released Userful MultiSeat 4.0, software which turns one Linux computer into 11 high performance independent computer stations using standard USB devices such as the HP t100, Wyse E01, MCT MWS 8820, and DisplayLink devices. Userful MultiSeat enables schools and businesses to deploy more than twice as many computers for the same cost, while enabling up to 11 users to use different applications at the same time from one host computer, each with their own monitor, keyboard, and mouse. At just $59 per seat (education pricing), Userful MultiSeat is the lowest cost computing solution available with the features and performance of a full desktop computer.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode of Free as in Freedom, Karen and Bradley discuss in the first segment recent press coverage of sexist attitudes at Free Software conferences, and in the second segment, discuss the public filings related to the Novell sale.
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Google
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On the Chrome team, we’re constantly amazed by the speed of innovation on the web. We designed Chrome to make the web shine, and we hope our upcoming efforts will help support this vibrant ecosystem even more. By making the web faster, helping people discover great apps, and making computers more fun to use, the next year of computing should be even more exciting than the last one.
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We’ve had plenty of pre-knowledge on this, but surprisingly this is our first actual glimpse of Google’s new unbranded “Cr-48,” the very first Chrome OS laptop. Google will distribute the laptop through its Chrome OS Pilot Program, in a sort of public beta.
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Google launched the Chrome Web Store yesterday during a press briefing, during which the search giant also demonstrated its upcoming Chrome OS platform. The Web Store allows users to “install” Web applications, making them easily accessible from Chrome’s new tab page.
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If the target is netbooks, as Google execs have implied, then good luck to Google: The market unanimously rejected a non-market-leading OS when Linux netbooks were offered a couple years ago and quickly updated to run Windows XP. And Chrome OS is basically the Chrome browser running atop a Google-customized version of Linux. For those who simply want to browse the Web, watch online videos, and perhaps do a bit of work on documents, there’s no reason why a lightweight Web-centric OS shouldn’t be welcomed.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that all the leading commercial Linux companies are certified to Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0), including Canonical, Kylin, Linpus, Mandriva, Neoshine, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag and Red Hat.
The Linux Foundation has also released a beta of the LSB 4.1 and is soliciting feedback from the public. The official release of LSB 4.1 is expected in January. For more details, please visit: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/LSB_4.1_Beta.
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Applications
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The DockBarX repository has not been updated yet, so as usual I’ve uploaded it to the WebUpd8 PPA (using the original packaging by T. Scott Barnes so many thanks to him!).
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GnoMenu is a nice and simple alternative menu application you could use in your Ubuntu. And it looks pretty too. GnoMenu’s XML theme engine supports a wide variety of themes, even those with transparency effects.
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APTonCD is a GUI tool that can extract the .deb packages that you have manually installed on your machine and selectively copy them to an ISO image that can be burned to a CD or DVD. The tool can then be used, on another machine, to restore those packages. The main use is to create disc-based package collections that can be used to add packages to systems that don’t have an Internet connection, perhaps as part of a mass installation strategy.
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Proprietary
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All in all, Komodo IDE 6 has a lot going for it. I do have one gripe, however. With Komodo 5, the toolbar was way too cluttered. Komodo 6 could have, and should have, improved on this. As it stands, if you have too many icons on the toolbar to fit the width of the window, all of the right-most toolbar icons disappear and are inaccessible. If you want to show the button text to see what all of those tiny little icons do, even more of your toolbar is gone. I’m pretty sure that in earlier versions of Komodo it wrapped around, which meant you would have one awfully thick toolbar with multiple rows, but at least you could see and use all of your icons. Somewhere in Komodo 5, if I remember correctly, this broke and it still has not been fixed. If there is one thing that drives me nuts about Komodo, this is it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you are running out of RAM on your Linux system, you will want to find the culprit in order to solve the problem, either by reconfiguring the RAM-hungry application or by stopping it.
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I love menus. Actually, I love to be able to configure menus in order to make the Linux desktop be as efficient as possible. The problem with that is, I tend to not go with the usual desktop (GNOME or KDE). So sometimes getting the menus exactly how I like them (or to suit my current needs), isn’t easy.
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Since I have been playing around with Fedora 14, I thought I would try and write a very newbie friendly guide on how to install the nvidia drivers from www.nvidia.com.
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YouAmp is a small an light music player concentrating on playback capabilities and aiming at desktop integration for the Gnome desktop.
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VirtualBox 4.0 beta was released today with some major changes. The biggest change is that some functionality has moved into a separate package (such as the USB 2.0 support, RDP server and more).
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Fans of OpenOffice, Abiword, and KOffice, and Scribus dominate the open source document printing discussion, because traditional office suites and desktop publishing apps account for the lion’s share of the pages in our paper trays. But for a lot of old-school typesetters and writers, nothing in the WYSIWYG realm can hold a candle to the performance and flexibility of TeX, and its popular LaTeX and BibTeX derivatives. Although TeX is most often used to create structured documents like research papers, it can be used to generate any document type — including specialty items. For the unfamiliar, here are some resources for using TeX to print envelopes, labels, badges, and cards.
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Games
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For those into the World of Worldcraft computer game, which lacks a Linux client at this time, the Cataclysm expansion pack was released over the night. Fortunately, for those not wanting to use Microsoft Windows to play this popular MMORPG, CodeWeavers is out with CrossOver Games 9.2.1, which brings WoW: Cataclysm support to Mac OS X and Linux gamers.
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Gather the parts to the world’s greatest invention in this unique Steampunk, Hidden Object Adventure!
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Features
* Over 20 tracks and battle arenas
* Split-screen multiplayer support
* Many game modes
o Grand Prix
o Single Race
o Time Trial
o Follow-the-leader
o 3-Strikes Battles
* Funny characters
* Runs on GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOSX, FreeBSD, Solaris
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Open source and Linux programming experience are mentioned as desired skills.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Highlights of Amarok 2.4 include trans-coding support, a brand-new (completely rewritten) music collection scanner, support for writing back tags to music files (such as the album art covers, number of play counts, etc), a mass-tagging user-interface provided by Musicbrainz, Apple iPod Touch 3G support, compatibility with other newer media players / music devices, a new applet for guitar and bass tab information, and other new applets and improvements.
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Diplomacy. The board of KDE e.V. is one of the few groups of people in KDE, which is formally elected. Thanks to German association law, which is the governing law for our organization, this is a very solid, well-founded, democratic process. So the board is well legitimated to represent KDE. This comes with responsibility, as sometimes the board is asked for official decisions and guidance. Today we had to deal with one of these requests. These issues are not always easy to handle. While they certainly are one of the more challenging parts of the board work, I think they are also one of the more important parts. Having the board to handle these issues allows the community to get things moving, where it would be much harder without officially legitimated people.
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Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge.
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I’m going to share my thoughts on Calligra in this blog entry, but I am not a member of the Calligra team. I do follow the mailing lists, and have spoken to several of the people involved over the last year about the various situations. This affords me a somewhat special viewpoint: I’m fairly aware of what’s been going on, but not directly involved.
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KDE must have grown so big and old that it became unpopular to be associated with it. At least I cannot help having this sentiment after observing a couple of sub-projects trying hard to not be tied to KDE too closely.
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I think Harri somehow made a mistake in his recent blog on K* == Bad. The Calligra community isn’t moving away from KDE at all. We’re also not pre-empting the KDE move to git — we’re using the excellent KDE infrastructure for hosting git projects. Not only that, but KO GmbH, the company founded by some KOffice community members, actually sponsored the conversion of KOffice from subversion to git. And we’re sponsoring the conversion of the KDE kdelibs and kdebase module as well. And Marijn, the Calligra Tables maintainer, he is also maintaining the KDE kdelibs packages for MeeGo.
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GNOME Desktop
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Getting Things Gnome(GTG) is a nice and simple tool to organize and manage your tasks and time efficiently. GTG uses a very handy text edition system for task creation and edition. The task editor can automatically recognize metadata such as tags and subtasks only by the use of a very simple syntax.
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Could you translate your love/excitement/anticipation for GNOME 3.0 into a kick-ass T-shirt design? Want to win money in the process?
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Xfce
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Xfce, the little desktop that could, is steadily progressing toward its January release with several developmental builds. Xfce 4.6.2 was released last May and since the project has been working hard on its next release branch which will incorporate major changes to the core as well as several new features. The latest snapshot was recently released featuring a long list of improvements.
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Picked Gentoo to play for and won Robot Fight Night, so $400 US was donated to the Gentoo Foundation to pay for Gentoo Development and Services, etc.
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Truth is, for every distro I find or that is suggested, I get two more suggestions for distros I wouldn’t put on a Pentium III, let alone on a lowly 120Mhz Pentium.
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What happens when your online team asks for a Drupal or WordPress server, or you require a file server for your branch office really quickly? The answer is that you rush to your Web browser, and start doing Google searches for how-tos, or juggle your ISO collection of distros, spins and remixes.
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Red Hat Family
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Whatever the one I downloaded and installed dated 15th October 2010 was, apparently Alpha 1 was just released to the SL servers a few days ago on 03 December. Here’s a link to a short README for release notes. It also says that an improved SL 6 Alpha 2 is to be expected exactly a week later on Friday 10 December.
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Community contribution has long been an important topic at Red Hat.
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We’re in the holiday spirit at Red Hat and celebrating the best way we know how – the open source way! Open source is not only a superior model for software development which has helped Red Hat grow its business, it’s also a great way to leverage the power of collective philanthropy. Red Hat associates in the United States have put this power of collective philanthropy to work in selecting a charity for the company’s annual holiday donation.
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With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 now cutting its way into the enterprise-calibre open source operating systems space, there is much to talk about as the terms security and virtualisation are increasingly used to highlight its key new features.
It has been almost eight years since the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat says it has experienced no major changes to the ABI (application binary interface) or API (application programming interface) that might otherwise affect application compatibility since the Release Candidate stage was announced a few months back.
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Shares of Linux distributor Red Hat (RHT) are up 72 cents, or 1.5%, at $47.64 after Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Holt this morning raised his rating on the stock to Overweight from Equal Weight following a meeting with the company’s CFO, Charlie Peters.
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Shares in Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) jumped to a 52-week high of $49 Tuesday after Wall Street analyst firm Morgan Stanley upgraded its stock.
Red Hat closed Monday at $46.92 but opened Tuesday at $47.52.
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There are only days left until 2010 is done, and this year is one that anyone interested in open source should remember for a long time, because it was the year that every single U.S. public company focused on open source lost its independence, except one: Red Hat. With the news of Novell’s sale still fresh, and with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems fading in the rear view mirror, it’s easy to forget that Novell and Sun were both once-mighty commercial open source-focused companies that are only shells of themselves now. Meanwhile, Red hat marches on to quarter after quarter of financial success with its own open source strategy. What has Red Hat done right?
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Fedora
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The Fedora 12 (Constantine) operating system reached end of life on December 2nd, 2010. This means that, starting four days ago, users of Fedora 12 no longer receive security/critical fixes and software updates. Therefore, all Fedora 12 users are urged to upgrade to the most recent version, Fedora 14, as soon as possible.
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Debian Family
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In Lucas’s eyes, the success of Ubuntu creates new problems.
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The point here is the swirl is not trademark…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Official Ubuntu Advertising Team is now alive and kicking. The team is focused on advertising and sharing the love of Ubuntu with others through various mediums. The project strives to produce professional quality advertisements and promotions and deliver them to the general public. And the support of awesome Ubuntu user community is the inevitable part.
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Unity Linux 2010.02 has been released. It’s the second snapshot of the 2010 build and comes with a number of updated packages from the previous two releases as well as improvements to the “mklivecd” and “unity-installer” tools.
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Flavours and Variants
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Verdict: 5/5
All in all, Linux Mint 10 is a very likeable release. It doesn’t introduce any new features, but a slew of tiny yet important tweaks improve the overall usability of the system, making it the best alternative to Ubuntu. While Linux Mint 10 doesn’t introduce any new features, it sports a few refinements and improvements that make this distro a real pleasure to use.
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Opengear has begun shipping a line of “smart” Linux-based cellular routers. The ACM5004-G routers support remote management via 3G, offering console server functionality and control of devices with serial, USB, Ethernet and digital I/O interfaces.
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Phones
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Android
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Big Buck Bunny is one among the three Blender Foundation produced open movies, others being Elephant’s Dream and Sintel[watch them all]. And the webpage for Google’s very own Android 2.3 powered Nexus S Phone shows the Big Buck Bunny trailer to illustrate the ‘Entertainment on the Go’ section!
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Having sold Sun to billionaire yacht-racer Ellison, McNealy is now doing unpaid work. He advises startups for no salary or retainer, he sits on the board of Curriki [5] — a project he created to deliver free, open source educational materials for kids in the US up to college age — and he speaks at the odd event, such as last month’s PostgreSQL West 2010, where I caught up with him.
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I am proud that a few words of mine helped to start an open source development center in Soweto, Africa (one year later I found out about this), and I am proud that a talk I gave in 1999 inspired Mark Spencer to make Asterisk a FOSS project (discovered this in 2001). I am proud that I helped get Linus an Alpha processor and encouraged him to make Linux a 64-bit operating system (three-year payback on this one), and I am proud of the many students and FOSS developers and advocates that I have helped along the way. I still receive letters from students I have not seen for thirty years, as well as newer students.
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Web Browsers
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Now, here is something interesting for you all. The following infographic lists your favorite browsers with interesting ‘character’ description.
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Mozilla
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Considering the virtual reams of data we generate for companies like Facebook every day, they give us awful little in return. While they sell the information to third parties or use it to display targeted advertisements, we’re left with a largely anecdotal understanding of Internet habits. We can install programs to track our personal Internet usage, but it’s difficult to place these individual habits in a broader context. I may spend two hours a day surfing around, but how does that compare to my peers? Enter Firefox, the open-source project that happens to be the world’s second-most-popular browser.*
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Firefox 4 will automatically update the browser’s extensions, a Mozilla interface designer said Sunday.
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Oracle
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The Reg has learned that with 75 per cent of qualifying Java Community Process (JCP) members having voted on whether to ratify Oracle’s proposed roadmap for Java 7 and 8, Oracle’s plan has been accepted.
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CMS
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With all the bad press surrounding Facebook this past year, a lot of us are looking for a good alternative. That’s the need the new, open-source, user-controled social network Diaspora aims to fill. Here’s what it looks like so far.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The European Commission’s (EC) largest ever software contract is in “direct contradiction” of EU guidelines, according to campaign group Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
The EC signed the €189m SACHA II software framework deal last week, as revealed by Computerweekly.com.
But the deal contravenes numerous EU rules and guidelines calling persistently to implement non-proprietary computer systems, said the FSFE
FSFE president Karsten Gerloff said in a statement that by striking such deals “the Commission is digging itself deeper into the vendor lock-in hole,” when it should be seeking to be more independent of vendors and making great use of open software and open standards.
The FSFE said SACHA II contradicted European competition rules by discriminating in favour of proprietary software vendors.
The contract also ignored the EC’s Digital Agenda, which called in May for IT systems to be “open and interoperable”, said the FSFE.
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Project Releases
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For those not tracking the Phorogit code of the Phoronix Test Suite, all of the test profiles and test suites living within our open-source benchmarking software have been removed. All 130+ test profiles and ~50 test suites have been dropped, as they’re no longer living within the benchmarking package.
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Government
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Then, after establishing a levy for the sake “compensation”, establish a second additional levy (equal or greater in amount) for supporting authors and artists. The wasteful, misdirected plan for “compensation” should not be a replacement for the useful, efficient plan. So implement the useful, efficient plan that supports artists directly, because that is good for society, and implement the “compensation” required by the WTO but only so long as the WTO retains the power to impose it.
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Open-source software is growing in popularity as government IT managers are selecting open-source stacks as part of their data center consolidation strategy.
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As soon as top employees exit the doors of their high profile company, you can bet that other Silicon Valley tech companies are already clamoring to snatch up these valued industry professionals. Here is how they are taking the talent from one another, who’s winning and who’s losing.
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This brings me to the question, is Facebook the new Apple? With unrelenting press coverage and a desire by some bloggers to see everything get killed by Facebook, are we witnessing a new ‘cult of Facebook’ in the making?
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Commissioner this morning has issued a statement confirming that parents ought to be free to photograph their children in nativity plays without the fear of being told to desist by school staff worried about violating the Data Protection Act.
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In the relatively small number of US diplomatic cables released to date by WikiLeaks, from its cache of 251,287 documents, the most disturbing revelations concerning the “War on Terror” deal with the pressure that the Bush administration exerted on Germany in 2007, regarding the planned prosecution of thirteen CIA agents involved in the rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen seized as a result of mistaken identity, and the pressure that the Obama administration exerted on the Spanish government in 2009, to derail a criminal investigation into the role played by six senior Bush administration lawyers in establishing the policies that governed the interrogation — and torture — of prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”
Neither of these developments had been reported prior to the release of the cables by WikiLeaks, and they are therefore extremely significant in establishing how long Bush administration officials were involved in fending off torture investigations overseas, and how eagerly Obama administration officials took up this role.
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“A unique and extraordinary case” is how a federal judge described our lawsuit, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, challenging the Obama administration’s targeted killing policy.
We brought the case on behalf of Nasser Al-Aulaqi, whose U.S. citizen son, Anwar Al-Aulaqi, has been put on a secret hit list by the government. In a decision issued today, the judge emphasized that the case raises critically important questions, including whether “the Executive [can] order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization.” The court nevertheless dismissed the case on the basis of “standing” — ruling that our client does not have the right to represent the interests of his son — and on the grounds that the case raises “political questions” that are not subject to judicial review. He did not rule on the merits of the case.
The ramifications of the court’s decision are breathtaking.
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Given our serious concerns over the legality of Homeland Security’s domain name seizures, one thing we keep hearing from supporters of the effort is that asset seizures are “nothing new” and happen all of the time. We’ve already discussed how that’s not exactly true — and how pre-trial seizures are supposed to be focused on situations where evidence might get destroyed. But it’s even worse than that. It appears that law enforcement has a long, and rather dubious, history of greatly abusing the ability to seize property for their own benefit.
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Tony Blair is to be summoned back to the official inquiry into the Iraq invasion in light of damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since he appeared as a witness earlier this year.
Blair will give evidence between 18 January and 4 February next year along with Admiral Lord Boyce, the former chief of the defence staff, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary. Three successive cabinet secretaries who operated at the heart of Whitehall will also be called.
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There is a war underway. I’m not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I’m talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I’m talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It’s a war that’s poised to topple what’s left of American democracy.
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Apparently all of the folks with an ounce of PR sense in the State Department were busy responding to Wikileaks issues. That’s about the only explanation I can come up with for why the State Department still decided to push forward with its announcement that it will be hosting UNESCO’s ‘World Press Freedom Day’ next May, right as it’s been attacking Wikileaks left and right for showing how a free press really works.
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Cablegate
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Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. It’s only because of his leaks that we know the US government has secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians – five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them – and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.
Each of the wikileaks revelations has been carefully weighed to ensure there is a public interest in disclosing it. Of the more than 250,000 documents they hold, they have released fewer than 1000 – and each of those has had the names of informants, or any information that could place anyone at risk, removed. The information they have released covers areas where our governments are defying the will of their own citizens, and hiding the proof from them.
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A state department cable released this afternoon by WikiLeaks reveals that US diplomats intervened to try to amend a draft law going through Russia’s Duma. Their explicit aim was to ensure the new law did not “disadvantage” the two US firms, the cable states.
