• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

2011 to be year of Linux in the clouds

It’s time for our annual outlook on Linux for the new year, and after spending the last few years highlighting non-desktop Linux in 2008, the range of Linux in 2009 and hidden Linux in 2010, they will all be coming together in 2011, which will be the year of Linux in cloud computing. This is a trend that has been building over the past few years, but I believe it will hit a tipping point in 2011.

Switching to Linux (For the Right Reasons)

Instead I think there needs to be more focus on “control” over how things are running.

Kernel Space

• Linux.com Gift Card Winners Announced

• What’s new in Linux 2.6.37

  After about eleven weeks of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 2.6.37. The new version of the main development line has many improvements. Advances in the Ext4 file system mean it should be able to compete with XFS on larger systems and new discard functions can inform slow SSDs of vacant areas, without negatively affecting performance.

Applications

• To Know Software Is to Love It?

  Familiarity is not something users are born with, Hoogland notes; rather, “it is something they learned over an (often extended) period of time.”

  Hoogland’s question, then, was, “do you think a time will ever come when users will realize that just because you know how to use a piece of software doesn’t automatically make it the best software for completing the task at hand?”

  That’s a key question, in Linux Girl’s view, cutting as it does straight to the heart of one of FOSS’s biggest challenges — how to get past the inevitable learning curve.

• Most Popular Free and Open Source Software Lists of 2010

• Ring in 2011 with Old School Apps

  After placing my order without looking at the menu, I realized that what’s true at Steak ‘n Shake is true for a lot of applications — there’s no good reason to change just for the sake of change. Especially when you know your way around the classics. And unlike the double burger and fries, Mutt and Vim aren’t doing any damage to my arteries.

• Advance Music Player and Organizer – Clementine

  Clementine is a multiplatform music player. It is inspired by Amarok, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching, organizing and playing your music.

• Bombono DVD reached 1.0

  Share This

  Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is made easy to use and has nice and clean GUI.

• DVDShrink alternative for Linux Users: K9Copy

  K9Copy is a small utility which allows copying DVD’s on Linux.
  The DVD video stream is compressed by the program Vamps.

• Proprietary

  • FBReader Has Encyclopedic Knowledge of E-Book Formats

    FBReader is an e-book reading program that makes it quick and simple to access thousands of free literature titles available on the Internet. It runs on the Linux, Microsoft Windows and Free BSD platforms. In addition, it runs on various Linux-based mobile devices such as Nokia, Motorola, Sharp and Siemens smartphones.

  • Opera 11 Heats Up Web Browser Race: Review

    Opera 11 with new extensions, tab stacking and visual navigation aids put the web browser on a competitive footing with Microsoft’s IE

  • Fluendo Releases Moovida Pro, Adds Linux Support

    Fluendo’s big announcement at CES 2011 this week centered around updates to its Moovida media player, including long-anticipated support for a stable Linux version. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters for Linux partners in particular.

    As many readers may know, Moovida has a long history. Its origins date back several years, when Fluendo – a company based in Barcelona which makes most of its money selling legal multimedia codec solutions for Linux — launched Moovida’s predecessor, Elisa, as a media player for Linux. The project was later ported to other operating systems and renamed Moovida. It enjoyed popularity for a while among many users, particularly on Linux platforms, where few good alternatives existed at that time.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Wings3D and the GIMP: UV Mapping and Texturing the Airplane

  • WingPanel: A Super Sexy Space-Saving Top Panel

  • Trouble Adding Public Key to Heroku in Ubuntu

  • Linux / UNIX Desktop Fun: Terminal ASCII Aquarium

  • Open Terminals at any directory location, on the fly using nautilus-open-terminal extension

  • 9 UNIX / Linux tput Examples: Control Your Terminal Color and Cursor

  • How To ‘Really’ Hide Folders In Ubuntu Using The Gobolinux Kernel And Gobohide (.deb Download)

  • The Minimalist Object System and Your Lousy Axioms

  • Stop or suspend a running process in Linux

  • Advanced NMAP – Part 3

• Games

  • 7 Classic game on Linux

    Games released prior to 2000 on Amiga or perhaps on other operating systems and now ported to Linux.

  • Low on FPS? Install Optimized Build of Urban Terror Launcher

    Urban Terror (UrT) is one of the most popular games for Linux platform with hundreds of players playing it everyday. Many players use their own configuration files and scripts to configure game as per their needs and boost FPS (frames per second).

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4.6 RC 2 Released

  • KDE Plasma, Applications and Development Platform 4.6 RC2 Available

    KDE, including all its libraries and its applications, is available for free under Open Source licenses. KDE can be obtained in source and various binary formats from http://download.kde.org and can also be obtained on CD-ROM or with any of the major GNU/Linux and UNIX systems shipping today.

  • 4.6 RC2 Available, Last Chance to Test

    KDE’s release team has rolled another set of 4.6 tarballs for us all to test and report problems: 4.6 RC2 This is the last test release leading up to 4.6.0, which is planned for 26th January.

  • fire up the synchrotron!

    I carved out a few days to work on this idea and finished up the last bits today. I called it synchrotron. It goes with the whole particle physics naming theme in Plasma and sounded like something out of an awesomely bad sci-fi movie. Win-win, really.

  • light up the synchrotron

    A few people asked if Synchrotron could replace kde-look.org or kde-files.org and the simple answer is: “no”. The reason is that Synchrotron is not meant to allow for uploads and sharing of content by users. It is quite specifically an upstream tool. It’s designed to make our lives as upstreams as easy as possible, in fact, but this makes it rather useless as a public file and data sharing hub. In theory it’s possible for Synchrotron to be extended to be such a thing, but I have zero personal interest in that.

Distributions

• 6 Lightweight Linux Distributions To Give Your Old PC A New Lease of Life

  If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got at least one old desktop PC or antiquated laptop lying dormant in the attic, cupboard or still under your desk. I’d even hazard a guess you’ve got a CRT monitor and a serial mouse to boot.

  Now, you’re never going to use that old machine for anything particularly demanding, but if a simple web browser and word processor is the order of the day then there’s plenty of lightweight solutions that can come to your rescue.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Bullish Moving Average Crossover Alert (RHT)

    Today, shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) have crossed bullishly above their 10-day moving average of $46.32 on volume of 518 thousand shares.

    This may provide swing traders with an opportunity for a long position as such a crossover often suggests higher prices in the near term. Watch for a close above this moving average level for confirmation.

    SmarTrend issued an Uptrend Alert for Red Hat on October 29, 2010 at $42.22. In approximately 2 months, Red Hat has returned 10.7% as of today’s recent price of $46.74.

    In the past 52 weeks, shares of Red Hat have traded between a low of $26.51 and a high of $49.00 and are now at $46.74, which is 76% above that low price.

• Debian Family

  • The Bizarre Cathedral – 88

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Details Emerge on Ubuntu-Powered Tablet

      We’ve already heard news of Augen’s dual-booting Gentouch Espresso Doppio–offering users the choice of Android 2.2 or Ubuntu–but an alternative focusing exclusively on Ubuntu could be attractive.

      It didn’t take long, after all, before recipients of Google’s Chrome operating system-based CR-48 notebook computer got Ubuntu up and running on the device.

    • First Look: Ubuntu’s Unity Makes Bold Statement, But Needs Work

      There is plenty of time left for the next version of Ubuntu, version 11.04 now in Alpha, also known as “Natty Narwhal,” to leap some of its current technical obstacles.

      But an initial look at an Alpha version of the forthcoming Linux distro shows a dispiriting number of technical issues with its vaunted new “Unity” interface that need to be smoothed over before it will be the reliable, smooth technology we’ve come to expect from the Ubuntu community.

    • Evolution of Ubuntu Over the Years – A Brief History

      All in all, 2010 proved to be *the* most important year as far as Ubuntu and Canonical are concerned. Two major Ubuntu releases and a bunch of new strategies and change of platforms that are going to makeover Ubuntu over the years. Here is a nice and simple listing of changes that completely reinvented Ubuntu in 2010.

    • Top 5 List Of Reasons Why Ubuntu Is A Great Alternative To Windows

      By joining the millions of users today who are using Ubuntu, you are doing good deeds for your computer; you are preventing it from being damaged by spyware and other viruses.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola Unleashes an Android Onslaught

      Motorola delivered on its rumored Android tablet Wednesday. It presented the Xoom, a tablet running Android 3.0, aka “Honeycomb.” The tablet will have 4G capabilities using Verizon’s network. Another star of Motorola’s show was the Atrix, a heavily powered smartphone that can connect with a docking station to create a laptop- or desktop-like form factor.

    • Comcast To Bring Live TV To Android Tablets

      Today’s announcement is yet another in a series of scheduled app releases Comcast’s development team will deliver on as many different devices as possible including other smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.

