12.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“What’s this thing? It looks pretty cool. What pretty icons! Can I touch them? I can, really?” Etc. That basically describes our infantile thought process when we stumbled across the DreamScreen 400 (not to be confused with the DreamScreen photo frame line), a new all-in-one desktop from HP, but suddenly it all became clear: this thing is built for the Indian market, and us chubby Americans will have to keep on dreaming. Still, it’s an interesting thought experiment.
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I stumbled upon a website that showcases a 50-monitor setup powered by a 25 Linux cluster, which I think is awesome and could easily win any Linux workspace contest if qualified. The display is composed of fifty 21-inch touch-screen monitors that can run at a resolution of at least 12800×5120 (65,536,000 pixels).
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Everyone who follows super-computers knows that they run on Linux. Just one look at the latest Top 500 SuperComputer list confirms that. Today 91.8% of all super-computers run Linux. Alas, if you look at the latest list, you’ll also see that the U.S. now trails China in the super-computers. IBM’s new CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics chips, though, should soon put the U.S. back in the lead.
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“I’ve seen some organisations using a cut-down version of Linux and running a remote desktop client to a [virtual machine] to run those applications, so there’s ways of getting around it,” he adds.
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Linux is one of the most flexible and suitable operating system for just about any purpose that I know of. It can be found everywhere from phones to toasters, supercomputers to computers smaller than a pack of cigarettes. It handles large amounts of money as well as your private, personal Internet surfing with equal ease.
Linux is a formless amoeba which is able to mould itself to what ever container it is poured into. But does it have any direction? Does the very act of Linux being pulled in several directions at once stretch this computing amoeba membrane thin and at risk of tearing?
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There is nothing sufficiently wrong with Java that would cause it to uniformly be a second-class citizen on every distro. It is a widely-used language, especially in the corporate world. It has a vibrant open source community. On servers, it generated very interesting stable (Tomcat) and cutting-edge (Hadoop, Cassandra…) projects. So what grudge do the distributions hold against Java ?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Domain Technologie Control (DTC) is a GPL web control panel for administering and accounting hosting services.
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Kernel Space
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Matt Bridger says he is “a bit of a later developer, IT-wise.” He received his first degree in History and during that time, he rarely came close to a computer. But the increasing relevance of computing around him could not be ignored, says Matt, both in the workplace and in everyday life. He soon found himself providing IT support to colleagues while working at the University of Cambridge, which is where he first encountered Linux. The OS was being used to manage academic archives and the faculty website.
Matt says that he once he discovered Linux, he was immediately drawn to open source because of the values of collaboration and sharing. He said Linux’ strength in powering software and systems made the magnetism even stronger.
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Graphics Stack
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Canonical has been using the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for providing 2D acceleration and kernel mode-setting for NVIDIA hardware on an open-source driver by default, but they haven’t yet shipped the Nouveau Gallium3D driver that would provide OpenGL acceleration support (along with OpenVG, OpenGL ES, and the other APIs accelerated by Gallium3D state trackers). Their reasoning for holding back on shipping the Nouveau Gallium3D component by default (though it is available through an experimental package) has been that the upstream Nouveau developers haven’t yet declared it stable and are unwilling to take bug reports against the driver. Canonical though may be in the process of reevaluating their Nouveau Gallium3D decision and this 3D driver could end up appearing in Ubuntu 11.04.
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While the merge window was supposed to close yesterday for X.Org Server 1.10, which is supposed to be released in February, it looks like Keith Packard will keep it open for a few more days. Keith Packard, who is continuing to serve as the X.Org Server release manager, wants to keep the 1.10 merge window open until at least next Monday so he can pull in some new code he has been developing.
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X.Org Server 1.10 was just looking to be a big bug-fix release to the X.Org Server with no major features being introduced, up until the merge window was about to be closed. Then last night it was proposed by Keith Packard, the xorg-server 1.10 release manager, to keep it open a few extra days so that he could finally merge the per-CRTC pixmap support. This work alone is nice and is long awaited, but now NVIDIA’s James Jones is calling for pulling another feature that’s had code available for months: X Synchronization Fences.
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Applications
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This is why I love Linux. If you don’t like one application, choose from the alternatives, simple as that. GNOME Do is an incredible launcher application for Ubuntu. But since GNOME Do is basically a Mono application, many might refrain from using it. But don’t worry, Synapse and Kupfer are equally good or even better GNOME Do alternatives. Learn more.
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While other FOSS video editors like OpenShot and Avidemux are good, Pitivi comes pre-installed with Ubuntu 10.04. (You can also install it manually by typing sudo apt-get install pitivi)
The latest version of Pitivi was 0.13.4, at the time of writing. This full-featured video editor is written in Python (with GTK+) and is licensed under the LGPL (refer to www.pitivi.org for more details). It is supported by the Gstreamer multimedia framework, so it can handle most of the available formats and conversion. You can also convert your videos to HD using Pitivi, which we will come to soon. For now, let’s get started. I suggest you try out these steps as you read :-).
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Proprietary
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This morning there was the report on the release of Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Beta 1, which finally brought GPU-based Flash video acceleration to Linux. H.264 video acceleration has already been available on Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, but this is the first time that Adobe is bringing this support to the official Linux Flash player. With the 10.2 release to all operating systems they are providing this support via an API they call “Stage Video” for the complete acceleration of the entire playback process.
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There is the first beta release of the Adobe 10.2 Flash Player now available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux platforms that brings a variety of improvements since the Flash Player 10.1 release from earlier this year. For Linux users this Adobe Flash update is quite important since it finally delivers GPU-based video acceleration support via their new Stage Video technology that is now supported on all platforms. Adobe’s Stage Video offloads the entire video process to the GPU and in this article are some initial tests illustrating the benefits of this Flash update for Linux users.
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The tests here are just like the NVIDIA VDPAU tests from this morning, various system metrics were monitored by Iveland Alpha 3 while playing back a 1080p H.264 YouTube video clip under Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and this brand new Flash Player 10.2 Beta. The system under test this time was a Samsung NC10 netbook with an Intel Atom N270 (32-bit CPU, the Flash Player 10.2 Beta with video support currently lacks x86_64 support), 2GB of system memory, a 32GB OCZ SSD, and Intel 945 integrated graphics. The Intel Atom netbook was running Ubuntu 10.10 with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, X.Org Server 1.9, Mesa 7.9, and xf86-video-intel 2.12.0. This was a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10 as of this morning.
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While the X Server 1.10 merge window should soon close, the patches for implementing X Input 2.1 / Multi-Touch support are on track for the next release, X Server 1.11. Ubuntu is also expected to ship these patches with their X.Org Server in Ubuntu 11.04.
The most recent Multi-Touch / X Input 2.1 patches were published nearly one month ago and Canonical’s Chase Douglas had based this work upon Daniel Stone’s earlier patches. Chase though did not pursue getting this work into X.Org Server 1.10 but is rather waiting around for the 1.10 merge window to close and then will focus upon re-basing the work.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The first relese candidate of popular racing game SuperTuxKart has been released.
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Ubuntu Software Center is definitely coming alive. The latest entrants in the ‘for purchase’ section of Ubuntu Software Center include the incredibly good puzzle game called World of Goo and Vendetta Online, a 3D space combat MMORPG.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Improved map management and support for exporting routes in the KML format in Marble. Support for showing/hiding the bottom page bar in Okular. An option to create QML Plasmoids added to Plasmate. Support for GetHotNewStuff in the Pastebin Plasmoid. Work to increase the number of supported rows in KSpread. Pidgin support added to the “IMStatus” function of Choqok. Animated tiles in KMahjongg. Various work in KDE-PIM. Start of filtering (no GUI yet) integrated into KMail Mobile. Long-awaited ability to set custom button labels for yes, no, continue and cancel buttons in KDialog. “Find links only” option added to the “find bar” in KHTML. More work in kdebindings/perl. New activity manager daemon (with the KDED and Nepomuk service merged into a separate application). Facet API into imported into libnepomuk. Timestamp functionality added to KSharedDataCache to support KGameRenderer and similar libraries. Support for shutdown/restart when there is no active display manager (using ConsoleKit) in KDisplayManager. PolicyKit-kde removed from kdebase. KOffice 2.3 Beta 3 is tagged for release.
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Today is the big day. The sale of the Open-PC starts. The first PC which is build by the free software community and not by a big company. Everybody can contribute. The Open-PC is using only free software and drivers.
The good news is that we are not starting with one or two but with three manufacturing partners and models. We are working together with ARLT and greeniX in Germany and ThinkPenguin in the US and we are looking for more partners in other countries.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome Shell and Unity may have started on separate paths, but they are definitely heading to the same direction. Seif Lotfy has just posted a screenshot (not mockup!) of his current work: Zeitgeist and Gnome Shell…
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Unity has it. KDE is getting it. So I took the liberty of hacking on Shell (thanks to the guys on #gnome-shell)
After 2 days (no JS experiece) I wrote the JS DBus bindings around Zeitgeist and did this…
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Seif Lotfy – Zeitgeist creator, hacker and all round semantic solider – has spent the last few days bringing Zeitgeist love to GNOME Shell.
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MythTV 0.24 was released one month ago on their expedited release schedule, but the developers of this popular free software multimedia project are beginning to focus on their next release: MythTV 0.25. This release will drop support for XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) and libmpeg2 decoding and they also plan to drop Xv (X-Video) support in due time as well.
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Here’s what I like. They’re all good. However, like anyone, I have my personal favorites. Here goes…
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New Releases
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RabbitMQ, part of VMWare’s SpringSource division, has released version 2.2.0 of its open source enterprise messaging system based on the AMQP specification. According to the developers, the latest version addresses a variety of bugs found in the previous release and introduces several enhancements.
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Two weeks have passed since the release of Iveland Alpha 2, but now it’s time for the third alpha release for the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 “Iveland” benchmarking platform. Quite a number of changes have built up over such a short period of time as this release nears OpenBenchmarking.org integration and ready for its planned release in Q1’2011.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
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Red Hat Family
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In the past 52 weeks, shares of Red Hat have traded between a low of $25.92 and a high of $46.25 and are now at $46.87, which is 81% above that low price.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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MIT krb5 clients incorrectly accept an unkeyed checksums in the SAM-2 preauthentication challenge: An unauthenticated remote attacker could alter a SAM-2 challenge, affecting the prompt text seen by the user or the kind of response sent to the KDC. Under some circumstances, this can negate the incremental security benefit of using a single-use authentication mechanism token.
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Bui Quang Minh discovered that libxml2, a library for parsing and handling XML data files, does not well process a malformed XPATH, causing crash and allowing arbitrary code execution.
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Linux Mint Debian offers the “ready to use” Linux Mint experience in a rolling release Linux distribution. Until now, LMDE was only available in 32bit, but an announcement on the Linux Mint blog states that Linux Mint Debian 64bit will be released in December.
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A new LMDE release is planned this December including the following:
* All Linux Mint 10 features
* Support for i386 and amd64 architectures
* Improvements to the installer, fonts and sound support
* Performance boost
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This little or perhaps slightly long post would detail the good and bad I have been observing within the Debian community and the influence that Ubuntu has been having, for both good and bad .
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The latest video from the Ubuntu One team, in which the Ubuntu One Music Streaming service is demoed, is both informative and persuasive.
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Please remember, Ubuntu IRC Membership is a way for people to acquire Ubuntu Membership for IRC contributions. Some examples of what these might include are available on the wiki. For more general contributions, you should apply through a Regional Membership Board.
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Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Alpha 1 has been released today. There’s nothing much to talk about right now since it’s only the beginning of the road, but since Unity received an update a couple of days ago, I though you might want to see a new video with Unity in action…
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We are proud to announce today, December 2nd, that the first Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system is now available for download. As usual, we’ve grabbed a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 11.04 development.
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Ubuntu team yesterday announced the release of Natty Narwhal, which will eventually become Ubuntu 11.04. The Alpha 1 is far from what you will see in the final release, however it gives a glimpse of the integration of two major components on the desktop edition — Unity and Global Menu.
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Overall Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to set up, easy to manage, sleek in looks and good in performance. Ubuntu is a clear superior to previous Ubuntu versions in most aspects and one of the best distros to get started with in the world of Linux. New users, whether to Linux, or to computing in general will find Ubuntu a suitable OS.
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Phones
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Android
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Being an Android developer, I’ve been baffled by the absence of the Android Market in the Android SDK. The absence makes it inconvenient for us to develop because we find it difficult to install our favourite apps like DiskUsage. With necessary limitations in place Google should have included the Market app as part of the SDK to make the emulator experience closer to real life.
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It’s been a long time coming, but the official Google Reader app for Android is finally here. Let’s jump into the features, shall we?
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The smartphone market in China is growing at an extraordinary rate, largely thanks to Google’s Android OS. Chinese consumers purchased 8 to 10 million smartphones last quarter, up from an estimated 2 to 3 million in the same period last year. And according to Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt, the bulk of them ran Android.
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GCA Technology Services was chosen for its reputation and proven track record in developing and delivering world class identity management and web infrastructure training, as well as its wide-reaching US training delivery infrastructure. The company has a 100% client referral rate, and trained more than 2000 delegates in 2010.
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The PES -who sponsored the development of the badge feature- used civievent for the first time at a big scale: their council in warsow. You might see some bits of it in the news, like the greek prime minister that just finished his speech, but only on this blog will you know more about part of the logistic of such a big event, and how civicrm helped it.
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Let’s immediately agree on the obvious question: Why would anyone use Identi.ca when everyone is on Twitter?
Basically, this is the same question as “Why use Diaspora when everyone is on Facebook?”, “Why use Facebook when everyone is on MySpace?”, “Why use MySpace when everyone is on Friendster?”, or the good old “Why use XMPP when everyone is on MSN?” and “Why use MSN when everyone is on ICQ?”.
By now, I think most of you see where I’m going with this…
There is always a network that is more popular than others at a given point in time, without it being an obvious guarantee of said network’s quality.
This is simply the case because a network’s value is equal to its number of users squared. This is called Metcalfe’s Law.
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The press has been alive the past several days with news of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where the police have been going in and rounding up drug dealers. From the amount of press and police actions, some people outside of Brazil must think that all of the people in the favela are thieves or drug dealers.
I went to a favela in Rio de Janeiro a few weeks ago while I was on a trip to Brazil. I was invited by a very interesting guy who was born in the favela, and started his “business career” by selling trinkets to the tourists on the beach. He taught himself how to speak three languages besides Portuguese, and in a short time he realized that he could make more money if he bought his trinkets off-season instead of waiting for the prices to rise in season. Later in life he taught himself computers and networking, and finally set up a wireless network infrastructure inside the favela. People laughed at him and told him that there would not be enough business, but by careful planning his little company is growing and the favela is benefiting from the connectivity.
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Stallman has long criticized the more pragmatic half of the open-source community for its somewhat libertarian approach to licensing, a la Apache and BSD. Yet in an age of web-delivered software-as-services, an age that treats Stallman’s GPL with absolute indifference, Stallman expressly demurred from baking in a broader definition of “distribution” into version three of the GPL. My sources suggest that this was a direct consequence of Google applying pressure to the Free Software Foundation.
When then-general counsel of the FSF, Eben Moglen, gave a keynote at the Open Source Business Conference in 2007, he was asked about the FSF’s decision not to close the so-called “ASP loophole” in the GPL that allowed companies like Google to heavily modify GPL code and distribute it as a service, without contributing commensurately back. In early drafts of GPLv3, the FSF had defined “distribution” to effectively bar network-based software distribution, but in the final draft it was purged, and then whimpered its way into the GPL’s ugly stepchild, Affero GPL.
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Why do people choose to participate in Open Source ? It’s always a mix of various reasons, so let’s try to explore and classify them.
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Events
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The eleventh annual Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) will take place on the 5th and 6th of February, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. The KDE organisers have announced that they are now accepting submissions for talks to take place in the Cross Desktop Developer Room (DevRoom) on any KDE related topic.
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Valerie Aurora wrote an excellent article for lwn.net, The Dark Side of Open Source Conferences. Currently, the article is only available to lwn.net subscribers, but you can write to Valerie to get the link, or wait until the post is publicly available in a few days.
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Databases
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I’d like to wish Henrik Ingo well now that he has publicly announced his resignation from Monty Program. Henrik, I especially wish you all the best with the new member of your family.
I know you put a lot of effort into your presentation to the Monty Program board regarding transfer of trademark ownership, and you know (and I do not mind saying externally) that I supported transfer to a non-profit designed for such purposes. Our informal, non-inclusive vote in Istanbul aside, I think the company as a whole should put a lot of thought into such matters. I would always hope the board would do the same.
And it is my understanding that this is what is happening. Not that the board made a final decision to maintain trademark ownership, but that they decided more research and discussion are needed. And despite my knee-jerk reaction to go the Debian trademark route, I came to Monty Program from Canonical. Wiser legal and business minds have decided to retain the Ubuntu trademark for Canonical. Just as Red Hat has retained the Fedora trademark. So despite my inclinations I have to ask why others have chosen differently.
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Oracle
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Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.”
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Dissatisfied with the infrastructure at Oracle’s java.net project hosting web site, the developers of the Hudson Continuous Integration technology are considering finding a new home at GitHub. The developers appear to have been unhappy for a while, and it seems that their dissatisfaction continues, although Oracle, after taking over Sun, soon started to migrate the Java portal to the more modern Kenai infrastructure.
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Following our new strategy with regard to Oracle code, we (GRUB maintainers) have decided to grant an exception to our usual policy and import ZFS code from grub-extras into official GRUB.
Our usual policy is to require copyright assignment for all new code, so that FSF can use it to defend users’ freedom in court. If that’s not possible, at least a disclaimer asserting authorship (i.e. that no copyright infringement has been committed). The purpose of this, as always, is ensuring that GRUB is a legally safe codebase.
The ZFS code that has been imported into GRUB derives from the OpenSolaris version of GRUB Legacy. On one hand, this code was released to the public under the terms of the GNU GPL. On the other, binary releases of Solaris included this modified GRUB, and as a result Oracle/Sun is bound by the GPL.
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Education
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I must start by thanking Mel Chua for visiting us in Connecticut and for prompting/prodding me to think more deeply about how open source and academia work together to accomplish education. I believe I now have a better picture of student and academic participation in open source projects.
At first look, student participation in open source projects seems like it should be relatively easy to accomplish. Sure, from a teaching perspective there are issues related to selecting a project, learning curve for the project, finding a mentor, identifying ways that students can participate, figuring out how to grade things, and more. But these things are surmountable.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation Europe relies on donations to be an independent voice. Our donors and Fellows help us to achive that with continous support. Another possibility to support FSFE is through some support programs . Some of you already know these programs, some don’t. I will try here to briefly present how these programs works and then present the incomes we receive through them.
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Government
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Two left-wing political parties in the Portuguese parliament want to make the use of open standards mandatory for public administrations. Next week Friday, the parliament will discuss two motions, filed by the Left Bloc, with sixteen of the 230 seats in the parliament, and the Portuguese Communist Party, which has thirteen seats.
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Openness/Sharing
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We know all about blood donors, those excellent people who give their plasma, plus a selection of interesting corpuscles and other matter, for the good of those in need of a fresh infusion of the red stuff. There are also organ donors. In fact, many a fine fellow whom you meet at The Old Nick on an afternoon might well be composed of spare parts stitched together from kind donors, if you watch how they weave their way away from that fine hostelry after an evening’s serious discussion of legal topics over a pint of Badger. But only recently has the IPKat discovered the concept of the public domain donor.
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Open Data
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Art Open Data is Open Data that concerns art institutions, art history, the art market, and artworks.
It is useful because it allows us to examine and think about those subjects in new ways.
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Open Access/Content
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Researchers from Aachen University’s Media Computing Group have created a computer workstation where the desk and screen are transformed into one multi-touch display. The display is curved at the middle and uses infrared emitters and cameras to track user movement over the whole of the surface, which has its graphical user interface beamed onto it by a couple of short throw projectors hidden within its wooden frame.
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A few months back a columnist for the Guardian, Helienne Lindvall wrote a laughably confused argument claiming that people who explained how “free” was an important element of a business model should not be trusted because they also made money. That made no sense, and lots of people explained why. She also got an awful lot of the basic facts wrong.
Lindvall is back, and rather than admitting her mistakes, she tries again, but comes across as even more confused and factually-challenged. The majority of the piece is about setting up more strawmen to knock over, with the two key ones being (1) that supporters of embracing new business models are “defeatist” because they suggest that file sharing cannot be stopped and (2) that while record labels may have ripped off musicians in the past, the companies ripping off musicians today are the “web 2.0″ companies that are making money on content — such as Google, Flickr and others.
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This morning, an article and comment thread related to a piece of satire the site and its readers took seriously, went missing.
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In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the relationship between the newly independent Republic of Moldova and the formerly Communist Romania was dominated by the rhetoric of “the bridge of flowers over the river Prut” (the natural border between the two countries). Although the metaphor of brotherhood failed to be translated into geopolitical unity, the facts underlying it (a shared past, culture, religion, and most importantly, a common language, although Moldova begs to differ on the subject) made it inevitable that the fates of the two countries should remain entwined.
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Science
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The quads, which have been nicknamed ‘the Dollies’, are exact genetic copies of their predecessor, who was put down seven years ago.
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NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.
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The newsroom at the New York Times is seen as editorial staffers work feverishly to prepare a Monday edition, in this Nov. 5, 1978 file photo. The chaotic newsroom culture of the mainstream media has not been a good platform for informed science journalism.
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Health/Nutrition
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Success in tobacco control will not happen without public health champions speaking freely and honestly to the public. As professor Gérard Dubois explains below, there is real danger these voices are being silenced.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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When Wikileaks released thousands of classified US diplomatic cables this week, a familiar criticism was repeated by the project’s foes: these leaks could harm innocent people. There’s no evidence of that yet, but within the documents there is evidence the American government has harmed innocent people.
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A couple of days ago we wrote a small post thinking about ways in which Wikileaks could be taken off the Web. The conclusion was that Wikileaks might survive almost any type of concerted effort to remove it from the Internet. I was not really expecting the strength with which those words would be tested in the last few days.
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In my recent article Ward Churchill: The Lie Lives On (Pravda.Ru, 11/29/2010), I discussed the following realities about America’s legal “system”: it is duplicitous and corrupt; it will go to any extremes to insulate from prosecution, and in many cases civil liability, persons whose crimes facilitate this duplicity and corruption; it has abdicated its responsibility to serve as a “check-and-balance” against the other two branches of government, and has instead been transformed into a weapon exploited by the wealthy, the corporations, and the politically connected to defend their criminality, conceal their corruption and promote their economic interests; and, finally, that the oft-quoted adage “Nobody is above the law” is a lie.
Some critics were quick to dismiss my article as politically motivated hyperbole. But with the recent revelations disclosed by Wikileaks, it appears that this article did not even scratch the surface, because it is now evident that Barack Obama, who entered the White House with optimistic messages of change and hope, is just as complicit in, and manipulative of, the legal “system’s” duplicity and corruption as was his predecessor George W. Bush.
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The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively “killing” its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.
The whistleblowers’ website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.
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Reports say WikiLeaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organisations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, “covert following and hidden photography”.
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American hacker Jacob Appelbaum fights repressive regimes around the world. Now he’s on the run from his own government
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The recently released WikiLeaks diplomatic cables are not critical for Russian-US relations, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday. “The leaks show the full extent of the cynicism of those evaluations and judgments that often prevail in the foreign policy of various states, in this case I am referring to the United States,” Medvedev said.
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Despite accusations that Julian Assange is on the run, The Independent has learnt that Scotland Yard has been in contact with his legal team for more than a month but is waiting for further instruction before arresting him. Police forces around the globe have been asked to arrest the enigmatic Wikileaks founder, who is wanted in Sweden to answer a series of sexual allegations against him.
But the 39-year-old Australian supplied the Metropolitan Police with contact details upon arriving in the UK in October. Police sources confirmed that they have a telephone number for Mr Assange and are fully aware of where he is staying.
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British and American officials colluded in a plan to hoodwink parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs, the Guardian can disclose.
According to leaked US embassy dispatches, David Miliband, who was Britain’s foreign secretary under Labour, approved the use of a loophole to manoeuvre around the ban and allow the US to keep the munitions on British territory.
Unlike Britain, the US had refused to sign up to an international convention that bans the weapons because of the widespread injury they cause to civilians.
The US military asserted that cluster bombs were “legitimate weapons that provide a vital military capability” and wanted to carry on using British bases regardless of the ban.
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The WikiLeaks revelations have claimed their first political scalp in Europe with the sacking of the German foreign minister’s chief of staff, who acted as a mole for the Americans, keeping the US embassy in Berlin posted last year on the confidential negotiations to form Angela Merkel’s new government.
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It starts early. When the most recent Wikileaks dump broke, most of the folks in China news circles were focused on its supposed revelations about China’s support (or lack thereof) for North Korea. As the story has cooled, of course, most people have returned to earth, reminded that these cables represent the diplomatic equivalent to water-cooler gossip. But the Chinese government was, needless to say, paying close attention, and yesterday the Global Times ran an op-ed that betrays just how threatened they are by the idea of Wikileaks, even if the egg is on America’s face this go-round.
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Contrary to other European leaders who downplayed the importance of sometimes unflattering reports about them in the US diplomatic cables revealed by Wikileaks, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he was working on legal action against claims that he owned eight secret Swiss bank accounts.
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Actor Mark Ruffalo has been placed on a terror advisory list by U.S. officials after organizing screenings for a new documentary about natural gas drilling.
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Julian Assange:
Many weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over a pot-plant. However, as yet they have not satisfied two of our publishing rules.
1) that the documents not be self-authored;
2) that they be original.
However, it is worth noting that in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs.
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The person getting all the attention was Dorsey, because by then Twitter was all anyone wanted to talk about. In fact one reason we know so much about the trip is that Dorsey and his colleagues spent much of their time tweeting about it, sending news of their journey in electronic haiku to their followers back home. ‘Lots of helicopters,’ Dorsey observed on his Twitter feed: ‘Met the president of Iraq. Amazing palace.’ In another tweet, he tells his followers that he’s been ‘talking to Iraqis to figure out if technologies like Twitter can help bring transparency, accessibility and stability to the area’. When he finds a wi-fi network in the presidential palace, he says how happy he is to be back online: ‘Catching up on the rest of the world.’ ‘Lots going on out there!’ he writes. Barham Salih’s inaugural tweet was less upbeat: ‘Sorry, my first tweet not pleasant; dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.’
