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09.29.10

Links 29/9/2010: Dell to Bring 7-Inch Linux-based Tablet; Mageia Gets a Logo

Posted in News Roundup at 2:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Mocking fortunes

    X windows:

    The ultimate bottleneck.

    Flawed beyond belief.

    The only thing you have to fear.

    Somewhere between chaos and insanity.

    On autopilot to oblivion.

    The joke that kills.

    A disgrace you can be proud of.

    A mistake carried out to perfection.

    Belongs more to the problem set than the solution set.

    To err is X windows.

  • The joy of installing hardware in Linux

    I want to write about the bright side of Linux hardware management and support.

    IS THERE A BRIGHT SIDE?

    Contrary to what many believe, Linux hardware support is superb, which is not the same as saying it supports every single hardware part or device under the sun. This is a key concept that has been misinterpreted (and misused at times).

  • Desktop

    • Chasms and Imagination

      GNU/Linux on the desktop has long ago ceased to be a geek/early-adopter thing. It is being accepted on the mainstream/mom and pop desktop now. That started happening with the netbook. Many millions of netbook users are not geeks and don’t know an OS from an application. They know GNU/Linux works and love it. OEMs have passed up that opportunity in some ways but consumers have not. They have bought GNU/Linux whenever and wherever it has been offered.

    • Uncluttered Minds Do Not Care…

      Chase, Ami and Zeneda are three fairly recent recipients of HeliOS Project computers, ages 12, 13 and 11 respectively.

      When we go into a home to give a child a computer, one of the first things we do is explain to them that we have installed Linux on their computer, not Windows.

      This announcement is usually met with even stares or shrugs.

    • How I converted my Office to Linux

      I use Linux for my TV, notebook, development (work & hobbies), electronics and thin clients.

      [...]

      Im a programmer at heart and although I do a lot of administration at work I try my best to minimise this with the use of technology be it hardware, software or scripts. What we had to start with Mixture of large noisy desktops Running Windows XP 100Mbps 24port switch 6 Staff, with requirements for 10 desktops (display screens, boardroom, casual employee and test computers) Safety net I had many safety nets as I was migrating…

  • Server

    • Dell Servers Certified to Run Ubuntu Server Edition

      It’s a small step for Dell and symbolic victory for Ubuntu Server Edition, Canonical’s Linux distribution. Specifically, selected Dell PowerEdge servers are now certified to run Ubuntu Server Edition. Does that mean Dell is shifting away from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux? And what are the implications for Linux channel partners?

    • Amazon Web Services unveils PHP tool kit

      Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a toolkit to make it easier to develop applications in PHP that will run on Amazon’s cloud, the company said on Wednesday.

      Using the AWS SDK for PHP, which works with PHP 5.2 or later versions, developers can build applications that use different parts of Amazon’s cloud, including Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for computing capacity, and the SimpleDB database.

    • Red Hat KVM Virtualization Powers Banking Startup

      Financial services firm Ganart’s experience with the open source code as the basis for its check cashing kiosks indicates how Red Hat is positioning itself for growth in private clouds.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Harmony brush adoption in Krita: Sketch

        Besides my sponsored work on Krita, I work in my spare time (if I find some) on some new features. I did a thesis about brush painting and I still enjoy this topic. So when I find some new interesting brush, that might be usable, I’m trying to adopt it in Krita as a new brush engine. Few months ago I discovered project Harmony and I liked the brushes there. Especially Sketchy, Shaded, Chrome, Fur and Long Fur. The idea for those brushes comes from concept of connecting neighbour points. The concept was realized first in Scribbler and Harmony was inspired. Then I adopted the Harmony version in Krita.

      • 5 Intriguing KDE Apps

        The beauty of an open development platform is that anyone can take a stab at creating an application. KDE, which is built upon the Qt application and UI framework, is a shining example of this. A quick look at KDE-Apps.org reveals that new apps are added daily. I periodically browse through the latest KDE apps to see if anything stands out, and I found these five, some of which are in early development.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • How will GNOME 3.0 be Received?

        After a week of using GNOME Shell, the preview of GNOME 3.0, on Fedora 13, that is the closest I can come to a prediction about how GNOME’s new desktop will be received when it is officially released in the spring of 2011.

        On the one hand, GNOME Shell is an attractive and easy to use interface that integrates multiple workspaces better than any desktop that I’ve seen. On the other hand, it requires some adjustments in the way you work, and, in its present form, feels inflexible — although part of that inflexibility may be due to features that haven’t been implemented yet.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Spotlight on Linux: SliTaz GNU/Linux 3.0

        In the world of small size distributions, SliTaz is one of the most remarkable. Not only does it have one of the smallest download images, but it can also run on modest hardware while offering graphical applications with familiar interfaces. It’s one of the wonders of the Linux world.

        SliTaz ships as an installable live CD and features an attractively configured OpenBox window environment. Not only is it attractive, but also very familiar. Expected elements are in place on a lower panel such as an application launcher, system tray, task manager, pager, and traditional menu system. With the 30 MB ISO, one might expect only commandline applications, but SliTaz offers graphical applications for many tasks. For example, the Midori Web browser is featured and it offers many of the amenities that other more popular browsers have such as Speed Dial (visual bookmark page), tabs, and Private Browsing. Using the SliTaz Package Manager, get-flash-plugin can be installed to fetch and install Adobe’s Flash Player.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Best of Proposed Mageia Logo

        The Mageia project is a fork of Mandriva Linux. It is a brand new project, announced on September 18, 2010. There is an ongoing discussion about different aspects of the project, and one of those discussion revolves around the project’s logo. There have been some very good and some not so good logos proposed by community members, and what is being presented in this article are some of the proposed logos.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Software Center will have Zeitgeist Integration in Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’

          Ubuntu Software Center will have Zeitgeist integration in Ubuntu 11.04 as announced by Michael Vogt on his blog. Seif Lotfy, from Zeitgeist Developers’ Team proposed the idea of possible integration of Zeitgeist into Ubuntu Software Center.

        • zeitgeist support landed in software-center trunk
        • Googlubuntu Aims To Make Your Linux Mint / (K)Ubuntu Searches More Relevant

          Thanks to a tip from a friend, and the newly redesigned (and much maligned) Digg, a really handy, highly customized search engine was recently brought to our attention named Googlubuntu. How did we miss it? What Googlubuntu is, as you might guess, is a specialized search engine that pries through relevant ‘buntu domains in order to help you get your ‘buntu-fied answers faster – and presumably to weed out the nonsense stuff.

        • Ubuntu 10.10 Beta 1 and a Dell M4500

          My Linux life has been pretty stable and mundane lately (other than a DAVMail outage, mentioned below). The main desktop runs Ubuntu 10.04, and it has been humming along without issue. Every now and then the summer rainstorms come along and pop the mains, and it and its companion PC, a Windows 7 system, crash to the ground. When power returns, the Linux system spins right back up and keeps right on going. The Windows 7 system committed Harikiri a couple weeks ago after one of the power hits, and it was a slow painful process to get it put back together. The office UPS system went to meet its maker a few month back, and I guess I should have replaced it sooner. I did not replace it because I had a new laptop coming, and I was rethinking the need for desktop PC’s at all. Laptops have their own built in UPS’s.

        • mFatOS – A fat Ubuntu

          mFatOS has a few big issues that need to be smoothed out.

          First, there are just too many programs available. I can understand variety and color, but it’s just too much. Adding applications for the sake of adding them does not help the average user. Sometimes, less is more.

          Second, the integration of various elements. Ubuntu logos all over the place, hard-coded repositories for developer’s country, applets in non-English configuration, browser history, GRUB menu layout, all of these are not done with enough care to make it feel professional enough.

          mFatOS joins a long series of quickly remastered Ubuntu forks, including OzOS, MoonOS, Zorin, Ultimate Edition, and some others. Like most of these, the integration of elements is not good enough. The magic is in the little details. Unfortunately, it takes months and months of dedicated work by entire developer teams and can’t be done easily.

          It’s very decent, it works well, it’s fairly suitable for the typical Linux user, and the offline stuff is a blessing for people with bad Internet. However, mFatOS does not have a critical WOW factor. If you’re looking for a heavily loaded distro that has it all, take a look at openSUSE Edu-Li-f-e. You may even want to consider PCLinuxOS. Another suitable choice could be Scientific Linux. Last but not the least, let’s not forget the one true fork of the highly successful Ubuntu family, Linux Mint, which really takes the remastering business to another level.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tablets

      • Dell to Launch 7-Inch Tablet in Weeks Ahead

        Dell Inc. will launch its seven-inch tablet in the next few weeks and a 10-inch tablet within 6-12 months, Dell Greater China President Amit Midha said Wednesday.

      • Next Up for Netflix: Android Phones and Tablets?

        Now that Netflix has an app on the iPad and the iPhone, it could soon make a push into the Android ecosystem, based on job postings that have cropped up on the company’s website recently. The creation of an Android app could expand Netflix’s addressable audience on consumer electronic devices even further, especially with a group of new Android-based tablets set to launch.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Databases

    • Open Source Databases Have Come of Age

      Client/server systems with SQL interfaces jockey for position against upstart NoSQL systems with intimidating (and exciting) new models for data representation, distribution and consistency. In addition, more than a dozen embedded and special purpose databases have grown up to serve the needs of applications too small or too agile to require a full RDBMS.

  • Oracle

  • Government

  • Licensing

    • The “Free Beer” Hangover

      Changes to the way mailing lists work are nothing new. I am a member of several Yahoo Groups. But I am also a member of a number of Google Groups and a mess of mailing lists running on Mailman. While reading the complaint, I had two thoughts.

      First, I was reminded of comments made by Stormy Peters at LinuxCon this year. She was talking about Facebook and Google and by implication Yahoo, when asking us if we were aware of all the things that these services provide and the licenses, for lack of a better word, that they provide them under. She pointed out that they are essentially offering free beer and we, as users are drinking it up without any thought of the costs afterwards. And as the folks decrying the changes in Yahoo’s Groups are discovering, some of those costs are pretty high.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Wikipedia Adds BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

      Streaming capabilities have been added to BitTorrent via the Tribler client, and more recently uTorrent. Thus far the implementation of these technologies into major websites has been lacking. That position changed this week as the Wikimedia Foundation partnered with P2P Next to use BitTorrent-powered streaming for their video content.

    • Tunnel vision: Sydney movie maker stopped from listing free BitTorrent film

      A top movie website has rejected a thriller about a TV crew being hunted in tunnels – and the producers, including Andrew Denton, believe it’s because they want to give it away free.

      Sydney independent film producer Enzo Tedeschi said he tried five times since June to get the film, The Tunnel listed on the Internet Movie Database, IMDb.com.

      But each time it has been rejected and Mr Tedeschi – who has had other films accepted – believes it is because he wants to distribute it through BitTorrent – which is best known for the illegal sharing of movies and music.

      Getting listed on IMDb is important to a producer, as the site is considered the premier database used by industry professionals, including those in Hollywood.

      “Some people think that by releasing our film legitimately on peer-to-peer networks that we are condoning piracy,” said Tedeschi, who has worked in television and film for a decade.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Finance

    • Home prices to take hit next year in many markets

      Don’t take the latest snapshot of U.S. home prices too seriously.

      The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city index released Tuesday ticked up in July from June. But the gain is merely temporary, analysts say. They see home values taking a dive in many major markets well into next year.

      That’s because the peak home-buying season is now ending after a dismal summer. The hardest-hit markets, already battered by foreclosures, are bracing for a bigger wave of homes sold at foreclosure or through short sales. A short sale is when a lender lets a homeowner sell for less than the mortgage is worth.

    • Recession rips at US marriages, expands income gap

      The recession seems to be socking Americans in the heart as well as the wallet: Marriages have hit an all-time low while pleas for food stamps have reached a record high and the gap between rich and poor has grown to its widest ever.

    • Sour economic mood in living room and boardroom

      Americans in both the living room and the boardroom are growing more fearful about the economy, creating a Catch-22 for the job market: Shoppers won’t spend until they feel more secure, and business won’t hire until people start spending.

      The eroding views were revealed Tuesday by two separate surveys, one that found everyday Americans are increasingly pessimistic about jobs and another that found CEOs have grimmer predictions about upcoming sales.

    • Biz leaders gloomy on economy

      A wide swath of U.S. businesses Tuesday reported that the economy has slowed significantly in the last few months, and they said that the tax stalemate in Washington was a major reason that flagging consumer sentiment is now endangering the recovery.

      In separate reports, big business members of the Business Roundtable, along with manufacturers, home builders and the oil industry gave gloomy assessments of the recovery and said Congress’ decision to postpone action on tax cuts until after the election was weighing heavily on consumer sentiment.

    • Where Are All the Prosecutions From the Crisis?

      A consistent question since the financial crisis in 2008 is why has the federal government not prosecuted any senior executives for their roles in the collapse of firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns or the risky investments that led to bailouts of onetime financial giants like the American International Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How can companies worth billions of dollars just a few months earlier suddenly collapse in 2008 without someone being held responsible?

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • New sex laws: Conservatives ‘very concerned’

      Toronto judge Susan Himel says Canada’s prostitution laws meant to protect women and residential neighbourhoods are endangering sex workers’ lives.

      If her decision to strike down the laws stands, “prostitutes will be able to communicate freely with customers on the street, conduct business in their homes or brothels and hire bodyguards and accountants without exposing them to the risk of criminal sanctions”, says the Toronto Star.

      But the Stephen Harper government is “seriously considering” an appeal against the decision, says Xtra!.

      “Yesterday we had the naming of the commissioner for the Public Inquiry in Vancouver for the missing women,” NDP MP Libby Davies, part of a special parliamentary committee on sex laws, is quoted as saying in the story, going on:

      “These are related issues — what happens to women who are on the street who are involved in the sex trade, and the risks that they’re at. This is something that can’t just be swept under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

    • People Behind the Internet Question Plan to Block Piracy Sites

      A group of engineers with legitimate claims to helping invent the Internet — and we’re not talking about Al Gore — are opposing a Senate bill intended to fight copyright infringement, saying it would endanger the system of domain names that underlies the Interne

    • Political Porn Scandal Revealed as Internet Bungle

      The arch-conservative Christian Democratic Party is staunchly against pornography and defended the allegations, claiming any website visits logged were for “research purposes.”

      But Paul McLeay, the minister for the state’s ports and waterways, resigned after admitting he looked at adult and gambling websites on his parliamentary computer.

      However, further investigation revealed that McLeay — guilt aside — possibly resigned prematurely, while Nile probably was using the Internet for research purposes.

      Analysis of the audit left investigators red-faced when it was discovered that mainstream news websites had been classified as “adult” because of advertisements or links to matchmaking and dating sites.

    • Thai Webmaster Arrested for Online Speech

      On Friday, the Director of a popular alternative Thai news portal Prachatai was arrested by the Thai government. Chiranuch Premchaipoen — popularly known as Jiew — was charged under the intermediary liability provisions of the 2007 Computer Crime Act and for “Lèse Majesté,” or defamation of the Thai royal family. She faces a 32-year prison sentence.

      Jiew’s crime? In 2008, Prachatai published an interview with Chotisak Onsoong, a Thai man known for refusing to stand at attention during the Thai Royal Anthem — a dangerous political act in Thailand, though not technically a crime. The interview received huge attention, drawing over 200 comments from Thai citizens. On April 28, 2008, complaints were filed against Prachatai alleging that several comments on that interview were a defamation to the Monarchy. An arrest warrant for Jiew was issued on Septemeber 8, 2009, but no summons was received by Jiew until her arrest this past Friday.

    • Which words does Google Instant blacklist?

      Some folks at the Hacker publication 2600 decided to compile a list of words that are restricted by Google Instant.

      Except in extreme and special cases, Google is known for anything but censorship, but as we’ve said before, there are some terms the web giant’s new instant search feature won’t work with.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Public consultation on the open internet and net neutrality

      DG Information Society and Media has launched a public consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality. European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, announced in April 2010 her intention to launch this consultation in order to take forward Europe’s net neutrality debate. The consultation is part of the Commission’s follow-up to its commitment – one of the prerequisites for the successful conclusion of the 2009 EU telecoms reform package – to scrutinise closely the open and neutral nature of the internet and to report on the state of play to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Seriously? ASCAP Still Wants A Performance License on Downloads

        The download part of the decision may seem rather obvious to the outside observer, though in the post-analog land grab, traditional definitions seem to carry little weight. “[We] are, of course, disappointed in the Court’s decision that there is no public performance in the transmission of certain musical downloads,” ASCAP told Digital Music News. “We are studying the decision and will determine what further action is appropriate.”

      • A Field Guide to Copyright Trolls

        With all of this talk about copyright trolls and spamigation, it is easy to get confused. Who is suing over copies of Far Cry and The Hurt Locker? Who is suing bloggers? Who is trying to protect their anonymity? Who is defending fair use? What do newspapers have to do with any of this? In order to cut through the confusion, here’s a concise guide to copyright trolls currently in the wild, with status updates.

      • BT embroiled in ACS:Law porn list breach

        BT has admitted it sent the personal details of more than 500 customers as an unsecured document to legal firm ACS:Law, following a court order.

        The news could put BT in breach of the Data Protection Act, which requires firms to keep customers’ data secure at all times.

        The e-mails emerged following a security lapse at ACS:Law.

        A BT official admitted “unencrypted” personal data was sent, adding it “would not happen again”.

Clip of the Day

Karl Goetz – GNewSense


Links 29/9/2010: Linux 2.6.36 RC6, MeeGo Ported to More Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 8:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.35.7

      I’m announcing the release of the 2.6.35.7 kernel. This is only needed if you run Xen, there was a typo that caused problems. My fault, sorry.