The revelation comes a day after Visa – apparently acting under intense pressure from Washington – announced it was suspending all payments to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website. Visa was following MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon, all of which have severed ties with the site and its founder Julian Assange in the last few days.
The companies have justified their decision to stop donations on the grounds that WikiLeaks is acting “illegally”. Each has quickly become the target of sustained online revenge attacks by disgruntled hackers, with mastercard.com paralysed today.
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More mirrors were being created, and in the evening we could count up to something like 84 of them in the mirror list, it was quite a lot to keep track of. To do this they, just as I would have, started a pad where you could help to list and sort all mirrors. It started in ietherpad but they only allow 16 people in a pad at the time, normally that’s a lot. In this case it was peanuts. It was moved over to Mozillas open pad, and from what I’ve read even they got a taste of the DDoS to kill Wikileaks. The list was moved over to Tumblr, and from what I’ve seen they have not had any problems with attacks yet.
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“Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorized release of 250,000 documents from the U.S. diplomatic communications network,” Rudd told Reuters in an interview.
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The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.
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Now that Julian Assange is in custody of British authorities on a warrant for alleged sex crimes in Sweden, Obama administration officials may well be working behind the scenes to secure his extradition to the United States, an international criminal law expert tells Salon.
Assange has not been charged with a crime in the United States — though it’s possible that there is an arrest warrant or indictment under seal. The Obama Justice Department has repeatedly suggested that it is going after Assange, though officials have not said what law they believe Assange has broken (and experts say that making any case against him could prove difficult).
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On Sunday 28 November Wikileaks began releasing the first of its 250,000 leaked US embassy cables. Almost immediately, a hacking attack known as a “DDOS” – distributed denial of service – attack tried to knock it off the net. These are the attacks that have followed in the succeeding days.
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In fact there’s two ways to understand what the Wikileaks cables’disclosure reveal. One is the factual disclosure of actions, affairs, skeletons in the closet, various projects and information that enlightens the perception of the US Government on worldwide topics. You can feed anti-Western sentiment or anti-american feelings with this material, but frankly it’s not like these two memes would be fading away anytime soon without the leaks. Another one is the notion that all of a sudden transparency will fix the state of the world, starting with America. Transparency helps, but some things have to remain buried for a long time, some things are not meant to be disclosed. And talking about transparency, we should not be anymore naive and demand that the same kind of information be disclosed from countries like Iran or North Korea: I’m sure it would highlight another well-known reality: that US or democratic countries are not just no worse, but are in fact much better than these countries (some people are ready to absolve them from their wrongdoings on various grounds).
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The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.
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The ongoing story related to the release of over a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables is a good example of the workings of the global media, an industry tasked with the formation of public opinion in the world.
The picture emerging is consistent – an industry whose primary task is truth is instead dominated by bias, distortion, misinformation and propaganda. But Wikileaks is a movement that is difficult to suppress.
The pattern of misinformation was, of course, put into perspective by the handful of media reporting accurately on the story. Newspapers like the Guardian in the UK and Der Spiegel in Germany are doing a tremendous job of laying out the facts, as is the community-based US broadcast network Democracy Now by providing historical and social context to the information contained in the leaks.
Yet, these are not the media with the largest audiences.
Those audiences are commanded by the TV networks, and it is there that the misinformation is at its greatest. Instead of informed debate, audiences are getting distracting narratives. The result is a public misinformed on the purpose and impact of Wikileaks and its efforts.
The consolidation of global media, its ownership in the hands of a few multinational conglomerates, has been well documented. The dominance of government and corporate interests on the public agenda is not a surprise. The ongoing media coverage in the West on the release of US diplomatic cables offers a glimpse into media complicity in the unfettered advancement of the neoliberal agenda around the world and its impact on environmental degradation, human rights and social justice.
From demonising Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange to linking Wikileaks with terrorism, networks such as CNN are doing a very good job of towing the US government line. By consistently attacking the credibility of Wikileaks, they attempt to marginalise and cast doubt on the facts of the story.
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Wikileaks is a threat. We’ve heard it incessantly, from Democrats and Republicans, the State Department and Paypal. Some have gone so far as to call the open-publishing project a “terrorist organization.”
It’s true. Wikileaks is a threat. But it is not for any of the flimsy reasons we’ve been hearing.
The true threat of Wikileaks, and the reason it is being labeled a terrorist organization by both politicians and, disturbingly, some journalists, is not the content of its documents but the premise of its work.
Wikileaks is a “threat” because it challenges the secrecy, control and power upon which all mainstream media outlets and authoritarian regimes depend.
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PayPal today admitted it suspended payments to WikiLeaks after an intervention from the US State Department.
The site’s vice-president of platform, Osama Bedier, told an internet conference the site had decided to freeze WikiLeaks’s account on 4 December after government representatives said it was engaged in illegal activity.
“State Dept told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward,” he told the LeWeb conference in Paris, adding: “We … comply with regulations around the world, making sure that we protect our brand.”
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Since yesterday around 22:30 CET Visa and Mastercard payments are being rejected on our donation system. We have received a suspension notice stating that Visa Europe has ordered our payment processor to suspend payments and undertake due diligence investigation in order to pretect the Visa brand ensure neither the payment processor nor Visa Europe is running legal risks by facilitating payments for the funding of the Wikileaks website. For the same reasons the payment processor has suspended the payments of Mastercard.
The suspension period will be one week with effect from 8 December 2010 Danish local time. The suspension period may be prolonged.
DataCell ehf who facilitates those payments towards Wikileaks has decided to take up immediate legal actions to make donations possible again. We can not believe Wikileaks would even create scratch at the brand name of Visa. The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their brand much much more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have them occur. Visa customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that they really donate and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them. It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down. We strongly believe a world class company such as Visa should not get involved by politics and just simply do their business where they are good at. Transferring money. They have no problem transferring money for other businesses such as gambling sites, pornography services and the like so why a donation to a Website which is holding up for human rights should be morally any worse than that is outside of my understanding.
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The contents of the leaks are not the main issue; in fact, they are at most an interesting bonus and occasionally a dangerous distraction. No less a personage than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, no admirer of Wikileaks, has stated that the practical impact of the leaks in terms of security and compromised diplomacy is negligible. He goes on to make the point that countries don’t do business with the US on the basis of ideals but rather as a result of self interest. Your mileage may vary, but I believe it’s safe to take his word as an intelligence veteran charged directly with national defense over the flatulent posturing of elected leaders whose need for a good target to harangue often takes precedence over the facts of the matter.
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Saudi Arabia proposed creating an Arab force backed by US and Nato air and sea power to intervene in Lebanon two years ago and destroy Iranian-backed Hezbollah, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
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I’m pleased to report that Tom Flanagan has been charged for calling for the assassination of Julian Assange on CBC. All manner of threats have been leveled at Julian Assange, including a threat to kidnap his son.
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Organizers of “Anonymous,” the group behind cyber attacks on Mastercard.com and other websites, vowed Wednesday to extend their campaign to anyone with an “anti-WikiLeaks agenda.”
In an online chat with Agence France-Presse, organizers of “Anonymous” said thousands of volunteers were taking part in their defense of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, whom they described as a “free-speech martyr.”
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The two Swedish women who accuse WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of sexual misconduct were at first not seeking to bring charges against him. They just wanted to track him down and persuade him to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases, according to several people in contact with his entourage at the time.
So, several unnamed people who were “in contact” with “Assange’s entourage” told Mark Hosenball that they knew the true motives of Julian Assange’s accusers. Who are these people and how do they claim to know what was going on in the minds of these women?
But let’s assume that these women didn’t initially want to press charges. That doesn’t necessarily damage their credibility.
According to the story, the two women only went to the police for help after they tried and failed to get Assange to submit to STI tests. The cops passed their stories along to a prosecutor, who decided that the women were describing sexual assaults and issued a warrant to arrest Assange on rape charges. The warrant was dropped the next day, but the case was later resurrected.
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The furor over Wikileaks has become Theatre of the Absurd.
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The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.
Hackers in London apparently affiliated with “Operation Payback” – a group of supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks – have tried to shut down SarahPac and have disrupted Sarah and Todd Palin’s personal credit card accounts.
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“We will not be gagged, either by judicial action or corporate censorship. Today Visa joined Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon, EveryDNS and others in cutting off their links.
“Wikileaks is still online. The full site is duplicated in more than 500 locations. Every day, the cables are loaded more than 50 million times.
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PayPal has said that its decision to stop people from using its service to make donations to Wikileaks was made after a letter from the US government.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The number of mountain gorillas living in the Virunga Massif in central Africa has soared by 26.3% since 2003, according to a new census. The increase in numbers from 380 to 480 individuals is thanks to “immense” efforts to reduce poaching and disease, scientists said – but should not be read as a sign that the fight to save the highly endangered species is over.
The 450-square-kilometre Virunga Massif is composed of three national parks: the Volcanoes national park in Rwanda – made famous by the film about the conservationist Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist – the Mgahinga gorilla national park in Uganda and Parc National des Virunga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the census, which was conducted in March and April this year, its gorilla population is growing at a rate of 3.7% a year.
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The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians’ every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.
The company’s top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew “everything that was being done in those ministries”. She boasted that the Nigerian government had “forgotten” about the extent of Shell’s infiltration and were unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.
The cache of secret dispatches from Washington’s embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.
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Finance
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Do not buy stocks. Not for retirement. Not in the coming decade. Don’t. Huge risks.
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The path from prosecutor to private sector is well-trodden.
But David Markowitz, of the New York Attorney General’s office, is making the leap in rather spectacular fashion. The 40-year-old lawyer is leaving the NYAG’s team, where he presided over some of the most high-profile cases against financial firms, to work as an associate general counsel at Goldman Sachs, one of the most maligned on Wall Street in recent years.
At Goldman he will be a senior member of the litigation and regulatory proceedings group, which works on a broad variety of matters, said a spokesman for Goldman. “We are pleased that Mr. Markowitz is joining the company,” he said.
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Obama went on national TV to give a ringing defense of his compromise, declaring it the necessary price for heading off a tax increase that neither taxpayers nor the weak economy could stand and for gaining more months of unemployment payments for millions of jobless workers.
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The SEC said the division paid “kickbacks” to bidding agents who collect proposals for government business. In exchange, the bank received information about what other firms were bidding.
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A defensive President Obama cast himself Tuesday as the guardian of middle-class Americans and the unemployed, saying sharply that he had to strike a deal with Senate Republicans over the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy in order to protect the fragile economic recovery.
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The political posturing may not be entirely over, but President Obama and Congress have reached a tentative agreement to temporarily extend the Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans, including the wealthiest taxpayers.
Besides extending the tax cuts, President Obama made several other concessions to the Republicans, including raising the estate tax exemption to $5 million. Republicans, meanwhile, agreed to extend jobless aid to the long-term unemployed.
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The Federal Reserve has a story and is sticking to it: We didn’t lose taxpayer money, and we won’t.
But several emergency programs and credit lines still exist, and the path to profitability on them remains uncertain.
Hedge funds, pension funds and other investors have some $25 billion in outstanding loans from the Fed, some backed by subprime consumer debt. The central bank’s books are stocked with $66 billion of securities related to Bear Stearns and the American International Group, and the troubled insurer also owes $20 billion on a Fed credit line.
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If you look at the numbers alone, the tax cut deal looks to have robbed Republicans blind. The GOP got around $95 billion in tax cuts for wealthy Americans and $30 billion in estate tax cuts. Democrats got $120 billion in payroll-tax cuts, $40 billion in refundable tax credits (Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and education tax credits), $56 billion in unemployment insurance, and, depending on how you count it, about $180 billion (two-year cost) or $30 billion (10-year cost) in new tax incentives for businesses to invest.
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Last Friday’s jobs report was disappointing, but a new data released today suggest that all hope is not lost.
American job openings increased to 3.4 million in October from 3 million in September, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. That is the fastest increase in six months.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. need to pitch in to help pay for the billions of dollars of network investments needed for their bandwidth-hogging services, European phone operators say.
As mobile and Web companies add videos, music and games, operators including France Telecom SA, Telecom Italia SpA and Vodafone Group Plc want a new deal that would require content providers like Apple and Google to pay fees linked to usage.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It’s long been common knowledge that US diplomats have had a heavy hand in other country’s copyright laws but, with the Wikileaks release of State Department cables, we’re finally seeing some actually confirmation of that. We’ve already covered the US’s involvement in Spain’s proposed copyright changes and now a Swedish television station claims to have a cable (not yet released by Wikileaks) that shows heavy “behind the scenes” involvement by the US Embassy in Swedish copyright law.
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A truly free press — one unfettered by concerns of nationalism — is apparently a terrifying problem for elected governments and tyrannies alike.
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Well, well, well. Remember back when the Associated Press threatened bloggers for quoting snippets of AP articles? Is the organization considering dipping its toes in the Righthaven waters? The Las Vegas Sun reports that Righthaven has signed up Media News as a client and has sued a blogger on behalf of the Denver Post, after the blogger apparently reposted a Denver Post column by Mike Rosen (with a link and credit). This is interesting for a few different reasons. First, it was just a few weeks ago that the Denver Post published a cryptic “reminder” about copyright that had a bunch of people scratching their heads. I had thought about mentioning it at the time, but it seemed so utterly lacking in context, that there wasn’t much to say. I guess the Righthaven lawsuit provides context.
Blender 2.5: Animation
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Heck, even installing it is just a few clicks of the mouse. Easier then Windows, in fact ( no serial keys! ).
I’m calling this false, but I’d like to qualify that, saying that learning the terminal is objectively a great thing to do.
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Server
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Here are six different web servers freely provided by the open source community for Linux, Windows, and other OSs…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Then I get a bit into setting up the toolbox in GIMP 2.7 and show how to manage the docks after the “landing zones” have become invisible. And of course there is the challenge!
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Google
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You’ve read about it many times, you’ve seen lots of screenshots but it was just a product of the future. Well, this time I’m not going to tell you anything except: Chrome Web Store is now live, so check it out for yourself.
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Google held a conference today in which they’ve demoed Chrome OS which is said to be extremely speedy, have ultra-fast setup, built-in Verizon connectivity, multiple users support, easy security and application updates as well as Citrix Receiver applications (Citrix Receiver allows businesses to deploy desktop applications, such as Microsoft Excel).
But that’s not all! Google also announced that Acer and Samsung will launch Chrome OS netbooks in mid 2011, with other manufacturers to closely follow. Further more, Google launched the Chrome OS Pilot Program in which a Chrome OS netbook (“CR-48″) will be used for testing. A limited number of these CR-48 netbooks are available right away – you can apply for one already by either submitting a video on YouTube or by filling out THIS form.
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When was the last time we stood back and just marveled at how far Linux has come in the server, desktop and embedded spaces? Might seem a bit cliché to some, yet no one can argue that Linux’s progress has been truly remarkable.
Sparing you the “this is the year of the Linux desktop” type statement once again, I’d like to turn your attention to where I believe Linux is headed in 2011 and beyond. Considering some of the amazing milestones that have already been met, it’ll be interesting to see if Linux can maintain its forward momentum.
Linux in 2010 held its own in the world of embedded systems, saw some successes in the server space in the enterprise world, and gained significant achievements in the desktop space as well.
So what could 2011 and beyond possibly hold in store for Linux enthusiasts?
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Kernel Space
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And even if it does turn out that I could do the release early, as you say, I don’t really think anybody wants the merge window over the holidays. So practically speaking I think we’ll end up with a quiet holiday, with the 2.6.37 release happening early January.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced plans to provide minor patches and bug fixes only for the current Stable Series of the Linux kernel. Selected older kernel versions will, in future, be maintained as “Long-term” releases. The kernel developer said he hopes that this approach will help the community and developers focus on the current versions rather than waste their time with old kernel versions. The Long-term kernels are to follow the same rules as the Stable Series kernels.
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A new edition of a study by the Linux Foundation explains the Linux kernel development process and includes various statistics that demonstrate the kernel’s growth rate. It also analyses how much is contributed to the kernel’s development by which developers and companies.
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Graphics Stack
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Assuming no regressions are to be found in this xorg-server 1.9.3 release candidate (tagged as v1.9.2.902), Jeremy intends to issue the official 1.9.3 point release in one week’s time.
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Rafał Miłecki, the Polish free software developer who previously spearheaded bringing power management to the ATI KMS Linux driver via a number of patches late last year and into this year, has been working on another project. No, it’s not with regard to the open-source Linux graphics stack (unfortunately), but it’s on the B43 Linux wireless driver. Rafał has brought support for Broadcom’s 802.11n hardware to the B43 driver.
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So I have a T410s with an LVDS panel and switchable graphics between intel and nvidia. I’ve gotten the basic switching support just like we have on the intel/amd combination.
The code is a start towards generic nvidia/nvidia and intel/nvidia switching but its missing some bits. The MUX switch on some GPUs relies on passing a parameter to the WMI function that we aren’t passing, luckily the lenovo doesn’t need this parameter at the moment so it works fine. Other laptops in this range may require the parameter.
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Following the hiatus last week with the X.Org Server 1.10 merge window being kept open to allow time for finishing up RandR 1.4 with per-CRTC pixmaps and then NVIDIA pushing for fence sync support in this release, the work has now settled and the merge window has closed. Keith Packard has also announced the first development snapshot of X.Org Server 1.10.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Few days ago PlayOnLinux team announced that Call of Duty Black Ops is now available on playOnLinux , this mean that you can install the game by just a few clicks using PlayOnLinux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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since this is my first post on the Planet, I’ll shortly introduce myself and my activities in KDE. My name is Matteo and I am the maintainer of the Qalculate plasmoid and runner since SC 4.5. I am also the founder and maintainer of Cirkuit, a KDE app to produce publication-ready graphics using different backends (TikZ, Circuit Macros, Gnuplot).
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GNOME Desktop
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Yesterday the GNOME Project has announced the interns for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women and I’m one of them.
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Xfce
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We are pleased to announce the second preview release of Xfce 4.8. This release marks the beginning of the string freeze. From today on until the final release, strings may no longer be changed in the master branch of Xfce core components. This will help translators to prepare their translations for the final release scheduled on January 16th, 2011.
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Every Linux enthusiast has their own take on choosing the right Linux distribution (or Linux “flavor”). Discussions regarding the distributions can be as heated as the classic Linux-Mac-Windows argument. However, everyone has their own right to put forward their opinions whether it’s the new guy who still believes Windows 7 rules or a Linux veteran of unsurpassed Terminal command skills.
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This past week, I had a frustrating reminder of a lesson I learned long ago…but let slip away out of either arrogance or stubbornness. That lesson is that choosing the right distribution is the first (and most important) key to success when deploying the Linux operating system.
Yes, we all have our favorite distribution, but sometimes that favorite distribution simply will not do the trick and a different flavor must be used.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With much teasing or coaxing from Ax, I’ve installed Ubuntu Linux on my Toshiba P20, replacing the installation of Gentoo Linux on it. Have I stopped being a Gentoo User? No. I’m just on hold for the moment.
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There’s no need to panic though. The launcher already supports an auto-hide function (although one would also love to see an intellihide option too) and users will be free, of course, to use Docky, AWN, aDesk Bar or an other form of dock alongisde the Unity launcher.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ultimate Edition 2.8 Gamers is a nice way of slicing UE up into a gaming-friendly version. The developers have done a pretty good job putting the emphasis on gaming while not really short-changing the user too much on non-gaming applications. I found it quite possible to use UE 2.8 Gamers as a regular distro when not playing games.
