• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Penetration into Entertainment Accessories

Today Linux is running most set-top boxes, media streamers, routers, synthesizers and keyboards. Linux is what runs the show at the London Stock Exchange as well as entertains travelers on innumerable airlines.

Desktop

• Click a Link – We Get Money….Maybe.

  Most of the grants available to us are for equipment. I think what I find most ironic is the push to give us computer equipment for our office and logistic operations.

Server

• Zarafa Shows Open Source Momentum at FOSDEM 2011

• Dell Releases Ubuntu-powered Cloud Servers

  Dell is marketing the servers to organizations developing applications to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Organizations could use the servers to test the applications locally before uploading them to Amazon’s paid service. The servers have a preconfigured testing and development environment. Eucalyptus duplicates the AWS APIs (application programming interfaces).

  Partnering with Canonical allowed Dell to deliver an infrastructure-as-a-service product in an integrated package and based on open standards, said Andy Rhodes, executive director of marketing for Dell’s data center solutions division, in a statement.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Free as in Freedom: Episode 0×08: Strictly Commercial

  Bradley and Karen discuss non-commercial-only commons licenses, particularly the CC-By-NC license, and how they compare to Free Culture and Free Software licenses, and why some authors pick NC licenses instead of Free Culture/Software ones.

Kernel Space

• Kernel prepatch 2.6.38-rc3

• The Linux 2.6.38-rc3 Kernel Arrives

  After Linus released an early Linux 2.6.38-rc2 kernel due to the 2011 Linux.Conf.Au, Linus has released the Linux 2.6.38-rc3 kernel while developers are returning from this Australian conference.

• Kernel Log: Consistent names for network interfaces

  Future distributions will use a consistent, predictable scheme to name network interfaces, using names such as “em1″ and “pci2#1″ instead of “eth0″ and “eth1″ to provide more transparency for server administrators. As various new kernels have recently been introduced, the Kernel Log will provide an overview of the most important Stable and Longterm kernel series.

• Video: Lessons Learned from 13 Years of LWN

  Jon Corbet gave a presentation about the lessons he has learned running Linux Weekly News for 13 years.

• Graphics Stack

  • Tiling Is Being Worked On For The Open Evergreen Driver

    While the Radeon HD 6000 series is AMD’s latest generation of graphics processor, and has initial open-source support available as of earlier this month, the open-source Linux GPU driver support isn’t yet complete for the older Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” series and generations even older than that. One of the features that has been lacking for Evergreen is tiling support within the ATI Gallium3D “R600g” driver for the HD 5000 series while it is available for the R600 ASICs and earlier. Evergreen tiling support though is now being worked on, which should deliver a performance boost once fully implemented for this hardware.

Applications

• Download Double Commander 0.4.6 .deb (Works In Ubuntu 10.10!)

  Double Commander is one of the best two-pane file managers for Linux (but also runs on Windows). It comes with a multi-rename tool, tabbed interface, custom columns, internel text editor with syntax highlighting, built in file viewer, archive support (are handled like subdirectories), extended search and lots more.

• TagPlayer Gets NotifyOSD Support, AppIndicator

  A new version of TagPlayer, a Linux music player plays your local music by using its Last.fm tags, was released today.

• Gimp Paint Studio(GPS)- A collection of brushes and accompanying tool presets for GIMP

  GPS (Gimp Paint Studio) is a collection of brushes and accompanying tool presets. Tool presets are a simply saved tool options, highly useful feature of the GIMP.

• Freespeak, an handy translator

  It is undeniable sometimes when we’re browsing or readiang an article/tutorial we hit a language that we do not understand yet that’s the thing we are looking for, but linux users do not have to worry about these issues because there is applications that can help us in the translation, yup “FreeSpeak“, the application is quite powerful for translate from or into other languages.

• Padre – Perl Application Development and Refactoring Environment

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Who knew IPv6 would be this easy?

  • Setting Up An Android App Build Environment With Eclipse, Android SDK, PhoneGap (Fedora 14)

  • More Latency Tweaks for Desktop Users

  • Better Queries with MySQL—Part 1

  • export environment variable from a bash script

  • OpenBVE – Train Simulator for Ubuntu. Install and Play.

  • Make Mandriva 2010.2 as Router

  • Collecting User Input in a Bash Shell Script

  • UNIX / Linux: How to Use Sticky Bit on Directory and File

  • Gentoo Install Checklist

  • Turn off your PC and BitTorrent from a Linux console with rTorrent

• Games

  • Frictional Games

    Frictional Games was behind 2010’s most scary game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. By some accounts, the most scary video game ever. Considered by fans, a spiritual successor to the well-received Penumbra series. Amnesia is their most critically acclaimed effort yet. We reached out for a few comments on their success and on being an indie developer.

  • Unigine Corp. releases a few more Oil Rush screenshots, teases awesomeness

    The folks over at Unigine sent out an email last week letting us know they’ve added a few more screenshots to their screenshots page.

  • LGC Tiny and Big Preview!

    Venn of Linux Game Cast let us know they’ve posted a preview of Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers based on a beta build provided by the dev team

  • The Goblin and the Butterfly 1.0.0.19

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • [KOffice] Views and a Conversion

    Back in July I blogged about the maturity of KWord. Or, more accurately, the lack of that. I attacked the problem head-on of why KWord is not really used for serious work. In this blog I want to revist the issue and show the progress made since then.

    First, a little look back. Since the KOffice2.0 release now 2 years ago we made various releases with the 2.3.1 release being the most recent. The amount of features added and bugs fixed in each release is nothing short of amazing. Yet, the most heard complaints are of simple issues. Things that stop even the least demanding users from using it daily. In my last blog I suggested user profiles in the form of personas as means to focus on a solution. And this has had some good effects!

  • More Details Emerge On The Bretzn Project

  • KDE SC 4.6.0 in Gentoo

    I’m pleased to announce the availability of KDE SC 4.6.0 to another distro.

  • KDE 4.6 Review | LAS | s1504

• GNOME Desktop

  • Clutter 1.6 & GTK+ 2.24 Tool-Kits Released

    There’s good news in the land of GNOME tool-kits this week. In preparation for the release of GNOME 3.0, GTK+ 2.24 as well as Clutter 1.6.0 have been officially released.

    GTK+ 2.24 is the last stable GTK2 release in that series with all of the exciting work now going into GTK3, which will also be officially released soon. GTK+ 2.24 is the last stable update but it will continue to be maintained and receive bug-fixes. GTK+ 2.24 isn’t too exciting but is a step to help in porting applications to GTK3 while still being source and binary compatible with earlier GTK2 releases.

  • Glade learns some new tricks

    Today’s release of Glade 3.9.2 was brought to you in a large part by our hero Juan Pablo Ugarte the Magnificent (and the crowd goes wild !)

  • Attack Of The Clones Is A Very Interesting, Unique GTK/Metacity Theme

    Attack Of The Clones is yet another theme created by JurialMunkey (who is also behind Divergence IV: A New Hope) that features a unique Metacity theme and a very interesting combination of light and dark colors.

  • Gnome-Shell gets a Live CD

    GNOME-Shell is very nearly upon us – but it’s been an absolute age since I last played with it myself (been knee deep in Natty, folks!).

  • Easily Test Gnome Shell Using A Live CD!

    Testing Gnome Shell just got a whole lot easier! There are now live CD Gnome Shell (Gnome 3) ISO files available for both Fedora and openSUSE – you don’t have to install them, all you have to do is write the ISO files onto an USB stick or CD, boot and enjoy Gnome Shell.

  • GTK+ 3.0, GNOME Shell, Mutter Near Final

    In preparation for the GNOME 2.91.6 release tomorrow, many GNOME modules are being checked in, including new versions of the GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit, the GNOME Shell, and the Mutter window manager.

    While GTK+ 2.24 is now final, version 3.0 is still being worked on but is almost done. GTK+ 2.99.3 is the new release and it also comes with one last ABI break before going gold. GTK+ 3.0 is expected to be declared stable next week.

  • The Board 0.1.1

    I decided to use the classic odd-unstable/even-stable style of versioning.

Distributions

• In Pursuit of a Minimal and Useful Unix

  Ubuntu is the most useful flavor of Unix available today. It has drivers for most hardware you’re likely to encounter, including wireless cards and camera memory sticks. Installation is a breeze, there are tons of ports, and tutorials for anything involving a terminal and an incantation of shell commands. There’s some bloat: Solitaire, instant messagers, OpenOffice, but most apps that ship with Ubuntu have their uses.

• Gentoo – The Pros and Cons

  I’ve recently been getting back into Gentoo Linux, running it in a virtual machine and for some reason I actually understand it better this time around.

  I have used Gentoo before, without truly understanding what I was doing, but now, after using other distros Gentoo actually makes sense. However, it still is a rather unique distro, with its own way of doing things, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Allow me to outline a few.

• Reviews

  • SalineOS 1.1 review

    SalineOS 1.1 ships with OpenOffice 3.2.1.

• Red Hat Family

  • Send in the Clones: The Long Wait for CentOS 6

    You do get what you pay for. And if you pay nothing, there’s little cause to complain.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Improving Diversity At UDS

      The Ubuntu Developer Summit is our twice-yearly event in which the Ubuntu community gets together to discuss, design, and plan the work for the next release of Ubuntu. It is an important staple in the Ubuntu calendar, and we meet next in May in Budapest, Hungary.

    • Main frozen for Natty Alpha 2

      Two days out from the expected release of Natty Alpha 2, the milestone freeze is now in effect. Please take care that any packages that you upload to main between now and the Alpha 2 release will help us in the goal of a high quality and timely alpha, and hold any disruptive or unnecessary uploads until after the alpha is out.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Openmoko Community Update

    The Openmoko Community Update for February 1 has been released with news of new Openmoko hardware. “GTA04 is a project by the long time distributor and hw developer, German company Golden Delicious. The name is loaned from Openmoko project because of the spiritual continuation – GTA01 was the codename for Neo1973, GTA02 was the Neo FreeRunner, and GTA03 was the canceled successor product. Besides offering improved versions of Neo FreeRunner (better battery life, better audio output), they’ve a complete replacement board planned to fit an existing Neo FreeRunner case and use the existing display.”