    • 8Pen Reinventing Android Keyboard

    • How Amazon Will Help Android Beat The iPhone

      Android app store is growing at a precedented rate. Apps for Android are all set to explode the market, reason being an 800-pound gorilla entering the Android app segment with a lucrative paid model. This gorilla specializes in selling out stuff over the Internet. If I may say, this gorilla has become the defacto online market. It’s called Amazon.com.

    • Amazon, Don’t Infect Android With Your DRM Cancer

      DRM is the cancer of the digital world. It attaches its value degrading quality to everything it touches. Ironically its a failed model. Amazon, the on-line middle-man is now exposing Android market to its DRM cancerous cells. The company is all set to launch its own Android app store and it will allow developers to attach DRM to their apps.

Apache Subversion to WANdisco: +1 on the code contributions, -1 on the attitude.

In conclusion, we reiterate that we welcome WANdisco’s involvement in Subversion, and failure on WANdisco’s part to address the above concerns will have no effect on the acceptance of technical work funded by WANdisco. We simply felt it necessary to clarify WANdisco’s role in Apache Subversion, for the benefit of our users and potential contributors.

Open source needs firm foundations

So as we reach the start of 2011, you might want to ask: will those developers really be there in a year?

That’s a question of more than theoretical concern, as the events of the past year have shown. Oracle Corp.’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. and the impending sale of Novell Inc. have thrown many of the most important open-source projects into a state of uncertainty, or worse. Widely adopted tools, including the MySQL database, Java software platform and OpenOffice productivity suite have all been in play, as has SUSE Linux, the second most popular enterprise distribution of Linux.

To varying degrees, each of these projects has suffered. Initially, the fear and uncertainty caused by the protracted sales of Sun and Novell allowed competitors to cherry-pick their open-source project development teams. After the Sun sale went through, Oracle’s actions led to further departures. Worse, Oracle abandoned support entirely for some projects, and declined to clearly signal its intentions regarding others. The consequences have been significant, including new forks of MySQL and OpenOffice. In the Java community, turmoil is ongoing, as evidenced most recently by the resignations of several representatives from the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process.

FOSS Is Fun – The Unsung Heroes

The very point is that the community as such does not distinguish between a user and a contributor. Every user is, by definition, also a contributor—and vice versa. How does one contribute? By writing code, doing documentation, translating, testing applications, reporting or fixing bugs, using applications, advocating FOSS adoption, writing tutorials, textbooks and how-tos, conducting training workshops, giving talks at user group meetings, attending user group meetings, monitoring mailing lists and chat channels, and asking and answering questions… or by just talking about FOSS—the list is endless.

What the WWF has to learn about FOSS

It seems it will be some time before the WWF will release a Linux version. But wait a minute: Linux is already supported! Yes, a set of simple bash scripts was able to fill the gap, simply because the FOSS ecosystem is very rich already. And it is performing very well.

In a test performed by Hermann Radeloff this file was printed using the WWF driver, which resulted in this file. The same file generated by the Linux toolkit resulted in this file. In short, a 104 KB file was bloated to a massive 686 KB file, while the Linux toolkit reduced it to a meager 95 KB. That is: with WWF banner.

My Top 5 Favorite Open Source Happenings in 2010

It’s a new year, and as we look to 2011 as the year that open source kicks butt, we should take a few moments to reflect back on 2010. After all, that’s what you’re supposed to do in January, right? Look back, then look ahead, then resolve to be better.

So during my retrospective look, I realized that sitting among the rubble of the open source landscape in 2010, there were a few gems that stood out. These are in no particular order, and I think they all represent what the future of open source is truly about: community, giving back, driving imagination, challenging assumptions, and not accepting the status quo or the mandates of others. In short, it’s about freedom, innovation, and collaboration.

Key open source security benefits

Discussions of the relative security benefits of an open source development model — like comparative discussions in any realm — all too often revolve around only one factor at a time. Such discussions tend to get so caught up in their own intricacies that by their ends nobody is looking at the big picture any longer, and any value such discussions might have had has already evaporated.

LibreOffice – The Likely Future of OpenOffice

With many of the major Linux vendors behind them, it looks like LibreOffice will be the office suite of the future, at least on many non-Microsoft platforms. Oracle, while perhaps never a darling of the open source community, seems to be making more enemies than friends as of late. If they cannot build more good will toward one of their most prominent offerings, the days of OpenOffice as the free suite of choice may soon be at an end.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Is Firefox Set To Turn Against Flash?

    Rob Sayre, one of the leading developers of the Firefox platform has posted a very candid opinion about Apple’s influence on the web and it is not the kind of opinion you would expect. In fact, Sayre openly criticizes Flash as being incompatible with the mission of Firefox.

CUBRID/Databases

• CUBRID 3.1 Stable is now available!

  On December 31 CUBRID 3.1 arrived! For the last two months, since we released CUBRID 3.1 Beta on November 12th, 2010, several new features have been added to the final stable release, many have been enhanced and fixed.

• Overview of New High-Availability Features in CUBRID 3.2

• Decomposing Twitter (Database Perspective)

Oracle

• Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel

  Oracle caused quite a stir in 2010 when it announced its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux. With the New Year upon us, we checked in with the company’s Senior Director of Open Source Product Marketing Monica Kumar to get a refresher on the ABCs of this important introduction as well as the company’s latest take on Linux.

Education

• Spend more, not less on school ICT

  A few years ago I fell for the official Government line when Becta announced (pre-bank crisis) that school ICT spending was unsustainably high. Of course this kind of talk fired up the apologists for free, open source software and as the recession bit the idea of saving money grew.

  Obvious cuts could be made in software costs, energy consumption and technical support but few took up the challenge. Then came the big cuts and the new Coalition Gov axed nearly all BIG IT projects setting the mood music for the possibility of further money saving through technological change maybe like low energy thin-client workstations running off free, open source software (stop me if you have heard this one)?

Business

• Big business better use open source

• Digium® Sees Continued Growth of its Switchvox® Unified Communications Solution in 2010

• Ingres Set to Close 2010 With Strong Financial Results and Unique Market Position

• Updated open source business strategy framework

  We have had a couple of queries this week regarding the open source business strategy framework we have used for the last two years or so in our analysis of open source-related business strategies.

  The framework has evolved over time based on changing strategies, our research, and feedback from clients (and non-clients), but the last publicly-available version of the framework (to which the query related) was only a work in progress.

  Since there is interest in making wider use of this framework – we are pleased to have seen several OSS-related vendors using it to explain their strategy – the easiest thing to do is to publish it here.

Programming

• CollabNet Extends Agile ALM Cloud Leadership With Lab Management Upgrade

  CollabNet®, the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (Agile ALM) in the Cloud, today announced the immediate availability of CollabNet Lab Management 2.3, the latest version of the company’s Cloud-based server provisioning and profile management offering. Lab Management enables distributed development, build, and test teams to significantly reduce infrastructure costs while promoting development productivity and rapid innovation.

• WANdisco Shakes Up Software Change Management With Overhaul of Subversion

  WANdisco, the makers of Enterprise Subversion, has today announced a major new initiative to overhaul the Subversion open source Software Change Management (SCM) project. With more active developers from the Subversion project on staff than any other company, WANdisco will use its vantage point to lead efforts to improve Subversion with major new features and enhancements that the user community have been asking for.

Standards/Consortia

• Payment standard for Internet TV to be implemented next year

  China UnionPay and various Chinese authorities plan to draft an online payment standard for Internet TV which is expected to be launched in the first half of 2011, according to a report of the National Business Daily Tuesday, citing Liu Fengjun, assistant president of China UnionPay.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Haiti to the US Embassy: Here’s the Will of the People

  By the time United States policymakers in Haiti are finished playing with Haiti, they will hang Preval out to dry, ignore the process that was not inclusive, not fair, not free even before one ballot was cast; ignore that most of the candidates asked for the (s)election to be annulled by midday of the farce, their voters then stopped voting – and go on with their farce. But with Manigat and Martelly. I think that’s most likely what they will do.

• Crying out loud

  It might have all ended there, but Shaul and a few others decided to continue: Today, six years later, Breaking the Silence, which consists of six people on salary and another 15 volunteers, constitutes part of the public discourse in Israel. Since the exhibition, the organization has published five pamphlets of testimonies from soldiers who served in the territories, all of them describing infringements of the rights of the local population (including testimonies from Hebron, soldiers talking about the rules of engagement in the territories, testimonies of female soldiers and more ).

• Egypt’s discredited elections blighted by shadow of police violence

  The Mahmoudia canal wends its way through some of Alexandria’s poorest quarters before eventually reaching the middle-class suburb of Somoha, where elegant blocks of flats abut the water’s edge and a rickety old footbridge connects one bank to the other.

  It was here that 19-year-old Ahmed Shaaban’s body was found floating among the reeds, battered and bruised. The police say he drowned himself deliberately, though it is difficult to see how – the channel is so shallow it barely reaches one’s knees. A few days later, Shaaban’s uncle stood in front of a local journalist’s video camera and addressed Egypt’s leader, Hosni Mubarak, directly. “You are at war with your own people,” he said softly. “Your gang is running loose killing citizens, and all you care about is the presidential chair.”