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Phones
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Android
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Google says that the number of Chrome users has climbed to 120 million, growing significantly over the past year. Chrome’s emphasis on speed was cited as one of the most significant factors driving its popularity. Performance will continue to be one of the defining priorities of Chrome development as Google works to make the browser a compelling application platform.
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Android 2.3, codenamed Gingerbread, was revealed by Google this morning. It will ship first on the upcoming Nexus S smartphone, which was built by Google in collaboration with Samsung. According to an Android developer, we will likely see it rolled out as an update for Nexus One handsets in the next few weeks. We look forward to doing a full review when it arrives on devices, but we decided to get an early look via the SDK.
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The new video shows a device that looks much like the one from the previous images: a Sony Ericsson phone with a sliding keyboard much like the PSPGo and a touchscreen interface. Based on the phone’s display, the video was taken on Thursday, December 2 and the model has been codenamed “zeus.” It also features the Android OS, as rumored, running the upcoming “Gingerbread” version of the software. And while the video doesn’t show any actual games playing, the device does has a PlayStation icon, which leads to a very XMB-style interface.
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The video of Andy Rubin’s talk at the Dive Into Mobile event is up, and you can watch the juicy bit above, where he takes out the prototype Motorola tablet and toys with it for all to see, demonstrating the new Google Maps and “accidentally” teasing video chat capability and some other things.
The pad looks bigger than 7″, the size we heard about, but I can’t swear to it. If I had to take a guess at the screen resolution, I’d go with 8-9″ at 1024×600. It looks thin and rather unadorned right now, but this likely isn’t the final industrial design, so let’s just not worry too much about that. He seemed proud that it had no buttons on it, though, so I’m guessing that’s final.
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Sub-notebooks
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They are presented here in alphabetical order.
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KDE’s Plasma netbook packs the power of KDE applications. The interface is sleek, simple and attractive. There’s a wealth of KDE add-ons available and ‘live’ applications can be pinned to ‘Page One’. Personally, I may not use any of the add-ons, but I am likely to use the KDE netbook interface as the default. I find that the full-screen mode for applications minimises distractions, especially when reading or viewing media. I have always liked the full-screen interface of Sugar (OLPC).
Switching between application windows was the hardest with KDE. It would be nice if it was as easy as on Sugar—at the press of a function key.
Currently, I expect to keep each of the three installed, and keep them updated. Maybe, after a year, one will become my definite favourite.
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The Document Foundation on Sunday announced the availability of the first release candidate of LibreOffice, marking the approach of the first stable version of the brand-new open source productivity suite.
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Oracle
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It was more than six months ago that Oracle released Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2, formerly known as Sun’s VirtualBox, as their most recent major update. Oracle now, however, is readying a very major VM VirtualBox 4.0 update. Today they have released the first public beta of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 and it brings many new features along with some changes that may prove to be another disappointing step by Oracle in alienating the open-source community.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The European Commission will spend EUR 189 million on proprietary software over the next six years, in direct contradiction to its own decisions and guidelines. The Commission last week announced a six-year framework contract to acquire a wide range of mostly proprietary software and related services1.
“This is a rough deal for Europe”, says Karsten Gerloff, President of Free Software Foundation Europe. “Instead of coming up with a strategy to take advantage of Free Software and become independent from vendors, the Commission is digging itself deeper into the vendor lock-in hole.”
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Project Releases
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In addition to the usual fixes, this release also includes support for the new “add.ignoreErrors” name given to the existing “add.ignore-errors” configuration variable.
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Licensing
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Copleft is a property of some licenses that uses the right to authorize derivative works as a tool to control the license(s) under which such a derivative must be relicensed. For instance, the GNU GPL only permits larger works to be redistributed under the GNU GPL. No exceptions. One can argue how far this limitation can legally go and what is the border between “derivative work” and “collection of independent works”. While this distinction is clear for literary works, in software there are a lot of variants — one of which is “dynamic linking” — that make things far more complex and less cleancut. Because of this, I prefer to leave the matter unresolved and proceed under the assumption that “derivative” here is really a derivative, whatever that means.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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This post was cowritten by Friedrich Lindenberg, CKAN developer, and Stefano Costa, lead of OKF Italia.
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Open Hardware
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China on Tuesday reiterated the importance and urgency of resuming the six-party talks on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, urging the parties to support China’s proposal for emergency consultations among chief negotiators.
“The development of the situation on the Korean Peninsula has proven the importance and urgency of resuming the six-party talks,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu at a regular press briefing.
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Google Inc has won a share of a federal government contract that the company hopes will give it a boost over Microsoft Corp as they race to convert government agencies to cloud computing.
The US General Services Administration awarded a five-year, $6.7 million contract last week to Unisys Corp, with Google as a subcontractor — a relatively small dollar amount but an important initial foothold.
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HIS HOLINESS Pope Benedictus XVI, Pontifex Maximus and Dominus Apostolicus can now at the words “P2P Pirate” to his list of official titles.
The Pope was one of 774,651 people caught by the insecurity outfit Avast’s sweep of illegal use of its software.
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The rise of China as an economic and political juggernaut has become a familiar refrain, but now there’s another area in which the Chinese are suddenly emerging as a world power: education.
In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) comparative survey of the academic performance of 15-year-olds around the world — an authoritative study released every three years — Chinese teenagers from Shanghai far outscored their international peers in all three subject matters that were tested last year: reading, math and science.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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On November 11, the relentlessly upbeat Transportation Security Administration (TSA) blog discussed the newly “enhanced” airport security pat-downs that would soon be coming to a groin near you. “It just makes good security sense,” said TSA’s “Blogger Bob.” His commenters did not concur.
“The next time I fly, I’m wearing my trusty kilt,” said one—and we’re assuming that he’s a true Scotsman.
This was an idea too good not to receive wider exposure (no pun intended), and it was naturally soon paired with the idea of a “National Opt-Out Day” to take place this week on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving. The idea is for a mass opt-out of the new AIT body scanners that can see through clothes, with participants choosing instead to have the more invasive pat-down.
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Cablegate
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A leading US senator suggested tonight that the New York Times and other news organisations publishing the US embassy cables being released by WikiLeaks could be investigated for breaking American espionage laws.
Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland security committee, told Fox News: “To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”
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It was like watching a vast army advance. As I read the WikiLeaks cables, the strategy became clear. The US decides what is in its interests, then sets its massed ranks of diplomats around the globe to work.
Demarchés, statements of what the US wants, are delivered in person and pledges of support gathered. Only the strongest resist: a major developing power like Brazil or a rich and secure nation like Norway might bridle, but I saw dozens of cables from tiny nations immediately acceding to US demands.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defends the publication of secret U.S. documents in an editorial published online early Wednesday by The Australian newspaper.
WikiLeaks is serving a vital purpose, Assange wrote, “fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.”
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There was a rumor going around that perhaps Twitter was censoring “wikileaks” as a trending topic. In response, Twitter has denied this, saying that it’s simply untrue — but at the same time the company has refused to comment on whether or not it will allow Wikileaks to keep its Twitter account.
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Ah, is this reason enough to cancel my Maestro card subscription? And start living life with cash only? Or should I just get another debit/credit card? Hm, I wonder what VISA’s opinion is regarding Wikileaks.
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A spontaneous movement to boycott Amazon.com, the online retailer, has taken off in response to the company’s decision to kick WikiLeaks off its servers. We at Antiwar.com unequivocally endorse this effort. In spite of attempts by some to claim the company was subjected to a threat “at gunpoint,” in reality, no one put a gun to Amazon’s head. They were more than happy to join the attack on WikiLeaks, as their statement made all too clear:
“There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate.
“There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against.
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. … It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.”
“We’ve been running AWS for over four years and have hundreds of thousands of customers storing all kinds of data on AWS. Some of this data is controversial, and that’s perfectly fine. But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.”
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Julian Assange and WikiLeaks may soon learn what it feels like to have their secrets put on public display. In January of 2011, German former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg plans to publish a book detailing multiple years inside the controversial whistle-blower organization.
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In an interview with The Times the German defector gave a blistering insider’s insight into the workings of WikiLeaks, which appears to operate as secretly as the institutions that it infiltrates.
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Supporters of the website Wikileaks will mobilise on Friday (10/12/10) to protest against the backlash it has faced for its release of more than 250,000 US government cables.
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Wikileaks has been dumped by Amazon and mirrored across the globe as it attempts to spread its whistleblowing message to the masses. But would any web-hosting company in Australia consent to play host to Wikileaks? The answer, so far, appears to be “probably not”.
Several large Australian web-hosting companies said today they would be unlikely to host the Wikileaks repository if asked to by a customer, for a number of reasons.
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote this Op-Ed for The Australian today:
Key lines:
* WikiLeaks is fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
* The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
* (My idea is) to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.
* People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars.
* The Gillard government (Australia) is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed.
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In Russia, the findings of a young whistleblower lawyer concerning the rampant corruption of major state-affiliated companies have made much bigger waves than the recent tsunami of Wikileaks revelations.
34-year-old Moscow lawyer Alexey Navalny could be nicknamed the “one-man Wikileaks”. His website is dedicated to uncovering and publishing incidents of high-level corporate corruption, with revelations concerning Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom, leading Russian oil company Rosneft and Russian bank VTP, among others.
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Assange appeared in court in blue suit with a white shirt. Asked to give an address he replied: “PO Box 4080.” When the question was asked again, he said: “Do you want it for correspondence or for some other reason?” Later, the WikiLeaks founder, who was accompanied by officials from the Australian high commission, gave an address in his native Australia.
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Finance
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President Barack Obama still has work to do to sell the tax package he negotiated with Republicans to Democrats in Congress.
House Democratic leaders say the package is tilted too much in favor of the wealthy, putting Obama on the defensive for striking a deal that is picking up support among GOP lawmakers and business groups.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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—André Marin, Ontario’s Ombudsman, speaking at a press conference today about the G20—specifically, the provincial government’s introduction and mishandling of Regulation 233/10 under the Public Works Protection Act, and what it led to. In his report [PDF], Caught in the Act, Marin writes that the regulation and Act gave “extravagant police authority….to arbitrarily arrest and detain people and to engage in unreasonable searches and seizures.”
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The biggest social-networking site in the world broke with many of its online brethren today when it issued a statement saying that it will not ban content from a “fan page” associated with WikiLeaks, the controversial repository of leaked confidential documents whose founder, Julian Assange, is currently on the run.
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Just as the stories are starting to get interesting, the Tunisian authorities block Wikileaks and every other form of leaks that mention Tunisia based on cables from the whistleblower site.
Soon after the cables surfaced activists around the world started creating websites to tackle specific topics and countries drawing from the plethora of information the cables provide. Tunisian activists didn’t waste time, Tunileaks was born.
Tunileaks was created by Nawaat to offer a central place for Tunisians and everyone one else interested in discussing and unraveling information related to the Tunisian government found in the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM (or Vuvuzelas)
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The US Copyright Group (USCG) campaign to turn piracy into profit is starting to fall apart. Today, the anti-piracy lawyers dropped 97% of the alleged BitTorrent file-sharers from the Far Cry case because of a lack of jurisdiction. This setback seriously limits the profitability of the law firm’s business model, and is a clear victory for thousands of people who were pressured to pay expensive settlements.
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Remember how excited Cablevision was about putting up that paywall for Newsday, the newspaper that it owned? While the company claimed that the purpose of the paywall was really all about keeping Cablevision customers from deserting in favor of Verizon, it was still rather stunning to find out after three months, the company had secured a grand total of 35 paywall subscribers who weren’t just grandfathered in as Cablevision TV subscribers.
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Sweden’s highest court has rejected an application by an anti-piracy group which would force an ISP to hand over the identity of a file-sharing site operator. Antipiratbyrån wants TeliaSonera to reveal who is behind the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker but the ISP has refused and taken its case all the way to the Supreme Court. That Court has now decided that the final decision lies with the European Court.
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Piracy is so difficult to battle because file-sharers are motivated by altruism and not financial gain, according to one academic.
XGL Debian GNU/Linux
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
12.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Out on the web, M$ has an army of astroturfers proclaiming that GNU/Linux has less than 1% share of desktops and that “best practice” is to scrap working computers every few years and that a whole organization must run that other OS just because some particular application runs only on that other OS. These lies, repeated often enough, are believed by uncritical thinkers despite the obvious flaws in reasoning. Critical thinkers can find plenty of evidence that GNU/Linux runs on 5-10% of PCs, more in some places like Brazil where most barriers to adoption are gone. That share has been achieved with very little advertising except sharing by individuals. As new architectures like ARM and tablets come on the market and XP is killed, GNU/Linux will have a decent share of PCs and M$ will have failed utterly in its dream of a licence for each PC for its OS.
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From the 24 tests shown via the Phoronix Test Suite, Ubuntu 10.10 ruled when it came to the OpenGL performance, it was mixed between the two operating systems when looking at the OpenCL computational performance, and with the CPU-bound tests it was often mixed as to whether Mac OS X or Ubuntu was superior, but it seemed Ubuntu did do better when it came to more of the multi-threaded benchmarks.
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The Brazilian government education authority has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use nationwide. Mandriva is working with the hardware manufacturer partner Positivo, to deliver this open source solution which will help teachers to improve students’ education. Also, this will be one of the world biggest organized deployment of Linux, with potential to get to 1.5 Million units, and confirms Linux as a key, cost-effective alternative PC operating system. The hardware, operating system and software is targeted to have a per student cost around USD $200.
The Intel-powered classmate PC is a small and rugged, fully functional mobile PC, specially designed by Intel for primary students in emerging markets. Brazil will be one of the first countries to deploy Intel-powered classmate PCs in their schools to such a large scale. The Brazilian government’s decision to choose as Intel Learning Series solutions running Mandriva Linux on a classmate PCs reaffirms Linux as the preferred operating system for the global education market with Mandriva as the Linux education market leader.
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OK, so it’s a bit of a clichéd question, but with the awesome developments that have taken place in the Linux world over the last year, it’s worth asking again. Will 2011 – finally – be the year that Linux makes serious inroads into the desktop space? Are all the pieces in place to mount a major assault on Microsoft and Apple? Or are we barking up the wrong tree, and we should be looking to the mobile space with Android and Chrome OS for Linux’s future?
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Google
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Google said at the start that “Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” Google hasn’t always been on message with this.
Google also took its time getting even a Chrome beta out the door. Now that Chrome OS is about to be unveiled, we know that it is going to be Google’s “desktop” operating system, while Android is for smart phones and tablets.
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Thin clients are in demand for virtual desktops of all kinds, even “cloud” computing. Tomorrow, Google is expected to reveal an operating system on a device with the system intended to function mostly on the cloud.
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Tomorrow, December 7, Google is expected to launch its new netbook-and-tablet cloud-based operating system, Chrome OS. It’s also entirely possible that Google will simply show off the much-hyped Chrome Web Store. The event was only announced December 3, and it’s extremely unlikely that Google would rush the launch of something huge and consumer-facing.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Huawei, a leader in providing next-generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, has become its newest member.
Being recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies, Huawei is using Linux to develop network equipment and devices and sees its Linux Foundation membership as an opportunity to collaborate with a worldwide network of developers, users and vendors to advance that work.
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Apparently childhood in the Torvalds family is a tough affair. There’s this constant nagging worry about the parents caring enough that the kids are being fed. Only to be occasionally overshadowed by the terror of dead pets being flushed.
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Applications
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TeamViewer is an application for remote control, desktop sharing and file transfer between computers. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (even though it comes in a .deb or .rpm, it uses Wine which comes bundled with it).
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Proprietary
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Skype is hiring a whole lot of engineers. Many of them will work on the company’s mobile applications, as we reported earlier this week, and many will work on cloud-based implementations of Skype that would include working with third parties such as LinkedIn. This hiring binge is part of Skype’s big expansion in Silicon Valley, something I wrote about in July 2010.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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At the beginning of October there was the announcement of the Unigine OilRush game, a strategy game developed atop the Unigine Engine and developed by Unigine Corp itself as one of the first real games available to multi-platform gamers of this advanced, very interesting game engine. The screenshots continue to look impressive and it was supposed to be released in Q4’2010, but now Unigine Corp is sharing that the game’s release date has been pushed back to March of 2011.
A three month delay in Unigine’s first game release is a bit disappointing, but it comes due to taking longer to negotiate with their publisher and ensuring the game itself will be great for all gamers upon its release. The precise release date in March has not been given officially, but it should come shortly after GDC 2011 (the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco) that is running from 28 February through 4 March.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.
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Red Hat Family
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Now that I have spent some time with RHEL 6 I have to say that, over-all, it’s a good release. It’s solid, polished and comes backed by a great support infrastructure. Home users may be put off by the smaller repository, older packages or, for that matter, the price tag. Businesses though, Red Hat’s target customers, should be very happy with this release.
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Debian Family
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Interview with Asheesh Laroia, a member of the Debian Mentor Community.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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What I found particularly touching about this story was a poem that Manuèla wrote about her experience of joining the Ubuntu community:
I came in a community named Ubuntu.
Unsure if I was good enough to help with anything
Not really knowing where I ended up.
There came a blanket of warmth and cordiality to me.
Caring, social and tolerancity.
I did not know what came over me
It was like i was coming home after a long journey
And warmly was received by family.
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Today I want to talk about bug fixing. Tomorrow Jorge will be starting a weekly Bitesize Bug Campaign in which he will highlight a set of bitesize Unity bugs, that is bugs that only require small and simple fixes (and are ideal for new Unity developers), and work with the community to get those bugs fixed. This campaign is similar to the papercuts effort in that these bugs are rough edges that need sanding off. Jorge will highlight a new set of bugs each week, and he will also highlight those rock stars who contribute these improvements to Unity.
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Flavours and Variants
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The default Bodhi Linux theme looks very geekish, using black and green which at first I thought it would be annoying but I quickly got used to it and further more I ended up loving it by the time I’ve finished writing this post. Don’t worry though, it can be easily changed if you don’t like it from the Enlightenment menu.
Even though it is minimalistic, Bodhi Linux tries to cover every little aspect to make your desktop experience enjoyable. And for everything else, the new online software center (which should be available soon – read on for more info) will allow you to install any extra packages you may need to further tweak or enhance Bodhi with minimum effort.
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Phones
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Android
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Version 6.1 of the CyanogenMod Android distribution has been released.
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Today’s a Google day. The company, after announcing before the weekend that they had a couple of announcements ready to go for Monday, has officially pulled the curtain off their latest version of the Android mobile Operating System, Android 2.3. Its’ better known as Gingerbread, and for those in the development community who have been waiting to get your hands on it, the time is now.
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For a complete overview of what’s new in the platform, see the Android 2.3 Platform Highlights.
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Google has revealed Android 2.3, codenamed Gingerbread, a new version of its popular mobile platform. It introduces a handful of modest user interface enhancements—such as a more refined touchscreen keyboard—and brings some noteworthy performance improvements that are largely intended to boost Android gaming.
Alongside the release of Android 2.3, Google has also announced plans to launch the Nexus S, a new smartphone that was developed in collaboration with Samsung. Much like Google’s Nexus One, the new phone in the Nexus series will be available unlocked with a pure Google experience. The unlocked version will be sold at Best Buy for $529 without subsidy, and T-Mobile will be selling it on contract for $199.
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VMware is teaming with LG to sell Android smartphones that are virtualized, allowing a single phone to run two operating systems, one for business use and one for personal use.
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In a bit of awesome news, the android.view.KeyEvent class (that’s geek speak for keyboard controls in the code) in Android 2.3 has been updated to include support for what looks like Playstation phone controls.
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Tablets
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A 3D version of Google Maps will accompany a Motorola tablet running Honeycomb, the next version of Google’s Android, according to Google’s Andy Rubin.