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Sojourner – FOSDEM conference browser

      Sojourner by Will Thompson allows you to browse the schedule for FOSDEM 2011, one of the biggest free and open source software conferences in Europe. You can browse by time, by category or by room, and star interesting talks to help locate them later.

  • Android

    • Pentel Airpen Pocket Digitizes Your Handwritten Notes, Stores them on Your Android

The Open-By-Rule Governance Benchmark

What does authentic open source community governance look like? An open source community will involve many people gathering for their own independent reasons around a free software commons with source code licensed under an OSI-approved open source license. But there’s more to software freedom than just the license. The key question any potential co-developer will want to ask is “what is the governance” – on what terms are people participating?

Top ten reasons why I won’t use your open source project

Here’s our top ten list of things you can do to promote your Open Source project, or ten reasons I don’t fork your project.

Why a Distro-Provided OpenSSH is Better than a Third-Party OpenSSH

Recently one of our customers sent us marketing materials from one of our competitors. One thing that stuck out was the positioning that their version of a critical system component used in *NIX OpenSSH is better than the vendor-provided OpenSSH (from Red Hat, for example). As a former systems engineer responsible for many *NIX systems, this raises a red flag and here’s why.

What are the top ten open source projects? OpenLogic’s support view.

According to OpenLogic the top ten projects by support are:

* JBoss Application Server
* Tomcat
* Apache HTTP Server
* Hibernate
* Core Spring Framework
* Struts
* MySQL Community Server
* Subversion
* Ant
* Log4j

Events

• Video: LCA 2011 Keynote Vint Cerf

• Video: LCA 2011 Keynote Geoff Huston

Web Browsers

• Little-known wonders in Chrome, IE & Firefox

  Firefox 4, the Beta version of which can be downloaded by anyone, by default gives screen shots of the eight most frequented sites you’ve visited.

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Gets Desktop Alerts for Gmail, Chat

    I’m making an exception today to discuss the new HTML5 desktop notifications that alert Google Chrome users when a new e-mail or chat message arrives.

• Mozilla

  • What’s up with SUMO – Jan. 29

    The big things this week:

    * Army of Awesome is now localizable. If you are interested in seeing Army of Awesome in your language, contact Kadir: atopa (at) mozilla (dot) com
    * Top 19 articles + templates will be ready for localization by Thursday.
    * Mobile ready SUMO coming soon. Here’s the demo site shown in the video.

  • Home Dash Faster in your Language with 3

    Following up on the initial release of Home Dash last week, Home Dash 3 adds initial localization support for Spanish, German and Chinese.

  • Last Day to Vote: Game On Community Choice Award

    Today is the last day to VOTE for the Game On Community Choice Award. Take a few minutes to rate the sheer awesomeness of these games. We will be announcing the winner of the Community Choice award on Thursday, February 3, along with all the other prize winners. We will also be randomly selecting three lucky voters and send you a special-edition Mozilla Labs Game On swag pack!

  • Mozilla Firefox L10N Evening – London

    Tuesday, February 08, 2011 from 6:30 PM – 10:30 PM (GMT)

  • Python scoping: understanding LEGB

  • Contributor Engagement Asia town hall meeting planning

    As 2011 starts, I am happy to be working with a newly created team, Contributor Engagement, to help Mozilla communities in Asia contribute to Mozilla. Team-mates of mine, Mary Colvig and David Boswell and William Quiviger have all blogged recently about our new team and efforts.

    To that end, we are scheduling a ‘town hall meeting’ for Asian Mozilla community members next week, either Monday, February 7th, Tuesday, February 8th, or Wednesday, February 9th. This meeting would be a conference call and IRC chat to discuss contribution at Mozilla — what you enjoy about it, what could be improved, what tools you could use to make it easier to contribute to Mozilla, updates + happenings with Mozilla and so on. To start, we’d like to give an overview of the new team, share some very early 2011 plans and most importantly, get some feedback.

SaaS

• Yahoo! commits to Apache Hadoop, drops Yahoo! Hadoop

  Yahoo! has announced that it is dropping its own distribution of Hadoop and plans to work more closely with the Apache Hadoop community. The Yahoo! distribution had been a vehicle for Yahoo! to experiment with and release its own work on the distributed computing and storage framework, but this appears to have been to the detriment of Apache’s Hadoop. “Unfortunately, Apache is no longer the obvious place to go for Hadoop releases” said Eric Baldeschwieler, Yahoo’s VP of Software Engineering, adding that Yahoo has always been committed to open sourcing its work. After reviewing the company’s options, Yahoo has decided to focus on working with the Apache Hadoop community and to be prepared to compromise on how it achieves its development goals.

• What would make cloud computing truly free and open?

  The various trends known as cloud computing have spawned serious critiques about vendors’ reliability, security, privacy, and liability. This talk melds cloud computing with the principles of free and open source software to find solutions or mitigating factors for many of these concerns. Although other proposals have been aired for cloud standards, open clouds, open source licensing, loosening data, and others gestures toward customer control, this talk goes a step or two beyond them to suggest a more comprehensive architectural approach.

Oracle

• Java Hangs When Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308

  This number is supposed to convert to 0x1p-1022, which is DBL_MIN; instead, Java gets stuck on 0×0.fffffffffffffp-1022, the largest subnormal double-precision floating-point number.

• Oracle writes new OpenJDK rules

  Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle has announced on his blog that he, with the assistance of John Duimovich and Jason Gartner of IBM, Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, Prof. Doug Lea of SUNY Oswego, and Adam Messinger of Oracle, has been drafting a set of OpenJDK community rules, or bye-laws, by which the community will operate. He says the draft document will soon be published for public comment.

• Open-source forkers declare Oracle independence

• LibreOffice Debuts, Beating OpenOffice.org by a Whisker

  LibreOffice 3.3 is as polished as one might expect in a project that, for all its novelty, has many years of development work behind it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• New Country Coordinators for Italy and the UK

  Giacomo Poderi and Sam Tuke are the new Country Coordinators for the Italian and British Country Teams respectively.

  Giacomo Poderi, team member since 2006 and former Deputy Coordinator, is the new Coordinator of the Italian Country Team. The priority goals for the Italian team, under Giacomo’s coordination, will be to create links between FSFE’s work at the European level with the work done by the many groups, associations and activists in Italy in favour of Free Software. To promote participation, increase visibility and networking with other Italian activists, the team will use collaborative projects promoted by FSFE such as the PDFreaders campaign and the forthcoming DFD ’11. At the same time, the team will provide its help to the projects promoted by the groups of the Italian Free Software movement.

• reddit joins the Free Software Foundation! Help us design an ad for FSF.

  reddit, like many of you, supports the work of the Free Software Foundation to promote and protect computer user freedom, and fight against threats such as software patents and DRM. In order to show our support, we’ve joined the FSF as a corporate patron, joining the likes of Google, IBM and Hewlett Packard in our dedication to the cause.

  To celebrate this, we’ve teamed up with the FSF to help design a new logo for their associate membership program. Associate members make up the vast majority of funding for the FSF, and associate members are computer users who, like us, acknowledge and appreciate the importance of free software and the work being done by the FSF. When you join the FSF associate membership program, you join a society of ethical computer users, who value freedom and support efforts to stamp out DRM and software patents. In addition, associate members receive some cool benefits from the FSF:

Project Releases

• jQuery 1.5 Released

  Right on schedule jQuery 1.5 is ready for consumption!

Government

• PL: ‘Ninety percent op public administrations use open source’

  Ninety percent of the public administrations in Poland is using open source software in one way or another, according to the results of a survey carried out in 2010. However: “The uptake of open source is relatively low. It is not evenly spread over servers and desktops.”

• European Commission consults on the modernisation of the European Public Procurement Market

  Public procurement accounts for roughly 17% of the EU’s GDP. In times of tight budgets and economic difficulties in many Member States, public procurement policy must ensure the most efficient use of public funds, with a view to supporting growth and job creation. This would require flexible and user-friendly tools that make transparent and competitive contract awards as easy as possible for European public authorities and their suppliers. With these objectives in mind, the European Commission has today launched a consultation. This open debate with interested parties will focus on the modernisation of the rules, tools and methods for public procurement to deliver better on these goals. The deadline for responses to the Green Paper is 18 April 2011.

• GR: Open source and free Linux system for teachers and pupils at elementary schools

  Sxolinux, the Greek open and free Linux system for pupils constitutes an effort to create a computer laboratory at elementary schools.

  This kind of software allows the use of old and disused systems whose owners would easily give them for recycling. Therefore, with donations of material and with five days of volunteer work, a computer lab was set up. The creator of the distribution used for the Greek sxolinux is Dimitris Kalamaras.

• Govt open-source group nears critical mass

  Proposed by the South Australian Government’s chief information officer back in 2009, the Open Technology Foundation (OTF) aims to educate and support an open and level playing field for the adoption of open technology in governments across Australia, spearheaded by Steve Schmid, the foundation’s strategic planner.

  [...]

  Schmid even wants to take the OTF to the world, with support already coming in from New Zealand governments.

Licensing

• OSOR publishes a new “Legal Corner” section and a licence wizard!

  As from February 2011, OSOR visitors discover a new “Legal Corner” section in their top menu bar. The aim of this section is to provide guidelines and ad-hoc advices around licensing and other legal aspects of using free /open source software (FOSS).

Openness/Sharing

• Six ways to build a solid community

  There’s no guarantee that anyone can build and sustain a community. But there are certainly elements that most successful communities share, and that’s what we’ve tried to present here.

• Committee announce new inquiry into peer review

  The Committee has today launched an inquiry into peer review. The committee invites evidence on the operation and effectiveness of the peer review process used to examine and validate scientific results and papers prior to publication.