• Nader: TSA is delivering naked insecurity [old headlines obscured by Wikileaks news]

• Anatomy of a journalistic smear job

  John Tyner, a software engineer who posted an Internet blog item saying he had been ejected after being threatened with a fine and lawsuit for refusing a groin check after turning down a full-body scan at San Diego International Airport

• TSA turns off naked body scanners to avoid opt-out day protests

• Israeli forces raid Madaa during children’s classes, director Jawad Siyam arrested

  Israeli police raided Madaa Community Center this afternoon and arrested Jawad Siyam, director of the Center. A force of uniformed and plainclothes police stormed the Center at 2pm today, seizing Siyam amidst several children’s classes run by the Center each afternoon and instigating fear and panic. Officers shouted aggressively at Siyam to comply in front of the young students, including Siyam’s 7 year old child.

• More on How the IDF Spin Machine Works in the Abu Rahmeh Killing

  A female protester dies at a Bil’in protest from tear gas inhalation. The IDF is not only faced with a public relations nightmare, but also with the real possibility that there will be pressure to change its mode of operations, and to use a less effective (from its standpoint) tear gas. There may even be pressure to conduct a military investigation, which the IDF certainly doesn’t want. So the only thing that it can do is to attack the credibility of the woman’s family and witnesses.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks cables: Pakistan opposition ‘tipped off’ Mumbai terror group

  Pakistan’s president alleged that the brother of Pakistan’s opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, “tipped off” the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) about impending UN sanctions following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, allowing the outfit to empty its bank accounts before they could be raided.

  Six weeks after LeT gunmen killed more than 170 people in Mumbai, President Asif Ali Zardari told the US of his “frustration” that Sharif’s government in Punjab province helped the group evade new UN sanctions.

• Cables Show U.S. Government Works for Boeing

  In 2006, a senior Commerce Department official hand-delivered a personal letter from George W. Bush to the office of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urging the king to complete a deal with Boeing for 43 airliners, including some for the king’s family fleet.

• Diplomats Help Push Sales of Jetliners on the Global Market

  To a greater degree than previously known, diplomats are a big part of the sales force, according to hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks, which describe politicking and cajoling at the highest levels.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Leaked EPA Memos May Explain Massive Bee Die-Off

  CMD’s guest blogger, Jill Richardson, has done some ground-breaking reporting on the potential cause of the massive bee die-off. According to Jill’s investigation, leaked U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memos reveal that the agency gave conditional approval to pesticides now in wide use, without requiring adequate proof that they are safe to use around honeybees. In the wake of the new information, beekeepers are starting to blame the country’s massive die-off of honeybees on the pesticides.

Finance

• Corporate Junk Economics Return to Capitol Hill

  Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, has reportedly asked more than 150 trade associations, corporations and think tanks to provide a wish list of public health, environmental and other public protections that they would like to see eliminated. The purported rationale for such an effort is to spur growth, but in fact this is the cutting edge of a movement to trade away public health, clean air, and a stable economy to gin up corporate profits already at record highs.

  [...]

  * Corporations and their apologists routinely overstate the costs of public protections and ignore their benefits. To take one example, the Heritage Foundation attributes more than a third of all costs of regulation issued in 2010 to fuel economy standards. Yet Heritage fails to mention that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found those rules would confer benefits three times as great as the costs.

• Congress unlikely to extend hand to ailing states

  Cut spending, raise taxes and fees, and accept billions of dollars from Congress. That’s been the formula for states trying to survive the worst economy since the 1930s.

• Gene Sperling Thinks Asset Bubbles Are Cool

  I will depart from my policy of not commenting on articles where I am mentioned to clarify the issues (to me) surrounding Gene Sperling’s selection as a President Obama’s national economic advisor. The primary issue is not that Sperling got $900,000 from Goldman Sachs for part-time work, although that does look bad. The primary issue is that Sperling thought, and may still think, that the policies that laid the basis for the economic collapse were just fine.

• A banker for White House chief of staff

  Granted that Bill Daley, whom Obama will announce Thursday afternoon as his new chief of staff, is not your typical banker. He’s a former commerce secretary, who headed up President Bill Clinton’s effort to enact the historic NAFTA treaty, served as chairman of Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, and happens to be a member of a storied political dynasty in Obama’s hometown of Chicago.

• Gene Sperling 101

  Starting in 2001, Mr. Sperling took on a variety of jobs, mostly part time, including a position at the Brookings Institution, as a columnist for Bloomberg News and as an adviser to Goldman Sachs. For much of this period, he worked for the Council on Foreign Relations, where girls’ education around the world was one of his main interests.

• Ireland bailout protest draws 100,000 to Dublin streets

  One of the largest demonstrations in the Irish Republic’s history brought more than 100,000 people on to Dublin’s streets in protest over the international bailout and four years of austerity ahead.

• Oil prices may threaten global economic recovery, says energy agency

  Oil prices are entering the “danger zone” and threaten to derail the fragile global economic recovery, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency.

  The Paris-based government policy adviser calculates that the oil import costs for the 34 countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) soared by $200bn over the past year to reach $790bn by the end of 2010.

• Full-Catastrophe Banking in 2011

  With a $4.7 trillion dollar bailout under their belts with no harm done to their billion-dollar bonuses, don’t expect Wall Street bankers to be chastened by the 2008 financial crisis. Below we list eight things to watch out for in 2011 that threaten to rock the financial system and undermine any recovery.
  1. The Demise of Bank of America

  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the troubled Bank of America (BofA). BofA is already under the gun, defending itself from multiple lawsuits demanding that the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages it peddled to investors. The firm is also at the heart of robo-signing scandal, having wrongfully kicked many American families to the curb. If Assange has emails showing that Countrywide or BofA knew they were recklessly abandoning underwriting standards and/or peddling toxic dreck to investors, the damage to the firm could be irreparable.

• Governance, Triangulation and Compromise

  Those of us who want President Obama to improve his relationship with the business community and bring more people with actual business experience into his administration are hoping that such steps will make the President more pragmatic and better able to address the very complex problems the nation faces. We are hoping that such steps will make him a more effective leader, better able to get things done.

  And, as Matt Bai points out at the end of his column: “Such compromises [like the tax deal], ideal or not, are the building blocks of responsible governance. If that makes Mr. Obama some kind of triangulator, then it could also make him a successful president.”

• Principles and Compromises

• The Evolution of Money

  Money, as one of the podcasts observes, has been one of the great constants in human affairs, right up there with sex and war. Money was not necessary when people lived in small communities where they knew and trusted their neighbors and could therefore exchange labor, food or goods in kind. But the need for inventing money arose once civilization started to expand and people were dealing with strangers they may never see again and could not trust, as was the case in Lydia and neighboring communities a few thousand years ago.

• BankofAmericaSucks.com

  According to the publication Domain Name Wire, Bank of America (BofA) is buying up hundreds of domain names such as BankofAmericaSucks.com and BrianMoynihanBlows.com. The megabank is prepping for the possible release of damaging information from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a big bank executive.

• Bank of America Wants You to Know Its Executives Don’t Suck

  Company defensively registers hundreds of domain names for its senior executives and board members.

  As Bank of American awaits a possible release of information from WikiLeaks, it wants to ensure that you don’t think its executives suck. Or blow for that matter.

  The company has been aggressively registering domain names including its Board of Directors’ and senior executives’ names followed by “sucks” and “blows”.

• AltriaKills.com

  Tobacco industry documents, for example, show that in 2001, after Philip Morris changed its corporate name to Altria Group to escape the bad image of being a tobacco company, the company bought up a huge number of similarly derogatory domain names, including AltriaSucks, Altria-Sucks, AltriaKills, and AltriaStinks, each one with the suffixes .com, .net and .org.

• Lorillard Buys “MentholKillsMinorities.com”

  Lorillard, Inc., manufacturer of the country’s best-selling menthol cigarette, Newport, is working behind the scenes to keep the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from banning menthol as a cigarette flavorant. Adopting a PR tactic other embattled companies like Bank of America and Altria have used, Lorillard is scooping up a host of menthol-bashing domain names to keep them out of the hands of critics, including MentholKills.com, KillerMenthol.com, MentholKillsMinorities.com and MentholAddictsYouth.com.

• Lorillard Fights to Snuff Menthol Ban

  Among the company’s tactics: buying up a host of menthol-bashing Internet domain names, including MentholKillsMinorities.com, MentholAddictsYouth.com and FDAMustBanMenthol.com.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The battle for hearts and minds

  Lobbying firms are expanding their roles beyond the corridors of the Capitol by establishing public relations and communications divisions to work their issues directly to the public through television ads, rallies, radio, print and the Internet. (Times Union archive)

• Lobbying and PR Firms Converge, Use Election Tactics Full Time

  Professional lobbyists are expanding their activities beyond the traditional cajoling of legislators in the halls of the Capitol and are now using election-season tactics — like polling, “grassroots” rallies, radio, print and television ads, and social media like Facebook and Twitter — full-time to push legislation. As a result, the PR and lobbying fields have exploded with firms that do all of the above and more.

