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09.04.10

Links 4/9/2010: ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ as GNU/Linux Demo, WeTab Runs MeeGo

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Presenting the Local Akademy Team 2010

        It is a while now since Akademy 2010, KDE’s annual conference, came to a close. There were a huge number of blogs and articles about what happened and it is safe to say that the latest conference was a success. Many attendees noted how smoothly everything ran, thanks to the KDE organizers and the local team. The local team did an awesome job, not only during the conference itself but also during the many months of thought and hard work before Akademy. The Dot managed to catch up with some key players in the local team to get their take on the KDE invasion of Tampere and find out what it is like to organize such a large event.

      • Help Test the Next Generation of KDE’s Kontact

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Cortex-A8 SODIMM module supports Linux, Android

      Direct Insight announced a SODIMM-sized COM (computer on module) based on TI’s Sitara AM3703 or DM3730, with ARM Cortex-A8 cores clocked at up to 1GHz. The SwiftModule-DM offers up to 256MB of RAM and 256MB of flash storage, and a touchscreen interface supporting up to 2048 x 2048 pixels, and is compatible with both Linux and Android.

    • Media players offer 3.2-inch displays, Android 2.1

      Philips and Samsung have both announced Android 2.1-based, 3.2-inch portable media players (PMPs), primed to compete with Apple’s newly upgraded iPod Touch. Philips’ GoGear Connect reportedly includes Wi-Fi, GPS, and Android Market access, while Samsung’s Galaxy Player 50 offers both a videocam and two-megapixel camera in addition to its multimedia capabilities.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo

        • Neofonie WeTab now runs MeeGo Linux

          The Neofonie WeTab gained grabbed a lot of headlines when the company first introduced it a few months ago. And why not? The tablet is kind of everything the Apple iPad is not. It has a nice big 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel HD capacitive toushcreen display. It supports HDMI output, has 2 USB ports, and a 1.3MP camera. It also packs 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1.

        • Toshiba shows off 10.1 inch Android tablet

          Toshiba Europe announced a 10.1-inch Android 2.2 media tablet, due for a fourth quarter release in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Folio 100 runs Android 2.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and offers a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, but it lacks both GPS and Android Market access.

        • Tablet Skirmish Heats Up With Toshiba Entry

          Toshiba has announced its own entrant into the tablet market with the Folio 100, which will run on the Android 2.2 operating system. Sporting a screen just over 10 inches, the device will be larger than other early competitors to Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPad tablet computer, such as the Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) Streak.

    • Tablets

      • Strong early sales of $140 Android tablet surprise retailer

        Beijing-based international online reseller LightInTheBox.com announced it has had two months of surprisingly strong sales of a seven-inch, $140 Android tablet. The aPad Android Tablet runs Android 1.6 — with Android Market support — on Samsung’s ARM11-based 667MHz S3C6410, and offers 1GB of flash, an SD slot, Wi-Fi, and an 800 x 480-pixel screen, says the company.

      • Toshiba debuts Android-powered Folio 100 tablet

        Samsung’s Galaxy Tab got a lot of the attention Thursday, but Toshiba had an Android tablet of its own to debut here at the IFA electronics show: the Folio 100.

        Unlike the smaller Tab, the Folio bears more of an outward resemblance to Apple’s iPad, the dominant tablet device on the market today. And where Samsung will sell the Tab only through phone companies as a kind of smartphone on steroids, Toshiba’s Folio will like the iPad come in 3G and non-3G models when it goes on sale in Europe in the fourth quarter.

        The Folio will cost 399 euros (about $511) for the version with just Wi-Fi networking; the 3G version price jumps to 499 euros (about $639). It’s got a 10.1-inch multitouch screen with 1024×600-pixel resolution, an Nvidia Tegra processor, stereo speakers, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, two USB ports, an SD card slot, an HDMI connector for sending video to other screens, Bluetooth communications, and 16GB of memory.

      • Bigger is Better… Right?

Free Software/Open Source

  • CAOS Theory Podcast 2010.09.03

    Topics for this podcast:

    *Open source seeding the clouds
    *Canonical’s cloud subscription pivot
    *Hypertable steers commercial route for NoSQL database
    *Implications of Oracle’s Java lawsuit

  • Events

    • Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

      Some conference organisers will say “we didn’t get any submissions from women” to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

    • Ohio LinuxFest Registration and Contest Deadline Extended
    • Ohio LinuxFest Proves Real FOSS Diversity

      The annual Ohio LinuxFest is a genuine grass-roots community event. It is one of the most fun and most worthwhile Linux fests, and one of the most welcoming– everyone from brand-new Linux users, people curious about Linux, to wizened gurus and everyone in between are welcome.

    • Interviews from GUADEC, Part 3
    • ApacheCon NA 2010 registration opens

      The Apache Software Foundation has announced that registration is now open for this year’s ApacheCon North America. ApacheCon NA 2010, the official user conference of the Apache Software Foundation, will take place from the 1st to the 5th of November at The Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia.

    • [Registration Opens for ApacheCon North America 2010]
    • ApacheCon 2010 Registration Is Open
    • Call for Papers for SCALE 9x opens

      Organizers of the Southern California Linux Expo 9x have announced that the Call for Papers for SCALE 9x opens Wednesday, Sept. 1, with five speaker tracks.

    • XDS 2010 Has Been Moved To A Tobacco Factory

      Among the topics to be discussed at this ex-tobacco factory event are whether X drivers should be merged back into the X.Org Server for the 1.10 release, DRM/KMS support on non-Linux platforms, what hardware should continue to be supported and what drivers should be eliminated, a review of the latest DRI2 protocol additions, a development process recap, a multi-touch session, a session on X Gestures, handling input events, board of directors chat, documentation / how to get more individuals involved, EGL in Mesa, and libxkbcommon maintainer-ship. Birds of feather sessions for Xephyr, XCB, and the Wacom support are also planned.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle

    • MySQL Connector Released for OpenOffice.org

      The OpenOffice.org community has released a MySQL connector for OpenOffice. This allows you to edit the table in any MySQL installation from any desktop installation of OpenOffice.

  • Education

    • LiveText – A Cross Platform Online Education System

      In the last couple months I have posted my disgust about two different online education systems that are being used at various colleges around the United States. My dislike for these systems stems from the fact that even though they are web based, they do not adhere to Web Standards. This means that they are not fully accessible on FOS operating systems as they should be.

      [...]

      So if you are an educator looking for a platform to teach your online class through (or an administrator at a school that make the decision for many) I implore you to choose LiveText or another system that supports all operating systems (Not just those paying a Windows Tax).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • [ANNOUNCE] Git 1.7.2.3
    • Language agnostic web server Mongrel2 1.0 released

      Version 1.0 of Mongrel2, a language agnostic web server initiated by Zed Shaw, has been released. Shaw announced the release on his blog of the project which began development only three months ago. “I love this project” said Shaw, “Even if it doesn’t go anywhere and nobody uses it I am so happy I got to work on another cool idea nobody’s really done before”. Mongrel2 uses a simple backend protocol to allow Ruby, Python, C++, .Net and other languages make use of it’s ability to handle not just HTTP but Flash XMLSockets, WebSockets or Long Polling, and it’s event based I/O system.

    • First Alpha of uTorrent Server for Linux Released

      The uTorrent Server application provides a state-of-the-art implementation of the popular BitTorrent protocol and a full-featured WebUI (web-based user interface).

Leftovers

  • GPU vs. CPU Computing

    Graphics processing units (GPUs) have, for many years, powered the display of images and motion on computer displays. GPUs are now powerful enough to do more than just move images across the screen. They are capable of performing high-end computations that are the staple of many engineering activities.

    Benchmarks that focus on floating point arithmetic, those most often used in these engineering computations, show that GPUs can perform such computations much faster than the traditional central processing units (CPUs) used in today’s workstations—sometimes as much as 20 times faster, depending on the computation.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Oil rig fire triggers new pollution fear in Gulf of Mexico

      Fresh fears about drilling in the Gulf of Mexico were raised today when fire forced workers to abandon an oil and gas platform, just six months after the BP explosion that created an environmental disaster in the region.

    • Tibetan nomads struggle as grasslands disappear from the roof of the world

      Like generations of Tibetan nomads before him, Phuntsok Dorje makes a living raising yaks and other livestock on the vast alpine grasslands that provide a thatch on the roof of the world.

      But in recent years the vegetation around his home, the Tibetan plateau, has been destroyed by rising temperatures, excess livestock and plagues of insects and rodents.

  • Finance

    • Afghanistan tries to prevent run on its biggest bank

      Afghan authorities today attempted to prevent a potentially catastrophic run on the country’s biggest bank after allegations of corruption and mismanagement led regulators to replace two of its top executives.

      The revolution at the top of Kabul Bank, which is responsible for paying the salaries of nearly all the country’s policemen and soldiers, has caused shock in the capital amid fears of a collapse in confidence in Afghanistan’s ramshackle and corrupt financial system.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • MLB Decapitates Flugtag’s Phlyin’ Phanatic

      Major League Baseball is taking a guillotine to Phillie royalty. Well, a flying stuffed rendition of Phillie royalty.

      A Flugtag team that spent $3,000 and 400 hours building a flying machine topped with a replica of one of Major League Baseball’s favorite mascots was told two days before the local competition that the Phanatic can’t fly.

    • Copyrights

      • Mark Waid Explains: Culture Is More Important Than Copyright & It’s Time To Look For Opportunities In Sharing

        He also mentions that he’s got some plans in place for how he’s going to embrace things like BitTorrent and run some interesting experiments. He points out that they’re experiments, and there’s no guarantee they’ll work, but he wants to step forward and at least try to embrace it. This is great to hear, and I look forward to seeing what kind of experiments he runs.

      • Huge Push In Brazil To Legalize File Sharing

        That said… while I appreciate getting rid of “the war on copying,” I do think there are some serious problems with a proposal like this. Copyright levies tend to have serious unintended consequences. They create large bureaucracies, where money collection and distribution is not always done fairly. In fact, they often tend to favor bigger name artists over smaller artists, and just having the bureaucracy creates overhead that goes to the bureaucracy, rather than the artists. On top of that, it takes away incentive for consumers to support artists directly through other creative business models, because they feel that they “already paid,” via the levy.

      • Here come ‘Hurt Locker’ file-sharing subpoenas

      • ACTA/HADOPI

        • ACTA Action: Call on Obama to end the secrecy, reject the treaty

          Please read and share this article by Knowledge Ecology International’s James Love, sign our anti-ACTA petition, and call on Obama to publish the treaty text.

          Two weeks ago, we delivered over 4,000 of your signatures on our ACTA petition to negotiators meeting in Washington, D.C.

        • French ISPs and French Government Locking Horns Over HADOPI Costs

          There’s a major battle brewing between the French government and the French ISPs. A line is being drawn and it’s about the money. While this was foreseeable thanks to our earlier reports, it will be very interesting to see how far the battle will escalate. One report suggests that ISPs may even opt to not honor their end of the anti-piracy effort.

Clip of the Day

It’s a Unix system


Credit: TinyOgg

09.03.10

Links 3/9/2010: Wine 1.3.2, Great Fedora Site Redesign

Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • New, open source PS3 jailbreak may get round piracy claims

    Users will need to know what they’re doing, but the hack is achievable with a $25 Teensy++ USB development board or a $30 AT90USBkey loaded with the PSGroove files – which are available here.

    The hack is essentially similar to the PS Jailbreak technique.

  • Open Source: Quality, Flexibility and Cost

    Open Source has matured to the point where it is now used to some extent in every company. 98 percent of respondents to a survey said that their organizations make use of Open Source in some way. The people answering the survey were IT professionals in areas like network operations, server management and engineering.

  • Adopting Enterprise Open Source Software

    Nagios sent me a reminder yesterday, which I finally got around to reading today, to update to the latest version of Nagios Core, 3.2.2. We were running 3.2.0, so we were a couple versions behind, so after browsing through the list of fixed bugs I thought it would be good to go ahead and upgrade. I had a meeting in fifteen minutes, and Nagios was actively monitoring servers in production.

  • Google Wave’s open source future “in a Box”

    “Wave in a Box” will include a server and web client using the same structured conversation system that appeared in Google’s own Wave service, complete with support for threaded conversations in the web client and a refined version of Wave’s client-server communications. The server is based on the FedOne example server which was released on waveprotocol.org as a basic client/server prototype. Patches that have already been contributed allow “Wave in a Box” to implement a MongoDB based persistent store which supports searching and the server will also feature the gadget, robot and data APIs which allow for external applications to offer inline information or automated services within a Wave conversation.

  • Google Wave Freed As Open Source Project

    Alex North, Software Engineer, Google Wave team, wrote on a blog, “We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we’ve already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or “Wave in a Box.”

  • Nuxeo present FISE, a RESTful semantic engine

    Open source enterprise content management experts Nuxeo have announced that, as part of the IKS European project, they are working with partners in the project to develop an open source semantic engine with a RESTful interface, dubbed fise. Fise, which stands for Furtwangen IKS Semantic Engine, was initially created in March at the IKS Semantic Engine Hackathon and now Nuxeo have made a demonstration system available for users to get a feel for what a semantic engine can achieve.

  • Giving Back To Open Source

    And recently, I became aware of the debt I owe to the Open Source movement. Open Source software freed my PC and turned it into a sleek, fast, secure, stable and powerful machine. I feel I owe much to Open Source software.

  • Open Source Software is “coming of age”: Accenture

    Showing how seriously OSS is now being taken at management level, nearly two thirds of the respondents said that their organisations now have a documented strategy for open source adoption with the remaining 32 percent currently developing a strategic plan.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome reaches second birthday, version 6 goes stable

      Google recently demonstrated some highly experimental tab features that offer insight into how Chrome tabbing might eventually be enhanced. Compared to something like Mozilla’s Panorama feature, Google says it wants to create something more automatic that doesn’t require much user intervention.

    • Two years on, Chrome reshapes browser market

    • Mozilla

      • Meet Kerim Kalamujic, Bosnian Contributor!

        1. Hello Kerim. To start out with, could you give us a little introduction and tell us a little bit about you?

        Hi. I was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am 25 years old, I have an Engineer’s degree in Telecommunications and am currently working as an IT Director in a local company called Triland Development.