• Open Data

  • CC and data[bases]: huge in 2011, what you can do

    You may have heard that data is huge — changing the way science is done, enabling new kinds of consumer and business applications, furthering citizen involvement and government transparency, spawning a new class of software for processing big data and new interdisciplinary class of “data scientists” to help utilize all this data — not to mention metadata (data about data), linked data and the semantic web — there’s a whole lot of data, there’s more every day, and it’s potentially extremely valuable.

  • Art Open Data

    The following guest post is by Rob Myers, artist, hacker, writer, and member of the OKF Working Groups on Open Data in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

    Art Open Data is Open Data that concerns art institutions, art history, the art market, or artworks. Using this data, we can examine art history and contemporary art in powerful new ways.

• Open Access/Content

  • Al Jazeera adds Egypt and Tunisia coverage to its CC video repository

    Since the beginning of the Egyptian uprising on January 25th, Qatar-based all-news Arabic channel Al Jazeera has been feeding its repository of CC-licensed video with up-to-date footage from Egypt and Tunisia.

• Open Hardware

  • Customize Your Car’s Electronics Using Arduino

British firms face bribery blacklist, warns corruption watchdog

British companies may face international blacklisting as a result of the government’s attempts to water down the Bribery Act, the chairman of an international anti-corruption watchdog warned.

Prof Mark Pieth said that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was obviously “disappointed and concerned” at the prospect of further obstruction in implementing the act, passed by the last Labour government after long delays and that patience was “running out fast” among other industrialised nations.

Why work?

Even though both eBay and Walmart sell huge volumes of retail products, eBay does it in a way that gives much more freedom to its sellers than Walmart sales clerks have. Is it more fun to be an eBay seller than a Walmart clerk? I suspect it often is. And I suspect that eBay sellers—on average—probably bring more energy, creativity, and dedication to their work than a typical Walmart clerk.

Another way of thinking about how to make work fun is to look at some of the most fun activities around—games—and try to use the same features that make games fun to make work more fun. Almost 30 years ago, in my Ph.D. thesis, I used this strategy to suggest how to make education more fun by incorporating features of highly motivating video games. And, surprisingly, the framework I developed then still applies—with some adaptation—to making work fun today.

The framework highlights three important features of highly motivating environments like video games: challenge, fantasy, and curiosity.

Challenging environments are those where you are always confronting challenges that are on the edge of your capabilities—not too easy and not too difficult. It may seem strange to use this example, but I just saw the movie The Hurt Locker, and one of the main characters in the movie was essentially addicted to the life-threatening challenge of disarming dangerous bombs in Iraq. Was his job fun? Most people probably wouldn’t think so, but for him the challenge made his job almost like a game, and he brought huge amounts of dedication to doing his work.

Two /8s allocated to APNIC from IANA

The information in this announcement is to enable the Internet community to update network configurations, such as routing filters, where required.

APNIC received the following IPv4 address blocks from IANA in February 2011 and will be making allocations from these ranges in the near future:

* 39/8
* 106/8

[...]

APNIC reiterates that IPv6 is the only means available for the sustained ongoing growth of the Internet, and urges all Members of the Internet industry to move quickly towards its deployment.

Science

• Antenna decision makes waves

  Procedural transparency is at issue as a US agency transfers a high-precision radio dish to an international partner.

• Japan’s space agency teams up with fishing net maker to collect space debris

  The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Nitto Seimo Co aim to tackle the increasingly hazardous problem of debris damaging space shuttles and satellites.

  The new system involves launching a satellite attached to a thin metal net spanning several kilometers into space, before the net is detached and begins to capture space waste while orbiting earth.

• Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

  As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”

Security

• Tuesday’s security updates

• Anonymous takes down Berlusconi’s site

  Now Italy, run by the Silvio Berlusconi Mafia, has experienced the first tremors, heralded on January 23 when Anonymous gave warning of things to come.

• Stop trying to balance liberty with security

  From the countless amendments and additions to the Counter Terrorism Act to the ever-expanding Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, there’s no doubting that British anti-terrorist legislation since 9/11 now constitutes a mightily oppressive edifice.

• Report: Ryanair’s booking system is insecure

  Economy airline Ryanair’s online booking system allows for flight amendments and the addition of extra services for their associated fees. According to a report by Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (German language link), it’s easy for an outsider to gain access to the system using just a reservation number or email address along with the flight date as well as the departure and destination airports.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Egypt report from Human Rights Watch: “Impunity for Torture Fuels Days of Rage”

  A report released by Human Rights Watch documents how Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government effectively condones police abuse by failing to ensure that law enforcement officers who are accused of torture are investigated and criminally prosecuted. HRW describes torture as “an endemic problem in Egypt.” According to HRW, ending police abuse—and the cycle of impunity for those crimes—is a driving element behind the massive popular demonstrations in Egypt this past week.

• What’s Happening in Egypt, the Action Movie Explainer: “Raiders of the Lost Mubarak”

  After she realized many people couldn’t wrap their heads around what was going on in Egypt, Furrygirl decided to turn to Hollywood staples and made this Raiders of the Lost Ark mashup version which explains things pretty clearly.

• Egypt: “Your Weapons Are on Cairo’s Streets, America”

• Egypt protesters vow to step up pressure

  Tens of thousands of people have gathered in central Cairo for a seventh day of protest.

  As pressure mounts on President Hosni Mubarak to step down, police have been ordered back to the streets to positions they abandoned on Friday.

• Egypt protests reinvigorating opposition in Iran

  Protests in Egypt calling for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak have also reinvigorated Iran’s opposition, triggering calls to regroup.”

• Egyptian Protests Inspire Opposition in Iran

  Egypt’s uprising has captivated the Arab world, but in Iran—fresh from its own outpouring of antigovernment unrest—backers of the regime and supporters of the beleaguered opposition are competing for credit for inspiring the demonstrations in Cairo.

• Hidden Behind Egypt’s Uprising, Sudan Protests

  Once the success of the protests in Tunisia reminded the world that governments can be changed by a wide spectrum of people and not a political cadre or religious group or opposition politician but the people themselves, those people went to town prodding and testing for weakness.

  The people of Algeria, Libya, even Yemen were seen on the streets. But Sudan seems to be hidden behind the Egyptian flare up. Now, crisis mapping shows how deep and widespread the discontent is in that country.

• Causes and contexts: Arab Twitter revolutions and the origins of the First World War

  Take the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia over the past few weeks. Communications technology and social networks have been present, both on the streets, among the protagonists.

  Did Facebook cause the revolution? Is it a Twitter revolution? These are partly silly questions, partly interesting ideas to follow through. Historians will soon enough, why shouldn’t we?

• Incredible: Watch volunteers translate Egyptian phone messages in real-time

  To further this aim, a number of volunteers outside of Egypt (you know, where the Internet still works) have decided to collaborate online to get those voicemails – which are mainly in Arabic – translated into English.

• Live From Egypt: The Rebellion Grows Stronger

• Million Egyptian Protest Planned as Resistance Continues

  It is morning again in Cairo as I post this. The curfew ended at 8:00am and the people of Egypt enter the seventh day of their history making struggle. A famous poem by the early 20th century Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi, “To the Tyrants of the World” [hear it on NPR] has become a rallying cry in both Tunisia and Egypt.

• Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

  We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

• Report: Torture in Egypt rampant amid impunity for security forces

  The words are those of one Egyptian speaking to Human Rights Watch – and alleging torture by Egypt’s security services against his fellow detainees.

  Another man, a 22-year-old taxi-driver, told HRW last year about his detention by Egyptian police: “They had whips and hit me on the legs, on the bottom of my feet, and on my back. When they took me down, they brought a black electric device and applied electro-shocks four or five times to my arms until it started smoking.”

• Haroon Moghul on Why the Egyptian Revolution is not Islamist

  Egypt’s “secular” dictator, who didn’t meddle too far into his people’s religious life — he was no Shah, and no Ben Ali — hasn’t created a sharp cultural divide in his country (the economic one is something else altogether). So why would Egyptians need, want, or stress, an Islamic Revolution?

• China quick to label Egypt uprising as “chaotic”

  We all know the line abut Tiananmen Square, that we can only thank God the CCP saved China from chaos by cracking down on the protesters by whatever means necessary. This argument was carried to another extreme in the case of Russia, where the rapid switch to democracy plunged the nation into chaos. Every schoolchild in China knows about that. And now Egypt. Seems like whenever a dictatorship is threatened, the CCP feels the need to desperately convince its citizens that change equals chaos.

• The ‘Italian Job’ and Other Highlights From U.S.’s Rendition Program With Egypt

  Among the many aspects of the U.S.-Egypt relationship, few have been as controversial as the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, where the agency frequently handed over suspected terrorists to foreign governments with histories of torture and illegal detention.

• The Egypt Crisis in a Global Context: A Special Report

  Let’s begin by considering the regime. In 1952, Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a military coup that displaced the Egyptian monarchy, civilian officers in the military, and British influence in Egypt. Nasser created a government based on military power as the major stabilizing and progressive force in Egypt. His revolution was secular and socialist. In short, it was a statist regime dominated by the military. On Nasser’s death, Anwar Sadat replaced him. On Sadat’s assassination, Hosni Mubarak replaced him. Both of these men came from the military as Nasser did. However their foreign policy might have differed from Nasser’s, the regime remained intact.

• Looters included undercover Egyptian police, hospitals tell Human Rights Watch

  Human Rights Watch confirmed several cases of undercover police loyal to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime committing acts of violence and looting in an attempt to stoke fear of instability as demonstrations grew stronger Tuesday against the autocratic leader.

  Peter Bouckaert, the emergency director at Human Rights Watch, said hospitals confirmed that they received several wounded looters shot by the army carrying police identification cards. They also found several cases of looters and vandals in Cairo and Alexandria with police identification cards. He added that it was “unexplainable” that thousands of prisoners escaped from prisons over the weekend.