• Locals hire PR help over chicken plant flak

  “In this business, what we do is build narratives and tell stories,” he said.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Senator Wyden: Thank You For Fighting Internet Censorship

  More than 300,000 Americans have signed our petition opposing the “Internet Blacklist Bill” — the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). (Click here to sign the original petition and read more about the bill.) The bill would give the government the power to force Internet service providers to block your access to certain sites. It’s shockingly similar to what goes on in places like China and Iran — and it’s the kind of thing that’s just not supposed to happen here.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Ease of Use: Designing The Ultimate Grandmother-Ready Computer

When it comes to ease of use, there is no difference between a computer with Windows and a computer with Linux, assuming both systems are installed properly. That there is a meaningful difference is a myth perpetuated by Windows fanboys or individuals who have outdated experience with Linux. Also, the comparison that is often being made is unfair: One’s experience with a computer purchased as Best Buy or supplied at work, with OEM Windows already installed (see below) is being compared with a self-install of Linux onto an about to be discarded computer.

Server

• Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in December 2010

  Rank	Company site	OS	Outage hh:mm:ss	Failed Req%	DNS	Connect	First byte	Total
  1	Swishmail	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.012	0.223	0.099	0.198	0.495
  2	ServInt	Linux	0:00:00	0.015	0.487	0.102	0.207	0.514
  3	www.logicworks.net	Linux	0:00:00	0.015	0.247	0.106	0.400	0.609
  4	Hosting 4 Less	Linux	0:00:00	0.015	0.188	0.113	0.228	0.448
  5	Multacom	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.023	0.205	0.113	0.230	0.584
  6	iWeb Technologies	Linux	0:00:00	0.035	0.302	0.095	0.226	0.226
  7	www.singlehop.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.035	0.420	0.105	0.582	0.966
  8	www.dinahosting.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.035	0.184	0.106	0.213	0.213
  9	Rackspace	F5 BIG-IP	0:00:00	0.043	0.193	0.092	0.186	0.186
  10	Iomart plc.	Linux	0:00:00	0.046	0.186	0.102	0.212	0.492

• IBM’s Jeopardy strategy: Divide and conquer

  When it comes tackling a challenge as tough as answering a human question, the best computational approach may be to break the job down into multiple parts and run them all in parallel, IBM is betting.

  IBM will be taking this strategy next month when its custom-built computer, nicknamed Watson, will compete in an episode of the Jeopardy game show against two previous champions.

• Server virtualization has stalled, despite the hype

  Four years ago, data center server utilization was just 18 percent. To put it another way, on average 82 percent of the server capacity in major data centers was underutilized. Given all of the emphasis on server virtualization in the last few years, you’d expect utilization to have increased sharply. But it hasn’t. According to Gartner research, overall utilization is still at 18 percent — and utilization of x86 servers is one-third lower at 12 percent.

Audiocasts/Shows

• LNLP #1120 | HTC HD2 Runs MeeGo Linux, Ubuntu Tablet, PS3 Linux

Google

• Cr-48 Chrome OS netbook hacked to run Android 2.3 Gingerbread

  Hexxeh, who recently released a Cr-48 tool to boot any OS, including Windows or Mac OS X, has now successfully got Android 2.3 Gingerbread to run on his Cr-48 netbook.

  All we have right now is a single photo (above), but you can click it for a super-high-res (cellphone camera?) photo if you like. According to unnamed sources close to Hexxeh, it is indeed Gingerbread running on Cr-48, but beyond that we know nothing.

Kernel Space

• False Boundaries and Arbitrary Code Execution

  In Linux 2.6.24, file capabilities were introduced, which allowed for the distribution or the administrator to set the capabilities needed for an application via modification of the application’s extended attributes on disk. The immediate application of file capabilities is to remove the need for suid-root binaries on the system. It can also be used however to reduce the capabilities used by a normal root-running daemon, by clearing the effective bit in the file capabilities.

• Announcing the beta release of PowerTOP 2.0

  After two alpha releases, with really valuable feedback from testers, I’m now releasing the beta release of PowerTOP 2.0 to go with the release of kernel 2.6.37, which has some features that the new PowerTOP will use.

• Iveland, OpenBenchmarking.org Launching From SCALE

  It’s official: Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 “Iveland” and OpenBenchmarking.org will be launching next month at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, California.

  In the talk entitled Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices by Matthew Tippett and myself, Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org will be officially unveiled and launched.

• Graphics Stack

  • A Big Comparison Of The AMD Catalyst, Mesa & Gallium3D Drivers

    There has been much progress over the past year to the open-source ATI drivers and the Linux graphics stack in general, but it still has a ways to improve. Our similar set of results for the NVIDIA side with the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver will be out in a few days. Also worth noting is that at this time only the R300 class Gallium3D driver is enabled by default in Mesa (and most Linux distributions) while the R600 classic Mesa driver is still used rather than its newer Gallium3D driver. Based upon the faster performance, minimal regressions (just Nexuiz with Evergreen ASICs and a few other areas), the superior architecture (support for state trackers, etc), better OpenGL 2.1 support, and other benefits, hopefully in Mesa 7.11 we will see R600g by default and it being utilized by most Linux distributions upon their next major update.

  • VIA KMS + TTM/GEM Driver Moves Along Without VIA

    At the end of December we reported on the 3Dfx KMS Linux developer working on VIA code to provide kernel mode-setting support for VIA’s IGPs in the Linux kernel and thus TTM/GEM memory management support too. This is after VIA had promised to deliver this support (along with Gallium3D support) in 2010, but failed miserably. This code though is now moving along but without any support for VIA.

  • VIA Releases The Dual-Core Nano X2 CPU

    For the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, VIA Technologies has just released their Nano X2 Dual-Core CPU.

  • There May Finally Be Better ATI Linux Video Playback

    It would be really great if they would implement NVIDIA’s VDPAU within their driver, but that’s perhaps too optimistic.

Applications

• 5 of the Best Free Linux System Cleaning Tools

  So, let’s explore the 5 cleaning tools at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

• Prey- An awesome application to track your stolen Laptop and android phone | Linux

  Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop and android phone if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free. so basically you install a tiny agent in your PC or phone, which silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic.

• Nautilus Columns Update Brings PDF Support

  A new version of Nautilus Columns which adds PDF info (thanks to draxus) is available in the WebUpd8 PPA. This is very useful for those who have a lot of PDF files for which the title is not descriptive.

  To display the PDF info, in Nautilus go to Edit > Preferences > List Columns and check “Artist” (Artist was used instead of Author to keep the Nautilus columns number low) and “Title”, then navigate to a folder where you have some PDF files and change the Nautilus view to “List View”. Please note that your PDF files need to have the author and title info available or else you’ll get “n/a” in those fields.

• How To ‘Really’ Hide Folders In Ubuntu Using The Gobolinux Kernel And Gobohide (.deb Download)

  You won’t get the Gobolinux filesystem hierarchy by using these packages, you’ll just be able to “really” hide folders.

• MusicMe: a transparent music player for Linux

  To be fair in MusicMe’s favour it has been around a little while just not much talked about.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • KVM & Virtio (disk/nic) on Scientific Linux 6 (alpha 3)

  • Tips & Tricks on MySQL for Python

  • Install Oracle 11gR2 on SL6 KVM at KVM-QEMU Instance on SL 6 (alpha 3)

  • Murach’s PHP and MySQL Book Review

  • XBMC with VAAPI on Poulsbo (Intel GMA500) or other VAAPI Systems

  • The Perfect Database Server : Firebird 2.5 and FreeBSD 8.1

  • Building a test and development infrastructure using OpenStack

  • Gimp Tutorial: Add HDR-like effect to a normal potrait picture.

• Wine

  • Best Windows Games and Apps That Run Under Linux

    The following article was created to inform our readers about popular native Windows games and applications which install and run under Linux-based operating systems, with the help of the Wine software.

  • q4wine 0.120-r1 has been released

  • CodeWeavers CrossOver Multi-User Pricing Discounts save up to 43% off full retail

• Games

  • Steel Storm Episode I- An awesome old school top down arcade shooter game for Linux

    Steel Storm is an old school top down arcade shooter with score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action and have limited amounts of time to play computer games.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Atolm – Impressive New Theme by the Artists Behind Orta GTK Theme

    Hope you all remember Orta GTK theme, one of the best themes I have ever used in Ubuntu. Atolm is another impressive theme by the same artists who gave us brilliant Orta theme. Atolm is especially suited for those who like dark themes more.