    • Linux 2.6.36-rc6 Kernel Released

      The Linux 2.6.36 kernel is just about here. Linus Torvalds has now released the sixth RC build of this upcoming 2.6.36 build. In the past week since 2.6.36-rc5 was released, there’s been many more regression fixes going into the kernel, but still it’s not in a state ready for release by Linus’ standards.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

        We’ve said it a few times already that the R600g driver continues to advance, but this open-source Gallium3D graphics driver that provides hardware acceleration for ATI R600/R700/Evergreen ASICs (the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 graphics cards) has now received another huge boost with what has been dubbed as the “new design” and with the latest Mesa Git code these new code paths are used by default.

        Jerome Glisse describes the R600g driver’s “new design” on the Mesa development list for those interested in all of the technical details behind it and/or were curious what the stream of Git commits against Mesa master referencing this new design were all about.

  • Applications

    • Xnoise music player adds Sound Menu integration
    • OpenShot 1.2.2 Now Supports Export of Video in HTML5 WebM Format

      As you should know already, the WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. Latest Open Shot 1.2.2 now has an option to export your videos in WebM format.

    • Rhythmbox Needs an Overhaul, 100(or less) Papercuts for Rhythmbox Maybe?

      Rhythmbox is, as you all know, the default gnome music player and default music player for Ubuntu as well. Canonical integrated Ubuntu One Music Store with Rhythmbox through a plugin with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” and the implementation works pretty good. The store has a discreet selection of music if you live in UK or USA, for everyone else it’s a very small selection of music, but that’s another story.

    • gThumb 2.12.0 (Stable) Has Been Released [Ubuntu PPA]

      Finally, after a long period of development, a new stable gThumb version has been released: 2.12.0. We’ve been following the gThumb development here at WebUpd8 so you should already be up to date with all the changes. To mention just a few new features since the last stable version (not development!): Facebook, Flickr, PicasaWeb and Photobucket export, import from Flickr and PicasaWeb, gThumb can now play videos and many many other new features and improvements which I’ll not cover since we already talked about all of them throughout the gThumb 2.12 development posts (gThumb 2.11.x was the development branch for gThumb 2.12). You can read all about the gThumb 2.12.0 new features by browsing our gThumb posts.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Software Center with a dose of Zeitgeist and maybe Teamgeist

        Today the Zeitgeist team showed Michael Vogt a possible integration of Zeitgeist with Software Center. And guess what he likes it and he will look into making it become a soft dependency. He will look into merging our branch soon. All it does is tell you how many times you used an application in the detailed view.

      • Ubuntu Software Centre with a pinch of Zeitgeist? More please!

        Stat fans looking to get a informational fix on the applications they use may be interested to hear news on semantic tracking tool Zeitgeist’s latest possible excursion into the desktop – via the Ubuntu Software Centre.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat v. Oracle: Which is More Standards Compliant?

        RHEL 5 was released in February 2007, while LSB 3.2 was still being put together for its January 2008 release. So Red Hat did put a little effort into getting compliant with the then-cutting edge LSB release. I might suspect that when RHEL 6 comes out, it will be compliant with LSB 4.0 (or whatever’s available at that time). But I have some concerns: Red Hat hasn’t gotten any of its RHEL-5 point releases updated to LSB 4.0 yet, even though it has had plenty of opportunity to do so.

        While I have issues with Oracle’s spin-doctor moves to lock more users into its hardware offerings, I think I will be a little hard-pressed to call Oracle Linux a complete knock-off of RHEL. In this instance, it seems clear that Oracle, which has not always been the best open-source player, has actually put in the extra effort to maintain current LSB certification.

      • Red Hot?

      • Fedora

        • Is Fedora’s Boot Time Increasing?

          The last time we closely examined the boot performance of Fedora Linux was in 2008 when comparing the boot times from Fedora Core 4 through Fedora 8. However, with more distributions taking pride in recent months over shortening their boot time — with Canonical for example having worked towards a ten second Ubuntu boot time — we decided to see how long it’s taking Fedora to put its hat on these days. With the three Intel notebooks we used from our recent Fedora power consumption review, we measured the boot times using Bootchart on the Fedora 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 Alpha releases.

        • Graphics Test Week starts tomorrow!

          It’s been creeping up, and now it’s time: the world-famous Graphics Test Week begins tomorrow, with the Fedora 14 Nouveau Test Day! That is 2010-09-28. As always, the event runs all day in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC (you can connect with WebIRC). To complete Graphics Test Week, the Radeon Test Day takes place the following day, Wednesday 2010-09-29, and Intel Test Day takes place Thursday 2010-09-30.

          As always, we’ll be testing a range of graphics driver functions, and we need as many people as possible to join in so we can evaluate the widest possible range of hardware and identify as many bugs as possible for the developers to fix. You can do all the testing from a live image – no need for an installed copy of Fedora 14, though you can test that way too if you like – and the testing is very easy, there are step-by-step instructions for each test and for entering your results. And of course, there’ll be many people in IRC to help with testing and debugging.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Community Artwork – Building Bridges

          With nearly all of the design work complete for Maverick Meerkat some folks are reflecting on Community and the path which lead to here. The Ubuntu Artwork Team and perhaps others are trapped by the pressure to produce in a manner which competes with established professional players and finding resources with the time and skills to complete tasks on time. With the desire to move Ubuntu into the mainstream, Canonical added talented resources to the design team leaving Community members standing on the side line to wonder how they can get back into the game. To add additional confusion to the mix the paradigm changed as new players entered and challenged existing norms.

        • Ubuntu Hardware Summit Success !
        • ARM A15: A Game Changer

          ARM based devices are ubiquitous, just like Linux. You may of not of even heard of ARM, just like you may not of heard of Linux, but making a phone call or searching on Google means you could already using their technologies.

          ARM, just like Linux, is a quiet pioneer, prevalent in the background just waiting for the opportunity to become mainstream. Whether mainstream is the goal, prevalence most definitely is on the agenda.

        • Something New and Beautiful: Ubuntu, distilled, in type

          Ubuntu is a global phenomenon, and we knew at the start we didn’t have the breadth of eyeballs close at hand to keep the font on track as it expanded. So we planned a process of expanding consultation. First within Canonical, which has folks from nearly 30 countries, and then within the Ubuntu community. We published the font to Ubuntu Members, because we wanted folks who participate and contribute directly to Ubuntu to have the strongest say in the public process of designing the font. We heard from Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, Chinese and many other cultures. Not everyone has glyphs in this first round, but everyone has had a hand in bringing us to this milestone.

        • Interview with Leann Ogasawara

          My name is Leann Ogasawara and I’ve been working for Canonical for the past 3 years. Since joining the Ubuntu Kernel Team, I’ve been involved with QA and triaging, stable maintenance, and am now this cycle’s Ubuntu 10.10 kernel release manager.

        • ‘Party the real way for Ubuntu 10.10’ says Vancouver LoCo team

          “Don’t Call It A ‘Party’ If It’s Not!” yells the catchy slogan from the Ubuntu Vancouver LoCo team in their promotional call-to-arms for celebrating Ubuntu 10.10’s release next month.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • LMNR (Linux Mint Netbook Remix)

            I’ve stumbled upon a version of an as-yet-unnanounced new edition of Linux Mint, LMNR (Linux Mint Netbook Remix). It appears to be a netbook UI on top of the regular Linux Mint 9 Gnome edition. It looks very nice, and appears to be the answer to those with small screen netbooks who want the polish of Linux Mint.

          • Edubuntu 10.10 boasts many surprises

            Ubuntu’s education spin ‘Edubuntu’ has gained a new-look installer, some new applications and much more for its 10.10 release coming next month.

            Talking about the changes Edubuntu’s Jonathan Carter notes that whilst 10.10 doesn’t see the spin receive as big a overhaul as 10.04 had it nevertheless continues to build on the work laid down then, making for a ‘very good’ release.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo

        • MeeGo port for Dell Streak, HTC Desire and Nexus One

          Various developers have ported the handset variant of MeeGo, a platform mainly sponsored by Intel and Nokia, to a variety of smartphones that ship with Google’s Android. A page in the MeeGo wiki provides details about the ports’ current state of development and shows a Nexus One and a HTC Desire with the MeeGo handset user interface. Another photo shows a MeeGo command line log-in prompt on a Dell Streak.

    • Tablets

      • Chromium OS infiltrates iPad, makes itself comfortable

        What is this madness we see before us? Hexxeh, he who provides your nightly Chromium builds, has dropped a small but perfectly formed bombshell by revealing that he’s managed to install Google’s nascent OS onto Apple’s hotcake of a tablet, the iPad.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Practical Open Source Software Exploration
  • What makes Zeitgeist tick

    Zeitgeist is a prototype developed by BBC Research & Development to discover and track the most shared BBC webpages on Twitter. An overview of the project has already covered in our previous post.

    Today we’re publishing the full source code of this system under the GNU GPLv3 licence on github at http://github.com/bbcrd/zeitgeist.

    This post will discuss the technical architecture of the system, how we approached various problems, and our technical learnings from building the system.

    From a research point of view, we were particularly interested in two things:

    * The Twitter Streaming API and how it worked in practice
    * Whether a messaging pipeline architecture would be a good fit for this problem domain

    The system consists of an interface to the Twitter Streaming API which passes tweets to a processing pipeline. The pipeline finds and extracts links to the BBC, resolving shortened and redirected urls. Continuously-running background jobs extract page metadata and handle retweets and deletions. Finally, there’s a web interface to present the results to end users, which was written using the well-tested software stack of Sinatra, Thin and nginx, all fronted by a Squid proxy. The Zeitgeist database is mysql, the modelling done using Datamapper.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Elementary Firefox hits version 2.0

        An updated version of elementary styled Firefox theme ‘Firefox elementary’ has been released today.

        The theme helps to seamlessly integrate Ubuntu’s default web browser into your Elementary themed desktop.

  • Databases

    • Couchapp Walkthrough – Part 1

      Couchapps are a particular way of using couchdb that allow you to serve web applications directly from the database. These applications generate HTML and javascript to present data from couchdb to the user, and then update the database and the UI based on their actions.

      Of course there are plenty of frameworks out there that do this sort of thing, and more and more of them are adding couchdb support. What makes couchapps particularly interesting are two things. Firstly, the ease with which they can be developed and deployed. As they are served directly from couchdb they require little infrastructure, and the couchapp tool allows for a rapid iteration. In addition, the conveniences that are provided mean that simple things can be done very quickly with little code.

      [...]

      In addition to all the client-side tools for interacting with the database, it is also possible to make use of couchdb features such as shows, lists, update handlers validation functions in order to move some of the processing server-side. This is useful for various reasons, including being more accessible, allowing search engines to index the content, and not having to trust the client not to take malicious actions.

  • Oracle

    • James Gosling Interview – 9/22/10

      James Gosling: Well, the tshirt had been kinda fun. I am yet to see anyone wear one.

      Moderator: (jokingly) yeah, we’ve been all “taken care of” by the Oracle employees already, that’s why you don’t see us wearing them.

      James Gosling: Various Oracle employees have been instructed not to wear them. I’ve noticed this is a great tshirt to wear in big crowds around here because the seas just parts, ‘cuz people are like, ‘I don’t want to be near that.’ Which I find really funny. And the whole free java thing is kind of a weird history with me because Sun from day zero is an open source company and this whole weirdness that we have about open source was not a weirdness open source but a weirdness about the actors and the games in the drama. So when the start of the Java foundation thing happened in 2007 what we have to understand is that that was entirely orchestrated by Oracle. Oracle wrote that bizarre clause that went in that one set of meeting minutes, they wrote that. They went around to everyone in DC and said it is the sense of the executive committee that the Java community would be best served by the established new Java and Java foundation. And so if you’re an open source contributor, participant, that all sounds really good. And fundamentally we agreed with that. The problem was that A. it was driven by Oracle whose motives were more than slightly not what we wanted them to be, and they had strong-armed a bunch of people into signing in ways that made them uncomfortable. And some folks like IBM I mean, IBM’s been kind of weird on the whole topic because on the one hand they do everything they can to try and screw Sun over, I mean they didn’t name eclipse casually

      Moderator: I was surprised that they aren’t the ones that bought Sun

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Generation Facebook and higher education

      Many challenges lurk at the intersection of the open world of FOSS and the (traditionally) closed world of the college classroom. Perhaps it is because I’m reading The Starfish and the Spider with my first-year students right now, but I believe there are a lot of opportunities for educators who embrace the chaos and find ways to support their students in entering into and flourishing in the connected world of decentralized learning.

  • Programming

    • Interview with James Gosling

      About a half hour into our libations in walks a legend: James Gosling, creator of Java itself. Nervously, but keeping our cool, we approached and introduced ourselves. We left it at that. As the beers flowed, our courage and machinations began too as well. “What if, now just what if, we could get Gosling to do a cast?” But doubting thoughts prevailed: “Nah we aren’t big enough” “Do we really want to disturb a guy drinking his beer?” Quickly some of the Coder’s wives keyed into our anxiety over the issue. Wanting to play match maker, they approached James and asked him if he’d be willing to do a podcast with us. And wouldn’t you know it, he whipped out his iPhone (yay James!), opened his calendar and said “Sure! What works for you guys?”

Leftovers

  • Once More, With Feeling: Embracing ‘Free’ Doesn’t Mean You Make No Money

    I usually like The Guardian, but Lindvall’s work is not up to its normal standards. Free is a part of a business model. That’s all anyone’s saying. And when you say that it means you do believe in a larger business model, which means making money. I’m always amazed at how people like Lindvall seem to have their brains stop in their tracks when they get to the big 0, and never reach the other side of the tracks where it’s explained how you use that $0 to make money elsewhere.

  • AOL Acquires TechCrunch

    The rumors have proven true: AOL is snapping up Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch family of sites. The site will share a stable with AOL’s other major tech property, Engadget, along with TUAW, Switched, and DownloadSquad. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Business Insider has a source claiming the site went for $25 million.

  • Science

    • Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans

      Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

    • PICTURES & VIDEO: British team proves flapless flight with Demon UAV

      Manoeuvring without the aid of control surfaces has been demonstrated by an unmanned air vehicle designed by a British team of industry and academic specialists.

    • Why cell phone talkers are annoys-makers

      Cell phone users irritate so mightily because their background chatter forcibly yanks listeners’ attention away from whatever they’re doing, says psychology graduate student Lauren Emberson of Cornell University. Overhearing someone spewing intermittent exclamations into a handheld gadget lacks the predictability of hearing a two-way exchange and thus proves inherently unsettling, Emberson and her colleagues report in an upcoming Psychological Science.

    • Solar cells thinner than wavelengths of light hold huge power potential, Stanford researchers say

      In the smooth, white, bunny-suited clean-room world of silicon wafers and solar cells, it turns out that a little roughness may go a long way, perhaps all the way to making solar power an affordable energy source, say Stanford engineers.

      Their research shows that light ricocheting around inside the polymer film of a solar cell behaves differently when the film is ultra thin. A film that’s nanoscale-thin and has been roughed up a bit can absorb more than 10 times the energy predicted by conventional theory.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • DHS Launches Cyber Attack Exercise

      For three or four days this week, the Internet will come under a virtual attack from an unknown adversary, and it will be up to the government and private sector’s coordinated efforts to root out the cause and work together to keep systems up and running — at least within the simulated confines of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Storm III exercise, which begins Tuesday.

      The Cyber Storm series of exercises simulates large cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and government IT assets in order to test the government’s preparedness. Specifically, this year’s exercise will be the first time DHS will test both the draft National Cyber Incident Response Plan (an effort to provide a coordinated response to major cybersecurity incidents) that will be publicly released later this year and the new National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (the hub of DHS’ cybersecurity coordination efforts).

    • Soldier confesses to ‘thrill kill’

      In a disturbing video, a young corporal admits his role in the killings of unarmed Afghan civilians — alleging that his superior egged him on

    • FBI drive for encryption backdoors is déjà vu for security experts

      The FBI now wants to require all encrypted communications systems to have backdoors for surveillance, according to a New York Times report, and to the nation’s top crypto experts it sounds like a battle they’ve fought before.

      Back in the 1990s, in what’s remembered as the crypto wars, the FBI and NSA argued that national security would be endangered if they did not have a way to spy on encrypted e-mails, IMs and phone calls. After a long protracted battle, the security community prevailed after mustering detailed technical studies and research that concluded that national security was actually strengthened by wide use of encryption to secure computers and sensitive business and government communications.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell in row over Brazilian Indian land grab

      Brazilian authorities have written to energy giant Shell expressing concern over the activities of its new Brazilian joint-venture partner, which is producing biofuels from land taken from an impoverished Indian tribe.

      Last month, Shell signed a $12 billion deal to produce biofuels from sugar cane with Brazilian biofuels giant Cosan. But some of Cosan’s sugar cane is grown on land officially recognized as belonging to Guarani Indians.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Motorcyclist wins taping case against state police

      A Harford County Circuit Court judge ruled this afternoon that a motorcyclist who was arrested for videotaping his traffic stop by a Maryland State Trooper was within his rights to record the confrontation.

      Judge Emory A Pitt Jr. tossed all the charges filed against Anthony Graber, leaving only speeding and other traffic violations, and most likely sparing him a trial that had been scheduled for Oct. 12. The judge ruled that Maryland’s wire tap law allows recording of both voice and sound in areas where privacy cannot be expected. He ruled that a police officer on a traffic stop has no expectation of privacy.

    • An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee

      Today, 89 prominent Internet engineers sent a joint letter the US Senate Judiciary Committee, declaring their opposition to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA). The text of the letter is below.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Guest column: Copyright is no justification for digital locks

      Many creators start with views similar to what Stephen Ellis wrote in this space on Friday. While some retain this naive view, others take the time to learn how the technology in question works. They change their views once they speak with independent technical people, and go through the legal and economic analysis of real-world technology. Far from digital locks protecting copyright, they are the greatest threat to copyright and the interests of creators.