• Fight On

  The first new song here in a while. I don’t even know if this will still be relevant by the time you hear it but I had to release it anyway. Like the rest of us around the world I’ve been watching the events in Egypt on the news. The people are calling for the end of a dictatorship and the birth of a new age of democracy.

• Watched Mubarak Making His Statement

  Actually he doesn’t get it at all. His speech would have made sense if it had been given thirty years ago. Now, well, he just sounds lost.

  The entire speech is about what he is going to do. The problem is that the Egyptian public wants only one thing, for him to leave.

• Anderson Cooper ‘punched in the head’ 10 times by pro-Mubarak thugs

  CNN’s Anderson Cooper said Wednesday that he and his crew were violently attacked by pro-Mubarak forces as they tried to make their way through the streets of Cairo.

  “Anderson Cooper punched 10 times in the head as pro-Mubarak mob surrounds him and his crew at Cairo rally,” Maan News Agency’s George Hale tweeted.

  Cooper described his ordeal on CNN’s American Morning.

• DNA collection from arrestees starts Tuesday in North Carolina

  Tuesday marks the first day of a new law that allows law enforcement to take DNA from arrestees, not just those convicted of a crime.

  The new state law begins February 1 and requires officers to take DNA samples from anyone charged with assault on handicapped persons, stalking, or any felony.

Cablegate

• Julian Assange awarded Sydney peace medal

  In the estimation of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange stands alongside the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.

  As he outrages and embarrasses world leaders by leaking secret US diplomatic cables – and continues to face down allegations of sex offences – Mr Assange has been chosen by the foundation to receive a rare gold medal for peace with justice.

• Open Letter To The Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Re Julian Assange.

  It is pleasing that you would welcome him back to Australia but your statement that the government cannot do anything to assist him in that regard is not strictly correct and springs from a factual error in you saying “They are charges and they’ve got to be worked through proper process.” Prime Minister, in brief these are the relevant facts and applicable law:

  1) Mr Assange has not ever been charged by Sweden or anybody else.
  2) The Swedish authorities have initiated an extradition process which is contrary to the European Arrest Warrant (“EAW”) system in that they want him back in Sweden for the purposes of investigation, not explicitly to charge him.
  3) The EAW is a fast track extradition process between EU member states brought into effect to allow decisions to be made between EU judicial systems, not between politicians.

• Plea over WikiLeaks jail ‘Briton’

  The Government has been urged to intervene in the case of a soldier held in a US jail on suspicion of passing state secrets to WikiLeaks – on the grounds that he is part-British.

  Bradley Manning, a private in the US Army, went to school in Haverfordwest, Wales, where his mother still lives.

  He has been accused of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website.

• Amnesty urges UK to intervene in Manning case

  Amnesty International called on British authorities to intervene Tuesday in the case of the Army private accused of leaking material to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks amid claims that he is an American-British dual national.

  Pfc. Bradley Manning has been held at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia since last summer under conditions which his supporters describe as punitive. Manning’s case has attracted sustained attention in Britain in part because his mother is Welsh, but some supporters now claim that the 23-year-old holds British citizenship.

• Lionel Barber’s Hugh Cudlipp lecture: the full text

  Let me now turn to more current sources of controversy, notably the WikiLeaks phenomenon and the phone-hacking scandal. While each is very different and each raises important questions for public policy, there is a single common thread: the transformational power of technology which is rendering media laws and practice obsolete.

  First, a few words on the WikiLeaks affair. The two industrial scale data-dumps included vivid, if partial US military dispatches from the front-line in Afghanistan and Iraq followed by 250,000 classfied diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world. Set alongside each other, they look like the scoops of the century. But as both Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian and Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, have recounted: managing the story and Mr Assange was far from straightforward.

  Keller describes Assange as a character out of a Stieg Larsson novel who was “elusive, manipulative, volatile and ultimately openly hostile to the New York Times and Guardian.” That will not surprise too many journalists accustomed to dealing with tricky sources, but in this case, other equally challenging ethical, legal and practical problems presented themselves.

  These included how to deal with a US government committed to protecting classified information; how to conduct a cross-border investigation encompassing other media organisations; and how to disentangle the newsworthy and compelling from tens of thousands of computer-stored data. In this respect, the Daily Telegraph’s handling of its Westminster expenses scoop, while still a formidable logistical challenge, tends to pale by comparison.

• Assange’s lawyer says FOI inspired WikiLeaks

  Poor regulation across many of the world’s freedom of information systems formed part of Julian Assange’s inspiration to establish WikiLeaks, the Australian’s lawyer says.

  The 39-year-old is currently under US criminal investigation over the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret military reports and diplomatic cables released.

• The Witch Hunt Against Assange Is Turning into an Extremely Dangerous Assault on Journalism Itself

  Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals.

• Army Leaks Hit Piece on Bradley Manning

  Last night’s DoD press conference on Bradley Manning was a bizarre affair. Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell was snappish, hectoring and ill-prepared. They were clearly thrown when Jim Miklaszewski reported that the Quantico brig commander acted inappropriately in putting Manning on suicide watch, and the journalists present greeted Morrell’s excuses with extreme skepticism.

• Egypt – Cable from Imprisoned Egyptian Opposition Leader: Defend Democracy “for the friendship of peoples live forever”

  Ayman Nour, one of the senior leaders of the Egyptian opposition who is currently organizing a coalition to create an interim government, wrote an eloquent letter from prison in 2006 to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in which he implored the U.S. not to stand by and ignore his plight, according to a new cable released by Wikileaks.

• Egypt – U.S. intelligence collaboration with Omar Suleiman “most successful”

  New cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the U.S. government has been quietly anticipating as well as cultivating Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian spy chief, as the top candidate to take over the country should anything happen to President Hosni Mubarak. On Saturday, this expectation was proved correct when Mubarak named Suleiman to the post of vice-president making him the first in line to assume power.

  An intelligence official who trained at the U.S. Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, Suleiman became head of the spy agency in 1993 which brought him into close contact with the Central Intelligence Agency. Recently he took up a more public role as chief Egyptian interlocuter with Israel to discuss the peace process with Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian factions.

• WikiLeaks files reveal ‘cold, callous and brutal’ behaviour of ministers

  A mother who lost her daughter in the Lockerbie attack has condemned the “cold, callous and brutal” behaviour of British ministers after WikiLeaks documents revealed how they secretly advised Libya on securing the successful early release of the bomber.

• WikiLeaks: FBI hunts the 9/11 gang that got away

  Secret documents reveal that the three Qatari men conducted surveillance on the targets, provided “support” to the plotters and had tickets for a flight to Washington on the eve of the atrocities.

  The suspected terrorists flew from London to New York on a British Airways flight three weeks before the attacks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• SPCA investigates slaughter of 100 Whistler sled dogs

  The “execution-style” mass cull of 100 sled dogs owned by Whistler-based Outdoor Adventures has sparked an SPCA investigation into allegations of animal cruelty, outrage from animal welfare groups and suspension by Tourism Whistler of reservations for dog sledding excursions by the company.

• Brazilian president’s promises crumble under weight of Belo Monte dam

  Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, has never been popular among environmentalists.

  Since the early days of predecessor Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency, when she occupied the post of minister of mining and energy, many activists have seen her as a leader with an old-fashioned view of development. Something like “economic growth is priority number one, no matter if some hectares of Amazon rainforest has to be chopped down”.

  The animosity increased even more after Rousseff was promoted, in 2005, to the ministry of internal affairs – the post that paved her way to the presidency. With the second most important job in the republic, she was responsible for coordinating the government action plan, the Plano de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) – the “plan of growth acceleration”.

• Vedanta fights back over Indian hill tribe’s sacred mountain

  FTSE 100 mining giant Vedanta is challenging a ban on mining the sacred mountain of India’s Dongria Kondh tribe. The Orissa High Court will hear the case on Wednesday 2 February.


  The Dongria Kondh, whose plight has been compared to the fictional Na’vi in Hollywood blockbuster Avatar, won an historic victory against Vedanta last year. India’s Environment Ministry blocked Vedanta’s multimillion-dollar bid to create an open-pit bauxite mine on the Dongria’s sacred mountain, stating that Vedanta had shown ‘blatant disregard for the rights of the tribal groups.’


• Masters: Extremely dangerous Tropical Cyclone Yasi bears down on flooded Queensland, Australia

  Of course it remains An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact that we get more snow storms in warm years. See also Another terrific ABC News story — on the role global warming is playing in extreme winter weather.

• Chimpanzee mother learns her infant has died (video)

• Italian hunting in the dock after 35 people killed in four months

  It is not just birds, rabbits and wild boar who meet a sticky end in the Italian hunting season.

  According to statistics published today, 35 people have also been killed in the past four months, and another 74 injured. Italy’s anti-hunting league, the LAC, said all but one were hunters killed accidentally by their shooting companions.

Finance

• AIB sues Oracle over ‘wasted expenditure’

  ALLIED IRISH Banks is suing two related international companies, claiming some €84 million spent by it on a new retail banking software system was “wasted expenditure”.

  The bank claims Oracle’s Flexcube product was “beset with serious technical problems” from the outset in 2007 and only some 3,000 customers out of an expected five million were switched over to it in a three-year period. In March 2010, work on implementing the Flexcube product ceased.

• Manufacturing surges to record high

  Purchasing managers’ index data for January shows activity grew at the fastest rate in the survey’s 19-year history, and highlights strong inflation which could make an interest rate rise more likely

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Google Spent More on Lobbyists in 2010 Than Yahoo, Facebook & Apple Combined

  Google dropped $5.16 million on lobbyists in 2010, according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database. The sum represents a 29% increase over the $4 million the company spent in 2009.