      • Mozilla’s Bespin becomes Skywriter

        The project is now to be officially hosted on GitHub to allow developers to fork the project more easily. Previously, Skywriter was officially hosted using Mercurial which led to developers only installing Mercurial for access to Bespin and the creation of unofficial mirrors. The new GitHub repository is a work in progress though as it will only contain an “all JavaScript” version of the Skywriter system, and that is currently incomplete. The older bespinclient Mercurial repository is being kept open for now to give developers access to “something that works today”. The project also has a new home page on Mozilla Labs reflecting the name change.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle

    • Gosling Webcast

      Next week JavaZone, the conference that brought you Lady Java and Java Forever will be held in Norway. To celebrate the opening of the new ForgeRock Norway office, we’ve arranged for a party just before the conference starts, on Tuesday evening. If you are in Oslo and would like to attend, please send an RSVP to the address on the web site.

    • Does the Fate of OpenSolaris Tell Us Where Unix Is Headed?

      It’s not easy to pin down the exact date of the birth of OpenSolaris, but it’s really easy to nail the date of its demise: Friday, August 13, 2010. This was the date a leaked Oracle internal memo was released on the Internet: a memo that effectively announced the end of the OpenSolaris Project, just over five years after the general release of the OpenSolaris code and 830 days after the first official release of an OpenSolaris distribution from Sun Microsystems.

    • An obituary for Larry Ellison

      I’m tired of hearing questions about the future of Java, OpenOffice and MySQL (to limit myself to only three projects), and even more tired of trying to talk to people with whom I have contact in Oracle and always hear the same history (invest more and do better), that simply doesn’t translate into any concrete action. I’m tired of living in a world of uncertainty and rumors in this area.

  • CMS

  • Education

    • New course management program to replace WebCT

      EduCat is powered by an open source course system called Moodle, a software package for creating internet-based courses and websites. NMU is switching because the vendor that supports WebCT will no longer be licensing the software, said Smock. NMU’s license with WebCT expires in July 2011.

  • Healthcare

    • Open health in Guatemala

      The FreeMED Software Foundation has been involved with a medical clinic and teaching project in Guatemala for some time. The project, hosted by Pop-Wuj, a non-profit Spanish language school in Xela (Quetzeltenango), Guatemala, hosts a medical clinic for the poor in the city and surrounding pueblos.

    • EU: 3.3 Million To Continue Projects On Open Source And Reusable Data

      The European Commission is planning to spend 3.344 million Euro until 2016 to continue the services provided by its projects – such as OSOR.eu and Semic.eu – on open source and on electronic data exchange.

      The EC published the budget details last week Thursday for its e-Government project. Apart from the 3.344 million Euro planned for the new platform to provide collaborative services for current Semic.eu and OSOR.eu users, another 8.8 million Euro are foreseen to provide support for existing and future communities around eGovernment in general, including the growing Open Source community on OSOR.eu and the community around interoperablity assets on Semic.eu.

    • Medical FLOSS Repository: An update from Medfloss.org

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Only one day left to influence the EURO 2012 qualification games

      As it is common in football since some time to bribe the referee, this is also possible: Just transfer the money to FSFE’s bank account with the subject “donation for Free Software European championship [Country name]” and announce your bribery via microblog with the above mentioned hashtag ;)

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Game-addicted man scores rare win over software lawyers

    Craig Smallwood sued Lineage II maker NC Interactive late last year, claiming that his compulsive urge to play the game caused him to sink more than 20,000 hours into it. As a result, he had to be hospitalized and continues to suffer extreme and serious emotional distress and depression that requires treatment and therapy three times a week, according to court documents.

  • Lawyer sues Avvo for libel after receiving poor online rating

    A Florida lawyer has sued Avvo for libel, arguing that the Seattle online attorney rating service published inaccurate information about him and engaged in a practice of blackmail in order to get him to participate on the site. Larry Joe Davis Jr., a St. Petersburg lawyer who has a 3.7 rating on Avvo, argues in the suit that the site inaccurately listed him as having a practice in the “employment/labor” area when in fact he specializes in health law. He also alleges that Avvo engaged in unfair acts of trade or commerce.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Security hole found in top price-comparison sites

      While sites such as Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com might save you time and money, the true cost could be higher than you think courtesy of a basic flaw when it comes to securing customers’ personal data.

    • Kirklees Council ban future use of Mosquito device on council land and property

      A DEVICE which targets young people has been banned following a campaign by junior politicians.

    • United Airlines and Dulles security treat Pakistani military officers as terrorists

      The officers were on a junket in the USA, and had been travelling extensively; one of them said words to the effect of, “I hope this is my last flight.” This was interpreted as a terrorist threat by a flight attendant.

    • Sneaky Senate Trying To Slip Internet Kill Switch Past Us

      Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

    • Hardware hackers defeat quantum crypto

      Security researchers using hardware hacking techniques have unearthed generic flaws in supposedly ultra-secure quantum cryptography systems.

    • German “secure” ID cards compromised on national TV, gov’t buries head in sand

      A German TV programme showed hackers from the Chaos Computer Club using off-the-shelf equipment to extract personal information from the government’s new “secure” ID card, which stores scans of fingerprints and a six-digit PIN that can be used to sign official documents and declarations.

    • Drumroll, please: the top Web scams of the decade

      Good to know that there are so many people out there who care. But better to know what the most common scams look like. Here is security vendor Panda’s new list of the biggest Web scams of the decade.

    • New malware detects browser, shows fake malware warning page

      Microsoft is warning about a new piece of malware, Rogue:MSIL/Zeven, that auto-detects a user’s browser and then imitates the relevant malware warning pages from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. The fake warning pages are very similar to the real thing; you have to look closely to realize they aren’t the real thing. The ploy is a basic social engineering scheme, but in this case the malware authors are relying on the user’s trust in their browser, a tactic that hasn’t been seen before.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Former Lehman CEO: It’s Not Our Fault We Went Bankrupt

      Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy had nothing to do with Lehman Brothers, according to Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ former CEO.

      Instead, Fuld argued at a public hearing today, Lehman went bust because the financial world wrongly lost confidence in the bank, and the government failed to effectively intervene.

    • Lehman Brothers ex-CEO Wants Everyone To Know That It Was Everyone Else’s Fault Lehman Failed

      In fact, a recent report from Planet Money and Pro Publica, that came out just last week, showed how ridiculous levels of self-dealing among banks not only prolonged the mess, but actually made the eventual impact much, much worse. Basically the banks created fake demand for the very worst parts of the mortgage-backed securities they were trying to sell, in order to keep on selling.

    • Goldman employees still enamored with firm, CEO

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) is the bank many Americans love to hate, but one group just plain loves it: its employees.

      The firm’s employees are among the most fiercely loyal in the financial services industry, according to a survet by glassdoor.com, a career website. And Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein had the highest approval rating of any CEO in the financial sector.

      Glassdoor.com’s survey was done online, which means it is not exactly scientific, but any good news is surely welcome at Goldman, which is fresh off settling civil fraud charges with U.S. securities regulators. The lawsuit set off a public relations nightmare that led some inside the bank to question whether Blankfein should be ousted.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Announcing our new Online Director

      He comes to us from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Joey brings extensive experience from a range of online activist efforts, including the T. Boone Pickens alternative energy campaign, and an in-depth knowledge and understanding of how to use technology to galvanize and engage a community. He will lead our digital grassroots efforts towards change in Washington.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Google’s Earth

      Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

    • Murdoch Reporters’ Phone-Hacking Was Endemic, Victimized Hundreds

      A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted, according toThe New York Times.

      Andy Coulson, currently media advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is accused of having encouraged the hacking during his tenure as editor of Murdoch’s News of the World paper.

    • Don’t Let Schools Chip Your Kids

      On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track the children’s movements at school and during field trips, and collect other data like whether the child has eaten or not.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Scam Artists Use HADOPI to Steal Users Money

        News has surfaced that warning letters, allegedly from HADOPI, are being sent to an untold number of French citizens who are accused of copyright infringement. The problem? Neither HADOPI nor rights holders actually sent those e-mails.

      • Introduction to “three strikes” copyright infringement rules in Dragon*con EFF track

        Distribution of digital content has only gotten easier over time. In the early years of web sharing, distribution happened over the client-server system. The more people using it, the slower the system was. But now with peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, speeds and access actually increase with a greater number of users. Trammell demonstrated with the following list, a history of how, since P2P arrived, the two big players in the fight against sharing, the RIAA (Recording Industry of America) and MPAA (Motion Picutre Association of America), have fought it:

        * 1999 – RIAA labels sued Napster
        * 2002 – RIAA sued Aimster
        * 2003 – MPAA studios sued Grokster
        * 2006 – RIAA labels sued the developers of LimeWire

        [...]

        The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (which has its own session for discussion at Dragon*Con) is an international treaty to create standards for IP rights enforcement. It’s supposed to be a response to the increase in pirated works and is a framework for companies to voluntarily join outside of WTO, WIPO, and the UN. It’s also held in secret. Many in the US have sent FOIA requests seeking transparency. There have been leaks and a condensed version that have come out. And earlier this year, they confirmed that mandatory graduated response for signing companies is off the table.

      • ORGCon: James Boyle Interview

        In this video James speaks to Open Rights Group volunteer Nitya Rajan about the importance of the public domain, and why it should be treated with care and respect.

      • Settlement reached after judge refuses to dismiss copyright suit

        U.S. District Judge Philip Pro rejected a defendant’s argument that the case should be dismissed because Righthaven didn’t own the copyright to the story at the time of the alleged infringement.

      • Copyrighting Fashion: Who Gains?
      • Media Minutes: September 3, 2010

        Latinos for Internet Freedom, a new coalition of more than 40 organizations and groups, is advocating for an open and accessible Internet. And bloggers and nonprofits are now targets of a “lawsuit mill” that shakes down people for big sums of money for sharing articles and links.

      • iTunes song-sample plan runs into music publishers
      • LVRJ Defends Righthaven Suits; Mocks Competitor For Highlighting Problems With Them
      • Why we are writing about the R-J copyright lawsuits

        Some commentators are wondering why the Las Vegas Sun, and our sister publication In Business Las Vegas, have published so many stories about the Las Vegas Review-Journal/Righthaven LLC copyright infringement lawsuit campaign.

        Are we covering the R-J/Righthaven lawsuits, which through Monday totaled 107 complaints against defendants throughout the United States and Canada, because they involve our competitor?

        Because we’ve reported criticism of Righthaven by defense attorneys and others, do the Sun and In Business condone and encourage copyright infringement?

        And as I’ve been the writer of most of these stories, one reader said it appears I’m “outraged” by Righthaven and asked me if that was the case.

      • ACTA

Clip of the Day

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow vs. Deepak Chopra


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 3/9/2010: GNOME 2.32 Beta 2, Android Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 1:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Dell Studio 1747 Laptop: One Fatal Flaw Away from Linux Perfection

      If you’re looking for a workhorse, desktop replacement laptop it’s hard to find one more powerful than the Dell Studio 1747. Armed with an Intel Core i7, a 17″ inch display, and as much RAM as you’ll find in any laptop, the 1747 is a monster. Power aside, how does it fare as a Linux box? Almost perfect, but with one major flaw.

      [...]

      In almost every way I’m satisfied so far with the 1747. However, the lack of working wireless is really problematic for people who actually use the laptop to move around. I’ve already ordered an ExpressCard adapter that’s gotten good reviews for working with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, which set me back less than $30 on Amazon. Given that I scored a good deal on the laptop, I’m not too unhappy at having to pick up a wireless card.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Who Contributed The Most During X Server 1.9?

        Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There’s also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • 7 Things You Can Do in KDE, But Not in Windows

        When the KDE 4 series was still being developed, Aaron Seigo announced in his blog that it would do away with icons on the desktop.

        He was being deliberately provocative, because what he really meant was that users would no longer be stuck with a single set of icons on the desktop. By abstracting the desktop icons into a separate feature called FolderView, KDE makes it easy to maintain and load separate sets of icons for different purposes. If you take the time to setup FolderView to suit your work habits, it reduces the number of icons on the desk at any one time, and makes finding them much easier.

        2) Running Multiple Activities

      • Dolphin in KDE 4.5

        KDE 4.5 has been good to me so far, except the monstrosity that is Dolphin. I was already irked by the slowness and the crazy sorting behaviour, now it hangs 10 t 15 seconds when I try to do CPU-heavy tasks like no file manager was ever meant to do, oh, I don’t know, move a file. Or maybe copy one. Opening a directory. Stuff like that.

        But in KDE it’s always been easy to switch file manager. Most people in this case would use Konqueror instead, but I don’t like that one either. Thunar is my application of choice here, but up until now the Oxygen theme and Thunar didn’t play along, resulting in horrible default folder icons.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 2.32 Beta 2 Has Been Released

        The second beta of the next GNOME release has arrived full of bug fixes and updates. Many of the standard packages have been updated for GNOME 2.32 Beta 2 (2.31.91) and more translation work has been done.

  • Distributions

    • A Guide to Today’s Top 10 Linux Distributions

      Choosing the distribution–or “distro”–that’s right for your business will depend in large part on five key factors, as I’ve already described. It’s also helpful, however, to have a basic understanding of how the major Linux distros differ.

    • What I want from computers

      Well, my first blog post on this subject generated some broad agreement (and a few flames), but I think it’s necessary to be a little more specific about the three main things I want from from computers, from Linux, from whatever, as opposed to just from Fedora or any one Linux distribution. Here we go, and remember, this applies always to a “stable” release, not to the latest half baked bits that are under work, and it’s equally applicable to any Operating System you care to mention…

    • Reviews

      • I wrote a review article about antiX core today

        The result is a REALLY fast system, faster than anything else I am using in fact. I really like it. It is fast – I said that more than once for emphasis, but its also flexible, and it provides only what you configure, nothing more, nothing less. What I have built represents what I prefer to use in my personal computing environments.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Magento Appoints Software Veterans Michel Goossens and Jary Carter to Spearhead Global Expansion

        Goossens joins Magento from Red Hat (NYSE: RHT | PowerRating), where he was vice president EMEA of the organization’s JBoss division.