Distributions

• A Tale of the Synaptics “ClickPad”

  PCLinuxOS – works, including left/right buttons and tapping, but to actuate the buttons you have to touch only the very corners at the bottom of the ClickPad. In particular, if you try to click at the point where the “dot” for the buttons is marked on the ClickPad, it will not work. I believe that it works here because PCLinuxOS is still using a somewhat older version of X and synaptics, such as the version which worked on Ubuntu 10.04.

• DouDouLinux: A Linux Distribution Especially Designed For Kids

  DouDouLinux is, maybe, the greatest aid for parents who don’t have enough time to spend with their children while they have fun on the computer but who also don’t want to come back and find out that their operating system kind of crashed or that some important document was accidentally erased. That’s because you don’t have to install DouDouLinux to be able to use it, all you have to do is boot it from an USB stick (and when booting you can choose if you want the changes to be saved or not) or a CD/DVD and the kids don’t have to log in to be able to play!

• New Releases

  • Puppy Wary 5.0 released- One of the best LinuxOS for old computer

• Red Hat Family

  • Managing Yum Plugins

    If you’re using Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, or a number of other RPM-based systems, you are probably very familiar with using Yum to install packages and update your system. It’s very useful out of the box, so to speak, but it can be extended to add even more functionality.

  • Tuning Fedora for SSDs

    A while back, I found myself reading a generic PC magazine in a waiting room, and they had an article on Tuning SSDs for Windows 7. It made me wonder what the Fedora equivalent would be. So, I asked my friend and Red Hat coworker Jeff Moyer about it. Jeff knows more about SSDs in Linux than anyone else I know, he does most (if not all) of the testing of SSDs for Red Hat’s storage team.

• Debian Family

  • DACA Could Mean Fewer Bugs in Debian

    Every piece of software written has bugs. From the insignificant to the showstopper, bugs are there despite the herculean efforts of developers. But thanks to a new Debian project, many previously undetected bugs may finally get squashed.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Cult of Ubuntu aka CoU Launched

      CoU is the best place to find beta testers for your applications and concepts. One of the best way is to connect with your users directly. You can publish your own write-ups and blogs on CoU without any editorial intervention. Either send your write-ups to the editor or send an account request and we will create an account for you to publish your content at your will. If you think there is better way of doing this, let us know and we will do what ever is possible.

    • What Is Cult of Ubuntu aka COU?

    • This Just In: “Ubuntu Myopia Continues…”

      Ever on the watch for mainstream media articles that don’t quite *get* Ubuntu, yet another questionable article catches my eye.

      Short summary: “Ubuntu is ruining the kernel. It’s buggy and a copycat of OS X. No wonder it has so many bugs: It’s based on Debian UNSTABLE. Even Dell is dropping it. And to top it off, Ubuntu is switching to Unity and not making it easy for users to opt out. Their existing user base is no longer the focus.”

    • First peek at ratings n’ reviews in Ubuntu Software Centre

      The Ubuntu Software Centre in 11.04 Natty Narwhal will comes with support for application ratings and reviews.

    • Raising Caine

      Caine is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04 for forensic scientists and security-conscious administrators. Poised to do battle against IT ne’er-do-wells, Caine has a comprehensive selection of software, a user-friendly GUI, and responsive support.

    • Ubuntu Software Center Getting Search Suggestion

      Aside from Unity, the Software Center is one of the main areas of development in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narhwal. It is getting a lot of new features like support for user ratings, reviews etc. Another feature – search suggestion – has quietly landed in trunks.

    • Ubuntu isn’t replacing OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice … yet

      It looks as if some folks got a little bit carried away with the news yesterday that the next version of Ubuntu, 11.04, will feature LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org.

      Because, actually, that’s not exactly what’s happening. Yet.

      On Monday, Linux Magazine’s Amber Graner got it right, when she reported that Ubuntu Desktop Engineer Matthias Klose announced that “LibreOffice would be included in the Alpha 2 Natty Narwhal release for evaluation and possible inclusion into the final Ubuntu 11.04 release.”

      Somehow, by the next day, the news was mistakenly distorted to headlines in more than a few outlets that stated “LibreOffice Replaces OpenOffice In Natty, PPA For Lucid And Maverick,” or similar. It hit the Twittersphere, and I even re-tweeted the news myself. And off it went, with a lot of folks, including me, thinking that LibreOffice had indeed made the Ubuntu big-time.

    • LibreOffice: Ready for Liftoff

      LibreOffice, the Oracle-free fork of the OpenOffice office suite, may, or may not, end up being the default office suite in Ubuntu, but its first release is almost here.

      Before getting into that though, there have been rumors running around that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had already committed to using LibreOffice in its next release, Ubuntu 11.04. True, Ubuntu has always been interested in replacing OpenOffice with LibreOffice Indeed, Mark Shuttleworth told me back when LibreOffice was starting to break away from OpenOffice that, “The Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. That’s not the same thing though as saying it’s going to ship in Ubuntu 11.04.

    • Natty nm-applet improvements

      In light of the discussion I’m referring to above, as well as a number of bugs that have been reported against network-manager-applet, I’ve been working on fixing these issues, including making the animations work again, re-adding icons for wireless signal strength and fixing the icons when connected to VPNs.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • MoonOS is a complete, Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the LXDE and Enlightenment 17 desktop managers and imaginative, original artwork.

        moonOS is a complete, Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the LXDE and Enlightenment 17 desktop managers and imaginative, original artwork.

        A project created and designed by Cambodian artist Chanrithy Thim, moonOS is intended as an operating system for any desktop, laptop or virtual machine.

      • Bodhi Linux hits Alpha 4, gets ace new look

        I’ll cut to the meat of this review right away: Bodhi Alpha 4 has had a dramatic makeover. The new default E17 theme – called A-Nogal-Bodhi – gives the whole desktop a lighter, less oppressive feel than the black and green ’80′s terminal’ theme previously used.

        The icon set has been changed to the popular Faenza set.

      • moonOS 4 “NEAKE” Released With File Hierarchy System, AppShell

        moonOS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. moonOS 4 codenamed “NEAKE” has been recently released, replacing E17 with GNOME for the main edition and is currently available for 32bit only. While it provides a new stylish interface by default, the most interesting new feature in moonOS 4 is the use of a new File Hierarchy System which aims to make the filesystem more user-friendly. Read on!

      • Lubuntu Screencast: Share/Backup packagelist

        In this Screencast I show you how to share and backup your packagelist of currently installed applications. This is especially usefull if you want to share you list of applications between different computers or you want to have a backup in case you reinstall Lubuntu

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • mPlayer — the cross-platform, open source media player — ported to webOS

    Sure, the webOS App Catalog lags behind the markets of other mobile OSes — but the homebrew community continues porting apps to HP/Palm’s platform. One of the more recent additions is mPlayer, the cross-platform open source media app.

  • Checking out JQuery Mobile, Part 1

  • Android

    • Verizon preps Motorola Droid Xoom tablet, HTC Thunderbolt phone

      Motorola’s first Android tablet will be called the Droid Xoom, and will ship in February with an external 4G LTE modem, say industry reports. Meanwhile, photos have leaked of a purported HTC Thunderbolt 4G phone due to be announced by Verizon next week at CES, and more evidence piles up for Honeycomb being Android 2.4 instead of 3.0.

    • What Are Your Six Go-To Android Apps?

      If you’re the proud new owner of an Android-based smartphone or tablet you might be digging through the Market wondering what you should be installing. So I thought we’d take this chance to tap the collective wisdom of the Linux Mag audience and see what everyone is using on their phones and tablets.

    • Android tablets, smartphones to rule at CES

      Android is set to “explode” at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, with smartphones and tablet computers including a newly revealed HTC Shift 4G phone for Sprint and a four-inch smartphone/tablet hybrid from ViewSonic. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless is cutting the price of the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet by $100 to $500, says an industry report.

    • Best Android apps

      Smartphones are now an essential business tool and there are hundreds of applications to choose from

      Smartphones are a key part of any businessperson’s gadget lineup and Android-based phones are among the most popular. We look at some of the best Android applications on offer.

    • Motorola finally breaks up. What now?

      Motorola is no longer one company. A long-in-the-works breakup of the smartphone and telecom equipment maker finally took effect Tuesday morning — probably to the delight of frustrated institutional shareholders like corporate agitator Carl Icahn.

    • Amazon’s Disruptive Android App Store Now Open To Developers — Full Details

      First, some background for those who don’t follow Android too closely. All Google-endorsed Android devices ship with the Android Market, along with a suite of other Google-made applications like Gmail. Android Market is a lot like Apple’s App Store with a few key differences: it doesn’t have an approval system, so developers can quickly submit and iterate on their applications. It also tends to have a lot of junky applications that Apple would reject — things that crash on launch on certain devices, or apps with that occasionally have features that don’t work as expected. While Google’s terms do require descriptions to be accurate, the general attitude is to let the market decide what works, and it surfaces the top rated applications (most of the time) while letting the junk sink.