Censorship

• Probably Not The Best Time To Introduce Legislation That Can Be Described As Having An ‘Internet Kill Switch’

  We’ve already discussed how, contrary to the claims of some, there really isn’t an attempt to create “an internet kill switch” in the US. There is a (admittedly bad) proposal concerning how the US would respond in the event of some sort of “cyber attack.” The proposal itself would allow the government to mandate how certain “critical infrastructure” pieces of the internet should respond in the event of such an attack.

• Egypt’s Internet blackout gets even blacker

  On Friday we reported that almost all Egyptian Internet connectivity had been cut off. Routes to the company’s major ISPs had been dropped from global routing tables, leaving no way to send traffic to the country. At the time, one ISP, Noor Group, remained connected.

• Ham Radio Not a Viable Option for Egypt

  The Egyptian government has ordered the shutdown of all ISPs (Internet service providers) as well as some cell phone services. The move appears aimed at disrupting protestors, who have been demonstrating across the country since last week. They are calling for the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Civil Rights

• Egyptian Actions Highlight Dangers in U.S. Cybersecurity Proposals

  The Egyptian regime’s shutdown of the Internet in an attempt to preserve its political power highlights the dangers of any government having unchecked power over our Internet infrastructure, and puts a fine point on the risks to democracy posed by recent Congressional proposals to give the President a broad mandate to dictate how our internet service providers respond to cyber-emergencies.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Statement from the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry

  Today, the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, issued the following statement regarding usage-based billing:

  “On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, the CRTC announced its decision to allow wholesale and retail internet service providers to charge customers for exceeding the monthly usage of data transfer permitted with their broadband Internet package. This will mean, for the first time, that many smaller and regional internet service providers will be required to move to a system of usage-based billing for their customers.

• Reverse internet billing decision, Liberals say

  A CRTC decision that will force small internet service providers to restrict the internet service plans available to their customers should be reversed by the federal government, the federal Liberal Party says.

• Usage-Based Billing Hits Canada: Say Goodbye To Internet Innovation

  O, Canada, what have you done? The country’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, has passed sweeping new regulations that will force Internet Service Providers to switch to so-called usage-based billing—metered pricing, in less flowery language. That means ISPs there will charge customers by the gigabyte for Internet access, and that’s on top of a flat service fee. There’s nothing particularly new about metered pricing, but the fact that it’s being implemented on a country-wide basis surely merits a quick discussion.

• Canadians Angry About Usage Based Billing

  Why is this important? Well, these limits or caps that ISP’s have put into place will effect Canadian jobs, and businesses not just consumers wallets. As almost anyone who follows the business side of the tech industry knows, everything is moving towards cloud computing. Basically what cloud computing means, is that any digital product you buy, view, or back up will be done via Internet only. From streaming video like Netflix, to music stored in virtual music lockers, to companies throwing their backups on secure servers over the net. Cloud Computing will significantly impact on the amount of bandwidth Canadians use as hard drives slowly become obsolete.

• Open letter to Minister Clement concerning CRTC

  On behalf of the 107,000 members of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), I am writing to express our strong concern with a recent decision of the CRTC regarding usage based billing for internet services (CRTC2011-44). The effect of this decision, should cabinet not overturn it, would be significant for small businesses in Canada, particularly as they come out of the recent recession. The vast majority of smaller firms rely on reasonably priced internet services to help them run their operations.

DRM

• ORG calls for DRM evidence

  We know that there has been plenty of under-the-radar harm caused to ordinary consumers by ‘Digital Rights Management’ (DRM) over the past years. And we wouldn’t want that left out of the Review’s evidence base. It might be seeing the service you bought content on disappear, making your purchased music or films useless. Perhaps you bought an iPod or other music player and discovered too late that the format of your legally purchased music collection wasn’t supported. It might be that you bought music or film on one platform and found that unnecessarily restricted your subsequent choices about where to watch it, listen to it, or read it.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • My Submission to The Legislative Committee on Bill C-32 (CC32)

    Culture grows through sharing. It used to be Canadians bemoaned the lack of a Canadian “identity.” This cultural void was certainly tied in to the limited exposure Canadians had to our own culture since a few corporations controlled all of our culture.

    Today’s combination of hardware, software, media devices, and the Internet makes it possible for creators to create and distribute our work directly to our audience. The new technology has been an incredible boon to both creators and consumers.

    The independent Canadian music industry is ushering in an incredible golden age, in spite of the CD levy which penalizes independent creators. Canadians are leading the world with Independent music production and distribution. And nobody is looking for a “Canadian Identity” anymore since Canadian culture is thriving– through sharing– on the Internet. For the first time in more than half a century, Canadian musicians don’t have to sign away the rights to their music to get recorded and distributed.

  • Copyright is a Monopoly! (And isn’t like normal property)

    The equation of ‘intellectual property’ (IP) such as copyright with (traditional “real”) property is frequently made, especially by those advocating its extension. However, this equation is fundamentally erroneous and results in very serious misapprehension of the nature and effect of IP. In particular, patents and copyright confer monopolies in a way that ownership of real property does not.

  • Hadopi Wants To Kick People Offline For Watching Unauthorized Streams As Well

    There’s no indication given as to how Hadopi or anyone else would actually be able to find out who was watching streamed content, short of seizing log files. But, won’t it be great when you can lose your internet connection, because your friends pointed you to a video on YouTube that wasn’t properly licensed?

  • How shall the artists get paid?

    There will never be a shortage of culture. We have created since the day we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls. There is more culture available than ever, much thanks to the Internet.

    There are millions more people who want to live off creating culture than the demand will bear. Most create for different motivations than money. You will have no hard time finding a professional broker or accountant who picks up their guitar as they come home from work to relax a bit, but show me a professional rock guitarist who picks out the financial ledgers for some relaxation in their spare time? In financial terms, there is an oversupply of creators. Always has been.

    When the printing press and libraries arrived, the middlemen proclaimed the death of culture. History repeats itself. Let’s get rid of the middlemen, limit their monopolies, and let the artists and culture flourish.

  • U.S. Resume Controversial File-Sharing Domain Seizures (Updated)

    US authorities have seized the domain of the hugely popular sports streaming and P2P download site Rojadirecta. The site, which is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, lost its .org domain which now redirects to a notice from DOJ/ICE. Rojadirecta is an unusual target because two courts in Spain have ruled that the site operates legally, and other than the .org domain the site has no links to the US.

  • 670 Alleged File-Sharers Off The Hook As BitTorrent Case Dismissed

    Last year, an adult movie producer filed suit against 670 individuals who it claimed had infringed copyright on an obscure title. Now the entire case, which was presented by lawyer Evan Stone, has been dismissed. The plaintiffs were scathing about the court-appointed EFF attorneys, describing them as defenders of piracy. The case was dismissed with prejudice, which means that each of the John Doe defendants are completely off the hook.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • UK Government to reassess website blocking piracy measures

      The government has asked the UK’s media regulator Ofcom to review part of the anti-piracy law from the Digital Economy Act to assess if the measures put in place are actually workable and consider the practicality of blocking websites that infringe copyright.

      The government introduced new rulings as part of its crackdown on individuals accused of copyright infringement but after a campaign on the Your Freedom website, a site that allows users to nominate laws they would like to see the government get rid of, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has said “the government will look at whether we have the right tools for the job in addressing the problem of online copyright infringement”.

    • Digital Economy Act Costs – an unlawful Prisoners Dilemma

      On 17 January 2010, the draft Online Infringement of Copyright (Initial Obligations) (Sharing of Costs) Order 2011 was laid before parliament. It is the first substantive item of secondary legislation made under the Digital Economy Act 2010 and concerns about the simplest thing possible: how much copyright owners and ISP’s will have to pay under the Initial Obligations Code (IOC). Despite its simplicity it has been misdrafted and it may also be unlawful.

    • DE Act: should Parliament pass flawed ISP costs order?

      The European Commission questions whether the DE Act cost-sharing is allowable under EU law. And Ofcom suggests that ISPs could give credit vouchers to the rights-holders if they send fewer warning notices than they forecast.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Keyboard PCs

The full-sized keyboard makes this a better tool for those who can and do type on the web or locally. That’s most of us, folks. The one I particularly like in specs is a small cheap computer, $99 including GNU/Linux.

Post-Christmas Review: Tech Toys and GNU/Linux Compatibility

Well, Christmas 2010 is over, and all the little tech toy devices have been connected, installed, and played with (or returned to the store from whence they came if they didn’t clear those hurdles). This year was an amazing success. Three major computer-linked devices worked on the first try without a hiccup. And I have to at least say a word or two about Mattel’s new Computer Engineer Barbie — a purchase I must admit was a little silly, but my daughter does play with it.

Desktop

• Where is the Linux Desktop’s Aim?

  By a very definition, it seems that working for the Linux desktop is like shooting darts in the dark. Obviously, one would not be able to see where the dart goes, neither if you are hitting the target. However you are definitively hitting something, but you do not seem to know what.

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: Consistent names for network interfaces

  Future distributions will use a consistent, predictable scheme to name network interfaces, using names such as “em1″ and “pci2#1″ instead of “eth0″ and “eth1″ to provide more transparency for server administrators. As various new kernels have recently been introduced, the Kernel Log will provide an overview of the most important Stable and Longterm kernel series.

Applications

• a simple ftp program with python xmlrpc

  Hope you have read my post about creating a simple client server program with python xmlrpc. Now we will try creating a sample file transfer program through which we can transfer files (text, images, movie) over the network. The logic behind this is the same that we used in the client server program shown in the above link. The remote procedure call allows to call functions placed in a remote server, passing parameters to it and receiving return values from the remote function in the server.

• 6 of the Best Free Linux Point-of-Sale Software

  Linux has a good range of open source Point-of-Sale software which can help retailers make considerable cost savings, not simply due to the lack of licensing and upgrade fees. One application which has not been included in this feature but is worthy of a special mention is NolaPro. It is an outstanding free to download application but is released under a proprietary license.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Weekend Project: Tackle Color Management on Linux

  • Guide to CMus – Music Player for Your Terminal

  • Create Professional Videos on Linux with OpenShot

  • How To Restore Ubuntu After Windows Re-installation

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE at FOSDEM Next Weekend

  • KDevelop 4.2 Supports Latest KDE Releases

    Only three months after the last feature release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.2. As usual, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins.