      • Fedora

        • Caroline’s Identity Crisis
        • On updates and user experiences and so forth

          In fact I could be quite happy if we revised Fedora’s process completely. I can see a future where we aim to be a rolling distribution, and put out a point release only when we *have* to; when I asked people within Fedora a while back why point releases still exist, the only really valid answer was more or less ‘because sometimes changes happen that we can’t handle with an in-place update’. That’s fine, but in that case, there’s no real reason besides PR to schedule releases every six months; why not just do a release when some change means we *have* to do one? When such a change comes along we put out a set of images and give people six months to reinstall or upgrade, pushing security fixes for the previous codebase during that period, and then just declare it dead and say everyone needs to be on the new code now? Most of the objections to this kind of thing are about providing stable platforms and dependable updates and yadda yadda, but I already said, there’s no reason Fedora has to be that project. In a lot of ways I think Fedora could be a much more interesting and useful project in the long term if it wasn’t.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu in Education

          The Andalusia deployment of over 200,000 systems is well documented and Amtron deploying 28,000 in Assam in northern India and Oxford Archaeology and Johns Hopikins and Oakland University and the list continues to grow. Next week I’m visiting a local school in my backyard of Houston, TX that has migrated to Ubuntu using Moodle and other open source SIS (Student Information Systems). The project lead is also the volunteer coordinator of the Moodle Core Contrib team. I had to travel out of town to meet him and learn about this great project. I’m really glad I did!

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android, iOS Gap Is Wider Than It Appears

          Jobs’ love-hate relationship with Google became apparent when he pointed that “some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers.”

          Who are these friends — Microsoft or Google?

          Apple/Google inspired Microsoft entered this number game (do you remember when was the last time they came out with an original idea?) and announced that they are activating 10 Windows 7 per second.

          So, the jab could be at Microsoft! However, in most cases Microsoft gets free rides, Windows 7 comes pre-installed with generic PCs and most users were forced to upgrade from grandpa XP and rouge Vista.

    • Tablets

      • Tablet Computers Will Thrive Because They Are Shareable

        -Google’s Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and now Android Developer Advocate, discussing the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, and tablet computers in general. The Galaxy Tab has a 7″ screen (almost 30% smaller than the iPad screen) and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo).

      • Samsung ‘Prioritizing’ Android Ahead of Windows Phone 7 and Its Own Bada

        In a recent disucssion with Reuters that took place at IFA, Samsung head of marketing for their mobile division YH Lee asserted the companies commitment to Android as its main smartphone focus. Lee said, “we are prioritizing our Android platform” due to the operating system being “very open and flexible.” He also noted high consumer demand for the platform that has quickly risen as a prime challenger against Apple’s iOS.

      • Samsung: ‘we are prioritizing our Android platform’

        Samsung may be one of the big players that Microsoft is pinning its hopes on for Windows Phone 7, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to the company at IFA. Speaking to Reuters at the show, Samsung’s head of marketing for its mobile division, YH Lee, said flatly that “we are prioritizing our Android platform,” adding that, “Android is very open and flexible, and there is a consumer demand for it.”

      • PC replacement trend for enterprise market to appear in 1Q11, says Asustek

        Asustek is also set to launch a tablet PC, the Eee Note, and an e-book reader, the Eee Reader, in Taiwan and Europe in October. The Eee Note adopts an ARM-based Marvell processor and Linux-based operating system, designed by Asustek, for a price of US$199-299. Asustek will also launch a Wintel-based Eee Pad tablet PC in December with the model using a 10-inch panel, Nvidia Tegra processor and Android operating system, to show up in the first quarter of 2011 for a price below US$399.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Blender 2.5 Quizzes

    An enjoyable little time-waster: test your Blender 2.5 knowledge with a Blender quizz. Right now there are four quizzes to take, and more will appear in the future.

  • Introducing fise, the Open Source RESTful Semantic Engine

    As a member of the IKS european project Nuxeo contributes to the development of an Open Source software project named fise whose goal is to help bring new and trendy semantic features to CMS by giving developers a stack of reusable HTTP semantic services to build upon.

    [...]

    A semantic engine is a software component that extracts the meaning of a electronic document to organize it as partially structured knowledge and not just as a piece of unstructured text content.

  • Open-Xchange Releases Free Migration Tool For Microsoft Outlook Users

    Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced the availability of data migration tools for users of Microsoft Outlook to easily move e-mails, contacts, appointments and tasks to Open-Xchange Server.

    [...]

    Due to PST file size limitations, PST files can be distributed amongst several workstations without a proper back-up strategy. Having all data centralized on the Open-Xchange Server enables administrators to integrate that data into their server-side backup environment and security policies. The software is available for free download at http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=OX_Outlook_Uploader

  • FOSSFactory: Collaborative Free Open Source Design, Development & Funding Community

    There is no doubt that open source movement is taking over the world, 72% web sites run on open source server Apache, wordpress the open source blogging platform based on PHP/MYSQL is the #1 blogging platform in the world. Major sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google on open source software such as PHP, Python, Ruby and Java.

    FOSS stands for Free and open source software software that is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code.

  • Is Open Source Software Competitive With Cutting-Edge Applications?

    Indeed, the larger problem is that it’s very rare to see open source software really leading innovation in important, emerging software categories such as speech recognition or social networking. The problem isn’t lack of good developers in open source. In social networking, for example, developers have created good open source offerings, but they don’t lead the pack, and they certainly don’t challenge Facebook.

    Open source is home base for renegades, rebels, and out-of-the-box thinkers. It remains a conundrum why open source software doesn’t lead the way in more important, cutting-edge tech categories.

  • More Organisations To Be Hosted On Open Source Stacks: Dave Hall

    As the desktop becomes less important, open source developer and enthusiast Dave Hall sees greater opportunities for organisations to switch to Linux-based desktop environments. In an exclusive interview, Hall talks about his contribution to FOSS and open source software and the way forward.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle

    • Print file format changes on Linux

      The CUPS print system that is used on Linux and other Unix operating systems is switching its file format from PostScript to PDF. As part of this OpenOffice.org should switch its print output file format to PDF, too. This was implemented in OOo for issue 94173.

    • OpenOffice.org Conference 2010: preparing the next ten years

      Florian Schiessl explained what made the Munich’s conversion to OpenOffice.org work: maniac attention to detail and patience. They looked at some 21000 different templates and macros one by one and converted each of them manually, but only when they were sure they couldn’t be abandoned, eventually reducing their number of about 40%. More info is at WoLimux. They had problems when they sent ODF files to other organizations that had never seen them before, but Schiessl’s suggestion is “do talk with your partners when they refuse ODF and there will be good results and simplification for everybody, for example like using MS formats, but abandoning MS-only macros because they were not necessary in the first place”. (of course, being one of the largest cities in Europe helps a lot in this approach… single users still have less opportunities to be heard).

    • Live from the OpenOffice.org Conference in Budapest

      This week the world-wide OpenOffice.org community comes together at the annual OpenOffice.org Conference in Budapest. Oracle, the steward of OpenOffice.org, is sponsoring the event and the Oracle Office team participates in various work groups and technical sessions. In his keynote, Michael Bemmer, General Manager of the new Oracle Office Global Business Unit, underlined the “importance of Oracle Open Office and OpenOffice.org to Oracle and its customers” (photo). The Open Document Format (ODF) is one of this year’s main topics of the conference with governments and businesses from all around the globe sharing their ODF experiences and discussing the overall benefits of open standards. Stay tuned to learn more about how the new solutions will make life easier for end users, and reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprises and public sector customers.

    • From the Editors: Keeping Sun’s open-source software open

      In other words, Oracle seems to be saying, competitors shouldn’t be using Oracle technology in their own products, and that includes Sun’s technology. This is, quite frankly, what many observers (including SD Times) were concerned about. Oracle does not have a tradition of playing well with others.

    • Celebrating 10 Years of OpenOffice.org – Congratulations!

  • Education

    • An open source education–for educators

      One of the challenges of working in the space between academia and open source communities is translating the cultural and timescale differences. One approach to bridging the gap is to empower people already in the academic space–like professors–to navigate the free and open source software (FOSS) world and bring that knowledge back to the institutions they come from. The week-long POSSE Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) workshop, sponsored by Red Hat, aims to do just that.

  • Business

  • Project Releases

    • Lightspark 0.4.4.1 released

      ver­sion 0.4.4.1 of the lightspark player has been just released. It’s mainly a bug fix release, the most rel­e­vant news are:

      * Fixed a crash when using flashblock
      * Restore sup­port for YouTube

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Three Keys to Success For the 21st Century Manager

      A trio of recent Harvard Business Review blog posts all center around a common theme: what does it take to be a successful business leader and manager in the 21st century? What traits and characteristics should this new generation of business leader possess?

      The posts center around three key areas: how a successful leader will handle the “new normal” of the 21st century business landscape, how the leader will exhibit the necessary people management skills, and how the leader can exponentially increase the amount of value generated by the company or organization.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Discovery, rediscovery, and open access. Part 2.

        In Part 1 of this essay (published in SOAN for August 2010) I sketched some ways in which the growth of OA modified William Garvey’s 1979 observation that “in some disciplines, it is easier to repeat an experiment than it is to determine that the experiment has already been done.”

        http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-10.htm#rediscovery1

        Here I’d like to connect OA with three variations on Garvey’s theme. Garvey focused on cases in which redoing past work is undesirable but easier than looking up the original results. The problem to solve or work around is a dysfunctional access system. Sometimes, however, we positively want to redo past work. The problem is that the original results are untested or unconfirmed, not inaccessible. Sometimes we redo past work inadvertently. The problem is our near-sighted review of past literature. Sometimes redoing past work and looking it up are both undesirable. The problem is that we’ve allowed knowledge to become taboo and replaced curiosity with a defensive preference for what we already believe. Anything is easier than looking up past work or redoing it. All literature reviews are near-sighted. The problem lies in us, our fears and complacency, or in our predecessors, who might have broken the access system, burned the books, or created a culture in which inquiry is stigmatized as disloyal and harmful to party, profits, or faith.

  • Programming

    • Eclipse Day at the Googleplex 2010

      Here at Google, we have engineers using Eclipse every day to build our external and internal products, as well as engineers building and releasing Eclipse tools. Earlier this year, we announced Eclipse Labs, which is “a single place where anyone can start and maintain their open source projects based on the Eclipse platform with just a few clicks.” Since we use Eclipse so much here at Google, hosting Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is one way of giving back to the community and providing an environment for Eclipse contributors and users to network and share ideas. We hosted Eclipse Day before in 2009 and 2008, and last week we hosted our third year where we tried out some new ideas: a brief lunchtime unconference and post-conference Ignite talks.

Leftovers

  • Six more cops indicted in Danziger Bridge shootings, coverup

    Six current or former New Orleans police officers are the latest to be indicted in the sprawling civil rights investigation into shootings on the Danziger Bridge and a subsequent conspiracy to cover up what happened. Two people died and four were injured in the tragic incident that happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

  • Justice Department Sues Infamous Joe Arpaio, ‘America’s Sheriff’
  • Nadine Gordimer goes back into battle

    Twenty years after helping defeat apartheid, the eminent writer is fighting government plans to muzzle South Africa’s media

  • Woman Sues Facebook After Being Banned From Site

    Would you drive all the way from Maryland to California to try to get your Facebook account reinstated? That’s what Karen Beth Young did but apparently this wasn’t enough to impress the Facebook receptionist on duty. “Oh, people have driven farther than you, from Canada,” she was reportedly told, according to this Forbes story.

  • The 8 Best Sites For Funny Computer Desktop Wallpapers

    When you work a lot on the computer, you come face to face with the desktop several times a day. The most important is first thing in the morning, when you start up your computer for the day, to check your email and read a few of your favorite blogs.

    There are few greater opportunities to get your mood off to a good start every day than the appearance of a really funny image or quote. With your coffee perched up to your lips, you’ll find yourself chuckling, and the entire mood of the morning has changed – you have a smile on your face before the coffee even reached your blood stream.

  • Does Cisco buying Skype make sense?

    A Cisco buyout for Skype makes sense for Skype as well. Skype, despite some efforts such as trying to combine VoIP with private branch exchange (PBX) and Unified Communications systems with Skype Connect, may be popular with people in general, but it’s never made much of an impact in the corporate markets. I’m sure Skype’s private equity owners would also welcome a buyout more than casting their bread on the uncertain waters of a Skype IPO in this shaky market.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Pathologist in G20 death case found guilty of misconduct

      The Home Office pathologist criticised for his autopsy on the body of the newspaper seller who died at the G20 protests in London was found guilty of misconduct and “deficient professional performance” today.

    • Life in America’s toughest jail

      In “Tent City”, a notorious convict camp in the Arizona desert that lacks even basic air conditioning, temperatures regularly top 130 degrees, causing no end of heat-related health problems among its internees. Arpaio once boasted that he spends more feeding his police dogs than he does on feeding his prisoners: “The dogs never committed a crime and they work for a living,” he said to justify the poor quality of the food served in his jails – just a couple of reasons, perhaps, why his jail system is subject to the most lawsuits and has the highest prisoner death rates in the US. One man who has experienced Sheriff Joe’s brand of justice at first hand is Shaun Attwood.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • US salmonella scare: farm inspections reveal manure, mice and maggots

      US politicians are coming under pressure to increase regulation of the country’s largest egg producers after a federal inspection of two companies at the centre of a salmonella scare revealed breaches of basic hygiene.

      Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspections of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, both in Iowa, found piles of chicken manure up to 2.5 metres (8ft) high beneath the hens’ cages. Employees crushed flies underfoot and live and dead maggots were seen in a manure pit.

    • Weaning the world off oil

      Ten days ago I received a letter from Cairn Energy, the British company at the centre of Greenpeace’s current direct action in the Arctic. I was told that its drilling operation is “relatively straightforward” and that the blue whales, polar bears and kittiwakes in Baffin Bay are safe, because, according to Cairn, “our programme is conventional”.

    • 75 months and counting …

      To minimise the danger of alarmism, but without hiding from the facts, we set our parameters to assume that humanity would be on the lucky end of the spectrum of environmental risk. We were optimistic, perhaps too much so, about the speed and likelihood with which ecological dominoes might fall in a warming world. Nevertheless, what we found was startling. One hundred months on from August 2008 we were set to cross an atmospheric threshold.

  • Finance

    • Auto-tune The Financial Crisis: ‘Bankers’ Song’ Takes On The Financial Crisis (VIDEO)

      Ever heard of Commissioner Rouglas Scholtz-Tweakin of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? Neither had we.