      I will not speak about audiences of copyrighted works. I am a creators’ rights activist trying to protect the interests of fellow creators, and oppose the C-32 digital locks based on this. The fact that digital locks also harm the interests of consumers is in addition to its harm to creators, not a matter of allegedly balancing the interests of one over the other.

    • TalkTalk, BT: we’d put iPlayer in the slow lane

      The UK’s two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they’d give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so.

      Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Challenge To Graham Henderson: Please Point Out Who Believes Music Should Just Be A Hobby

        There’s been a bizarre shift lately in the recording industry’s attempt to demonize people who believe in embracing new business models and new technologies in the music business. We just wrote about Universal Music’s Jim Urie claiming that “copyleft” supporters don’t care about art, and along those same lines, Zeropaid points us to Graham Henderson, the head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA — which is almost entirely dominated by foreign companies) going to Washington DC to lobby in favor of more draconian copyright laws.

      • Appeals Court Tells ASCAP: A Download Is Not A Performance

        A few years back, we covered the legal fight pitting ASCAP against Yahoo and RealNetworks, where the two internet companies were told to pay up based on a ridiculously arbitrary fee formula, including a totally made up multiplier called the “music-use-adjustment-fraction.” The really scary part was that it calculated the revenue based on all of Yahoo’s revenue. So, yes, even though Yahoo makes most of its revenue in ways that have nothing to do with music, its total revenue is used as part of the calculation. The one good thing that came out of the legal fight was the court making it clear to ASCAP that a download is not a performance, which requires a separate fee. As you may recall, ASCAP has been trying to claim just about anything involving music is a “public performance,” in a weak attempt to get more cash.

      • The “legal blackmail” business: inside a P2P settlement factory

        UK pornographer Jasper Feversham was fed up. The Internets were sharing his films, quality work like Catch Her in the Eye, Skin City, and MILF Magic 3. He wanted revenge—or at least a cut. So Feversham signed on to a relatively new scheme: track down BitTorrent infringers, convert their IP addresses into real names, and blast out warning letters threatening litigation if they didn’t cough up a few hundred quid.

        “Much looking forward to sending letters to these f—ers,” he wrote in an email earlier this year.

        The law firm he ended up with was ACS Law, run by middle-aged lawyer Andrew Crossley. ACS Law had, after a process of attrition, become one of the only UK firms to engage in such work. Unfortunately for Crossley, mainstream film studios had decided that suing file-sharers brought little apart from negative publicity, and so Crossley was left defending a heap of pornography, some video games, and a few musical tracks.

      • Law firm faces huge fine over leak of personal files

        A law firm that pursues the owners of internet accounts linked to alleged illegal downloads of music and films was warned yesterday it faces a swingeing fine after the personal details of a further 8,000 people were leaked online.

        The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said that ACS:Law, which has sent thousands of letters to suspected internet “pirates” asking them to pay compensation of £500, could be forced to pay up to £500,000 if it is found that the company has flouted data protection law by failing to safeguard personal details on its computer system.

      • 7 Bit Torrent Piracy Suits Target 5,469

        In one of the largest swoops targeting bit torrent piracy, numerous suits were filed Friday against 5,469 suspected of poaching porn off the Internet, XBIZ has learned.

        West Coast Productions, Combat Zone, Third World Media and Patrick Collins Inc. filed seven suits at U.S. District Court in Martinsburg, W. Va., against the bit torrent users whose IP addresses were tracked.

        All of the suits were filed by attorney Kenneth J. Ford at U.S. District Court in Martinsburg, W. Va., and seek to identify each user through their Internet service providers. Each asks for injunctive relief and damages.

      • A Look At The Technologies & Industries Senators Leahy & Hatch Would Have Banned In The Past

        The more I look at the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA) bill proposed by Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch (and co-sponsored by Sens. Herb Kohl, Arlen Specter, Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Evan Bayh and George Voinovich) the worse it looks. The idea behind the bill is to give the Justice Department the ability to avoid due process in shutting down or blocking access to sites deemed “dedicated to infringing activities.”

Clip of the Day

Ralf Wildenhues – “Recent developments in GNU Autotools”


Credit: TinyOgg

09.28.10

Links 28/9/2010: Pinguy OS 10.04.1.2 Reviews, GNU/Linux Used by Children in Brazil and Asia

Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Migrating to GNU/Linux

      I am fortunate. My IT is straight forward. I set up GNU/Linux servers and GNU/Linux desktops and everyone (almost) is happy. It works reliably and I don’t need to fix much. Others have a more challenging task. Leaving the servers GNU/Linux and migrating the desktops to the next version of that other OS did not work for them. Perhaps eventually they will be able to make the desktops GNU/Linux and life will be easier. If you read the comments, you will find others did.

    • Children in Brazil and Asia get computers for first time with low-cost Linux software

      A Linux-based software that lets you use one computer to control ten separate ones has been in “overwhelming demand” from schools in Asia and South America according the makers Userful.

      The computer system called Userful Multiseat Linux lets anyone provide desktop computers at a fraction of traditional costs, which opens up computers to places with less money to spend.

    • M$ v World

      UPDATE At the end of an article linked from the one mentioned above, ARS Technica reported in July 2010 that only 63% of their visitors used that other OS and 6% used GNU/Linux. Clearly, they have different visitors than NetApplications counts. ARS shows 26% use MacOS although Apple says they produce only about 3% of PCs.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Measured in geologic time…
    • Clonezilla: Recovery for many file systems

      Clonezilla, a disaster recovery, disk cloning, disk imaging and deployment solution, features major enhancements and updates in its latest release. The new version 1.2.6-24 comes with Linux kernel 2.6.32-23 and is based on the Debian Sid repository. Support for the Btrfs file system has been added, and the release was successfully tested with Ubuntu Maverick beta and OpenSuse 11.3 restoration. However, author Steven Shiau cautions that the Btrfs file system is still in beta and therefore unsupported.

    • Pinguy OS

      • Pinguy OS 10.04.1.2 released and Review included

        Pinguy OS should run reasonably well on a computer with the following minimum hardware specification. However, features such as visual effects may not run smoothly.

        * 700 MHz x86 processor
        * 384 MB of system memory (RAM)
        * 8 GB of disk space

        [...]

      • Pinguy OS 10.04.1.2

        Summary: Pinguy OS provides a complete desktop distro solution that newbies and experienced users alike can enjoy.

        Rating: 4/5

    • Red Hat Family

      • 3 Stocks That Blew the Market Away

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is another welcome overachiever in enterprise software. The company building cost-effective subscriptions on top of open-source Linux software generated a profit of $0.19 a share in its latest quarter. Wall Street was settling for net income to clock in at $0.18 a share.

      • 2 Tech Firms Toast Feats

        Allis said his goal is to create a homegrown, publicly traded success story, like Raleigh-based Red Hat, a software company known for its worker-friendly culture of ice cream socials and fine art on the walls.

      • Notable Stock Earnings Surprises

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) shares surged 11.24% to $40.83 following a fall of 4.40% in the regular hours. The company late Wednesday reported its fiscal second-quarter results, that easily beat the analysts’ consensus.

      • Red Hat Priced Like It’s 1999: Expect a Hangover Like 2001 – cbl
      • Why is Red Hat promoting Flash video content?

        One thing I find annoying is that all of the videos from the KVM Forum 2010 event have been posted to Vimeo… and seem only available in streaming Flash format.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 14 on System Z alive and kicking!

          The Fedora s390x team[1] is happy to announce the first installable Fedora on IBM System Z (aka s390x) since Fedora 6!

          It’s been a long time in the making, but after several Fedora releases since we started getting everything up into shape again we’ve finally reached a point where we can provide an installable version of Fedora on IBM System Z again.

        • Announcing the release of Fedora 14 Beta!!
        • Get the next Fedora, right now.
        • Fedora 14 Beta Emerges with Latest in Open Source Software

          Emergence is the process by which simple interactions give rise to more complex and ordered patterns and systems, such as the intricacies we see in snowflakes. The Beta release of Fedora 14 “Laughlin” similarly provides a preview of some of the best free and open source technology currently under development, integrated into an ordered distribution that anyone can freely download, use, modify, and redistribute.

        • Fedora presents…Graphics Test Week this week

          It’s been creeping up, and now it’s time: the world-famous Graphics Test Week begins tomorrow, with the Fedora 14 Nouveau Test Day! That is 2010-09-28. As always, the event runs all day in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC (you can connect with WebIRC). To complete Graphics Test Week, the Radeon Test Day takes place the following day, Wednesday 2010-09-29, and Intel Test Day takes place Thursday 2010-09-30.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian != Ubuntu! — “Please download the voice plugin to make a call”

        No, this isn’t Debian’s fault. This is Google’s fault. Google didn’t clue in that Debian and Ubuntu aren’t the same distribution. Sure, they both use dpkg, but saying that makes them compatible is like saying Slackware and Linux-From-Scratch are the same because they both use tarballs for packages, or like saying RedHat and OpenSuSE are the same because they both use rpm.

      • Review: aptosid 2010-02 “Keres” KDE

        As aptosid is based off of Debian (and is tied even more closely to Debian than Ubuntu is), I am rather shocked that for all the odd networking tools included, Synaptic Package Manager is not included; there are 0 GUI tools for installing packages. Given how good Synaptic Package Manager is and given that aptosid is closely tied to Debian, even if this is a distribution meant for more advanced Linux users, I think this omission is inexcusable.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 212

          In This Issue

          * Ubuntu 9.04 reaches end of life
          * Announcing the Ubuntu Application Review Process
          * Taking a Step Back With Fresh Eyes
          * Behind the Circle: Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda)
          * Ubuntu Stats
          * LoCo News
          * Launchpad News
          * Growing List of Schools Using Ubuntu
          * The Growing Linux Multi-touch Community
          * Edubuntu Makeover
          * Test your might!
          * Debian-Ubuntu Community Conference
          * My experience upgrading UNE 10.04 to Maverick (and yours!)
          * What I do
          * Know of a cool app that deserves more attention? Nominate it for the next Ubuntu post-install guide!
          * Artwork Team – What are we doing here?
          * Ubuntu Artwork Crisis
          * In The Press
          * In The Blogosphere
          * Canonical Showcases at IDF San Francisco
          * Ubuntu, Canonical Wallow in Muddy Waters with Contributors’ Agreements
          * Can Ubuntu Attract More Hardware Partners?
          * Making a Difference; Selling a Difference
          * UCLALUG Fall 2010 Installfest
          * Do you dent or tweet ?
          * Join the openSUSE Conference 2010!
          * OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2010
          * Full Circle Magazine – Issue #41
          * Featured Podcasts
          * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
          * Upcoming Meetings and Events
          * Updates and Security
          * UWN Sneak Peek
          * And much much more!

        • The Ubuntu Font Family Is Now Available In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (Officially)

          If you’re not using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, you can download the Ubuntu Font Family as an archive or deb from HERE although the recommended way of getting the font is through the official PPA (still private, hopefully it will be made public soon) so you can get updates!

        • New Ubuntu font lands in Maverick for all users

          The new Ubuntu font that Canonical commissioned typeface designers Dalton Maag to develop for the Ubuntu operating system has landed in Ubuntu 10.10 for all users.

        • Hiding In Plain Sight: On Being More Transparent

          Thus, we had a discussion at UDS and broke the problem into two areas: the technical implementation which I openly vetoed myself having any view on as I believe I lack the technical expertize, and the governance process part, which I volunteered to craft a process for. Before the UDS session I produced a rough draft on the Ubuntu Wiki and presented it to the room in the session.

        • Interesting uses for Ubuntu One

          Ubuntu One is a great program/service with many uses, some obvious some not so obvious. Here are a few creative uses for Ubuntu One that some people have come up with.

        • Canonical cutting the edge of interface design

          For those of you who deny that any Linux distribution innovates, I give you Parallax. Parallax is an interface, written for the Ubuntu environment, that allows the operating system to be aware of its physical context. That is, where the user is in relation to cameras. For example: The user is watching a video and the user moves farther away from the screen. When the system picks this up (via cameras) the image on the screen then pans out.

        • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-ready SoCs sip half a Watt

      Freescale Semiconductor announced a Linux-ready, ARM9-based i.MX28x SoC and a Coldfire-based MCF5441x MCU, both targeting fanless industrial applications as well as automotive systems. The i.MX28x and MCF5441x each consume less than half a Watt, support extended temperatures, offer clock synchronized Ethernet, and with some models, include a Layer 2 switch for low-cost daisy-chaining of devices.

      The i.MX28x and MCF5441x are aimed at low-power applications, including appliances, portable and diagnostic medical devices, energy distribution equipment, meters, human machine interfaces (HMIs), motor control, and industrial controllers, says Freescale. The MCF5441x provides customer benefits tailored for motor control, while the i.MX28x is oriented more at display applications, says the company.

    • Rugged, fanless PCs report for duty

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Sony Ericsson Drops Symbian OS for Android OS

          Google’s Android OS gets a boost as Sony Ericsson announces it is dropping Symbian for the open-source Android OS.

        • Rumor: An Amazon Android Tablet May Follow The Amazon Android App Store

          Okay, we know now that Amazon is on the verge of releasing an Android-based app store. But last week, before we knew that, we got an interesting tip that such a move was coming soon — this week, actually. And that tip came with a bonus attached — the tipster also heard that Amazon was going to be releasing an iPad competitor alongside the store.

        • Why Nokia now needs to embrace Android

          Nokia’s open source adventure has come to a grinding halt as Sony Ericsson drops the Symbian platform in favour of Android.

          Given the choice between Symbian and Android, Symbian Foundation members such as Sony Ericsson and Samsung are going for Android.

          Maybe Nokia needs to do the same.

        • Sony Ericsson LiveView acts as a 1.3-inch remote control for your smartphone, requires Android 2.0

          You’ve been asking for someone, anyone, to please kick out a tiny remote control display that can save you from having to whip your smartphone out for every little thing and Sony Ericsson, it seems, has listened. The 1.3-inch OLED screen above is a new Bluetooth accessory for Android 2.x phones that’s said to function very much like a desktop widget.

        • HTC to ship 7-8 million smartphones in 3Q, and 9-10 million in 4Q10, say Taiwan makers

          Taiwan-based vendor HTC will ship an estimated 7-8 million smartphones in the third quarter of 2010 and 9-10 million units in the fourth quarter, and its second-half 2010 smartphone shipment volume will rank fourth behind Nokia, RIM (Research in Motion) and Apple, according to Taiwan-based makers of handset components.

        • T-Mobile G2 preview

          * Software: The G2 runs Android 2.2, and at first glance it really does appear to be running an untarnished, stock build. Unlike the Desire Z, there’s no Sense skin, but, of course, there are some tweaks. We’re assuming these have been made on T-Mobile’s end, but there’s an added pane shortcut, which like Moto’s new skin, lets you jump to different screens without having to swipe through. The app drawer interface has also be beautified with a 3D-like shelf. Still, the experience feels a lot closer to stock Android than anything we’ve seen in a long time, and it feels pretty darn good.

        • T-Mobile G2 Will Not Support Tethering At Launch
        • Android: Open Source or Just an Open Mess?

          I believe, from Archos to Samsung, we should have the ability to use or purchase plain Android at the current version to any device we want. If/when this happens, Google will have achieved its original goal of taking costs out of handsets and allowing anybody to run Android on “any” device. Currently Android is being watered down and neutered by Motorola and Samsung UI’s and carrier chatzki. We are at the carrier’s and manufacturer’s mercy and we will continue to be the loser until Google inserts their power. And it may be too late in light of the recent failure of the Nexus One which was at a least back-handed effort to poke a sharp stick in the eyes of the carriers.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The (r)evolution of operating systems.

    During the proprietary operating systems evolution, a revolution in operating systems started. This open source (which is a special sauce all of it’s own) operating system revolution started out simply enough and was also quite basic. It did have a recipe to follow although the ingredients were all home grown.

    Like the proprietary operating systems these revolutionary operating systems evolved as well. However they were not and would never be a homogenised franchise chain, more like fine restaurants, independently run, offering different, customisable delights yet still following the same basic model. Contrary to the real world, these fine operating system restaurants are free in all respects whereas the proprietary franchises are not.

    This revolution in open source operating systems started out quite a bit later than the proprietary operating systems did. The horse had already left the gate so to speak. This means that the proprietary operating systems had taken just about all of the cake to themselves are were happily munching away.

  • Open Source and Sustainability

    So, people ask me, how does this reduce carbon emissions? There are obviously small energy savings (related to DVD production, packaging, transportation, etc) when an individual downloads software instead of buying it off the shelf. However the big emissions savings occur when large companies that maintain vast amounts of data switch to Open Source. Recently the Bank of New Zealand reduced their energy costs and carbon emissions by converting their front end systems to Open Source.

  • Is Adobe’s open source strategy a commercial consulting trap?

    Adobe Altruism?

    So is Abobe using these open source code dissemination techniques to genuinely “give back” to the community, or it simply “seeding” its software development methodologies more deeply and laying a child-snatching trap for programmers as a result?

  • Events

    • Report from PyCon India 2010

      So I am back from PyCon India 2010. I missed last year, so was waiting for this year’s event. Met many faces after very long time and to be in a place with so many other python lovers is always a nice experience. The total attendance was around 700 but the venue was too big for that number , so except the lunch time, corridors had lesser number of people discussing. The selection of the talks were also matching the environment as they came from different directions. We saw talks with hardware accessibility to web development to GUI application toolkits, network programming, scientific computing, terminal based works etc.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle

    • And now, page 2

      After 20 incredible years at Sun/Oracle, I have decided to try something new.