    • 40 percent of new users are choosing Android

      More than 40% of U.S. customers who purchased smartphones over the last six months have chosen Android-based phones.

    • Galaxy Tab review: Android hitchhiking its way to tablet success

      The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one of the first high-end Android tablets from a mainstream hardware vendor. Available with 3G connectivity from a wide range of carriers, the Tab is arguably the vanguard of the legion of Android tablets that are expected to arrive in the coming year.

• Tablets

  • Android At CES Means Bad News For Apple iPad

    All this is about to change. Android is coming to strike back. CES will witness a whole new species of Android Tablets competing with the iPad. Just the way Android has beaten the iPhone in the mobiles space, Android is all set to beat iPad in the tablet segment.

  • Asus slips out keyboard equipped Android tablet

    Asus has outed its Android tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), including one that cannily solves the problem of typing quickly on a touchscreen: it has a drop-down physical Qwerty deck.

  • See If You Can Spot The Problem With Microsoft’s Tablet Strategy

    Earlier today, computer maker Asus kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show a day early by announcing four upcoming tablet computers. Three of them run Google’s Android operating system. One runs Windows 7. See if you can guess which one is the outlier:

    * Eee Pad MeMO: starts at $499

    * Eee Pad Slider: starts at $499

    * Eee Pad Transformer: starts at $399

    * Eee Slate: starts at $999

Open Source community building: a guide to getting it right

A diverse developer community is critically important to the long term viability of free and open source projects. And yet companies often have difficulty growing communities around their projects, or have trouble influencing the direction of the maintainers of community projects like the Linux kernel or GNOME. Sun Microsystems and AOL are prominent examples of companies which went full speed into community development, but were challenged (to say the least) in cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship with community developers. There are many more examples – but often we never even hear about companies who tentatively engage in community development, and retreat with their tail between their legs, writing off substantial investments in community development. Xara, for example, released part of their flagship software Xara Xtreme for Linux as open source in 2005, before silently dropping all investment in the community project in late 2006.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/01/04

    Summary

    * These posts written every 2 weeks explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers. There’s a lengthy overview of the Add-on Review Process that should be read as a general guide about the review process.
    * Most nominations are being reviewed within 10 days.
    * Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.

  • Game On Submissions: 1 Week Away

    Friendly reminder: the finish line for the Game On competition is just one week away on the 11th of January, 2011! If you want to build a game for the whole wide Web to use, this is your chance to make that game. We’re beyond excited to see what the possibilities will be, so we’re building a gallery to show your games to the world! This gallery will be opening soon after the contest ends.

  • How to develop a HTML5 Image Uploader

SaaS

• Behind the Cloud Redux

  Behind the cloud it is still just computers – not the Great and All Powerful Oz – (and data, data connections and us IT professionals), but there is certainly a lot more that needs to be considered before connecting to it.

• Cisco, Cloud Computing and Open Source Software

  The move to cloud-based infrastructure is one that is set to dominate networking discussions in 2011. One of the leaders in the move to cloud is networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), which provides servers, routing and switching infrastructure that enables cloud computing deployments.

  At this stage of cloud development and deployment, standards are still emerging, which is where open source software may be able to help.

CMS

• Friendly and powerful: Drupal 7

  We are proud to present to you our best work yet – Drupal 7, the friendly and powerful content management platform for building nearly any kind of website: from blogs and micro-sites to collaborative social communities.

• Drupal7 Released with Revamped UI, Semantic Tech, and More

  Drupal, the popular open source content management platform that powers websites like WhiteHouse.gov and NPR Public Interactive, got a fresh new look this week. It took three years, and the effort of thousands of contributors from more than 200 countries, but Drupal 7 is now available for free download at the project’s website. More than just a facelift, this release sports several important new features.

Healthcare

• Reporters Not Welcomed At Corporate-Sponsored Rick Scott Inaugural

  Reporters did manage to catch up with the woman who briefly heckled Scott during the inaugural speech. Her basic complaint appears to be the fact that Scott would prefer to blow off his singular achievement as a human being — the record-setting fraud penalty that Columbia/HCA had to pay after systematically bilking Medicare under Scott’s leadership.

Business

• Getting Down to the Business of Open Source

  All-in-all, “The Business of Open Source” offers some useful stuff to get the mental wheels turning after the holidays at the start of what will doubtless be another exciting and successful year for open source in business.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSFE Newsletter – January 2011

  Get active: Help with Euro 2012 championship

  Help us gathering information about government’s Free Software usage. This information helps us to evaluate the current situation and of course it will decide who will be the European Free Software champion in 2012. Add the information on our website before March 25 and it will influence the next matches, add information continuously and it will help Free Software activists all over the world.

Project Releases

• BleachBit 0.8.5

• Introducing Sqlite-Commander – Curses Client for your SQLite Database

  While I was working in a project involving sqlite, I wanted to check the contents of a sqlite database. The command line sqlite client involves too much of typing for viewing records. The sqlite viewers that I found were not very keyboard friendly.

Openness/Sharing

• Open-source animation movie comes to India

  The techies in Kerala have one more feather to add in their cap. India’s first open source movie concept is getting ready under Chamba Swathanthra Movie Project, started in Kerala.

  Open source films (also known as open content films and free content films) are films which are produced and distributed using free and open source software methodologies. Under this concept, the movie and its sources are made publicly available via an online download or by other means that are either free or with a cost that covers only reasonable reproduction expenses. About 20 people have already registered to film an open source animation movie in the website www.chambaproject.in and are working to make possible the open source movement in the Indian movie sector.

• What you see is FOR THE WIN.

  I posted to foundation-l concerning the other way to get more people editing Wikipedia: the perennial wish for good WYSIWYG in MediaWiki.

  [...]

  Eight times the number of smart and knowledgeable people who just happen to be bad with computers suddenly being able to even fix typos on material they care about. Would that be good or bad for the encyclopedia?

• THE OPEN SOURCE VENTURE PROJECT (Picture This)

  Here’s how it works:

  1. An Internet site that allows people to search on an address to view a picture of that location.
  2. An address specific self-service advertising system (akin to adwords and earlier work on context sensitive advertising).
  3. A cell phone application that makes it easy for anyone to take a digital picture and upload it to the site.

  The twist in this approach comes in how it is built at the software level. It provides a way for tens of thousands to contribute and earn nearly all of the revenue it generates.

• Open Hardware

  • Nice drawings of the Arduino UNO and Mega 2560

Programming

• PHP floating point bug crashes servers

  The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits “2.2250738585072011e-308″ from the string format into the floating point format.

Why ProPublica is publishing web ads — and what that means for the nonprofit outfit’s funding future

Check out ProPublica’s website today, and you might notice — along with blog posts, donation buttons, links to special projects, and the kind of deep-dive investigative journalism that the nonprofit outfit is celebrated for — a new feature: advertisements. Starting today, the outfit is serving ads on its site to complement the funding it takes in from foundation support and reader contributions, its two primary revenue streams.

“This has been something we’ve been expecting to do for some time,” Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager, told me in a phone call. “It was a question of when.”

Real, Live Practice Babies

Once upon a time, infants were quietly removed from orphanages and delivered to the home economics programs at elite U.S. colleges, where young women were eager to learn the science of mothering. These infants became “practice babies,” living in “practice apartments,” where a gaggle of young “practice mothers” took turns caring for them. After a year or two of such rearing, the babies would be returned to orphanages, where they apparently were in great demand; adoptive parents were eager to take home an infant that had been cared for with the latest “scientific” childcare methods.

To tweet or not to tweet: How companies are reining in social media

Social media like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn enable ordinary people to do international live broadcasting. It’s little wonder companies worry about the potential damage to their brand or reputation from wayward tweeting employees, and I am told many a celebrity’s agent has considered adding a “no drinking and tweeting” clause to his contract. Here’s a look at how some companies are writing (and rewriting) their social media policies to deal with the risks they face.

Science

• Philosophy Lives

  Philosophy, Étienne Gilson observed, “always buries its undertakers.” “Philosophy,” according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in their new book The Grand Design, “is dead.” It has “not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, [and] scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” Not only, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, has philosophy passed away; so, too, has natural theology. At any rate, the traditional argument from the order apparent in the structure and operations of the universe to a transcendent cause of these, namely God, is wholly redundant—or so they claim: “[Just] as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit. Because there is a law of gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

• The Next $100 Billion Technology Business

  That headline is the cover language from the current issue of Forbes magazine – for a story I wrote about DNA sequencing and, particularly, about Jonathan Rothberg and his new Personal Genome Machine.

  What we are declaring in this story is that DNA sequencing, the technology by which individual letters of genetic code can be read out, could be the basis for a $100 billion market that encompasses not only medicine, where sequencing is already being evaluated to help cancer patients, but also other fields like materials science, biofuels that replace petroleum, and better-bred crops and farm animals. There are even synthetic biologists who are talking about using biology to make buildings and furniture based on the idea that this will be better for the environment than current plastic and concrete.