      To go along with their new expose on banks’ self-dealing, NPR and ProPublica collaborated with “reporters” at Auto-tune the News to bring us exclusive footage of the “eleventh commissioner” at the private hearings. (Hence, the reference to commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin.)

    • No bank account? Get your tax refund on plastic

      A new Treasury Department program to give people without bank accounts faster access to their tax refunds will help some avoid costly short-term loans. But careless consumers could end up racking up fees and padding bank profits.

    • Productivity falls while labor costs increase

      American companies experienced the largest drop in workplace productivity this spring in nearly four years and a rise in labor costs, suggesting businesses may no longer be able to squeeze more work out leaner staffs.

      Productivity dropped at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the April-to-June quarter, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s double the 0.9 percent decline originally reported a month ago.

    • Bernanke: Shut down banks if they threaten system

      Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a panel investigating the financial crisis that regulators must be ready to shutter the largest institutions if they threaten to bring down the financial system.

      “If the crisis has a single lesson, it is that the too-big-to-fail problem must be solved,” Bernanke said Thursday while testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

    • Wonkbook: Romer wants more stimulus; five reasons for economic optimism; illegal immigration down

      In her final speech as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer issued the clearest call any member of the administration has made for substantial new stimulus. “The only surefire ways for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less,” she said. As is her trademark, Romer delivered her “scary descriptions and warnings” with a “perma-smile and singsong delivery.”

      If you’re looking for actual optimism, however, we’ve got some of that, too: Neil Irwin sees at least five reasons to be upbeat about the economy. Many will be glad to hear that illegal immigration has fallen by two-thirds since 2005. And Republican House chairmen will be happy to know that John Boehner plans to make them more powerful if he becomes speaker.

    • Former Lehman Brothers CEO Fuld: U.S. regulators acted on ‘flawed information’

      U.S. regulators acting on “flawed information” denied Lehman Brothers the bailout assistance that its Wall Street competitors received, dooming the investment bank to collapse, former company chief executive Richard S. Fuld said Wednesday.

      In remarks before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up by Congress, Fuld testified that Lehman gave government regulators a number of options for saving the company but that these were rejected. He said the regulators just weeks later extended similar measures to other Wall Street banks.

    • Ex-Lehman CEO says regulators refused to save firm

      The former chief of Lehman Brothers told a panel investigating the financial crisis that the Wall Street firm could have been rescued, but regulators refused to help – even though they later bailed out other big banks.

      Richard S. Fuld Jr. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at a hearing that Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself in the fall of 2008.

    • Manufacturing rebound spurs biggest stock rally in months

      After their worst August in nine years, stocks kicked off September with a big snap-back rally, following the release Wednesday of surprisingly good news about the U.S. manufacturing sector.

    • Small businesses hold off spending while waiting for aid

      Small businesses have put hiring, supply buying and real estate expansion on hold as they wait out the vote on a small-business-aid bill that stalled in the Senate earlier this summer.

      The much-debated legislation offers tax breaks and waived loan fees. But it also comes with more divisive components, such as a $30 billion fund that would help community banks give loans to small businesses. Opponents say the fund would be a mini version of the often-criticized TARP large-bank bailout program.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • China accused of holding woman in mental hospital for challenging officials

      They snatched Liao Meizhi on her birthday, dragging her off the street and into a dirty blue van as others held back her husband.

      It was only two months later, when a stranger knocked on the door, that her family learned where she had been taken. The man said he had just been discharged from a nearby mental hospital – and that Liao was being held there against her will. Her husband insists she has no psychiatric problems.

    • Assange: The Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land…

      …as no doubt the story of Julian Assange’s escapades in Sweden will be known once it inevitably makes its way into the hands of one of the goofier Hollywood directors – say Robert Zemeckis or Mel Brooks, or perhaps Stephen Herek of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It would do better in the hands of Andy Wachowski, where he might do for Julian Assange what he once did for Keanu Reeves.

      Who could ask for a more beautiful set-up? It’s a story fit for a tabloid, yet it might be transformed into something an intellectual could read without embarrassment. This latest adventure is the stuff of pulp fiction, and chock full of Langley spies, computer hackers, crazy feminists, flatfooted cops and sleazy rags in the female kingdom of Sweden!

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Scammers using fake copyright infringement notices for profit

        HADOPI, meet the internautes. The French “high authority” that oversees the country’s three strikes anti-P2P file-sharing campaign is now being used by spammers and scammers who attempt to trick people out of their cash by accusing them of copyright violations.

        The e-mails have appeared in recent days, purporting to come from France’s Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (HADOPI). This is the government group that will accept file-sharing complaints from movie and music rightsholders, then issue sanctions and fines to users, with Internet disconnection and blacklisting the ultimate penalty.

      • The Era of Copyrighted Cocktails?

        So, can a cocktail be copyrighted? In short, no. The publication of a recipe can be legally protected, but the “expression of an idea,” as the lawyers in the seminar explained, cannot. It’s the reason musicians can’t be sued for covering another band’s song in a live show. But few bartenders publish their recipes. They tend to pass them on as an oral tradition.

      • iTunes song-sample plan runs into music publishers

        A trade group representing music publishers and songwriters informed Apple on Tuesday that the company could not go ahead with a plan to extend the length of iTunes song samples without the publishers permission.

      • ACTA

        • Informal Meeting of EU Foreign Affairs Ministers may discuss ACTA on September 10th

          The Dutch Parliament moves the ACTA dossier from the Economic Affairs committee to the Foreign Affairs committee.

        • US told EU to hide ACTA from public

          The United States is behind the wall of secrecy surrounding global trade talks to combat counterfeiting, say EU policy sources, who claim that American officials are refusing to let their European counterparts publish the draft agreement online.

        • USTR Behind ACTA Secrecy; This Is Not The Transparency We Were Promised

          Transparency? Not around the USTR, apparently. They’ve been using transparency as a negotiating ploy, and when they don’t get what they want, they refuse to let the document be released. Of course, in being so childish, all the US has really done is draw more scrutiny, and pretty much guarantee that a draft (including the markup that the one and only official release left out) get leaked.

Clip of the Day

Stephen Hawking


Credit: TinyOgg

09.02.10

Links 2/9/2010: New Survey Shows Red Hat GNU/Linux Increasingly Replacing Windows

Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Mainframes Have a New Need for Speed

      The first is virtualization, which more IT organizations are starting to consolidate on faster servers. Virtual machines hunger for memory and the mainframe, most likely running Linux, provides an efficient shared memory architecture.

    • IBM launching world’s fastest microprocessor

      Such workloads include data managed by DB2/IMS, and general Java performance on Linux, though we imagine the cards should fall about 60% faster as well when you beat solitaire.

    • MokaFive outs bare-metal PC hypervisor

      MokaFive thinks the market does indeed want a bare-metal PC hypervisor, and so, according to Padmanabhan, the techies at MokaFive have grabbed a popular Linux distro – the company won’t say which one – and ripped out everything that was not necessary and locked it down to turn it into a hypervisor for running the Moka Player.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 2 Episode 16

      In this episode: Sony was legally allowed to remove the ‘Other OS’ feature from the Playstation 3, according to Australian lawmakers. Glibc is now really free and KSplice gets into Fedora. We report back from the mid-point of our games development challenge, and ask, what’s your favourite Linux improvement?

  • Applications

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • TrygTech Announces Linux-based BSP for Topaz i.MX25 CPU Module

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Motorola Defy: Android 2.1 goes rugged with water, dust and scratch resistance

          Remember the Motorola i1? Moto has just added its second rugged(ish) Android handset in the 3.7-inch Gorilla Glass-fronted Defy. It’s dust-, scratch-, impact-, and water-resistant. Matching up to the IP67 durability spec means it’s expected to resist being submersed in up to a meter of water for up to half an hour — making it a pretty awesome option for taking your Android to the beach, 854 x 480 is your screen resolution, backed up by an OMAP 3610 chip running at 800MHz (there had to be some tradeoffs, right?).

        • Motorola spins rugged Android phone and a new Milestone

          Motorola has long made ruggedized phones running Linux, but the Defy is only its second such Android model after the Motorola i1 was unveiled in March. The Defy offers a larger display and more features than the 3.1-inch i1, but it lacks the phone’s push-to-talk capability designed for Sprint’s iDEN-ready Nextel Direct Connect service.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • HP netbooks get dual-core Atoms

        HP has revamped two of its 10.1-inch netbooks to include Intel’s recently announced, dual-core Atom N550 processor, along with optional Broadcom video accelerator chips. Both netbooks are available with Windows 7, but the Mini 210 also offers a Linux-based “QuickWeb” fast boot option, and the Mini 5103 is available with a full SUSE Linux installation.

    • Tablets

      • Archos releases five budget Android tablets

        In terms of the individual models’ hardware, the information Archos has disclosed is sparse. To assess the devices’ suitability as internet tablets, such details as their display resolution and battery life would be helpful. In terms of software, Archos offers its own Android apps for rendering videos, photos and music.

      • Haptic technology targets Android tablets

        Immersion Corp. announced technology designed to enable touch feedback effects for tablets and other devices running either Android or Windows 7. The “TouchSense 2500″ solution has already been built into Toshiba’s dual-screen tablet, the Libretto W100, the company adds.

Free Software/Open Source

  • You can make money with open source. Literally.

    This is an old story–two years old, to be specific. But it was new to me when I heard it at LinuxCon, and it was new to a lot of others in the room too. And it was a great story, so I wanted to share it further.

    In 2008, the Dutch Ministry of Finance held a competition to design a coin that would honor the country’s architecture.

    To briefly describe the coin, on one side is a portrait of Queen Beatrix. But on closer examination, the portrait is made of of the names of Dutch architects. The names aren’t all readable with the human eye, which the designer describes as a “compact disc” of information in the ancient format of a coin.

  • Open Source Problem-Solving Tool Helps FOSS Teams Stay Focused

    If you’ve ever been gridlocked in a group decision-making process, you know how quickly things can go from frustrating to downright unwieldy. Even with a common goal in mind, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and competing opinions. Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ACH) is an open source application that’s been helping the CIA with its research methodologies for years and it’s freely available to the public to help groups look at — and solve — problems objectively.

  • Open Source, Low Cost GSM Cell Service Offered at Burning Man

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Drumbeat: what’s next?

        But, the fact of the matter is, Mozilla isn’t naturally good at this. We’re more often than not too earnest about the web. We need to develop or lighter sexier side. Especially if we want millions of people across the web to join and support our cause. In terms of Drumbeat next steps, this is a major area we need to work on.

  • SaaS

    • CloudBees Launches Hudson as a Service

      The vision of CloudBees is to offer a Java Platform as a Service. This is cool, but the market will take time to evolve. The interesting twist that CloudBees has come up with is to offer real services to the Java community as a Cloud based service (kind of like how SalesForce is useful to sales teams, CloudBees will initially be very useful to development teams).

    • Skygone Cloud Powers Open Source Web Mapping Suite – OpenGeo Cloud Edition

      Skygone Inc., a leader in geospatial cloud computing, today announces the launch of OpenGeo Cloud Edition; the first fully-supported, open source web-mapping software suite delivered to users via cloud computing.

    • How Facebook Scales with Open Source

      As Facebook has grown, the company has worked to develop a number of tools to handle this data, both in terms of the storage and the delivery of content, and it has open sourced many of these. Facebook has been built from the beginning on open source technologies, according to David Recordon, Facebook’s Open Source Programs Manager. But Facebook’s use of open source goes far beyond the LAMP stack (or even, beyond the LAMP stack plus Memcached). The company has also created and released several open source projects and participates heavily in others, most notably perhaps, Hadoop.

    • Have we reached a tipping point for cloud-based VoIP?

      Given the expectation that most people have now of being able to reach anyone, at any time by e-mail, IM or voice, that would seem to be the case. And by building upon the open source base, that will happen even faster.

    • “Open Standards Of Cloud Computing, Key Challenge To Open Source”

  • CMS

    • Version 4 of Plone CMS released

      The Plone developers have released version 4.0 of their open source content management system (CMS). The developers have improved performance, included a new theme, reduced the system’s memory requirements and implemented an improved user and group management feature.

    • Vividwireless goes social, open source to attract uni students

      Like the Unwired site before it, vividwireless’ website has gone the open source route and is based entirely on the Drupal content management system; a second local win for the community after the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) also launched its Drupal site last week. The company charged with building the site, PreviousNext, has continued to work with the ABC in using Drupal to launch social networking initiatives as well as whole sites including the Hungry Beast, ABC Digital Radio and the forthcoming ABC Music site revamp.

    • ‘Diaspora’ – open source Facebook alternative launches September 15th

  • Education

    • Kitsap Regional Library Catalog System Ailing

      King County libraries have based their software development on Evergreen, an open-source integrated library software system developed by a group of up-and-coming IT geeks for Georgia’s statewide library system.

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Freedom Day 2010
    • Ohio LinuxFest 2010: sudo install freedom

      The eighth annual Ohio LinuxFest is September 10-12 in lovely Columbus, Ohio. As always, this is a free event chock full of interesting hands-on Linux and free software solutions. Register at the Supporter level for $65 and you’ll get lunch, one of the gorgeous t-shirts pictured here, and that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting an event like this.

  • Project Releases

    • Mahara: Who’d Have Thought?

      One of the things that warms the cockles of my heart is the widening ripple of open source. Starting, as it did, with core system software, it is now moving ever further into more specialised areas.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • What would scholarly communications look like if we invented it today?

      I’ve largely stolen the title of this post from Daniel Mietchen because I it helped me to frame the issues. I’m giving an informal talk this afternoon and will, as I frequently do, use this to think through what I want to say. Needless to say this whole post is built to a very large extent on the contributions and ideas of others that are not adequately credited in the text here.

    • Open Hardware

      • Apertus Open Source Hardware and Software Targets HD Video Cam Market

        The success of a consumer-grade open-source HD video camcorder may not sound as appealing today due the declining costs and prices of consumer camcorders from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, JVC, and others over the years, but the prospect of a geek-oriented model makes the Apertus stand out in the crowd. The Apertus camera uses the open source Elphel software along with an open source hardware reference design, combining the Aptina CMOS sensor to accommodate C-mount and CS-lenses and a range of shooting modes, including RAW image files.