      This was a very hard decision, and not one made lightly. I have always enjoyed my work, and still do — everything from MTS-2 to Sun Fellow to Oracle VP. I love the people I work with and the technology we’ve created together, which is why I’ve been doing it for so long. But I have always wanted to try doing a startup, and recently identified an opportunity that I just can’t resist. (We are in stealth mode, so that’s all I can say for now.)

    • OpenOffice goes its own way

      After Firefox, OpenOffice may be open-source software’s greatest desktop success story. For years though OpenOffice has stagnated. While under Sun’s management, OpenOffice got off to a great start, the program hasn’t been doing much of anywhere lately. That may be about to change under an independent non-profit group called The Document Foundation.

    • LibreOffice is Born! – Updated

      LibreOffice is being welcomed by Red Hat, Canonical, Google, and Novell, among others, and by both FSF and OSI. Canonical has already committed to shipping LibreOffice. And others are welcome to join the party, including Oracle. If Oracle does jump in, then the name may revert, but in either case, I think it’s a wonderfully refreshing development. I can’t wait to use it. You can download a beta version here already.

    • Larry wants triple money back from Micron

  • Document Foundation/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice.org community members launch the Document Foundation
    • LibreOffice – a community fork for OpenOffice.org
    • LibreOffice – A fresh page for OpenOffice

      While development of the new fork will focus around the developers inherited from Novell, Red Hat and Debian, the project has the support of the great majority of the community surrounding OpenOffice.org; Among those who have expressed support for LibreOffice and the Document Foundation are the Free Software Foundation, the OSI, OASIS, Canonical, credativ and Collabora and the GNOME Foundation.

      The Document Foundation has been presented not so much as a fork as a chance to refresh the development of OpenOffice.org around a broad-based ecosystem that is no longer reliant on the commercial interests of a single company. LibreOffice is not the first fork of OpenOffice.org that has taken place, but previous forks or branches such as Go-OO have only enjoyed limited community support.

    • LibreOffice: OpenOffice.org Liberated

      The idea of creating an OpenOffice.org fork and creating an independent foundation is not new and it has been discussed several times by the OpenOffice.org community and developers outside Sun Microsystems, the previous steward of the OpenOffice.org project. Sun has been often criticized for the way it managed the project. But apparently the hassle of forking OpenOffice.org outweighed the benefits of such move. The acquisition of Sun by Oracle changed the situation.

    • OpenOffice.org Discovers the Joy of Forking

      Rather cheekily, the Document Foundation writes:

      Q: And why are you calling the software “LibreOffice” instead of “OpenOffice.org”?

      A: The OpenOffice.org trademark is owned by Oracle Corporation. Our hope is that Oracle will donate this to to the Foundation, along with the other assets it holds in trust for the Community, in due course, once legal etc issues are resolved. However, we need to continue work in the meantime – hence “LibreOffice” (“free office”).

      Yeah, good luck with that one, people: I can really see Larry handing those “assets” over; not.

      Still, such naïve optimism aside, this is incredibly good news for free software. For some years, I have been worried about the dependence of OpenOffice.org on a commercial sponsor – first Sun, now Oracle. I have long thought that a foundation would be far better for users and coders. Interestingly, the new foundation will not be asking for an assignment of copyright:

    • Hello LibreOffice. One question: Have you played into Ellison’s hand?

      Losing the legal protection afforded to StarOffice/OpenOffice by SUN-Microsoft patent agreement is a worry. But lets put it in perspective. It is at least a year or so away. Microsoft knows that the first thing LibreOffice will do if Microsoft makes any move in this direction is to run to the European Commission and file an antitrust suit on Office (again), draining resources it could use to fight the more important battleground of so-called ‘Cloud’-based services.

      How about the business dimension? Oracle, under Larry Ellison, is know to be ‘predatory’ towards Open Source. They do contributes to open source, in particular, the Linux Kernel. Other than that, the best I can describe their behaviour is a business’ vulture. Don’t believe me, see the Unbreakable Linux campaign or Ellison’s proclamation that “If an Open Source Product Gets Good Enough, We’ll Simply Take It.” What Oracle is doing is above board, but they leave a bad taste in the mouth. So I guess Oracle philosophy is the same as mine: Do as little as possible.

      [...]

      Finally, note that I do not share Alex Brown’s optimism for OOXML adoption in LibreOffice. They are staffed by the same people who rejected it in the first place.

    • Welcome The Document Foundation and LibreOffice
    • Give up spoon-feeding: Use a fork instead.

      Now let’s dwell a bit deeper on what we announced. So why did we announce the birth of The Document Foundation? Why not? A foundation for OpenOffice.org had always been planned. But after ten years, this promise was never fulfilled, and it would seem that the new owner of Sun Microsystems, Oracle, is not keen on engaging too much with the community about this. So we decided to move on by ourselves, and move this project forward. Let’s be frank: Every FLOSS project has its own set of issues. Inside OpenOffice.org we have many issues, even though it’s one of the friendliest and most welcoming community you’ll ever find. But 10 million lines of code that are not easily hackable, a certain heaviness in our process and governance structure made us feel like we had to change something. In fact, I would go as far as claiming that the Document Foundation is the ultimate victory of the old “StarDivision” and I do feel this is their moment of glory, even more so if they choose to join us. We feel that what we’re doing is fundamentally right and is a real opportunity to deliver the promise of Free, Libre and Open Source Software.

    • LibreOffice: The newest member of the ODF family

      So I am very pleased to read in their press release that the Document Foundation is firmly committed to the ODF standard. I encourage them to turn those words into actions and to join the OASIS ODF TC and to participate in the ODF Plugfests. As OASIS ODF TC Chair, I extend to them a warm welcome.

    • OpenOffice.org developers move to break ties with Oracle

      Some developers of the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite announced a break from Oracle on Tuesday, introducing a new name for the project and establishing a new foundation to guide its future.

      They will distribute a version of the open-source office productivity suite under the name “LibreOffice,” under the purview of an independent organization called The Document Foundation.

    • LibreOffice – Google, Novell sponsored OpenOffice fork launched

      The OpenOffice development community have today announced the launch of a new foundation – The Document Foundation – that will oversee, guide and develop a new fork of OpenOffice named ‘LibreOffice’.

      The ‘fork’ seeks to build upon the last 10 years of work that OpenOffice.org and the OpenOffice.org Community have built with the hope that the hand of an independent foundation will guide the software to an even brighter future.

      In contrary to OpenOffice.org it is expected that LibreOffice will no longer recommend the installation of non-open-source extensions.

    • The Launch of the Document Foundation and the Oxymoron of Corporate Controlled “Community” Projects

      …Sun maintained too much control. This reality has played out over and over during the past 30 years – when one or a few companies maintain too much control, others stay away, because they can’t be sure that the project will be managed for everyone’s benefit.

      Knowing that an organization is “safe” to join, and will be managed for the benefit of the many and not of the privileged few, is one of the key attributes and assurances of “openness.”

    • Create an independent OpenOffice.org-Foundation
    • OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers

      Until there’s a decision from Oracle the OpenOffice.org suite will be retain the LibreOffice name. Based on Oracle’s history of responding to community ultimatums, we suggest you get used to LibreOffice.

    • OpenOffice.org Declares Independence From Oracle, Becomes LibreOffice
    • The Document Foundation on Facebook
    • The Document Foundation (LinkedIn)

      The Document Foundation continues to build on the Foundation of ten years’ dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an independent Foundation is the best fit to the Community’s core values of openness, transparency, and valuing people for their contribution. It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community.

    • LibreOffice

      OpenOffice.org has been the killer app for GNU/Linux in schools. The savings on licences for Office alone can justify migrating to GNU/Linux. As Oracle seem not particularly friendly/responsive to FLOSS, this fork may have been inevitable or just a good thing on its own. This action may briefly distrub development but I see a bright future for the software in GNU/Linux.

    • OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

  • Education

    • Educational Tools for my School

      Today I finally got Moodle up and running. It is functioning which is the good news. I still need to add the classes and students to our Moodle instance but within a week, teachers will be able to use it with their class. Moodle is an open source learning management system popular around the world. I am a Sakai guy myself but it is actually more difficult to install and maintain than Moodle.

  • Funding

    • Snort rival launches threat-detection start-up

      The company’s founder, Matt Jonkman, is also president of OISF, which has been receiving funding from the Deptartment of Homeland Security. Jonkman says Emerging Threats Pro depends on private and undisclosed funding not related to OISF.

  • Project Releases

    • GNU Libtasn1 2.8 released

      GNU Libtasn1 is a standalone library written in C for manipulating ASN.1 objects including DER/BER encoding/decoding. GNU Libtasn1 is used by GnuTLS to handle X.509 structures and by GNU Shishi to handle Kerberos V5 structures.

  • Government

    • The Estonian Interoperability Framework adopts the European Licence

      Compiled in 2010 by the Department of State Information Systems (RISO) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia, the Information Society Yearbook reports that software developments done for the government or produced by the government in Estonia will be distributed under the EUPL licence.

  • Licensing

    • Scanning tunneling microscope under GPL3

      ChemHacker has posted schematics and code for a scanning tunneling microscope. [Sacha De'Angeli] finalized the proof-of-concept design for version 0.1 and released all of the information under the Gnu general public license version 3. You’ll need to build a sensor from a combination of a needle, a piezo, and a ring of magnets. There’s an analog circuit that gathers data from the probe, which is then formatted by and Arduino and sent to your computer.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Feedback is a gift

      In the open source software world, the people who give feedback by pointing out bugs in the software are the heroes. In the world of human resources or legal affairs, when I get feedback, it is often not exactly what I am hoping for, but I have found that if I stay open to the possibility that the feedback I am receiving will help the end product, it can be a great source for improvement.

      [...]

      At Red Hat, we have an internal mailing list called memo-list that, since the early days of the company, has been a way for any employee to provide feedback and suggestions. When I first joined the company, I found the open forum, with frequent criticisms and suggestions, to be a “problem.” But over the years, I have observed that some of the ideas shared on memo-list have been true gifts, giving the company feedback that has changed the company for the better. Some feedback on memo-list is simple criticism, without accompanying source code providing a fix, but I would rather know that the concern is there than for people to keep their concerns to themselves. While I find the former ultimately more constructive and helpful, I have come to learn that both forms of feedback are gifts. The real problem would be if we weren’t receiving any gifts of feedback at all.

    • Transparency

      With the Internet having established itself as cheap and omnipresent way of transmitting information, of reaching many many people (given you reach the right multiplicators) we’ve also seen many organizations and groups of people step up to the task and fight for transparency: The EFF, the CCC or projects like the now famous Wikileaks (among others).

      They fight governments and cooperations who hide the “truth” from the public, who make deals against the public interest or funnel away public money into their own pockets and we all should be thankful for those organizations and their work. The world needs whistleblowers and people who dig in the darkness till they find what’s what.

    • Open Data

      • data.open.ac.uk

        data.open.ac.uk is the home of open linked data from The Open University. It is a platform currently developed as part of the LUCERO JISC Project to extract, interlink and expose data available in various institutional repositories of the University and make it available openly for reuse.

  • Programming

    • First service release of Eclipse Helios

      The Eclipse development team has released version 3.6.1 of the open source development environment. This is a first service release of the IDE, which was released in the summer as part of Helios and consists of around 40 Eclipse projects. The new version is primarily a bug fix version and does not contain any new functionality. The release notes provide detailed information on what’s new in Eclipse 3.6.1. The Helios release is made available in more than ten packages which contain pre-configured components for different areas of use, including IDEs for Java, C/C++, RCP/RAP and mobile developers.

Leftovers

  • Taking on Too Much – From Burnout out to Balance one moment at a time!

    I’ve been traveling and speaking more at events, I’ve been helping plan more events and writing blog posts and articles for Linux Pro and Ubuntu User Magazine. As well as staying involved in the Ubuntu Community with my LoCo team, Ubuntu News, and the various Ubuntu Weeks. Needless to say – I love it. But like the saying goes – Too much of a good thing isn’t.

  • Cross-platform bookmark sync service XMarks shutting down

    The plug will be pulled on cross-browser bookmark sync service XMarks in 3 months time, Xmarks CTO Todd Agulnick has announced today, forcing its 2 million users to go elsewhere.

  • AOL reportedly in talks to buy influential tech blog TechCrunch
  • Obama highlights IPv6 issue

    IPv6 is the biggest upgrade in the history of the Internet, but the Obama Administration has only just begun to give IPv6 its attention

  • Interview with Vinton Cerf at Internet Governance Forum 2010

    Here is a transcript and video of the interview I had with Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet and Vice President, Chief Evangelist, Google at the Internet Governance Forum 2010. It followed the session on Managing the Network at the Internet Governance Forum, where a wide range of issues were brought up on the net neutrality debate. I wanted to get his view on how he thought developing countries can ensure that they have access, promote net neutrality as well as use the internet to realise their development goals. He gave a very open, interesting and insightful response and I think that internet stakeholders in developing countries need to look at these issues more closely to ensure that they are connected in a way which is appropriate to the local context, as he points out. Read the transcript and summaries and look at the videos of the interview below.

  • Blue Shield faces class action for physican rating program

    The California Medical Association filed a class action Friday that alleges Blue Shield of California has launched an inaccurate physician rating program that potentially harms doctors and their patients by spreading misinformation and failing to accurately assess patient care.

    Filed in Alameda County Superior Court, the lawsuit alleges Blue Shield went public with the program in June even though the company was aware it was flawed. The complaint seeks a court order to halt the program and inform the public of its deficiencies. It also demands monetary relief and damages.

  • Science

    • Digital Agenda: European Commission announces €780 million boost for strategic ICT research

      Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said: “Increasing overall investment into ICT research is crucial for our future. The EU’s support to our world-class researchers announced today must be accompanied by substantial additional investments by the beneficiaries themselves. This research will help Europe’s industry to strengthen its competitiveness.”

    • Digital Agenda: Major ICT companies join European Commission initiative to reduce electricity consumption
    • NASA v. The Scientists

      Just weeks before the Supreme Court is due to hear a case that has dominated his life for the past three years—and may affect the lives of thousands of fellow government contractors—Robert Nelson’s thoughts are a billion miles away. “Right now I’m sitting at my desk looking at a spectral image of the surface of Titan,” he says by phone from his office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he’s a planetary astronomer.

      Nelson’s role in NASA’s Cassini mission is to pore over data coming back from the probe, which is now in orbit around Saturn. He and his colleagues are investigating evidence that the planet’s largest moon is volcanically active. One of their theories is that ice volcanoes spew a slurry of frozen water and liquid methane onto Titan’s frigid surface.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Just because GM is gaining popularity doesn’t make it right

      To approve or not to approve? The transgenic question is back in the form of the super salmon or the Frankenfish (which sobriquet you pick depends on how GM-tolerant you are). Take a growth gene from another type of salmon, mix with a bit of DNA from the eel-like ocean pout, as US biotech firm, AquaBounty has done, and you get a creature with all the appearance of an Atlantic salmon that is actually produced in a giant, inland tank. AquaBounty has spent 15 years trying to get US regulators to approve the advanced hybrid fish for supermarket shelves and now appears to be very close.

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Comcast Hackers Get 18-Month Prison Sentences
    • WTF worm makes Twitterers declare goat lust

      Another malicious worm hit Twitter over the weekend, days after the micro-blogging site reached near-meltdown from a technically similar attack.

      This time around the danger came from clicking links contained in micro-blogging messages beginning “WTF [URL]“. Last week’s more serious onMouseOver problem struck when users moved their mouse cursor over an infected tweet. These messages contained hidden JavaScript code that exploited a cross-site scripting problem – in the case of the WTF worm a CSRF (cross-site request forgery) technique is in play.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • ✈ Travel Security – A Modest Proposal

      In future, all passengers aboard planes must:

      * Wear secured headphones for safety education and approved entertainment throughout flights, so that passengers cannot communicate with each other for co-ordinated attacks. It’s possible Apple or Sony might sponsor these, reducing costs. This measure will also reduce incidents of unlicensed use of music, especially as people cross market boundaries, so maybe the RIAA will support this.
      * Travel blindfolded. This prevents any awareness of location or time and ensures no targetted use of devices. This additionally defeats attempts to benefit from unlicensed movies, so MPAA sponsorship for the blindfolds is possible.
      * Travel naked. This reduces opportunities for concealment of devices, although security staff will still need to use powerful scanners pre-boarding.
      * Undergo sensory disorientation pre-travel, so that passengers do not know where they are seated or what the time is. This could be combined with the blindfolds and headsets.

    • ICO lets police maintain ANPR location secrecy

      The Information Commissioner’s Office has decided against forcing police to disclose the locations of vehicle tracking cameras.

      The ICO said that Devon and Cornwall Police was correct in refusing to provide the locations of automatic numberplate recognition cameras (ANPR) that it ran in its area following a Freedom of Information request by Kable.

    • More Stories Of People Arrested For Making Joke Threats On Social Networks

      Earlier this year. we wrote about a guy in the UK, Paul Chambers, who was arrested after he tweeted a message about blowing up his local airport if it didn’t reopen in time for the flight he had to take the following week. The message was clearly a joke. Now, as I mentioned at the time, I have no problem with the police doing a quick check to make sure it’s really a joke, but that’s as far as it should go. Instead, the police ended up arresting him under the Terrorist Act and eventually charged him with a crime. They did not charge him with making a fake bomb threat (which is a crime) because they knew that such a charge wouldn’t stand up in court. Instead, they charged him with using the internet to send a “message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” Chambers is back in the news, as he’s now appealing his ridiculous conviction.