  • KRunner Position Trick

    First, launch system settings and open Window Behavior. Second, switch to the Window Rules control module, and click ‘New…’. Third, click ‘Detect Window Properties’, click the krunner applet window, and click ‘OK’. Finally, go to Geometry, check Position, choose force, click ‘OK’ and click ‘Apply’. Tada, all done.

  • KDE 4.6 For Fedora 14 Is Here

    KDE, the sexiest, desktop environment has reached version 4.6, which brings some cool features. However it’s a bit hard to get your hands on it while it’s still hot, especially on the distro of your choice.

    Fedora is one of the most popular GNU/Linux distros and there is no point in keeping Fedora users, who enjoy the luxury of bleeding edge software, away from 4.6. Rex Dieter has created unofficial builds of KDE 4.6 for Fedora 14 for the daredevil types.

  • Fedora Goes to the Dogs – Hot Dogs That Is

    There has been some contention over the upcoming artwork for Fedora 15 this cycle, but no on saw this coming. Most either predicted that the upstream GNOME 3 background would be the basis for the whole of Fedora 15′s artwork, or GNOME 3 would be a bit out of place with the rest of the overall theme. Perhaps as a reaction to this controversy, Lumens said, “Recent releases have focused on artwork that is too abstract, too focused on looking shiny. While the result look professional, it lacks a certain sense of the absurd. I propose creating a complete set of Hot Dog themed artwork that is used by default.”

  • Trying to love KDE 4.6

  • Bretzn results released into the wild

    Apart from being a tasty Bavarian bread-snack, Bretzn is a code-name for a collection of technology aimed at solving a problem which has existed in software development for a very long time: “How do you get your applications to your users?”

  • Bring Your KDE Application to the Masses with Bretzn

Distributions

• ArchBang Linux 2011.01 brings new look

  The ArchBang project has released the 2011.01 edition of its ArchBang Linux distribution, code named “Symbiosis”. Like Arch Linux, upon which it is based, ArchBang is a simple and lightweight Linux distribution for i686 and x86-64 platforms aimed at Linux users who want to create “their own ideal environment” and install only what they need. However, ArchBang uses the minimalistic Openbox window manager with support for its pseudo-tiling functions.

• Reviews

  • Pardus 2011

    I was very happy to see the inclusion of LibreOffice in this release.

• New Releases

  • Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Linux Distribution Releases to Watch in 2011

    Owing to its open licensing and decentralized style of development, there’s never a shortage of new Linux-based operating systems releases poised for release. Looking ahead at the rest of 2011, eWEEK Labs has compiled a list of Linux distribution releases worth watching for in the months ahead.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Strengthens its Focus in India with Executive Appointments

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has strengthened its India operations with two key executive appointments, further reaffirming its commitment to deliver innovation to enable Indian businesses, telcos and government agencies to take advantage of the current shifts in the datacenter around virtualization and cloud computing. Red Hat appointed Anuj Kumar as the new Country General Manager and Jagjit Singh Arora as Director, Enterprise Sales.

  • Red Hat Brings New Executives On Board

    Red Hat has strengthened its India operations with the appointment of Anuj Kumar as the new Country General Manager and Jagjit Singh Arora as Director, Enterprise Sales.

• Debian Family

  • Countdown to Debian Squeeze

    There’s lots of great software in Squeeze. I just touch the tip of the iceberg with 1630 packages on this notebook out of 28K+ in the repository. Some of my favourites are LyX, LibreOffice, GIMP, InkScape, vlc, Dia and mplayer on the desktop and Apache, MySQL and PHP on the server. For making my own software I use vim, FreePascal and BASH usually. So much software. So little time.

  • Cross Platform Application Installer Meeting Could Mark A Milestone: Debian Project Leader

    While initiative likes Free Desktop have gone a long way to produce cross-distribution standards, per-distribution packaging policies still differ and in that differences we find the distinguishing traits of individual distributions. Losing those difference will not necessarily be good for Free Software, so I think that a single “App Store” might still be a red herring.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Natty Alpha 2 Coming Feb 3

      Ubuntu 11.04 aka Natty Narwhal is going to be a rocking and ‘rock-solid’ release as we can see from the work going on behind the ‘open’ doors. Apart from few bugging things like making Mono-based Banshee as the default music player, Natty is going to be a ‘revolutionary’ (if I can borrow the over-used adjective from Apple PR team) release.

    • Main frozen for Natty Alpha-2

    • Technology hero

      Since 2004, there have been 13 releases of Ubuntu, maintaining for the most part Shuttleworth’s target of a new version every six months. In that time, Ubuntu has become easier to use and more visually appealing, two attributes that were generally absent in early Linux distributions.

      To me, Shuttleworth is a technology hero because he has used his considerable talent to help develop, maintain and popularize a Linux-based operating system that is second to none in terms of stability, security and ease of use, and made it available to everyone free of charge. I began using Ubuntu in 2006 and have never felt the need to go back to Windows, and today, the only thing I still use my Macbook for extensively is Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, which still blows away anything available on Linux today.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • MadBox 10.10 Review – An Ubuntu Based Openbox Distro

        MadBox is a relatively new Ubuntu-based Openbox distribution. It tries to cater to CrunchBang (“#!”) Linux users who want an Ubuntu-based Openbox distribution (as #! switched to a Debian base almost a year ago), as well as to users who want a fast and lightweight OS or one that will work on a slower computer without sacrificing polish.

Devices/Embedded

• Get Pinch And Zoom Feature On Your NOOKcolor

  Linux powered eBook reader NOOkcolor gets pinch and zoom functionality in the browser through a firmware upgrade.

• Phones

  • Sound of Footsteps

    Smartphones sold about as many units as the world shipped other personal computers in 2010Q4. One-third of those smartphones were shipped with Android/Linux.

  • Android

    • Release of Android 3 Tomorrow

      Android 3 is having a coming-out party tomorrow. Having achieved 22% share of tablet PCs with Android 2, a smart phone release, Android’s share should go critical with the availability of Android 3. Several manufacturers have delayed releasing new product until Android 3 was final and one has released new product with 2 with an upgrade to 3 promised.

    • Want to learn how to program on Android?

      Tomorrow, February 1st, the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, will be announcing six new training courses dedicated to the development of Linux-based mobile operating systems Android and MeeGo.

    • Want To Become Android Programmer?

    • Android enthusiasts hack Honeycomb to run on Nook Color

      The unofficial port of Honeycomb to the Nook is still at a relatively early stage of development, but it already has working support for hardware-accelerated rendering on the Nook hardware. This is a highly significant revelation because it demonstrates the potential suitability of Honeycomb for lower-end devices.

    • Keep Your Android Phones, Ubuntu Netbooks Safe With Prey

      Prey, the popular free and open source software which allows tracking lost mobile devices, has hit version 0.5.2. If you are concerned about losing your phone or netbook, you would want to get Prey protection for your mobile devices.

    • Linux Becomes The Leading Mobile Operating System: Courtesy Android

      Android was by far the largest smart phone platform in the US market in Q4 2010, with shipments of 12.1 million units – nearly three times those of RIM’s BlackBerry devices. Windows Phone 7 devices appeared too late in the quarter to take full advantage of holiday season purchasing. As a result, Microsoft lost share in the United States, from 8% in Q4 2009 to 5% in Q4 2010.

    • World’s First 3D Phone Will Run On…Linux, Android

      At this year’s Mobile World Congress, LG will unveil the Optimus 3D, the world’s first 3D smartphone offering consumers a full 3D experience right in the palm of their hands.

Attacks on FLOSS

We have seen it all:

* astroturfing all over the web,
* trolls specializing in FLOSS, trying to make Freedom seem a flaw,
* pronouncements from high and low that FLOSS is patent-encumbered or is a copy of non-free software, and
* serious attacks on the infrastructure of FLOSS, and
* European Commission decides to renew M$’s contract for 36K PCs…

Don’t fear the fork: How DVCS aids open source development

Every once in a while, some extremely popular open source project faces what is generally regarded as one of the most painful, frightening experiences for such a project and its user community: the fork. An argument can be made that divergent evolution for purposes of specialization — such as when Knoppix burst onto the scene, based on Debian but customized for use as a LiveCD — is not a “true” fork. A fork, one might argue, is only what happens when the codebase is copied and taken in a slightly different direction because it is intended to replace (or at least compete with) the original project due to disputes between people who have different visions for it, rather than being intended to complement it by filling an otherwise empty niche.

3DMagix and IllusionMage, scam or open source leeches?

The companies IllusionMage and 3Dmagix resell via their websites Blender under their own name. Both websites are probably managed by the same person or company.

Where 3 times 3 is 8.

OOo is truly the most powerful and user-friendly office application suite out of those three tested in this overview: OpenOffice.org, KOffice and GNOME Office. It has all-round functionality which can be used by everyone who is comfortable with Microsoft Office products. Migration from MS office to OOo is not an issue at all.

Events

• Upcoming Open Source Webinars: Eucalyptus-Membase, Infobright-Jaspersoft-Talend, Hippo

  Eucalyptus, the world’s leading private cloud provider and Membase, makers of the foremost simple, fast, and elastic NoSQL database present a simple solution to that very question.

• Upcoming Open Source Webinars: BlackDuck, Continuent, Nuxeo

Oracle

• What the LibreOffice fork means for Oracle’s shabby treatment of Sun’s free software projects

• Oracle promises to obey own OpenJDK rules

  Oracle is drafting rules it says even it can obey to run the open-source reference implementation of Java, OpenJDK.

CMS

• CMS and blog software without databases

  I was reading the Splitbrain.org blog, which I quite like by the way, and when I see a blog that I like, both content-wise and design/execution-wise, I try to figure out whether or not the software behind it is WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, etc.