Rubin showed off the unreleased prototype tablet at the opening session of D: Dive Into Mobile in San Francisco today, the same day that the company announced plans to ship Gingerbread, Android version 2.3. Honeycomb and the Motorola tablet will arrive at some point next year, Rubin said, showing off the Google Maps application and eliciting more than one “oooh” from the crowd of mobile professionals.
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The Document Foundation welcomes the new BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software, a software development project recently announced by BrOffice, Itaipu Binacional and the Itaipu Technological Park Foundation. The main software lab, based in Foz do Iguacu, will contribute to the development of LibreOffice (BrOffice in Brazil), and other free software projects. The activity is forecast to start in the first quarter of 2011.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that Google’s Wave communication platform has been accepted into the Apache Incubator – a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the ASF was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki last month by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration. In a post on the Apache mailing list, Google’s Dan Peterson says that the the vote to accept Wave into the incubator was “overwhelmingly positive”.
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The investigation into BP’s disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill has hit the buffers after a drilling technology firm refused to hand over access to fundamental software used on the rig.
National Oilwell Varco rejected US government demands to provide access to its proprietary HiTech application, which was relied upon by BP engineers to determine the presence of dangerous hydrocarbons in the well during the drilling. It said that handing over the code would mislead the investigation.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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I commented on Friday about the weakness that responses to Wikileaks have exposed in cloud computing, whatever your view of Wikileaks itself. While there are strong incentives to host critical infrastructure in the cloud or using web services, we saw last week both Amazon Web Services and PayPal – flagship brands in cloud computing and web commercial services respectively – suddenly toss customers off their services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse. I’m sure they breached none of their own (voluminous) agreements. We saw other, less well-known companies (Tableau, EveryDNS) follow suit too, and even a Swiss bank finding a handy loophole. We also saw the US Department of Homeland Security start to seize domain names – this time at least by sending a court order to Verisign, albeit sealed, but without useful explanation or workable recourse. I sense we will see more of this happening.
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Education
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I want to see e-readers and epub succeed in schools but I fear restrictive practices will threaten their adoption. The future may lay with EPUB and the Open Education Resources project (OER)
[...]
Many others have noticed the problem of providing ‘school-knowledge’ for all. To many, including me, it should be free and free of restrictions in distribution. The Open Source model so well known to us in the software world is making inroads in the proprietary education system.
The Open Education Resources project embraces the likes of Wikipedia, WikiEducator and Open Text Books. The once hopeful project known as the National Digital Resource Bank seems unfortunately to have foundered (too expensive?) and is currently off line.
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Sugata Mitra is the founder of Hole in the Wall experiment, which inspired the writing of Slumdog Millionaire. On the same day he keynoted at Big Ideas Fest, a story about his Self-Organized Learning Environments hit Slashdot.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This year, the FSF will also be undertaking a series of new public advocacy campaigns to advance awareness for free software. This, our first series of general GNU/Linux adoption campaigns, is possible only because we now have fully free distributions utilizing a kernel, Linux-Libre, that has removed all the nonfree code normally present in Linux. And it is only possible because our new hardware endorsement program will make it increasingly possible to find hardware that respects our freedom.
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Openness/Sharing
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Who’s behind it?
The Eurostat Hackday is currently being organised by:
* DERI
* LATC
* LOD2
* The Open Knowledge Foundation
* Planet Data
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As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely like you) in Ottawa and Sao Paulo and we agreed to see if we could prompt an international opendata hackathon. At the time we thought there would be our three cities and maybe three of four more. At no point did we think that there would be 1000s of people in over 73 cities on 5 continents who would dedicate the time and energy to helping foster both a local and international community of open data hackers, advocates and citizens. Nor did we know that the wonderful people like those with Random Hacks of Kindness would embrace us and help make this event such a success.
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TSMC has many clients for its 28nm process, including Xilinx, Altera, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm, and has attained tape-out for 71 IC products. The 28nm production capacity will be fully utilized by the end of 2011, TSMC noted.
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As if you don’t know this already, Grooveshark is an online music broadcasting application.
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Much of the world’s food supply is transported via an inefficient, polluting, and dangerous system of highways and trucks. The overwhelming share of the fuel used to move food powers cumbersome vehicles, only eight percent is really needed to transport the cargoes themselves to supermarkets, according to one estimate.
So what’s the alternative? Move the whole system underground and set up a “transport industry Internet,” says the United Kingdom based Foodtubes Project, a consortium of academics, project planners, and engineers. Siphon veggies, corn flakes, and cans of baked beans about in high-speed capsules (one by two meters) traveling through dedicated pipelines lodged below our cities. And why not? That’s the way we transport water, oil, gas, and sewage, isn’t it?
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Nvidia is looking to pack more CPU cores into mobile devices like smartphones and tablets as a way to improve performance while preserving battery life.
Most of the mobile devices today contain single-core processors, which are not enough to handle new mobile applications such as 3D gaming and video, the company said in a whitepaper published this week.
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Science
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On one level the answer is simple: it comes from our mastery of our subject matter – it comes from our knowledge and training. In that sense, anybody with a Ph.D. who walks into a classroom should have authority. But we know that’s not the case. There are many professors who have to work very hard to establish themselves as authority figures. Some reasons for this have to do with personalities, level of confidence, and other personal attributes. But that doesn’t explain why, for certain groups of professors, their authority is not a “given” and it is not assumed. To believe that it is ignores the connection between individuals and their experience with (or lack of) privilege as members of particular groups. So, yes, we walk into the classroom as individuals who have mastery over our field, but a growing number of us also walk into the classroom as members of under-privileged and/or under-represented groups.
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The good news: scientists have discovered a completely new type of bacterium that could help with the disposal of old ships and oil rigs. The bad news: it’s eating the Titanic.
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With global networks carrying complex time-sensitive data, the speed of light is actually becoming a significant source of latency, researchers have found.
While today’s fiber optics-based networks can shuttle data around the world at the speed of light — momentarily slowed only by routing and switching — the vast geographic distances data has to travel can be a factor of delay, especially when the information itself is generated so quickly by computers and is useful only within a very short time period. At least one industry, finance, is starting to chafe at this limit.
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The mega-filament collapsed in a gorgeous cascade of hot plasma between noon and 2 p.m. EST. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a beautiful movie of the eruption (above). The explosion does not appear to be aimed at Earth, so we shouldn’t expect any magnetic storms or satellite troubles.
The loop of hot plasma has been snaking around the sun’s southeast limb since Dec. 4, and appears to be growing by the hour. When SDO saw it on Dec. 4, the filament was more than 250,000 miles long, about 30 times the diameter of the Earth. In the image below, taken at about 12:30 p.m. EST on Dec. 6, the loop of charged plasma stretches more than 435,000 miles, the full radius of the sun.
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Health/Nutrition
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Dwindling biodiversity could cause more humans to contract infectious diseases such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus, according to scientists who have reviewed the results of 24 separate studies.
Biodiversity hotspots must be protected to prevent the transmission of dangerous diseases from increasing, they warn.
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They don’t send out press releases, don’t have public information officers and their contacts are not widely publicized by the huge international humanitarian operation helping cholera-hit Haiti.
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Security
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The key on the CPE worked fine for my Linux netbook and an iPhone, but not a Windows 7 laptop. So he said he would change it, and suggested, nay insisted upon… 0123456789. We protested. No, he said, people wouldn’t guess it (I’m not making this up, by the way). We refused.
[...]
Cue much palaver testing various keys on various devices, but eventually we found something that would work on everything: a WEP key with few letters mixed in. Great. Now, on the issue of the 0-9, this engineer told us many Windows Vista/7 PCs have Wi-Fi password issues, and the ISP’s standard Huawei home gateway is partly to blame, and he therefore usually sets customers’ security to 0123456789.
Hence the depression. In the context of the Digital Economy Act, if this is the norm, we can look forward to an awful lot of court cases.
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The full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs that are fast becoming the norm at US airports – just in time for Thanksgiving! – do at least provide the answer to what should be done with Osama bin Laden if he’s ever captured: Rotate him in perpetuity through this security hell, “groin checks” and all.
He’ll crumple fast and wonder that 19 young guys in four planes could so warp the nervous system of the world’s most powerful nation that it has empowered zealous bureaucrats to trample on the liberties for which Americans give thanks this week.
[...]
Anyone who has watched TSA agents spending 10 minutes patting down 80-year-old grandmothers, or seen dismayed youths being ordered back into the scanner booth by agents connected wirelessly to other invisible agents gazing at images of these people in a state of near-nakedness, has to ask: What form of group madness is it that forsakes judgment and discernment for process run amok? I don’t doubt the patriotism of the Americans involved in keeping the country safe, nor do I discount the threat, but I am sure of this: The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.
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By co-opting doctors to supervise waterboarding, George Bush subverted their sacred oath to give himself legal cover
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The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) strongly condemns the criminal proceedings launched against K.K. Shahina, a reporter with the weekly news magazine Tehelka in India, after a story of hers appeared to cast doubt at the prosecution of a prominent Islamic cleric and political figure on terrorism charges.
Shahina’s story appeared in an issue of Tehelka dated December 4, released a week prior to the cover date. It is available online and is based on interviews with key witnesses cited in the case made by police in Karnataka state in southern India against Abdul Nasar Mahdani, an Islamic cleric who heads the Peoples’ Democratic Party, active mainly in the neighbouring state of Kerala.
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Today I read that the TSA will now tell children that groping them is a game. Terrorists, through a series of acts in one day 9 years ago, are now causing our children to be sexually molested when we travel. Having a stranger touch your genitals is not a game unless you are both consenting adults.
We need to grow up, crawl out from underneath the bed, trust each other and fight back. We need to carry our fingernail clippers and our knives on the airplane again. We need to give up the charade that we can be stripped of everything that can be a weapon. We need to fight back with intelligence, not fear. Invest all the money that is going into scanners and use it to fight terrorists not travelers.
Remove TSA from the airport process. Let airlines decide how to run security for their flights and let travelers vote with their money for the type of security they want.
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A few weeks back, we wrote about the FBI celebrating that they stopped a terrorist plot that appeared to have been mostly planned by the FBI itself — basically encouraging one guy, who had no actual terrorist connections, to think he was a part of a terrorist plot where none actually existed… and then arresting the guy. As we noted at the time, we knew of at least two other very similar stories, where US law enforcement appeared to set up people in such a manner.
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Anticipating the US attempts to block it though, WikiLeaks has taken the precaution of posting a big, 1.4-gigabyte file encrypted with a 256-digit key said to be unbreakable.
Titled “insurance.aes256″, the file was big enough to contain all the US cables said to be in WikiLeaks’s possession.
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Cablegate
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Yesterday Alexander Cockburn reminded us of the news Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett broke at Counterpunch in September. Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden has a significant history of work with anti-Castro groups, at least one of which is US funded and openly supported by a former CIA agent convicted in the mass murder of seventy three Cubans on an airliner he was involved in blowing up.
Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here.
Quelle surprise, no? Shamir and Bennett went on to write about Ardin’s history in Cuba with a US funded group openly supported by a real terrorist: Luis Posada Carriles.
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US and UK diplomats warn of terrorists getting hold of fissile material and of Pakistan-India nuclear exchange
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Guns and ammo from Turkey. Missile components from Germany. Guidance systems from China. Iran is on a global, clandestine mission to acquire weapons and weapons technologies of all sorts, diplomatic cables released Sunday by WikiLeaks reveal. And the Tehran regime is using a series of front companies in its attempt to assemble the arsenal.
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Last weekend, I posted that I suspected the KIPR tag on U.S. diplomatic cables being released by Wikileaks represented cables involving intellectual property issues. Sure enough, the first batch of KIPR cables have been released in Spain, confirming U.S. pressure on that country to reform its copyright laws. The release – which come from El Pais – has generated considerable commentary with BoingBoing proclaiming that it reveals that the U.S. wrote Spain’s proposed copyright law. That headline led others to speculate what the remaining KIPR cables might reveal, particularly the 65 Canadian ones (there are also 84 WIPO tagged cables and nearly 2,500 KIPR tagged cables overall). There has been one release on copyright law in France, with officials discussing U.S. industry support for its three-strikes approach.
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WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks’ own site is taken down.
But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a more hostile tone. On Saturday PayPal restricted access to WikiLeaks’ account to prevent fund raisers from donating money to help the site. In return, the PayPal blog page that announced the decision to shut off WikiLeaks’ account was taken offline for around eight hours last night by a distributed denial- of-service (DDoS) attack.
Experts at Panda Labs pointed to a statement from the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, which said that the PayPal blog would be the target of its first DDoS counterattack on behalf of WikiLeaks. Panda also cited comments from a Twitter account named AnonyWatcher, which released several statements related to the attack.
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It’s the latest financial hit against Wikileaks, which earlier saw its PayPal account suspended. Wikileaks own statement in the matter said that the account, with some $41,000, was seized after the bank found that Assange, “as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyer’s address in Geneva for the bank’s correspondence.”
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Public Safety Minister Vic Toews appeared unconcerned or unaware Monday of the WikiLeaks release of a list of sites and resources in Canada identified by the United States as critical to that country in the event of attack, natural disaster or other emergency.
“I don’t follow gossip very much so I don’t really know the impact of WikiLeaks, but I can assure you that the security agencies in Canada are following it very closely and to the extent that I need to be involved and address those issues, they will brief me on the issues,” Toews said in response to questions from an audience after delivering a speech in Ottawa Monday.
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Tom Flanagan thought assassinating Julian Assange was reasonable.
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We are succeeding in adding the Wikileaks censorship issue in the public agenda. Perhaps the time has come to propose a boycott against those companies who are suspending the services which support Wikileaks activity?. Please, think about that.
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It’s thanks mainly to Julian Assange and Wikileaks that people around the world finally have a little insight into the brutality and venality of US foreign policy. Assanges’ quest to let people all over the world know the truth and his refusal to stand mute in the face of duplicity and injustice deserve our praise. Moral courage of that calibre is rarely seen nowadays, and people need to know what is really happening and why. If he didn’t publish these documents you can bet we would never have known the truths they contain.
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As I write this, much of the international media is consumed with WikiLeaks’ gradual publication of a quarter-million US diplomatic reports. Why? Well first off, everyone likes to be let in on a secret, and if that secret involves acronyms like CIA, RAW, MI6, or ISI, the sexiness quotient skyrockets. That’s more or less just human nature. But the reports also provide grist for media publications—especially European ones—always eager to spread some dirt about the Americans. London’s Guardian, Madrid’s El Pais and Paris’s Le Monde were fairly salivating as the documents’ release date approached, and wrote with near-orgasmic prose once publication began. Their behaviour, too, was more or less predictable.
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Meanwhile, business group CBI has called manufacturing the “unsung hero” of the UK economy.
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Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power.
Now WikiLeaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document — and we can be certain that it will — Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.
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Since several major Internet companies cut off services to WikiLeaks in recent days, activists have created hundreds of mirror sites, Web sites that host exact copies of another site’s content, making censorship difficult.
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One cable reads, “A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.”
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One of the many fascinating aspects of the Wikileaks #cablegate saga is that, unusually, computer technology plays a central rather than peripheral role in all this. And not just any old computer technology, but specifically aspects that are key to the open source world.
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Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) introduced a bill Thursday aimed at stopping WikiLeaks by making it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants.
Ensign accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his “cronies” of hindering America’s war efforts and creating a “hit list” for U.S. enemies by outing intelligence sources.
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MasterCard is pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, a move that will dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site, CNET has learned.
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The WikiLeaks affair has twofold value. On the one hand, it turns out to be a bogus scandal, a scandal that only appears to be a scandal against the backdrop of the hypocrisy governing relations between the state, the citizenry and the press. On the other hand, it heralds a sea change in international communication – and prefigures a regressive future of “crabwise” progress.
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The Swiss Bank Post Finance today issues a press release stating that it had frozen Julian Assange’s defense fund and personal assets (31K EUR) after reviewing him as a “high profile” individual.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Tuesday in London on a Swedish warrant, London’s Metropolitan Police said.
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Wikileaks has been dumped by Amazon and mirrored across the globe as it attempts to spread its whistleblowing message to the masses. But would any web-hosting company in Australia consent to play host to Wikileaks? The answer, so far, appears to be “probably not”.
Several large Australian web-hosting companies said today they would be unlikely to host the Wikileaks repository if asked to by a customer, for a number of reasons.
Bulletproof Networks has earned a reputation for stability and reliability with its customers. The Australian company hosts several large Australian sites which attract record amounts of traffic — and sometimes controversy.
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In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.
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Julian Assange’s lawyer has warned that supporters of the WikiLeaks founder will unleash a “thermonuclear device” of government files containing the names of spies, sources and informants if he’s killed or brought to trial.
Assange, the 39-year-old Australian who has most recently embarrassed the U.S. by leaking hundreds of previously secret diplomatic dispatches over the past week, has dubbed the unfiltered cache of documents his “insurance” policy. The 1.5-gigabyte file, which has been distributed to tens of thousands of fellow hackers and open-government campaigners around the world, is encrypted with a 256-digit key, reports The Sunday Times. Experts interviewed by the paper said that even powerful military computers can’t crack the encryption without the key.
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I’m tired of people saying that Assange/wikileaks ‘leaked’ the info. People from inside these agencies/companies do the leaking. Assange/wikileaks just reports it. All they want to do is kill the messenger.
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In State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, the Moscow Embassy describes how Intel bypassed Russia’s tough crypto import regulations
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With Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS.net dissolving their relationships to WikiLeaks, leaving it without a stable home and a way to make money, Twitter currently serves as the only solid ground the Internet whistleblower has to stand on. This has left many wondering whether or not Twitter will eventually take down the @wikileaks account if put under enough pressure, from lawmakers or otherwise.
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PSSST. Want to share a secret? Here is the place to send it. But be quick. This postbox to contact WikiLeaks in Australia is about to shut down.
Australia Post insists its sudden decision to close the University of Melbourne Post Office has nothing to do with the fact that Box 4080 is the Australian postal address for submissions to the whistleblower website.
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The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian’s assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.
IIn the US, however, the government has a “heavy burden” for engaging in prior restraint of even secret documents, an established principle since New York Times Co. vs. The United States*, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. If we want a different answer for Wikileaks, we need a different legal framework first.
Though I don’t like Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposed SHIELD law (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination*), I do like the fact that it is a law, and not an extra-legal avenue (of which Senator Lieberman is also guilty.*) I also like the fact that the SHIELD Law makes it clear what’s at stake: the law proposes new restraints on publishers, and would apply to the New York Times and The Guardian as it well as to Wikileaks. (As Matthew Ingram points out, “Like it or not, Wikileaks is a media entity.”*) SHIELD amounts to an attempt to reverse parts of New York Times Co. vs. The United States.
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I wonder whether it has occurred to the US Government that copyright is the reason it is so hard to shut off the cablegate cables. Not directly, indirectly through technology evolution in response to regulatory change. Ever since the mid 90s the copyright industry has had the practical effect of energetically evolving new and better means of disseminating information.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The UN climate talks in Cancún were in danger of collapse last night after many Latin American countries said that they would leave if a crucial negotiating document, due to be released tomorrow, did not continue to commit rich countries to emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.
The Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (Alba) group of nine Latin American countries – who claim they are backed by African, Arab countries and other developing nations – said they were not prepared to see an end to the treaty that legally requires all of its signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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Without a proper waste collection and management system, such nocturnal enterprises are not unusual in Uganda. These days, however, the two men turn rubbish into fuel. The friends have honed a technique to produce what Kyagulanyi calls “non-fossil fuel”, made from refuse such as plastic bottles, polythene bags and organic waste.