  • Programming

    • GitHub launches “Pull Requests 2.0″

      GitHub has announced “Pull Requests 2.0″, a revamping of the Git pull request system which enhances the system’s collaborative capabilities. GitHub provides hosted repositories for Git, the distributed revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds, enhancing the system in its own web front end and tools. GitHub has become one of the most active venues for open source developers to share, discuss and develop their code, building on Git’s ability to allow developers to clone a code repository and work with the code without having to coordinate pushing changes back.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Web versus Apps: what is missing in HTML5

      3D gaming: There is at the moment no way to create something like the Epic Citadel demo, or Carmack’s RAGE engine on iOS. The only potential alternative is WebGL, that is (like the previous links) based on OpenGL 2.0 ES, and paints on the HTML5 canvas (that, in the presence of proper support for hardware compositing, should allow for complex interfaces and effects). The problem is that browser support is still immature – most browsers are still experimenting in an accelerated compositing pipeline right now, and there are still lots of problems that need to be solved before the platform can be considered stable. However, after the basic infrastructure is done, there is no reason for not seeing things like the current state of the art demos on the web; modern in-browser Javascript JIT are good enough for action and scripting, web workers and web sockets are stable enough to create complex, asynchronous event models. It will take an additional year, probably, until the 3D support is good enough to see something like WoW inside a browser.

Leftovers

  • The Tweet Paywall

    I encountered for the first time today in accessing Steve Daniels’ book about Kenyan craftsmen, Making Do. Tweeting about the book (with my own verbiage) got me a digital copy of the beautifully illustrated book for free.

  • `Top Gear’ Driver `Stig’ Named as Ben Collins After BBC Loses Court Ruling

    News Corp.’s HarperCollins revealed the identity of the “Stig,” a test driver who appears on the television show “Top Gear,” after the British Broadcasting Corp. lost a ruling to keep his identity secret.

    The publisher said racing driver Ben Collins is the masked man who tests the performance of cars on one of the U.K.’s most popular television shows. The announcement came after High Court Judge Paul Morgan in London refused a request from the BBC to keep the character’s identity secret. HarperCollins plans to publish the driver’s autobiography on Sept. 16.

  • In Defense of Links, part three: In links we trust

    The history of Web linking has been a long chronicle of controversies we didn’t need to have: irrelevant debates over issues like so-called deep linking (if you really don’t want to be linked to, why are you on the public Web?) or the notion of a power-law-driven A-list in blogging (if you want to become a celebrity, other media are far more efficient). To this list, we can now add the “delinkification” dustup.

    It’s hard to imagine the benefit for ourselves, or for the Web, of a general retreat from linking. Writing on the Web without linking is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.

    A long time ago, I wrote a column titled Fear of Links about the then-burgeoning movement of webloggers. I urged professional writers to stop looking down their noses at links and those who make them: “A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.”

    That was 1999. Today, we live in that piece’s “tomorrow.”

  • Science

    • God did not create Universe: Hawking

      God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system

      Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company’s transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter’s extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter’s OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter’s very own official client application for Android.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • German Military Study Warns of Potential Energy Crisis

      This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, that warned of the risks posed by peak oil.

    • Friends of the Earth urges end to ‘land grab’ for biofuels

      European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).

      In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.

    • Tokyo Two: Online March for Justice

      Greenpeace anti-whaling activists Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato (the “Tokyo Two”) have been facing trial for nearly two years in Japan and now a verdict will be announced on Monday September 6th.

    • Gulf oil rig explodes off La. coast

      An offshore oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Lawyer Offers Self Help To Sued BitTorrent Users

        In recent months thousands of US BitTorrent users have been sued for allegedly having shared movies such as The Hurt Locker and Far Cry. Because the settlement amount proposed by the copyright holders is less than hiring a defense lawyer, many defendants have not sought legal representation. Acknowledging this injustice, attorney Graham Syfert is now offering a cheap solution to the problem.

      • ACTA

        • The Truth about Fakes (and Piracy)

          My reading of this is that whatever the industries concerned might say about how awful, deceptive and damaging fakes and piracy are to the economy, ordinary people – and the newspapers that try to mirror their views – know that the true picture is rather different. It also means that ACTA is even more wrong-headed than even I thought.

Clip of the Day

MSI Company Profile


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 2/9/2010: Red Hat at Year Highs, Fake ‘Open Source’ Called Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Choosing an Open Source Systems Management Solution

    The Little 4 may be smaller in terms of their bottom lines, but in terms of systems management capabilities, there’s nothing little about the open source offerings from Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWork Open Source, and The OpenNMS Group.

  • Events

    • Nomination period open for Nordic Free Software Award

      The Nordic Free Software Award given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL 9.0′s first release candidate arrives

      The first release candidate for version 9.0 of the PostgreSQL open source database has been released after four months in beta. The developers expect no changes in commands, interfaces or APIs between the release candidate and the final release, though there may be more release candidates before then, depending on bug reports. The most prominent feature in the new release is integrated replication using “Hot Standby” and “Streaming Replication” while other features include full support for 64-bit Windows, improved reporting queries, SQL standard per-column triggers, enhanced Perl and Python integrations and easier database permission management.

  • Oracle

    • The end of OpenSolaris?

      Sun aspired to be central to the next network-inspired boom, and it was understood that to do that, you had to be promiscuous, available, familiar, and easy-to-acquire. Hence open source, and hence OpenSolaris, and hence creating an OpenSolaris distribution (rather than just offer the source).

    • The State of Oracle/Sun Grid Engine

      Let’s take a look at the good news. According to DanT’s Grid Blog Oracle has plans for Grid Engine. As Dan mentions, Grid Engine does not compete with any Oracle product and like other resource managers has applications outside of HPC, which probably means Cloud based solutions.

  • Education

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Comment: The hype is over

      However, it didn’t quite work out that way: Commercial open source software, it turns out, is just the same as any other commercial software; the only difference is that one gets to take a peek at the source code (and often only certain portions of the code, see The H Open feature “Open core, closed heart?”) and can download a free trial version with varying degrees of functional restrictions from the internet.

      But what about vendor independence? There is only one company that can offer vendor support for SugarCRM. Lower costs? Commercial open source vendors need to cover their development costs just like every other software vendor. Low entry requirements? Not least because of the competition from the open source community, more and more proprietary applications now also offer free trial or community versions. And don’t you dare mess with the code if you wish to have vendor support.

      The “commercial open source” model, it seems to me, has outlived itself. Sure enough, vendors such as Alfresco or SugarCRM have established themselves in the market – because their products stand up to those of their proprietary competitors. Not because their software is open source, however – this “only” gave them an added edge compared to other start-ups. However, this effect is now gone, and companies who develop open source software are no longer considered extraordinary.

    • Open source 4.0: excellent for dancing

      By commercializing open source projects indirectly, through complementary products and services, multiple vendors are able to seize a commercial advantage and run with it without endangering the core open source project. As long as they continue to collaborate on the non-differentiating code, the project should benefit from being stretched in multiple directions.

      There will inevitably be some vendors that want to have their cake and it eat – benefiting from the work of others without sharing – but that is an inherent risk with community-developed open source, and I would argue that most have learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating than they do from forking and that it is in their own commercial interests to contribute to the common good.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD Will Continue Supporting ZFS

      Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode.

    • ZFS Support Will Continue In FreeBSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry (August 2010)

      This month we welcome Jose Marchesi as maintainer of the new package recutils, Mike Gran as maintainer of the new package guile-ncurses, and long-time maintainers Bruno Haible, Jim Meyering, and Simon Josefsson adding the new package vc-changelog to their duties.

    • Software Freedom Day to be marked in Melbourne

      Software Freedom Day, a day observed worldwide to spread the message of free and open source software, will be marked in Melbourne on September 18 from 10am to 4pm at the State Library of Victoria.

  • Government

    • Can councils rise to the Open Source challenge? Should they?

      There was an interesting little piece in the Guardian few days ago suggesting that local authorities could save £51 million by moving some council employees to Open Office* and ODF**, and away from Microsoft Office and their document format, with the total savings rocketing to £200 million if every council employee in the country moved over.

      This sensible proposal came from Cllr Liam Maxwell who’s reponsible for IT in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and I’m sure Cllr Maxwell would be the first to acknowledge it’s not a new suggestion. The office suite – as a commodity piece of software – has long been seen as one of the easiest ways to get open source onto people’s desktops and save money in the process.

      I’m certain Cllr Maxwell also appreciates that there are issues, some of which are mentioned in the Guardian, but they’re not made very clear and it’s worth expanding on them.

  • Licensing

    • Could this Lawsuit Undermine the GNU GPL?

      As Welte says, this really is outrageous: it’s GPL’d code, and the embedded system manufacturer is somehow trying to claim that it has the right to stop someone else from using and modifying that code on those devices – as if the hardware made any difference. But the whole point of the GPL is that others must be able to take software distributed under it and use it as they wish.

      I suspect that with some careful explanation from Welte (and others), the company will see that it doesn’t have a case, and the court action will be quietly dropped. On the other hand, if the case were to go forward and resulted in a win for the company concerned, it would represent a major problem for the GPL. Stay tuned…

    • More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case

      Right now I’m facing what I’d consider the most outrageous case that I’ve been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Sharing Economy

      Sharing. It’s one of the first things most children are urged to do.

      Few children, though, have the presence-of-mind to ask their parents when they last shared their weed-eater, their water blaster or even their car.

      The fact that virtually every garage has one of each of the above suggests the concept of sharing has some way to go in the adult world.

      Yet if dwindling resources and growing population is the biggest issue of our times, this will need to change. Everyone with one item of everything is not a sustainable thought.

    • The Case For Open-Source Design: Can Design By Committee Work?

      The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

    • Open Data

      • The ABCD of Open Scholarship

        We had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Dave Flanders (JISC) David Shotton’s (Oxford) group (#jiscopencite) and our #jiscopenbib (Cambridge/OKF) – more details later. We really believe these projects can make a major change to Open Scholarship. We came up – almost by chance with the ABCD of Open Scholarship:

        * Open Access
        * Open Bibliography
        * Open Citations
        * Open Data

    • Open Hardware

      • Arduino Projects: Getting Started

        Anyone who has ever hacked around in their PC will have been hit with an urge to take their tinkering to the next level and create a custom-built device, but few actually try – believing such things to be far too complicated. At least, until the Arduino appeared on the scene.

        Originally developed in Italy in 2005 as a tool for students building interactive design projects, the Arduino is a microcontroller-based prototyping board – but one that pretty much removes the barriers to entry that previous electronic prototyping systems had.

  • Programming

    • September Project of the Month: GPL Ghostscript

      The end of the year is right around the corner (already!) but we’re not quite done showcasing projects that have been with us for 10 years or more. September’s Project of the Month is GPL Ghostscript, a complete set of page description language interpreters including PDF, PostScript, PCL5, PCLXL, and XPS.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Bill would let repeat offenders hide record

    Six state senators want to give a break to ex-convicts who might be haunted by their criminal records when they attempt to land jobs.

    Senate Bill 291 would remove court and police records from public view by allowing nonviolent criminals with multiple convictions to apply to seal records documenting their offenses after five years of clean conduct.

  • Northern Ky. teacher wins $11 million judgment against gossip Web site

    A gossip Web site has been hit with an $11 million judgment for libel and slander after posting false accusations that a Northern Kentucky teacher who works on the side as a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader was exposed to two venereal diseases.

  • Perhaps Avoiding Links Is Really A Way To Get People Not To Read The Details Of The Studies You’re Misrepresenting

    Earlier this year, as part of a discussion about Nick Carr’s most recent book we pointed to some reports that noted Carr appeared to misrepresent the scientific research to support his point. It appears that others are finding more examples of this as well. There was a little web-hubbub that I ignored earlier this year when Carr declared that links in documents were bad, and he was shifting all his links to the end. This was apparently based on some research, Carr claimed, that showed links in text are really distracting. Personally, I found that premise to be laughable, as I think after my second week online I stopped being distracted by links and quickly learned to use them effectively.

    Still, without having a chance to dig into the research, I didn’t have much to say on the subject. However, Scott Rosenberg is digging in and finding that, once again, it appears that Carr is conveniently misrepresenting the studies he relies on to support his anti-link thesis. T

  • The new banana republic

    All governments need to be watched. You never know when one of them will slip in a nasty tax on the quiet or pass a seemingly simple notification that can be the undoing of entire communities or of the environment. That is the nature of the beast. But how vigilant can people be with a government that will try to alter the entire complexion of a critical law-in-the-making by sneakily replacing a clear-cut ‘or’ with a lethal ‘and’—under the very noses of the MPs opposed to legislation?

  • Why our jobs are getting worse

    And all this was enabled by technology. The modern supermarket – with its electronic scanning and inventory controls and price reductions decided by a software program run out of head office – is probably more hi-tech than any web-design firm. The result is that the man or woman in charge of your typical supermarket (or other chain shop) now has little to do with the selling or arrangement of goods: nowadays they concentrate on driving their staff to meet the targets set by head office. Their job is not so much retail-management as rowing cox.

  • Science

    • Ancient brewers tapped antibiotic secrets

      of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

      The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Special constable jailed for Wigan ex-soldier attack

      A Greater Manchester Police special constable convicted of assaulting an off-duty soldier and lying about the attack has been jailed for three years.

      Peter Lightfoot, 40, was filmed hitting Mark Aspinall while attempting to arrest him after he had been thrown out of a Wigan club last July.

    • After Katrina, New Orleans Cops Were Told They Could Shoot Looters

      In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department.

    • Vladimir Putin says ‘unsanctioned’ protesters can expect police brutality

      Vladimir Putin today angrily dismissed protests against his regime as “provocations” and said anyone who took part in unsanctioned street rallies against the Kremlin should expect a “whack on the bonce”.

    • Hay-what?

      So, in essence, the outside public – including Iranians – are asked to believe that a) Haystack software exists b) Haystack software works c) Haystack software rocks d) the Iranian government doesn’t yet have a copy of it, nor do they know that Haystack rocks & works. (And who could fault them for not reading Newsweek? I certainly can’t). For someone with my Eastern European sensibilities, that’s a lot of stuff to believe in. Even Santa – we call him Ded Moroz – appears more plausible in comparison.