• The Central Dogma of molecular biology

  This video captures the beauty of “The Central Dogma” of molecular biology, which is that “DNA makes RNA makes protein”. (For you twitter fiends, this translates as “DNA>RNA>protein”.)

  This nicely done animation describes how proteins act similarly to “molecular machines” to copy, or transcribe, specific genes in the DNA of every cell into small, portable RNA messages, how those messenger RNAs are modified and exported from the cell nucleus and finally, how the RNA code is translated to build proteins — a process known as “gene expression.”

Health/Nutrition

• Why does health care in Cuba cost 96% less than in the US?

  Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — When Americans spend $100 on health care, is it possible that only $4 goes to keeping them well and $96 goes somewhere else? Single payer health care [government-funded universal health insurance] advocates compare US health care to that in Western Europe or Canada and come up with figures of 20–30% waste in the US.

  But there is one country with very low level of economic activity yet with a level of health care equal to the West: Cuba.

Europe

• Five years with EU under focus of ministers, diplomats

  Full European Union membership is still a strategic goal for Turkey, several ministers and top diplomats have maintained, despite admitting making significant errors along the way, including a decrease in public support for this bid.

  On the second day of a week-long annual gathering of ambassadors, the Foreign Ministry hosted on Tuesday a session titled “A balance sheet on the fifth year of our EU membership process: Negotiations and reform process.”

• China Promises Support for Euro Zone

  China’s leadership has launched a charm offensive aimed at Europe. The country’s vice premier, who is visiting Spain and Germany this week, has promised that Beijing will continue buying up government debt to support the troubled euro zone. He has also called for more bilateral trade.

• ‘Federalism now’, Northern League insists

  Northern League leader Umberto Bossi on Wednesday insisted that the government must pass its pet federalism project by the end of the month.

  Bossi, Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s key ally, said the week of January 17-23 would be crucial to get the bill out of a parliamentary commission and on the way to final approval.

• Expenses watchdog reminds MPs of level of public mistrust

  The watchdog introduced last year to govern MPs’ expenses today hit back against threats that it could be reformed or even scrapped with a poll reminding parliament of the depth of public mistrust they still face in the wake of last year’s expenses scandal.

  David Cameron issued a warning before Christmas that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority should reform and improve the way it works after complaints from every corner of the House of Commons of slow payments, troublesome IT systems and unfair rules. He set an April deadline for Ipsa to improve or face being forced to change, meaning it could even be scrapped.

Security

• 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents – Update

• UK credit cards panic

• Security advisories for Wednesday

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Court OKs searches of cell phones without warrant

  The California Supreme Court allowed police Monday to search arrestees’ cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they’re carrying when taken into custody.

• The conviction of Michael Thompson

  Does warning other drivers about speed cameras constitute obstructing a police officer?

• Rise of Tibetan soft power

  Many Tibetans these days are rightfully feeling dismayed, believing that their culture and identity is increasingly being eclipsed and their hopes for a resolution to the Tibetan question dashed by the rise of China.

  But hold on a minute. Though China is already on the path to being an undisputed economic and military power, Tibet has also become a superpower in its own right.

Cablegate

• US Gov’t Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked

  I didn’t realize that you needed to use such professional help to figure out if you had a disgruntled worker on your hands. Isn’t it the role of managers themselves to have a sense as to whether or not their employees are disgruntled? Though, I’m somewhat amused by the idea that the US government thinks that a psychiatrist or sociologist can accurately pick out who’s likely to leak documents.

  Not that it’s a bad thing to try to figure out if there are disgruntled workers or to make sure secure systems really are secure. I’m all for that. I just think it’s a bit naive to think any of this will actually prevent future leaks. You just need one person to get the info out, and there’s always someone and always a way to do so — as demonstrated by the fact that this document itself “leaked” so quickly. It seems a better situation would be to focus on making sure that any damage from such leaks is minimal.

• Bradley Manning’s Trial – Update

  The army court-martial defense specialist and Bradley Manning’s attorney David E. Coombs published his Motion to Dismiss Manning’s case for Lack of Speedy Trial in his blog Army Court Martial Defense dot Info.

• Shirky squares the circle

  There is even a delightful irony in his prescription. Among the groups Mr Shirky proposes that American embrace is WikiLeaks. His essay was evidently penned before the site was cursed by American officials for releasing hundreds of US diplomatic cables onto the net. America can benefit from promoting social media, he concludes, “even though that may mean accepting short-term disappointment”. If only he had known what was to come.

• U.S. tells agencies: Watch ‘insiders’ to prevent new WikiLeaks

  The Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive new steps to prevent more WikiLeaks embarrassments, including instituting “insider threat” programs to ferret out disgruntled employees who might be inclined to leak classified documents, NBC News has learned.

  As part of these programs, agency officials are being asked to figure out ways to “detect behavioral changes” among employees who might have access to classified documents.

• Israel said would keep Gaza near collapse: WikiLeaks

  Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday.

  Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables leaked to WikiLeaks, showed that Israel kept the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv briefed on its internationally criticized blockade of the Gaza Strip.

  [...]

  Palestinians say impoverished Gaza remains effectively a “prison” sealed off by Israel, and have called for an opening to allow normal trade and other links with the world.

• From Judith Miller to Julian Assange

  Today it is recognized at the Times and in the journalism world that Judy Miller was a bad actor who did a lot of damage and had to go. But it has never been recognized that secrecy was itself a bad actor in the events that led to the collapse, that it did a lot of damage, and parts of it might have to go. Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th. (I develop this point in a fuller way in my 14-min video, here.)

  In May of 2004, the New York Times, to its great credit, finally went back and looked at its coverage of the build-up to war in Iraq. (Shamefully, NBC and the other networks have never done that.) But the Times did not look at the problem of journalists giving powerful officials a free pass by stripping names from fear-mongering words and just reporting the words, or of newspapers sworn to inform the public keeping secrets from that same (misinformed) public, of reporters getting played and yet refusing to ID the people who played them because they needed to signal some future player that the confidential source game would go on.

  In its look back the Times declared itself insufficiently skeptical, especially about Iraqi defectors. True enough. But the look back was itself insufficiently skeptical. Radical doubt, which is basic to understanding what drives Julian Assange, was impermissible then. One of the consequences of that is the appeal of radical transparency today.

• Prentice was ready to curb oilsands: WikiLeaks

  Former environment minister Jim Prentice told U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson that he was prepared to step in and impose tougher regulations on the oilsands if the industry damaged Canada’s green reputation, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks.

• WikiLeaks: the latest developments

  Iran’s president ‘slapped’ by the head of the revolutionary guard, a German CEO blasts French industrial espionage and the latest on WikiLeaks

• December 2010 Web Server Survey

  Open source HTTP accelerator Varnish gained 545k hostnames. A recent blog post on the varnish site identifies WikiLeaks as one particularly prominent user of the software, with both cablegate.wikileaks.org (performance graph) and warlogs.wikileaks.org (performance graph) served by Apache via Varnish.

• Is Openleaks The Next Haystack?

  As everyone who’s even half-awake knows by now, a bunch of people who used to work on Wikileaks have got together to work on Openleaks. From what I hear, Openleaks is going to be so much better than Wikileaks – it will have no editorial role, it will strongly protect people who submit leaks, it’s not about the people who run it, it’ll be distributed and encrypted.

• WikiLeaks: cables indicate Japan asked USA for help fighting Sea Shepherd

  The Wall Street Journal notes that cables released by WikiLeaks show the Japanese government repeatedly asked the US for help against anti-whaling activist organization Sea Shepherd (covered many times on BoingBoing in the past). These repeated requests for assistance included asking the US to revoke the group’s tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization.

• Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Prosecute Assange–For the U.S.’s Sake, Not His

  6. If the government can pressure private companies to silence Wikileaks, it can silence anyone.
  Senator Lieberman’s staff seemed to apply some governmental pressure to Amazon, which found a violation of its broadly worded “terms of service” to remove Wikileaks from Amazon servers. (The administration has not applied similar pressure, to my knowledge.) Paypal and Mastercard refused to process donations, applying a standard far lower than the standards applying to government.

  I agree with those who view these moves as an Internet “tax on dissent.” To put this in perspective, what if Amazon interpreted its terms of service to kick controversial politicians off its servers? What if Paypal stopped processing payments to controversial newspapers, political blogs, or … Klansmen and flag burners? What if Mastercard, after receiving calls from a Senator, refused to process donations to the Palin or Romney campaigns, while processing donations for the Obama reelection? The affected speakers would be harmed and would have no legal means to defend themselves by challenging the government’s attempt to silence them.

  The New York Times has raised concerns about these actions: “A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.”