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I was kindly invited yesterday by Spanish newspaper El País to participate in a digital debate, “Transparency versus security” (only in Spanish), where I asked when would we be able to access to the content of 115 cables tagged KIPR Madrid Embassy (link to Google fusion tables).
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Britain was accused by Amnesty International of handing a “free ticket” to suspected war criminals after the government published parliamentary legislation designed to make it more difficult to arrest Israeli officials and ministers on British soil.
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TSA regional security director James Marchand advises parents whose kids are upset by TSA groping to make a game of it, a suggestion that alarmed sex-abuse prevention experts, since “Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is ‘one of the most common ways’ that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact.”
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Éric Besson, the Minister of Industry, Energy and Digital Economy in France, has declared war on WikiLeaks (article in French here).
Besson has asked CGIET (The General Council of Industry, Energy and Technology) to stop the site being hosted in France, as this violates secret diplomatic relations and endangers the people protected by those secrets.
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American officials swept aside British protests about secret US spy flights taking place from the UK’s Cyprus airbase, the leaked diplomatic cables reveal.
Labour ministers said they feared making the UK an unwitting accomplice to torture, and were upset about rendition flights going on behind their backs.
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The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment – but that doesn’t help if the censorship doesn’t come from the government.
The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun to publish a trove of over 250,000 classified diplomatic cables, found itself kicked off of Amazon’s servers earlier this week. WikiLeaks had apparently moved from a hosting platform in Sweden to the cloud hosting services available through Amazon in an attempt to ward off ongoing distributed denial of service attacks.
[...]
Importantly, the government itself can’t take official action to silence WikiLeaks’ ongoing publications – that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint, or censorship of speech before it can be communicated to the public. No government actor can nix WikiLeaks’ right to publish content any more than the government could stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, which were also stolen secret government documents.
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The weaknesses are not caused by Wikileaks. The Internet-mediated transition from a hub-and-spoke topology of society to a meshed topology is the ultimate cause. It renders irrelevant the control-point thinking from the earlier age of chains of intermediaries. In every place where individuals take up the opportunities of the meshed society, the weaknesses emerge. The challenge by established computer corporations to open source, for example, is a direct consequence.
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The ACLU has released a statement by Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:
“We’re deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be constitutional, or a good idea. The courts have made clear that the First Amendment protects independent third parties who publish classified information. Prosecuting WikiLeaks would be no different from prosecuting the media outlets that also published classified documents. If newspapers could be held criminally liable for publishing leaked information about government practices, we might never have found out about the CIA’s secret prisons or the government spying on innocent Americans. Prosecuting publishers of classified information threatens investigative journalism that is necessary to an informed public debate about government conduct, and that is an unthinkable outcome.
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I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
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Revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers and on Web sites around the globe. But in parts of the world where the leaks have some of the greatest potential to sow controversy, they have barely caused a ripple.
Authoritarian governments and tightly controlled media in China and across the Arab Middle East have suppressed virtually all mention of the documents, avoiding the public backlash that could result from such candid portrayals of their leaders’ views.
In China, the WikiLeaks site has been blocked by the government’s “Great Firewall,” and access to other sources for the documents has been restricted. Most Chinese are unable to read the contents of the diplomatic cables. . . .
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WikiLeaks has exposed official wrongdoing and countless war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, serving as a vital conduit of information the U.S. government has tried to keep hidden from its own citizens — and which deserves to be free. Yet Amazon.com recently kicked WikiLeaks off its servers all because one politician, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, asked. That’s not right.
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At around 10PM EST last night, WikiLeaks was no longer accessible at the wikileaks.org web address. That’s the end of that, right?
Wrong.
The site is still accessible through several alternate domain names (wikileaks.ch, wikileaks.dd19.de, wikileeks.org.uk, to name a few), all of which point to its machine-readable IP address: 213.251.145.96.
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The stuck pigs are squealing. To shift the onus from the US State Department, Hillary Clinton paints Wikileaks’ release of the “diplomatic cables” as an “attack on the international community.” To reveal truth is equivalent in the eyes of the US government to an attack on the world.
It is Wikileaks’ fault that all those US diplomats wrote a quarter of a million undiplomatic messages about America’s allies, a.k.a., puppet states. It is also Wikileaks’ fault that a member of the US government could no longer stomach the cynical ways in which the US government manipulates foreign governments to serve, not their own people, but American interests, and delivered the incriminating evidence to Wikileaks.
The US government actually thinks that it was Wikileaks patriotic duty to return the evidence and to identify the leaker. After all, we mustn’t let the rest of the world find out what we are up to. They might stop believing our lies.
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The US Government doesn’t get it. The truth is out there and attacking the messenger does nothing to fix their tarnished image. What about the stupidity of distributing the stuff internally to millions of people and assuming it would never leak? What about the stupidity of spying on the world and assuming the world will continue to trust the USA? What about the stupidity of trying to hide civilian casualties when the civilians have families and can do the maths? Could the attacks on Wikileaks be a smoke-screen to hide all that? Could it be easier to wage a war than to change for the better?
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Finance
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Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude continues to talk the talk – warning big resellers that the days of massive contracts with even bigger margins are over.
Maude said both suppliers and civil servants would need to change.
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Scotland Yard has deployed undercover officers to spy on a network of activists whose viral campaign against tax avoiders threatens to close down hundreds of shops in the run-up to Christmas.
The surveillance officers were first used at a protest in October, the Guardian can reveal, despite an assurance given to parliament last year that only officers in full uniform gather intelligence at protests.
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The European Union had to accept Greek Cyprus’ accession despite its leader’s public campaign against a UN plan to reunite the island because member Greece would have otherwise blocked the membership of other countries, a former EU official was quoted as saying in a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which rebounded from the financial crisis to post record profit last year, was a regular borrower from two emergency Federal Reserve programs in 2008 and early 2009, new data show.
The firm borrowed from the Fed’s Term Securities Lending Facility most weeks from March 2008 through April 2009, data released by the Fed today show. Two units of the New York-based firm borrowed as much as $24.2 billion from the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility in the weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy in September 2008, the data show.
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The November jobs report is ugly. Last month, the jobs report showed the economy added 150,000 jobs, sparking hopes that recovery was underway. And the recent economic data had been good: Black Friday saw a lot of shoppers, and initial unemployment claims had been going down. The expectation was that November’s report would be yet another piece of good news.
It isn’t. The economy created 39,000 jobs in November — about 160,000 fewer than it’d need to begin cutting into unemployment, and about 100,000 less than it’d need to just keep up with population growth. Speaking of unemployment, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent.
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In Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Roger Lowenstein profiles Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase. The piece, titled “Jamie Dimon: America’s Least-Hated Banker,” is generally sympathetic, but in every significant detail it confirms that Mr. Dimon is now – without question – our most dangerous banker.
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The longer people stay out of work, the more trouble they have finding new work.
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President Barack Obama’s budget deficit commission failed to garner enough support Friday to spur quick congressional action on its austere spending blueprint, but the plan will live on because a bipartisan majority on the panel embraced it.
Commission members said that by winning over 11 of the 18 panelists, they had defied expectations. They said it showed that Washington is capable of having an “adult conversation” on a bipartisan basis about the painful choices required to avert a European-style debt crisis.
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I think liberals are committing a conceptual mistake touting how much money was made as a result of the TARP fund.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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An Indian case study of how open standards can make an impact on the domestic technology industry and promote innovation, by offering a level-playing field for technology companies — both big and small — is the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications (SCOSTA).
SCOSTA was a standard developed for smart card-based driving licences and transport-related documentation by different State governments. It was developed by the National Informatics Centre in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Despite attempts by proprietary lobbies to make the body opt for a proprietary standard, the NIC and academics went ahead and developed an open standards, one that comprised technological specifications that were entirely royalty-free, and put up the specifications on their website. By doing so, they made a huge impact on the entire market.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN.
The recent seizures of around 80 domains by the US authorities only goes on to show the amount of influence the government have over the internet. There is a fear that if the US Senate passes the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, such instances will increase – becoming a threat to an open internet.
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In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the intermediary of a big studio or retailer. TIME put him on its cover, as did FORTUNE. He was 19 years old. (See the 50 Best Inventions of 2010.)
That same year, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Lech Johansen, working with two other programmers whose identities are still unknown, wrote a program that could decrypt commercial DVDs, and he became internationally infamous as “DVD Jon.” He was 15.
In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker in Sedona, Ariz., wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a fixture on Windows machines and helped mainstream the digital-music revolution. During its first 18 months in release, 15 million people downloaded it. Three years later, Frankel wrote Gnutella, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol so decentralized that, unlike Napster, it could not be shut down. Millions of people still use it.
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It looks like the FCC isn’t ready to give up its consumer advocacy on usage-based pricing plans. An FCC spokeswoman emailed me a statement attributed to a senior FCC official that said, “Usage-based pricing can create more choice and flexibility for consumers. But practices that are arbitrary, anti-consumer, or anti-competitive would cause serious concern. The FCC will be a cop on the beat for consumers.”
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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce this week whether he’ll fulfill President Obama’s promise to protect the open Internet and Net Neutrality.
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NINETEEN TECHNOLOGY HEAVYWEIGHTS have written to the UK Communications Minister and urged him to cement the Government’s stance on the open Internet.
The open letter, which is addressed to Ed Vaizey, Jeremey Hunt and Vince Cable, said that rather than just support the idea of the open Internet in principle the Government should preserve it with legislation and enforcement from Ofcom. This they added will protect Internet users and keep ISPs from abusing their dominant position.
The letter, which is undersigned by firms including Yahoo and Ebay, Skype and Which?, as well as the National Union of Journalists and the Open Rights Group, starts with some good words for the minister.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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What do we really know about the costs of violations of intellectual property for national economies? Or, conversely, about the economic benefits of strengthening copyright, trademark and patent protection? You could be forgiven for thinking that we know a great deal.
A widely quoted FBI assessment from 2002 estimated that US businesses lose between $200bn and $250bn to counterfeiting annually. A 2002 press release from the Customs and Border Patrol estimated counterfeit goods costing businesses $200bn dollars in losses annually and 750,000 jobs. The Federal Trade Commission was quoted as a source by industry groups for a claim that the American automobile industry alone loses $3bn annually from counterfeit car parts.
Those sound like authoritative sources and scarily large numbers. Unfortunately, when the General Accounting Office – the US government’s non partisan independent watchdog – sought the basis for those figures, it found that in each case there was no methodology, there was no study. Or in the GAO report’s words, they “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.” The FBI and the Border Patrol at least turn out to have made the numbers up in that authoritative scholarly form, “the press release,” while the poor FTC simply had industry groups attribute numbers to it with no basis in fact.
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In a rare defense of notorious copycat practices by certain Chinese manufacturers, a senior official has stated that “innovative elements” of fake products should be protected and encouraged, instead of being squashed without consideration of their intellectual property value.
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“We are the first generation in history to deny our culture to ourselves,” Jennifer Jenkins said.
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Copyrights
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Demonoid, one of the most prominent BitTorrent sites on the Internet, is ditching its .COM domain. In an announcement today the world’s biggest semi-private tracker says it will move to a .ME domain with immediate effect. The move comes as no surprise since both the MPAA and RIAA listed Demonoid in their recent submissions of “notorious markets” for pirate material.
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After being in quiet development for some months, in September the Mulve music downloading app hit the mainstream. Very quickly everything went sour, with British police swooping on the guy who registered the Mulve domain and placing him under arrest on a range of charges from copyright infringement through to conspiracy to defraud. Today we can report the outcome. For once it’s good news.
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But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright. As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.
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SUPPOSE for a moment that the gloomiest predictions for the music business turn out to be correct. Efforts by governments and record companies to shut down file-sharing websites like the Pirate Bay fail. Piracy becomes so entrenched that people simply stop buying legitimate CDs. Customers drift away from Apple’s iTunes store, which sells digital music tracks. They refuse to pay even trivial monthly subscriptions for music-download services like Pandora and streaming outfits like Spotify. Improbable? Not at all. In China, this worst-case scenario has already come to pass
The Yes Men Fix The World (2009) official trailer
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Fans of FOSS are already all too accustomed to the many barbs and insults Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) tends to sling at any free competitor, but one of the latest was so mystifying as to leave many Linux bloggers scratching their heads.
To be precise,”Нужно иметь в виду, что Linux не является российской ОС и, кроме того, находится в конце своего жизненного цикла” was the comment from Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft Russia. Translated, it reads, “We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle.”
Now, those who have been paying attention know that Russia is in the midst of what might be called an on-again, off-again affair with free software, as Glyn Moody notes in a recent blog post on the topic.
[...]
“Saying a thing doesn’t make it so,” Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl. “Linux still has legs it hasn’t even walked on yet.”
The operating system is “still growing in the server space, and Android looks poised to utterly dominate the smartphone landscape,” Espinoza explained. “Meanwhile, the desktop computer is on its way out; less and less people need one, and more and more Internet citizens lack one.
“The year of the Linux desktop just may end up being the year the desktop is replaced by tablets and smartphones,” Espinoza concluded.
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Linux Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
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Server
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Linux server revenues rose by 32.6 per cent to $2.1bn; IDC did not return a call at press time to get a figure for Linux server shipment growth in the quarter.
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Applications
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There is a longstanding myth that the choice of multimedia applications is sparse in Linux. This article began as a roundup of Multimedia Apps (multimedia being images, audio, and video). We had to split the story not once, but twice, in order to accommodate the number of titles we found. It’s safe to say that this myth has been busted.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In case you missed out on it earlier this year, you should really play Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Frictional Games built on the foundation it laid during its work on the Penumbra series to deliver a title that doesn’t rely on shock scares or cheap, gross-out imagery to frighten. It’s the genuine article — a consistently unsettling game world that never lets up and only becomes stranger as time goes on; a title very much worthy of the designation “survival horror.”
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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As of today, the latest release in KDE’s 4.5 series is 4.5.4, which adds a bunch of stabilization and translation updates on top of 4.5. Users in general are encouraged to upgrade to 4.5.4. The changelog has more details about some of the changes that went into this release.
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Today, KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the fourth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.5 series. 4.5.4 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5 series and is a recommended update for everyone running 4.5.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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Xfce
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Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve covered Linux desktop issues of all kinds, and we’ve examined desktop environments both well known (Gnome and KDE) as well as somewhat obscure (Window Maker, LXDE). For some reasons, we’ve never taken a close look at the very popular XFCE desktop environment. It’s nearly as feature-rich as Gnome, but with a smaller footprint. As it’s been a big name in the Linux desktop world for quite a few years now, it seems we’re long overdue to check out this polished and useful collection of software.
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New Releases
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The Linux Genealogy CD is a great way to take Linux for a “test drive” without changing anything on your PC. Once downloaded and stored properly on a CD-ROM disk, the Linux Genealogy CD can be used as a boot disk. You insert the CD into your PC’s CD disk drive, boot directly from the CD, and load Linux. You can run Linux as long as you wish but it never writes anything to your hard drive (unless you specifically tell it to). When finished, you boot down, remove the CD, boot again, and the system returns to Windows, exactly the same as before. Nothing has been changed.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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At the beginning of November the Mageia project had many necessary elements almost in place. These included things like a build server, Website and wiki hosting, a Code of Conduct, development and management teams, and a roadmap. The build server is based on Mandriva One and is just almost complete. PLF is temporarily hosting the some online resources and Zarb.org is hosting the mailing lists until a move to Gandi is completed. Packaging, artwork, distribution developers, translators, designers, QA, and other teams were organized. An alpha was planned for December at that time.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Here are the problems you can see just looking at a screen surface level here:
* The titlebar says warning. The text says error. The icon indicates a question. These are all in conflict with one another. This dialog is more of a warning dialog than anything else.
* The metadata about the drive in question is strewn all over the dialog and hard to read.
* The dialog uses the word ‘reinitialized’ and ‘re-initialized’ multiple times without explaining what it means.
* THE DIALOG USES ALL CAPS
* The dialog says that re-initializing will cause all data to be lost, but actually, it will only cause data on the drives being reinitialized to be lost, and only if there was any data in the first place (which there might not have been.)
* Four buttons across the bottom of the screen is a bit of an overload, yet if we had say 100 such devices attached to the system (slices of a network drive maybe) then we would see this dialog 100 times without those extra ‘all’ buttons.
* What does ignore do? Ignore what? Ignore this warning and go ahead an re-initialize? Wait a minute… (It actually ignores the drive in question, removing it from the set of drives considered in the install process)
* Overall, the dialog is scary, and this fright is brought up in situations that should not be frightful – e.g., you’re simply installing on a virtual machine with a virtual disk. No need for the scare!
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Recently, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu shocked the Ubuntu Linux world when he announced that the next release of the popular Linux, Ubuntu 11.04, would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface.
Why move from pure GNOME to Unity? As Shuttleworth explained to the Ubuntu developers, “Lots of people are already committed to Unity — the community, desktop users, developers, and platform and hardware vendors.” In particular, he noted, “Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) favor Unity. They’re happy to ship it.”
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Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1 is set to be released today and many of you have been wondering what Canonical’s Unity desktop will look like in this forthcoming release codenamed Natty Narwhal. I, for one, have been quite interested based upon the terrible Unity experience in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook, so I fired up the latest Ubuntu Natty daily LiveCD released this morning. Here are some screenshots of the new Ubuntu Unity desktop as it stands in Natty Alpha 1 along with screenshots of Natty’s classic GNOME desktop.
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Sub-notebooks
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Developed by Google, Chrome OS is currently available as a release candidate, with general release expected early in 2011. Although according to Wikipedia, Chrome OS will not be available as a download, but shipped pre-installed on computers, a download is still available on lie.
Chrome is the most extreme example yet of an operating system designed for use with online applications. It installs with little more than the Chrome browser and a panel with a few basic utilities on it, and almost all the available apps are online.
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EditShare founder and president Andy Liebman said that, based on early inquiries, more than 25,000 editors and developers could participate in the beta program. “We believe we can unleash a large community with developers,” he said.
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When I heard that Xmarks, the popular cross-browser plug-in that synchronizes bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers, was going out of business, I was really upset. For me, and many others, Xmarks is an invaluable resource. Well, we don’t have to worry anymore. LastPass, makers of an excellent password manager, has just announced that they’ve bought Xmarks. Hurrah!
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No, Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) is about as secure as any network can be. But, US Army intelligence analyst, Private First Class Bradley Manning showed how even the best laid security plans are useless if they’re not followed. While SIPRNet materials seemed to have been shared over a secured network, the laptops that Manning used to vacuum down the gigabytes of data, now in WikiLeak’s hands, had a CD/DVD burner on it. According to a Wired report, Manning said, “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused to revive Tiffany & Co.’s bid to hold EBay Inc. accountable for sales of counterfeit goods on its auction website.
The justices today left intact a ruling that said Tiffany couldn’t use federal trademark law to sue EBay, the most-visited U.S. e-commerce site.
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A few folks sent over this rather bizarre, but entertaining, story in the NY Times about a guy who operates an online ecommerce shop for eyewear out of his home office, and seems to have done quite well… in part by being a total jackass. The story is almost unbelievable. I’m not going to name the site, because, as is noted in the article, the guy thrives on having his site named in various places, which has only served to boost the Google juice for it. However, the guy discovered that the more complaints he got online, the higher his site ranked in Google, leading to more sales. Yes, if you do a search on the site’s actual name, there are tons of complaints warning people to stay away — but many of his customers don’t actually do that.
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As you can clearly see, none of the competing search engines I’ve named are listed in the top results. Rather than show them, Google instead shows pages about cars that it has collected across the web using its own technology.
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The cool news is there’s a new speed record for electric aircraft. A French pilot flew his twin-engine, electric powered Cri-Cri to a top speed of 162 miles per hour. This beats the previous record of 155 mph set by an Italian team in 2009.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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But McCall was merely pointing out that there’s a “revolving door” at these agencies, and machines are pitched by former government folks, with little evidence that they’re effective. Matthews totally takes what McCall actually says and pretends (falsely) that she claimed he made a corrupt deal while still in power. This is what passes for journalism these days?
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She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. “That’s my money,” she remembers saying. The officer’s reply? “It’s not your money.”
At this point she told the officers that she had a good explanation for the checks, but questioned whether she had to tell them.
“The police officer said if you don’t tell me, you can tell the D.A.”
So she explained that she and her husband had been on vacation, that they’d accumulated some hefty checks, and that she was headed to her bank’s headquarters, where she intended to deposit them.
She gave police her husband’s cell-phone number – he was at her mother’s with their children and missed their call.
Thirty minutes after the police became involved, they decided to let her collect her belongings and board her plane.
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…TSA’s claim that 99 percent of passengers “consent” to full-body scans is less impressive.
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What’s missing from all of these celebrations is an iota of questioning or skepticism. All of the information about this episode — all of it — comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud. As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims — as here — are uncorroborated and unexamined. That’s why we have what we call “trials” before assuming guilt or even before believing that we know what happened: because the government doesn’t always tell the complete truth, because they often skew reality, because things often look much different once the accused is permitted to present his own facts and subject the government’s claims to scrutiny. The FBI affidavit — as well as whatever its agents are whispering into the ears of reporters — contains only those facts the FBI chose to include, but omits the ones it chose to exclude. And even the “facts” that are included are merely assertions at this point and thus may not be facts at all.
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Of course, this is hardly new. There appears to have been a very similar story just a month ago, involving a guy in DC who wanted to bomb Metro stations, but the only actual plotting he was able to do was after federal authorities stepped in and helped him plan everything.
Even that is hardly new. I remember a fascinating episode of This American Life back from the summer of 2009 describing (in great detail) a very similar story of a supposed “arms dealer” that the Justice Department championed as a success story when it arrested and prosecuted him for selling missiles to terrorists. The only problem is that the deeper you dig, the more you realize that the whole plot was also set up by the feds. The guy had no way to get a missile. It was actually provided by the feds themselves.
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We’ve already pointed out how many mainstream newspapers and magazines have been mocking the concerns of people who are upset by the TSA’s new search procedures. And, of course, the latest is that the press has decided this story is over because not enough people (in their estimation) opted out of the naked scans last week. NYU professor Jay Rosen notes a related, but disturbing, trend in the mainstream press coverage, with multiple publications suggesting that it was somehow childish to suggest these machines invade privacy with little actual security benefit. The common theme in all of these reports? “Grow up.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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An exercise we did Friday at Univeristy of Nevada, Reno’s High School Journalism Day raised an interesting legal question: can a public university restrict its students’ use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter?
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I call a foul on Comcast. This strikes me not only as a violation of network neutrality, but as remarkably short-sighted.
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On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski set a vote on rules to protect network neutrality, the principle that broadband companies shouldn’t block or degrade rival web content, services or applications. The vote will be held on December 21st.
The compromise rules would re-establish the principle that U.S. internet users can use whatever software, websites and equipment they like on their cable or DSL connections. Those companies would also be barred from slowing down or blocking content from competitors. The ISPs will also have to be transparent about how they manage congestion on their networks to ensure that anti-competitive behavior isn’t being disguised.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Hershey Co, has taken one of its major competitors, Mars Inc., to court in a federal lawsuit over the packaging of chocolate and peanut butter candy.
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Copyrights
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Described online as a struggling screenwriter who sells flowers to make ends meet, P.J. McIlvaine is now facing the biggest struggle of her life. After creating a free online library of Hollywood movie scripts to assist other screenwriters, she incurred the wrath of Twentieth Century Fox. Without any previous contact, the movie giant sent private investigators to P.J’s home to gather information and has now sued for a mind boggling $12 million.
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This is hardly a surprise. Since Whitney Harper lost the appeal in her fight against the RIAA, claiming that statutory rates should be lowered to $200 (from a minimum of $750) as she was an “innocent infringer” (something which the law allows), we noted that it was unlikely the Supreme Court would hear the case. Even after the Supreme Court asked the RIAA for more info, we still noted that it was a long shot. So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.
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Accusing someone in a federal lawsuit of illegally downloading pornography is by itself so potentially embarrassing that it puts undue pressure on an accused person to settle, a watchdog group has told judges in Texas and West Virginia.
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Of course, even more insidious is Morton’s regular mixing of “counterfeiting” and “copyright infringement” — which are two extremely different things. In his statement, however, he seems to rely on whatever is “worst” for what he’s talking about. Counterfeit products seem like a bigger problem than straight copyright infringement, so he puts that first as saying “counterfeiters” are a problem. But, of course, the websites seized have nothing to do with counterfeits, so he switches and pretends he’s talking about copyright, saying that “criminals are stealing American ideas and products and distributing them over the Internet.” Except you can’t “steal an idea.” It’s simply not possible. Nothing is missing. You can copy an idea — but an idea is not copyrightable — only an expression is. You would think that someone representing the US government, seizing domain names over copyright infringement would know that you can’t copyright an idea.
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For a domain name, even a short seizure effectively erases any value the asset has. Even if ultimately returned, it’s now worthless.
Clearly the prosecutors here understand that a pre-trial seizure is effectively a conviction. Consider the following quote from Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, who said at a press conference today, “Counterfeiters are prowling in the back alleys of the Internet, masquerading, duping and stealing.” Or consider the wording of the announcement placed on seized domain names (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023918-93.html), implying at the least that the sites were guilty of illegal acts.
There’s no requirement for the government to explain the seizures are only temporary measures designed to safeguard property that may be evidence of crime or may be an asset used to commit it. Nor do they have to acknowledge that none of the owners of the domain names seized has been charged or convicted of any crime yet. But the farther prosecutors push the forfeiture statute, the bigger the risk that courts or Congress will someday step in to pull them back.
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Even more damning, top artists like Kanye West clearly appreciate sites like this. Just a few weeks ago, Kanye West linked to OnSmash via his Twitter feed.