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The Obama administration reversed its decision to expand offshore drilling today, saying it had learned a lesson from the BP oil disaster.
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Nigeria’s anti-corruption police said today that they will charge former US vice-president Dick Cheney over a $180m bribery case involving energy firm Halliburton.The announcement follows a probe into the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in the conflict-ridden Niger Delta.
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Could the whale wars be over? Things are looking very good in that direction! The whalers may be close to capitulation.
It is December 1st, at least on the Japanese and Australian side of the International Date Line, but the Japanese whaling fleet remains in port.
For years I have said that Sea Shepherd goes down to the Southern Ocean stronger than the year before, and the Japanese ships go down weaker. They may be weaker than we thought. They may be ready to call it quits. The illegal Japanese whaling fleet may be on the brink of surrendering, at least for this year.
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Aw man, and we were doing so good with those plastic bags….dang it. But yes, according to Global Entrepreneur magazine, China creates 30.6% of the world’s waste or an unbelievable 150 million tons every year.
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A global survey that looks at international efforts to address climate change has yet again ranked Canada near the bottom — just as the country’s top environment officials leave for a United Nations conference on the issue.
The sixth annual list compiled by 190 climate experts around the world placed Canada 54th out of 57 countries, ahead of only Australia, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.
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Italy is moving ahead with a plans to ban the production and distribution of non-biodegradable plastic shopping bags starting January 1, its environment minister told ANSA this week.
“There is no going back”, said Stefania Prestigiacomo, stressing that “producers had enough time to prepare themselves for this change”. The government’s plans to ban plastic bags, first drawn up in 2007, originally foresaw an end to their use starting from January 2010 before a one-year extension was granted. A campaign is being planned to inform citizens about the ban and about environmentally friendly alternatives, said Prestigiacomo. The environment minister is certain that the ban will have a positive effect.
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Finance
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This is the Japan you might remember from 80s television: all those documentaries about the far east’s new economic powerhouse and consumerist paradise, and Clive James snarking his way through clips from perplexing gameshows. As the dog wigs show, that side of the country still exists. And yet, in the intervening 20 years something big happened to Japan, something that places it in the heart of the debate over what Britain’s economy might look like over the years ahead. Decades before the British were bandying the term about, Japan suffered a major banking crisis – and it still hasn’t recovered.
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Rarely has the true face of the modern Republican party in America been exposed so obviously.
Just a day after President Barack Obama met with Republican leaders and came out talking of a new era of co-operation, Republican senators united around Mitch McConnell to sign a letter declaring they would pass no legislation without movement on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
That legislation they are willing to scupper includes extending unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans, still suffering the terrible hangover of the Great Recession. The tax cuts the Republicans are really fired up over will benefit only the top 2% of Americans.
To put it even more simply: Republican leaders are happy to go virtually on strike in order to win a tax cut worth billions of dollars for America’s most wealthy people (which includes themselves and many of their top campaign donors). At the same time, they are willing to deny help to America’s most vulnerable; standing by as once middle-class people lose their homes as their benefits disappear.
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Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently-passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve Become the Central Bank of the world?”
When AIG was bailed out out in Sept. 2008 and immediately passed on huge sums to overseas counterparties, including Société Générale (France) and Deutsche Bank (Germany), there was a public uproar. The Fed data out today confirms what many suspected. This back-door bailout of foreign banks was just the tip of the iceberg. The Fed data covers 13 programs amounting to some $3.3 trillion in loans. We could only look at a few, but in every program examined, foreign banks were huge beneficiaries of a taxpayer-funded lifeline.
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Such is the message from the massive document drop the Federal Reserve made last week. The Dodd-Frank law forced the Fed to disclose the recipients of $3.3 trillion from emergency lending programs put in place during the crisis days of 2008, so the taxpayers who paid for those rescue efforts now know whom they were helping.
Not that we should expect to receive any thank-you notes from these institutions for rescuing them from themselves.
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The Federal Reserve made $9 trillion in overnight loans to major banks and Wall Street firms during the financial crisis, according to newly revealed data released Wednesday.
The loans were made through a special loan program set up by the Fed in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse in March 2008 to keep the nation’s bond markets trading normally.
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There is one problem, however. Basel may have asked the right question, but it did not come up with the right answers, mainly because it allows banks to remain dangerously leveraged, setting equity requirements way too low. This fact is not understood because the debate on capital regulation has been mired with a cloud of confusion, and filled with un-substantiated assertions by bankers and others. As a result, the issues appear much more mysterious and complicated than they actually are.
After a massive and incredibly costly financial crisis, we seem to have financial system that is a more consolidated, more powerful, more profitable and, yes, as fragile and dangerous as we had before the crisis. How did this happen and what can we do?
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President Barack Obama on Saturday praised a newly sealed trade deal with South Korea as a landmark agreement that promises to boost the domestic auto industry and support tens of thousands of American jobs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But that hasn’t stopped the Right from propagating the myth that the failures of “socialism” forced them to embrace capitalism.
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Last week, when the American League of Lobbyists announced a new PR offensive to help change the public perception of the profession, including this video, we just couldn’t contain ourselves. Their Lobbying-as-American-as-Mom-and-Apple-Pie PR effort deserved a classic Internet video mashup – one, that in Sunlight-style involves “data jamming” – telling the real story of how lobbyists work to control the Washington agenda…
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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WikiLeaks has become the symbol of disturbing information that can’t be stopped. Recent declarations and actions against the organization clearly expose the will of governments to control the Internet. From now on, it seems that both sides are fighting a battle that could be one of the most important that we must wage for the future of our democracies. On one side, those who would like to put the Internet under control, through administrative or privatized censorship, in order to remain in power. On the other, citizens of the word at large ready build networked societies in which the sharing of knowledge, freedom of expression and the increased transparency allowed for by the Internet must be protected and strengthened at all costs.
It is essential to debate about how the leak of the diplomatic cables is organized, drop by drop, by WikiLeaks, and about the security of the individuals mentioned in the documents, in particular to be able to detect the false rhetorics being spread about them: The cables weren’t “stolen” by WikiLeaks. It received them like newsrooms usually receive anonymous brown paper envelopes full of documents. It also sought to minimize the harm to innocents’ lives through the erasure of their names prior to publication.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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New Zealand is one of several countries currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a regional trade deal that the U.S. would like to see include a major chapter on intellectual property (Canada has been excluded from the talks). A new leak [PDF] of the New Zealand government’s position on the IP chapter is revealing on several levels, most notably for its criticism of the WIPO Internet treaties and the attempts to limit existing flexibilities on digital locks. According to the leaked document:
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Comcast customers in Illinois and three other nearby states lost their Internet access last night, apparently due to the same problem that took down service for East Coast customers just a week ago.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In the April 2010 issue of SCRIPTed, there is a very interesting article by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe entitled “The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing“.
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Counterfeit Culture is one of my favourite chapters. It includes an unforgettable scene about Bernie who is managing the China business for Johnson Carter and wants a breakdown of the ingredients King Chemical uses when it is manufacturing their soaps and shampoos and Sister, who is the co-owner of King Chemical: “Sister said that she was not compelled to provide a breakdown. The details were their trade secrets, she insisted.
This infuriated Bernie. “The product line came from my sample set. What trade secret? It’s my fucking product!”
Mr Midler dryly determined: “the factory was claiming intellectual property rights over its copying methods.”
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Copyrights
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As you may have read, the US government “seized” a bunch of domain names that were hosting sites allegedly involved in piracy and counterfeit goods over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Over 80 domains, all of them in the .com namespace, had their DNS settings reconfigured to point them to a scary-looking notice from the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE division.
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One reason is compatibility. My primary goals include being used in soundtracks and mashups, so I needed licensing that allowed my work to be incorporated into as many other works as possible. Public domain is the only universal. The only license for creative works that is used widely enough to be considered a standard is a Creative Commons non-commercial license (like this one), but they are deliberately incompatible with many works.
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In addition to changing their default licensing policy from CC BY-NC to CC BY, the University of Michigan has enabled even greater sharing and reuse by releasing more than half a million bibliographic records into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication. Following on the heels of the British Library, who just released three million bibliographic records into the public domain, the University of Michigan Library has offered their Open Access bibliographic records for download, which, as of November 17, 2010, contains 684,597 records.
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I’m delighted to introduce Andrew Rens, one of our exceptional CC Superheroes, who will tell you in his own words why he supports Creative Commons and why you should too. Rens, the founding legal lead of Creative Commons South Africa – a volunteer position he held from 2003 to 2009 – possesses particularly adept superpowers when it comes to facing tough issues around intellectual property and education in Africa. Here is his story.
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As part of an investigation running for more than a year, police in Iceland have been trying to track down individuals who run file-sharing sites and those who added large amounts of content to them. This week, teenagers as young as 15 had quite a surprise when police raided several locations across the country.
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The US “IP Czar,” Victoria Espinel, said at a conference this week that Homeland Security’s seizure of a bunch of domain names was apparently just the beginning of a larger plan to go after such folks. Espinel has been making the rounds over the past few months, working to get various companies to voluntarily start censoring websites in this manner, even without the COICA bill being in place. This isn’t really a surprise. Espinel has stated in the past that her job is to focus on the enforcement side of copyright law, so it’s no surprise she’s supportive of such seizures.
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BT today told the press that Ministry of Sound have abandoned their attempts to get the details of thousands of alleged filesharers under a “Norwich Pharmacal Order” (NPO).
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Kroes is calling for two very important reforms. The first is pan-EU copyright licenses. This would allow simpler trade in legitimate copyright works. iTunes, for example, has never provided services to many EU states, because getting licenses is too complicated.
The second reform is about allowing the use of the vast swathes of music, books, films and photos where the copyright owners have long since disappeared, generally because they have died, and it is unclear where their relatives might be. These are called “orphan works”. While the best solution would be shorter copyright terms, there are other possible solutions.
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You may recall, a couple of years back, the Associated Press got a ton of negative attention for threatening bloggers who “quote too much” of AP articles. Soon after that, we were among those who noticed that the AP had a deal with a company called iCopyright, which seemed to suggest that “fair use” quotes were limited to four words or less. After that, rates started at $12.50 to quote five words. The AP later came out and said that this was entirely different, but to this date has never adequately explained when its deal with iCopyright applies and when it does not. This got some attention earlier this year, when the cheeky folks at Woot mocked the AP over this after the AP quoted Woot’s CEO from his blog. Separately, some others noticed that the iCopyright system on the AP’s site was so screwed up that you could just put in any text you wanted and “license” it — even if it wasn’t the AP’s to license.
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ACTA
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You can request legal access to ACTA related documents from the Council. Either documents are available through the register or for the confidential ones just fill out a form with your address and mention the requested document numbers. The Council will either enable public access to the documents and sent you a pdf or deny your request and state reasons for that or they sent you a crippled, a redacted version. If your request is refused you can file a confirmatory application and when that is denied again, you can go to court or complain at the EU ombudsman. In the case of ACTA the confidentiality at the Council was so rigid. Many first applications were rejected which is quite unusual.
Inside Wikileaks – UK
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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In the third annual report about Linux kernel authorship by Linux Foundation, a number of interesting statistics popped up. Among the most important statistics is the one showing the level of contributions from different entities that include big corporates and individuals.
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Graphics Stack
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Apple’s Jeremy Huddleston has announced the second release candidate for the forthcoming X.Org Server 1.9.3 point release. This point release in the stable 1.9 series delivers on more bug-fixes, with a handful of them for Apple’s XQuartz, which is important especially as it looks the 1.9 series will be used by Mac OS X 10.7.
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Intel’s Keith Packard wrote a few emails to the X.Org developers over the night commenting on his per-CRTC pixmap implementation for RandR 1.4 in xorg-server 1.10. For those unfamiliar, this support basically provies, “multiple scan-out buffers which applications can create and assign to arbitrary collections of CRTCs. These pixmaps can be associated with a window for use with OpenGL or drawn to directly.” This feature really becomes useful when dealing with display setups where the screen layout exceeds the maximum size of the rendering/scan-out engines, provides the abilities for integrating compositing and project transformation into one step, and eliminating visual artifacts during screen rotation.
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Red Hat’s Owen Taylor started out by asking about a broad overview on NVIDIA’s Fence Sync, seeing as he is the maintainer of Mutter, the GNOME 3.0 compositing window manager that uses Clutter. “There’s already a lot of magic voodoo dances around both Damage and Texture-From-Pixmap, what extra incantations does this add to the picture?” Owen further noted, “I can understand each individual step of the magic voodoo dance, but when I go away from the individual problems and come back 6 months later, I have to work it all out again. And there’s a strong sense that only particular code paths that actually are in use are tested and anything else probably doesn’t work, at least on some drivers.”
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We have sent over an email to NVIDIA to try to get more information on this new driver architecture. Seeing as NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux driver shares a common code-base with their Windows driver and also their FreeBSD/Solaris support, it does lead us to believe that such a new architecture would continue to be shared across all platforms.
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Applications
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Starting with version 1.1, “Muon” is now the “Muon Package Management Suite”. (Don’t worry, I won’t try everybody try to say that for the sake of branding 
) The Muon suite is made up of the following components:
* The Muon Package Manager. (Which has heretofore been called “Muon”) Its focus has been and will remain hardcore package management with a sane GUI.
* The Muon Updater, an update manager
* Finally and with grand introduction, The Muon Software Center.
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There are quite a few GUIs for FFmpeg out there, but I’ve found Sinthgunt to be the easiest to use – it requires just 3 clicks to convert a video: select the video, select the preset to which you want to convert to, and click “Convert”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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With Natty Alpha 1 out in the wild with Compiz based Unity on the desktop, I want to see a change in our priorities for a while which I think will be super-beneficial to refocus on a point that has always plagued Compiz – Stability.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Clementine, the Qt port of Amarok 1.4 got a huge list of new features in the latest 0.6 release candidate version.
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A release candidate for Clementine 0.6 is now available for testing and it’s certainly one of the most ripened releases for a while!
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GNOME Desktop
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Because Zeitgeist itself is merely a back end for indexing data, it can’t be “seen.”
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Xfce
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It was barely a month ago that the first development snapshot of Xfce 4.8 arrived, but being released this Sunday is the second preview release of the forthcoming Xfce 4.8 desktop, expected to go gold in January.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The recent article about Fedora moving to Unity is a good example. The author very well understands the title to be nowhere near accurate and yet persists on it even though all the comments so far have pointed out this problem. Calling it a blog does not excuse one for a professional stand point to write crap.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Just in time for the holidays; your guide to giving away computers with Ubuntu and Edubuntu or your favorite *buntu. In the past few weeks I’ve been contacted by several organisations who are giving away computers pre-loaded with different versions of Ubuntu. Their stories need to be shared as they are doing some amazing work built upon all your great work in Ubuntu. So here’s a quick guide to how you can help spread Ubuntu and really make a difference in people’s lives all over the world.
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Linaro is important because it is not simply a software project but also a hardware one. With major players such as ARM on-board Linaro is also looking at creating hardware platforms optimised for a Linux operating system. ARM is a key player in the mobile computing space, to date being most active in the mobile phone sector but rapidly moving into the larger-form factor tablet and netbook market.
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A rather small crowd of researchers, kernel developers and industry experts found their way to the 12th Real-Time Linux WorkShop (RTLWS) hosted at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. The small showing was not a big surprise, but it also did not make the workshop any less interesting.
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Events
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Less than two weeks left for SCALE Call for Papers; Sponsors start lining up for event. As everyone’s sights are set on the December holidays, the Southern California Linux Expo reminds those who plan to submit papers for SCALE 9X to get them in before the deadline, which is a little over a week away. The deadline for the SCALE 9x Call for Papers is Dec. 13, with notification of acceptance being sent to speakers by Dec. 27.
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Web Browsers
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Just in time for the holidays, the Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (December 2nd) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 8.0.552.215 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.
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Previously only available in the Beta channel, Google has released version 8 of the Chrome web browser into the stable channel. This major update is the first version capable of using the upcoming web store and includes a built-in PDF viewer that’s sandboxed to help prevent attackers from exploiting security vulnerabilities in the plug-in. A sandboxed Adobe Flash Player plug-in has been integrated into the Development (Dev) channel version of the browser, so that too should appear in the stable release in due time.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I HAD worries that GNU Octave would not support some of the advanced graphing functionality of MATLAB, but with the help of tools like gnuplot, Octave stays on par in this game (bar some OpenGL enhancements). Much to my surprise, the 3-D charting and graphing software in GNU Octave. Here are some visualisations of cardiac images I work with.
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Project Releases
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The first release candidate of OpenOffice.org fork LibreOffice has been made available for download.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Folks, interesting article by Rebecca Fernandez on open access scientific magazines. I have listed the links from the article below…
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Standards/Consortia
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The OASIS ODF Technical Committee voted a couple of weeks ago to create a new subcommittee, on “Advanced Document Collaboration”. Robin LaFontaine, from DeltaXML will chair the subcommittee.
Since the entire ODF TC is quite large now (almost 20 active members attend each meeting) it is impossible to do a technical “deep dive” on every topic in our meetings. So when a particular specification domain requires sustained attention for a period of time, we can create a subcommittee, to allow interested TC members to study and draft specification enhancements. We’ve done this several times before. For example, the Accessibility SC developed the accessibility enhancements for ODF 1.1. And the Formula and Metadata subcommittees drafted those key parts of ODF 1.2. I hope that this new SC will be equally successful in their work.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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While most traditional political parties are wary of supporting the actions of whistleblower site Wikileaks, Pirate Parties around the world have made it very clear whose side they are on. Just before the weekend Wikileaks moved to a Pirate Party owned domain, and today a conglomerate of Pirate Parties have just announced that they are now providing the site with several much needed mirror servers.
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TODAY I decided to step up with my support of Wikileaks, which I perceive as a test case for free speech and Internet freedom regardless or irrespective of the impact of what they are doing.
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I’m (was?) a Twitter user. This past week I found it utterly weird that none of the words #wikileaks, #cablegate, #cables, #Assange were actually “trending”. I even tweeted about this 5 days ago. Today, my fears of secret censorship are coming true. It appears that Twitter is censoring all these words, so they don’t appear in the (much-used) Twitter “trends” list.
It has done so for a whole week, and continues to do so. The only related trend today that currently trends in a few countries is the much less popular #imwikileaks, which shows us that Twitter’s filter engine simply hasn’t added that keyword too in their filter, YET!
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To those looking for a response in advance of this, I will simply reiterate the two points of our core values that are particularly germane to the matter: first, we support open government, which is certainly an end furthered by WikiLeaks’ actions, but we also believe in the importance of protecting individual privacy, which has been compromised by a number of releases to date. Reconciling these two positions, already somewhat at odds, with the question of WikiLeaks will be the task of our membership in the days to come.
Finally, allow me to apologize for the lack of promptness in this regard. Democracy, as you are no doubt aware, is a horrendously inefficient system of governance, but it is the only one that can achieve worthwhile results.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesman says Tom Flanagan’s remarks that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be assassinated are “simply not acceptable,” even if they weren’t serious.
Dimitri Soudas commented Friday after Assange said the prime minister’s former adviser and others “should be charged with incitement to commit murder.”
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Julian Assange is being investigated by Australian police to establish whether he has broken any of the country’s laws and is liable to prosecution there, foreign minister Kevin Rudd said today.
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…Julian Assange has almost certainly committed no crime under Australian law in relation to his involvement in Wikileaks.