    • U.S. Uses Domain Names As New Way to Regulate the Net

      Governments have long sought ways to regulate Internet activity, whether for the purposes of taxation, content regulation, or the application of national laws. Effective regulatory measures have often proven elusive, however, since, unlike the Internet, national laws typically end at the border. Earlier this month, the United States began to move aggressively toward a new way of confronting the Internet’s jurisdictional limitations – the domain name system.

      Domain names are widely used to ensure that email is delivered to the right inbox or to allow users to access a particular website. The system includes a large database that matches the domain name (e.g. michaelgeist.ca) to a specific IP address (i.e. the location of the computer server). The system is used billions of times every day to route Internet traffic to its intended destination.

    • Stop the Internet Blacklist!
    • Cocaine detectors for parents are a terrible idea

      Nearly being arrested for drug smuggling provided me with an excellent introduction to the problem of false positives

    • Afghan stringers are the bedrock of our reporting

      Stringers in Afghanistan, where I am the correspondent for al-Jazeera, are the eyes and ears of the world’s media. Without them, getting a picture of what is going on outside Kabul is almost impossible for a western journalist. Most correspondents don’t often stray from the capital and those embedded with security forces struggle to witness anything not cleared by military censors.

    • Bill Would Give Justice Department Power to Shutter Piracy Sites Worldwide
    • Council workmen blast residents for sweeping up leaves ‘because it’s against the rules’

      Community-minded residents have had a ticking off for sweeping up leaves from outside their homes – because it is against council rules.

      With the first autumn leaves falling onto their street, families in Blakenall, West Midlands, have dutifully been sweeping them up and putting them into their garden recycling bins.

    • Pentagon destroys thousands of copies of Army officer’s memoir

      The Department of Defense recently purchased and destroyed thousands of copies of an Army Reserve officer’s memoir in an effort to safeguard state secrets, a spokeswoman said Saturday.

      “DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security,” Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham said.

    • Misbehaving Federal Prosecutors

      Last week, USA Today published the results of a six-month investigation into misconduct by America’s federal prosecutors. The investigation turned up what Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman called a pattern of “serious, glaring misconduct.” Reporters Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy documented 201 cases in which federal prosecutors were chastised by federal judges for serious ethical breaches, ranging from withholding important exculpatory evidence to lying in court to making incriminating but improper remarks in front of juries.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • We can’t use it – so why the heck are we prospecting for new oil?

      Forget, for a moment, the fragility of the Arctic environment and the likely consequences of a spill there. Forget the dangers of deepwater drilling in a strait plagued by storms and icebergs, and the difficulties – greater than in the Gulf of Mexico – of capping a leaking well there. There’s an even bigger question raised by a British company’s discovery of oil off the coast of Greenland. It’s the same question that is invoked by the decision the British government is expected to make tomorrow: to allow exploration wells to be drilled in deep waters to the west of Shetland. Why the heck are we prospecting for new oil anyway?

    • “Sea Snot” Explosion Caused by Gulf Oil Spill?

      In the weeks after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, scientists surveying the surface near the drill site spotted relatively huge particles—several centimeters across—of sea snot.

      These particularly slimy flakes of “marine snow” are made up of tiny dead and living organic matter, according to Uta Passow, a biological oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    • How global warming is aiding – and frustrating – archaeologists

      Archaeologists have gained an unexpected benefit from global warming. They have discovered melting ice sheets and glaciers are exposing ancient artefacts that had been covered with thick layers of ice for millennia.

      The discoveries are providing new insights into the behaviour of our ancestors – but they come at a price. So rapid is the rise in global temperatures, and so great is the rate of disintegration of the world’s glaciers, that archaeologists risk losing precious relics freed from the icy tombs. Wood rots in a few years once freed from ice while rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather, crumble to dust in days unless stored in a freezer. As a result, archaeologists are racing against time to find and save these newly exposed wonders.

    • Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger

      As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says (sea “mucus” blob pictures).

      And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant.

      Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season’s warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map).

    • An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism

      By liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume, climate catastrophe can be averted without recourse to authoritarianism

  • Finance

    • Senators Slam Goldman, Schiff Slams Senators: “They Have Some Nerve”
    • The Angry Rich

      Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.

      No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.

      These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.

      Yet if you want to find real political rage – the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason – you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

    • New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified

      New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It’s so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being “rich”, or what tax rate is “too much.” But I’ve done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

    • HMRC letters target taxpayers with Swiss bank accounts

      Hundreds of wealthy UK taxpayers have been sent letters by HM Revenue & Customs over possible large-scale tax evasion, the BBC has learned.

    • Resale Fees That Only Developers Could Love

      But four months later, when a local television reporter was doing a story on housing taxes in their subdivision, the Dupaixs discovered that their sales contract included a “resale fee” that allows the developer to collect 1 percent of the sales price from the seller every time the property changes hands — for the next 99 years.

      Mrs. Dupaix, 34, says she and her husband had no clue about the fee when they closed on the house. “Of course we were upset,” she says. “We didn’t know about it, and our closer at the title company didn’t know about it.”

    • Lies in the Name of the Free Market

      A powerful advocacy organization has made a big impact on this midterm election cycle in states across the country. Americans for Job Security (AJS) has spent millions of dollars on attack ads targeting candidates they view as anti-free market. While this group believes in the free exchange of capital, they are vehemently opposed to the free exchange of information, at least when it comes to their sponsors. AJS has routinely denied requests for a list of donors. As a 501(c)(6), they do not have to reveal this information. But the IRS has stated that any 501(c)(6) group whose “primary purpose” is political activity, must name their donors. The Washington Post reports that AJS spends the vast majority of its budget on television and radio ads before elections. Groups such as Public Citizen have complained to the IRS about AJS’ abuse of its tax-exempt status. But the ambiguous nature of the IRS’ “primary purpose” standard has allowed AJS to continue spewing attack ads every election cycle.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Pesticide Industry to Use Tax Dollars to Attack Critics

      The California Department of Food and Agriculture has awarded $180,000 in federal funds to finance an agribusiness-chemical industry plan to combat its critics – Environmental Working Group and other health, consumer and organic farming advocates who have campaigned against overuse of pesticides on food crops.

      The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF), a Watsonville, California, trade association representing more than 50 large produce growers and marketers and pesticide and fertilizer suppliers, is slated for a slice of California’s $17.5 million share of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Specialty Crops Block Grant program, which Congress set up in 2004 to improve “efficiency, productivity and profitability” in farming of vegetables, fruits, nuts and flowers. The 2008 farm bill expanded the specialty crops program, mandating that USDA distribute $55 million in state block grants in 2010, and the same for 2011 and 2012, to advance “buy local” campaigns and other efforts to make produce, nuts and flower crops more competitive.

    • Honda secures naming rights for Rose Parade

      The three-year deal marks the first time the iconic parade will have a corporate sponsor and the first name change in the parade’s 121-year history.

    • Pastors plan to ‘bait’ IRS with pulpit politics

      On Sunday, a group of 100 preachers nationwide will step into the pulpit and say the only words they’re forbidden by law from speaking in a church.

      They plan to use the pulpit as a platform for political endorsements, flouting a federal law that threatens churches with the loss of their nonprofit status if they stray too far into partisan politics.

      While other church and nonprofit leaders cringe at the deliberate mix of the secular and the religious, participants in the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday protest hope this act of deliberate lawbreaking will lead to a change in the law.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Buckyballs magnet magnates bully scrappy Zen Magnets: video response

      Basically, this video’s got everything: consumer advocacy, magnets, science, copyright abuse. It’s about the classiest response I can imagine to a legal threat. Let’s hope Zen sells a lot of magnets off the back of it.

    • Copyrights

      • ACS:Law: When bad things happen to bad people

        For some time now English law firm ACS:Law has been in the middle of controversy for its use of dubious tactics against copyright infringers. ACS:Law’s cause célèbre is that they became famous when they teamed-up with porn producers and then they started sending cease-and-desist letters to people claiming that they had been sharing adult content, including some German gay porn (why is Germany the home of gay porn by the way? Inquiring minds demand to know). The business model seemed to be to ask for off-court settlement, or the allegations would be taken to court. Most people paid off to have the accusations go away, possibly to avoid embarrassment. However, many of the targets got together and complained to consumer-rights magazine Which? who in turn filed a complaint to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA). The complaint was serious enough that it got referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT), who are currently investigating ACS:Law for unethical practices.

      • Political Forum Fights Back Against Righthaven Copyright Troll Suit

        The online political discussion forum Democratic Underground is fighting back against a lawsuit filed by copyright troll Righthaven LLC, arguing in court documents filed Monday that the short excerpt of a news article at issue in the suit is a clear case of fair use.

        Democratic Underground — represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Winston & Strawn LLP, and attorney Chad Bowers — was sued by Righthaven on August 10 for a five-sentence excerpt of a Las Vegas Review-Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, with a link back to the Review-Journal website. Righthaven has brought over 130 lawsuits in Nevada federal court claiming copyright infringement, even though they do not create, produce or distribute any content. Instead, they create lawsuits by scouring the Internet for content from Review-Journal stories posted on blogs and online forums, acquiring the copyright to that particular story from Stephens Media LLC (the Review-Journal’s publisher), and then suing the poster for infringement.

      • Pandora and Canadian Copyright Royalties

        And therein lies the crux of this story: Pandora and Re:Sound, one of the copyright collectives from which Pandora needs to obtain a license to stream music in Canada, are still in the midst of negotiations about the royalties which Pandora would be obliged to pay.

      • US ISP Suddenlink Claims The DMCA Requires They Disconnect Users

        The DMCA has no requirement that ISPs disconnect people after three accusations (not convictions) — and it especially doesn’t say that ISPs don’t need to offer a refund when they do this. For all the fighting by the record labels trying to get a three strikes policy into law and complaining about the DMCA, perhaps it makes them happy to know that some ISPs are simply pretending the DMCA is a three strikes policy.

      • Multinational copyright companies will require French ISPs turn over 150,000 subscriber names and addresses per day

        France’s “3-strikes” rule comes into effect this week, and multinational corporations are already flooding French ISPs with more than 10,000 requests a day for the personal information of accused infringers; they estimate that this number will go up to 150,000 users/day shortly. Once a user has received three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement, the entire household is cut off from the Internet for a year, and it becomes a crime for any other ISP to connect that family or household. The only opportunity to defend yourself from the charge is a brief “traffic-court”-like streamlined judiciary.

      • Pirate Bay filesharing appeal opens in Sweden

        Four founders and financiers of filesharing site The Pirate Bay, who last year were sentenced to a year in prison, opened their appeal bid to get the verdict overturned in Stockholm on Tuesday.

      • ACS:Law gets a threatening letter in the post

        The fallout from the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against ACS:Law’s website has gone far beyond just punting the firm’s website offline. After the attack, the website came back online with a 350MB file containing emails and a list of over 5,000 Sky Broadband customers that the firm has claimed illegally downloaded pornography.

        It is this file that looks to have placed ACS:Law in trouble with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The regulatory body primarily deals with the Data Protection Act, though it also concerns itself with various other privacy and information laws, and earlier this year was given the power to investigate and issue fines of up to £500,000 for such a breach of the Data Protection Act.

      • Porn studios borrowing from RIAA playbook with P2P lawsuits

        The porn industry, long plagued by piracy, has apparently had enough and is beginning to band together to target infringers. Like a move straight out of the RIAA playbook, some companies are beginning to file lawsuits en masse against anonymous P2P users, and have also begun to formulate ways to target sites like YouPorn and PornTube, where users often upload copyrighted clips of their favorite porn movies.

      • ACTA

        • Notes on ACTA Meeting Emerge

          Last Friday September 27, ACTA host Japan sponsored a lunch mixer with NGOs and almost no one came. By one account, there may have been as few at three NGOs there. Requests to the Japan and US delegations to release a list of who attended the meeting have gone unanswered. But a few details have begun to emerge. There is little to counter the widespread perception that the meeting was designed to thwart rather than engage the expression of civil society views on the negotiation.

          The meeting was an informal lunch with negotiators scattered at tables rather than structured in a means for dialogue. This is similar to the D.C. “mixer” and in contrast to Lucerne. In Lucerne the delegates requested written questions in advance and answered them in a structured dialogue around a conference table. Everything was on the record, which led to many news stories based on meeting notes released from those present. In DC and now Tokyo the engagement was more informal with no opportunities for formal question and answers of the group.

        • ACLU Settles Student-Cell-Phone-Search Lawsuit With Northeast Pennsylvania School District
        • MPs have not examined ACTA, says IPO

          The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has confirmed that no text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been shared with MPs or the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.1 Parliament has not been involved in the negotiating process either.

          No democratic institution in the UK has seen the ACTA draft. There has been no democratic scrutiny of the text, Parliament has been shut out of this process. This draft agreement lacks legitimacy before it is even agreed.

      • Digital Economy (UK)

        • The ACS Law leak shows that the Digital Economy Act carries huge privacy risks

          Unwarranted private surveillance, plus incompetence, have led to a huge leak of sensitive personal data from ACS:Law.

          Information about individual alleged infringers appears to have been contained within the emails leaked at the weekend.

          While reports have concentrated on the “attack” by 4Chan users that brought their webserver down, the more important questions are:

          (a) Why did ACS:Law host email files and sensitive information in a place that could easily be exposed to the public?

          (b) Is it legal and permissible to collect and process such information from torrents without permission or knowledge? As we have reported, the EU Data protection authorities think the answer is probably ‘no’. Now the world can see why.

Clip of the Day

Ludovic Courtès – “Libchop – a library for distributed storage and data backup”


Credit: TinyOgg

09.27.10

Links 27/9/2010: Audiocasts, Fedora 14 Preview

Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source vs Proprietary Software – The never ending Battle

    Open Source provides solutions at the lowest costs possible or at no cost at all while Proprietary Software promises the provision of the best-in-the-business solutions at a higher cost.

  • Welcoming OpenIndiana

    Perhaps it’s not fair to make a judgement call so early given that this is OpenIndiana’s first release and they’re just getting started, but this initial offering felt more like an early beta than a final release. The system is stable and there are some good features in place. I liked the installer and the Device Driver Utility is a great point in the operating system’s favour. Hardware support was a little better this time around than it was a year ago on OpenSolaris. But the heavy nature of the operating system combined with the fickle privilege escalation and small package repository makes OpenIndiana an unappealing choice right now for a desktop system. Hopefully these matters will get ironed out as the project matures.

    There is one other thing I feel should be addressed. OpenIndiana seems to be lacking a focus. It has its roots in server technology, but it has become memory hungry, runs a desktop and uses a graphical installer. On the other hand it lacks the range of applications and drivers one might expect in a desktop system. Some people have told me it’s more of a testing ground for people migrating, testing and developing across platforms, but if that’s the case where are the great development tools and virtualization software?

    The wonderful tools which were previously attracting people to OpenSolaris (ZFS, DTrace) have been ported to other operating systems. OpenIndiana doesn’t showcase Sun/Oracle technology; all it really does is give people an open source version of Solaris. And, if you’re into tweaking operating systems or you’re considering a migration to Oracle solutions, then I suppose that’s all OpenIndiana needs to be. As a former fan of Solaris, I was hoping to find something which stood out, something the operating system could hang its hat on, and I didn’t find that. OpenIndiana isn’t a bad system by any means, but I haven’t found a reason, besides curiosity, to run it either.

  • Will Code For Beer

    People ask me why programmers write code and give it away “for free”. There are many reasons, but one I often give is that a programmer might end up at a conference and a grateful user of their code might “buy them a beer, or even a dinner.”

    It was February or March of 1995, and the port of Linux to the Alpha processor was well underway. In talking with some of the developers over the Internet, I started to hear rumors that the Alpha port would not have “shared libraries”, but instead would have statically-linked binaries.

    For those of you who do not understand the ramifications of statically linked binaries, it means that every program has all of the libraries it needs to run linked as one blob on the disk and even in the main memory of the computer with the rest of the code that the programmer wrote.

    In the early days of programming this was not as horrible as it sounds, because few libraries existed that could really be “shared”, but as operating systems became more sophisticated and included math libraries, graphics libraries, security libraries and a variety of other functionality that could be shared between programs, the duplication of this code thousands of times on an individual system by linking it into every program took up huge amounts of disk space and additional memory space that became intolerable.

  • 60 Great Open Source Developer Tools

    If you’re looking for good open source developer tools, you literally have thousands to choose from. For this list, we focused on 60 of the best and most well known. Rather than trying to rank them, we’ve arranged them into categories and listed them in alphabetical order.

    That said, we’re sure to have left off a few (or perhaps even a few dozen) that deserve to be included. Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.

    One quick note about operating systems: Many of these open source developer tools run on a wide range of OSes. In some cases, they support more than a hundred different platforms.

    For the sake of keeping the list short and readable, we noted whether each developer tool supports the big three – Windows, Linux and OS X. If you want to know whether a particular tool will run on Solaris or FreeBSD or another platform, you can click the link to check its Web site.

  • Web Browsers

  • CMS/Social

    • Highlights of the First Week

      The community’s response to our release has been amazing. Within the first week of releasing code to developers, Diaspora is the 10th most popular project on Github with over 2500+ watchers. We’ve had 412 forks of Diaspora to date, and about a half a million views of the code as well. Many people have gotten the alpha running on their own machines, and have provided countless bug reports and feature requests.

    • Beyond Diaspora: Another Facebook alternative has a head start

      StatusNet is a free software, aka “open source”, microblogging platform (e.g. Twitter). It successfully federates, and better yet, Diaspora has promised to implement OStatus, the same set of standards used by StatusNet so that if and when Diaspora goes public, users on each will be able to connect with each other seamlessly. Diaspora also promised to be free software under the GNU AGPL, same as StatusNet.[10] The most popular public instance is Identi.ca and you can sign up to try it for yourself. StatusNet alone may be a suitable replacement for Twitter, but by itself it doesn’t provide the same functionality as Facebook.