It really looks like Homeland Security/ICE may have seriously screwed up here. Whether or not seizing domains in general like this is even legal is an open legal question — and blatantly seizing domains with tons of legit content that the industry and artists regularly used themselves seems like a test case the government doesn’t want just waiting to happen.
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Barnett also claims that this is no different than Customs seizing shipments of counterfeit goods as they enter the US, but that’s a huge stretch. Customs’ job is to guard what crosses the borders. That’s it. Seizing entire domain names because there may be some infringing material on the site (which, again, was never established at a trial) has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the borders. And the very fact that Barnett’s already admitted to relying on the industry’s say so that these things are infringing is downright scary. Why are our tax dollars being used to protect legacy entertainment industry companies that refuse to adapt?
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Over the past weekend, Internet pop sensation Justin Bieber went to upload the music video of his new song called “Pray” to his personal YouTube site. He was in for a rude surprise: YouTube automatically blocked his video upload on “copyright grounds” that the video contained content from Universal Music Group (UMG), parent company to Bieber’s record label, Island Def Jam records.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee apparently just loves expanding copyright law for no reason whatsoever. Just after they unanimously agreed to move the COICA censorship bill forward, they’ve also unanimously agreed to move forward with the fashion copyright bill, which is nothing more than blatant protectionism for the largest players in the fashion industry, at the expense of new entrants and (more importantly) the public. This has been discussed over and over and over again and it’s a real shame.
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Versions of the bill had been introduced three times in recent years, but until now, the bill has never been referred out of committee in either the Senate or the House.
Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Most people don’t realize how easy it is to install applications on modern releases of the Linux operating system. As the package managers have evolved into powerful, user-friendly tools, the task of installation has become equally user-friendly. Even so, some users encounter traps that seem to trip them up at every attempt. How can you avoid these traps and be one of those Linux users happily installing application after application? With these five tips, that’s how.
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Desktop
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Linutop released a new version of its small, fanless Linutop 3 PC, moving up from a 1GHz Via C7 CPU to a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 while dropping to under 16 Watts of power consumption. The Linutop 3 ships with 1GB or 2GB of RAM, 2GB of flash, gigabit Ethernet and serial ports, six USB 2.0 ports, and dual SATA ports.
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Server
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ZT Systems announced what it says is the first commercially available ARM-based development platform for the server market. The Ubuntu Linux-based R1801e 1U rackmount server employs SSD (solid state disk) storage and eight ARM Cortex-A9-based computer-on-modules (COMs), providing 16 600MHz cores while using less than 80 Watts, the company says.
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Companies usually spend time and money developing new and interesting features to drive upgrades, but Microsoft is taking a different approach with the “Vail” release of Windows Home Server (WHS): It’s dropping the popular Drive Extender feature that lets users “pool” hard drives to increase storage. In response HP is kicking WHS to the curb and using WebOS for its MediaSmart systems.
One of the reasons I’m such a fan of Linux, and FOSS in general, is that no one company is in charge of product direction for the platform. If a Linux vendor or project decides to drop a feature or turn off support for something (for example, Red Hat dropping Xen support) other vendors can pick it up or continue to offer support.
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Ballnux
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More photos have been posted of an “LG Star,” rumored to be the first Android smartphone to offer a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Meanwhile, a more imminent LG Androider called the LU3000 has been tipped in South Korea, and the FCC has posted details on two Samsung Android phones, one of which appears to be the rumored Nexus S.
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Lineo Solutions announced Warp for Atom, a new version of its Linux fast-boot technology claimed to boot in 4.06 seconds on an Intel Atom Z530-based single board computer (SBC). Meanwhile, MPC Data released a YouTube video of a Renesas SH7724-optimized version of its SwiftBoot Linux fast boot technology, claimed to boot up in just a second.
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Kernel Space
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According to the 2010, ‘Who Writes Linux’ report, the number of code commits to the recent 2.6.35 kernel was 18 percent lower than the 2.6.30 kernel which was released in 2009. There are a number of reasons why kernel code commits have slowed over the past year, including new processes for staging code.
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Kernel.org is the central hub which runs the infrastructure that the Linux Kernel community uses to develop and maintain a core piece of the operating system. The infrastructure is getting some massive muscle power with two new “heavy lifting machines” and two new backend machines to round out kernel.org’s infrastructure of 12 boxes running worldwide.
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Graphics Stack
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It’s long been a topic of what parts of X.Org should be killed with fire. There’s plenty of dated and obscure X.Org and Mesa drivers around for hardware that hasn’t even been manufactured in years and are rarely used. At XDS Toulose and on other occasions it’s been decided not to do a massive purge of all these legacy graphics drivers for Linux. Old hardware support by the X Server has once again been brought up, but this time it’s about monitors.
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Applications
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Every day we read of new Linux distributions (GNU/Linux to be correct), and sometimes happen to want to try them “on the road”, even those who do not have a live version. The first program that comes to mind, I think, is precisely Qemu. But I also think that there is also an attempt to find a more friendly alternative.
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When using my netbook I loathe having to use Empathy – or any instant messenger for that matter. But why?
Windows. No not that sort but the sort that litter up our desktops, get in the way of what we’re actually trying to do and otherwise just loiter around, occasionally jostling for attention.
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Never memorize what you can look up. This is one of the essential rules of system administration, and it applies very well to creating crontab entries. If you’re not an expert on cron, don’t worry — just use the Corntab site or iPhone app.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group is proud to announce a 50% off recession busting sale on Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenIndiana. With the current US unemployment rate hovering near 10% and rumors of the possibility of a double dip recession. We want to do our part to help save individuals and small business as much money as we can on their Wine related software needs. With Bordeaux you can run many of todays most popular Windows based office applications and games on your operating system of choice.
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Games
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Interaction Studios the developers of the legendary space shooter series Chicken Invaders, released it’s latest game Chicken Invaders: Ultimate Omelette, which like their other games will be available for GNU/Linux soon.
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Several days ago I’ve posted about Dressed-Up Pups is coming to GNU/Linux, but apparently, more games are coming to GNU/Linux as well…
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Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines. Uses OpenGL & SDL.
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As Linux gains more popularity, the number of major commercial game vendors supporting Linux has not increased, but independent developers are certainly taking notice. Here are four more Linux games that are sure to distract you from real work. Be sure to play them only when your boss is not looking. Enjoy!
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Last May, PC gamers on Windows, Mac and Linux had a chance to pay want they wanted for five indie games. Gamers had two weeks pay what they wanted for World of Goo, Lugaru, Aquaria, Gish and Penumbra Overture. Your money also went to two charities, Child’s Play and EFF.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.
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Some months ago I joined the Game. “Join the Game” is the campaign from the KDE community to make it possible to everyone to support the KDE project. Although I contribute to KDE already (e.g. promotion) I had the impression that I still take more than I could give back. To show my love and to support the vision and the values behind KDE I decided to become a financial sponsor, too.
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GNOME Desktop
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In Linux, a lot of design makeover starts with a mockup. We have already experienced it first hand with the clever redesign of Nautilus called Nautilus Elementary. The following Evolution mockups are so impressive that I really hope someday these changes will be implemented in Evolution partially at least.
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Xfce
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Not Debian this time — although Debian could probably put up a fight when compared to this. No, this time it’s Alpine Linux, which you may or may not have heard of. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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We will give them a free license for our server product – Mandriva Enterprise Server – for each MUGs in the world. We know that it is a small gift, but we offer it to you all as a token of our gratitude for everything you have been doing.
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Red Hat Family
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The latest Linux-based OS from Red Hat offers a strong foundation for hosting virtual workloads, complete with distinctive capabilities such as security features rooted in SE Linux.
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Red Hat climbed 6.28% to $46.23 after posting a new 52-week high of $46.25.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I am running the development version of Ubuntu (the Natty Narwhal). I’ve tried the Unity desktop (and will continue to do so) but for reasons I won’t go into here, I need to use the Ubuntu Classic Desktop for now.
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People assume that Canonical guys and gals are the only ones who work on Ubuntu. When people talk about the direction in which Ubuntu is going, people talk about the direction that Canonical takes Ubuntu in.
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Linux is free as in beer. Yeah, and speech too, but I’m concentrating on the beer right now. The same is true for Ubuntu’s brand of Linux. You can download a free beer, er, I mean a free ISO image of the latest Ubuntu from the Ubuntu servers, burn that ISO, and install it on as many PCs as you want. You can then hand that CD to a friend and let them do the same. I’ve done this countless times over the years. I’ve also paid for Linux many times over the years and frankly, I don’t object to doing that when I think paying a little here and there supports the companies that support and promote Linux and other free and open source software.
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For those unfamiliar, the Ubuntu Manual was started by Benjamin Humphrey to provide users with a comprehensive guide minus the technical jargon often found in books and forums. The team quickly progressed and released the manual for Ubuntu 10.04. The manual covers nearly every daily task an Ubuntu user will encounter: web browsing, music, scanning documents, managing photos, troubleshooting, finding help, and more. The guide also provides clear screen shots, making it easy to follow for people of all levels of computer expertise.
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Canonical had experimented and discarded the idea of a mobile device centric version of its popular desktop OS Ubuntu. However, a closer look at the current smart-phone OS market makes me believe there is room for the company to revisit the idea of a mobile version of the OS, this time, targeted at smart-phones and not the ambiguous MID.
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Flavours and Variants
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I’m proud to say that Linux Mint is the best autumn release, and possibly the best release of 2010. It’s on par with Ubuntu in terms of good looks and stability, but then it builds on this foundation and becomes even better. The default choice of programs is superior. The Software Manager is a blast. You get the best system menu and the prettiest icons on the market.
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Splashtop Inc. (formerly DeviceVM) released the first downloadable version of its Linux-based Splashtop instant-on companion operating system for Windows, and also signed a deal with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on all Splashtop products. Based on the Google Chromium browser, Splashtop OS (beta) is billed as a lightweight, web-centric OS optimized for notebooks and netbooks.
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Phones
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Android
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Qualcomm has the competitive advantage of being able to most quickly update IC designs to Android versions due to its close cooperation with Google, whereas MediaTek gains the upper hand in terms of cooperation with China-based handset designers and vendors, the sources indicated.
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Tablets
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Coby Electronics announced a seven-inch Coby Kyros Tablet MID7015 Android tablet for $250, and Linsay’s seven-inch Tablet A-1A tablet is selling on Amazon.com for approximately $200. Meanwhile, a rash of negative reviews of low-cost Android tablets has led pundits to worry that the tablets’ bad reputation could stifle more compelling Android competitors due in 2011.
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Capgemini positions Open Source as a brand next to Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM and is offering a Total Open Source Stack.
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The progress made by the LibreOffice folks so far is impressive, at least when it comes to attracting contributors. The third beta was released on November 18th, and seems to have impressive momentum. The release notes list 118 contributors who’ve helped with the development just between beta 2 and beta 3. How’s it looking so far? Don’t expect miracles, but it’s shaping up nicely.
If you’ve installed beta 2, remove it before installing beta 3. I installed on Ubuntu 10.10, which was pretty easy — just download the tarball with all the Debian packages and uncompress it. Then go to the DEBS directory and run sudo dpkg -i *deb. After that, go to the desktop-integration directory and install the single Debian package (libreoffice3.3-debian-menus_3.3-2_all.deb) there. That package isn’t strictly necessary, but it provides menu integration. You probably want that.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Add-ons are useful if you want to add new functionality to Thunderbird or change its appearance.
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Oracle
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Oracle has now filed its Reply to Google’s Answer with Counterclaims to Oracle’s Amended Complaint.
And now that I’ve read all three documents, I think I’ve finally understood what it’s about, at least the big picture. It’s an intriguing case. Standard wisdom would indicate that Google would settle, pay up, and move on. From that viewpoint, Google’s filing would be mostly positioning for settlement purposes.
But nothing in patent law is normal right now, so if Google is interested in getting these patents tossed overboard in a way that could have broader implications for software patents, they might decide to go all the way with this. After all, they have alleged that each of Oracle’s patents is invalid “because one or more claims are directed to abstract ideas or other non-statutory subject matter”, and frankly the first thing I noticed with the patents was that they didn’t seem to be tied to a specific machine, so depending on how the US Supreme Court defines its terms after Bilski, this case could be the one to get that firmed up. Google has a strong record of winning patent infringement cases, so they know what they are doing.
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How many times have you run into problems with Java? Chances are very good that most of you have. If you perform a Google search using the words “Linux” and “Java,” you’ll have an all-day scavenger hunt on your hands. Searching for answers to installing Java, making it work and surviving the aftermath could use up whatever energy you’ve gleaned from actual cups of java. If you install the correct package, you need never fret again. You’ll learn to love Java again. You might even sing about it.
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Project Releases
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Martin Dougiamas, founder of Moodle, has announced the release of Moodle 2.0, which is now available for download.
Dougiamas writes in his post, “I know it’s taken a long time, it’s been a rough and rocky road. A huge thank you must go out to all the developers, testers, supporters, teachers, trainers, administrators, artists, friends, researchers and students who have contributed to this release. Special thanks to our Moodle Partners for providing most of the funding.”
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Standards/Consortia
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It proved to be highly CPU-intensive during my tests, but worked smoothly in Firefox 4 beta 7 on my Ubuntu desktop computer.
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The 2018 World Cup has been awarded to Russia.
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GSA’s decision to switch to Google Apps resulted from a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process that took place over the past six months, during which the agency evaluated multiple proposals for replacing their existing on-premises email system. GSA selected Google partner Unisys as the prime contractor to migrate all employees in 17 locations around the world to an integrated, flexible and robust email and collaboration service in 2011.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A self-proclaimed “hacktivist” said Tuesday he’s the computer expert who knocked rogue Web site WikiLeaks offline for several hours through a distributed denial of service attack.
The hacker, who calls himself The Jester and goes by the name th3j35t3r on Twitter, said he was motivated to take down WikiLeaks for patriotic reasons. He also said his other targets include Web sites used by Al Qaeda and other terrorists groups for recruiting purposes.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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An international conservation conference in Paris made progress this Saturday on protecting sharks but didn’t do anything to save the Atlantic bluefin tuna, which has been severely overfished to feed the market for sushi in Japan, environmental groups said.
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Finance
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In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. failed to vacate a $20.1 million award an arbitration panel had granted Bayou Group LLC creditors who sued Goldman for failing to detect Bayou funds for which it did transfers were a fraud.
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Keep in mind this is very raw data and will need far more processing before conclusions can be
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What exactly does it mean when the Fed bails out a number of American corporations, including Goldman Sachs (for $590 Billion), and does not ask them to help reform the financial system or to keep a lid on humongous executive bonuses? In fact, Goldman Sachs sent many lobbyists to Congress to make sure that the financial reform would not be too onerous for them (and succeeded)! Something is rotten in the State of Denmark that won’t be made fresh soon.
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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac defended their role in the foreclosure crisis in prepared testimony to Congress on Wednesday, while at least one federal regulator said the mortgage giants had contributed to the problem.
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The federal government’s crackdown against what it considers illegal insider trading advanced on Tuesday with one arrest and a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against a husband and wife formerly employed by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.
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Securities and Exchange Commission attorneys wanted to bring a case swiftly against Bank of America for allegedly misleading shareholders when it acquired Merrill Lynch, and as a result omitted significant violations from their initial charges, according to an agency watchdog report released Tuesday.
The report by the office of SEC Inspector General David Kotz also found that the agency sought a relatively small penalty against Bank of America, $33 million, after investigators initially “relied substantially on case precedent” to arrive at the figure.
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According to preliminary tax collection data compiled by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, 48 early reporting states collected 3.9 percent more in taxes, in nominal terms, from July through September 2010 than in the same period in 2009. Still, don’t get too excited: tax collections were 7 percent below the same period two years ago, which means the pain that many states have been feeling is not likely to recede yet.
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November marked a two-year low for the number of people applying for initial unemployment benefits, suggesting that the tight job market may be easing at last.
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Progressives hope that the federal government will raise revenue mainly, if not exclusively, by levying taxes on wealthy Americans. But a comparison of France and the United States suggests that raising tax revenue will ultimately involve increasing tax rates on the poor much more than they would be increased on the wealthy.
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The European Central Bank stepped up efforts to contain the continent’s government debt crisis, as bank president Jean-Claude Trichet announced it would prolong measures to provide ready cash to banks and steady the financial system.
Markets were initially disappointed Thursday when Trichet did not say the bank would go even further and increase its purchases of government bonds. The euro sagged almost a cent during his news conference.
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The chairmen of President Obama’s debt-reduction commission have been unable to win support from any of the panel’s elected officials for their proposed spending cuts and tax increases, underscoring the reluctance of both parties to risk short-term political backlash in pursuit of the nation’s long-term fiscal health.
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Legislatures around the country may have to make more spending cuts over the next couple of years because of dwindling help from the federal government and a slow recovery in tax revenue, according to a new report.
States will spend about $43 billion in economic stimulus funds during the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. After that, they’ll probably have to get by with less federal funding.
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The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.
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The worst summer for home sales in decades also put a chill on foreclosure sales, even as the average discounts on the distressed properties got bigger compared with other types of homes.
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Both Democrats and Republicans seem willing to extend most of the tax cuts. But Democrats want to let cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire, citing damage to the federal deficit from lost revenue as a main argument.
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In September the state of California hit a new high in food stamp benefits, crossing the 6 billion dollar mark on an annualized basis. Over the past year in California alone the total number recipients of the federal SNAP program (supplemental nutritional assistance program) rose by 16.3%. In many of the big counties of California however, food stamp usage rose even faster.
[...]
The State of California is running hard now to take as much federal assistance for which it qualifies. In addition to food stamp benefits now annualized at six billion dollars, the state continues to borrow funds from Washington to pay its own portion of unemployment benefits.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In a first for the UK, the University of Glasgow is to offer Intellectual Property – including ground-breaking medical and scientific research – to business and entrepreneurs free of charge.
Speeding up and simplifying IP transfer, the move will revolutionise the relationship between academic research and commercial enterprise and make Glasgow the most libertarian University in the UK for IP access.
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Copyrights
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As has been reported, it looks like ICE, which is the principal investigative arm of DHS, has begun seizing domains under the pretext of IP infringement. But it’s actually not ICE who is executing the mechanics of the seizures. It’s a private company, immixGroup IT Solutions. Here is what is going down.
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Some of you may recall that a month ago or so, I posted a comment here about a bill making its way through the Senate, the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (“COICA”), that would allow US courts to “seize” domain names belonging to US or foreign websites simply upon a charge, by the Attorney General, that the site was “primarily devoted” to infringing activities. I was the author of a law professors’ “Letter in Opposition” to the bill, which garnered around 50 co-signatories, based largely on the grounds that these seizures would represent “prior restraints on speech” under the First Amendment, and were blatantly unconstitutional.
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Trademark suits can often be rather silly and highlight the high legal costs of maintaining sanity. This week-end’s press gives us two nice examples.
Harper advisor calls for assassination of Wikileaks director
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While we anticipated Mesa 7.10 being a late Q4’2010 or very early Q1’2011 release, today that’s now been formalized with Intel’s Ian Romanick once again stepping up to the plate to manage this next Mesa 3D release. Ian’s proposal calls for Mesa 7.10 to be branched on 8 December and then for the final release to be out around or on the 7th of January. In traditional Mesa fashion, a Mesa 7.9.1 bug-fix release will also come around that time.
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It’s long been a topic of what parts of X.Org should be killed with fire. There’s plenty of dated and obscure X.Org and Mesa drivers around for hardware that hasn’t even been manufactured in years and are rarely used. At XDS Toulose and on other occasions it’s been decided not to do a massive purge of all these legacy graphics drivers for Linux. Old hardware support by the X Server has once again been brought up, but this time it’s about monitors.
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Applications
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http://www.webupd8.org/2010/12/zeitgeist-extension-for-chrome-to-use.html
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Proprietary
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Adobe Flash Player 10.2 beta was released today with preliminary support for Stage Video which is supposed to reduce the performance impact while playing back video content across all platforms. The new version also brings enhanced text rendering, and two popular requests from the community: a native custom mouse cursors API and support for full screen playback with multiple monitors.
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Yesterday afternoon the Adobe developers came out to release their first Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Beta for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. This Flash Player releases introduces “Stage Video”, which is their new API and method for accelerating Flash video content across all platforms, including Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Back in May we reported that Ryzom was released as free software, with Ryzom being a massively multi-player online science-fantasy role playing game developed by a French game studio. Six months after putting the code out there, Winch Gate Properties Ltd is announcing the official release of their native Linux client for the Ryzom game.
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It’s now two months since Linux Game Publishing went offline due to a failure of their only web server and full service has still not been restored. Last week their service was partially restored with the LGP DRM system going back online along with some of their other web-sites, but the main Linux Game Publishing web-site is still down with no update since the 23rd of November.
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Red Hat Family
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As El Reg reported back in September, Makara was shopping itself to various potential suitors, and today Linux, virtualization, and middleware juggernaut Red Hat snapped up the startup to pad out its platform as a service products to better compete against Microsoft, VMware, and others.
[...]
Crenshaw did not tip the company’s cards on when this future integrated product based on Makara and JBoss technologies would be delivered.
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Several days ago, Chen Lei, aka supercyper, told me that Thorsten Leemhuis (thl) has entirely left RPM Fusion. Thl will spent more time in his other jobs. Supercyper is so worried about that. He said RPM Fusion will die if thl no longer works for RPM Fusion.
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For the CentOS developers and users, Christmas Day may bring more than the usual presents under the tree.
If past experience holds, it should take the CentOS development and QA teams about 45 days from the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to get CentOS 6 ready for release… which puts the projected release date on December 25.
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Debian Family
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While the upstream FreeBSD project doesn’t have an easy root ZFS file-system installation option within FreeBSD 8.0/8.1, this isn’t particularly ground-breaking, as the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD already has ZFS installation support that is quite easy to work.
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Users of Linux can save themselves a lot of time, trouble, heartache and pain by taking the path of least resistance and using a distribution that works with their hardware out of the box.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Mobile Linux has had a difficult road to the mainstream and remains highly fragmented. The
most famous Linux-based mobile OS, Android, officially doesn’t even qualify as Linux any more. This seems to have given Intel and Nokia the opportunity to present themselves as the guardians of Linux for mobile devices. However unlikely this scenario may seem, given past history, their mutual platform MeeGo has its credentials firmly intact, and is hosted by the Linux Foundation, which fosters development of the open source platform. Now Intel and Nokia are taking even more of the high ground, as both have entered the top five contributors to the Linux OS kernel for the past year.
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With the growing popularity of Google’s Linux-based Android operating system for smartphones and other mobile devices and the excitement surrounding Intel’s and Nokia’s joint MeeGo project for tablets, Linux is becoming a key player in the mobile market. All top smartphone makers, excluding Nokia and Apple, have at least one Android phone in their product lineup. Nokia is expected to rollout a slew of MeeGo devices in 2011.
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The Symbian Foundation announces website closures starting mid-December 2010.
Recently the Symbian Foundation announced Nokia’s commitment to making the Symbian platform available under an alternative direct and open model. As a result of the Symbian Foundation licensing transition, there will be a reduction in daily operations and staff numbers.
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Events
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Allies are extremely important. There aren’t that many women here yet. So, in order to be successful at changing the tone in the free software community, we need your help.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It has finally happened. It took a little longer than anticipated, but Chrome has now passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit TechCrunch. For the month of November, Chrome is number one for the first time, edging out Firefox 27.80 percent to 27.67 percent.
Back in early September, on Chrome’s second birthday, we noted that Google’s browser had been making huge gains over the past couple of years and was only about 3 percent away from passing longtime leader (again, in terms of browsing traffic to TechCrunch) Firefox. The quickly progressing Firefox 4 beta likely slowed Chrome’s march to the top a bit, but it couldn’t fully hold it back. Now the question is: can Chrome hang on?
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Funding
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Some time ago I was asked to do a study of our most popular open source projects to assess 1) what governance models are out there and 2) if the governance model has any effect on the project’s success (such as size of developer community) on the one hand and on the other hand on the business of the related vendor(s).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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A few weeks ago there were benchmarks of GCC, LLVM-GCC, DragonEgg, and Clang. In this compiler performance comparison the releases of GCC 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, and a 4.6 development snapshot were benchmarked. On the LLVM side there was LLVM-GCC 4.2, DragonEgg with GCC 4.5 and LLVM 2.8, and then Clang with LLVM 2.8. This combination of eight open-source compilers were tested on three distinct Intel and AMD systems (even a 12-thread Core i7 Gulftown), but all of which were 64-bit capable and contained relatively high-end processors from their respective series. To complement this earlier article, available now are some new GCC/LLVM benchmarks but this time an older Intel Atom CPU was used to look at the 32-bit compiler performance on a slower, low-power netbook.
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Project Releases
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After over a year it’s about time that I announced an arm release so here it is! What’s new since August of 2009, you ask? Lots. The project has been under very active development, continuing to add usability improvements to make relay operation nicer and less error prone. If you’re really curious what I’ve been up to this last year then it’s all available in the change log.
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There’s long been a desire by KDE users to have a Phonon back-end for the VLC media player (there’s 4 year old bug reports on the matter) and just now there is finally a Phonon-VLC release that is considered “stable enough for day to day use.” Phonon-VLC is a version of VLC that uses the Phonon back-end from KDE4 as it’s back-end. This multimedia API was originally provided by KDE libraries and then integrated into Qt is abstracted and can then target a particular multimedia back-end like GStreamer or Xine.
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Openness/Sharing
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The open source community has a phrase for the principle of rapid prototyping: “Release early, release often.” The theory is sound: Don’t wait until a project is perfect to share it. Instead, keep producing work so more people can experience it, react to it, find bugs, and improve it.
But does the principle also work in a creative environment? Ideas are fragile. Their merit is judged not just on the idea, but the quality of the execution. Often they need to be protected just to get that far. All it takes is one naysayer to sweep the legs out from under your idea.
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Florida student is relieved to know deputies aren’t searching for him…but he’s still in shock that the Polk County Sheriff’s Office erroneously released his photo in connection to a September murder.
Investigators originally released a driver’s license photo of Zachary Garcia — spelled with an “A” — but it was Zachery Garcia — spelled with an “E” — who was charged in connection with the crime.