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Agenzia Habeshia, EveryOne Group, Human Rights Concern Eritrea and Christian Solidarity Worldwide today sent a joint appeal to the UN, the EU, the British, the Italian and the Egyptian governments for urgent intervention in the plight of refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia who are currently held hostage in the Sinai Desert by Bedouin people traffickers.
Hundreds of refugees from the Horn of Africa have been held for months on the outskirts of a town in Sinai in purpose-built containers, where people traffickers are demanding payment of up to US$8,000 per person for their release, though the hostages had already paid US$2,000 for passage to Israel.
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On Thursday 2 December 2010 the papers were filed at Court for an application for an appeal of my client Paul Chambers to the High Court. In a perhaps ironic twist, the receiving court – Doncaster Crown Court – was closed because of snow.
The appeal is formally called an “Appeal by Case Stated”. These are appeals to the High Court on points of law. The Court will now have 21 days to consider the application: the decision should be just before Christmas. If granted, then there will be a High Court hearing early in the new year. However, if the application is not successful, then Paul has the option of a judicial review of that refusal, where the High Court can order that permision be granted.
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The past week has seen plenty of ink spilled — virtual and otherwise — about WikiLeaks and its mercurial front-man, Julian Assange, and the pressure they have come under from the U.S. government and companies such as Amazon and PayPal, both of which have blocked WikiLeaks from using their services. Why should we care about any of this? Because more than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.
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Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
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You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made – the state with all its powers – it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.
We’ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.
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Some of our users might know that we have been accepting donations to support us in developing TortoiseSVN for a few years now. We used PayPal to achieve this, as do many other open source projects and even some closed source but free-of-cost projects.
Even the biggest hoster of open source projects, sourceforge.net, has a special feature built into their project pages where every project can activate such “donate” buttons, and that too is handled by PayPal.
Now imagine my surprise when I got an email from PayPal last Wednesday with the subject “PayPal appeal denied”. Because I never had to appeal anything with my PayPal account. Reading through that email I discovered that my account was blocked because they’ve decided that I’m not allowed to receive donations.
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The German man in question, Khaled El-Masri, was an innocent who had a misfortune to have the same name as a terrorist suspect. He was illegally kidnapped, imprisoned in Afghanistan, interrogated and tortured.
For over a year. His family had no idea what had happened to him. He had no chance to defend himself, to seek legal representation, every human right he had was taken from him. He had to go on a hunger strike for 27 days before he was able to force a meeting with a prison official and a CIA official. And this was taking place after they’d already found out that his passport was genuine and that he was innocent.
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American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash in which individuals are redirecting parts of their own sites to its Swedish internet host.
Since early on Friday morning, it has been impossible to reach WikiLeaks by typing wikileaks.org into a web browser because everyDNS, which would redirect queries for the string “wikileaks.org” to that machine address, removed its support for Wikileaks, claiming that it had broken its terms of service by being the target of a huge hacker attack.
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The campaign against WikiLeaks is a clear move to censor political material on the Internet and, potentially, on other media. The first moves made by lawmakers such as Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, have no legal foundation and yet have succeeded with Amazon and PayPal. What has followed is shockingly repressive and obscurantist. The Library of Congress blocked access to WikiLeaks across its computer systems, including reading rooms, and Columbia University students aspiring for diplomatic careers have been advised not to comment on, or link to, the whistleblower website’s revelations. It is doubly tragic that such concerted attacks are securing support from countries with a progressive legacy such as France. The intolerant response to WikiLeaks is a potential threat to all media and must be fought. Senator Lieberman and other lawmakers have introduced legislation that proposes to make the publication of an intelligence source a federal crime. Already, U.S. law allows the shutting down of some Internet domains managed in that country on grounds of infringement of copyright. The threat to the publication of inconvenient material, even with responsible redactions, is all too real.
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A British MP whose parliamentary aide was arrested over claims she is a Russian spy has challenged the security services to “prove their point now”.
Lib Dem Mike Hancock said Katia Zatuliveter, 25, had nothing to hide, he backed her 100%, and would appeal.
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It is a witch-hunt against Wikileaks, while largely ignoring the content of what was exposed.
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WikiLeaks is a website started by freedom-of-information activist and former hacker Julian Assange. On November 28, WikiLeaks sent a massive cache of government documents to five news organizations. You can’t see the leaks on its own site at the moment, as it’s currently suffering from a massive denial of service attack that has the site closed for business at the moment, although there is a mirror site in Switzerland where you can see the “Cablegate” documents. These documents are diplomatic cables that Private First Class Bradley Manning downloaded at an army base in Iraq between November 2009 and April 2010. Manning then passed them on to Assange.
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As of late afternoon, wikileaks.ch was freely accessible to UAE consumers using etisalat lines. Earlier in the day, users reported browser inconsistencies, with the site available to those using Firefox but not to those using Internet Explorer.
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A B.C. lawyer has filed a complaint with the Vancouver police, urging them to investigate whether Tom Flanagan, a former campaign manager for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, broke the law when he said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be assassinated.
Gail Davidson, a co-founder of the group Lawyers Against the War, wrote in the complaint that, on Nov. 30, Flanagan “counselled and/or incited the assassination of Julian Assange contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada,” while commenting on the CBC program Power & Politics.
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Twitter, the very popular 140 character social networking site, has a feature called “Trends” and is supposed to capture what the most popular topics of discussion are, at any given time. When people “Tweet” about a given topic, they can insert what is called a hash tag into their Tweet. For example, if I wanted to Tweet about Richard Feynman, and I wanted other people interested in Richard Feynman to be able to find it, I could put something like “#Feynman” within my post. Twitter would then automatically categorize this post under “Feynman” and voila, people can search for it on Twitter. This is how “Trends” are calculated. If say, within a given time span of perhaps 10 minutes, a million people put the tag #Christmas into their tweets, and this would be a very popular Twitter topic and should make it into the “Trends” list. Simple enough.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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So-called Flash cookies—chunks of data embedded in the Adobe Flash Player on internet users’ browsers that can’t be eliminated with standard privacy controls—have been on the radar of privacy advocates since last year. But the FTC made it clear today that it’s now starting to take a more active role in addressing what it referred to as the “Flash problem.”
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Tomorrow I’ll travel by land, sea and air the length of Canada to sit in a room full of strangers.
One of them, a man named Wayne Crookes, wants me to pay him what will be, if he gets his way, an inordinate amount of money for something I haven’t done.
Others of them, a panel of legal experts chosen for their wisdom and knowledge of Canada’s archaic defamation laws, will decide if that’s going to happen.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Two acquisitions in as many days? Say it ain’t so! Prior to even unboxing Phonetic Arts, Google has now snapped up Seattle-based Widevine.
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I heard about the new .WWF format this morning. It is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund to prevent people printing .PDF files. As a matter of fact, it is an encrypted .PDF format with the “printing” flag disabled.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Those who wish to justify copyright as something more or other than an intrusion into the rights of owners of things must then advance an account of the objects of copyright, and in doing so explain how such an account can make sense in one or more of the accounts of ideas and things so far advanced. To date they have failed to do so.
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Viacom would like the court to carve out an exception to the DMCA, essentially reinterpreting the law so that YouTube no longer qualifies for the DMCA’s safe harbor immunity. It’s, to me, a really dangerous document, in that it suggest in effect a system whereby fair use is technically impossible or so difficult and expensive to make use of that no average guy will do so. It argues that YouTube’s refusal to implement a technology-based filtering system Viacom likes, Audible Magic, to prescreen uploaded video places YouTube outside the protection of the DMCA. It also argues that you can be guilty of direct infringement if you benefit financially from infringement, even if you don’t specifically know it’s happening.
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Joi Ito, 44, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with a particular interest in the world wide web, was an early investor in Twitter, Technorati, Flickr and Last.fm. He grew up in Japan and the US; he once owned a nightclub in Tokyo and worked as a DJ in Chicago. Time magazine hailed him as a member of the “cyber-elite” in 1997 and two years ago Businessweek named him “one of the 25 most influential people on the web”. Ito has a special interest in issues of copyright in the digital sphere and is CEO of the organisation Creative Commons. He is now based in Dubai.
Sony Ericsson ZEUS – Z1-PlayStation Phone (spy)
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I have not seen that many articles on assistive technologies in Linux around. When you think about it, assistive technologies are fairly easy to dismiss or forget, which is quite unfair. It is not only about visually impaired people. It is about anyone who may need help beyond the classic keyboard-and-mouse approach. A rare exception to bundling assistive technologies in a very friendly manner is Knoppix Adriane, a Linux distro that comes with a screen reader built-in and enabled by default. You may also be interested in Festival, a text-to-speech synthesis program. Having started there, I’d like to expand the sub-series on assistive technologies and present Orca.
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Having all the software you need in one place saves you having to trawl the web to find the program you’re missing. It also means the software has been independently checked and digitally signed by the distro’s developers, making it almost impossible to pick up a root-kitted version.
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The first point is that when he says a “free OS that just works”, he is a statement not only about the “easy-to-use-GNU/Linux” as a whole, but Ubuntu in specific. This is an excerpt from a larger conversation.
The second point is that when he says “linux”, I take that to mean “GNU/Linux”, or the F/OSS ecosystem.
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Desktop
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Lastly, here is a composite graph looking at the results from idling and then running a number of Phoronix Test Suite test profiles, including the ones listed above. Again, Ubuntu finished most of its tests quicker than Mac OS X, but not without going through significantly more power. Stay tuned for the beginning of more Mac OS X performance tests next week, which goes into much further depth than this brief look at the power consumption.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This edition has information on the Linux distro Slitaz along with more thoughts on FreeDOS and Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Also included is a desciption of the hardware used to run Slitaz and Plan 9, 20 minutes duration.
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On the show this week: Cablegate, more on the Novell deal, Google Wave becomes an Apache project, Microsoft meddles in OpenStreetMap, Symbian Foundation shutting down and much more as usual…
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In this podcast I talk about working with and learning git. I also interview Vilhelm von Ehrenheim. He and his teammates;
* Sebastian Hallén
* Alex Werther
* Johan Hyldentong
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Google
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According to our good friends at Engadget, Google is finally going to let loose some details on what is around the bend for Chrome OS, and at the same time will release a Google branded Chrome OS netbook.
If you just reached for your credit card, hang on, this netbook is most likely a limited release of a mere 65,000 units, many of which will go to Googlers and their selected friends. The judgement day is supposedly set for December 7th, in the midst of AllThingsD’s event ‘Dive Into Mobile.’
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The headline pretty much reveals the brunt of it, but indeed, it looks like next week Google is going to start talking about how its Chrome operating system is coming along.
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Ballnux
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Samsung has increased its target to 1.5m units by the end of the year.
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Kernel Space
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Over 5 1/2 years ago we started the stable Linux kernel releases, and by all merits they seem to be pretty popular.
[...]
So, it’s “back to our roots” time, and I’m now only going to be doing -stable releases for the last kernel released, with the usual one or two release overlap with the latest release from Linus to give people a chance to move over and have the new release stabilize a bit.
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Last year we introduced Phoromatic as an extension to the Phoronix Test Suite for making it easy to build a benchmarking test farm or simply benchmarking systems across the world all from a simple and easy-to-use web-interface where all of the test results are also stored. A few months after launching Phoromatic, Phoromatic Tracker launched as an extension to that for being able to monitor the performance of a given software component on a timed basis or even on a per-commit VCS basis (or when externally triggered otherwise). As an example of that, we launched our Linux kernel test farm, which has now been running for a year.
[...]
Visit kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com for the latest Linux kernel benchmarks. For those interested in a more historical look at the Linux kernel performance, see our five years of Linux kernel benchmarks. The next iteration of Phoromatic will also boast greater analytics capabilities.
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Applications
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Stellarium and Celestia 3D are two incredibly good applications for aspiring star gazers. Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time while Celestia 3D is an awesome 3D astronomy program that allows users to display objects ranging in scale from artificial satellites to entire galaxies in 3D.
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With an incredibly simple user interface and the ability to encrypt and backup your data to network drives, external drives, FTP/SSH servers and even Amazon S3 storage, Déjà Dup is the perfect Linux backup solution. Set up a secure, regularly-scheduled backup in minutes. It’s like Carbonite for Linux, except you can pick where your data goes.
Linux backup software is certainly nothing new. Many people swear by rsync for their backup needs, while others like Back In Time, an easy backup program for Linux.
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The festive Season is well upon us and the celebrations are only a few short weeks away, so in preparation this tutorial will help motivate you for the Holidays and produce an elegant wallpaper!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine maintenance release 1.2.2 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for animated cursors.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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Games
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…to date there have been ten Linux game proposals submitted since this competition began last Thursday.
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Graphically this this probably the most attractive Linux RPG I’ve seen to date. The game is very easy to get into and its a very polished product. Do I think that its worth the subscription fee? Yes, although I would say that I would have preferred the game to be more “traditional” in its RPG design, ie Dwarfs, Elves, Humans, castles, dungeons et al, however the storyline and world offers something a little different from your average RPG game. Ryzom is best described as being “science fantasy”.
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The game is available for Linux as a .deb or as src and whats unique about Zaz is it also offers an Amiga version (which automatically gets it +1 in my book) The latest version (1.0.0) was released in September and is the creation of Remigiusz Dybka, Kinga Dybka and Leonard Ritter, released under the GPLv3.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This is something that I have wanted to do for the last week and a half or so, but I haven’t been able to do it because I’ve been really busy.
I said in my review of Debian 6 “Squeeze” Standard that I wanted to customize that installation with Trinity 3.5.12. Well, now it has finally happened: please welcome the newest member of the Oxidized Trinity family, Oxidized Trinity 6 “Squeeze”!
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GNOME Desktop
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So the current proposal looks like this (it is being updated since the whole layout changed)
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New Releases
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Hot off the press for Saturday 4th December is Puppy Arcade 10, which was kindly announced to me by Scott Jarvis its creator. Openbytes and Puppy Arcade have a history. It’s a distro that I have been following and reporting on for a long while and during that time I have watched it mature into a solid, stable, unique distro which still manages to improve and build upon every release.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Adam Williamson has shared that he’s looking at packaging Canonical’s Unity desktop for Fedora. “Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity’s developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged. It’s the same for any project, really – if you have a wide base of users of a project across many distributions, it gives everyone involved a reason to work to make sure it’s easy to maintain the project across distributions.”
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So since I woke up this morning at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep I thought I may as well do that very thing. It’s quite a big project, but I’m just started at the bottom of the dependency pile and seeing how far I can get. So far, I have review requests in for libindicator and dee. I need to do nux, and after libindicator goes in, the actual indicators. The remaining dependencies are a bit trickier: right now Unity needs a patched Compiz, which will become the upstream Compiz eventually but isn’t yet. I’m asking our Compiz maintainer if we can ship the ‘experimental’ branch for F15. bamf depends on a change to glib which hasn’t made it upstream yet; I’m trying to poke the appropriate people to get consensus on getting the change upstream. If we can clear those two, I’m hopeful it should be possible to have Unity available in the Fedora repos. Hell, we could make a spin of it.
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Debian Family
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Click here to read the full interview. I speak of my Debian projects, of the Ubuntu-Debian relationship, and more.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Edubuntu 11.04 (codenamed: Natty Narwhal) is the next version of Edubuntu due for release in April 2011. Development on the system is already in full swing and today marks the first tested installable development version. It’s in a very early state and has some serious known problems, so it is not recommended for anything else than testing purposes.
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This alpha is exciting to me because the Unity Launcher is already pretty usable. I’m using it daily, and am already addicted. The move to the new compiz has really really sped things up. Of course, I can’t recommend to an average user that they rely daily on alpha software. This is fresh code, and it stresses more fresh code in the graphics stack. This means crashers.
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Another rocking day for the Ubuntu Cloud community! The Ubuntu Cloud Portal has just been launched hurray. The portal helps new-comers to the Ubuntu cloud community quickly find interesting information they may care about such as documentation to read/edit, projects that may interest them and so on. In this first release the following is available
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After the new Natty Narwhal Alpha 1 pre-release, I am pleased to announce that Natty is now open for translation…
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On the same day as the Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1 release, the developers behind Linaro, which is also sponsored by Canonical, released their first alpha of Linaro 11.05.
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The Desktop Experience team is building the base; but there are plenty of other parts that need to be done. Keep in mind that these parts are just as important and a critical piece of the entire user experience.
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Keep in mind that some of Unity’s features are not implemented in this alpha release.
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So the current proposal looks like this (it is being updated since the whole layout changed)….
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Last week I decided to give Ubuntu 10.10 codenamed “Maverick Meerkat” a try. I have to say that this version looks absolutely amazing and everything worked out of the box but it felt very heavy and cluttered on my Lenovo ThinkPad R400. So, I returned to my previous and favourite OS, #! CrunchBang Linux.
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Phones
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Android
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Wow, this went unnoticed for a while, didn’t it? On November 23rd, Google’s own GoogleinHK YouTube account posted a video walkthrough of the new Google Voice Search in Cantonese. With only 2100 views, this official Google-authored video did not grab anyone’s attention, until someone noticed that it featured over a minute of the clearest Gingerbread user interface video we’ve seen to date. The greens, the blacks – it’s all there.
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Not too long ago, I mentioned a workshop with FreeDroidz in this blog. I heard about these robots before, saw them at fairs and haven’t known much about our host, except that they are the sponsor of the Fellowship grant. Matthias asked me if I was interested in leading such a work shop at schools in the future.
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Hooray look at that! Some dude on the other side of the world has a Playstation phone (otherwise known as Zeus Z1), and he (or I suppose it could be a she) put up two videos of it working. Here you’ll see quite a few fine features like the slick new Android 2.3 Gingerbread interface, the super sensually smooth sliding of the back panel becoming game controls, and the big S in square in the center of the controller.
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There was a good crowd at the TechFellows event tonight in San Francisco. I ran into a lot of people I don’t see all that often. Among them were two entrepreneurs that have made a ton of money by selling their companies in the last couple of years. They’re both working on a slew of new projects, and the way they’re doing it is fascinating.
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Events
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A few weeks ago, I blogged about how widespread sexual harassment at open source conferences is and suggested that open source conference organizers should adopt an official policy taking a stand against all forms of harassment at their conferences. Easy, right?
It turns out that writing a practical and useful anti-harassment policy is a lot of hard work. I know because I spent the last three weeks writing one in collaboration with Esther Filderman, Beth Lynn Eicher, Mary Gardiner, Sarah Smith, Donna Benjamin, and many others. Our goal was to create a policy that could be easily customized and adapted to any open source, computing, or technology conference, and to collect useful resources for people considering adopting a policy. After long discussion with the organizers of many conferences and beta testing it with the generous help of OSDC, we made the first official public release of the policy on Tuesday.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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AR: We’ve seen Web TV tried many, many times before. This is the nth time—I’m not entirely sure why people got so excited this time around, given that it hasn’t worked in the past. And the reason why it hasn’t worked in the past, in my opinion, is that when you are sitting there on your couch, you’re not necessarily wanting to engage. Surfing is an active verb; when you’re browsing, you’re not just passively consuming. The big shift with the Web was that all of a sudden you’re having a dialogue with your customers, and consumers are having a dialogue with brands, and people are talking directly to other people. But when people sit down in front of the TV, they’re doing it, perhaps, to zone out.
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CMS
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Following three beta releases, and with tons of bugs fixed and user interface improvements added, we are proud to present to you the first release candidate of Drupal 7.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the last beta version was released two weeks ago, we have improved styling in the default “Bartik” theme, numerous bug fixes and improvements to the Update Manager and Search module, revisions to both user interface text and developer documentation to be more understandable and accurate, and we’ve made final clean-ups to some of the architecture improvements added during the release cycle. The deprecated Profile module is now hidden on new sites and we’ve substituted it with the ability to put user fields added through Field UI on the registration form.