  Well, it turns out that Splitbrain.org is done with DokuWiki, which is a wiki platform that doesn’t rely on a database, with all the data stored in regular files on the server.

  I like simplicity.

  DokuWiki isn’t exactly a blogging platform, but you can turn it into one with plugins.

Healthcare

• VA wants help modernizing health records system

  The Veterans Affairs Department is looking for expert help in developing an open source software model for modernization of its long-standing VistA (Veterans Health Information and Systems and Technology Architecture) health records system.

Business

• Can Open Source Make ERP Better?

  Derek Singleton at SoftwareAdvice.com has written an interesting article entitled Can Open Source ERP Succeed? He brought up some of the hurdles for the adoption of open source ERP software.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Intel warns of $1bn cost of chip fix

    The chipmaker Intel has halted shipments of hardware incorporating its new “Sandy Bridge” processors and says it will have to spend a total of $1bn (£600m) fixing a fault, delaying hundreds of new PC models for up to three months and potentially stifling growth in the personal computer market.

    Launched early in January, the Sandy Bridge chip combines standard processing and graphics units on a single die. But Intel said today it had found flaws in a support chip, called Cougar Point, which would have led to failures over time in connections to hard drives and DVDs.

New homes burn faster

It’s never been more dangerous to be a firefighter.

Our homes and the stuff inside them are nearly six times more flammable than they were 30 years ago.

What that means for firefighters is the amount of time they can safely be inside a house on fire has dropped from about 17 minutes to three minutes or less.

Salvation Army under fire over tycoon’s profits bonanza

The Salvation Army is facing calls to explain how it allowed a private businessman to build a multimillion-pound personal fortune with profits from its charitable clothes recycling scheme intended to be used for good causes.

Newspaper Reporter Talks About Criminal Complaint Filed By Sheriff

The Shelby County Sheriff has prepared a criminal complaint against a newspaper reporter for asking him questions.

Embattled Sheriff Dean Kimpel, who was already under fire for allegations of sexual assault, is now accusing a writer from the Sidney Daily News of telecommunications harassment.

Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User’s 4,000 Photos and Can’t Get Them Back

Major, major stumble from Flickr today—a Zurich-based photoblogger says Flickr deleted his account by mistake and lost his 4,000 photos.

Science

• How to read a paper

  This is a tricky problem to solve on a handheld device, or indeed anywhere. There is a press release on the Lancaster University website explaining that this device has been studied and found to work. I asked for details. The methods and results of this study are secret. No paper has been submitted for publication.

• Training teachers to take on the creationism/evolution battle

  In a recent issue of Science, Berkman and Plutzer focus much of their article on that 60 percent of cautious teachers who, for one reason or the other, fail to fully support evolution. The authors propose that it is possible to persuade those timid teachers to become advocates of evolution, as the teachers do not exhibit strong conservative markers like believing that the universe is only 10,000 years old. Berkman and Plutzer suggest that the main cause of the problem is that these teachers lack confidence in their grasp of evolutionary biology.

Health/Nutrition

• Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPers

  Despite persistent rumors, Rand Paul was not named in honor of influential conservative thinker, Ayn Rand. His name is Randall.

  It’s good he was not named for Ayn Rand because her real name was Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum which she changed honoring her Rand typewriter.

  Miss Rand, famously a believer in rugged individualism and personal responsibility, was a strong defender of self-interest. She was a staunch opponent of government programs from the New Deal and Social Security to the Great Society and Medicare.

• Federal judge says healthcare law is unconstitutional

  A federal judge in Florida dealt President Obama’s healthcare overhaul a sweeping blow Monday, ruling the law unconstitutional because of its requirement that Americans have health insurance starting in 2014.

• Minnesota issues list of toxic chemicals in children’s products

  The Minnesota Department of Health identified the presence of lead, cadmium, Bisphenol A and six other toxic chemicals in children’s products, such as jewelry and textiles. Advocacy group Healthy Legacy urged government agencies to require companies to disclose if such chemicals are present in their products.

Security

• Amazon.com Security Flaw Accepts Passwords That Are Close, But Not Exact

  For example, if your password is “Password,” Amazon.com will also let you log in with “PASSWORD,” “password,” “passwordpassword,” and “password12345.”

  Wired has been able to confirm the flaw, which was first reported on Reddit. It appears to affect only older Amazon.com accounts, which have not had their passwords changed in the past several years.

  Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Police use CS spray on tax protesters

  Tax avoidance protesters needed hospital treatment today after police used CS spray to break up a demonstration on Oxford Street in central London.

  Hundreds of people staged peaceful sit-ins at high street stores around the country as part of the latest UK Uncut day of action, designed to highlight companies it says are avoiding millions of pounds in tax.

• Guardian Davos journalist’s sinister encounter with the Swiss riot police

  My day began listening to George Osborne debate the fragility of the global economy. It ended sitting on the floor of a freezing underground car park, hands bound behind my back, in the custody of Swiss riot police.

  A peculiar ordeal in ostensibly the world’s most peaceful nation began when, leaving Davos after four days covering the World Economic Forumsummit, my taxi to the Swiss resort’s railway station got clogged in traffic caused by an anti-capitalist demonstration. I hopped out and walked past a line of police to reach a platform where an uneasy mixture of demonstrators, skiers in full gear and WEF delegates were milling around. There were a few yells and chants – and the tinkling of glass being broken somewhere nearby.

• The imperial war presidency

  Progressive groups have made so much noise cheering for the elimination of this or that weapon, that the overall increase in the military budget each year has been missed, just as it will be missed by any casual viewer of this week’s speech. But a group of hundreds of prominent activists, authors, and academics has recently released a statement outlining Obama’s militarist record and committing to oppose his candidacy for the Democratic nomination next year unless he changes course.

  Nearly two thirds of US citizens believe that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced. Since he became president, Obama has had three opportunities to work with Congress to reduce military spending, but instead, has championed increases in that spending each time, despite the fact that this spending represents a clear threat to the economic future of our country.

• Jordan protests: King Abdullah names Marouf Bakhit PM

  King Abdullah of Jordan has dismissed his cabinet and appointed a new prime minister amid large street protests.

  New PM Marouf Bakhit has been charged with carrying out “true political reforms”, but the Islamist opposition rejected the appointment.

Cablegate

• Protect Your Friends — Protect Julian Assange

  Prof. James Duane, of the Regent University School of Law, explains how stating even a harmless fact to the police can enable them to convict you of a crime that you did not commit. (The second part too.) I didn’t refer to these on video.google.com because you need to run non-free/libre Javascript code to view the videos there, even if you use the free Gnash player instead of Adobe’s nonfree player which implements digital handcuffs.)

  During the present witch hunt, it’s worse. Innocent-seeming information they get from you could give them the opportunity to convict you or your friends, and Assange, even if you had nothing to do with the leak and neither did they.

  Suppose that federal agents believe that Bradley Manning knew J. R. Gensym. Suppose they find out that you met J. R. Gensym. They could try to pressure you into testifying that you helped Julian Assange communicate with J. R. Gensym and Bradley Manning (even if you didn’t). With that testimony, they can condemn Assange to a life of solitary confinement. Whatever they threaten you with, it won’t be as bad as the shame of knowing you were their tool to destroy Assange.

  If they don’t see a good way to use you against Assange, they might try to use your friends or acquaintances instead.

• WikiLeaks And The Double Edge Of “Internet Freedom”

  Those new facts and accountability, as driven home by WikiLeaks’ information bombshells from the Afghan War Diaries to Cablegate over the past year, cut both ways. And no one has felt those cuts more strongly than the State Department itself.

  That paradox of U.S. Internet freedom policy has long been on the radar of Evgeny Morozov, the visiting scholar in the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University. His new book The Net Delusion, published this month, takes on the State Department’s simplistic rhetoric on the Internet and authoritarianism, arguing that dismantling dictatorships around the world is a far more complex affair than piping in uncensored bandwidth.

• Wikileaks: Libyan ‘frogman’ sent to train in Rome couldn’t swim

  One of the dispatches from Feb 17 2009 and titled “The frogman who couldn’t swim: a co-operation cautionary tale”, recounts how the Italian Government funded a Libyan to attend “a training program in Rome on underwater explosives detection and demolition”.

  It continues: “After several days of classroom instruction, the candidates – it was a regional course and included students from several countries – were taken to the pool for their first practical session in the water.

  “The instructor directed the students to don their masks and regulators and enter the deep end of the pool; however, after several minutes, the Libyan student had still not entered the water.

• WikiLeaks: 9/11 gang with pilot uniforms fled to London

  Pilots’ uniforms, laptops, a smashed mobile phone and lists of air crew names were hardly typical holiday luggage, but nor did the hotel workers feel it was enough to merit calling the police.

  But the day after the guests checked out of the hotel, their odd behaviour suddenly seemed to make sense, to the horror of those who had witnessed it.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Papier-mache milk bottle arrives in UK supermarkets

  But now, inspired by a papier-mache balloon that his son made at school, Martin Myerscough believes he has come up with the answer. The GreenBottle, which looks remarkably like the conventional two-litre plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, comprises a sturdy paper shell with a plastic liner to keep the milk fresh.

Finance

• Fresh Rules on Banks Could lead to More Crisis: Goldman President

  The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos saw Goldman Sachs President, Gary Cohn issuing a warning against the initiative to implement fresh regulations on banks. Such a step, said he, could lead to the next crisis by pushing risky activities towards hedge funds and other lightly supervised entities.

  The Goldman Sachs executive also criticized the regulators for their focus on traditional institutions.

• Treasuries climb as official says Obama to seek spending freeze

  Demand for Treasuries as refuge eased as Al Arabiya television reported that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will announce plans to step down at the end of his term, renewing demand for higher-yielding assets such as stocks. The Institute for Supply Management’s factory data came three days before the Labor Department is forecast to report that the U.S. added jobs for a for a second consecutive month in January.