    • Andy Coulson discussed phone hacking at News of the World, report claims

      The prime minister’s media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and “actively encouraged” a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

    • Blair Almost Ordered London Plane Shot Down On 9/11

      Those who were in London on 11 September 2001 may recall the wild speculation flying around about potential attacks on our own city. Several hijacked planes were heading for London, the whole of Canary Wharf was being evacuated…anything might happen. Fortunately, we were hit by nothing more than rumour. But a new revelation from Tony Blair’s memoirs reveals how close we came to accidental tragedy.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ‘Phantom’ oil slick was a smear against Climate Camp

      What’s ironic about all this is that the big news on the Guardian’s website isn’t an investigation into whether or not the police deliberately misled the public by duping lazy newspapers into regurgitating a fake smear story. Rather, some journalists think that it’s the Climate Camp who are the ones supposedly controlling the media.

  • Finance

    • Goldman feels heat in suit vs. Dollar Thrifty

      The investment bank, which is still trying to burnish its reputation after settling fraud charges brought this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, stands accused in a lawsuit of using information it gleaned from one client to win business from another.

    • Ex-Lehman CEO says regulators refused to save firm

      The former chief of Lehman Brothers told a panel investigating the financial crisis that the Wall Street firm could have been rescued, but regulators’ refused to help – even though they later bailed out other big banks.

      Richard S. Fuld Jr. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at a hearing that Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself in the fall of 2008.

    • No holiday for labor unions

      Labor Day this year comes draped in mourning. More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours, been forced to go part-time or seen other such problems during and after the Great Recession.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

      Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • William Gibson jacks into Google’s cool menace

      I don’t like William Gibson’s Op-Ed piece on Google in today’s New York Times merely because, barely a week after I went all Jeremy Bentham Panopticonic on the cat bin lady, he writes that “Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google.” Even though it’s kind of a put-down (perennial!), still, great minds think almost alike, right?

    • India lifts threat of block on BlackBerrys

      Stepping back from the brink of a crackdown, India’s ministry of home affairs said RIM had made “certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these would be operationalised immediately”. It did not offer any detail on these concessions and RIM, which is based in Toronto, declined to comment.

    • Sneaky Senate Trying To Slip Internet Kill Switch Past Us

      Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • AT&T: Net rules must allow ‘paid prioritization’

      AT&T said Tuesday that any Net neutrality plan restricting its ability to engage in “paid prioritization” of network traffic would be harmful and contrary to the fundamental principles of the Internet.

      Telecommunications providers need the ability to set different prices for different forms of Internet service, AT&T said, adding that it already has “hundreds” of customers who have paid extra for higher-priority services.

    • AT&T calls net neutrality advocate a conspiracy theorist

      In a letter to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), AT&T tried to rubbish points made by the group, calling them “not exactly true”. The argument revolves around the notion of “paid prioritisation” of Internet connectivity, something that net neutrality activists are fiercely against.

      AT&T claims that the Free Press, in supporting Diffserv, is in direct contradiction to its support of equal packet rights. Diffserv is one of a number of mechanisms proposed to provide differing quality of service (QoS), though typically it is run on customers’ routers.

      The telecom behemoth argues that paid prioritisation will not create an Internet ‘rich club’, saying that small to medium businesses voluntarily take AT&T up on the offer. However the fact that a few firms purchase managed connectivity from AT&T doesn’t really change the fact that applying such policies at the network core is something that will concern the majority of users. Judging by the lengths to which AT&T goes to promote it, those fears won’t be allayed any time soon.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Mixing it up without IP

      Intellectual property exists to promote progress. Its purpose is not to ensure that no one’s ideas are stolen or that creative people can earn a living, unless those things are needed to promote progress in a field. The granting of temporary monopolies in the form of patents and copyrights is the price we pay for progress, not a goal in itself.

      It might be completely true that bartenders are shamelessly stealing from each other, and that’s certainly something we should condemn, but we probably shouldn’t get the law involved unless we can show that this theft is causing mixology to stagnate. Along with fashion, cooking, and even magic, we’re in an industry that’s arguably better off with weak IP. This decade’s boom in craft cocktails is a sign that we’re doing OK without stricter protections, and I’d be worried that additional threats of lawsuits would have a chilling effect on the sharing of new techniques and recipes.

    • Copyrights

      • Indian gov’t issues music royalty directive

        A long-standing issue over revenue terms between private FM radio stations and music labels here saw the Copyright Board issuing a directive Wednesday laying out a revenue-sharing model instead of the earlier fixed-cost structure.

        The Copyright Board, part of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, has been mediating a bitter dispute over the last couple of years between FM stations and music labels over establishing a revenue model between both parties. Private stations launched here over five years ago after the government auctioned licenses inviting private players in radio broadcasting.

      • Consumer survey on copyright access barriers

        Access to Knowledge: Reports of Campaigns and Research 2008-2010The biggest barriers that consumers face in accessing copyrighti works are those created by copyright law. Even so, consumers around the world will choose original copyright works over pirated copies, provided that they are available at an affordable price.

      • ZeroPaid Interviews Russell McOrmond 2 – Canadian Bill C-32 (Part 2 of 3)

        A law closer to the language of the WIPO treaties wouldn’t protect this practice. In the short term even the USA DMCA doesn’t protect this practise. Bill C-32 would legally protect this practise, given circumventing access control technical measures and even providing tools to change the locks on what we own are being made illegal.

      • Foreworld as Foretaste

        That is, piracy isn’t a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text – again, something that pirates can’t offer.

      • Compartilhamento legal! – Brazil is putting an end to the ‘war on copying,’ at R$ 3,00 per month

        An overlapping constellation of civil society and art actors focussed their submission on a single issue: file-sharing. Under the slogan “Compartilhamento legal! R$3,00 de todos para tudo,” this network is proposing to legalize non-commercial file-sharing in exchange for a levy on broadband Internet access. The idea is nearly as old as peer-to-peer file-sharing itself. It has been tested in technology and in law making a few times. Here and now in Brazil, it feels like it might actually become a reality.

Clip of the Day

emacs text editor


Credit: TinyOgg

09.01.10

IRC Proceedings: September 1st, 2010

Posted in News Roundup at 11:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

Links 1/9/2010: Linux in Ukraine, ‘Green Party’ of Belgium Moves to GNU/Linux Desktops

Posted in News Roundup at 3:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Aussie gamer loses Playstation court fight

    A gamer who sued Sony over an upgrade that removed functions from his Playstation 3 console has lost a court claim against the company.

    Adelaide man Michael Trebilcock wanted $800 in compensation, claiming the upgrade meant the console could no longer be used as a computer.

  • Ukraine to Create is Own GNU/Linux Distro

    I’ve been writing for a while about Russia’s on-off idea of creating its own GNU/Linux distro. It looks like Ukraine is following suit. Via Google Translate:

    its purpose is to optimize the expenditure of budgetary funds and the solution using unlicensed software in state bodies.

    According to estimates from officials, the savings of switching apparatus to free software can be 87%.

  • Desktop

    • An Application Dock for Linux

      I am a PC, Mac, and Linux user. At night I dual boot between Vista and Ubuntu and during the day I use a Mac almost exclusively. As a result, there are many things I like about using my Mac at work and would not mind seeing them on my home desktop. Since buying a Mac right now for personal use is out of the question I have to make do with what I already have. At any rate, one of the Mac features I actually like is the Dock. For those of you who are not Mac users, the Dock is basically a bar at the bottom of the desktop where application icons can be displayed that will launch the application once clicked on. It’s attractive and useful and I have wanted one on my non-Mac desktops for some time now.

    • My Linux Experience

      Long story short, I use Ubuntu because it was the first distro that actually worked without pulling teeth, and it still works fine for everything I do. I’ve had a few issues with it, I think they push some changes too soon without ironing bugs out – which incidentally is why I don’t use Fedora, I like my stuff to tend towards stability rather than cutting edge. I’ve tried Debian but it seems TOO slow moving. Ubuntu just works, it does everything I want it to, and I have never really been left wanting.

    • Is your company afraid of Linux? (3 of 3)

      Most Linux distributions are free to download and use, although, there are a few Linux enterprise shops that provide licensing and professional support for their product. SUSE (now a division of Novell) and RedHat are two of the most popular. SUSE’s enterprise server license ranges form $400 to $1500. RedHat is anywhere from $400 to $1,200. These license plans “include” professional support anywhere from email-only support to 24×7 phone support. Each license is renewable yearly because of the licenses focus around their professional support plans.

    • BE: Political party moving to a complete open source desktop

      Ecolo, a green political party in Belgium, is planning to complete its move to a complete open source desktop system by the end of 2011. On the 220 workstations in its main office, it will gradually replace the underlying operating system to Ubuntu Linux, says Sebastien Bollingh, the party’s ICT manager.

  • Google

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE SC 4.5 Falls Short

        It’s great that the new focus has been on solidifying the desktop, but with new regressions and no major must-have features to make this release worthwhile, I simply can’t recommend it in its current state. For now, I recommend sticking with KDE 4.4 for the time being and blocking this release if your distribution allows it. I’m confident though that future point releases will solidify KDE 4.5, and when that happens I may consider taking another look.

      • Reviewed: KDE 4.5

        Trepidation. That about sums up the feeling of upgrading to a new version of KDE. You want to like it, but are afraid that whatever has been fixed will be counterbalanced by something rather sucky. This version of KDE has seen 16,022 bugs fixed and 1,723 new feature requests added, so the balance is in favour of not-sucky. Or is it?

        For the most part, the improvements in this version of KDE aren’t the things that you see, but the things that you don’t see any longer. Chief among the long list of user grievances in 4.4 was the behaviour of system notifications – no longer. Now the notifications look better and don’t clog up the screen for 10 minutes every time you try to copy a file somewhere it can’t fit.

        [...]

        Our Verdict: Now with less suck, the 4.x series moves from being merely usable to almost desirable. 8/10

      • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-08-31

        This week on KDEMU, Paul sends a shout-out, Gamaral sends a shout-out and Jeff sends a shout-out right after sharing what Amarok, KDE Sysadmin and CampKDE are all about.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • A Good Reason to Use PCLinuxOS 2010

        CFS trades higher kernel overhead for maximizing interactive performance. On mobile devices, the higher overhead means running the processor at higher speeds, which builds more heat. Heat is the enemy of every mobile device.

        For a bit of background, Con Koliva developed the Rotating Staircase Deadline scheduler, which inspired Ingo Molnar to develop CFS. Seeing the problems with CFS, Con Koliva designed BFS (Brain Fucked Scheduler), an expression of how he felt about writing yet another scheduler. Con Koliva designed BFS for those devices with less than 16 cores, which, to the best of my knowledge, covers all mobile devices, and older non-mobile desktops.

        Although it first appeared in September of 2009, there was not an immediate rush to switch from CFS to BFS. Android has a development branch that includes BFS. It was not included in the Froyo (Android 2.2) release, as a customer survey did not show any differences. At this time, only Zenwalk 6.4 and PCLinuxOS 2010 use BFS as the default scheduler. As it matures, you may see BFS appear in other mobile projects, such as MeeGo.

      • PCLinuxOS

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • You can help the defenders.

        Here’s a brief snippet of what I wrote to the advisory-board list this morning:

        Red Hat Legal provides numerous services as counsel to the Fedora community, including defending Fedora trademarks against possible encroachment. Occasionally, people who have no connection to our community attempt to use the Fedora trademark to signify business efforts that have no connection to the Fedora Project, our distribution, or the Fedora community. Red Hat Legal is currently working on just such a defense. They’ve asked me to pass on a request for assistance in gathering physical evidence of our use of the Fedora logo worldwide prior to January 30, 2007.

      • Today: Open Your World webcast with Stefan Lindegaard on the Open Innovation Revolution

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • A day of failure with Debian

        The Broadcom driver has been annoying me since I got the ProBook. The only distro on which I managed to manually install it is Fedora. On Ubuntu, I now connect to the Internet using my ZTE MF110 modem and use Hardware Drivers (jockey?) to automatically install it. On a side note, I couldn’t do that with Kubuntu, because KNetworkManager is too buggy to let me connect to networks that do not support 2G data (which Digi Mobil Romania is).

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 208

          Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Natty Narwhal, I am tickled pink to announce the details of the next Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place in Orlando, USA from 25th – 29th October 2010. We also have a brand new Ubuntu Developer Summit website which provides all the details about how to get there and why UDS is interesting if you are in our community, if you are an upstream, and if you are a vendor.

        • Default Wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.10 – Looks Like the Inside of a Barf Bag

          I made no secret of my dislike for the “Aubergine” wallpaper in Ubuntu 10.04. If you had asked me when that was released if I thought Ubuntu/Canoncial could come up with something worse, I would have said no.

          Unfortunately, I would have been wrong. Ubuntu has revealed the default wallpaper for their 10.10 release. I swear to you, it looks like the inside of a barf bag. Every time I look at it, I get a very strong urge to contribute more to that bag… Take a look for yourself. Read the comments. Ugh. Bletch.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Reviewed: Linux Mint 9 KDE

            Despite this, Mint is up there with Kubuntu as a coherent KDE desktop. If you’ve used Gnome Mint, but fancy lots of apps with a capitalised K in the name, this is the logical choice.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Palm Reveals webOS 2.0 SDK Beta

        Palm released new information on webOS 2.0, the Linux-based mobile OS that powers the Palm Pre and Pixi.

        The announcement highlighted 7 core features new to webOS 2.0. It’s confirmed that webOS 2.0 will feature multi-tasking in the form of Stacks. Stacks groups related applications into fanned stacks similar to a deck of cards, reducing clutter. webOS 2.0 automatically groups similar applications together, but it’s possible to manually group applications as well.

      • WebOS 2.0 Pushed to Developers

    • Tablets

      • Hands-On With Stream TV’s Surprising, Open Source-Friendly Tablet

        If anyone unseats the iPad, the victor might be the one that doesn’t try to beat Apple at its own game. We checked out Stream TV’s eLocity Android tablet first-hand, and this plucky contender may put up a serious fight.

        To say that the eLocity A7 isn’t going directly head to head with the iPad isn’t to say that it’s not out to impress. The solidly built 7-inch tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s beefy, dual core Tegra 2 processor, will run Froyo out of the box and is capable of outputting a plethora of formats at 1080p via an included HDMI cable.