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Healthcare
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The positive stance of the Cabinet Office towards Open Source software is widely communicated. However the Department of Health’s current IT consultation paper ‘An Information Revolution’ does not mention open source software at all. This stark omission in a paper which depends on ‘a presumption of openness’ across the NHS supply chain begs for comment from the open source community.
According to the Department of Health, patients will be given the information to consent to treatment, given control over their data in new forms of online experience and given the decision to release this data for management and research purposes, which will in turn improve care. This new world is to be underpinned by “a presumption of openness” between systems, governed by open standards of information exchange.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This edition covers the current developments in Open Standards policy, some basic information about software patents, an update from FSCONS about distributed computing, and how you can support us in the end of the year.
This month was the first time in FSFE’s history that we had a booth at three conferences at the same date: the Brandenburger Linux Infotag (BLIT) in Potsdam/Germany, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS in Göteburg/Sweden, and T-DOSE Eindhoven/The Netherlands. Our PDFreaders campaign is quite successful: 31 public administrations already removed advertisements for non-free PDF readers from their websites, 8 of them added links to pdfreaders.org. FSFE’s sysadmins updated the Fellowship blog software, and we gave several presentations to politicians, parties, the public administration, and the Berlin Debating Union. This month Fellowship interview is with Brian about free documentation, emacs org mode, and his understanding of software as a tool. And finally we would like to congratulate Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Free Software developer and community builder from Iceland, who has received the Nordic Free Software Award.
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Openness/Sharing
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Rice University’s Connexions and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Process Society (IEEE-SPS) recently announced the release of a set of open educational resources on signal processing. The materials allow engineering instructors to mix and match to build customized courses, textbooks and study guides, and are useful for practicing engineers for their own education and career growth. The high-quality resources are peer-reviewed and available for free on the Connexions IEEE-SPS portal.
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“Economies of the Commons 2 is a critical examination of the economics of on-line public domain and open access resources of information, knowledge, and media (the ‘digital commons’). The past 10 years have seen the rise of a variety of such open content resources attracting millions of users, sometimes on a daily basis. The impact of projects such as Wikipedia, Images for the Future, and Europeana testify to the vibrancy of the new digital public domain. No longer left to the exclusive domains of digital ‘insiders’, open resources (data and content) are rapidly becoming widely used and highly popular.”
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Open Access/Content
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In partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Graduate School of Education at University of Pennsylvania, Startl will announce the winner this spring during the Milken PennGSE Education Business Plan Competition. The Startl Prize for Open Educational Resources awards the best business plan that leverages openly licensed content to change the paradigm around the production, delivery, sharing, and experience of learning. The intention is to catalyze models that increase access to and dramatically lower the cost of learning. Startl is seeking to inspire entrepreneurs to think creatively about how to incorporate open principles into their core business strategy.
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The love affair is over: Mint.com and Yodlee are donesville. Split. Over.
The two giants of online personal financial management are going their separate ways. And yes, it’s because there’s someone else.
[...]
In September TD Bank customers stormed the Mint.com help forum, saying their accounts had suddenly stopped showing up when they logged in to Mint.
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This memo sounds rather like the equivalent of the “close your eyes” method of security. The only way to ensure Defense Department employees do not see any of this material online would be to disconnect from the Internet.
I would expect the Federal Government computer security staff to be aware of this. Perhaps the Department of Defense needs a little refresher course on computer security.
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In particular, all so-called ‘civil societies’ have historically emerged through intensive processes of the civilising of societies, especially through the establishment of enforcement agencies such as the police and of prisons, homes, mental ‘homes’, and other institutions where these ‘unruly elements’ were – and continue to be – incarcerated and ‘civilised’. I submit that this, and the treatment that aboriginals across the world have been subjected to, comes from the same root – and that we need to search for that root.20 Conversely, we need to recognise that colonisation, and the process and treatment of ‘civilisation’, are not restricted to the conquest and domestication of alien lands and peoples.
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The campaign to give the UK more hours of daylight in the evenings has been boosted by MPs who have given it initial approval.
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The daily-deal website turned down $6 billion, including executive performance incentives, and will now consider an initial public offering, says a person close to the talks
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Yesterday’s headline on the BBC News Web site as blunt: “Universities in Wales told to ‘adapt or die’“. The article went on:
Education Minister Leighton Andrews has told universities and further education colleges in Wales that there will be fewer of them by 2013.
Mr Andrews told the Institute of Welsh Affairs’ conference higher education institutions must “adapt or die”.
He warned their future funding would depend on a willingness to “progress swiftly to merger and reconfiguration”.
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Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced legislation on Friday that would require all public federal buildings to install WiFi base stations in order to free up cell phone networks.
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It’s not an official partnership, Waring explained. Amazon’s use of the content is licensed under Creative Commons, the alternative to traditional copyright that Wikipedia uses for all of its user-sourced encyclopedia content. At the bottom of a “Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Page,” a message explains: “The article appearing above is from Wikipedia…The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version.”
What’s the point? As the project rolls out, Wikipedia pages will show up in Amazon search results–for example, a search for author Stieg Larsson will eventually bring up not only links to the pages for purchasing his books but also to the Amazon-tagged Wikipedia page for Larsson.
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For inexplicable reasons, Commissioner Malmström has now suggested that children shall be granted rights they’ve already had since the year 2000. How progressive. All member states have already signed the UN protocol for children’s rights with regards to trafficking and online pornography. The last signatory member state was Czech Republic who signed it in 2005. That’s five years ago. This isn’t a move for children’s rights, it’s a move against them. It’s not a sign of progession, it’s a sign of cowardice.
Since Cecilia Malmström also considers children who are engaging in begging to be trafficked, at least if these children are from Romania or Bulgaria, it’s no wonder she hasn’t protested the Nicolas Sarkoszy proposal of keeping Bulgaria and Romania out of Schengen for another four years. Romanian EU-minister Bogdan Aurescu commented on the deportations to EUObserver. I would have suspected that this is because he is a nationalist, like many other European politicians, but his conservative majority party is not. ”We do not accept any restriction of freedom of movement,” he said. ”After 50 years of Communism, it is a very special and important right we have achieved.”
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Science
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Then the stories calmed down, and instead it was that they had discovered an earthly life form that used a radically different chemistry. I was dubious, even at that. And then I finally got the paper from Science, and I’m sorry to let you all down, but it’s none of the above. It’s an extremophile bacterium that can be coaxed into substiting arsenic for phosphorus in some of its basic biochemistry. It’s perfectly reasonable and interesting work in its own right, but it’s not radical, it’s not particularly surprising, and it’s especially not extraterrestrial. It’s the kind of thing that will get a sentence or three in biochemistry textbooks in the future.
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Humour
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Security
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One in 10 notebook computers will be lost over their three-year lifetime — a massive data loss problem exacerbated by ‘incompetent’ protection and ‘inaction,’ say experts
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.
An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as “soft on terror.” And they’re afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they’re right, but what has happened to leaders who aren’t afraid? What has happened to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?
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Facing indirect pressure from the U.S. Government, Tableau Software has dropped Wikileaks’ data from its site for people to use for data visualization. According to an announcement posted on Tableau’s blog, the company decided to drop Wikileaks’ content after reading Sen. Joe Lieberman’s public request that companies hosting Wikileaks’ data remove it. According to the announcement: “Our terms of service require that people using Tableau Public do not upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any content that they do not have the right to make available.” It does not appear that Tableau was contacted by the senator directly, nor that it received a cease-and-desist order or any other official request to remove the visualizations.
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There are many prominent Americans — and a great many ordinary Americans — who have made their views clear over the past week that WikiLeaks’ “cablegate” website should not be considered constitutionally protected speech. Others, however, believe equally strongly that now that the material is out, news media and website owners have the right to publish the material.
What is troubling and dangerous is that in the internet age, public discourse increasingly depends on digital spaces created, owned and operated by private companies. The result is that one politician has more power than ever to shut down controversial speech unilaterally with one phone call.
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THE Sunshine Coast mum of WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange fears her son may be assassinated for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret US government documents.
Christine Assange, who lives near Noosa, told the Daily she felt the same way the mother of a soldier would feel about her son’s work.
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In the latest in a series of blows to Wikileaks, PayPal says it will no longer support money transfers to the whistleblower site.
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A week ago when the first Wikileak cables started coming out, the New York Times reported that some of them shed some more light on the Chinese hacking attacks on Google which led to its withdrawal from operating in China proper. But the actual cables were not released until today. The NYT describes the cables at length in another article today. But the underlying cables are hard to find, so I’ve reproduced the four main ones below. I found three of them on Wikileaks, and the other on on the New York Times’ own Wikileaks documents page.
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EUROPEAN ORGANISATIONS could benefit from a 24 hour hotline for reporting denial of service and security attacks following the serious outages at Wikileaks.
European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom described the attacks on the Wikileaks website as ‘scary’ and suggested that they should be the catalyst for regulatory change. This change, she added, will start with speeding up proposals for a 24 hour alert attack hotline.
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WikiLeaks directed readers to a web address in Switzerland on Friday after two U.S. Internet providers ditched it in the space of two days, and Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting its trove of leaked data.
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Criminal Conservative pundits Tom Flanagan and Ezra Levant seem to be calling for someone to assassinate WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, because of the leaks concerning Afghanistan and Iraq.
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[UPDATE: Anna Ardin did in fact make the whole story up as part of her 'seven step plan for revenge'. See here.]
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The charges against Julian Assange were indeed trumped up. Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén planned it all. They went to the police station asking for advice, knowing the police would turn it into an accusation of rape. They’re also the ones who leaked the story to the tabloid Expressen.
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All of which closely follows Anna Ardin’s notorious ‘seven step plan for revenge’ and is based directly on it.
A lot of the above has been inferred by pundits and researchers but it is only now that people finally learn the truth.
Case Dismissed
Expressen did their damnedest – all three of the reporters working overtime on Twitter from the wee hours of Saturday morning – to give the story legs. They truly didn’t have much of a story: all they had was the leak by Ardin and Wilén that charges would be filed.
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1. Silvio Berlusconi ‘profited from secret deals’ with Vladimir Putin
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2. The US pressured Spain over CIA rendition and Guantánamo
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3. US diplomats spied on the UN’s leadership
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4. The scale of Afghan corruption is overwhelming
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5. Hillary Clinton queried Cristina Kirchner’s mental health
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6. The Bank of England governor played backroom politics
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7. The British government remains in thrall to the US
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A 10 page Powerpoint presentation (pdf) that I recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request to the Department of Justice, reveals that law enforcement agencies routinely seek and obtain real-time surveillance of credit card transaction. The government’s guidelines reveal that this surveillance often occurs with a simple subpoena, thus sidestepping any Fourth Amendment protections.
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Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows.
The document, obtained by security researcher Christopher Soghoian, explains how so-called “Hotwatch” orders allow for real-time tracking of individuals in a criminal investigation via credit card companies, rental car agencies, calling cards, and even grocery store loyalty programs. The revelation sheds a little more light on the Justice Department’s increasing power and willingness to surveil Americans with little to no judicial or Congressional oversight.
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I have just received word that Emperor Lieberman has dissolved the council permanently.
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The Force is what gives a Jedi activist his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
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Kennedy said: “The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. Inherently and historically, we as a people are opposed to secret proceedings and concealment.”
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Organizers of National Opt Out Day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when air travelers were urged to opt out of the full-body scanners at security checkpoints and instead submit to full-body patdowns — were outfoxed by the TSA. The government pre-empted the protest by turning off the machines in most airports during the Thanksgiving weekend. Everyone went through the metal detectors, just as before.
Now that Thanksgiving is over, the machines are back on and the “enhanced” pat-downs have resumed. I suspect that more people would prefer to have naked images of themselves seen by TSA agents in another room, than have themselves intimately touched by a TSA agent right in front of them.
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The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this. Afghanistan is, in that sense, the same kind of quagmire as Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians, but otherwise little has changed.
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Reporters Without Borders condemns the blocking, cyber-attacks and political pressure being directed at cablegate.wikileaks.org, the website dedicated to the US diplomatic cables. The organization is also concerned by some of the extreme comments made by American authorities concerning WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
Earlier this week, after the publishing several hundred of the 250.000 cables it says it has in its possession, WikiLeaks had to move its site from its servers in Sweden to servers in the United States controlled by online retailer Amazon. Amazon quickly came under pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and its chairman, Sen. Joe Lieberman, in particular.
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Mitch McConnell and his Republican brethren sent a letter to Senate Democrats a few days ago announcing that no laws would be passed until the Democrats give them tax cuts for the rich. They claimed that this pledge didn’t include the START treaty, and then like clockwork, they started denouncing the START treaty, so yeah, it includes the START treaty- a matter of global security if not national security. Democrats are beginning to realize that negotiating with Republicans “is almost like negotiating with terrorists”.
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When the officers who were accused of using excessive force during the G20 summit in Toronto were cleared by the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), it emerged that the SIU thought that the officers likely did use excessive force, but they couldn’t be identified, and therefore couldn’t be charged.
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Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair publicly apologized Friday to G20 protester Adam Nobody for suggesting he was armed and violent when arrested by police.
Chief Blair said there is no evidence Mr. Nobody was armed at the time of his arrest.
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WikiLeaks received a boost tonight when Switzerland rejected growing international calls to force the site off the internet.
The whistleblowers site, which has been publishing leaked US embassy cables, was forced to switch domain names to WikiLeaks.ch yesterday after the US host of its main website, WikiLeaks.org, pulled the plug following mounting political pressure.
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Lawyers representing the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, say that they have been surveilled by members of the security services and have accused the US state department of behaving “inappropriately” by failing to respect attorney-client protocol.
Jennifer Robinson and Mark Stephens of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocent told the Guardian they had been watched by people parked outside their houses for the past week.
“I’ve noticed people consistently sitting outside my house in the same cars with newspapers,” said Robinson. “I probably noticed certain things a week ago, but mostly it’s been the last three or four days.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Venezuelan National Assembly has approved the creation of oil joint venture among Venezuela, Cuba and Angola, reports Prensa Latina news agency.
The enterprise will include the Venezuelan Oil Corporation, the Cuban Company Cupet and the Angolan enterprise Sonangol.
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Finance
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Ontario’s attorney general says he is investigating why criminal charges were dropped against a Toronto man accused of operating a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
“I have asked the chief prosecutor to get to the bottom of it and I’ve asked for the report as quickly as possible,” Chris Bentley said in Ontario’s legislature on Tuesday, responding to a question by NDP justice critic Peter Kormos.
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Conservative readers still don’t understand why the Coalition is hated in the poor areas of Britain. They would grasp the loathing better if they went back through the arguments they made in opposition, and realised that their leaders have failed to follow through the logic of the ideas they once espoused.
The best Tory criticism of Gordon Brown to my mind was that he had stood by while the boom bypassed large parts of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the North and South West. He left them with Soviet-style local economies, dominated by the public sector. Their populations’ prosperity depended on state subsidy rather than private endeavour.
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The new US owners of Cadbury’s chocolate are working on a secret plan to shift key parts of the 186-year-old British business to Switzerland in a move likely to deprive the UK exchequer of millions of pounds of tax.
Kraft, which took control of Cadbury in an £11bn takeover this year, intends to turn the firm into a subsidiary of a new Swiss company. The new structure would slash its bill for UK corporation tax. Last year, Cadbury handed over £200m to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
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With superglue and megaphones, pop-up protests forced several branches of Topshop and Vodafone around the country to close today on one of the busiest trading days of the year.
Campaigners staged a sit-in at Sir Philip Green’s flagship London Topshop store, and in Brighton a few glued themselves to the branch windows, while other high streets in towns and cities across Britain saw similar protests in a day of action against the tax arrangements of rich individuals and big businesses.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Top ten lists, objectification of women, and the wholesale copying of press releases; these are some of the unfortunate trends in gaming journalism today.
Some would call game journalism a kind of enthusiast press, and on many counts I find it hard to disagree with them. Like with other forms of enthusiast press, big gaming sites rely not only on strict gaming news, but also an array of gaming-related stories to flesh out their coverage. Sometimes these related stories fall within acceptable levels. At other times some of the content posted to gaming blogs makes me feel simply terrible for the state of the field.
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In the soft morning light, the silver-gray mountain of electronic trash did not look especially hazardous. But it was.
Inside that massive rubble of technology, with its V-shaped canyons of printers and keyboards and its fin-like ridges of fax machines and coffee makers, was enough toxic material – including lead, cadmium and brominated flame retardants – to poison California watersheds for centuries and sow disease in humans.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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COICA, the Internet Blacklist bill, passed out of Senate committee on November 18th. It’s now facing some stiff opposition in the broader Senate, but we need to let that opposition know we support them — please add your name if you haven’t already, and write directly to your own senators.
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This week’s news that the feds seized 82 websites based on allegations of copyright infringement demonstrated that government website seizures can silence innocent speech. But let’s take a broader view for a moment. The domain seizure debacle, the COICA Internet censorship bill, ACTA, and many other short-sighted efforts to eliminate copyright infringement all depend on (a) the traditional entertainment industry’s yowling wail that “piracy” on the the Internet is injuring the livelihoods of artists and (b) the US government’s chronically uncritical acceptance of those complaints.
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It seems as fast as new URLs and IP addresses for Wikileaks and for CableGate are being posted they are being torn down.
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The Lahore High Court in Pakistan has dismissed a petition to ban WikiLeaks from the Internet in that country.
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The WikiLeaks website that is attracting millions of fascinated viewers this week appears to unavailable to Chinese web surfers.
People trying to log onto wikileaks.org in China are met with a notice saying the connection has been reset. That is the typical response when Chinese censors have used their sophisticated firewall to block access to a site.
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The Library of Congress has blocked access to the Wikileaks site on its staff computers and on the wireless network that visitors use, two sources tell TPM.
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epublicans, who will control the U.S. House of Representatives in January, greeted the idea of Internet “do not track” legislation coolly on Thursday, expressing concern that hindering advertiser access to consumers web browsing habits would slow innovation.
Their opposition bodes badly for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as it promotes a plan to allow consumers to bar data and advertising companies from monitoring what websites they view and what content they download.
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It seems like, as in the US with Senator Lieberman’s desire for censorship, a French politician has also been looking to censor Wikileaks, which has been partially hosted by French firm OVH.
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Eben Moglen, Executive Director of the SFLC, testified at the Congressional “Do-Not-Track Legislation: Is Now the Right Time?” hearing held in Washington D.C. on December 2nd.
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A House panel Thursday morning took up the question of whether a law establishing a so-called “do-not-track” mechanism to set limits on how much personal information Web companies can collect is needed to protect consumer privacy online.
The hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s consumer protection subcommittee comes just a day after the Federal Trade Commission released a draft report advocating a Web-wide opt-out mechanism patterned after the popular Do Not Call registry that restricts the activities of telemarketers.
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Just a quick post here, closing the loop on a story we’ve covered for a few years. You may recall that a couple with the surname Boring, sued Google, when they discovered their house was on Street View — saying that it violated their privacy and “devalued” their property.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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China is often criticized for its Internet censorship practices. Although this is certainly valid with regard to political issues, the United States is rapidly becoming one of the most progressive countries when it comes to commercial censorship. Safeguarding commercial interests is increasingly preferred above the rights of the general public. Ironically, BitTorrent sites may have to flee to China to keep their ‘freedom’.