      This is where GNU Social comes in. GNU social aims to extend the StatusNet to provide the capabilities of a full social network. It will incorporate additional features for controlling privacy settings and sharing pictures or video, and it will display all of this in an interface that’s designed not for a microblogging site, but rather for a complete social networking site. The distinction between GNU social and StatusNet is a bit confusing as they has a unique relationship: when development on the original version of GNU social stalled, the developers looked for another codebase to work on. The result was the social/status alliance, between GNU social and StatusNet. Both projects are co-dependent and contain code from either other, thanks in no small part to the hard work of Craig Andrews of GNU social, and Evan Prodromou of StatusNet.

    • Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress

      Microsoft’s killing another me-too Web 2.0 service, sinking its fledgling Live Spaces blog network and shifting 30 million users to WordPress.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Telephony Statement on new Internet Surveillance Laws

      Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.

      Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.

    • Happy 27th Birthday GNU Project!

      A hearty Happy 27th Birthday to the GNU Project! Here is a link to the original announcement of the GNU Project posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Without the GNU project FOSS as we know it today would not exist. Thank You to everyone who works and has worked on the GNU project over the last 27 years. You have helped make the world a better place. We at LXer take our hats off to you.

  • Government

  • Licensing

    • Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works

      What is this “Free Culture” thing? What is “Free Software”? And how do I get my work out there? If you’re looking to participate in the “Commons”, you’ll need to get comfortable with the idea of free, public licenses and how to use them for your works. This won’t be hard at all, especially with this short guide, but there are different traditions that have sprung up around different kinds of works.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Digital Primer Video Available from the Xiph.Org Foundation

      Today, the Xiph.Org Foundation announced that they have released the first of a series of videos aimed at teaching us geeks what video is really all about. From the xiph.org site:

      “The program offers a brief history of digital media, a quick summary of the sampling theorem, and myriad details of low level audio and video characterization and formatting. It’s intended for budding geeks looking to get into video coding, as well as the technically curious who want to know more about the media they wrangle for work or play.”

Leftovers

  • Science

    • This is a news website article about a scientific paper

      In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

      In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.

      If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Feds Pushing For New Legally Required Wiretap Backdoor To All Internet Communications

      It’s difficult to see how this is any different than foreign governments demanding access to others’ communications as well. It’s pretty ridiculous for President Obama to talk about open internet principles to the UN, while cooking this up at the same time. Pushing for this also means that the US will have no excuse when the governments of Iran, China and elsewhere also demand backdoors into all US-based communications.

      And, really, that’s the biggest problem with this law. Beyond the inevitable privacy violations by the feds, putting backdoors into communications technologies guarantees that those backdoors will be used by others (outside of the federal government) to snoop on communications. The FBI and the NSA (who are pushing for this) are being totally and completely naive if they think that they’re the only ones who will use this. We’ve pointed out in the past how large scale surveillance systems mean large scale security risks, and this is no different. We showed how a similar surveillance system in Greece was hacked into to spy on government officials. US officials should be aware that they’re opening themselves up to these same potential risks.

    • Government Seeks Back Door Into All Our Communications

      For a decade, the government backed off of attempts to force encryption developers to weaken their products and include back doors, and the crypto wars seemed to have been won. (Indeed, journalist Steven Levy declared victory for the civil libertarian side in 2001.) In the past ten years, even as the U.S. government has sought (or simply taken) vastly expanded surveillance powers, it never attempted to ban the development and use of secure encryption.

      Now the government is again proposing to do so, following in the footsteps of regimes like the United Arab Emirates that have recently said some privacy tools are too secure and must be kept out of civilian hands.

    • Pentagon Seeks to Establish Basis for 1970`s Espionage Act Against Wikileaks

  • Finance

    • Geithner Calendar: Met Goldman’s Blankfein More Often Than Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, Boehner (EXCLUSIVE)

      Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has shown up on Geithner’s calendar at least 38 times through March 2010 since the Treasury Secretary took office in January 2009, three more entries than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 13 more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly four times as many as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner combined, according to a copy of Geithner’s daily log recently published online by the Treasury Department. The imbalance is striking, considering that Geithner was heavily involved in financial regulatory reform legislation, which Congress was grappling with during the period covered by the calendar.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

Clip of the Day

Nathan Evans – “DHT and routing in GNUnet”


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 27/9/2010: PlayOS GNU/Linux is Coming to PS3, Canonical Cooperates With Taiwanese Hardware Companies

Posted in News Roundup at 1:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 6 More Blender Made Movies and Animations You Probably Haven’t Seen Before

    Like two weeks ago, we featured some of best and most popular blender made short movies in our 8 stunning blender made short films and animations post. Now, let’s take the road less traveled. The blender movies we are going to showcase here are those rare ones which you guys probably haven’t seen before.

  • The open source organization: good in theory or good in reality?

    Most likely, these new employees will rebel with their feet. They’ll join a new breed of organization designed from scratch, like Red Hat, Google, and 100s of other yet unknown companies, built from the ground up to operate efficiently in an open world.

    Old-skool companies will have a tough time attracting the best young talent. And if they are losing the race for top talent, they be hard pressed to stay competitive.

    So this is why I love to talk about applying the open source way in organizations, even when I know that many of today’s corporate cultures would chew open source principles up and spit them out.

    I’m just running with the wind.

  • Oracle

    • Oracle aims to boost client-side Java with JavaFX improvements

      At the Oracle OpenWorld event, the database giant revealed some details about its Java roadmap. Oracle unsurprisingly wants to continue improving Java Enterprise Edition, but the company also highlighted its commitment to improving client-side Web support and mobile application development with JavaFX.

      The Java programming language plays an important role in facilitating third-party mobile application development, but the standard J2ME stack is increasingly being displaced on smartphones by custom frameworks or native toolkits because it doesn’t enable developers to create competitive user experiences. Java has long since lost to Flash for client-side Web development for similar reasons.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The benefits of publicness

      I’m reworking an early but foundational section of my book, Public Parts, arguing the benefits of publicness, a list I presented at the PII conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. I’d like to bounce my thoughts off you and ask for your views of the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole. I won’t go into great detail in this list because I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

    • Learning to Share, Thanks to the Web

    • Open Data

Leftovers

  • The Grumpy Editor’s Twitter experience

    Your editor, being the grumpy, older sort that he is, must confess that he has never quite understood the allure of services like Twitter. 140-Character broadcasts look an awful lot like a combination of the worst features of cellular short messaging and Usenet; it’s conversation via bumper sticker. A local disaster recently pushed your editor to spend more time on the site; what follows are some observations, somewhat tenuously tied to the world of free software.

  • Keynote at the Coffee Party’s Mock Constitutional Convention

    25 September, 2010, Louisville, KY: Keynote given at the Coffee Party’s Conference, launching the “mock constitutional convention” that I hosted with Mark McKinnon. This extends the argument for Citizen Funded Elections, linking the movement to what I have elsewhere called “neo-progressives.” ;

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • A Tale of Two Root Exploits, and Why We Shouldn’t Panic

      “The article is alarmist,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson, referring to a warning about a kernel bug. “It was ONE shared-hosting public-facing server at iWeb.com, among their tens of thousands of servers. “Are you running a publicly-facing shared-host server? No? Then don’t worry about it, and when your distro comes out with a new kernel, just update.”

    • Man gets 10 years for VoIP hacking

      A Venezuelan man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service.

      Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served.

      Pena was sentenced by Judge Susan Wigenton in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on computer hacking and wire fraud charges.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret”

      At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That’s not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

    • Blackwater’s ‘black ops’ for European multinationals

      Here’s a question: what do Monsanto, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and the Netherlands police have in common with the US Military’s European Command?

      The answer, as Jeremy Scahill – author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army – explains in The Nation, is that they have all availed themselves of the services of one of the most controversial private security companies on the planet. Here’s most of the article…

    • U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet
    • Sept. 26, 1983: The Man Who Saved the World by Doing … Nothing

      A Soviet ballistics officer draws the right conclusion — that a satellite report indicating incoming U.S. nuclear missiles is, in fact, a false alarm — thereby averting a potential nuclear holocaust.

      Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system, when the alarm bells went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites signaled Moscow that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

    • ‘The Only Option Left for Me Is an Orderly Departure’

      In an interview with SPIEGEL, Daniel Schmitt — the 32-year-old German spokesman for WikiLeaks who is also the organization’s best-known personality after Julian Assange — discusses his falling out with the website’s founder, his subsequent departure and the considerable growing pains plaguing the whistleblower organization.

    • Small Change

      Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

      Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución.

    • U.S. should be able to shut Internet, former CIA chief says

      Cyberterrorism is such a threat that the U.S. president should have the authority to shut down the Internet in the event of an attack, Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said.

      Hayden made the comments during a visit to San Antonio where he was meeting with military and civilian officials to discuss cyber security. The U.S. military has a new Cyber Command which is to begin operations on October 1.

  • Finance

    • DMCA As Censorship: Citibank Doesn’t Want You To Remember What It Said About Obama’s Bank Reform Policy

      We’ve been discussing quite a bit lately how copyright law is often used not as a tool to provide incentive to create, but as a tool for censorship. Here’s the latest example. John Bennett points us to the news that Citigroup filed a DMCA takedown request with WordPress.com over the site LBO-news’ 18-month old post that presented a copy a Citigroup analysis of Obama’s (then new) bank reform plan, which noted that it was actually quite bank-friendly. The key quote in the report: “the US government is following a relatively bank-friendly, investor-friendly approach.”

    • The Open University’s Patrick McAndrew: Open Education and Policy

      At the beginning of this year we announced a revised approach to our education plans, focusing our activities to support of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. In order to do so we have worked hard to increase the amount of information available on our own site – in addition to an Education landing page and the OER portal explaining Creative Commons’ role as legal and technical infrastructure supporting OER, we have been conducting a series of interviews to help clarify some of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today’s education landscape.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

      In an effort that raises fresh questions about privacy, officials are preparing to seek sweeping new Internet regulations, arguing that they are losing their capability to track suspects.

    • PI appeals to European Parliament to reconsider blocking measures

      In an open letter to the European Parliament, PI calls on MEPs to reconsider proposals to introduce internet blocking measures.

    • Privacy International launching legal action against ACS Law

      Privacy International (PI) has announced that it is planning legal action against controversial solicitors ACS: Law Solicitors (ACS Law), alleging a breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA).

      ACS Law, which is already under fire for sending letters to people alleged of copyright infringement, had its website hit by a denial of service (DoS) attack last Tuesday.

      The firm quickly suspended the site, but soon afterwards a file alleged to contain an archive of the firm’s email was uploaded to file sharing websites.
      Advertisement

      PI said this has led to the exposure of personal information of around 10,000 people alleged to have been involved in illegal file sharing.

    • Adult video-sharing list leaked from law firm

      The personal details of thousands of Sky broadband customers have been leaked on to the internet, alongside a list of pornographic movies they are alleged to have shared online.

      The list, seen by BBC News, details the full names and addresses of over 5,300 people thought by law firm ACS:Law to be illegally sharing adult films.

      It appeared online following an attack on the ACS:Law website.

      The UK’s Information Commissioner said it would investigate the leak.

      Privacy expert Simon Davis has called it “one of the worst breaches” of the Data Protection Act he had ever seen.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • FCC approves white-space use for unlicensed ‘Super WiFi’

      When the Federal Communications Commission issued its press release about the approval of additional unlicensed spectrum in what are called “white spaces,” it referred to the coming technologies as “Super WiFi.”

      In reality, it’s not clear that this previously unavailable set of unused frequencies will necessarily become anything that resembles WiFi. As the FCC points out in its statement, this is spectrum space that’s going to be available to a wide range of technologies, of which wireless broadband is only one. Even if this turns out to be a significant use of these white space frequencies, it’s not clear whether WiFi (or something like it) will be related in any way.

    • The Carriers’ Rebellion

      Before the Steve Jobs hypnosis session, AT&T ruled. Handsets, their prices, branding, applications, contractual terms, content sales…AT&T decided everything and made pennies on each bit that flowed through its network. Then the Great Mesmerizer swept the table. Apple provided the hardware, the operating system, and “everything else”: applications, music, ringtones, movies, books… The iTunes cash register rang and AT&T didn’t make a red cent on content.

    • Revenge of the Titans 1.52, and Very Cool DRM

      Since the year 350BC, Puppygames have all had DRM. Oh noes!!11!! Shock! Horror! Puppygames have DRM! Boycott all their shitty games! Find inferior open source / Flash alternatives and say you’d rather play them all day than give evil Puppygames a single cent of your filthy lucre! Use DRM as an excuse to install Trojan riddled spyware installs of Puppygames!

      Well, except Puppygames DRM is a bit different to other flavours of DRM.

      Nasty Big Corporation Ltd’s idea of DRM is that you are all thieving piratey scum who shouldn’t be trusted alone in a shop without being closely monitored by a big hairy security guard. Nasty Big Corporation Ltd likes to install rootkits on your PC. They like to insist on always-online validation to a server that sometimes goes titsup and stops you from playing. They’re pretty insistent that if you install the game on a couple of PCs that you’re probably just a filthy pirate, and that if you want to install it on your kid’s computer upstairs as well that you owe them another $59. Certain ones also reckon if you’re dissatisfied with a game in any way and want your money back you damned well can’t have it, and if you then go to the trouble of extracting the money back out of your credit card company, they erase all your games without any comeback, because unfortunately the small print dialog box you clicked through to get to your game said you agreed to this.

      Puppygames does it completely the opposite way around!

      Firstly and foremostly: if you don’t like our games, or they don’t work, we always refund you. Although we say no questions asked, we do like to ask anyway :) But we’ll never say no. Though we’d like to point out a couple of things: if the demo works, so does the full game, so you’d be kinda daft to buy the game without trying the demo first; and if you honestly didn’t think the full game was worth the cash, don’t be expecting to play it after asking for a refund, because it will mysteriously turn back into a demo again. What! You have a back door! I hear you cry. No, it’s a front door, and here’s me telling you about it. If your game is refunded because it doesn’t work or you don’t like it, it’ll connect to Puppygames, and find out, and turn back into a demo. Which of course should be just fine with you. Can you ever imagine a position where we’ll abuse this ability? No, because we’d look like total dicks.

      To date, only 18 customers have ever asked for a refund in 7 years. Because we use BMTMicro as our payment provider we’ve never had a single chargeback issued to us either, because we always refund.

      Secondly, we want you to share the full game with your friends and family. Yes, that’s right. We encourage you to spread the love to the people you care about. A Puppygames registration has your full name and email address encoded into it from your order (we’ve got your full postal address too, but that doesn’t get sent to the client any more). We think that anyone you care to share this information with, you probably trust enough to share your CDs and books with too, and so we also think you’d share your games with them. Your name flickers up on the title screen for a few seconds when the game starts just to remind everyone whose game it is, and then it fades away.

    • BBC DRM response from Ofcom and intial thoughts

      So the key confidential arguments that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 used to convince Ofcom to permit DRM on the HD Freeview signal are to be kept secret because there is no public interest test to compel disclosure of that information under sections 41 and 44 of the Freedom of Information Act.

    • DRM In (and Out) of Schools

      There are two major reasons why Kindles and iPads have no place in schools, both of which are related to DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).

      1. DRM prevents learning. It’s the information that is a resource. The access to this information is provided by tools. DRM actually makes it illegal for students to keep learning past a certain point, by preventing them from looking closely at how the devices work or from making their own methods for accessing, using, and sharing the information.
      2. DRM is, in the words of a guy I almost knew, “jus’ morally wrong.” Forcing DRM on people, even more so.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Leaked Emails Reveal Profits of Anti-Piracy Cash Scheme

        Friday night the anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law accidentally published its entire email archive online, effectively revealing how the company managed to extract over a million dollars (£636,758.22) from alleged file-sharers since its operation started. On average, 30% of the victims who were targeted paid up, and this money was divided between the law firm, the copyright holder and the monitoring company.

      • Streaming video introduces a new wave of Internet piracy

        University of Southern California student Elizabeth watched the season finale of HBO’s lusty vampire drama “True Blood” along with about 5.4 million television viewers.

      • Pirate Party Elects New Leader

        The election initially had 4 candidates – Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, Graeme Lambert, and Eric Priezkalns, however Erc and Graeme withdrew before the end of the nominations period, meaning voting was between Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, and the Re-Open Nominations option.

      • High-Profile, High Damages File-Sharing ‘Conviction’ Was a Farce

        In 2008, lawyers Davenport Lyons courted the mainstream media with the news that a court had found a woman guilty of sharing the game Dream Pinball 3D, an action which cost her around £16,000. Anyone with an understanding of these cases knew that something was wrong and now, thanks to yet more information from the leaked ACS:Law emails, we learn that this ‘conviction’ was built on foundations of sand.

      • In Copyright’s Future (IMG)
      • Copyright law needs a digital-age upgrade

        Did you ever imagine you could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends?

        If you did not get the copyright owner’s permission for these actions, you could be violating the law. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works.

        The statutory damage rule of U.S. copyright law originally was designed to provide some compensation to copyright owners when harm from infringement was difficult to prove. U.S. law authorizes judges and juries to award such damages in any amount between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work – and up to $150,000 per work if the infringement is deemed willful – without proof of any actual harm. The statute says the award should be “just” but provides no guidance about what this means. In one extreme case, a jury ordered an individual file sharer to pay nearly $2 million in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs. Is that really “just”?