Free Software/Open Source

  • XBMC 10.0 Beta 1 features new Add-ons system

    XBMC 10.0 Beta 1 is available to download from one of the project’s mirrors. XBMC source code is hosted on SourceForge and is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The most recent stable release is version 9.11 from the end of December, 2009.

  • Time for IBM to become an open source hero

    I’m not asking IBM to do something against its interests here. Quite the contrary. It is very much in IBM’s own interest that it step up and lead the open source movement. That’s something IBM representatives have been telling their customers and business partners for some time, that you give in order to get.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox’s New “JaegerMonkey” JavaScript Engine is Revving Up, About 20% Faster Already

        Firefox 4.0 is probably going to be one among the most important release Mozilla team has ever made. Competition is breathing down its neck like never before. Even IE, in its latest avatar(read IE9) is fast becoming a better piece of software. Mozilla’s answer to all this lies in upcoming Firefox 4.0. Already a lot of improvements have been made. But the biggest change is going to be the the new JavaScript engine called “JaegerMonkey”.

  • Databases

    • Famous Online Game and Online Word Processor use CUBRID Database

      Today is a Big day at Naver.com, Korea’s No.1 Search Portal with 34 million subscribers and 17 million daily unique visotors. Today Naver launches its new Online Word Processor Service backed up by CUBRID Database Server in an Open Beta state. The Word Processor service runs on CUBRID 2008 R2.2 with High-Availability feature ON. There is an approximate estimate that CUBRID Database will be process several million batch requests every day.

    • EnterpriseDB: Open Source Database Attracts More Funding

      EnterpriseDB, which provides enterprise-level open source PostgreSQL database services, has announced its completed a round of funding, adding KT (formerly Korea Telecom) and TransLink Capital to its list of investors. Here’s the story.

      While the company didn’t disclose the financial terms of the investments, EnterpriseDB’s press release says that TransLink Capital co-founder Jay Eum has joined their Board of Directors. At TransLink, Eum is also responsible for managing investments in companies like Carbonite and XSigo, so he has experience in the IT space.

  • CMS

    • Drupal Releases New Code of Conduct

      Drupal released its new Code of Conduct on Monday with the intention of preserving the community and environment that has sprung around the open source content management system.

      “The new Drupal Code of Conduct states our shared ideals with respect to conduct. Think of this as coding standards for people,” Moshe Weitzman said in the announcement on Drupal’s website.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview with Bradley Kuhn of the GNOME Advisory Board

      At that time, Richard Stallman asked me to remain on the GNOME advisory board as a volunteer, primarily to provide ongoing continuity to FSF’s representation on the Advisory Board. From 2005-2010, that position was in fact the only official duty that I carried out for FSF. But, as a side point, non-profits are very different from for-profits in this regard; it’s quite common for important roles to be held by volunteers. Since non-profits operate in the public good, many experienced professionals are willing to give their time without compensation.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Holy Smokes! At 5.2 GHz IBM Chip is Super Fast

    IBM today announced that it has developed a computer chip that has a record-breaking clock speed of 5.2 GHz. The chip — dubbed z196 processor — is going to be used in a new IBM mainframe system, the zEnterprise 196. IBM developed the chip for big honking computers whose primary job is to crunch copious amounts of data, especially for banks and retailers who are seeing a big shift in their business with the rise of mobile.

  • Science

    • Announcing PLoS Blogs

      Today we are pleased to announce the launch of PLoS Blogs a new network for discussing science in public; covering topics in research, culture, and publishing.

      PLoS Blogs is different from other blogging networks, because it includes an equal mix of science journalists and scientists. We’re excited to be welcoming our new bloggers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum to the network.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Will we ever recover from the financial crisis?

      Well, define recovery. If recovery is getting back to the low unemployment levels that preceded the crisis, then no, we might not ever recover. If recovery is just getting back to some more normal-looking growth and job numbers, it’s still going to take a very long time.

    • Obama says reviving economy the most urgent task

      President Barack Obama says his central responsibility as president is to restore the nation’s fragile economy and to help put the millions of people who lost jobs back to work.

    • 10 bailed-out banks spent $16.3M lobbying in 1H

      The 10 banks that received the most bailout aid during the financial crisis spent over $16 million on lobbying efforts in the first half of 2010, as the debate over financial regulatory reform reached its height.

    • Fed officials discussed further stimulus steps

      Federal Reserve officials signaled at their August meeting that they would consider going beyond a modest program to purchase government debt if necessary to boost the economy.

    • SEC says it lacked authority to charge Moody’s

      The Securities and Exchange Commission has declined to seek fraud charges against Moody’s Investors Services over its ratings of risky investments that led to the financial crisis.

      But the SEC said it decided against seeking civil charges only because it determined it lacked authority to charge a foreign affiliate of Moody’s.

    • Tradition ends: No Michigan state fair this year

      Rabbit breeder Rob Usakowski typically spends the week before Labor Day helping his daughters show their Jersey Woolies and Holland Lops at the Michigan State Fair.

      This year, he and his family are home after Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm canceled the fair, saying debt-ridden Michigan could no longer afford to subsidize it. Granholm’s decision makes Michigan the only Midwestern state and one of few nationwide without a state fair.

    • Hands off Social Security

      The White House deficit commission is reportedly considering deep benefit cuts for Social Security, including a steep rise in the retirement age. We cannot let that happen.

      The deficit and our $13 trillion national debt are serious problems that must be addressed. But we can — and must — address them without punishing America’s workers, senior citizens, the disabled, widows and orphans.

    • Source: JPMorgan Chase halting proprietary trading

      JPMorgan Chase & Co. is shutting down its proprietary trading desks and eliminating around 80 jobs to comply with new restrictions on investment banks, a source familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

      The source spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because JPMorgan Chase isn’t formally announcing the move.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Ecommerce directive: EU Commission sneaks out filtering review

      The review of the E-commerce Directive asks whether network filtering can be effective and whether there are liability issues for “web 2.0 and cloud computing”. Given that it is under the remit of the French Commissioner, Michel Barnier, how are we to read this strange approach to a consultation which specifically does NOT want to hear the citizen perspective?

      In the middle of the summer holidays, when few were around to notice it, the European Commision has sneaked out a highly controversial review of the Ecommerce directive. The review is consulting on the use of Internet filtering and monitoring and search engine linking. It appears to have been influenced by the pharmaceutical, luxury goods and copyright industries. And in a move that is sure to inflame the user community, the Commission has specifically ruled out responses from citizens’ groups and NGOs.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Does Steven Levitan Also Want A Cut Every Time You Buy A TV?

      We recently wrote about how TV producer Steven Levitan was publicly complaining that content creators deserve a cut of any IPO proceeds that Hulu gets, if it does go public. We pointed out what a ridiculous sense of entitlement was involved in such a sentiment, but rather than back down, Levitan is apparently only just beginning. The Hollywood Reporter interviewed him about his views on this, and he simply kept on repeating the same ridiculous concept that as a content producer he somehow deserves the money that Hulu makes. He also complains that TV companies should either keep shows offline under the false belief that TV shows are less likely to be pirated (no, stop laughing, he’s serious) and that if they must go online, they should include all of the commercials seen on TV. Because, apparently, recognizing that you’re dealing with people watching shows under very different circumstances and in very different ways apparently has not occurred to Levitan.

    • Copyrights

      • If Fashion Copyright Harms So Many, Why Is Congress Pushing For It?

        It’s even worse than that, actually. In many cases, there are plenty of us willing to speak up about the harm caused by greater protectionism, and the vast amounts of actual evidence and research showing how these policies are inherently going to do more harm than good — but very few people in Congress listen. Why? Because the industry has done a rather impressive targeted PR job of branding anyone who actually presents evidence and facts about the harm done by copyright law as simply supporting “piracy,” which then gets lumped in with all sorts of other awful things. It’s really a shame.

      • Introducing Copyright
      • Edwyn Collins stopped from sharing his music online

        he Scottish star’s manager has criticised MySpace and Warner Music for not allowing the singer to stream A Girl Like You, claiming he didn’t own the copyright

      • ACTA

        • It´s a bird, it´s a plane… no it’s “ACTA light”.

          Today in the European Parliament in Brussels Luc Devigne from DG Trade briefed the International Trade Commission in a closed door meeting on the latest round of the ACTA negotiations. He gave the impression that thanks to the EU many things were being “scaled back” to calm the worries of citizens and certain industries such as Internet Service providers or generic medicine producers.

          He insisted that lots of progress was made in DC on most topics and that now the text was “less complicated”. At the same time he stated that there was a still a “long way to go” to bridge the gap between the US and the EU on issues of scope of rights covered in border measures (EU broader, US narrower), geographical indications, industrial design and border measures concerning not only import but affecting goods being exported and in transit. The US only wants trademarks, and copyright in border measures that will be limited to imports (as established in TRIPS), while the EU wants this extended At the same time he repeated that all patents were out of border measures and criminal sanctions and that nothing in ACTA would affect “access to medicine.”

Clip of the Day

Object Oriented Programming


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 1/9/2010: Chakra 0.2.0, Ksplice Free for Fedora

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Journal Insider – October 2010
  • Software and licensing requirements for vCloud Director

    I personally welcome the fact that vCloud Director is based on Linux.

  • So Apple’s live streaming to everyone tomorrow…except Windows and Linux users.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • ZFS as a Linux kernel module
    • Torvalds Causes Mob Scene at LinuxCon Brazil

      The Linux Foundation today kicked off its two-day debut of LinuxCon Brazil. Attendees got a rare opportunity to see both Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton on stage, together, and in person. Based on this snapshot from Intel’s Dirk Hohndel, I think attendees were very excited about that opportunity.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE 4.5: Your New Desktop Awaits

        Not only is KDE 4.5 a far superior desktop to its predecessor, I would go as far to say that it has finally surpassed 3.5 in both usability and performance. That’s a bold statement considering how the desktop has evolved.

        But what have the developers done to make 4.5 so much better than that all other iterations in the 4.x branch? What they did was work some serious developer Kung Fu. The difference between 4.4 and 4.5 is very noticable. Let’s take a look at some figures from the KDE bug statics:

        * 16022 bugs fixed
        * 1723 feature requests filled

  • Distributions

    • Will Google’s Chrome OS Be a Huge Hit?

      Back in April of 2008, I wrote about a small company working with Google and delivering a PC running a Googleized version of the Linux Operating System. Notably, that company is still around while similar attempts in the end-user Linux arena such as Jolicloud are getting much more press.

      Many, back then, mistakenly took the gOS name as the Google Operating System. It actually stood for Green Operating System (and apparently is now a Linux build called the Good Operating System).

      Google is expected to introduce the Chrome OS in the fourth quarter of this year and there have already been a variety of leaks pointing to hardware displaying the product. Google also owns Android which is already a rapidly growing hit in the mobile market. One Google employee commented recently that, at some point, the two projects by Google will likely converge.

    • Chakra

      • Chakra 0.2.0
      • Chakra GNU/Linux 0.2.0 Screenshots

        This recent release of Chakra GNU/ Linux, codenamed ‘Jaz’, provides users with many new features. Chakra 0.2.0 features the Linux kernel 2.6.33.7 with LZMA support, KDE SC 4.4.5, X.Org 1.7.7, access to 5670 software packages, a new cinstall multi-tool for creating and managing bundles and packages and many other enhancements. Read the official release announcement for details. I found several useful applications setup and ready to go including K3B burning, Bluedevil bluetooth management and Bangarang for connecting to media and TV.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Ganart Technologies Builds Financial Transaction Cloud on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

        Ganart endeavors to bring consumable banking to the masses by developing software and systems in a cloud that offers its customers consistency with their financial services from end to end. When it first began developing these systems, Ganart built a datacenter based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

      • Increased Clientele for Red Hat

        A leading provider of open source solutions, Red Hat Inc. (RHT – Snapshot Report) continues to support organizations with a varied business demand in the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. IT based organizations are aggressively adopting Red Hat’s open solutions and Virtualization technology to grow their businesses.

      • Fedora

        • Ksplice Now Free for Fedora Users

          Ksplice, the technology that allows Linux kernel updates without a reboot, is now free for users of the Fedora distribution. Using Ksplice is like “replacing your car’s engine while speeding down the highway”, and it can potentially save your Linux systems from a lot of downtime. Since Fedora users often live on the bleeding edge of Linux development, Ksplice makes it even easier to do so, and without reboots!

        • A story about updates and people

          A bit of discussion about update policy in Fedora has been brewing lately and I’ve been reading and thinking (and stewing and moaning and wringing my hands) about the discussion a lot.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian developer Frans Pop passes away

        Early in 2006, he became the release manager for the Debian Installer project, taking over from veteran Joey Hess.

        According to the Debian project, Frans was a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Get the Linux Mint GNOME Menu in Ubuntu

          Ubuntu is far and wide the most popular Linux distrobution, although Mint certainly has its advantages for beginners, such as the menu organization. Ubuntu Forums member KdotJ shows us how to add Mint’s GNOME menu to your Ubuntu desktop.

        • Ubuntu for Non-Geeks

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linksys WRT160NL

      Linux-based and with a decent set of features, this wireless router supports many new technologies, and can be quite exciting. It includes Wireless-N, detachable antennae, USB and third-party firmware support. The last bit here would arouse the enthusiast inside you, but can this make for the area where it comes up short?

    • Asus RT-N16

      Like motherboards, the hardware Asus is known for making, you can use many different third-party router operating systems (aka firmware) on the RT-N16. Equipped with an overclockable 480Mhz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the router performed great in our trials when it was running DD-WRT, one of the most well-known Linux-based open-source router firmware options.

    • Navigation display SoC gains Linux development support

      Lineo Solutions and Timesys have collaborated on a new LinuxLink subscription supporting the 500MHz Renesas SH7724 SoC (system on chip). The Timesys LinuxLink subscription supports Renesas’ SH7724-based MS774 development board and offers a Linux 2.7.33.6 kernel, drivers for touchscreens and other peripherals, plus the usual LinuxLink tools and services.