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There have been two big stories this week, both of which have elements of US government censorship of speech. The first, of course, is the pressure put on Amazon to drop Wikileaks as a customer of its S3 storage. The second is Homeland Security seizing a bunch of domain names by getting VeriSign to hand them over. In both cases, defenders of these actions claim they’re not censorship, but both appear to involve the US government stepping in and either explicitly or implicitly getting a US corporation to block a form of speech. That’s concerning.
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In the latest move in the continuing saga of Michael Robertson’s battle with EMI, the moribund UK member of the Big 4 organised music cartel, he says he’s found “great new evidence” of how EMI “directs people to download free MP3s they themselves uploaded to Rapidshare”.
EMI isn’t only continuing its attack against Robertson of earlier MP3.com and Linspire fame, p2pnet posted recently, it appears to have escalated it.
Robertson’s answer? “I’m working right now on video responses to EMI’s exhibits”, he told us. “It’s a battle of the videos!”
Now he’s filed filed opposition to EMI’s papers “about why the Sideload.com music search engine and MP3tunes’ personal cloud storage are allegedly copyright infringing”.
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“The Conservative copyright bill ignores the needs of Canadian consumers and is a total attack on artist,” said Angus (Timmins – James Bay). “The New Democrats are firm in our support for consumer protection and artist royalties.”
In addition to investigating numerous amendments to address concerns raised by the education sector as well as other elements in the bill, New Democrats are bringing forward amending language aimed at increasing support for artist royalties and establishing a balanced position on digital locks.
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As newspapers everywhere struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many continue to debate how much emphasis they should put on digital vs. their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over.
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While the the Pirate Bay trial is recognized worldwide, historically only a handful of file-sharing cases have gone the distance in Sweden’s criminal courts. Now, after making available just 44 music tracks via a file-sharing network, a 26 year old man is being lined up for prosecution. Sweden’s Prosecution Office says that ‘illicit’ file-sharing is a “devastating social problem” so with the TPB convictions in hand, jail sentences will be considered more often in the future.
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…but Youtube asked us to “bring [our] application into compliance with the ToS“, which roughly translates to “take it down”, because their API Terms of Service clearly forbids any kind of downloading.
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As books follow music and video onto the internet, Dylan Horrocks warns that the law may end up stealing the rights of both writers and readers
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To put it mildly, this is hogwash. First of all, it’s exactly how the system has functioned since the DMCA came into being in 1998. If you see infringing content on a site, you issue a takedown and the site takes it down in order to keep its safe harbors. The idea that it would “completely destroy” the value of content makes no sense at all. First, you have to understand why it makes no sense that YouTube should be liable: it has absolutely no way of knowing, for certain, whether or not specific content is infringing. As it showed in the case, even Viacom itself had trouble figuring out what was infringing, and had sued YouTube over a bunch of videos that it had put on YouTube itself. How do you make YouTube responsible for determining such things when even the copyright holder can’t figure it out? It makes no sense.
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A fundamental question around content in the Web 2.0 world is: Who should be in charge of policing online copyright? So far, two federal judges have held that the copyright owners are responsible for that task. No appeals court has yet weighed in on this issue. Today, Viacom (NYSE: VIA) filed a 72-page appeal brief [PDF] asking an appeals court to overturn its defeat in a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG).
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Spain’s Congress is about to vote on a new and extremely harsh copyright/Internet law. It’s an open secret that the law was essentially drafted by American industry groups working with the US trade representative.
But it gets gets more interesting: 115 of the Wikileaks cables intercepted from the US embassy in Madrid were tagged with “KIPR” — that is, relating to “intellectual property,” The big question has been: will El Pais, the Spanish newspaper that has the complete trove of Wikileaks cables, release them in time to affect the vote on the new law?
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Having established the motivations for fair payment on a “commercial free culture project” in the previous column, I’m still left with the question of what exactly “fair” means. The problem is that there’s more than one way to determine fair shares on a project like this. The organization is necessarily loose, and so there’s no really clear and unambiguous way to determine fairness. Nevertheless, some plan has to be chosen, and in a way that is at least defensible.
OMG! Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Alpha 1
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.04.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department.
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One of the standards that has become normal in the US federal sector is the requirement that all mobile devices, such as laptops, have encrypted drives. This was a direct result of a number of laptop thefts earlier in the decade that resulted in the supposed leaking of personal information. As a former federal contractor, I watched a number of successful and not so successful methodologies implemented and deployed. Some resulted in real data protection and some resulted in wonderful bricks. In some cases on a regular (read daily) basis.
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Two steps to fix this problem:
* 1). Every project should have architects who set direction and whose opinion counts as gospel on decisions that will impact user experience. They can veto the silly wheel re-invention exercises. People who don’t like that can go hack on Linux From Scratch in their basement.
* 2). Every project should work with independent industry bodies to standardize the moment some new feature comes along. So that there is one “Linux way” to do it, and not ten different but similar ways to do the same thing.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced a new individual membership drive and promotion that makes members eligible to win free Linux.com Store T-shirts, hats, mugs and more.
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Graphics Stack
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Last week Unigine launched a game development competition where they will be granting a free Unigine Engine licensee to the development team that proposes the best original Linux game using their engine. This competition is still going on for a few more days so get your submissions soon [we are hoping to be able to share some of the submissions with you at some point]. While this competition may still be going on, the Russian developers behind Unigine continue working on the advanced, multi-platform game engine this holiday.
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Applications
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CLI Companion is a really useful tool especially if you are a complete newcomer to Linux and Ubuntu and totally unaware of ways to understand command line. Ironically, CLI Companion lets you learn and enjoy command line using its simple GUI.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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SuperGamer is an excellent project. First, it’s a complete live Linux DVD; not the latest or greatest, but still a fully capable Linux. Second, it’s a complete gaming platform with 30+ excellent games, including some of the most popular free and open-source games available. Third, it allows quick and easy demonstration anywhere, without making any change on the host platform. Fourth, it raises awareness of Linux gaming.
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Desktop Environments
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Although KDE is my work horse, every day, desktop environment, I enjoy testing different environments from time to time. Enlightenment is one environment that I had wanted to try for a while. I remember seeing some beautiful Enlightenment screen shots about 10 years ago. However, at the time, installing it was not an easy task. And frankly, KDE fulfilled all my needs on a DE. However, my admiration for Enlightenment has never really gone away. So, I was glad when I heard that PCLinuxOS had a release sporting this DE. Knowing how easy it is to install and maintain a PCLinuxOS desktop, I thought this may be the time to finally give Enlightenment a try. And I was right.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDAB’s Berlin office hosted the first Mobile Sprint for KDE contributors between the 18th and the 21st of November. The objective of the Sprint was to connect various KDE teams whose work in some way involves mobile platforms, so they could share experiences and work on improvements for all mobile projects.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat continues to hold its lead as the main corporate contributor to the development of the Linux kernel, according to the annual Linux Foundation report on kernel development which has just been released.
The report (PDF) shows that Red Hat contributed 23,356 changes to the kernel since the release of version 2.6.12 on June 17, 2005, amounting to 12.4 percent of the total. The kernel is now at version 2.6.35.
Version 2.6.12 is the point at which the use of the version control system git was initiated to manage development of the kernel.
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It’s the best of times for Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which is rolling for a billion dollar revenue year with profits at record highs and stock trading at a 52-week high of $47.74 on Friday.
Yet it’s also a time for reflection as the choice of the Hatters’ annual charitable donation amplified at the company’s annual Christmas get-together.
Employees voted again this year for the company to donate to charity rather that put on a Christmas bash. They chose that the corporate donation to be made to the Alzheimer’s Foundation.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux has long been a trusty go-to operating system option for most server roles, if not in its official Red Hat branded form, then in one of its respun incarnations, such as the fee-free CentOS or the Oracle rebrand Unbreakable Linux. Based on my tests of RHEL 6, I expect this new release to continue in that tradition—the new release performed as solidly as ever, and benefits from a support term that’s been lengthened from seven to 10 years.
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Fedora
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Despite all the negative reaction to Ubuntu’s move to Unity, is it possible that another popular distribution is going to walk in its footsteps? Do they want to experience the backlash and exodus of users? Do they want to be subjected to a barrage of criticism? Well, no, not really. But Adam Williamson is working on making some Fedora packages for those that might want to test and run it.
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I have been hard at work, improving the look and feel of Fuduntu Linux. Tonights updates bring much needed improvement to the desktop and panel icons.
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Debian Family
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What’s the biggest problem of Linux?
I’m always annoyed when some new hardware doesn’t work. It’s painful to have to google around to find out a solution. Sometimes you need a newer kernel, sometimes you need to build custom modules for your kernel, sometimes you need a firmware for a driver that you already have, sometimes you need a newer version of Xorg, etc.
I wish all hardware manufacturers could get their drivers merged in Linux before their hardware hit the shelves of shops.
Do you think the success of Ubuntu is beneficial for Debian or the opposite?
I think it’s mostly beneficial.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A little while ago I was asked to solve a problem that somebody was having with Upstart, and I realised that people weren’t understanding how things were actually working and were just muddling along when doing event matching in jobs. This is unfortunate, because it hides some of Upstart’s true power, so I thought it high time I actually explained this.
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The development page on Launchpad shows that the code is GPLv3 and LGPLv3. If we check out the branches, you can see that there are a ton of active forks. 47 at the time of this writing.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu lovers, don’t get me wrong : I’m a big fun of ubuntu. In fact, I always encourage people to use ubuntu and I install it for them.
However, with every new box I install ubuntu on, I find myself compelled to further enhance the fresh installation with new features. I know, ubuntu is great out of the box, it has great hardware detection capabilities, and is loaded with software that covers the needs of a casual user. Yet, default functionalities are not enough to turn a Windows-7-addicted into the ubuntu lover I want him to become. In fact, ubuntu new-comers get shocked by the new interface gnome offers, and frustrated when they find no flash support for their browsing. Hence, in order to fill that gap, I find myself downloading, installing and configuring new features, like compiz for visual effects, closed-source codecs for medias, system upgrades for more stability, a more friendly theme, etc…
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At every Ubuntu Developer Summit, the Ubuntu project comes together and tries to find new and exiting ways of breaking their own systems.
So it also happened about a month ago in Orlando, FL. But let me focus on the Kubuntu bits and pieces, since Ubuntu is way to big a project to summarize all the awesomeness in one (sensibly long) blog post.
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Wait, what’s this! Existing members and non-members can also enter the drawing by mailing their name and email address to The Linux Foundation headquarters. The address and official rules for the drawing are available at the Linux Foundation website. Yea!
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Embedded software vendor Mentor Graphics, which supports Linux, Android, and Nucleus OS, has acquired “certain assets” of GNU-based toolchain vendor CodeSourcery, Inc., including Sourcery G++ and Sourcery VSIPL++. The deal essentially amounts to an acquisition of CodeSourcery, as the appointment of its CEO Mark Mitchell as director of embedded tools at Mentor demonstrates.
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An open-source software company claims a website violates its trademark and uses it to distribute a media-player program riddled with “potentially malicious” spyware. Geeknet and VideoLAN, creator of the VLC Media Player, claim Tightrope Interactive violated the VLC trademark, which VideoLAN has used since 1998.
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In an intra-business setting, we all work for the same company, right? Why shouldn’t any and all code be freely available? Why should you have to write a new widget because your application doesn’t have one yet? And if that widget API does exist from some other team, great. But why not also make its source code available?
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As we wave goodbye to what’s left of 2010, we also wrap up our months-long look at projects that have been with us for 10 years or more. The final project we’re highlighting this year is Snort, an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system (IDS/IPS) developed by Sourcefire.
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This fully-featured suite of office programs comes with all the features you’d expect from the best of its kind, at a fraction of the cost. No, wait – it’s free! For the cost of a few minutes of screen time, you can get a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing, painting and database program. Most will read and write files from the most popular commercial software. The database doesn’t read Access files, but for most users, that won’t be a problem. If you send files to friends or professors who are still using Office, be careful – Microsoft won’t read OpenOffice.org format. Save it as a .doc file first. OpenOffice.org is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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On June 14, 2010, two female firefox (a.k.a red panda) cubs were born at the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee, and as of today, they’ve officially joined the Mozilla community. To meet our newest (and cutest) Mozillians, visit www.firefoxlive.org. For the next few months you’ll be able to watch these baby firefoxes play, live and grow via a 24 hour live video stream.
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Oracle
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Winning over IBM was a huge coup for Oracle, especially when you consider the fact that IBM is the one company that competes most obliquely with Oracle in hardware, database and software markets. And being able to keep Red Hat signed onto the project was another big win for Oracle: The company takes Red Hat’s Linux as CentOS and rebrands it with its own kernel version and logos.
And yet, both IBM and Red Hat are dedicated to the OpenJDK. Combine this with the news from Nov. 12 that Apple will also be joining the OpenJDK, and you’ve got quite an alliance of Java stakeholders all working on a single, unified Java.
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Government
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Two left-wing political parties in the Portuguese parliament want to make the use of open standards mandatory for public administrations. Next week Friday, the parliament will discuss two motions, filed by the Left Bloc, with sixteen of the 230 seats in the parliament, and the Portuguese Communist Party, which has thirteen seats.
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Licensing
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With the announcement of $1.3B in damages awarded to Oracle in the lawsuit against SAP , Oracle has made abundantly clear that they intend to do everything they can to lock customers in to their expensive and highly profitable maintenance and support fees. Of course TomorrowNow made it ridiculously easy for Oracle by stealing Oracle’s IP, but Oracle seems likely to go after other third-party support providers as well.
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Barnes and Noble posted the source code to the Nook Color here, which is a much faster turnaround than last time so some sort of progress has definitely been made.
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Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs committee today approved its report on the draft regulation to set up a European Citizen’s Initiative, as foreseen in the Lisbon Treaty. The change will enable any physical person to address the European Commission with a subject for legislative action as long as it falls within the competences of the Treaties.
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[JURIST] A top Chinese official on Monday called on the country’s lawyers to promote law enforcement and social justice [Xinhua report] and encouraged lawyers, prosecutors and government officials to build a community of support and respect. During a meeting attended by members of the country’s law firms and bar associations, Zhou Yongkang [BBC profile], a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Republic of China [official website], urged Chinese lawyers to take on more pro bono cases and resolve conflicts in order to promote social well-being. Zhou also encouraged the country’s courts to hire more lawyers to act as both judges and prosecutors.
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A chancery judge has admitted he violated the rights of a Tupelo lawyer by having him jailed for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in his courtroom, the state judicial watchdog group says.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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For three months Assange had been waiting in vain to hear whether media statements by and for the two female “victims” that there was no fear or violence were going to be embellished so the charges might be carried forward due to greater seriousness. Such statements would stop a rape charge in any Western country dead in its tracks. Rape is a crime of violence, duress or deception. You can rape someone by deluding them into thinking you are someone else or by drugging them or by reason of their young age but essentially it’s a crime of violence.
The women here are near to and over 30 and have international experience, some of it working in Swedish government embassies. There is no suggestion of drugs nor identity concealment. Far from it. Both women boasted of their celebrity connection to Assange after the events that they would now see him destroyed for.
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Amazon Web Services dropped WikiLeaks material from its servers on Tuesday, a move that is widely assumed to be a direct response to pressure from the Senate Homeland Security Committee. A statement from Amazon disputed that, stating that they kicked WikiLeaks off for violating the terms of service: “For example, our terms of service state that ‘you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.’”
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Finance
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The FBI raided three hedge funds Monday in what one of the targets called a wide-ranging probe of insider trading in the financial industry.
Bureau employees searched the New York offices of Level Global Investors LP, and the Stamford, Conn. headquarters of Diamondback Capital Management LLC, a law enforcement official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss an ongoing case.
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Many folks will not be having much of a holiday this week with the feds stepping things up in what could be one of the most far-reaching insider trading cases ever.
Earlier Wednesday, they made the first of what could be many more arrests. An employee at a California “expert network” firm was taken into custody before a scheduled trip to Taiwan on Sunday. Here’s the WSJ’s ongoing coverage of the arrest and what it means. Read here, here, here, here and here for LawBlog stories on what’s happened so far in the investigation.
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Federal authorities, intensifying an insider-trading investigation, are demanding trading and other information from some of the nation’s most powerful investment firms.
Hedge-fund giants SAC Capital Advisors and Citadel LLC, big mutual-fund company Janus Capital Group Inc. and Wellington Management Co., one of the nation’s biggest institutional-investment firms, have received subpoenas from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office seeking trading, communications and other data as part of a broad criminal investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
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The trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard Madoff’s investment empire is suing two of the world’s biggest banks to try to get more than $8 billion for victims of the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
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It’s a belief many law-school graduates cling to fiercely, in the face of all contrary evidence: That the tort system is a mechanism for discovering the truth, disciplining wrongdoers, and compensating victims for their losses.
A new study in the Financial Analysts Journal casts serious doubt on the premise, at least when it comes to shareholder class actions. In most cases, the authors found, the litigation mainly serves to punish shareholders who have already suffered from a downturn in their stock. Only suits targeting illegal insider trading, and to a lesser extent, accounting fraud were associated with subsequent higher long-term returns.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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We’ve pointed out in the past the rather bizarre dichotomy of US politicians (including the President) speaking out against internet censorship in other countries, while at the very same time supporting policies that censor websites in the US. Of course, the US censorship isn’t about political speech, but about copyright issues. However, that doesn’t make it any less censorship.
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When privacy violations occur, the first reaction for many victims is to search for a way to stop the offending conduct. The second response may be to invoke the law by filing a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Hundreds of complaints are filed every year and most are resolved with an explanation for what occurred, a change in corporate policy, or occasionally a formal apology. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that a growing number of complainants have been left unsatisfied with this outcome, however, and are turning to the courts for damage awards.
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Just in case new OMB director Peter R. Orszag needs any suggestions, the Sunlight Foundation — a group dedicated to improving government transparency — has several.
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Suppose we’re in trial circa 1999. We offer a key document marked as Defendants’ 123. Our opponent looks it over. “Objection,” she cries. “That document is not Defendants’ 123; this is Defendants’ 123.” And then she produces a different document.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission called for a do-not-track option for online browsing and pressed advertisers to make their data practices clearer for consumers, in staff recommendations on privacy.
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First came Do-Not-Call. Now, the Federal Trade Commission is focusing on Do-Not-Track.
In a 79-page report issued today, the agency suggested a new framework for consumer privacy in the commercial world, including a way for people to choose whether to allow companies to collect data about their online searching and browsing.
“Many of us on the Commission believe that it’s time for a Do-Not-Track mechanism with respect to third party ads,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a call with reporters. “A Do-Not-Track browser setting would serve as an easy, one-stop shop for consumers to express their choices, rather than on a company-by-company or industry-by-industry basis. Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Apple have already experimented with this, by the way, as has a coalition of companies.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Facebook is lining up to own the trademark on the word “face.”
Techcrunch reported that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to allow the social networking giant use of the word as long as the company pays a fee and files a Statement of Use. It will also have to use “Face” without the book part to show legal claim.
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Copyrights
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Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. disagrees with the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a dispute involving a 16-year old Texas youth accused of illegally downloading music from the Internet.
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Viacom Inc. says a new wave of digital piracy could threaten the U.S. media business unless federal courts overturn its defeat in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google Inc.’s YouTube video-sharing site.
The New York-based owner of MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures is expected as early as Friday to file its appeal of the June decision with the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. To add firepower to its case, Viacom has brought in former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson to argue.
Sony Vaio PCG-F350 with Puppy Linux
Credit: TinyOgg
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