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Oklahoma’s FOX 23 News found out about “Jus N Walk” and his Facebook page, which, sadly, no longer contains the photographs of Walker taking bong rips, drinking hooch and licking shanks. He likes fantasy novels, the movie Natural Born Killers, and, according to FOX 23, adheres to white power ideology. Watch the news report above.
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Google Editions, the Internet giant’s book store business promised for last summer, is set to launch before the end of 2010, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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One of the latest disclosure by Wikileaks that is doing the round today is the news that Gordon Brown personally appealed to the US Ambassador to resolve the Gary McKinnon case and allow him to face justice in the UK. By all account the US gave him a flat refusal.
The conspiracy theorists are suggesting it seems that this appeal by Brown took place around the same time as Scotland were pissing off the yanks by letting the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al Megrahi free because he only had a few months to live (still alive I think). In other words, the yanks took the “fuck you” approach as payback.
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Muscling up on cloud technologies, Cisco is in the process of acquiring network management software vendor LineSider Technologies, the company announced Wednesday.
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Health/Nutrition
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Scientists at the University of Missouri used cinnamon to replace almost all toxic chemicals needed for making gold nanoparticles used in electronics and healthcare products.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Pentagon Papers were a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The New York Times published the papers in defiance of the Nixon administration, and was investigated by the White House. Attorney Floyd Abrams, who defended the newspaper in the Pentagon Papers case, talks to Renee Montagne about the laws that apply to WikiLeaks.
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I’ve been dealing with a family illness, but couldn’t let the Wikileaks Cablegate incident pass without comment. In between hospital visits, I’ve been jotting down links related to the historic leak.
It’s a stunning experiment of forced transparency, prying open government against its will without much care or concern about the ramifications. Wikileaks is the Pirate Bay of journalism — an unstoppable force disrupting whole industries because they can.
To help make sense of my own opinions about it, I rounded up some of the more interesting responses and visualizations. Enjoy.
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Kevin Poulsen at Wired News: “The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden.”
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Admire him or revile him, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency, the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago. Over the last year his information insurgency has dumped 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war into the public domain–the largest classified military security breaches in history. Sunday, WikiLeaks made the first of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department cables public, offering an unprecedented view of how America’s top diplomats view enemies and friends alike.
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I think there actually is something talismanic about designating Assange a terrorist–politically talismanic. I think we’re getting close to a point where “terrorist” indicates a certain view of your enemies, as opposed to a statement of tactics. I have mixed feelings about the Wikileaks dump, mostly because I don’t really see any great scandals, atrocities, or cover-ups being exposed. Assange oeuvre is mostly hacker, and occasionally, accidentally humanitarian.
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Tom Flanagan, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, says he regrets his “glib” comment calling for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“It was a thoughtless, glib remark about a serious subject,” Flanagan said Wednesday on the CBC’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon.
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As more and more documents become available from Wikileaks, the public has gotten a novel and close up view of U.S. diplomats and their operations abroad. I was particularly interested to review heretofore secret documents dealing with Latin America, a region which has absorbed the attention of Washington officials in recent years. While it’s certainly no secret that the Bush administration, not to mention the later Obama White House, have both sought to isolate the so-called “Pink Tide” of leftist regimes in South America, the Wikileaks documents give us some interesting insight into the mindset of U.S. diplomats as they carry out their day to day work.
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He is a new kind of whistle-blower: one made for the digital age. Those before him (like Daniel Ellsberg) were limited in the ways they could go public with their information. But in founding WikiLeaks.org, Julian Assange gave himself the freedom to publish virtually anything he wants, whether it’s the true nature of Iraqi prisoner abuse, the double role Pakistan plays in Afghanistan or the personal e-mails of Sarah Palin.
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Sarah Palin, who is widely tipped as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, has said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
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Update: U.S. politicians told Amazon to remove Wikileaks
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Once a nation honored for our commitment to peacekeeping, today Canada’s international reputation is in tatters thanks to Tom Flanagan.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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President Barack Obama’s administration is to maintain a ban on off-shore oil and gas drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Atlantic coast.
The decision reverses a plan to open up new areas announced by Mr Obama in the spring, just before the BP oil spill.
Wednesday’s move sparked protests from oil firms and their allies in Congress.
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Finance
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First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.
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For the holiday season-to-date, $13.55 billion has been spent online, marking a 13-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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It wasn’t until I left America that I started to realize how badly the American plutocrat owned media lies to the American people through its disinformation campaign.
Well today for a span of at least this one Daily Kos diary, you will get to see what the American plutocrat owned media never wants you to see, and that is how Europe in particular and the world in general has come to see America as a country in decline, whose people are so badly misinformed by the media, they actually don’t realize that America is the only major industrialized nation in the world that by right of law does not offer universal medical access, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave and paid annual leave. It just seems almost impossible to get that word out to the American people. Even diaries on that subject at the Kos top out at just over 2,000 views.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook’s ‘Like This’ button is watching your every move.
Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not.
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In Germany, a few blogs and websites have already decided to throw in the towel before a law comes into effect from January 1, 2011. The so-called Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag (JMStV) will task anyone operating a .de domain with adding an age certificate to his or her website – imagine having to add a BBFC certificate on your blog.
Sounds like a dumb idea, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it is set to become reality due to politicians ratifying the law in the parliaments of Germany’s 16 federal states.
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YouPorn is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with an Alexa ranking of 61. Those who visit the homemade-porn featuring site — essentially, a YouTube for porn enthusiasts — are subject to scrutiny, though, of the Web tracking variety. When a visitor surfs into the YouPorn homepage, a script running on the website checks to see what other porn sites that person has been to.
[...]
So I checked in with Interclick. Interclick explained that it deployed the script on websites around the Web over a limited period, from March to October, to test the quality of data sets it had purchased. “Interclick purchases anonymous audience data from several vendors for the purpose of targeting advertising campaigns. Consequently, it has a number of quality control measures in place to understand the quality and effectiveness of this data. The code observed in the paper was a quality measure being tested,” said Interclick in a statement to me.
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He’s off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris’s start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world’s estimated 10 billion devices.
Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people. So, Mr. Norris is building a “credit bureau for devices” in which every computer or cellphone will have a “reputation” based on its user’s online behavior, shopping habits and demographics. He plans to sell this information to advertisers willing to pay top dollar for granular data about people’s interests and activities.
Device fingerprinting is a powerful emerging tool in this trade. It’s “the next generation of online advertising,” Mr. Norris says.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission plans to announce Wednesday a controversial proposal that would prohibit Internet providers from favoring or discriminating against any traffic that goes over their networks.
He would do so, however, without resorting to the more drastic step of changing the way the FCC regulates broadband providers, a move that would have more clearly asserted the government’s authority over Internet access.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It’s been sort of amusing over the past few years to watch the entertainment and media worlds focus increasingly on the idea that they need to “protect” content in some way, as if (a) that’s possible or (b) desirable. It is neither. At this point, it should be clear that there is no realistic way to “protect” content. The debunking of DRM has gone on for many years, and I don’t think we need to contribute any further to that discussion. But, more importantly, even if it were possible, I would argue that it is not a good idea. The opportunities for smart business models going forward are in enabling people to do more with your content. That is, it’s in using the content to create greater and greater value — and then setting up business models that allow you to capture some of that increased value.
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Copyrights
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We’ve discussed in great detail the efforts by Voltage Pictures, the producers of the movie Hurt Locker to sue thousands of people for sharing the movie. Well, “sue” should be used loosely, as the effort, coordinated by US Copyright Group (really DC law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver), is really about demanding people pay up to avoid getting sued. We also wrote about a lawyer, Graham Syfert, who was offering (for sale) a DIY legal kit for individuals on the receiving end of such a lawsuit, who couldn’t afford a lawyer. Apparently a bunch of folks have used those legal forms to make pro se filings — and apparently some of them are working. The motions to quash have gone nowhere, but motions to dismiss are apparently getting some traction, and USCG and Voltage are not at all happy about it.
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“What’s happening?” Jenkins continued. “This level of granularity–licensing two or three notes–IP rights are being applied down to the atomic level of culture. Tiny fragments of music come loaded with demands for payment and copyright protection.”
Despite the assertion that creativity is unaffected, these rulings have changed the music that we create and the way that it sounds.
Will it in any way give us more art, more creativity? Because after all, that’s the purpose of copyright, which is defined in US law as “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” It doesn’t seem so.
Would jazz, blues, rock, or soul have developed the same way under this legal regime? Probably not.
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Dmitriy Shirokov is suing a Washington law firm that sent threatening letters to thousands of alleged movie downloaders, accusing the firm of fraud and extortion. He filed the 96-page lawsuit, which argues that lawyers at Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver made a business of threatening people with expensive litigation and fines unless they pay “settlement offers” of $1,500 to $2,500, in the US District Court of Massachusetts.
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ACTA
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After last week’s rejection of the joint resolution on the anti-Counterfeiting Tade Agreement (ACTA) by the European Parliament, and the adoption of a bad, pro-ACTA resolution tabled by the conservative EPP group, La Quadrature has analyzed the results of the vote. The results show an overall polarized poll, with the bulk of the political groups who tabled the resolution voting in favor (S&D, ALDE, Greens/EFA, EUL/NGL), while the Conservatives rejected it (EPP and ECR). But details show that some MEPs did not follow their group’s position. The overall picture gives a clear view of who to convince in order to obtain a full rejection of ACTA during the upcoming consent vote.
Pentagon Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on Upcoming Iraq War Wikileaks Docs (Part 1 of 2)
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
12.01.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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5 Operating Systems Making News This Week
A response from Microsoft was that “Attempting to unlock a device could void the warranty, disable phone functionality, interrupt access to Windows Phone 7 services or render the phone permanently unusable.” That sounds worrying, but the Chevronwp7 team moved quickly to reassure potential Windows Phone 7 jailbreakers that Microsoft’s claims are “patently false as we use the same exact procedure the official Phone Registration tool uses.”
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Desktop
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I came across an article which mentioned Uruguay was distributing dual-booting PCs to students. I was concerned that that other OS would be distributed deliberately to students but no, its XO-Sugar and GNOME dual booting.
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Dell have unveiled a new update to their ‘small business’ Vostro laptop line – the super-thin Vostro V130.
Available pre-installed with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the Vostro V130 builds on its predesscor the V13, maintaining the slim profile, light weight and full-bodied performance that a netbook is unable to offer.
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We haven’t heard much about Ubuntu Light – the simplified ‘instant on’ version of Ubuntu intended for use on dual-boot laptops preinstalled on Windows – since it was announced back at UDS-M in Brussels last May.
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Of course, Linux-based, lightweight instant-on operating systems–such as Splashtop–have shipped on Windows systems before, and we’ve written about how dual-OS systems have a bright future, including dual-OS tablets. But anytime Dell ships a secondary OS–or an option for a free one–alongside Windows, it’s worth noting due to the sheer distribution volume that Dell has. The folks at Canonical should actively pursue this type of relationship with Dell.
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1. System76
Specializing in Ubuntu-powered laptops, desktops and servers, Colorado-based System76 is particularly notable because its success has just recently prompted it to start serving the United Kingdom as well. With a commitment to the ideals of open source software, System76 aims to help make it easy for consumers, businesses, schools and governments to make the transition to the world of open source software through world-class hardware, software and support. System76 ships to the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
2. ZaReason
California-based ZaReason will install a variety of free and open source operating systems on its laptops, desktops and servers, including not just Ubuntu but several of its derivatives along with Debian and Fedora. International shipping is available.
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Server
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High-performance computing (HPC) applications such as numerical simulation — whether for forecasting, mechanical and structure simulation, or computational chemistry — require a large number of CPUs for processing. To meet these needs, customers must buy a large-scale system that enables parallel processing so that the simulation can be completed in the shortest possible time. Such solutions are available in two forms: scale-up and scale-out.
Traditionally, scale-up customers have had no choice but to purchase high-cost, proprietary shared-memory symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems for HPC needs with proprietary operating systems such as AIX, Solaris, HPUX and others. These SMP systems require significant investment in system-level architecture by computer manufacturers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Google
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The bottom line is this – if you use a browser today for the majority of the time you are on your computer, then you are already a great fit for the Google Chrome OS. And if you use an Office Suite for the bulk of your work, then you’re also a potential candidate for the OS. But if you work on your computer without a connection then you need to embrace the full OS and the apps that go with it. Because without a pipe to the outside world the Google Chrome OS is just an empty browser – no fun at all.
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Once again, there’s been another story about how Google is having trouble retaining talent. Despite all Eric Schmidt’s attempts to tell folks that Google’s regretted attrition rate has not changed in seven years, this story just doesn’t want to seem to die. (And those stories about Google paying $3.5 million and $7 million to keep an engineer from defecting to Facebook? As far as I know, total bull. I bet it’s something made up by some Facebook recruiter who needed to explain how she let a live prospect get away. 
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Ballnux
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Since January 2010, there have been two major OS builds — Android 2.1 and Android 2.2 — with Android 2.3 on the way soon. Google’s last count had more than 60 handsets running on Android. After this holiday season, that number must be more than 70.
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This news won’t be as historic as the Berlin Wall tumbling down but for T-Mobile G2 owners, it’s certainly historic. For those unaware, T-Mobile and HTC decided to make the G2′s hardware near impenetrable.
If one tried to customize the device, it would reboot itself and return to its stock settings. While T-Mobile claimed they did it to prevent devices from bricking, most people have seen it as a major headache.
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Kernel Space
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As suspected, spending most of the week in Japan made some kernel developers break out in gleeful shouts of “let’s send Linus patches when he is jet-lagged, and see if we can confuse him even more than usual”. As a result -rc4 has about twice the commits that -rc3 had.
Why am I not surprised?
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An increasing number of contributions to the open-source Linux kernel are coming from mobile and embedded equipment vendors, according to an annual report about to be released by the Linux Foundation.
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Specifically, companies need to address firewalls (PCI-DSS Requirement 1), encrypt transmission of data when sent over public networks (PCI-DSS Requirement 4), and perform regular audits (PCI-DSS Requirement 11).
All of these are easy to do on Linux. Linux’s native firewall tools (iptables) are well-suited to setting up the kind of configurations you need to be PCI compliant. But, of course, there are plenty of software and hardware solutions available as well.
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To be specific, the Linux Foundation found that “over 70% of all [Linux] kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.”
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A few months ago, Linus Torvalds shared some interesting thoughts and concerns regarding the Git branching patterns being used in Kernel development.
Since learning what Torvalds has to say is always enlightening, I wanted to delve into the points he mentioned, because they align pretty closely with the techniques we recommend with Plastic SCM. Obviously, the points apply to Git, Plastic SCM, and any other SCM with good branching support, too.
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The Nouveau driver now supports power management and can address the GeForce 320M, and the code for Intel graphics cores now supports the video units on Sandy Bridge processors, which are due to be released shortly. A number of changes to the Radeon KMS driver should improve its performance.
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The Linux Foundation is releasing its “Who Writes Linux” analysis, illustrating who crafts the code, the pace of its evolution, and which companies are behind the kernel’s development.
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With the success of Google’s free Linux-based Android platform, Linux has become a key force in the smartphone software market. Google aims to copy its success in desktop search to the fast-emerging mobile Internet space.
All top smartphone makers, excluding Nokia and Apple, use Android in their flagship phones.
Earlier this year Intel and Nokia, the world’s largest smartphone maker by volumes, merged their mobile Linux versions into MeeGo, which has reached consumers through one small tablet manufacturer. But the bigger rollout from Nokia itself is expected next year.
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Graphics Stack
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At UDS we decided to defer deciding between Xserver 1.9 and 1.10 for Natty until the close of the 1.10 merge window, to gauge how dangerous 1.10 is likely to be.
The merge window closes tomorrow, and there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly flammable. There’s lots of cleanup, the new input stuff that we’ll be getting anyway, and some extra GLX infrastructure which drivers may want to hook into.
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Chia-I Wu, the developer who previously worked on the EGL state tracker, brought Mesa to Android netbooks, and allowed Nouveau to work on Wayland (and now is doing work for LunarG), has some improvements to the Vega state tracker. Namely he has cleaned up this Gallium3D state tracker for Mesa and additionally has a branch containing OpenVG 1.1 support.
The Vega state tracker implements OpenVG support on the Gallium3D driver architecture but up to this point it’s only implemented the Khronos OpenVG 1.0 specification. With thousands of new lines of code added to the cleaned-up Vega, OpenVG 1.1 is now ready. The new features include mask layer support, text support, and a new color transformation stage.
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This NVIDIA graphics driver is marked as the 260.19.26 beta, but they have yet to officially announce this new release or even provide a change-log.
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Applications
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The caveats: With Scribus you need to keep the Scribus file or else you are going to have to start over from scratch. You canNOT reopen the PDF you created in Scribus for editing.
Oh, right, Adobe Acrobat Pro will run you 450 dollars. Scribus is available free for Windows/Mac or for Ubuntu.
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Simple DVD ripping tool EzDVD Rip is now available to try as a beta.
The tool is designed with the less experienced user in mind, so the main selling point of the app is it’s straightforward-ness: pop in a DVD, enter a file name and hit ‘rip’!
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It’s finally arrived. After weeks of leaking screenshots and juicy tidbits on a ‘mystery new launcher’ we can reveal what it is.
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Michal Hruby, one of the main AWN developers has just announced the release of a new application called Synapse (codename “Acetylcholine”).
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As some of you know, during the summer I was working on a few Zeitgeist-related projects, one of them was Sezen and the panel-applet inspired by Sezen which allowed you to search Zeitgeist log conveniently from your panel. But I was never particularly happy with these solutions, and as a Gnome Do user, I was always disappointed that it is unable to find files the same way Sezen can, while the interface is pretty much a perfect fit for it. And that’s when Synapse was born…
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There’s a fairly new free software (GPLv2) project you might be interested in. As Jason Dobies mentioned, it’s nice and juicy. It’s called Pulp and it essentially makes managing software and updates on multiple systems a much simpler, less time-intensive task.
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A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.
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Proprietary
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“Check out Opera.com“, a spokesperson for the eponymous Norwegian software company asks of me. I oblige, and what I see seems to be Opera Software co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner‘s email inbox, browseable and all.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Winch Gate Properties Ltd has announced the release of the official native GNU/Linux client for the massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role playing game, Ryzom. To celebrate the release Ryzom is hosting an in-game contest with a grand prize of a ZaReason Terra-HD Netbook.
After releasing Ryzom to the free software community six months ago, with support from the Free Software Foundation, Winch Gate are now officially releasing a native Ryzom client for GNU/Linux game players.
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In May of this year we celebrated the freeing of the massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role playing game, Ryzom, under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPLv3).
Included with the software release were the high quality artistic works including 3D objects, animation tracks, particle effects and thousands of textures, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA).
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Age of Conquest III is a medieval Risk-like turn-based strategy game. The full version is available for $19.99 US; there is also a demo.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I am starting to suspect that I am the only person on the face of the Earth who actually uses this functionality. The metacity patch was rejected, the mutter patch seems to have gone to limbo (not a single developer bothered to reply to the feature request with patch over the last few months), and now it won’t enter kwin too. However, from the experience, the kde developer’s feedback was the best one, and it actually gave me some ideas on how to do this functionality without changing a single line of code within kwin.
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GNOME Desktop
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Note: This version now require the recent Clutter 1.5.8 development snapshot to build. It won’t work with Clutter 1.4.
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This puts it within striking range of Pentium III machines, in terms of memory. Or at least machines with 128 or maybe 192Mb, like this one did. I almost wish I still had that computer, just so I could try it out.
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Themes for Ubuntu and Linux are truly coming of age. Without any doubt, Faenza icon theme is easily the best I have used in my Ubuntu. Here is a collection of three cool GTK themes namely Divergence, Orta and Equinox that are the best in my list of GTK themes to use with Faenza. We have already featured these themes in the 7 brilliant GTK themes post before. We will have a more detailed review here.
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The Lightweight Portable Security distribution was created by the Software Protection Initiative under the direction of the Air Force Research Laboratory and the US Department Of Defense. The idea behind it is that government workers can use a CDROM or USB stick to boot into a tamper proof, pristine desktop when using insecure computers such as those available in hotels or a worker’s own home. The environment that it offers should be largely resistant to Internet-borne security threats such as viruses and spyware, particularly when launched from read-only media such as a CDROM. The LPS system does not mount the hard drive of the host machine, so leaves no trace of the user’s activities behind.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Finally, first alpha ISOs should be ready in January 2011. The first ISO has been delayed a bit as we want to be sure of starting with clean and rock solid basis.
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Today I read something very good: Mageia Alpha 1 will be ready for January, 2011!!!
At this point some users of other distros may be thinking “so what? My distro is much better anyway!”
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Red Hat Family
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Two years ago I published a table of Vulnerability and threat mitigation features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Now that we’ve released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, it’s time to update the table. Thanks to Eugene Teo for collating this information.
Between releases there are lots of changes made to improve security and we’ve not listed everything; just a high-level overview of the things we think are most interesting that help mitigate security risk. We could go into much more detail, breaking out the number of daemons covered by the SELinux default policy, the number of binaries compiled PIE, and so on.
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Enterprise open-source software vendor Red Hat has acquired cloud software provider Makara, Red Hat announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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Based on the run rates of the current quarter, Red Hat will likely reach $1 billion in annual revenue in 2011. Only a handful of companies, probably less than 20 software firms, have ever hit this milestone. Red Hat will be the first open source-focused company to break the billion dollar barrier. Certainly Richard Stallman did not envision this when he created the paradigm of Free Software. Such an event may be more in tune with what Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly, and others had in mind when they reframed Free Software as Open Source.
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With today’s announcement that Red Hat has acquired Makara, I am thrilled finally to be able to write about why we were excited about this opportunity from the very first time we began discussions with Red Hat.
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Fedora
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Procedure to get the device running on Fedora (first time usage):
* Plug in the device on any USB port
* Enter the PIN in the pop-up
* Enjoy mobile Internet connection
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Omega is a completely free and open source Linux based operating system and a Fedora remix suitable for desktop and laptop users. It is a installable Live image (1.2 GB) for regular PC (i686 and x86_64 architecture) systems. It has all the features of Fedora and number of additional software including multimedia players and codecs by default. Omega plays any multimedia content (including MP3) or commercial DVD’s out of the box.
* Simple and effective GNOME Desktop Environment. Other choices available in the repository
* Plays MP3 and all your multimedia content out of the box.
* Openoffice.org office suite
* Extra utilities and games.
* Xine, Mplayer, vlc and more!
* Includes the latest updates
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With Fedora 14 out of the door we are working on the artwork for Fedora 15 Lovelock. Our first step, as usual, is gathering general artwork concepts. Do you have an idea how could Lovelock wallpaper look like? Feel free to submit concept art on our wiki! The theme is lovelock, let you fantasy run wild.
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Until Makara, Red Hat hasn’t had a cloud offering designed entirely with the cloud in mind, so its presence as a cloud vendor is now a lot stronger. And, until now, no major software vendor has presented this degree of choice in its cloud strategy – something customers regularly cite as important. Will cloud computing be the area where Red Hat finally takes a market leadership position instead of acting as a thorn in the side of Microsoft and VMware?
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The four open FESCo seats were filled by Christoph Wickert, Adam Jackson, Matthew Garreett and Marcela Mašláňová. All seven FAmSCo seats were up for re-election in this cycle. Out of the twelve candidates, Neville A. Cross, Larry Cafiero, Rahul Sundaram, Gerard Braad, Igor Soares, Pierros Papadeas and Caius Chance were all voted to the committee.
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Debian Family
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As part of the Training Sessions initiative organized by the Debian Women project, this week a lesson about Python packaging will be held. The lesson, which is aimed at an intermediate audience, will focus specifically modules and applications packaging and will be held by Piotr Ożarowski who is member of Python Applications Packaging Team and Debian Python Modules Team.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The first alpha release of Ubuntu 11.04 is set to arrive this Thursday and one of the most prominent changes to be found in Canonical’s April 2011 Linux distribution update is the Unity desktop by default rather than GNOME2 or the GNOME 3.0 Shell on the desktop — up to this point Ubuntu’s Unity had just been used on the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. For those that have yet to try out the latest Ubuntu “Natty Narwhal” packages in preparation for this first alpha release, you are probably curious how far along is this new Unity desktop. Well, fortunately, Canonical’s Rick Spencer who is the Director of Ubuntu Engineering has provided a Unity update.
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All the alternative applications and runners-up were chosen to blend well in the GNOME environment, which means all of them (except for Thunderbird) are GTK-based.
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Desktop Unity became the default Desktop Environment in Ubuntu 11.04 recently. Though its quite a bit buggy, it does look good!
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Recently, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu shocked the Ubuntu Linux world when he announced that the next release of the popular Linux, Ubuntu 11.04, would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface.
Why move from pure GNOME to Unity? As Shuttleworth explained to the Ubuntu developers, “Lots of people are already committed to Unity — the community, desktop users, developers, and platform and hardware vendors.” In particular, he noted, “Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) favor Unity. They’re happy to ship it.”
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Flavours and Variants
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Happy Thanksgiving. Please be forewarned at time of posting Ultimate Edition 2.8 Gamers it is not fully mirrored so expect slower download speeds. Typically it takes 5 hrs or more to mirror across all 31 servers & sorry for the redundant screenshots.
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French near field communications (NFC) chip manufacturer Inside Contactless announced an Android- and Linux-ready NFC system-in-package for short-range wireless transactions.
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Asus launched its Linux-based Asus Eee Note EA800 (previously Eee Tablet) e-reader, available now available in Taiwan for about $230 and due in the U.S. in 1Q 2011, according to various reports. The Eee Note has an eight-inch, 1024 x 768 monochrome display with Wacom touchscreen technology, permitting 2450 dots per inch (dpi) pen input.
Asus announced the Eee Note EA800 in June under the name Eee Tablet. In August — while announcing an Android-based Eee Pad EP101TC tablet, said to be due in March 2011 — the company revealed that the Eee Tablet might undergo a name change to Eee Note, and would start selling in October for about $300.
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Announced last month, Jungle will run MMOs and online games on a customised Linux platform.