      • Esther Wojcicki becomes CC’s Vice Chair, focused on learning and education

        We’re excited to announce that Esther Wojcicki, current Chair of the Creative Commons board, esteemed and award-winning teacher, and leader at the nexus of education and technology, will become CC’s Vice Chair focused on learning and education. CC’s current CEO, Joi Ito, will step into the role of both Chair and CEO.

      • The Pirate Bay Appeal Starts Tomorrow

        Last year The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. Tomorrow the appeal of the trial will start, but unlike last time there is is an awkward silence in the media, blogs and even on The Pirate Bay. Is this the proverbial calm before the storm, or perhaps a change of course?

      • ACTA

        • IPRED2 pulled

          Ironically the IPRED2 failed to get Council consensus but the EU is negotiating via the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade agreement criminal measures with third nations which go beyond IPRED2, for instance include patent infringments which were explicitly excluded in the IPRED2 process. The ACTA criminal chapter also does not get the European Parliament involved in the legislative process and includes no fair use clause.

Clip of the Day

Matthias Wachs – “Low level transports and transport selection in GNUnet”


Credit: TinyOgg

09.26.10

Links 26/9/2010: More Oracle and Java, Defenders of Software Freedom in the New York Times

Posted in News Roundup at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Krita – The KDE Answer to GIMP

        I was recently browsing through various Linux news sites and bumped into this article, a taste of a comic done in Krita, the KDE painting and image editor application, which is part of the KOffice suite. Now I rarely use image editors, and I’m totally untalented at it, but when I do, I use GIMP for basic cropping, coloring or other simple stuff. Anyway, I remembered I only tried Krita once, in KDE 3, and I was a little dissatisfied with it (can’t remember exactly why), so at the time I decided to stay with GIMP. This is why this article brought Krita again in my attention, so I decided to give it a spin and see how it looks like.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Device update: The latest multifunction innovations

      In the meantime, I’ve still been able to dig up a few exciting announcements and breaking news stories. In last week’s update I referenced a study by Informa Telecoms & Media. While that study reported large growth in the ereader market, it also predicted that by 2014 dedicated ereaders would eventually lose favor to multifunctional portable devices. The material include in this week’s update shows strong support for that conclusion.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • The 5 Most-Used Android Apps on My Phone
        • Google’s Schmidt says requiring stock Android would violate ‘the principle of open source’

          The suggestion has been made countless times that manufacturers who customize their devices’ builds of Android (that is to say, nearly all of them) should have the decency to offer users the option of reverting to a completely clean, stock version of the platform if they so choose. The concept came up at a press lunch featuring Google CEO Eric Schmidt last week, and the dude responded with an interesting explanation for why they don’t require that of their partners: “if we were to put those type of restrictions on an open source product, we’d be violating the principle of open source.”

    • Tablets

      • Dell, Samsung Android iPad rivals demo’d

        First up, we have a segment from Michael Dell’s OracleWorld keynote, which, as we reported yesterday, involved the CEO whipping out the upcoming 7in Streak tablet.

      • HP has a tablet

        HP would not say which operating system runs on the tablet. HP is trying out almost every operating system on the market at the moment other than Mac OS X. It even has Palm’s WebOS to play with. The Times of India seems to think that it is running Android 2.1, but without access to the Android App store. It thinks the tablet will be a bit limited.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Tweet Nest Archives Your Tweets for Easy Reference

    Tweet Nest is a free, open source app that stores all your tweets on your server for easy storage and backup. This is particularly handy for people who tweet frequently, since Twitter archives tweets on its own servers for about two weeks.

  • A Brief History: 35 Years of Open Source Software
  • CSIS Updates Open Source Policy Survey

    e CSIS documents when Red Hat began its own research into open source policies and initiatives, published as the Open Source Index in 2008. At that time the CSIS report had identified about 250 open source policies, so it’s impressive to see a growth of more than 100 policies in the past two years. While some of these policies are smaller in scope, some are fairly major, setting forth national-level policies effecting trans-national IT transformation, such as the establishment of the Asia Open Source Software Center, which was created by joint R&D policies of China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Or the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), which called for a study and report on the availability of open source health IT systems (Section 4104(b)).

  • The enterprise market is not walking away from open source

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 beta 7 dev going slow, RC1 not due until late October

        Firefox 4 Beta 6 was released on September 14. Beta 7, which is currently under development, is slated for release sometime in the second half of September and the first release candidate is expected to be delivered in the second half of October.

        These dates are very tentative. Based on the discussion at the group’s weekly meeting Tuesday, much work needs to be done before the next beta is released. There are currently 51 blockers that need to be fixed before beta 7 ships, and a total number of 758 blockers identified in the code.

  • SaaS

    • Guest Post: How the Cloud is Changing the Way SysAdmins Work

      Cloud computing provides the ability to elastically expand and contract a large number of systems in terms of processing power, network throughput, disk storage, and memory. In order to keep up with this fast paced and on-demand resource availability, system administrators are turning to open source automation tools to reduce the costs of configuration management, mitigate the problems associated with platform and operating system management, and provide an extremely fast time to market for new services.

    • There Can Only Be So Many Winners in the Cloud

      Red Hat is a smart company, and has built a flourishing business around delivering top-notch support for its Linux offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is due out in a promising new version 6 later this year. But as enterprises become more dependent on the cloud, will they drift toward established huge companies or be willing to trust smaller players like Red Hat?

  • Oracle

    • Oracle Still Shows Few Signs of Open Java Goals

      I agree with the points that Blankenhorn makes, except that Oracle’s attitude correlates with “failing.” Microsoft built a huge pile of money pursuing goals that weren’t open, and boxing out competitors who were open. But Blankenhorn is correct that Oracle’s general business stance raises questions about its attitude toward opportunity creation.

      With regard to Java, there remain few signs that Oracle will walk down any type of truly open path. The company needs to assure the development community that Java won’t become a card the company plays in an attempt to control customers.

    • What Oracle wants

      Technology should be about rapid growth, about carving grand new niches that pour out opportunity in every direction. It should be about tapping a vein that no one company can exploit on its own, that sees perpetual change as the only constant.

      Linux is like that. That’s the secret of open source. There are Linuxes for clouds, Linuxes for desktops, Linuxes for mobile devices. There are Linuxes meant for enterprises, and Linuxes meant for individuals. Each distro seeks to carve out its own niche, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

    • Oracle’s invisible elephant
    • How Ellison could fight Google’s Android – without lawyers

      First, the good news. Java on mobile phones has been a palpable success. Installed on eleven billion mobile phones worldwide, Java ME is one of the most widely available software development platforms – ever.

      Its APIs are powerful and a pleasure to program with (as long as you’re targeting a single device, of course). Also, the Sun Microsystems team did a sterling job of integrating NetBeans with connected profiles, making it easy to create MIDP apps – MIDP, or Mobile Information Device Profile, being the most common Java ME profile for phones.

      [...]

      Frothy-mouthed developers can’t seem to stop writing Android apps. It helps that Android has its own mascot, the grinning green robot that looks like it’s about to start ‘dissing mashed potato and selling you its powdered variety. But more practically, the platform fragmentation that has so beset Java ME doesn’t seem to have affected Android quite so much. That’s because Android controls the entire software stack and Google seems prepared to stand up to the nakedly self-serving phone manufacturers.

    • Larry Ellison’s first Sparc chip and server

      Oracle has announced the Sparc T3 processor and its related Sparc T3 systems at the OpenWorld extravaganza in San Francisco, giving Solaris shops who had run out of headroom on the existing Sparc T2 and T2+ machines a little breathing room – and giving Oracle a chance to chase some entry and midrange Unix server sales against rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

    • Oracle pushes Java for mobiles

      JAVA TOOK THE SPOTLIGHT in San Francisco today as Oracle opened the Java One show, running alongside its main Openworld event.

      Java One 2010 marks the first year that Oracle has run the show since its acquisition of Sun. Thomas Kurian, EVP of Oracle product development, took to the stage on Monday evening to shed light on the firm’s three-year development plan for Java.

    • Oracle to webify mobile Java against Android

      OpenWorld JavaOne Oracle is throwing hardware-accelerated graphics and web integration into mobile Java to catch and contain Google’s rogue Android

      The database giant has laid out plans for Java ME – Oracle’s preferred flavor of Java on mobile – that will let the stack render HTML, CSS, and Javascript by default.

    • Oracle Promises To Maintain Open-Source Status For Java Tools

      In addition to those open-source Java offerings, Oracle is committed to releasing the JavaFX user interface controls as an open-source technology, Kurian said.

  • CMS

    • FCC.gov Announces Open Source Redesign

      At its core, the FCC’s new online platform will leverage the same open source technology powering WhiteHouse.gov, and they’re planning active engagement with the open source community. We’ve found open source technology to be a great way maximize the scalability and accessibility of WhiteHouse.gov, and we’ve even contributed some of the custom code we’ve written back to the public domain.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Open – Just like Windows or Mac

      It’s a common ploy to suggest that since the FSF advocates for Free Software, and discourages the use and promotion of Closed and Proprietary software that this somehow means that the FSF is actually ”anti-freedom” or whatever nonsense detractors are trying to spin out of nothing.

      Of course, if the FSF advocated that “any choice you make is equally acceptable”, then they would hardly be advocating Free Software, would they.

  • Government

    • Westminster eForum Speech

      Today I had the pleasure of addressing the Westminster eForum event on Free and open source software in business, in government. I had a five minute slot following the excellent Karsten Gerloff of the Free Software Foundation Europe, then after speeches from Paul Holt, Andrew Katz and Christopher Roberts we had a panel Q&A with questions from the audience. Here are the notes from my speech, transcripts of the whole event will be distributed around Westminster. T

    • Bristol Council mulls mixed FOSS, Microsoft upgrade

      On 30 September Bristol City councillors will be asked to adopt a proposal, steered by UK open source consultancy outfit Sirius Corporation, to “commit resources” for FOSS tech.

      But sadly for the council, and the UK open source community at large, Bristol can’t ditch Microsoft completely yet.

  • Licensing

    • The Defenders of Free Software

      Mr. Hemel serves as a volunteer watchman for free, open-source software like the Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft’s Windows. The use of free software has exploded, particularly in gadgets as varied as exercise bikes, energy meters and smartphones. Companies like Google, TiVo and Sony often opt to piggyback on the work of others rather than going through the ordeal of building all of the software for their products from scratch.

      [...]

      Last month, for example, Dell received a public tongue-lashing from the geek kingdom and a cease-and-desist letter courtesy of Mr. Hemel for shipping its new Streak tablet without providing the underlying open-source software code. Dell representatives acknowledged the issue and later put the code on a Web site. “We are committed to fulfilling all of our obligations when using open-source code in our product,” said a Dell spokesman in a company blog.

      Mr. Hemel says companies should make sure they know the ins and outs of everything they sell. “If we all play by the rules, we can make some really good stuff,” he says.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • How do we get government to share data?

        On Tuesday we wrapped up the Manor Makeover in Manor, Texas, population 6,500. In some ways, this is ground zero for Gov 2.0 at the local level. The City of Manor has done some very innovative things on a shoestring, gaining attention ranging from the blogosphere to national press and all the way up to the White House. In fact, keynote speaker Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House wrote up a blog post just last night. The makeover is pretty impressive — they even followed my blog post from earlier this year about how to embrace Gov 2.0. (Not that they’ve seen it — it’s probably just obvious if you think hard enough about prioritizing limited resources.)

Leftovers

  • Apple, Google, Others Settle Antitrust Probe Into Their Hiring Practices

    Six major technology companies—Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Intel (NSDQ: INTC), Intuit, Adobe Systems (NSDQ: ADBE), and Pixar—will no longer agree not to poach employees from each other, as part of a settlement they just announced with the U.S. Department of Justice. The government began an investigation a year-and-a-half ago to determine whether the companies, along with a few others, broke antitrust law by colluding on hiring practices.

  • US sues/settles with Apple, Google, Intel…

    On Friday, the US Department of Justice sued and then announced a settlement with Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar, in a move that will stop the six companies from entering into what the DoJ characterized as “anticompetitive employee solicitation agreements.”

  • How to disconnect from your online life

    There is now a generation who do not remember the world before the internet took off, and who live out their lives in a slew of public online arenas. But there is also a growing number of people who feel their life online has spun out of control.

  • Mixed Result for Google Today in European Courts

    Also today, Google had a legal setback in France where the Paris Court of First Instance ruled that a Google official had committed slander based on the results of queries to Google Suggest. The plaintiff — a person previously convicted of corruption of a minor — sued the Google Suggest director personally because the plaintiff’s name was returned in response to queries on search terms such as rape, satan worshipper, and other things. The court ordered the Google official to immediately remove all these references from Google Suggest, upon penalty of 500 euros per instance he fails to do so.

  • French court convicts Google and boss of defamation

    A Paris court has convicted US search engine giant Google and its chief executive Eric Schmidt of defamation over results from its “suggest” function, a French legal affairs website has revealed.

    The new function, which suggests options as you type in a word, brought up the words “rapist” and “satanist” when the plaintiff’s name was typed into the search engine, legalis.net reported.

  • Fired teacher fights to clear name after ‘hit’ allegation

    To this day, Randolph Forde experiences a small panic attack whenever the local news comes on the television.

    The former Georgia high school special education teacher was arrested in October on allegations that he offered money to one student to kill another. The story appeared on the local TV news before making national and international headlines, casting Forde as a man with an bizarre vendetta against a student he suspected of being gay.

  • Online hotel bookings to be probed for price-fixing

    The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is investigating whether the sale of hotel room bookings on the internet breaches competition law, looking into whether an allegedly long-established pricing mechanism is anti-competitive.

    An online reseller of hotel rooms complained to the OFT about a practice it said was called ‘rate parity’, in which hotels agree a minimum price for rooms. That reseller, Skoosh.com, claimed that the hotels it bought room bookings from were under pressure from other resellers to maintain those minimum prices.

  • WTF, kids swearing earlier now, researcher says

    Children as young as two are now dropping f-bombs, with researchers reporting that more kids are using profanity — and at earlier ages — than has been recorded in at least three decades.

    So finds data presented at this month’s Sociolinguistics Symposium in the U.K., at which swearing scholar Timothy Jay revealed that the rise in vulgarity within adult culture dovetails with similar spikes in the number of youths using offensive language.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • FDA begins considering genetically modified ‘frankenfish’ for US food supply

      Fish or frankenfish? A Massachusetts company wants to market a genetically engineered version of Atlantic salmon, and regulators are weighing the request. If approval is given, it would be the first time the government allowed such modified animals to join the foods that go onto the nation’s dinner tables.

    • Exclusive: Gulf seafood poses long-term health risks, experts say

      “We have not found it,” FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott claimed. “Every sample that we have tested for PAHs has come back clean. It has the potential to [bioaccumulate]. But we have not found it, even from samples taken from inside of closure areas.”

    • Microsoft warns of in-the-wild attacks on web app flaw

      A Long Island township has imposed restrictions on the placement of new cell towers that are among the toughest in the country, and one phone company says it effectively bans new construction.

      The town of Hempstead is a notable example on a list of municipalities tightening rules on where cell phone companies can place antennas. The moves come as consumers are demanding blanket wireless coverage for their phones and buying laptops and, more recently, tablet computers that also rely on cell towers.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Ozone layer stable, on the way to recovery

      Nearly all life of the planet benefits from this. People benefit especially (millions of cases of skin cancer averted, crops and livestock protected, etc.). This is an unmitigated success for the Earth.

    • Ship blog: The good, the bad and the ugly

      And now for the ugly. Well if we needed any kind of reminder of why we’re here, it came today in the form of news from Norway. We mentioned before that UK government representatives were heading to Bergen to scupper a German call for a moratorium on deepwater drilling. Well today we heard they’d succeeded. But what makes this bitter pill particularly hard to swallow is that in the end the Germans weren’t even calling for a moratorium on deepwater drilling. All they wanted was a commitment to discuss it at the next OSPAR meeting. But even that was too much for our supposed representatives, who made sure – along with Norway and Denmark – to delete any mention of a moratorium from the final conference text.

    • Going Beyond Oil
    • Captain’s blog: Blind Faith

      The well to the south is called “Thunderhorse”. The rig to the southeast is “Blind Faith”. Really. Could I make that up? Who would name an oil rig Blind Faith? Someone with a realistic sense of adventure? Don’t get me wrong; I like the names, even if I do not like what they do.

    • EU may speed up approval of genetically modified food crops

      As America chews over a bid to market “Frankenfish” salmon, Europe wants to drop scientific objections to genetically modified (GM) crops in a move even its backers admit leaves a strange taste.

      With the GM industry and its opponents each sharpening their legal claws, European nations will debate a proposed rule change on Monday that would allow officials to accelerate authorizations for 15 new transgenic crops while letting those who want to keep them off their territories do so.

    • Could the garbage heap help save us from global warming?

      In New Haven, W.Va., the Mountaineer Power Plant is using a complicated chemical process to capture about 1.5 percent of the carbon dioxide it produces. The gas is cooled to a liquid at a pressure of about 95 atmospheres and pumped 2,375 meters down to a sandstone formation, where it is meant to remain indefinitely. The objective is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere from the coal burning at the plant.

    • Amid Tension, China Blocks Vital Exports to Japan

      Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has blocked exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.

    • Chernobyl plant life endures radioactivity

      One of the researchers speculates that such mechanisms could trace back millions of years, when early life forms were exposed to higher levels of natural radiation.

  • Finance

    • Toxie’s Dead

      Toxic assets — bundles of mortgages that Wall Street sliced up and sold to investors — were at the center of the financial crisis. When the housing market tanked, no one wanted to own them. That’s when we bought one.

    • Blockbuster Reportedly About To File For Bankruptcy

      The rental landscape has already been transformed by number two player Movie Gallery’s decision earlier this year to shut down all of its 2,666 locations after it too filed for bankruptcy.