• EFF at SF4D January Meetup: Changes At S.F. City Hall & the Wikileaks Fallout

  EFF staff activist Rainey Reitman will be participating in a panel discussion on WikiLeaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Happy New Year from The North Sea. Or, Secrecy By Complexity

  The dramatic fall of Mexican oil production, and its largest field Cantarell, is often cited as a signature example of the problems facing Non-OPEC supply. Since the production highs of 2004-2005, Mexican production has lost over 800 kbpd (thousand barrels per day) which is fairly dramatic for a country that was producing around 3.4 mbpd as recently as 5-6 years ago. But as accelerated as these declines have been in Mexico, another oil producing region has seen even quicker declines.

• The Decline of Available Energy to Society

  Quantification of the decline of available energy, which results from the increased cost of energy extraction, is difficult.

• Dead birds in Louisiana; dead fish in Maryland, Brazil and New Zealand

  After reports over the weekend of thousands of dead birds falling from the sky in Arkansas and around 100,000 dead fish washing up on the shores of the Arkansas River, more mysteries abound with hundreds of birds dying in Louisiana, dead fish in Maryland, dead sardines on Brazil’s beaches, and hundreds of snapper floating in New Zealand waters.

• China Lights, Global Floods, Australian Coal

  One detects a slow, ironic hooray welling up from the climate change community this week because after a year of intense weather that’s devastated food crops worldwide now an epic flood in Australia threatens to cripple the production of coal. Accounting for 30% of global energy supply–and ready to go higher as oil supply declines–coal was thought to be permanently relegated to the 19th century only a decade ago. Now, however, coal is the go-to energy source of the developing world, the 5 billion people now passing through the gears of industrialism. And Australian coal, both thermal and metallurgical, is called upon heavily to feed this soaring demand. But as flooding in Queensland, Australia’s northern coal country, spreads over an area as large 350,000 square miles, what will happen to coal production and the export of coal?

• Ratcliffe coal protesters spared jail sentences

  Environmental activists who planned to shut down a coal-fired power station near Nottingham were spared jail today after a judge declared they acted with “the highest possible motives”.

  The campaigners were convicted of planning to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in what would have been one of the most audacious protests by green activists in the UK.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• In The ‘Net Delusion,’ Internet Serves Oppressors

  From bloggers of Myanmar’s 2007 Saffron Revolution to tweeters of the protests that followed Iran’s 2009 election, the Internet has proven itself to be a tool in promoting change and democracy in the world.

  But Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, argues that it doesn’t always work out that way.

• Privacy vs. Security vs. Anonymity

  First, let’s establish some basic definitions. For the purpose of this blog post, the following definitions will suffice (I’ll address alternative definitions later):
  • Privacy: having control over one’s personal information or actions
  • Security: freedom from risk or danger
  • Anonymity: being unidentifiable in one’s actions

• French Minister Uses Non-Existent Benefits to Sell LOPPSI 2 Legislation

  LOPPSI 2, the surveillance legislation in France, has been making headlines recently given that the legislation has re-entered political debate in recent weeks. The Interior Minister reportedly was out in the media telling everyone that one of the benefits of LOPPSI 2 is that it would stop cell phone theft in its tracks. Critics point to one tiny little problem with that sales-pitch – it doesn’t exist in the legislation in its current form and blocking stolen phones is already possible.

• EU ratifies UN Convention on disability rights

  Following formal ratification, it is the first time in history the EU has become a party to an international human rights treaty – the United Nation’s (UN) Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The Convention aims to ensure that people with disabilities can enjoy their rights on an equal basis with all other citizens. It is the first comprehensive human rights treaty to be ratified by the EU as a whole. It has also been signed by all 27 EU Member States and ratified by 16 of these (see Annex). The EU becomes the 97th party to this treaty. The Convention sets out minimum standards for protecting and safeguarding a full range of civil, political, social, and economic rights for people with disabilities. It reflects the EU’s broader commitment to building a barrier-free Europe for the estimated 80 million people with disabilities in the EU by 2020, as set out in the European Commission’s disability strategy (IP/10/1505).

• Virginia DMV Revokes World’s Greatest License Plate

  A man in possession of the world’s greatest license plate has lost his battle with the Virginia DMV, who ridiculously claim it encourages oral sex with kids instead of just cannibalism. Here’s their predictably unfunny response to the funny plate.

  According to poster WHOWANTSBEEF at Reddit, he’s the owner of the infamous “EATTHE Kids First” license plate floating around the internet for years. Unfortunately for him, someone complained his plate was advocating something beyond hilarious cannibalism.

• Court: No warrant needed to search cell phone

  The next time you’re in California, you might not want to bring your cell phone with you. The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can search the cell phone of a person who’s been arrested — including text messages — without obtaining a warrant, and use that data as evidence.

  The ruling opens up disturbing possibilities, such as broad, warrantless searches of e-mails, documents and contacts on smart phones, tablet computers, and perhaps even laptop computers, according to legal expert Mark Rasch.

• Consultation on the cabinet manual: have your say on a document being described as the first step to a British written constitution

  Views are being sought by January 10th on a document being described by some as the first step towards a British codified constitution. The 150-page draft cabinet manual, drawn up on 14 December, aims to set out how the UK is governed. While the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, has stressed in his introduction that the manual is intended only as a source of information and guidance on governance, the draft document has instigated a debate over Britain’s constitutional status in part thanks to the Cabinet Secretary himself proclaiming in interviews before it was issued that it was an eagerly awaited stage on the road to full codification. The political and constitutional reform committee is now heading a consultation on the manual, with responses to be submitted at 10am on Monday 10th January if possible, and otherwise by Friday 28th January. This is a chance to help broaden the debate around a document that could prove the foundation to a written constitution for Britain.

• Boston Tor Hackers, join us Saturday, January 15th

  We’re holding a Tor hackfest on Saturday, January 15th. The bulk of the Tor developers are in town and coming to this event.

• The EU Must Stop Hungarian Net Censorship

  La Quadrature du Net joins the blackout operation launched by Hungarian civil rights activists who oppose the newly enacted media law. Everybody is invited to join the blackout and contact their representatives to oppose any kind of censorship in the European Union.

  This law imposes a stringent regulation of printed, audiovisual and online media which severely undermines the democratic foundations of the Hungarian republic.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Untrustworthy Computing

  This is the latest example of how that other OS hides an endless stream of problems in its bloat. This is about displaying an image on your computer screen and compromising security. It is another example of how an OS designed by salesmen to sell in a desktop monopoly was not designed to deal with a hostile environment on the network and should be avoided like the plague.

• Paying through the nose for last-gen DSL

  If you haven’t yet taken a look at what’s happening in Canada to DSL pricing “you may want to, given that if North American incumbent ISPs get their wish — all broadband customers continent wide could be looking at paying an arm and a leg for aging DSL technology”.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Jeff Koons Sends Cease-and-Desist to SF’s Park Life Store

  Among the items San Francisco gallery and store Park Life stocked for holiday gifts was that most innocent of objects — a bookend in the shape of a balloon dog, made by a company based in Toronto. But right before Christmas, Park Life co-owner Jamie Alexander received an unusual Christmas present.

  Lawyers for artist Jeff Koons sent a letter asking Park Life to stop selling and advertising the balloon dog bookends, return them to some mutually agreed upon address, tell Koons how many have been sold and disclose the maker of said bookends — a fact, Alexander said, that could easily be found via Google.

• Copyrights

  • Open Letter by the Brazilian civil society to President-elect Roussef and Minister of Culture Ana Buarque de Hollanda

    The Points of Culture, the Digital Culture Forum, the Forum of Free Media, the development of free software, the initiative to revise the copyright law, the rejection of irrational proposals for the criminalization of the network, the construction of a Bill of Rights for the Internet (the Marco Civil) and the rejection of ACTA are well-known examples of this inclusive policy, and they are based on the guarantee of the right of access to the network and to knowledge, enabling a fertile and innovative environment for cultural production.

  • EFF Wins Landmark Ruling Freeing Promo CDs for Resale

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller’s right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores and rejecting UMG’s attempt to claim that a sticker on a CD created a license agreement forbidding resale.

  • Copy some webpages, owe more than the national debt

    The Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” is a set of snapshots of the Web over time. It’s a wonderful way to delve into the past (see Ars in its 1999 black-and-green glory to learn why “ERD Commander turns me on”), but it’s only possible thanks to rampant copying—and the potential copyright infringement that goes along with such copies. Thanks to US law, a successful copyright suit against the Wayback Machine could put the nonprofit Internet Archive on the hook for up to $150,000 per infringement.

    Multiply that $150,000 by the number of individual pages in the Archive and you quickly run into some serious damages.

  • ACTA

    • FFII requests proof ACTA’s criminal measures are essential

      The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) requests proof that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal measures are essential. The EU can only harmonise criminal measures if approximation of criminal laws and regulations of its Member States proves essential to ensure the effective implementation of a Union policy. The same is true for harmonisation by way of trade agreement. The FFII also requests documents which discuss the proportionality of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal measures.