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Phones
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Typically — and understandably — many Linux committers have come from enterprise-focused IT companies. And those companies, including Oracle, Intel and IBM, still rank high on the list of Linux supporters.
However, this year, the Linux kernel is also seeing a lot of support from companies (and developers embedded at companies) in the mobile page, including TI, Analog Devices, Qualcomm, Nokia and others.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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We are just at the beginning of a massive change in the way we use computers, and traditional desktops and laptops will be giving way to more and more internet-connected devices—that’s the vision presented in two keynotes at the first ever MeeGo conference. But in order for that vision to come about, there needs to be an open environment, where both [Aviva Stadium] hardware and software developers can create new devices and applications, without the innovation being controlled—often stifled—by a single vendor’s wishes. Doug Fisher, Intel’s VP of the Software and Services Group, and Nokia’s Alberto Torres, Executive VP for MeeGo Computers, took different approaches to delivering that message, but their talks were promoting the same theme.
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Android
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For the most part, the SHOUTcast experience hasn’t changed much since I looked at an alpha build a couple of weeks ago. It’s a bit prettier, and it’s now a lot easier to Favorite a station. Most importantly, SHOUTcast integration just works — you search by genre, or keyword, and start listening to music within seconds.
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Tablets
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Archos 101 Internet Tablet
[...]
Another Android 2.2 device, which is good, especially at this price point. More expensive tablets have opted for Android 1.6 instead, so Archos deserves credit for going the extra Android mile as slate slash touch computing is more enjoyable, if not perfect, with the later OS version.
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This’ll take you by surprise. The recently-released Archos 101 Internet Tablet, which Archos promised would receive an official update to Android 2.2 soon after launch, has indeed received it’s “FroYo” update. Very soon after launch. Well done, Archos.
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My name is Oscar Castañeda, I am a student from Guatemala currently doing a master’s in Computer Science at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands. For the 2010 Google Summer of Code I completed a project with the Google Open Source Programs Office as my mentoring organization and professor Michel van Eeten (TUDelft) and Nitin Bhide (Founder SVNPlot) as my project mentors.
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Lightworks, a professional non-linear video editor, is now available as open source. Their website hasn’t been fully updated yet, so I can’t say under exactly *which* license is has been released. Lightworks is Windows-only at the moment.
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For a while there, Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, was focusing on the server and the cloud. Ubuntu would love to give RHEL some competition, but the backers of this popular Linux distribution have also refocused on the desktop with the introduction of Unity as its primary desktop interface.
I’m excited by this development. I think Unity, which will also be Ubuntu’s gateway into smartphones and tablets, will make a great way for users who don’t know Linux to finally start using Linux. Unity may never be my favorite interface, but I’m an old guy who remembers the first interface wars as being between the Bourne shell and the C shell, not this new-fangled GNOME vs. KDE stuff. For people who don’t care about Linux internals and never will, Unity may be just the desktop they need.
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The advantages of open source software really become evident when it comes to using design applications. This category of software is one that not everyone needs — that is, unless you need software to help you create illustrations for Web design or print publication projects.
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Events
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A conference on the use of free and open source software in Europe’s public administration, is organised by Fundeceyt, a foundation for the development of science and technology in the Spanish region of Extremadura, on December 1 and 2.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A representative of Firefox web browser developer Mozilla, has criticised computing giants for ‘unwanted plug-ins’ installed by the companies into the Firefox browser.
“Why do they think this is okay?” asks Asa Dotzler, famously outspoken Mozilla director of Community Development in a blog entry referring to the practice of installing plug-ins to Firefox when installing software from Apple, Microsoft, Google and ‘others’.
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The shots are really flying in Browser War III, the mother of all browser wars. In this version of the browser war, open source is playing the part of the arms dealer, giving all of the combatants the ammunition to fight. The latest combatant is Flock, which today announced its long anticipated v.3.5. With this release Flock is offering a “socially aware” browser that is built on the open source Chromium platform. Prior to this Flock was built on top of the open source Mozilla.
With this release Flock is making no bones about who it considers its primary competition, RockMelt. I wrote about my early impressions of RockMelt a week or two back. I was not all that impressed then and in using it since, am still not. I find the window that pops up when searching all but useless. I almost always just click to open search in a tab. I never initiate a chat with all of the people on the right edge and go to the facebook, twitter and the other pages themselves, rather than use the left edge pop ups. The latest update has an endless stream of little pop ups telling me every new tweet and facebook post that my friends put up. With well over 500 on both facebook and twitter, you can imagine how annoying this could be. I have now shut that down. But I digress.
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Flock, the self-described “social web browser,” is responding to the launch of RockMelt with the release of Flock 3.5, which boasts greater speed and added functionality.
The browser touts social integration, primarily through a sidebar that lets users update their FacebookFacebookFacebook, TwitterTwitterTwitter and LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn statuses. It also has a multitude of link-sharing features, the ability to group friends across multiple services and a “Social Search” feature that displays what a user’s friends are saying about a specific query.
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Firefox 4 Beta 8 is now slated for availability on December 7.
Beta 8 was tentatively scheduled for release Nov 30th but the team continues to fix blockers, nail down security holes and synchronization issues.
The open source browser team plans at least two more beta releases before making available a release candidate. Firefox 4 is not expected to be available until the first quarter of 2011.
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Blender
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To achieve that figure of USD 46.6 billion and USD 32 billion, India needs tens of thousands of Blender-driven start-ups and professionals. Everyone can blend. Engineering students can enlist for Google Summer of Code or similar projects to further develop Blender’s features.
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Databases
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We are proud to announce the beta release for CUBRID 3.1! Even thought this is beta, it is very close to production level. Starting from CUBRID 3.x release we changed our Release Model. Now on for every release we will have one beta, then the production version. We decided so because the pace of new features introduction or performance enhancements in CUBRID is relatively high. So we want users to test out the new features during the beta releases, and report issues if found. However, each beta release will undergo the same quality assurance test environment as the next stable version will do. So, practically, beta is a stable release with a beta label. This is to ensure that once the stable version is out, the release is really stable. This is about the new CUBRID Release Model.
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I’m going to be starting an occasional series of blog postings comparing MySQL’s architecture to PostgreSQL’s architecture. Regular readers of this blog will already be aware that I know PostgreSQL far better than MySQL, having last used MySQL a very long time ago when both products were far less mature than they are today. So, my discussion of how PostgreSQL works will be based on first-hand knowledge, but discussion of how MySQL works will be based on research and – insofar as I’m can make it happen – discussion with people who know it better than I do. (Note: If you’re a person who knows MySQL better than I do and would like to help me avoid making stupid mistakes, drop me an email.)
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Oracle
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The Monday morning prior to the planned switchover to GitHub, Oracle Senior VP of Tools and Middleware Ted Farrell sent a message to the users list expressing concerns he had regarding the migration of the Hudson codebase from Java.net to GitHub:
Oracle’s goal is to grow the community and make hudson stronger. You all might not be aware of this, but the actual hudson user base is very large. Much bigger than what you see on the mailing lists or in the forums. The unfortunate part of that is how many of these users do not contribute to the core, and do not participate in these discussions. They want to do that, but don’t feel like they can be heard. We want them to be heard. We need to make the hudson community a place that will welcome all the hudson users and encourage its growth and longevity. We will be announcing some changes in the upcoming weeks that we believe will foster that.
For now, however, we are going to stay on the java.net infrastructure. We believe it is important for hudson to stay connected with the rest of the the java community, as well as take advantage of some of the cool changes we will have coming to java.net. Moving to GIT can be done while staying on java.net. It is not a requirement to move to github.
…
Because it is open source, we can’t stop anybody from forking it. We do however own the trademark to the name so you cannot use the name outside of the core community. We acquired that as part of Sun. We hope that everyone working on hudson today will do as they claim to want, and work with us to make hudson stronger.
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CMS
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Two months ago, we announced together with our friends at Windows Live that bloggers on the Windows Live Spaces service were being offered the opportunity to move their existing blogs over here to WordPress.com to join the best blogging community on the planet.
Since then, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of sites joining WordPress.com every day. With the addition of Windows Live Spaces sites moving to WordPress.com, Windows Live users who are new to blogging coming here, and word-of-mouth from our current and very passionate users, the number of people joining WordPress.com has doubled to over 900,000 per month (up from around 400,000 per month before the migration). We’re thrilled to see this explosion and to be introducing so many people to publishing with WordPress. With the recent releases of many new features and several new themes, and more of each on the way, it’s a great time to be on WordPress.com.
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Garmin, the satellite navigation company, is using Drupal for their Danish site: http://garmin.dk.
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Education
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In partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Graduate School of Education at University of Pennsylvania, Startl will announce the winner this spring during the Milken PennGSE Education Business Plan Competition. The Startl Prize for Open Educational Resources awards the best business plan that leverages openly licensed content to change the paradigm around the production, delivery, sharing, and experience of learning. The intention is to catalyze models that increase access to and dramatically lower the cost of learning. Startl is seeking to inspire entrepreneurs to think creatively about how to incorporate open principles into their core business strategy.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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BURG. That fancy themeable bootloader we chant about at least once a month, ever growing in popularity and continuing to rack up new themes by the week.
It’s easily one of the most popular ‘hacks’ for the more-experienced user to apply.
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As you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.
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Government
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Norway is becoming a real open source country. With all nineteen county administrations using some form of open source — from operating systems, to content management systems, to the Open Office package, open source has certainly hit the Norwegian market.
Open source has been in a fairly mature state for a while now, providing enterprises with the ability to deal with even the most critical tasks. So it’s not surprising that the Norwegian government has chosen open software.
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Openness/Sharing
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I’ve heard a few conversations in the last week treating open source interchangeably with crowdsourcing. Despite sounding the same they are very different, and the key difference is the ownership of the outcome.
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More art catalogues and price lists available for download on archive.org.
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Open Data
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As you may know the OKF is working on an EU funded project called LOD2. Part of the project aims to bring together openly licensed, machine-readable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies throughout Europe. It will also provide free/open source tools and services for those interested in reusing open government data.
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Open Hardware
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Such thoughts motivated an anonymous programmer going by the online name VitalyB to reverse engineer the firmware for Canon’s PowerShot series of digital point-and-shoot cameras. With hacker-level control, he could do things the engineers at Canon had never thought of. In 2007, he made public the fruits of his labor: the Canon Hack Development Kit, or CHDK, which Andrei Gratchev, a programmer working for eASIC Corp., of Santa Clara, Calif., and other developers have since broadened. Now you can find a version for just about any one of the Canon PowerShot series.
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This morning we learn that Google is apparently going to pay $6 billion for an online coupon company, Groupon (or is it $5.3bn – there is a $0.7bn earnout, not clear if its part of the $5.3bn or not). In the Real World, these are basically shoe-leather sweatware businesses and typically trade at about 1x revenue or thereabouts, but this is a 10x price at least (Groupon “self reports” monthly revenues of $50m, and I’m betting that it’s not being conservative).
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Who would buy MySpace? When News Corp. bought the social network for $580 million five years ago, it was on top; now MySpace trails Facebook and isn’t trying to catch up. And News Corp is finally talking about selling.
In an interview with Reuters, News Corp. COO Chase Carey said Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate was open to selling MySpace or taking on a new partner. Carey couched the possibility of a sale as just one of many options, but his comment followed months of rumors about MySpace going on the block. Chase also said that the timing for a sale has improved greatly now that MySpace is done with its relaunch, which positioned the site as a multimedia hub rather than a direct Facebook competitor.
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The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.
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ICAN’T
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In October, after the COICA bill was postponed (until now, essentially), I suggested that as long as the internet was bound by a DNS system centralized enough to be gripped at will by the United States government, it was in fact too centralized. An alternative to traditional DNS, currently presided over by ICANN, seems the only option if the current level of freedom of information on the internet is to be maintained.
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The International Olympic Committee is threatening to sue the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers if they don’t receive protection for IOC trademarks in ICANN’s upcoming revisions to its generic top-level domains (gTLD) guidelines.
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We’ll assume that if you found ICANN Wiki, you likely understand what a domain name and DNS is and have an understanding of what root servers are.
For those who would desire a quick refresher, DNS is a hierarchical system designed to, among other things, allow us humans to use text strings to access content or services by converting those strings as shorthand for the IP addresses (instead of having to learn or memorize numbers) on the global information network. (Grossly oversimplified)
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Health/Nutrition
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has carried out the first ever analysis of the world’s health systems, rating Dominica no. 1 in Caribbean healthcare.
The WHO used five performance indicators to measure health systems in 191 member states, finding that France provides the best overall healthcare followed by Italy, Spain, Oman, Austria and Japan.
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Despite small but significant signs that the country wants to move in a different direction, factory farms across the country are growing at an unprecedented rate—not in number, but in size.
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Security
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Cryptographers have cracked software used to verify that images taken with Canon cameras haven’t been altered.
Russian password-cracking company ElcomSoft said on Tuesday that it’s able to extract the original signing key from the Canon Original Data Security Kit and use it to validate fake photos. Canon has billed the service as a way to verify the originality of an image and to confirm that global positioning coordinates, data, time, and other metadata hasn’t been changed.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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WikiLeaks cable shows the US rebuffed a sensible solution in the case of the harmless computer hacker
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While the newest wave of documents leaks out through media, I thought I would look more at the last batch. A torrent took only a few minutes to bring in the goods and I left the torrent run to give back some bandwidth. The previous “war logs”, redacted heavily, are
* as CSV spreadsheet
* as SQL
If you are not familiar with MySQL, I will give a summary of what is required to use the SQL version. The spreadsheet is huge and needs lots of space. For the SQL version, you need a server or PC running MySQL or other SQL database.
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Controversial information disclosure site Wikileaks reportedly faced an intense distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack this morning. The site was temporarily disrupted by the onslaught, but is functioning again after migrating its services to Amazon’s cloud.
Wikileaks recently published thousands of confidential diplomatic cables that were sent between the US State Department and embassies around the world. The leaked documents shed light on US intelligence gathering efforts and reveal sensitive information pertaining to US foreign relations. The disclosure of the cables has proved embarrassing for the US and a number of other governments.
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Another day, another series of bizarre TSA-related stories. While the TSA still won’t provide any evidence that its efforts have actually made air travel any safer and continues to defend its security efforts as necessary, CNN is reporting that a child on a Southwest flight found a loaded gun magazine in a seatback pocket, which was kicked to the floor as the child climbed over the seats. Apparently, a law enforcement official (not an air marshal) who was allowed to take the clip on the plane, left it in the seat.
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The briefing came as a new Washington Post poll shows that half the American public opposes the controversial enhanced pat-downs, the paper reported Monday. The poll also showed that almost two thirds of Americans – down from 80 percent earlier this month according to another poll the administration has widely cited to defend the policy — support the use of digital scanning machines at airports
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Along those lines, the Unqualified Offerings blog (via Julian Sanchez) does a nice job explaining how the incentives line up to create this ridiculous situation. Basically, he notes that a terrorist attack on an airplane will happen. Some day. No matter what we do to try to prevent it.
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Obama uses national security as a cover for violating people’s rights.
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A self-described “rule follower” went through an airport pornoscanner wearing a panty-liner (she was menstruating). Because the hygienic item obscured the screener’s view of her vagina vulva, she was made to endure a humiliating fondling, “so invasive that I was left crying and dealing with memories that I thought had been dealt with years ago of prior sexual assaults.”
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Striking back, the Obama administration branded the WikiLeaks release of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecutions in connection with the exposure. The Pentagon detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.
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Most of the listed “Slaves of the West” are political liberals and human right activists. On the screen capture below you can see profile pictures of human rights lawyer, Teng Biao, citizen right activist Xu Zhiyong, political science scholar Qin Hui, prominent writer Yu Jie, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
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Once again, WikiLeaks has thrown governments and journalists into a maelstrom of fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’ll be weeks, if not longer, before we know the full scope of the diplomatic cables, but a few things are already clear enough.
What we know is being covered relentlessly here and across the Web. It’s what we don’t know that I’d like to note. So, here are some questions, many of which prompted by tweets and commentary elsewhere, for the major players in this drama.
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A senior defense official says lawyers from across government agencies are studying whether it might be possible to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.
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In this morning’s post, my worldly co-blogger characterises the content of the tens of thousands classified diplomatic cables as mere “gossip”, and maintains “that grabbing as many diplomatic cables as you can get your hands on and making them public is not a socially worthy activity”. I strongly disagree.
Greg Mitchell’s catalogue of reactions to the leaked cables is a trove of substantive information. For example, drawing on the documents made available by WikiLeaks, the ACLU reports that the Bush administration “pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA officers responsible for the kidnapping, extraordinary rendition and torture of German national Khaled El-Masri”, a terrorism suspect dumped in Albania once the CIA determined it had nabbed a nobody. I consider kidnapping and torture serious crimes, and I think it’s interesting indeed if the United States government applied pressure to foreign governments to ensure complicity in the cover-up of it agents’ abuses. In any case, I don’t consider this gossip.
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China supports the “independent and peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula in the long term” and cannot afford to give the North Korean regime the impression it has a blank cheque to act any way it wants, Chinese officials based in Europe said today.
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The problem with the wikileaks method of releasing the documents through mainstream media outlets, is that they are then interpreted for the public by a lazy and incompetent group of “Journalists” whose arses have grown plump on the rewards of retailing spoonfed propaganda.
So the mainstream missed the underlying stories and context, simply because they are too lazy and stupid to know the facts. The Prince Andrew story is a typical example. The Guardian reports that the US Ambassador disapprovingly notes his jolly (and stupid) remarks about corruption:
“In an astonishing display of candour in a public hotel where the brunch was taking place, all of the businessmen then chorused that nothing gets done in Kyrgyzstan if President [Kurmanbek] Bakiyev’s son Maxim does not get ‘his cut’.
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The Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has called for whoever leaked the 250,000 US diplomatic cables to be executed.
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The authorities that spent the most on CCTV during the 2007 to 2010 period are:
1. Birmingham (£10,476,874.00)
2. Sandwell (£5,355,744.00)
3. Leeds (£3,839,675.00)
4. City of Edinburgh (£3,600,560.00)
5. Hounslow (£3,573,186.45)
6. Lambeth (£3,431,301.00)
7. Manchester (£3,347,310.00)
8. Enfield (£3,141,295.00)
9. Barnet (£3,119,020.00)
10. Barking and Dagenham (£3,090,000.00)
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We had a bunch of questions concerning the legality of Homeland Security’s seizure of domain names via its Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group. The whole thing seemed of extremely dubious legality. And it appears we’re not the only ones to think so.
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The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden.
A Red Notice is a kind of international wanted poster seeking the provisional arrest of a fugitive, with an eye towards extradition to the nation that issued the underlying arrest warrant. Interpol transmits the notices to its 188 member countries, including Britain, where Assange is believed to be located. Interpol has no authority to compel a subject’s arrest. It issued 5,020 Red Notices last year for a variety of crimes.
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The view from this South Korean island takes in the undulating hills of North Korea just seven miles (11.25 kilometers) away and the seafood-rich waters all around — a region of such economic and strategic importance to both countries that one expert calls it a recipe for war.
Violence often erupts in this slice of sea claimed by both countries. Boats routinely jostle for position during crab-catching season, and three deadly naval clashes since 1999 have taken a few dozen lives.
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Do you have that principle down? If “a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail” because of the WikiLeaks disclosure — even a “single one” — then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a “disaster” and “Assange is a criminal” who “should be in jail.” That’s quite a rigorous moral standard. So let’s apply it elsewhere:
What about the most destructive “anarchic exercise in ‘freedom’” the planet has known for at least a generation: the “human disaster” known as the attack on Iraq, which Klein supported? That didn’t result in the imprisonment of “a single foreign national,” but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people. Are those who supported that “anarchic exercise in ‘freedom’” — or at least those responsible for its execution — also “criminals who should be in jail”?
How about the multiple journalists and other human beings whom the U.S. Government imprisoned (and continues to imprison) for years without charges — and tortured — including many whom the Government knew were completely innocent, while Klein assured the world that wasn’t happening? How about those responsible for the war in Afghanistan (which Klein supports) with its checkpoint shootings of an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans and civilian slaughtering air strikes, or the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, or the civilian killing drones in Pakistan? Are those responsible for the sky-high corpses of innocent people from these actions also “criminals who should be in jail”?
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The Wikileaks phenomenon — the existence of an organization devoted to obtaining and publicly releasing large troves of information the U.S. government would prefer to keep secret — illustrates just how broken our secrecy classification system is. While the Obama administration has made some modest improvements to the rules governing classification of government information, both it and the Bush administration have overclassified and kept secret information that should be subject to public scrutiny and debate. As a result, the American public has had to depend on leaks to the news media and whistleblowers to know what the government is up to.
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Sen. Joe Leiberman says the move by Amazon.com Inc. comes after congressional staffers called the company Tuesday to inquire about its relationship with WikiLeaks.
The site, which just released a trove of sensitive U.S. State Department documents, took up residence on Amazon’s self-service Web servers after a rash of Internet-based attacks started Sunday against its Swedish host, Bahnhof.
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Let me start out with a disclosure and disclaimer: I am an employee of an agency that is part of the Department of Homeland Security (home of the “rainbow of doom”). I do not speak for them. They do not speak for me. It is fairly typical for management and employees to have differing opinions on the issues that affect them, whether those differences are of degree and emphasis or deep philosophical differences.
[...]
Unless Americans of all stripes wake up and replace the current Democrat / Republican duopoly with a good-sized number of competitive parties, including those that are committed to curtailing these privacy violations, our nation will become more like those seventy to one hundred years ago in Europe. Seeing what the result was, I personally wish to avoid that.
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TSA agents in Phoenix insisted on x-raying a mother’s breast milk, causing her to miss her flight.
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Salon’s Patrick “Ask the Pilot” Smith describes the farcical state of airport security, in which uniformed pilots are prohibited from carrying a butter-knife, but airside catering and maintenance crews pass freely in and out of the “sterile” side of the airport without any screening…
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The British government promised to protect America’s interests during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, according to a secret cable sent from the US embassy in London.
Jon Day, the Ministry of Defence’s director general for security policy, told US under-secretary of state Ellen Tauscher that the UK had “put measures in place to protect your interests during the UK inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war”.
The admission came in the cable sent on 22 September 2009, which recorded a series of high-level meetings between Tauscher and UK defence officials and diplomats, which involved the then foreign secretary, David Miliband.
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Up to now, TSA has been saying that only men will do the “enhanced pat downs” on men, and only women will do them on women. They are lying. Rape survivor Celeste was flying out of O’Hare when TSA did this to her
Since Celeste didn’t agree to go through the scanner, the enhanced pat down began. “He started at one leg and then ran his hand up to my crotch. He cupped and patted my crotch with his palm. Other flyers were watching this happen to me. At that point I closed my eyes and started praying to the Goddess for strength. He also cupped and then squeezed my breasts. That wasn’t the worst part. He touched my face, he touched my hair, stroking me. That’s when I started crying. It was so intimate, so horrible. I feel like I was being raped. There’s no way I can fly again. I can’t do it.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A hellish vision of a world warmed by 4C within a lifetime has been set out by an international team of scientists, who say the agonisingly slow progress of the global climate change talks that restart in Mexico today makes the so-called safe limit of 2C impossible to keep. A 4C rise in the planet’s temperature would see severe droughts across the world and millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse.
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Last month I went on an extraordinary, epic journey through the Andes mountains of Peru and Ecuador. The aim was to record the stories of the largely hidden people on the frontline of climate change, and see how communities and governments are trying to adapt.
I began at 16,000ft on the snows of Mount Cayambe in Ecuador where the glaciers are in full retreat, and ended in the oilfields of the Amazon. In between, I came across water conflicts, deserts growing, rivers shrinking, extreme temperatures and diseases spreading, individuals who have seen the snows disappear in their lifetimes and are fearful for their future, and governments seriously worried that they will soon be unable to feed or provide water and power for their populations.
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Devastating changes to sea levels, rainfall, water supplies, weather systems and crop yields are increasingly likely before the end of the century, scientists will warn tomorrow.
A special report, to be released at the start of climate negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, will reveal that up to a billion people face losing their homes in the next 90 years because of failures to agree curbs on carbon emissions.
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A coalition of environmentalists have filed a groundbreaking lawsuit in Ecuador against the oil giant BP for violating Ecuador’s constitution which recognizes “the rights of Nature” across the globe. Plaintiffs include Nnimmo Bassey, the president of Friends of the Earth International and the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva.
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Finance
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Living in a tent inside an empty underground car park Malcolm Quigley’s fall from full time worker and home owner to destitution personifies the plight of those who have lost out in Ireland’s economic crash.
The 38-year-old tries to maintain his dignity despite having to shelter beneath an apartment block in south-west Dublin surrounded by discarded rotting food, drink bottles and the detritus of tin foil and used needles from heroin addicts who also use the place to shoot up.
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Jesse Eisinger put up an interesting piece yesterday at DealBook, reporting on a series of transactions conducted by Goldman Sachs in 2008 and 2010. He uses it to illustrate what he and many other people seem to view as an insoluble dilemma: how to distinguish between market-making by investment banks and proprietary trading. The distinction is an important one, as Mr. Eisinger explains, because the so-called Volcker Rule in the new Dodd-Frank financial regulation regime severely limits investment banks’ proprietary trading and investment activities.
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The first clue comes from the fact that €1.2 billion of the corporate loans underlying the securities in question “came from Goldman’s own balance sheet.” This means one of two things: either Goldman purchased these corporate loans from the original lenders (or secondary market holders) for its own account, or it loaned the money itself to those corporations.
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PR/Lobbying
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Among the many advertisements lining I-495 in New Jersey en route to the Lincoln Tunnel is a new one promoting atheism for the holidays rather than another gift.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Over the past few days, the U.S. Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and nine U.S. Attorneys’ Offices seized 82 domain names of websites they claim were engaged in the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and illegal copyrighted works.
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A Beijing activist was detained on a charge of inciting subversion after posting a photo online of China’s 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations, which the military eventually crushed, killing hundreds of people.