    • Phones

      • Ready or not: how mobiles became so much more than just phones

        Powerful operating systems such as Android have allowed developers to increase mobile phones’ potential to become all-round portable communication devices. Being lost is impossible with the latest mobiles and you can already get applications that use a mobile’s GPS receiver to find your nearest pubs, cash machines and hospitals. That information can then be routed through another application that will show you a map to get to your destination. All of that on top of the social networking, the newspapers you can download and the life organising you can do – all on the move.

      • Android

        • Android Fork Brings Froyo To 12 Smartphones

          The CyanogenMod team uses an instance of Google’s gerrit tool for code review and patch submission, helping make this former backport of Android 1.6 to T-Mobile’s G1 into thriving development for the G1/MyTouch/MyTouch 1.2, Droid, Nexus One, HTC Aria, HTC Desire, HTC Evo 4G (minus 4G and HDMI output), Droid Incredible, and MyTouch Slide. HTC Hero (including Droid Eris) are coming soon for 6.0, with Samsung Galaxy S devices expected to be supported in 6.1.

        • ViewSonic ViewPad 7 official: Android 2.2 and ‘full’ phone functionality

          We know you’re positively giddy with excitement to get at this OlivePad rebadge and ViewSonic is today fanning those flames of desire with a little bit of pre-IFA PR. Made official today, the 7-inch ViewPad 7 will try to lure in Android lovers with its tasty Froyo parfait, underpinned by hardware that includes front- and back-facing cameras, 3G for both phone and data transmissions, and a full-sized SIM slot.

        • Hands On With Stream TV’s Surprising, Open Source-Friendly Tablet

          To say that the eLocity A7 isn’t going directly head to head with the iPad isn’t to say that it’s not out to impress. The solidly-built 7″ tablet is powered by nVidia’s beefy, dual core Tegra 2 processor, will run Froyo out of the box, and is capable of outputting a plethora of formats at 1080p via an included HDMI cable. Eye catching stats. When the eLocity team stopped by our offices, they were sure to tout its media muscle, showing off some truly impressive HD content stored on the diminutive tab, through either 4 GB of internal storage or Micro SD.

        • Archos adding a slew of Android tablets including the 101

          With two Archos 5 tablets in my rearview mirror, I am definitely looking forward to the new 101. The nomenclature is shorthand for the 10.1″ screen with 1024×600 resolution.

        • Motorola Charm Rooted!
        • Motorola launches three new Android devices

          The MING devices from Motorola are touch smartphones, with a transparent flip-screen to protect its touch surface. The devices have run on a home brewed Linux based operating system up until now, but Motorola has just announced three new MING phones, all running on Android.

        • Apple’s App Store Vs Android App Store

          Apple’s app store is well equipped with 250,000 apps and 70% apps from them are supplied purely through payment. Whereas, Android’s apps 64 % of the 95,000 are supplied at free of cost from Google’s Android market.

          [...]

          vAndroid is at present not having any approval process and this creating a chance for the hobbyist apps to float on the Android. Also, Android encourages its developers to use open-source and Linux platform. This is another primary reason for the apps availability at free of cost in Google’s Android market.

        • Android Apps Mostly Free, iPhone Apps Mostly Paid
        • Apps: why free rules on Android, paid rules on iPhone

          [O]n Apple’s App Store, roughly 70 per cent of the apps are paid while on Android Market, it’s almost exactly the other way around, with 64 per cent free apps.

        • Indian eCommerce Leader Adopts Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

          Of course, the other major selling point for many buyers will be this phone’s OS. It runs on Google’s Android 1.6 system, which is user friendly and open-source. The fact that it’s open source opens up the playing field to developers who might not otherwise have the financial muscle to develop their apps from the ground up. That means more apps for the user. Android has been around since 2008 but it’s only in the past 12 months that growing support from developers and handset makers has prompted some commentators to claim it poses a serious threat to Apple’s iPhone iOS dynasty.

        • Red Hat Outlines Its Cloud Strategy

          Last week open source software vendor Red Hat (RHT) laid out its vision for a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as a part of its Cloud Foundations.

    • Sub-notebooks

    • Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source tools at heart of DARPA’s virtual satellite network

    next stage of development for the military’s advanced virtual satellite system that promises to replace monolithic spacecraft with clusters of wirelessly-interconnected spacecraft modules.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Healthcare/Biology

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FooPlug

      Set up your own plug computer to run GNU social — we built one, and called it the FooPlug.

  • Project Releases

    • CEDET 1.0 adds IDE features to Emacs

      Version 1.0 of CEDET – a “Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools” – has been released and brings to the Emacs editor features typically found in Integrated Development Environments such as project management, smart code completion and help, symbol reference analysis, code generation, advanced code browsing and UML diagramming. The features are ones that “developers have come to expect from an editor” say CEDET’s developers and are focused on, but not restricted to, C and C++ development. For example, the completion engine is generic and can work with any language which has an appropriate parser; a per-language support matrix shows which features are supported with which languages.

    • Lightspark 0.4.4 open source Flash player released

      The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.4 of its free, open source Flash player. The latest version of the alternative Flash Player implementation includes a number of bug fixes and several new features.

    • Introducing fise, the Open Source RESTful Semantic Engine

      As a member of the IKS european project Nuxeo contributes to the development of an Open Source software project named fise whose goal is to help bring new and trendy semantic features to CMS by giving developers a stack of reusable HTTP semantic services to build upon.

    • Open Source Digital Voice Codec

      It is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

  • Government

    • The future of the government forges

      It sounds obvious, but the idea remains revolutionary. For the first time, there would be a single repository for source code that could be shared between the hundreds of agencies, commands, and programs in DOD. Developers would be able to share their work in a familiar, web-based environment. A previous version of forge.mil was pulled for unknown reasons, but the current iteration is based on the TeamForge product from CollabNet. If you’ve used SourceForge, you get the idea. The DOD is the largest consumer, and one of the largest developers of software in the world. Much of this software is redundant, locked up by vendors and integrators, can’t work with other software, and nobody remembers how to maintain it. There’s no doubt forge.mil was long overdue.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Four Freedoms of Free Culture

      This has led to a proliferation of harmful and incompatible CC-NC and CC-ND licensed works, mistakenly labeled “Free.” Mako Hill points out that while Creative Commons pursued its goal of “Balance, compromise, and moderation,” it failed to define or defend any core freedoms. Indeed, there seems to be no concern about what the “Free” in Free Culture means. To most it means, “slightly less restrictive than modern copyright.” Even so, most CC licenses are more restrictive than pre-1970′s copyright (because modern copyright’s extended terms and more draconian punishments for infringements still apply).

    • Open Source Education: Free Textbook Archive
    • Cassidy: Former Sun chief Scott McNealy’s better idea for school textbooks

      Curriki has a start and a long way to go. Jones says college professors, teachers and authors have uploaded 38,000 educational pieces to the site, www.curriki.org. It has about 135,000 registered users. No question the site needs to become easier to navigate, Jones and McNealy acknowledge. And despite the volume of contributions, there are considerable gaps for those looking for a complete K-12 experience.

    • CSR and Innovation Part III: Open Source

      More importantly open source proponents argue that opening the field up to the global population of software innovators allows for more brain power than keeping it ensconced in the limited framework of proprietary secrecy. This results in an overall better product as the aggregation of creative minds is more expansive. It also means speedier resolutions of software glitches. (Indeed, in one of the most secretive arenas of software development – quantitative trading – many have warned about the alarming number of simple coding errors such as the one responsible for the “flash crash” on May 6, 2010).

    • Interview With Jean-Claude Bradley – The Impact of Open Notebook Science

      And in the spirit of the open source software movement, he reached out to the wider scientific community in 2008, launching a crowd-sourcing project called the Open Notebook Science Challenge. “We have drawn up a list of different compounds and solvents that are priorities and students are asked to measure their solubility,” he says.

    • Open Hardware

      • Now, open source hardware

        The concept of open source is now generally well understood in relation to software, but can it be extended in a clear-cut manner to hardware too?

        Yes, say a group of open source hardware enthusiasts, who have been working on the draft version of a definition of open source hardware. They hope to finalise it at a summit, scheduled for September in New York.

        Open source in the context of software implies not only the free availability of source code, but also the freedom to modify and redistribute it. The concept has widened and is being applied in other domains too.

      • How My Dad Is Trying to Save the World With Open-Source Machinery

        But don’t take my word for it; go through the slideshow below, which was prepared for Maker Faire Africa and which describes four the four core interrelated machines, which can be used in everything from a village blacksmithy to a full-scale factory or trade school. The best part? Dad’s giving them away — this is an entirely open-source project. The problem? Getting people in the NGO/development community to even understand what a machine tool is and why one would be valuable. If you can help spread the word, please do! His contact info and links to more information are in the slideshow, so please check it out.

  • Programming

    • Rails 3: New release completes integratation of Merb

      The Rails inventor said that more than 1600 contributors submitting thousands of commits over about two years have jointly made Rails “better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful”. New features include a router which allows declarations that are based on the REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture and an interface to simplify the addition and management of plug-ins. Overall, the new Rails is considerably more modular than previous versions and more dependency agnostic, allowing developers to easily use Test::Unit, Prototype or DataMapper and other libraries instead of Rails’ default libraries.

    • ★ On Copyright Aggregation

      Communities whose members are termed “contributors” rather than “members” or “participants” may well be unequal places where your interests are subsidiary to those of the copyright owner. They are often dominated by users and fans of the software rather than by co-developers, since the inequality makes it hard-to-impossible for a genuine co-developer to align any fragment of their interests on equal terms. Indeed, this inequality is seen by some dual-license proponents as one of the attractions of the model as they seek a community of enthusiasts and (hopefully) customers that they can exploit without competition.

    • R-evolutionizing Predictive Analytics – New Market Report Published

      The R open-source data mining language is quickly becoming the lingua franca of the budget-constrained data analyst who wants to harness the power of predictive analysis without a steep, complex, and expensive learning curve. Taking advantage of a gap in the market, Revolution Analytics was formed to commercialize R and raise its applicability in commercial settings.

    • August 30, 2010
      Open Source R Language Could Revolutionize Business Intelligence

      The R programming language could be coming to a workplace near you — if it hasn’t arrived already. The big deal about R is that it can analyze Big Data, those exploding data sets that have traditionally defied analysis.

      R is the brainchild of Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (known as “R” and “R”), academics at the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since Ihaka and Gentleman wrote the original R paper in 1993, R has become the lingua franca of analytic statistics among students, scientists, programmers and data managers.

Leftovers

  • Only Some Conspiracy Theories Welcome at Huffington Post

    Because today, the very same Huffington Post published this wonderful post from dangerous nutcase Jenny McCarthy about how autism is caused by vaccines and can be cured with experimental treatments that the established medical community doesn’t want you to know about. We can only assume that as soon as the editors discover this conspiratorial nonsense, they will promptly remove it.

  • “Glenn Beck sex tape” one of few things beneath HuffPo’s editorial standards

    Yesterday, former Air America editor in chief Beau Friedlander had a silly little blog at the Huffington Post in which he promised a $100,000 bounty for a Glenn Beck sex tape. The post was actually a barely coherent, largely inaccurate history of neoconservatism, plus complaining about Glenn Beck, that ended with a paragraph offering “a $100,000 payday to the person who will come forward with a sex tape or phone records or anything else that succeeds in removing Glenn Beck from the public eye forever.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • American Politics is Getting All Koch’ed Up

      The grassroots pressure group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), that actively fought health care reform, boasts “our citizen activists” are “the heart and soul” of the organization. So AFP wants the public and the media to believe. But an exhaustive report in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, shows that the heart and soul behind AFP are really the oil billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, whose privately-owned oil enterprise has made them among the richest men in America.

    • Tiki Barber Hires PR Agency In Attempt To Repair His Image

      The paper reports that Barber is working with 5WPR to help change the perception of his affair with Johnson.

    • Tiki Barber’s image upgrade

      Tiki Barber has hired a third p.r. agency to polish his image after splitting with his then-pregnant wife, Ginny.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Reading, Writing, and RFID Chips: A Scary Back-to-School Future in California

      According to a story from the Associated Press, the students will wear a jersey at school that has the RFID tag attached. The tag will track the children’s movements and collect other data, like if the child has eaten or not. According to a Contra Costa County official, this is a cost-savings move, as teachers used to have to manually keep track of a child’s attendance and meal schedule.

    • Judge Rejects Gov’t Request For Cell Tower Data, Noting Recent 4th Amendment Rulings

      We recently wrote about a somewhat surprising ruling by the appeals court in the DC circuit saying that long-term use of a GPS to track someone without a warrant violated the 4th Amendment. What was surprising about this is that, while state courts had ruled similarly, the federal courts had almost universally ruled that such tracking was legal.

    • Porn-browsing Oz minister quits

      The point of the Great Australian Firewall is revealed at last today – it’s to keep Aussie politicians in line.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Beach towel designer roundly defeated in court

      More than three decades after Clemens Franek moved to Los Angeles and teamed up with aspiring actor Woody Harrelson and aspiring screenwriter Bobby Farrelly to sell beach towels whose circular shape helped beachgoers tan evenly, a Chicago appeals court has said the invention can’t be trademarked.

    • Copyrights

      • Zaptunes: Unlimited MP3 Downloads For Just $25 A Month. To Good To Be True?

        San Francisco based Zaptunes has launched offering unlimited DRM free mp3 downloads for $25 per month. They say they’re adding songs constantly, but have started with 8 million tracks from all four major labels and many indies. To kick things off, the $25 is waived for the next 30 days.

      • US Commerce Secretary Sides With RIAA: Warns ISPs To Become Entertainment Industry Cops

        It’s no secret that US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is quite confused over intellectual property issues. There has yet to be a case where he’s actually questioned a highly biased or debunked industry study on the issue, and he seems to enjoy celebrating with the entertainment industry, even as the government has debunked the studies he relies on. But it’s really sad that he doesn’t even seem to consider the other side at all. His latest move is to side with the RIAA and effectively warn ISPs that they need to become copyright cops for the entertainment industry establishment.

      • Making the case for patents by making a case against them

        I’ve been hanging around the ‘Balanced Copyright For Canada‘ Facebook group recently. The name of the group is a misnomer. Balance has nothing to do with what the founders of the group intend. In fact the impression that I get is that they think that the ACTA treaty is too lenient.

Clip of the Day

A Preview of Alice 3.0, Introductory Programming in 3D


Credit: TinyOgg

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