• The Paradox of Corporate Taxes

  But Carnival’s biggest government benefit of all may be the price it pays for many of those services. Over the last five years, the company has paid total corporate taxes — federal, state, local and foreign — equal to only 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits. Thanks to an obscure loophole in the tax code, Carnival can legally avoid most taxes.

• Citigroup Takes Over EMI

  Citigroup has taken over EMI, the British music label of the Beatles and Radiohead, under a restructuring of its debt, EMI announced on Tuesday.

• Who Are the Biggest Corporate Welfare Queens?

  Tonight’s Open Thread: Who are the biggest recipients of Corporate Welfare?

• Factory activity grows, hiring outlook brightens

• Egypt’s Economy Is Near Paralysis

  International companies closed plants and sent workers home or out of the country; food staples went undelivered to stores; and banks remained closed during a week when many Egyptians, who are routinely paid monthly, would receive their paychecks.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Media Fights Propaganda Masked as News

  A coalition of journalist and civic organizations is waging a campaign to rid the Taiwan media of government propaganda masquerading as news, and signs are that the campaign has taken “the first steps” towards victory.

  The coalition said it will continue protesting government’s practice of “news buying” and the sharp rise in “embedded advertising” by agencies of the People’s Republic of China.

  In mid-January, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan amended the Budget Law to prohibit the use of government funds to “buy” news. The government also issued an executive order requiring that official policy explanations in media “be identified as advertisements and news as news.”

Censorship

• China micro-blogging sites censor ‘Egypt’

• Parents Sue Expert Witness Who Made Fake Child-Porn of Their Kids

  An Ohio lawyer who serves as an expert witness in child pornography cases might be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil damages for Photoshopping courtroom exhibits of children having sex.

  Attorney Dean Boland purchased innocent pictures of four juvenile girls from a Canadian stock-image website, and then digitally modified them to make it appear as if the children were engaged in sexual conduct. Boland was an expert witness for the defense in half-a-dozen child porn cases, and he made the mock-ups to punctuate his argument that child pornography laws are unconstitutionally overbroad because they could be applied to faked photos.

• The Terminator vs. the Constitution

  Does a zombie count as “an image of a human being”? What about an android or a shape-shifting alien? If his arm regenerates when you hack it off, does that still amount to “maiming”? Are you “killing” him if he comes back to life after you incinerate him with a flamethrower?

Privacy

• Major privacy study signals a worrying increase in surveillance across Europe

  The UK improves its privacy performance since 2007 but France is catching up as Europe’s “worst surveillance society”

  A landmark EU-wide study of national privacy safeguards published today shows a decline in privacy protection across Europe and a steep increase in state surveillance over the lives of individuals.

• Senator Calls for Privacy Protections for Device Location

  The increasing ability of mobile service providers to track customer locations raises “serious issues” for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Wyden added. “This is a policy area where the law has not kept up with the times,” he said.

Civil Rights

• Buzek on the developments in Egypt

  The entire world is watching what is happening in Egypt tonight and will hold the authorities accountable for any inappropriate use of force or any innocent death.

  In a democratic country, where the rule of law prevails, citizens are allowed to move freely, to talk to each other and to communicate with the rest of the world.

• Egypt Lies I Read on Twitter: Debunking Rumors and Misinformation on the #Jan25 Uprising

  I’ll be honest, my Arabic isn’t perfect. But from what friends tell me, it makes no direct reference to looting. It does however, encourage security forces to go about in civilian attire and harass protesters.

• Internet Freedom: CDT Statement on Egypt’s Internet Shutdown

  The Center for Democracy & Technology took position in response to the news that Egypt had cut Internet access and mobile services, below their press release.

• Photographers: You’re Now Officially Free To Shoot In Public Places And Outside Federal Buildings

• Is the Fourth Amendment Relevant in a Technological Age?

  This work will be a chapter in a forthcoming book in The Future of the Constitution series, edited by Jeffrey Rosen and Benjamin Wittes and published by the Brookings Institute. Over the past 200 years, the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees have been construed largely in the context of what might be called “physical searches” – entry into a house or car; a stop and frisk of a person on the street; or rifling through a person’s private papers. But today, with the introduction of devices that can see through walls and clothes, monitor public thoroughfares twenty-four hours a day, and access millions of records in seconds, police are relying much more heavily on what might be called “virtual searches,” investigative techniques that do not require physical access to premises, people, papers or effects and that can often be carried out covertly from far away. The Supreme Court’s current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence – specifically, its “knowing exposure,” “general public use,” “contraband-specific,” “assumption of risk” and “special needs” doctrines – has both failed to anticipate this development and continued to ignore it. This article describes this jurisprudence and how it can foster law enforcement abuse, mission creep, mistaken seizures and physical searches, and an oppressive atmosphere even for the innocent. It then outlines a more technologically-sensitive Fourth Amendment framework.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Ottawa enters dispute over higher Internet feesOttawa enters dispute over higher Internet fees

  The Harper government is stepping into a contentious debate over just how much Canadians should pay for Internet service, as Industry Minister Tony Clement says he will review a federal regulator’s decision that will raise prices for consumers and businesses.

  As people access increasing numbers of documents, video, software and other large files through the Internet, major communications providers such as Shaw Communications Inc. and BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada unit have begun to regulate how much their customers can download – charging them extra when they exceed monthly limits. Many consumers have responded by turning to smaller Internet providers that lease space on networks such as Bell’s and offer popular “unlimited” plans without such caps.

DRM

• Hotz Will Ask Judge to Reconsider TRO Order – Updated

  Wired’s David Kravetz reports that George Hotz’s lawyers plan to ask US District Court Judge Susan Illston to reconsider her recent temporary restraining order and the requirement to surrender all his computers and peripherals and retrieve from the Internet any information he put there about hacking Sony’s Playstation 3 to allow running unsigned code and to restore OtherOS functionality.

• Sony Trying To Play Whac-A-Mole Over PS3 Hack

• Official PS3 firmware v3.56 has a rootkit

• One Of The Earliest Computer Viruses Was Really DRM Gone Wrong

  Author William Gibson has a nice little opinion piece claiming that we’ve now hit the 25th anniversary of “digital vandalism” in the form of computer viruses. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about that, as just a few years back there were all those news reports about how Rich Skrenta (who later went on to found the Open Directory Project, Topix and Blekko) created the first widespread computer virus in Elk Cloner back in 1982. That said, Elk Cloner was more of a prank. The virus Gibson is talking about was more malicious, in that it locked up files. So, if Gibson’s point is that this was the first malicious virus, perhaps that’s more accurate (though, I would imagine there are some other claims to the throne).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Snail-like politics and the digital age

    If ever there was an unwanted stepchild of government policy, surely copyright reform would be it. But not for the expected reason — that, on paper anyway, it’s a subject that bores elected officials to tears.

    Quite the opposite, actually. Over the past two years, copyright reform has become a lightning rod that few politicians seem to want to touch.

    It’s not surprising therefore that the DVD-watching, internet-downloading world — from consumer advocates to artists and entertainment industry lobbyists alike — are frustrated with how slowly the legislative committee hearings on Canada’s proposed new copyright law, Bill C-32, have been going.

  • Hulu Owners Looking To Make Hulu Even More Useless

    It’s been almost two years since we suggested it might be impossible for Hulu to survive, given that it was in a bit of a “rock and a hard place” situation. The only way for it to really succeed long-term online was to disrupt the existing TV business. Because, if it didn’t do that, others could and would kill Hulu. However, Hulu is owned by the existing TV business, and that means the company can’t do what it needs to do.

  • Francis Ford Coppola, copyfighter

    In this interview with The 99%, Francis Ford Coppola says some extremely thought-provoking and sensible things about creativity, mastery, copyright, the business of the arts, collaboration, and life.

  • MPAA, BREIN take down more torrent sites; Internet barely notices

    At least 51 torrent sites have been taken down this month thanks to joint efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its dutch counterpart BREIN—12 in the US and 39 in the Netherlands. The two groups say they were able to work with the sites’ hosting providers to take them offline, though the names of the affected sites have not been released.

  • iTunes films break copyright laws

    Russian films are being made available through Apple’s iTunes service without the consent of the copyright holders, the BBC has learned.

    The popular films, dating from the Soviet era, are being made available to download as smartphone apps.

  • Porn industry goes after filesharers

    DOWNLOADING pornography over Bittorrent looks to be the easiest way of finding yourself fingered by lawyers for filesharing.

    A chap who wants to remain anonymous has collated publically available data on US cases against alleged filesharers during the period from 8 January 2010 through 21 January 2011. Some of the plaintiffs include such silver screen luminaries as Dogfart Productions, New Sensations and Hard Drive Productions.

  • Just Under 100,000 Sued In Mass Copyright Infringement Suits Since Start Of 2010

    We’ve been covering the mass copyright infringement lawsuits being filed in the US over the past year or so. Most of them aren’t designed with the idea of actually taking anyone to court, but mainly to threaten people into “settling” (i.e., paying up) to avoid the lawsuit. A “concerned citizen” hoping to remain anonymous has taken the time to put together an amazingly detailed spreadsheet cataloging all of these lawsuits. He claims that he will continue to keep it updated. One stunning point from the data? Between January 1, 2010 and now, 99,924 “John Does” have been sued in this manner. If I don’t hurry up and publish this post, I imagine we’ll have already passed 100,000.

  • ACTA

    • Triangulation 2: Michael Geist

      Columnist and law professor at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Michael Geist, who exposed the details of ACTA to the public, is this week’s guest.

    • ACTA: Negotiations May Be Done, But Debate Continues

      Next week, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage will begin hearings on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The hearing are long overdue as many other countries have held hearings or other consultations on the agreement. The ACTA hearings come just as the issue heats up around the world:

      * An ACTA analysis conducted by European law professors that concludes the agreement is not fully consistent with EU law.
      [...]