It is the first time Bai Dongping, 47, has been arrested, although he was taken out of Beijing “on holiday” by police or told to stay inside his home during high-profile events such as the Olympics, his wife, Yang Dan, said today. Bai was taken away on Saturday, Yang said, and Beijing police called her the following day to tell her why.
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Check-ins have given consumers a glimpse of the power of location and the deals they unlock. But there’s another world awaiting as mobile users learn to appreciate the era of “persistent location,” in which a user’s location is passively used to deliver relevant information. That’s the term used by Xtify CEO Josh Rochlin, whose company has built a geo-messaging platform that allows companies and brands to target their customers with location-specific messages.
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Welcome to the 21st century, where we all carry tracking devices in our pockets and where one morning you might find an FBI-installed GPS tracking device on your car. In this age of location-based-everything, the legal question of whether or not the government has to get a search warrant based on probable cause before secretly tracking you becomes all the more important. Three recent court developments from across the country — and a Congressional hearing — put a fine point on this key privacy controversy for the mobile era.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Comcast has demanded that broadband backbone provider Level 3 Communications pay it a recurring fee for delivering video traffic to Comcast customers, Level 3 said Monday.
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The fight that erupted today between Level 3 and Comcast involves an esoteric agreement between two of the Internet’s big players colliding with a series of equally arcane policy arguments, but at its core this fight is about money. Yet what began as a commercial dispute may end up fundamentally changing how the web works and who pays for it.
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The headlines are pretty rough: Comcast hates Netflix! Net neutrality is dying! Communist forces from Russia and Cuba are attack a small town in Colorado and a ragtag band of high school students band together to fight them (although, arguably, this may have nothing to do with Comcast/Level 3)! But what’s really going on here?
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Kindle readers, take note: You may have been paying for books you could legally download for free–in nearly identical editions–elsewhere.
The titles in question aren’t just public-domain books that have long been freely available at such sites as Project Gutenberg. They appear to be the exact Gutenberg files, save only for minor formatting adjustments and the removal of that volunteer-run site’s license information.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Can’t compete with free? Then you can’t compete period. Because if all you have to offer is what others can manage to offer for free, then you don’t actually have anything to offer to start with. Thing is, you DO have something to offer… you just don’t seem to want to offer it. Oh, and that last part, about there being no connection between fans and creators? That’s YOUR job, not the fans’. You have to make that connection. We’re not mindless moths, fluttering about the heat of your light, desperate to slam our bodies against the fixture. You connect with us, since you’re doing the selling, not the other way around….
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Copyrights
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A Nevada judge has given copyright troll Righthaven until mid-December to explain why one of the law firm’s targets wasn’t exercising its right to Fair Use when it republished a newspaper article on its website.
“The court hereby orders the plaintiff to show cause why this case should not be dismissed under the 17 U.S.C. § 107 Fair Use exception,” US District Judge James C. Mahan of Nevada told Righthaven on November 15. Mahan also issued a “show cause” hearing on the suit for December 15.
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Not a particularly surprising response, but kudos to PC Mag for sticking to its principles, and not feeling bullied by these industry folks.
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We’ve been sort of excited to see Project Gutenberg putting up so many classic science fiction stories that have gone into the public domain. But at least one writer isn’t thrilled about it — Greg Bear has been involved in a battle with Project Gutenberg over whether stories by Poul Anderson and other authors are in the public domain just because the magazines which published them originally failed to renew the copyright on the stories.
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Disney bosses were initially dismayed by Johnny Depp’s character in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, the actor has revealed. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Depp recalls the perplexed horror in which studio executives held Captain Jack Sparrow, the pirate loosely based upon Keith Richards.
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How do you stop people enjoying their natural liberty to communicate? How do you prevent them telling each other’s stories, singing each other’s songs, engaging in free cultural intercourse?
How do you end the war against file-sharing? How do you stop immortal corporations persecuting and predating upon the populace?
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Sending settlement letters to accused Internet movie pirates has become big business in the US this year, but a new class action lawsuit seeks to put the brakes on one of the main “settlement fraud and extortion” outfits: the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver.
Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver (DGW) is a Virginia law firm that set up shop last year as the “US Copyright Group,” and it has sued the people behind 16,000 IP addresses for sharing indie films on file-sharing networks. Those accused are given the chance to settle for $1,500 or $2,500 before being sued by name, though to date no such named lawsuits have been filed.
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Mark down the date: The age of stealing music via the Internet is officially over. It’s time for everybody to go legit. The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate.
TSA invades House Party
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
11.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We recently gave you a brief history of viruses on the Mac and as requested by a user we wanted to give you a history of viruses on Linux. Given the tight security integrated into Linux, it is difficult to take advantage of a vulnerability on the computer, but some programmers have found ways around the security measures. There are several free options for anti-virus on Linux that you really should use, even if it isn’t always running – a weekly or monthly scan doesn’t hurt. Free anti-virus solutions include: ClamAV, AVG, Avast and F-Prot.
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Desktop
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In short, from a Windows user’s viewpoint, Ubuntu Light is a feature. I find it really annoying that Dell isn’t just not advertising Ubuntu Light; they’re not even telling their internal staff about it. My friend knew on seeing the Ubuntu Light setup windows appear knew what Ubuntu was and she had some idea what it would be good for. Most users would find it puzzling at best.
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Applications
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For all Ubuntu lovers, I have gathered a list of best media players for Ubuntu and how you can install them.
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Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users – XMMS has to be mentioned here – well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user’s taste. Without further ado, here are no less than 16 graphical music players for Linux.
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Faenza fans – adds even more squares to your desktop with this Faenza theme for Cario-Clock, which is based on the actual Faenza clock icon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Lots of users have gigabytes of music in their personal computer, but every time when we want to listen to music on our portable device, we need to copy selectively some songs to the device and then listen. You can listen to all the songs from your PC itself. But what if your girl friend wants to watch videos and you have only one computer in your house? Now stop fighting, leave the computer with you girl friend and start your music stream to connect from your Android or any mobile with streaming audio playback support.
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Games
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There’s nothing like shooting up some bad guys, be they zombies, terrorists or aliens, everyone loves a good FPS.
Luckily for you, and thanks in part to the open-sourcing of a number of Quake engines, there happen to be a few high quality First Person Shooters available in Ubuntu’s Software Center – and they’re all native and completely free of charge.
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What’s in it? Well, there are the two Heileen games (two visual novels with over 80k words combined), Summer Session (a very fun and replayable dating sim) and Bionic Heart (a fully voiced dark-sexy-creepy sci-fi visual novel with 24 different endings). So as you can see, there’s a game for every taste!
Every game has a native GNU/Linux client.
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Independent Games Festival participant BEEP by indie developers Big Fat Alien is on track to be released for Linux in the next couple of months.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE desktop has taken the lead to bring the semantic desktop to users with their KDE 4.0 release. Although it had a rough start back then, IMHO Nepomuk always stood out as a major and remarkable service/technology.
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The KDE desktop has taken the lead to bring the semantic desktop to users with their KDE 4.0 release. Although it had a rough start back then, IMHO Nepomuk always stood out as a major and remarkable service/technology.
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In this second part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. In this installment he configures media players, K3b, Crossover Office, Lucid and Post Script and his final thoughts on his adventures.
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Similar artists applet now shows artist tags from Last.fm, and the full artist biography is shown when the artist image is clicked. It’s very nice to be able to listen to a stream from Last.fm, go to the Artist’s page in Last.fm, or even check out similar artists to any that sound interesting! A great way to Explore Your Music.
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GNOME Desktop
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Just a quicks heads up to those following the development of GNOME-Shell – Florian Müllner has just announced that the new-look relayout branch – which we cooed over lovingly several weeks back – has landed in the GNOME-Shell Master branch.
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The Gnome Shell overview relayout has been merged into the master branch. That means it is now officially part of Gnome Shell. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include any elements from the Tiled View mockups we’ve seen a few days ago but it’s probably too soon for that.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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There’s been a number of individuals and organizations asking us about benchmarks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, which was released earlier this month and we had benchmarked beta versions of RHEL6 in past months. For those interested in benchmarks of Red Hat’s flagship Linux operating system, here are some of our initial benchmarks comparing the official release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that members of the Red Hat executive team will host a press conference that will be broadcast live via webcast on Tuesday, November 30 at 11am ET.
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New York, November 29th (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $43.68 with the current price action closing at just $43.32 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.
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Fedora
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I’m happy to announce the results of our recent round of elections for at-large seats on the Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAmSCo.
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Debian Family
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The Debian archive is known to be one of the largest software collections available in the free software world. With more than 16,000 source packages and 30,000 binary packages, users sometimes have trouble finding packages that are relevant to them.
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It may be short notice, but if you are new to Linux, interested in Debian and live or work in the New York metro-area, check out Novice Night. It’s coming up this Wednesday. Info below is from Debian-NYC.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Even though there was already work for getting ConnMan in Ubuntu (since 10.10), an update today in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal brings appindicator support for the Network Manager applet (you can see the changelog here). This is very important since Ubuntu will ditch the notification area soon, therefore the connection manager has to use an indicator applet.
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Unity could work, if it meets several important requirements: beauty and functionality.
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Today I am finally finding Natty to be usably stable. So long as I stay away from Open Office, it seems to be running quite fine. So, I updated my maverick spider diagram in an attempt to capture where I think Unity is in the journey to being the Ubuntu desktop.
In this first natty diagram, yellow is the target, blue is maverick, and that orangy color is my subjective assessment of Unity as it is today. You can review the criteria that I chose from assessment in a previous post.
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A little while back I blogged about the work planned for Natty in the community team. I just wanted to provide a quick status update to summarize progress so far in the cycle.
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There is quite the buzz in the community about the new Compiz-driven Unity, and I know many of you are keen to play with it. Of course, do remember that it is incredibly early in the cycle and more things are likely to be broken than fixed as the transition is made. Some of you will be bummed out with the announcement that there will be no Maverick PPA for Unity, but fortunately, it is really easy to try Natty and Unity in a way that won’t involve sacrificing your current stable installation, or even touching your hard drive. You simply install and boot from a USB stick, and I wanted to share how to get this running.
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I’m not familiar enough with Ubuntu Development to know just how far this might go but at the very least it appears that some Ubuntu developers have identified as a goal to make LXC usable for production stuff and to put it on par with KVM.
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Flavours and Variants
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A few years back, Ubuntu was my first taste of Linux. As I spent more time using it, I found there were other “flavors” available (namely Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc) Sharing many things with its big GNOME brother, it felt natural for me to get my first cup of KDE through Kubuntu.
Unfortunately, back then KDE was going through some major changes (KDE 4.0), which added to the questionable stability of Kubuntu itself made the whole experience frustrating and disappointing. Initially, I thought it could be down to my lack of understanding of KDE, or perhaps that I didn’t install Kubuntu correctly. After reading many forum posts, though, I quickly realized that most people agreed that Kubuntu was not a good implementation of the KDE desktop. The average reply was recommending other alternatives, such as OpenSUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, etc.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Case Android: Nokia takes up Android.
Case MeeGo: Nokia implements MeeGo across its whole product line.
Case Windows: The Microsoft alumnus now running the company brings in Windows Phone 7.
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Sub-notebooks
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Schmidt reiterated at the Web 2.0 conference in November that Android is optimized for devices where touch-screen input rules, while Chrome OS is meant more for devices with traditional keyboards. The last time Google provided a significant update about Chrome OS, Sundar Pichai, the leader of the Chrome OS project, said Google was drawing up specific Netbook hardware requirements for partners that were likely to involve larger screens and keyboards than the industry standard Netbook.
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To conclude, I’d suggest either joining a trusted XMPP server or better yet run your own server. Personally I’m very happy with Gabbler since they promise not to log any data about you and would recommend them (sadly they don’t accept new accounts at the moment). There are quite a few XMPP servers though that provide a smilarly sane privacy policy out there.
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If you are interested in converting fellow staff and their students to Octave, remember that it suits an educational environment much better as it encourages sharing and collaborating, not asking for permissions, paying heavy fees/fines, and begging developers to fix bugs rather than have access to the source code, which in turn enables participation. Additionally, most of the basic functions are truly compatible with MATLAB’s and the lack of JIT optimisation, for example, should not matter much in an educational setting. Not many people create MATLAB GUIs either, so there is hardly a need for such advanced functionality. At a later date I hope to make some screencasts about Octave.
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Open source software is more attractive and better suited to traditional education needs, the IT head of Oxford University has said.
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Last week, at least for those of us in the United States, was time to give thanks. And while I have plenty to give thanks about personally, I can’t say the same thing when it comes to FOSS developments. Looking back on 2010, it’s been kind of a crappy year.
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The members of the tribunal were very satisfied…I ended my degree in Education successfully thanks to Open Source. THANK YOU, LINUX; THANK YOU, OPEN OFFICE!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A leading Mozilla executive has attacked Google, Apple and Microsoft for installing browser plugins without permission.
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Mozilla is designing a new multi-paradigm programming language called Rust. According to the Rust Project FAQ, the Rust team’s goal is “To design and implement a safe, concurrent, practical, static systems language.”
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 7 is now available on the download website. Unfortunately, not all Windows builds are complete yet as the remaining still needs to be signed. Please be patient.
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I joined Sun over 20 years ago; since then I’ve worked on many projects, enjoyed Sun’s culture and had a blast during the GlassFish years. The interregnum between the IBM rumor, the Oracle announcement and the Change in Control was way too long, but by February we started integrating the team and the products into Oracle.
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Mark Reinhold recently pointed out that he, Joe Darcy and Brian Goetz had submitted their OpenJDK work on features for JDK7 and JDK8 to the JCP for standardization. Normally I am somewhat sceptical about the JCP. I don’t believe the JCP fosters a truly open process and discourages Free Software implementations. But Mark, Joe and Brian seem to be proving me wrong. Of course that shouldn’t have surprised me, since they have shown themselves to do everything in the open and actively involve the community in all their OpenJDK work. All their code has been published under the GPL for everyone’s free use.
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It looks like Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison is getting ready to whip out his hardware again and measure it up against wares from IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
While the United States was getting ready to stuff tens of millions of turkeys last week, Oracle put out a teaser saying that on December 2 it would announce the details of a “New Sparc Solaris Sunrise SuperCluster,” which will sport “world record database performance.”
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CMS
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Of course WordPress gets new users out of this agreement and the blogging service which I think is the definitive choice for blogging on the net will expand with the mass migration of the refugees from Microsoft.
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Project Releases
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A month ago we reported on a Clutter 1.5 development release bringing a back-end for Wayland so that this tool-kit can run atop this lightweight display server, among other features it brought. In the past month there’s been the Clutter 1.5.6 development release too and just this morning Clutter 1.5.8 was released.
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Openness/Sharing
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1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization:
a) it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines of finite resources
b) it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation through copyright, patents, etc…
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Open Data
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The following guest post is from John Wilkin who is Executive Director of the HathiTrust, a Librarian at the University of Michigan and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data.
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Open Access/Content
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The Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy has always made it clear that it considers dissemination costs as legitimate research costs and as such provides grantholders with additional funding, through their institutions, to cover open access charges.
In view of this I thought it would be interesting to see how many papers, attributed to the Wellcome Trust and available through PMC and UKPMC, were “fully” open access papers, in accordance with the Bethesda Principles.
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Programming
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A few weeks ago I migrated two major projects to distributed version control systems (DVCS), leaving only one project in Subversion, the one hosted on Savannah. As you can read in my prior posts, I have resisted switching over to DVCS. However, recently I’ve understood the benefits propounded by DVCS adherents, and I’ve found that it has more features than most tutorials let on.
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Xinhua News Agency and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOC) here Tuesday to establish a multi-level business partnership in the area of international TV news service.
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What if the world were rearranged so that the inhabitants of the country with the largest population would move to the country with the largest area? And the second-largest population would migrate to the second-largest country, and so on?
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Science
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After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner — a woman from Spain’s soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property.
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Albert Einstein’s greatest scientific “blunder” (his word) came as a sequel to his greatest scientific achievement. That achievement was his theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, which he introduced in 1915. Two years later, in 1917, Einstein ran into a problem while trying to apply general relativity to the Universe as a whole. At the time, Einstein believed that on large scales the Universe is static and unchanging. But he realized that general relativity predicts that such a Universe can’t exist: it would spontaneously collapse in on itself. To solve this problem, Einstein modified the equations of general relativity, adding an extra term involving what is called the “cosmological constant”, which, roughly speaking, is a type of pressure which keeps a static Universe from collapsing.
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The end of a busy week. I promised to write about CERN, so here we go (there is a full set of photos of the visit here). CERN is a unique organisation, a truly global corporation where people from all over the world work together on nuclear research. Often they are working together virtually, but often also “on-campus” so to say near the French border outside Geneva. Having seen it now I fully understand why people strive to go there, if only for a few weeks of summer school. It is obviously a defining experience.
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Scientists are one step closer to learning how to program cells the way other people program computers.
Researchers led by Christina Smolke, a biochemical engineer at Stanford University, report the accomplishment in the Nov. 26 Science.
Smolke and her colleagues created RNA devices that could rewire cells to sense certain conditions and respond by making particular proteins. Such technology might be harnessed for creating cell-based therapies and cancer-fighting treatments. Someday, scientists might also be able to flip an RNA switch to make plants more tolerant to drought or coax yeast to produce industrial chemicals.
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November has been an exciting month for science at Creative Commons. Earlier this month we hosted a Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco on the promises and pitfalls of personalized medicine, which you can now watch online. We met a matching giving challenge by Hindawi, the open access scholarly journal publisher (disciplines from neuroscience to pharmacology), who doubled $3000 in donations to our annual fundraising campaign. We also saw BioMed Central, the world’s largest OA publisher, provide in-kind support for our fundraising campaign.
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NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
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His stunning prophecies have earned him a reputation as a tech visionary, but many of them don’t look so good on close inspection
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.
Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn’t sharing information that had put the nation’s security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous “lost opportunities” to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.
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We’re reported before on the arrest of Phillip Mocek just over a year ago at a TSA checkpoint at the airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his prosecution by local authorities on trumped-up criminal charges.
Now, after several postponements, Phil Mocek’s trial is scheduled to begin with jury selection on Tuesday morning, December 7th, 2010, in Albuquerque. The trial is expected to last 2-3 days. There’s more information here.
(The trial has been postponed several times, and might be postponed again, but this date appears to be for real, and Mr. Mocek is making firm travel plans — by land, not by air — to be in Albuquerque.)
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WikiLeaks was gifted with a heap of really important information. In order to ensure dissemination, they passed them around to five major news outlets located in 5 different countries. Each were aware the others had the story, so they ALL had no CHOICE but to publish, with or without corporate or government approval.
In this way, WikiLeaks guaranteed that the story broke and spread.
UK: The Guardian US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis
SPAIN: El Pais The greater infiltration of history reveals the secrets of American foreign policy (Google translation to English)
USA: New York Times: Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels
FRANCE: LeMonde WikiLeaks: Behind the Scenes of American diplomacy (Google translation to English)
der Spiegel: Greatest Data Leak in US Military History
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Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation’s secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing’s snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.
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While the world’s media are afire with yesterday’s WikiLeaks data release of secret US diplomatic cables, the local media in China are strangely quiet.
The reason, according to a Twitter update by Al Jazeera English’s correspondent in China, Melissa Chan a short while ago, is that China’s Propaganda Department have directed all domestic media outlets to stop reporting the WikiLeaks content.
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The entire world seems to be looking at Wikileaks after the release of some of the almost 250,000 diplomatic wires from U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. Endless lines will be written about this, my own view is close to what Simon Jenkins writes in his commentary piece in The Guardian, the media has the right to embarrass the powerful.
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The latest leak typifies the identity and culture of WikiLeaks and by continuing to analyze new disclosures I am tacitly supporting this, which is something I will not do. WikiLeaks’ motivation is that of a court jester, to mock and ridicule the contradictions of a state. However, they present themselves as a sage with the wisdom to adjudicate the public relevance of all information, which is the greatest contradiction of all.
To be clear, this is an entirely personal decision, and is not meant to discourage others from endeavoring to glean insight from this new data. The substantive value of the day-to-day machinations of diplomats, however, is dubious at best—even at aggregate.
Openness of information can lead to great things, not the least of which is the democratization of knowledge in ways never before possible. Shoving private messages into the public sphere without any context or care for the consequences can lead to misunderstanding, fear, and aggression. Unfortunately, WikiLeaks appears to be in the business of promoting the latter.
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The FBI announced a $10,000 reward Sunday for information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible for an apparent attack on an Oregon Islamic center that was attended by the man authorities say was behind a foiled bomb plot at a recent Portland Christmas tree lighting.
A fire appears to have started sometime early Sunday morning at the Salman AlFarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, authorities said. The building suffered some fire and smoke damage.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was seized in connection with the plan to detonate what he thought was an explosives-laden van at a Portland tree-lighting ceremony Friday night, occasionally attended the center, the mosque’s imam told CNN.
The blaze – discovered by a police officer who was driving by – was likely set intentionally, said Carla Pusateri, a fire prevention officer with the Corvallis Fire Department.
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The incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says WikiLeaks should be officially designated as a terrorist organization.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel’s presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to “determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization,” putting the group in the same company as al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.
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No parts of whistleblower website Wikileaks are now on the Australian blacklist of banned websites, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
In March 2009 the ACMA revealed that a number of pages on Wikileaks were put on the blacklist of banned websites because the pages linked to websites on Denmark’s blacklist.
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John Kampfner, The Independent / Index on Censorship: Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority
“All governments have a legitimate right to protect national security. This should be a specific, and closely scrutinised, area of policy. Most of our secrecy rules are designed merely to protect politicians and officials from embarrassment. Documents are habitually over-classified for this purpose. The previous government made desperate attempts to stop legal evidence of its collusion in torture from reaching the public. Ministers argued, speciously, that this was to protect the “special intelligence relationship” with Washington. It will be intriguing to see how much information is allowed to be published when Sir Peter Gibson begins his official inquiry. Precedent suggests little grounds for optimism.
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It’s also not hard to see US hardliners calling for Wikileaks to be “taken off the Web” by blocking its address (the COICA approach). Of course, that wouldn’t stop people accessing Wikileaks – there are plenty of ways of getting around this. That might then prompt the US to attempt to wipe the address off the official Internet completely, with the support of other governments around the world that are already increasingly unhappy with the threat that Wikileaks poses to their control.
That collusion is likely to be forthcoming. Indeed, Australia has already put Wikileaks on its own censorship blacklist once – ironically for daring to reveal details of Denmarks’ censorship blacklist. Apparently, though, it is currently off Australia’s (but it will be interesting to see for how long once the revelations from the cables start flowing…)
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New York Times editors said Sunday that although the paper’s reporters had been digging through WikiLeaks trove of 250,000 State Department cables for “several weeks,” the online whistleblower wasn’t the source of the documents.
But if WikiLeaks—which allegedly obtained the cables from a 22-year-old army private—wasn’t the Times source, than who was? Apparently, The Guardian—one of the five newspapers that had an advanced look at the cables—supplied a copy of the cables to The Times.
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A special, lead-free powdered metal is decoratively affixed to men’s boxers or briefs. When TSA screeners try to check your most personal space, the X-ray will reveal a less embarrassing natural shape, a fig leaf. You can pick these up in a “USA Patriot 3 Pack,” one red, one white, one blue for $50. A one pack goes for $18. (Click through the sideshow to see X-ray views.)
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More broadly, though, this release seems to me to mark another step down for the WikiLeaks concept. WikiLeaks’s release of the “Collateral Murder” video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.
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Can the world’s most elaborate censorship system put the clamps on the Internet’s most prolific source of confidential information?
A day after WikiLeaks began to release a quarter-million diplomatic cables sent from U.S. embassies, propaganda authorities in Beijing appear to be trying to control how much of the content of those cables leaks through to the Chinese public.
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The big story circulating around the globe is that Arab nations have been urging the US to bear down on Iran.
“King Hamad pointed to Iran as the source of much of the trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan,” one November 2009 cable discloses.
According to the memo, Bahrain’s Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa was speaking to General David Petraeus. “He argued forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear program, by whatever means necessary. ‘That program must be stopped,’ he said. ‘The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.’”
But the cables are also chock full of intelligence-gathering bombshells.
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Prince Andrew launched a scathing attack on British anticorruption investigators, journalists and the French during an “astonishingly candid” performance at an official engagement that shocked a US diplomat.
Tatiana Gfoeller, Washington’s ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, recorded in a secret cable that Andrew spoke “cockily” at the brunch with British and Canadian business people, leading a discussion that “verged on the rude”.
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This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are “putting the people of Gaza on a diet”.
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Assassins on motorbikes have killed an Iranian nuclear scientist and wounded another in identical attacks this morning. They drove up to the scientists’ cars as they were leaving for work and attached a bomb to each vehicle which detonated seconds later.
The man who was killed was Majid Shahriari, a member of the engineering faculty at the Shahid Beheshti in Tehran. His wife was wounded. The second attack wounded Fereidoun Abbasi, who is also a professor at Shahid Besheshti University, and his wife.
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The only life I see in imminent danger is Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the country’s former president, will probably have Berlusconi whacked in an omerta-style hit now that it’s been revealed we see Silvio as Vlad the Impaler’s sock puppet.
I can’t wait for the full 250,000 pages to be sorted through and commented on; I “can’t wait” with baited scare quote breath for GOP wingnuts and ball-less Democrats to try to outdo each other in either real or fake hysteria.
And, given its recent missive, I can’t wait, and “can’t wait,” for The Nation to bury its head further up Obama’s ass by saying the Koch brothers are funding Julian Assange.
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WikiLeaks is hosting its cache of confidential US Statement Department cables on US-based Amazon servers, just as it did with with the classified Iraq War documents it released last month.
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7.15am:
Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.
So wrote Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former intelligence analyst, suspected of being behind the leak of more than 250,000 dispatches from US embassies around the world.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Ecuador’s recent constitutional recognition of the “rights of Nature” is getting its first major workout in a groundbreaking lawsuit against BP: “This morning we filed in the constitutional court of Ecuador this lawsuit defending the rights of nature in particular the right of the Gulf of Mexico and the sea which has been violated by the BP oil spill. We see this as a test case of the rights of nature enshrined in the constitution of Ecuador–it’s about universal jurisdiction beyond the boundaries of Ecuador because nature has rights everywhere.”
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Finance
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Growing inequality at the heart of the US economy is being laid bare this holiday season.
Conspicuous consumption is back on Wall Street, in anticipation of bonuses close to pre-recession levels. Some American companies have just posted the largest quarterly profits ever. Meanwhile, one in five families is relying on food stamps to get by and unemployment remains stuck at around 10%.
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It’s a cheerless truth about the post-Thanksgiving start of the Christmas season, traditionally the bell lap in America’s year-long steeplechase of buying. There has been a rebound in consumption since the grimmest days of the Great Recession, but that has not been joined by an uptick in hiring or a robust expansion.
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On this, economists agree: Extending tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush for low- and middle-income people would strengthen the weak economy.
The question is what to do about the highest-paid 3 percent of taxpayers. Should Congress let their tax cuts expire at year’s end as scheduled? Extend them for only a while? Or make them permanent?
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You can add one more item to the list of problems keeping Sheila C. Bair up at night. The nation’s capitol, she fears, will be ground zero of the next financial crisis.
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Do you consider yourself a deficit alarmist?
No, I’m a deficit realist.
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Relatives of both Bernard Madoff and his wife are among those being targeted in 40 lawsuits announced Friday by the trustee endeavoring to recover money for victims fleeced by the disgraced financier.
Twenty-two of the lawsuits were filed against relatives of Madoff and his wife, trustee Irving H. Picard said in a news release. Eighteen lawsuits were filed against former employees of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, he said.
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An insider trading case last year that federal authorities said was the biggest ever is providing a recipe for another case that may be even bigger.
The current case is largely an extension of work that led to the arrest of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam in October 2009. The Galleon investigation marked the first time that federal authorities used wiretaps in an insider trading probe.
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Some in the industry believe that questions about this issue — known as “legal standing” — are trivial. They say it’s just a gambit by borrowers’ lawyers to throw sand in the foreclosure machine. Nine times out of 10, bankers say, the right institutions are foreclosing on the right borrowers.
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This same company is now insisting that other lenders that made stated-income loans — loans that Countrywide eagerly bought to fatten its balance sheet — must repurchase them on the grounds that, golly, the loans turned out to be fraudulent. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
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So, a credit line at 5.8 percent interest. Considering that Ireland was able to borrow at that rate as recently as mid-September, and was falling off a cliff then, why is this supposed to solve the problem?
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Whatever happens to the economy, the threads that weave individuals and institutions together will continue to fray until leaders of all sorts rethink their fundamental assumptions about the relationship between human beings and organizations.
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You’ve been told that nothing is sacred; that no state spending is safe from being cut or eroded through inflation. You’ve been misled. As the new public spending data released by the government shows, a £267bn bill has been both ringfenced and index-linked. This sum, spread over the next 50 years or so, guarantees the welfare not of state pensioners or children or the unemployed, but of a different class of customer. To make way, everything else must be cut, further and faster than it would otherwise have been.
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First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.
In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn’t say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation’s bad behavior.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A man has been fined for making offensive comments about Allah during the English Defence League protest in Leicester.
Lee Whitby was found guilty of using racially aggravated abusive words during the protest in the city centre on Saturday, October 9.
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The Home Office, after several weeks of requests from ORG and others, has agreed to a meeting of civil society representatives next week concerning their review of enforcement of RIPA’s interception laws.
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“According to Peter Sunde’s Twitter feed, he has been suspicious of ICANN for a long time. The non-profit corporation is tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces as well as handling the management of top-level domain name space including the operation of root nameservers.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The important aspects of e-reader devices come from the restrictions which digital text place on the reader. Because of the digital restrictions management put on e-book files, you cannot share books with your friends. You cannot borrow them from the library. You cannot make a copy in a different format. That is exactly what the publishers and proprietors of e-readers want. Content providers want each consumer to be in a silo. Every good and work they want to consume would be purchased directly, and sharing would not be possible, since every purchased would be bound to the original consumer.
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Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Level 3, which helps to deliver Netflix’s streaming movies, said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet,” and indicated that it would seek government intervention. Comcast quickly denied that the clash had anything to do with network neutrality, instead calling it “a simple commercial dispute.”
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Network services provider Level 3 Communications on Monday alleged Comcast forced it to pay recurring fees to transmit Internet video and other content to cable customers, but the MSO countered that Level 3 misrepresented negotiations between the two companies and was trying to get a “free ride” on its network.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Intellectual property policy has long been closely linked to U.S. trade policy, so it should come as little surprise to find that it appears to figure prominently in the cables obtained by Wikileaks. Although only a couple hundreds have been posted thus far, the Guardian has supplied a full list of all 251,287 cables. The list includes tags for each cable, so that the subject matter can be decoded. The Guardian has also posted a glossary of the tags, but omits KIPR, which appears to be the intellectual property tag (I base this conclusion on the correlation between the KIPR tag and the WIPO tag, to a specific reference to copyright in one of the cables, and the fact that IPR is a common acronym for intellectual property rights).
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Copyrights
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If you think that the Copyright Board has been moving quickly on the AC proposed $45/$35 1,300% increase tariff up to now, it has just pushed the warp speed button.
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Allyson Townsend, better known to her fans as Ally ASL, made headlines earlier this month when YouTube shut down her account after Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group complained that her videos, which featured Ally translating pop songs by Kesha, Owl City and others into American Sign Language, were violating those songs’ copyrights.
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The US Copyright Group thought it had found the ideal scheme to turn piracy into profit when it started filing lawsuits against tens of thousands of BitTorrent users this year. But the defendants in the Far Cry lawsuits have now become the plaintiffs in a class action filed against the anti-piracy lawyers and their partners. Among other things, the lawyers are accused of fraud, extortion and abuse.
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Well, the whole mass automated “pay up or we’ll sue” legal business may be getting a bit more interesting as Evan Brown notes that one of the folks sued by US Copyright Group has struck back with a class action lawsuit alleging that the law firm behind USCG, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, is engaged in extortion, fraud and conspiracy. The lawsuit looks to include in the class the nearly 5,000 people sued by USCG for sharing the Uwe Boll film Far Cry. The lawsuit highlights — as we pointed out earlier this year — many of the alleged infringements happened prior to registration, meaning that there would be no statutory damages available.
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The decision to sentence the co-founders of The Pirate Bay to jail is both absurd and unfair. It illustrates how an obsolete copyright law and its indiscrimate application are harmful to society as a whole. Such an incomprehension of technological, economic and social realities should not mask the fact that this decision is above all political.
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PrometheeFeu alerts us to a fascinating situation happening in France. Apparently, a successful French author, Michel Houellebecq, recently came out with a novel, La Carte et Le Territoire. However, it turns out that Houellebecq copied decent chunks of three separate Wikipedia articles in the novel, without any credit or indication that he was quoting another source. This is what is normally referred to as plagiarism — or, in some views, sampling. This isn’t all that surprising, and we hear stories of plagiarism in books all the time. In fact, we tend to think that people get way too upset over such things in books. After being called on it, Houellebecq appears to have admitted to copying those sections.
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The US Supreme Court today refused to hear the case of a file-swapper who claimed she was an “innocent infringer,” but one justice at least understands the absurdity of the current law.
The case concerned Whitney Harper, who shared some music on the family computer when she was a teenager and was subsequently hit with a lawsuit from the RIAA. Harper claimed that she was an “innocent infringer” who went straight when she learned about copyright law, and that she had thought P2P use was basically like (legal) Internet radio.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked judges in Texas and West Virginia to block requests to unmask accused file sharers in several predatory copyright troll lawsuits involving the alleged illegal downloading of pornography.
The cases were filed by two different companies and involve different copyrighted adult material. However, the tactics are the same. In both cases, the owners of the adult movies filed mass lawsuits based on single counts of copyright infringement stemming from the downloading of a pornographic film, and improperly lump hundreds of defendants together regardless of where the IP addresses indicate the defendants live. Consistent with a recent spike in similar “copyright troll” lawsuits, the motivation behind these cases appears to be to leverage the risk of embarrassment associated with pornography to coerce settlement payments despite serious problems with the underlying claims.
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After being in quiet development for some months, in September the Mulve music downloading app hit the mainstream. Very quickly everything went sour, with British police swooping on the guy who registered the Mulve domain and placing him under arrest on a range of charges from copyright infringement through to conspiracy to defraud. Today we can report the outcome. For once it’s good news.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have just confirmed the seizure of 82 domains as part of Operation in Our Sites 2. The authorities claim the actions were targeted at websites that were involved in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit and copyrighted goods, but fail to explain why a BitTorrent meta-search engine was included.
KDE 4.5.8 Base – Brief Preview
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On the show this week: Novell being bought with IP being sold off to a Microsoft spinoff, more crap from Fedora on SQLNinja, IE presumably cheating in benchmarks, Jolibook being sold in the UK, awesome kernel patches while Linus lays down the smackdown for bad ones and more…
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Applications
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Did you know we maintain a daily builds VLMC PPA? I bet most of you forgot because we haven’t published anything about it in a while. The development is quite slow, but something very exiting landed in VLMC recently: video effects.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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For a while we have known that KDE developers have been interested in supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 (and OpenGL 3.x) within the KWin compositing window manager as well as using more OpenGL within the Plasma Desktop and on the KWin front the developers, led by Martin Gräßlin, they have been making great progress towards KDE SC 4.7 where this work will be introduced.
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It is 11pm and I am on my way home from LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria. It was a long but amazing day. Myriam, Mark and myself were at the KDE and Amarok booth. Surprisingly Christoph (a local KDE on Gentoo user/hacker) supported us rather the whole day.
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The Desktop Toolkit is the small widget that sits on the upper right on the edge of the screen. Originally shaped like a cashew, it now looks like a tab. Click on it, and you find all sorts of useful tools: Add Widgets, Add Activity, Lock Widgets, and others. However, some users never seem to have looked at it, considering that Fedora has a package called kde-plasma-ihatethecashew whose sole purpose is to remove it.
What people have noticed is that the Desktop Toolkit gets in the way. Place a panel at the top of the screen, and it overlays the similarly shaped panel customization button so that you can never be sure what you are clicking.
You can drag the cashew to some other place (mine is on the bottom left), but many people haven’t noticed that, either. At any rate, no matter where you place it, the Toolkit looks like a menu, but doesn’t close when you click elsewhere on the desktop; instead, you have to click on the button again.
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GNOME Desktop
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Reviews
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All in all it was a disappointing week for me. Upstream OS provided me with a lengthy start-up process which hit a few bumps along the way. Fuduntu is basically a Fedora clone with GIMP and OpenOffice, driving up the size of the ISO. LightDesktop’s concept intrigued me, but the project needs to add some applications and improve on the installer before I would recommend it. It’s at least trying something different and I believe that to be worth while. I found it interesting that both Upstream OS and LightDesktop booted into login screens rather than automatically loading the desktop. Fuduntu’s concept of having a different scheduler and some tweaks to swap are interesting ideas, but I think the project would be better off presenting itself as a Fedora community spin rather than a separate distro.
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New Releases
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Puppy Linux founder Barry Kauler has announced the release of version 1.4 of Quirky. The Quirky Linux distribution is a platform for trying out new, “quirky ideas” and is in the same family as Puppy Linux, but its creator points out that it’s a “distinct distro in its own right.”
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS 6 is just round the corner and what better way to watch the build up than Google Insights and Twitter. Below are two widgets of interest first being Google Insights with the search term “CentOS 6″ and the second is a Twitter widget from TweetGrid searching for the hash tag #CentOS6
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Fedora
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Fedora Project developer Kevin Fenzi has issued a reminder that Fedora 12, code named “Constantine”, will reach its end of life (EOL) on Thursday, the 2nd of December, 2010. Originally released in mid-November of last year, Fedora 11 featured the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, version 2.28 of the GNOME desktop environment, KDE 4.3 and a number of software updates. As of the 2nd of December, no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The developers strongly advise all Fedora 12 users to upgrade to Fedora 13 or 14 to continue receiving updates.
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Debian Family
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This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS.
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I just returned from an intense week in the UK: an IKM Emergent workshop in Oxford, and the Open Government Data Camp in London had me almost drowning in “open data” examples and conversations, with a particular angle on aid data and the perspectives of international development.
As the result of that, I think we’re ready for a “Debian for Development Data”: a collection of data sets, applications and documentation to service community development, curated by a network of people and organisations who share crucial values on democratisation of information and empowerment of people.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Exaile music player users who wouldn’t mind controlling playback via the new Ubuntu Sound Menu can now get in on the action thanks to a new plugin created especially for this purpose.
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Ubuntu, the Canonical-sponsored operating system is gaining new grounds – in both enterprise and consumer segments. The Company now has new challenges — the challenges which develop as a company grows. We talked to Prakash Advani, Partner Manager – Central Asia at Canonical, to understand how Canonical is preparing Ubuntu for the future.
What are the challenges? Is Canonical planning to enter the hardware business and offer an Apple-like solution, fully optimized hardware for the OS? Has Ubuntu missed the tablet bus as Android, despite being not prepared for this form-factor has seen great adoption? What is Canonical’s stand on Apple using Canonical’s brand Launchpad? Will we see professional film-editing software on Ubuntu? Will you be playing the Call of Duty on Ubuntu any soon? There are many such questions buzzing every Ubuntu user. If you want to find out the answers, read on…
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Flavours and Variants
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Well that’s a giant leap forward. 
Nothing like swirling together a vague tribute to an IceBuntu desktop, which was itself a vague tribute to the old Feisty Fawn desktop. Yeah, I’m really going out on a limb there.
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So how about you? What kind of Ubuntu interface do you use on your netbook? Do you just use Unity? Something more like my setup? I’m really curious about Kubuntu, but it’s a real CPU hog at this point. I haven’t figured out how to fix that yet.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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It runs nicely on just about every platform, and I’ve been running it on Ubuntu as well as on my Nokia N900 cellphone for some time.
I started my daughter off with simple logo type program commands. Soon, she was drawing triangles, squares, hexagons, circles, and designs that I used to create with a spirograph when I was a kid.
We moved on to exploring a few other bits of programming and hit a few walls. The sound wasn’t working and some of the simple commands did not seem to do anything, so I figured maybe it is time to make sure that everything is up to date.
Scratch runs in a Squeak virtual machine. “Squeak is a highly portable, open-source Smalltalk with powerful multimedia facilities.” I had been running Squeak 3.9 on my various machines, and Squeak 4.1 is now out. So, I’ve started my upgrade to Squeak 4.1.
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Android
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We have been tipped off that a few VA-API patches have hit the upstream libva tree for furthering along Google’s Android support for this video acceleration API. VA-API is arguably the second best video playback acceleration API available to Linux users, after the NVIDIA-created VDPAU.
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Remember two years ago when Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system? The thinking was that cell phone manufacturers who depended on the Symbian OS could help keep it going. But it was already too late.
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There is already a community around open-source library software, says Don Christie of open-source developer Catalyst IT, but it is developer-focused. The support and marketing around Koha and related products is not well coordinated, he suggests.
ONL is an attempt to remedy that shortcoming, making New Zealand’s libraries more aware of the existence and potential of open-source software in the field.
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Events
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1. Ton Roosendaal – Keynote Presentation
2. Andy Goralczyk – Speed Modelling
3. Jonathan Williamson – Topology
4. Pablo Vazquez – Compositing in Sintel
5. Soenke Maeter – Lighting and Compositing in Sintel
6. Beorn Leonard, Lee Salvemini and Jeremy Davidson – Bringing Sintel to Life
7. Andy Goralczyk & David Revoy – Art Collaboration
8. Andrew Price – The Big Issues
9. Andrew Price – How to Raise Your Profile as an Artist
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CMS
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As the abuses and technical gaffes of the mainstream social networking operators contribute to growing concerns about privacy and autonomy in the cloud, it’s possible that users who are sensitive to such issues will begin to appreciate the availability of more open alternatives. Even if the open source options never gain serious mainstream momentum, they have the potential to draw some attention to the underlying issues that they are trying to solve. Diaspora doesn’t have to topple the entrenched giants in order to inspire positive changes in the industry; it just has to get a critical mass of people to start thinking more seriously about privacy issues and the right kind of interoperability.
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Openness/Sharing
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Scans of old (19th and early 20th century) art magazines, journals, and catalogues can be found on archive.org along with text extracted from them. These are a very useful resource for study of the history of art.
Google Books is better for searching for them, but archive.org is better for downloading them.
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Programming
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Given the broad number of open source data collection and analysis libraries and utilities freely available on the Internet, the concept of combining data analysis with open source tools is a topic worthy of deeper exploration. How well does author Philipp Janert fair with this effort? Read on to find out.
This is the second book review I’ve written in the past month that was written by a physicist turned software developer and book author. However, unlike Ruby on Rails Tutorial author Michael Hartl, Data Analysis with Open Source Tools Mr. Janert has pursued a consulting practice in algorithm development, data analysis, and mathematical modeling. As such, his specialty makes him the ideal subject matter expert to write such a book.
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Standards/Consortia
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Whether your computer is showing colourful fish floating in an aquarium, bouncing balls, or a mouse pointer that takes on the form of a paintbrush, it’s probably thanks to Flash technology.
But soon, many of these same features could be delivered by HTML5, an up-and-coming web standard. That would mean freedom from Adobe and its Flash Player plug-in. But will this new technology spell the end of Flash, Experts say – maybe.
The recent decision by Apple boss Steve Jobs to pick HTML5 over Flash has caused the debate to perk up again. But at the end of the day, both technologies have their advantages – and their limitations.
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A generation of political activists have been transformed by new tools developed on the internet. Here, a leading net commentator profiles seven young radicals from around the world
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If you need another reason to give thanks at the dinner table on Thursday, how’s this: people who maintain an “attitude of gratitude” tend to be happier and healthier than those who don’t, according to a lengthy and instructive article this week in the Wall Street Journal.
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When William Gibson published his seminal sci-fi novel Neuromancer in 1984, it seemed improbably dystopic. More than a quarter-century later, so much has changed that he now writes in the present tense. His latest book, Zero History, is the final volume of a loose trilogy that concentrates on a culture increasingly obsessed with branding and, well, stuff (though Gibson prefers the term “artifacts”). “I’ve always been, for whatever reason, very conscious of the world of things,” he says. We spoke at length with him about plenty of these things — from the iPad to those old-fashioned anachronisms called “books.”
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The National Audit Office is carrying out a new, fast-track investigation into the NHS IT scheme, including an inquiry into whether BT received £400m over market prices.
The NAO has confirmed that it plans a further audit of the National Programme for IT [NPfIT], after a request by Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a long-standing member of the Public Accounts Committee, who has followed the scheme since its inception in 2002.
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Science
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Those satellites in space don’t just take spy pictures. On this Black Friday 2010, they are actually taking pictures of you, and your rush to Black Friday deals.
The research is being done to see what consumer demand this year means for retail stocks. The trend, so far, has been favorable.
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Health/Nutrition
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More than 600,000 people, including 165,000 children, die every year from passive smoking, a report from World Health Organisation experts says today.
The estimates from the first analysis of the true global toll are based on the best available data across 192 countries and the known effects of exposure.
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Philip Morris International has been especially aggressive in fighting marketing restrictions overseas. The company has deployed a $5 million campaign in Australia to fight a government plan that would require cigarettes be marketed in plain brown or white packages. PM designed the campaign to make it look like it was coming from small store owners, and got help financing it from competitors like BAT and Imperial Tobacco. The companies also argue that higher cigarette taxes will stimulate smuggling, but tobacco industry documents reveal that global tobacco companies are not only complicit in cigarette smuggling, but that they oversee it, and even depend on it to gain access to closed markets.
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During my interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Wednesday night, I explained the sinister work of an industry-funded front group to discredit Michael Moore as a filmmaker and citizen and especially of his 2007 movie, Sicko. The PR firm hired by health insurers to do the evil deed set up and operated the front group, which it named “Health Care America,” to conduct a fear-mongering campaign designed to scare people away from the movie’s core message: that every developed country in the world except the United States has been able to achieve universal coverage for their citizens largely because they don’t allow big insurance companies to call the shots like they do here. I wrote about this in my book, Deadly Spin, in the chapter entitled “The Campaign Against Sicko.”
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Health insurers last year gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce $86.2 million that was used to oppose the health-care overhaul law, according to tax records and people familiar with the donation.
The insurance lobby, whose members include Minnetonka, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp. of Philadelphia, gave the money to the Chamber in 2009 as Democrats increased criticism of the industry, according to a person who requested anonymity because laws don’t require identifying funding sources. The Chamber got the money from the America’s Health Insurance Plans as the industry urged Congress to drop a plan to create a competing government-run insurance plan.
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The health insurance industry plowed $86.2 million into drumming up opposition to the health care reform bill, and that was just the money they spent in 2009. Big insurers UnitedHealth Group, CIGNA Corporation and others funneled the money to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry’s lobbying group, which in turn gave it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is acting as a front group for big industries to influence elections.
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Security
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Details about the U.S. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks are starting to come out. Although WikiLeaks itself may be under a denial of service attack, it provided several newspapers around the world access to the raw documents it is preparing to release later today. The New York Times just posted it’s first article summarizing the contents of the cables and highlighting the most newsworthy ones.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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I am a biochemist working in the field of biophysics. Specifically, the lab I work in (as well as many others) has spent the better part of the last decade working on the molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer. The result of that work is that we now better understand that people who have a deficient BRCA2 gene are hypersensitive to DNA damage, which can be caused by a number of factors including: UV exposure, oxidative stress, improper chromosomal replication and segregation, and radiation exposure. The image below shows what happens to a chromosome of a normal cell when it is exposed to radiation. It most cases, this damage is repaired; however, at high doses or when there is a genetic defect, the cells either die or become cancerous.
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Yesterday Paul Chambers lost his appeal against his fine and conviction for posting a joke on twitter which was prosecuted under the anti-terrorist legislation.
The case was so obviously ridiculous that everyone thought common-sense would prevail, but eschewing humour and reality, Judge Jacqueline Davies deemed the tweet “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.”
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Whistle-blower website reportedly to release millions of confidential diplomatic cables between US government officials.
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North Korea has placed surface-to-surface missiles on launch pads in the Yellow Sea, Yonhap news agency said, as the United States and South Korea began military drills and China called for emergency talks.
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In short, the torpedo recovered from the ocean where Cheosan was attacked is NOT the same torpedo shown in the North Korean plans. As I stated above, there are additional differences as well between the blueprints and the actual torpedo, but the actuators are the clincher.
The torpedo recovered fronm the oceasn where the Cheosan was sunk is not the North Korean torpedo shown in the blueprints.
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Speaking at a joint conference with Syrian President in Damascus, Indian President Pratibha Patil says India consistently supported Arab goals in the region.
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Israel has instructed its embassies in 10 European countries, including the UK, each to recruit 1,000 members of the public to act as advocates for its policies in a new public relations offensive.
A cable from the foreign affairs ministry was sent to embassies last week, with instructions from Avigdor Lieberman, the controversial and extreme right-wing foreign minister, to adopt a range of measures aimed at improving Israel’s standing in Europe.
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A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.
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While the world’s media are afire with yesterday’s WikiLeaks data release of secret US diplomatic cables, the local media in China are strangely quiet.
The reason, according to a Twitter update by Al Jazeera English’s correspondent in China, Melissa Chan a short while ago, is that China’s Propaganda Department have directed all domestic media outlets to stop reporting the WikiLeaks content.
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• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Saudi king urged Washington to bomb Iran
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How did such an enormous electronic database come into existence and then apparently be so easily leaked? The answer lies in the tag “Sipdis” which appears on the string of address codes heading each cable.
It stands for Siprnet Distribution. Siprnet is itself an acronym, for Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. Siprnet was designed to solve the chronic problem of big bureaucracies – how to share information easily and confidentially among large numbers of people spread around the world. Siprnet is a worldwide US military internet system, kept separate from the ordinary civilian internet and run by the defence department in Washington.
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Disclosures and leaks have been of all times, but never before has a non state- or non- corporate affiliated group done this at the scale Wikileaks managed to with the ‘Afghan War Logs’. But nonetheless we believe that this is more something of a quantitative leap than of a qualitative one. In a certain sense, these ‘colossal’ Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets – never mind private ones – has become rather difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Wikileaks here becomes symbolic for a transformation in the ‘information society’ at large, and holds up a mirror of future things to come. So while one can look at Wikileaks as a (political) project, and criticize it for its modus operandi, or for other reasons, it can also be seen as a ‘pilot’ phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.
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251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world. It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.
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The protest on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving was called National Opt-Out Day, and its organizers urged air travelers to refuse the Transportation Security Administration’s full-body scanning machines.
But many appeared to have opted out of opting out. The TSA reported that few of the 2 million people flying Wednesday chose pat-downs over the scanners, with few resulting delays.
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Many questions remain unasked as the U.S. continues its war on terrorism. One is whether Washington possesses the moral right to condemn terrorism when its own hands are so bloody.
Let’s examine our use of terror directed against civilians to achieve political or military goals, beginning with the atomic devastation of Japan. “Little Boy,” exploded over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killed 130,000 people immediately (including a dozen U.S. POWs) and 200,000 within five years, all but some 20,000 of them civilians. Twenty-five square miles of civilization were gutted.
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The well paid securitocracy have been out in force in the media, attacking wikileaks and repeating their well worn mantras.
These leaks will claim innocent lives, and will damage national security. They will encourage Islamic terrorism. Government secrecy is essential to keep us all safe. In fact, this action by Wikileaks is so cataclysmic, I shall be astonished if we are not all killed in our beds tonight.
Except that we heard exactly the same things months ago when Wikileaks released the Iraq war documents and then the Afghan war documents, and nobody has been able to point to a concrete example of any of these bloodurdling consequences.
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Yesterday we received a letter from a customer who wore her GladRags Pantyliner through a security scanner and was so traumatized by her resulting TSA genital search that she wanted to warn other women. (Read her letter below). Her past history of sexual assault made this experience a nightmare for her. At first we thought yes, we will warn people not to put themselves through this risk.
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On closer examination of sources it appears that Lt. Col. Aliyan left his position as Rotem commander in May 2008, six months before Operation Cast Lead. Therefore, he is not the Rotem commander who suppressed the death report in the following post. My apologies for not vetting the source more carefully. But thanks to two other Israeli sources we’re all convinced that we now have the right guy.
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Haiti is scheduled to hold elections on Nov. 28, and nothing — neither the cholera outbreak that has killed more than 1,000 people nor the fact that more than 1 million earthquake survivors remain homeless — seems likely to convince the Haitian government or its international backers that the vote should be postponed. It should be. Why? The electoral process is rigged. Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems happy to go along with the charade.
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Scotland Yard is under pressure after video footage emerged of police officers on horseback charging a crowd of protesters during a demonstration against increases in university tuition fees, 24 hours after they denied that horses charged the crowd.
Footage posted on YouTube showed mounted police riding at speed into a crowd of around 1,000 protesters who had gathered south of Trafalgar Square on Wednesday night.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Some of the world’s largest oil, mining, car and gas corporations will make hundreds of millions of dollars from a UN-backed forest protection scheme, according to a new report from the Friends of the Earth International.
The group’s new report – launched on the first day of the global climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, where 193 countries hope to thrash out a new agreement – is the first major assessment of the several hundred, large-scale Redd (Reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation) pilot schemes. It shows that banks, airlines, charitable foundations, carbon traders, conservation groups, gas companies and palm plantation companies have also scrambled into forestry protection.
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The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change commits signatories to preventing ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’, leaving unspecified the level of global warming that is dangerous. In the late 1990s, a limit of 2°C global warming above preindustrial temperature was proposed as a ‘guard rail’ below which most of the dangerous climate impacts could be avoided.
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Next week, Mexico hosts the UN convention on climate change in Cancún. It is ironic that such an important conference on the environment should take place in a country whose environment has been devastated, and in a city that exemplifies everything you should not do if you wish to protect the environment.
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The world warmed more rapidly than previously thought over the past decade, according to a Met Office report published today, which finds the evidence for man-made climate change has grown even stronger over the last year.
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What fun! We’re tracking all of these, and we’ll be getting in touch with the 10 iPod Touch winners (picked at random) on Monday, November 29 — because we want to catch all the time zones, and don’t want to miss you over the holiday. We’ll then contact you via Twitter to get your shipping info, and we’ll get your iPod Touch in the mail ASAP.
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Finance
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I’ve spent much of this long weekend curled up on the couch reading Too Big To Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the financial crisis of 2008. I’ve wanted to read this book since it came out last year but it took me a while to get to it. I’m enjoying it very much.
[...]
But I do think we are seeing signs of excess in the markets we invest in and I do think we are seeing investors chasing returns in deals they don’t fully understand. That is a red flag. And I am choosing to observe it, pay attention to it, and share it with all of you.
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Cut Ireland’s minimum wage? Check. Collect more in property taxes from beleaguered homeowners? Check. Raise the corporate tax rate, which could plug the gaping hole in Ireland’s tattered balance sheets even faster? Well, no.
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History is awash in rags-to-riches stories; they not only inspired generations of would-be entrepreneurs by offering a formula for success, but also provided the world with remarkable iconic figures to look up to.
However, we hardly hear about rags-to-riches and then back to square-one stories. The economic crisis that is engulfing Ireland, the Celtic Tiger, is an intriguing case in point.
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More than 100,000 Irish citizens took to the streets of Dublin today to protest against the international bailout and four years of austerity.
Despite overnight snow storms and freezing temperatures, huge crowds have gathered in O’Connell Street to demonstrate against the cuts aimed at driving down Ireland’s colossal national debt.
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Thousands of people marched through Dublin Saturday, demanding the Irish government default on the country’s debts, call an immediate election, and reverse plans for tough budget cuts and financial support from the International Monetary Fund.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block. (The first vote is scheduled Thursday, November 18!)
This is the kind of heavy-handed censorship you’d expect from a dictatorship, where one man can decide what web sites you’re not allowed to visit. But the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill quickly — and Senators say they haven’t heard much in the way of objections! That’s why we need you to sign our urgent petition to Congress demanding they oppose the Internet blacklist.
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You see, Torrent-Finder, which is back up under a new domain name, Torrent-Finder.info doesn’t host Torrent file or even BitTorrent file trackers. It’s just a search engine dedicated to file torrents such as movies, TV shows, or software programs. You can find the same file torrents with Google if you know what you’re doing. Torrent-Finder, and sites like it, just makes specific kinds of file searches easier.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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So I eventually succumbed. My joy of tech over won my aversion to the e-book reader and I bought a Kindle. The years fighting it and making better and better arguments for not needing or wanting one suddenly slip away.
And I apologize. I still love and define myself large parts of myself by my physical library but I have become a follower. Instead of constantly needing to carry books inside my heavy laptop bag I have this little device. I can choose from a great library of works and I can read them in a dark corner in a crowded bus.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s main IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) is down.
We’re currently getting ‘try again’ messages for http://www.ifpi.org/.
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Attorneys for the U.S. Copyright Group have filed a lawsuit against a lawyer who sold “self-help” documents to people who had been sued by the USCG, demanding that he pay the costs involved in dealing with the people who used the documents he sold.
Try to stick with me here, because this one gets weird. Back in August, an attorney by the name of Graham Syfert began selling documents that would allow defendants in lawsuits filed by the U.S. Copyright Group to respond in court without having to fork over the huge piles of money needed to hire an attorney. The USCG sued “thousands” of BitTorrent users who had downloaded films like The Hurt Locker, Far Cry and Call of the Wild, demanding a settlement of $2500 to avoid the much more expensive proposition of going to court.
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Last week while everyone was waiting for the COICA bill to move through Congress, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency one upped the Attorney General and seized domain names from a group of over 70 copyright infringing websites. A visit to the blacklisted domains now results in the ominous looking message from Homeland Security below.
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Every new year since the first copyrights expired, back around 1724, the world has looked forward to expiration of copyrights and the public domain availability of the works that have been kept under publishing monopolies.
This coming January 1 Europeans will see a nice list of great works entering the public domain as the copyright terms expire, some listed below, but the United States, where their landmark Supreme Court Case decided that an extended copyright term could last literally forever, a person can no longer look forward to such happenings.
Richard Stallman
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.28.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This week I’ve had two more colleague that want Linux also. Both with XP. I guess it was because they saw a not experienced user doing so well with Linux. Soon both computer will soon boot Ubuntu instead of XP.
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I wanted to post about that, but I was preparing my yearly report for the Professor Assembly and, therefore, had no time… but it occurred to me that I would use the chance to contribute by showing all professors how a computer running on Linux works. So, although they had a Vista 7 Starter laptop ready for the reports, I asked permission to use my modest netbook running Mandriva.
All my colleagues displayed their reports using the Vista 7 laptop and one professor suffered the embarrassment of MS PowerPoint 2007 not responding as she expected. I cannot say that was an “atypical behavior”: all of us have seen something like that happen time and again. I felt bad for her due to the fact that she told me that she slept till late because she invested a lot of time to create a beautiful PowerPoint presentation for the occasion.
When my turn came, I had my netbook ready and woke it up from hibernation (Yes! It DOES work in Mandriva 2010.1), unplugged the VGA cable from the laptop and plugged it to my netbook. As a good OS should behave, Mandriva picked up the signal and let me configure the display in a matter of five seconds. The picking up of the signal made me a little anxious because, prior to the meeting, they had to change the projector because 7 Starter did not let them change the display size of the screen (How about that!) and I had everything ready with the previous device.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Things to expect on Pwnage Radio
- Discussion of Free Software and Open Source products of personal interest to me.
- Discussion of Apple, Steve Jobs, Oracle and Microsoft.
- Discussion about the Fedora Project and other Fedora related news.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Being brought up from the discussion surrounding the RadeonHD driver being vandalized, which wound up just being a prank by two X.Org developers to torment one of the former RadeonHD developers, was a discussion why more companies don’t contribute back to X.Org. Do companies think the X.Org code is too hard? That it’s not worth the time? Is it all politics?
Here’s the beginning of this new thread. Reasons expressed by other developers range from Microsoft F.U.D. to vendors just wishing X.Org would go away, provide the vendors with a competitive advantage by not pushing their patches upstream, to their code just being in a poor and unreliable state. There’s also the matter that with the modularized X.Org state, it’s easier to keep and maintain an out-of-tree DDX driver than it is maintaining an out-of-tree kernel driver on Linux.
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Wayland has received quite a number of new patches in the past month from a variety of different developers, including the ability to run Wayland off a Linux frame-buffer, but now this weekend it has picked up another interesting feature: the ability to run another Wayland compositor instance within itself. There’s now patches out there for running a nested/session compositor of Wayland on top of an existing Wayland Display Server that in turn is running on a X11/DRM compositor and communicating with the hardware.
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Applications
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Have you been burned before and lost important data? Or do you lose sleep because of the fear of one day joining the ranks of those who have? Fear not, worried and jaded souls – there’s a range of Linux backup tools that can help.
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Using it, you can either supply the video file and let it search the subtitles or you can directly search them by the movie name. Either way, life becomes easier. One little thing though, you will need to have an account at opensubtitles.org because its needs to log in as an authenticated user.
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As long as we are talking about audio players, I always suggest Amarok, but most people are not looking for an all in on solution. They just want to play a few songs or play list sometimes and hence require only a simple and light audio player which can do all of it. Muine is one such music player for Gnome.
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Instructionals/Technical
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My recent personal experiences
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Games
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While open-source game engines are beginning to progress in terms of features and graphics capabilities — thanks in large part to id Software making open their older game engines — as a whole the open-source game engines and other “indie” game engines are far behind their commercial counterparts. There is the Unreal Development Kit that is available for non-commercial use, but now Unigine Corp is getting behind a game development competition to spur Linux game development efforts.
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One of the biggest drawbacks of running Linux is the lack of games made for the platform. Penguspy is a web site specifically designed to help Linux users find games that work on their system.
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Three Linux gaming sites, Linux Game Publishing, TuxGames, and the Linux Game Tome have had a considerable amount of downtime of late due to a catastrophic hardware failure.
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Even though I’m no fan of the multiplayer (zero-)gravity-shooter genre, I enjoy playing M.A.R.S., which features AI enemies and wingmen, various weapon types, upgrades and a pretty cool game mode, where a huge cannon will shoot at the planet of the enemy team of whoever is holding the remote to it. I also think it’s darn pretty.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Clementine – KDE4 port of Amarok 1.4 – full review
Kubuntu comes with Amarok 2.2.0, but if you’re happier with the look and feel of the older Amarok 1.4, Clementine is the perfect replacement. It offers an interface similar to the one of the KDE3 version of Amarok, and currently it integrates a pretty fair amount of features. Clementine comes with a file browser, radio support, Last.fm song submission, sortable playlists, cover manager, equalizer, cross-fading, tray icon integration, OSD, music library. Considering it isn’t included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories, here is a tutorial I’ve put up a while ago to install it.
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This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, The man from the future Nuno Pinheiro.
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Last weekend I could announce that KWin compiles with OpenGL ES headers. This weekend I was able to proceed even more: I got the first windows composited using OpenGL ES 2.0. Not everything is working and there is still lot’s of work to be done and it has not yet been tried on actual devices (yes you can use OpenGL ES on a desktop), but nevertheless it’s a very important step.
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GNOME Desktop
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I found the coolest tool, Universal Subtitles. With Universal Subtitles you can easily transcribe a talk, add subtitles or captions or translate any video on the web.
I’ve been trying to transcribe my Would you do it again for free? talk forever and I always give up – I can’t type fast enough to keep up and manually pausing required more hands than I have. Universal Subtitles let me type and automatically paused and let me catch up whenever the video got ahead of me. Then I could go back and edit, adjust the timing, etc. Now I could also go back and translate the subtitles into other languages.
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Reviews
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Yesterday, I upgraded to 2.6.36 and there were two error messages at boot time. One was about tomoyo-init scripts and the other was about HDA-Intel being unknown hardware. The former is harmless and the later was easy to resolve using the wiki. There still remain two things about Arch that annoy me:
* an okular issue with deja vu files; and
* false positives with rkhunter.
Yet again, they are mostly upstream issues. Thus, Arch linux is a nice distribution; but it may not be the best choice for new users.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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There are a few areas where Fedora 14 is slower than its predecessors are, but overall Fedora 14 is doing better or on par performance-wise to earlier releases.
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Recently (as it does from time to time) the question of professionalism and good behavior in Fedora’s support channels has come up again. Personally I spend a lot of time helping out on irc in #fedora, so thats the channel I can most speak about, however, I am also somewhat active on the fedora users list and somewhat rarely look at fedoraforums.
First a bit of history: I was at Fudcon (version 10 in Boston, 2008). I had been involved with fedora for years at that point, but I hadn’t really ever spent a lot of time in #fedora or working with support channels. In the State of Fedora talk at the end of the day, Paul Frields noted that he had dropped into #fedora and had a very poor experence. People were cursing, being abusive and all around unhelpfull. So, this seemed to me a great chance to step up and help out there. I found that for the past many number of years, the channel had basically 2 active and very overworked operators, and a smaller group of helpers. So, we formed the irc-support-sig, got more operators setup, tried to setup guidelines and encourage people to help. There are some great folks involved, spending a lot of their time and energy helping others now. I would personally say the channel is a great deal better now than it was in the past. Is it perfect? By no means.
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Fedora is quite popular distro and now I am going to depict experience with Fedora 14. I feel it not for novice user so I provide a easy to use Codec installation for novice user.
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Debian Family
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In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC. Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.
Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unity (which now shows up as a plugin in CompizConfig Settings Manager) has finally been made default in Ubuntu (desktop) 11.04 Natty Narwhal yesterday, as you can see in the Ubuntu meta changelog. That means that if you download the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily build and boot from it, you should get Unity without having to install / enable anything. The same changelog mentions that Screen has been removed from the desktop version.
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We’ve got issue 43 out with more of the great FCM goodness that you’ve come to enjoy. This month, we’ve got stuff like:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 17, Virtualize Part 6 – Debian & Xen, and Editing Photos With Raw Therapee.
* Review – Conky & Untangle.
* Top 5 – Backup Ideas.
* Readers Survey 2010 Comments & Replies!
* plus: Interviews, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!
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With the release of Ubuntu 9.10 late last year Canonical introduced PPAs, which is short for Personal Package Archives. A PPA allows anyone that has signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct to easily distribute software they have packaged to Ubuntu users. This revolutionary idea allows those who do not have the capability to establish their own repository to easily provide package updates to their users. Want the latest version of Openshot or PiTiVi? Then simply add a PPA to your system that packages up to date versions of these softwares and you will be set to go!
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The latest Ubuntu 10.10 operating system, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat” is being touted as an alternaive best-of-breed Linux-based OS for Filipino PC users.
Rather than just a simple update from Ubuntu 10 (Lucid Lynx), the Ubuntu 10.10 is set as an “evolutionary” step in visuals and system performance benefits, which are seamlessly integrated to ensure maximum productivity for the user.
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Flavours and Variants
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Yesterday, fresh from my success at building/installing Firefox 4 Beta 7 on my Ubuntu boxes, I decided to try it on my old laptop. This thing is pretty ancient – a Dell Latitude D610, I’m guessing about six or seven years old. It was running Mint 9, which is basically Ubuntu 10.04 with some slight modifications, so I thought the FF4 build and install process would be pretty much the same as on the two Ubuntu 10.10 machines I’d already installed it on.
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As a result, we expect our websites will be shutting down on 17th December. We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. Preparing this content will take some time, hence it will not be distributable before 31st January 2011. A charge may be levied for media and shipping.
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The 451 Group’s annual report on the state of the open source business world is out. Already the title: Control and Community suggests they are once again on top of what has been going on this year. Analyzing about 300 open source related businesses they not only “get it right”, but were actually able to uncover some facts even I was unaware of and this impressed me a lot. If an analyst can dig up statistics to back up something that I already “intuitively” know in my heart, that is a useful service. But if they can make me go “ah, I didn’t know that” on a topic I consider myself quite an expert in, the I’m impressed!
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Events
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CeBIT, held in Hanover, Germany each year, is the largest IT trade show in the world. Companies come from all over the world to show their goods and services to each other, and to make deals. For several years now Linux New Media, the publishers of various Linux magazines around the world has sponsored a “Linux Park” at CeBIT.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Now there is one other trick that GNU SIP Witch in particular can do which will make this methodology and both anonymous and verified secure calling over VoIP much more widely available. GNU SIP Witch can choose to act as a media proxy. It can do this by rewriting the SDP to goto SIP Witch managed RTP ports. Doing so, these ports could take in unencrypted RTP streams and encrypt using media cipher keys that GNU SIP Witch computes. This would be done if the calling party or the called party do not already independently support secure calling on their own. This means any existing SIP VoIP application, including SIP phone devices, can suddenly be used to make entire secure calls without any modification. Moreover, SIP Witch can selectively use secure calling depending on if the endpoints are on the same subnet or not, or placed at each workstation as a local proxy and assure all call traffic, including internal traffic is always secure, especially if there is concern with internal espionage. This maximizes the range of secure deployment scenarios and all without requiring the introduction of new secure VoIP user agents.
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Project Releases
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We’re pleased to announce the 1.4 release of PyPy. This is a major breakthrough in our long journey, as PyPy 1.4 is the first PyPy release that can translate itself faster than CPython. Starting today, we are using PyPy more for our every-day development.
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Lightspark 0.4.5 is nearing release with its new graphics engine. The release candidate for Lightspark 0.4.5 just came this Saturday, boasting this new graphics engine that more heavily leverages Cairo for graphics drawing and offloading more of the workload to the graphics processor for this free software project aiming to implement the latest Adobe Flash/SWF specification. Besides faster and smoother playback (and lower CPU utilization in most cases) with this new graphics engine, this open-source Flash player also now has better input support.
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Government
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As you may know the OKF is working on an EU funded project called LOD2. Part of the project aims to bring together openly licensed, machine-readable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies throughout Europe. It will also provide free/open source tools and services for those interested in reusing open government data.
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I’m Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re delighted to have such great a group of people here and many thanks to all of you that have come, especially if you’ve travelled a long way.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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A stellar pair of reverse engineers, bushing and pytey from iPhone DevTeam/Team Twiizers, have launched a Kickstarter fundraiser to back OpenVizsla, a open/hackable hardware-based USB protocol analyzer.
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The former prime minister said it was true that “people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion”.
But Mr Blair, who converted to Catholicism after leaving government in 2007, said it was also true that religion inspires acts of extraordinary good.
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This poll will remain open until Sunday December 12, 2010 (approximately 19:00 UTC). Afterwards, the results will be merged onto the FutureHaikuFeatures wiki page on the Haiku Project’s Development Tracker.
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The United Nations has again passed the resolution forbidding “defamation of religion.”
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Science
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What superpowers have been developed? Full scale war between the developed world and other strong militaries hasn’t happened since World War 2. The only way we would find out what powers have been developed would be by risking nuclear war. So maybe we’ll never know what powers have been developed.
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Security
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As many people have found, Twitter is a fantastic tool for spreading important news rapidly.
In the past it’s been used to share information about fires in Los Angeles, emergency landings in the Hudson River, and most recently helping aid be transported effectively to disaster stricken Indonesians.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Rob Ford ran a campaign for Mayor of Toronto based on the concept of respect for taxpayers. Now he’s mayor-elect, taking office in December. Is Rob Ford really going to show respect for taxpayers, or was it all a sham just to get elected?
Now admittedly Rob Ford’s campaign was about financial respect. He has for years complained about city hall wasting taxpayer money. But what use is ‘financial respect’, if he shows no respect for the people themselves?
Specifically I’m talking about the policing situation during the G8 and G20 meetings which ran from June 25 to June 27, 2010 (further information on the G8 and G20 summits can be found at the G8 Information Center and the G20 Information Center, both of which sites are operated by the University of Toronto, and of course the Wikipedia G8 and G20 pages.).
During the G8 and G20 meetings, it became apparent that there is a rogue element of the Toronto Police Service. This rogue element took advantage of security concerns to abuse the public that they are sworn ‘To Serve and Protect’ (the Toronto Police Service slogan), and to breach the values exposed in the Toronto Police Service’s Mission Statement. I don’t believe that this rogue element is a large portion of the force. I’ve known too many cops, and the vast majority take their charge seriously. But there are always a few bad apples, and you cannot store rotten apples with good apples, or the rot will spread to the good ones as well.
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One of the most worrisome things is happening on the web right now and with increasing frequency. Domains are being seized by the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security under the auspices of ICE. Not only are they being seized but it is happening without any notification but also apparently with the assistance of ICANN.
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As first reported by the BBC, The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is seeking the authority to close domains engaged in certain “criminal” activities, which includes not just website domains, but domain registrations such as email, and perhaps phones, too*. The police have submitted a plan to Nominet, a company which oversees all .uk web addresses. And more than a few liberal minds in London, numerous IT lawyers among them, are concerned.
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Flyingfish knows he’s allowed to photograph TSA checkpoints from public areas in the airport. He knows this because it is the TSA’s publicly stated position.
But a refused-to-identify-himself TSA agent and a state trooper at Hartford’s Bradley International Airport don’t know this, so they detained Flyingfish, told him he was in big trouble — that he had, in fact, committed a “federal offense.”
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The UK Government has issued Defence Advisory Notices to editors of UK news outlets in an attempt to hush up the latest bombshell from whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks.
DA Notices, the last of which was issued in April 2009 after sensitive defence documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing, are requests not to publish, and therefore not legally enforceable.
Which means there are no ‘official’ repercussions for ignoring the notices, but they are generally adhered to.
The news came to light in two Tweets from WikiLeaks one of which said, “UK Government has issued a “D-notice” warning to all UK news editors, asking to be briefed on upcoming WikiLeaks stories.”
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The United States has been in contact with Turkey over new files to be released on the Internet by WikiLeaks, Turkish officials said Friday, stressing Ankara’s commitment to fighting terrorism.
According to media reports, the planned release by the whistle-blowing website includes papers suggesting that Turkey helped Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and that the United States helped Iraq-based Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey.
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The US administration and key allies around the world are braced for the release of a vast quantity of sensitive diplomatic files on whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
In Washington, the State Department denounced the leak of classified material as “irresponsible” and warned that it would place lives at risk.
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A Somali-born teenager plotted “a spectacular show” of terrorism for months, saying he didn’t mind that children would die if he bombed a crowded Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, according to a law-enforcement official and court documents.
He never got the chance. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested Friday in downtown Portland after using a cell phone to try to detonate what he thought were explosives in a van, prosecutors said. It turned out to be a dummy bomb put together by FBI agents.
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I just realized that I may not be as fully informed about the role of Homeland Security as I should be, when this morning I read in a small piece on Neowin about DHS seizing over 70 domains for their proximity to sites known for piracy.
I did not know this had anything to do with the purview of DHS, as I was under the mistaken impression that the stated purpose of the department was the physical security of persons and property in the United States of America.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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BP ignored the advice of safety critical software in an attempt to save time before the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a presentation slide prepared by US investigators.
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The companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill made several risky decisions to save time — and consequently money — ahead of the disaster, according to a document that was pulled at the last minute from a presentation of the president’s oil spill commission earlier this month.
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Finance
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Often, the most provocative ideas arise after swigs of whiskey. This is especially true when a Rolling Stone reporter is around — and, as I recently learned, it’s all but guaranteed when that Rolling Stoner is Matt Taibbi, aka the heir to the magazine’s gonzo throne.
I had the chance to hang with Taibbi last week after he spoke to a Denver audience about his new book, “Griftopia,” which argues that Wall Street’s bubble-bailout cycle has been one of the greatest — and least prosecuted — crimes in history. His presentation was serendipitously timed, coming the same week as a local Bonfire of the Vanities-esque scandal was underscoring the speculator class’s privilege. In Colorado’s own Bonfire of the Rockies, a local prosecutor had just reduced hit-and-run charges against a fund manager because the prosecutor said a felony would have “serious job implications” for the Sherman McCoy in question.
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FURIOUS consumers are demanding compensation after a NAB computer bungle delayed millions of wages, pensions, family payments and business transactions across Australia.
Tens of thousands of anxious people could still be without cash for the weekend because of backlogs from the shambles.
The IT nightmare left some families destitute, throwing grocery and Christmas shopping, birthday party plans and even holidays into chaos.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I’d be against cap and trade. If I believed that prisoner abuse would make my family significantly less likely to be killed by terrorists, my thinking about torture would be different. And if I believed that the problems with the economy had been caused by too much government instead of too little, that my personal freedom was threatened by the government instead of large corporations, I’d probably be in a tea party supporter and a Republican.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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OpenDNS was founded in 2006 and quickly made a lot of fans around here due to their fast, reliable DNS servers and DNS services. It has been a profitable business; in 2008 it was estimated that OpenDNS generates a whopping $20,000 per day off of their DNS redirection relationship with Yahoo. Every DNS outage over the last four years effectively acted as an advertisement for OpenDNS, and the company has grown substantially — now serving roughly 20 million users.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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YouTube will begin paying French artists when their works show up on the site, thanks to a new deal with three French royalty societies. The agreement only affects videos viewed in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but it does cover clips and movies uploaded to YouTube from 2007 all the way through 2013.
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The UK’s High Court has ruled that news monitoring agencies will have to pay publishing companies to use their web content, effectively re-classifying headlines as separate literary works subject to copyright.
The moves follows a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency, owned by eight of the UK’s largest newspaper groups, and Meltwater, a news monitoring agency. Although cutting agencies like Meltwater pay the NLA a fee for reproducing full-length articles, this case was supposed to clarify the limits of the NLA’s licensing scheme.
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The High Court of England and Wales has decided on an interesting test copyright case regarding linking and news aggregation by public relations firms. The case is that of Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Meltwater Holding BV [2010] EWHC 3099 (Ch). The claimants in the case are the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), an industry association for several newspapers in the UK, and several other individual newspapers. The defendants are Dutch PR firm Meltwater, and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), the industry body for PR consultants in the UK.
Duke Nukem 3D for the Nokia N900
Credit: TinyOgg
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