    • Blockbuster winds itself into Chapter 11

      In the meantime, the firm said its US operations will stay open and continue to serve customers. So sympathetic customers might want to dig out that old overdue Molly Ringwald video that’s been lurking behind the sofa since 1991 and pop it in the drop box.

    • Akin Gump, Creditors Win Philly Papers Auction

      One additional note for bankruptcy buffs: The rules of the auction banned senior creditors from making a so-called credit bid, through which creditors essentially exchange their debt holdings for equity in the new company. The creditors in this auction would have to pay cash to the bankruptcy estate of the newspapers’ parent company. But in a funky (if common) twist in bankruptcy auctions, that cash will go right back to the buyers, since they are secured creditors and thus first in line to be repaid by the estate. It’s not a credit bid, but it’s close.

    • Americans Have No Idea About Wealth Inequality in America
    • Adobe stock cops a big whack

      The stock fell about 19 per cent on the US market yesterday, following announcement of third-quarter revenue of $US990.3 million.

    • Is Seagate poised to go private?

      Seagate has been in discussion with a pair of private equity firms about a move off the stock market and back into private ownership, according to reports.

      The alleged discussions have been reported by normally reliable Reuters, Bloomberg and others.

    • Taxman rejects ‘lie detector’ tech

      The government has denied claims it will extend use of telephone “lie detector” tests to the tax system.

      Proponents of such software – known as voice risk analysis (VRA) – say it is able to calculate the probability someone is lying over the phone by measuring variations in their voice. Scientists charge it is no better at identifying fraud than tossing a coin.

    • The Surprising Religion of Jack Ma

      Ma says three things are at the core of his company and business philosophy, calling them “his religion” on the show. The first is that technology isn’t Alibaba’s core competency, rather it’s the company’s culture. That first bit is the surprising part– Ma goes on and on about how untechnical he is. That’s something I’ve never heard any executive of a tech company say, even if they aren’t technical. Ma says “I know nothing about technology,” adding he can’t write code and the most he can do is send and receive emails. That takes some confidence as a leader to be so bold about what you don’t know.

      The second element of his “religion” is that shareholders come last– the most important groups are customers and then employees. He says matter-of-factly that customers are the ones who pay him and employees are the ones who stick with him but shareholders come and go. (Note: There’s some interesting subtext, whether it was intentional or not. The largest shareholder is Yahoo, who Ma would very much like to go.)

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Liberalism and Economic Freedom

      A big part of the problem is that the political right has become so effective at branding deregulation as their issue that people have come to talk about these things in a very right-wing way. Libertarians see the deregulation of barbering as part of a broader “economic liberty” agenda that also includes privatizing government services, cutting taxes, and so forth. And this means that even when regulations have clearly inegalitarian effects, the left has a knee-jerk tendency to support them on the grounds that anything the other side supports must be bad.

    • Watchdog: ‘Christine O’Donnell is clearly a criminal’

      Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a complaint alleging O’Donnell had used $20,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses.

    • Christine O’Donnell Is a ‘Criminal,’ Claims Watchdog Group

      A watchdog group has filed official federal complaints against Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, upset winner of Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary in Delaware, and has labeled her a “criminal” for allegedly using campaign contributions for rent and other personal expenses.

    • Crew Files Ethics Complaint Against Senator David Vitter (R-La)

      Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee against Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) over his improper use of taxpayer funds to subsidize the personal expenses of staff member Brent Furer and for lying about Mr. Furer’s legislative portfolio. Mr. Furer is infamous for brutally assaulting his girlfriend in 2008, while handling women’s issues for Sen. Vitter. According to Senate financial records, at taxpayer expense Mr. Furer flew to Louisiana in 2007 to appear in court to face a DWI charge, and again in 2008 to sign his probation agreement in the same matter. Sen. Vitter’s office claimed the senator was unaware of the court proceedings.

    • O’Donnell called evolution ‘a myth’, said she wanted to stop Americans from having sex
    • Netflix apologizes for allowing actors to talk to reporters at Canadian launch

      Problem is, many in the crowd were actors who were paid to be there. And some of those “extras” gave interviews to journalists, who didn’t realize they weren’t real consumers interested in the product.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Electronic Frontier Foundation Cries Foul On Censorship Bill

      That’s a big problem with censorship. The ripple effect from it extends far beyond freedom of speech issues, and can create a black market for freely distributed information, pitting governments against individuals.

    • Global ‘internet treaty’ proposed

      The proposal was presented at the Internet Governance Forum in Lithuania last week, and outlined 12 “principles of internet governance”, including a commitment from countries to sustain the technological foundations that underpin the web’s infrastructure.

    • Publisher agrees to drop US spy secrets from book: Pentagon

      A publisher has agreed to remove US intelligence details from a memoir by a former army officer in Afghanistan after the Pentagon raised last-minute objections, officials said Friday.

      The book, “Operation Dark Heart,” had been printed and prepared for release in August but St. Martin’s Press will now issue a revised version of the spy memoir after negotiations with the Pentagon, US and company officials said.

      In an unusual step, the Defense Department has agreed to reimburse the company for the cost of the first printing, spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told AFP.

      The original manuscript “contained classified information which had not been properly reviewed” by the military and US spy agencies, he said.

      St. Martin’s press will destroy copies from the first printing with Pentagon representatives observing “to ensure it’s done in accordance with our standards,” Lapan said.

      The second, revised edition would be ready by the end of next week, said the author’s lawyer, Mark Zaid.

    • Real-Time NSA Eavesdropping

      Eavesdropping is easy. Getting actual intelligence to the hands of people is hard. It sounds as if the NSA has advanced capabilities to automatically sift through massive amounts of electronic communications and find the few bits worth relaying to intelligence officers.

    • My report was too hot to broadcast: Brisbane war correspondent

      Brisbane war correspondent Michael Ware is set to reveal that an alleged war crime he filmed in Iraq has never been seen or investigated by authorities.

      Mr Ware, who covered the Afghanistan war from 2001 and the Iraq war from 2003 for Time magazine and the US television network CNN from 2006, returned to Brisbane in December suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

      His harrowing near-decade of war coverages were documented last Monday in the first of a two-part ABC Australian Story series, with the second part to be broadcast tomorrow night.

      Mr Ware tells of the alleged incident he says he witnessed and filmed in 2007 when working for US news giant CNN, but claims the network decided the footage was too graphic to go to air.

    • Saudi Arabia denies it will license blogs

      A Saudi official denied on Friday that bloggers and web forums would be forced to register under a new electronic media law, after remarks he made sparked outrage among Saudi internet users.

      Ministry of information domestic media supervisor Abdulrahman al-Hazzaa clarified that the new law will require on-line news sites to be licensed, but would only encourage bloggers and others to register.

    • Police lay charges of libel, obstruction against Calgary website operator

      RCMP have laid five charges against a Calgary man related to the operation of a website highly critical of Calgary police officers.

      In a news conference Friday morning, RCMP announced the charges against John Kelly, 53, of Calgary.

    • Is Quoting Someone Out Of Context Defamation?

      Earlier this year, there was certainly plenty of discussion in the political news business of the Shirley Sherrod incident, where Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Sherrod speaking, which implied she had made certain decisions on the basis of skin color. However, after Sherrod was fired from her job at the USDA, it quickly came out that the video clips of Sherrod speaking were taken totally out of context, and the message of the speech was completely the opposite of what had been implied. This quickly resulted in a scramble as pretty much every publication in the world covering the story wrote articles questioning whether or not she had a legitimate case of libel.

    • Hotel Kicks Couple Out, Accusing Them Of Writing Bad Review

      A recovering cancer patient and his wife were hanging out in their room at the Golden Beach Hotel when the manager stormed in and accused them of writing a negative review of the hotel on TripAdvisor. He kicked them out of the hotel, threatened to call the police, and refused to give them a refund.

    • Patrick Leahy Against Internet Censorship In Other Countries, But All For It At Home

      But a bigger point is just how hypocritical the Senators supporting this bill really are. Reader Dark Helmet already did a nice job highlighting the massive conflicts of interest among many of the Senators supporting this bill — including the fact that lead sponsor Patrick Leahy has among his top campaign contributors the TV/Movie/Music industries, with Time Warner, Walt Disney and Vivendi showing up near the top of the list. But, I’m sure that’s got nothing whatsoever to do with this bill…

    • Sorry, But We Don’t Just Hand Out Information On Our Commenters

      Since this is something that we certainly believe strongly in, we’re not about to just roll over and give out information on commenters, without a clear legal requirement to do so. Our policy is pretty firm that we believe that it’s proper to protect the interests of our community, within legal boundaries (of course). There were some oddities with this subpoena — issued from a Florida court — including the fact that it had apparently initially been issued way back in January and sent to a random law firm in Philadelphia that I’ve never heard of, which has never represented Techdirt/Floor64 and certainly is not authorized to accept subpoenas on our behalf. Thus, we never received it when it was first sent out — but were finally emailed a copy last week.

    • Legal case against TripAdvisor intensifies, comment posters also in spotlight

      The reputation management company behind the planned action, UK-based Kwikchex, says the number of enquiries from hotels that consider some comments made on TripAdvisor about their properties are defamatory is “escalating and, more importantly, so does the severity”.

    • Feds: Privacy Does Not Exist in ‘Public Places’

      The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

      The Justice Department is demanding a federal appeals court rehear a case in which it reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month, without a court warrant. The authorities then obtained warrants to search and find drugs in the locations where defendant Antoine Jones had travelled.

    • Obama Comes Out Against Censoring The Internet; Will He Veto Leahy/Hatch Censorship Bill?

      Again, all of this sounds good… but it makes me wonder how the administration feels about the new “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” from Senators Leahy and Hatch, which set up a system that avoids due process to censor websites in a clear attempt to “undermine fair competition and create market share for preferred businesses.”

    • Google Warning Gmail Users On Spying From China

      The warnings may indicate wholesale spying by the Chinese government a year after the Google Aurora attacks or simply random attacks.

    • ConLibs get shifty on spam and behavioural ads

      Last week, the government published its ideas as to how it would implement the changes to EU Directive 2002/58/EC. In relation to spammers and behavioural advertising it has decided to keep the low privacy standards that were acceptable to the previous New Labour government.

    • Czechs stop Google Street View

      Google will not get permission to continue developing its Street View database of images unless it obeys Czech laws.

    • Google responds to Czech ban

      Google’s Czech tentacle has responded to yesterday’s move by data protection regulators to stop the company collecting any more images for its Street View service in the country.

      The statement does not address data protection president Igor Němec’s main complaint: that Google failed to register as a processor of personal information, as is also required in the UK. We’ve asked Google why it failed to register and will update this story if we get an answer.

    • German gov gives Google Street View privacy deadline

      German officials have given Google until December 7 to set acceptable privacy standards for its Street View service.

      Other tech firms including Apple have also been asked to collaborate on a voluntary privacy charter for geographical services, under threat of legislation.

    • Street View prompts privacy code in Germany
    • T-Mobile admits to censoring text messages

      The admission came in legal case in which the mobile operator is being sued by the short-code text service EZ Text. The text marketing firm, which signed up a California marijuana dispensary found that it fell afoul of T-Mobile’s apparently secret guidelines.

    • T-Mobile sued for allegedly blocking pot-related texting

      In a case with free speech and Net neutrality implications, T-Mobile has been sued by a text message marketing company for allegedly blocking access to the T-Mobile network because of a client that provided information on medical marijuana.

    • T-Mobile Claims Right to Censor Text Messages

      The Bellevue, Washington-based wireless service is being sued by a texting service claiming T-Mobile stopped servicing its “short code” clients after it signed up a California medical marijuana dispensary. In a court filing, T-Mobile said it had the right to pre-approve EZ Texting’s clientele, which it said the New York-based texting service failed to submit for approval.

      EZ Texting offers a short code service, which works like this: A church could send its schedule to a cell phone user who texted “CHURCH” to 313131. Mobile phone users only receive text messages from EZ Texting’s customers upon request. Each of its clients gets their own special word.

    • Users Sue Internet Companies Over Hidden ‘Flash Cookies’

      If you don’t want your personal information and browsing history tracked, be sure to clear that history and delete browser cookies after every session. Or use “in private” search offered by Internet Explorer or similar anonymous search features found in Firefox, Chrome and others.

    • ZoneAlarm slammed for scarewarey marketing

      ZoneAlarm has run into criticism from its customers for using scary pop-up warnings as a marketing tactic designed to persuade users to purchase the paid-for version of its personal firewall.

    • Global Virus Alert! ZoneAlarm’s scare tactics raise hackles

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • DRM-Free Games Site GOG.com Gone

      The announcement on the site’s front page says, in part, “This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.”

    • IPv6 uptake still slow despite looming address crunch

      Even though many ISPs have begun offering IPv6 services to customers, uptake and use of the next-generation internet technology remains low, according to a European Commission-funded study published last week.

    • Vodafone shares subscriber info with world+dog

      Vodafone has been caught taking liberties with customers’ email accounts, and it seems at least some of the customers aren’t happy about the practice.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Marketplace’s Misleading Report On Fashion Copyright

      It’s about other designers and some “fast fashion” houses that create similar (but cheaper) designs targeting the lower end of the market. Counterfeiting is really a trademark issue — and is already against the law, but has nothing to do with copyright. Conflating the two is really bad, and confuses the issue totally, falsely giving the impression that fashion copyright is about protecting designers from counterfeit goods sold in alleyways.

    • Anti-Pirates List Dead and Pre-Teen Artists as Petition Signatories

      Yesterday the European Parliament adopted a report that paves the way for the introduction of draconian anti-piracy measures. A final push for accepting the report came from entertainment industry lobbyists who presented petitions signed by hundreds of artists. Among other suspicious circumstances, the signatories of the petitions include a 7-year old singer from Romania and a movie producer who died three years ago.

    • Runkeeper’s Ability To Outrun Nike & Adidas Shows How Big Companies Don’t Always Copy & Win

      What we’re seeing is, once again, plain old imitation by itself doesn’t appear to work very well, but imitation, plus some element of innovation to make it better does wonders. And yet, so many people don’t seem to recognize this and simply assume that the “big guys” will automatically copy and kill any new startup.

    • Copyrights

      • Europe on verge of criminalizing file-sharing

        The European parliament pressed on Wednesday for a crackdown on film and music piracy on the Internet, raising fears among online rights groups that a new law will soon follow.

        The European Union’s legislature adopted a non-binding resolution in a 328-245 vote calling for the creation within European law of the right to pursue people who violate intellectual property rights.

      • Supreme Court Eyeing RIAA ‘Innocent Infringer’ Case

        The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing into the first RIAA file sharing case to reach its docket, requesting that the music labels’ litigation arm respond to a case testing the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement.

      • Leaked Report Admits That Hadopi First Strike Accusations Won’t Be Reviewed For Accuracy

        As the French “three strikes” Hadopi process begins, with tens of thousands of notices being sent out to accused file sharers (their “first strike”), things may be even more ridiculous than previously assumed. Guillaume Champeau fills us in on the details of a leaked report from the French privacy commissioner (Google translation from the original French).

      • Spanish Collecting Society Targets Group Proposing Alternative Royalty System

        A Spanish group lobbying for alternative ways to protect and promote creative production has been asked to cease activity or face a lawsuit for damages, unfair competition and infringement by the Spanish collecting society SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores), according to the group. The collecting society also charged that the lobbying group is undermining its reputation.

        Lobbying group EXGAE has claimed they received a fax in August asking them to effectively disappear “from the face of the earth within the next seven days.” EXGAE “facilitates a legal consultancy service for artists and those affected by the actions of traditional royalties management organisations and other cultural industry groups,” according to its website.

      • Taiwan copyright poster winner turns out to be copycat

        The man, identified only by his surname Wu, apologised and admitted that his winning design was copied from a work by Dutch artist Dennis Sibeijn featuring a paper plane and, ironically, titled “Truth”.

        Wu was ordered to return to the Intellectual Property Office the 50,000 Taiwan dollars (1,600 US) prizemoney he won in the contest last year when he was a university student.

        His deception surfaced after a commuter recognised the work on a billboard carrying Wu’s prize-winning design at a Taipei subway station and reported to the office.

      • My Challenge To Jim Urie Of Universal Music: Instead Of ‘Drowning Out’ Those You Disagree With, Let’s Come Up With Solutions

        Back in June, we wrote about a ridiculous major label astroturfing campaign, spearheaded by Jim Urie, the CEO of Universal Music Group Distribution, involving a faux “grass roots” group called MusicRightsNow, which is just a major label front group, connected to Music United — also a major label front group. Well, he’s back. As a few of you have sent over, Urie appears to be claiming that the letter he sent out back then is responsible for the new pro-censorship Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The new letter urges people to click a link to send emails to elected officials supporting the bill. Amusingly (but not surprisingly), the link in the email (which I’m not providing here), does not allow people to edit the letter.

        [...]

        How incredibly insulting and how incredibly wrong. The people that Urie is lying about here care very much about art and the difference between right and wrong. It’s why we focus on new ways for artists to make money. It’s why we look at what the actual evidence shows, including the fact that artists are making more money today than in the past — in part, by getting out from behind gatekeepers like the major record labels. And this makes us happy, because we do care about art and we do care about the ability of musicians to make a living and to keep doing what they love doing.

      • Judge puts hammer down on Hurt Locker P2P subpoena

        A federal judge in South Dakota this week quashed a US Copyright Group subpoena targeting an ISP in his state. Why? Jurisdiction, and a fax machine.

      • US ISP Disconnects Alleged Pirates for 6 Months

        The United States Internet Service provider Suddenlink has effectively implemented a three-strikes policy for repeated copyright infringers. After three DMCA notices, alleged copyright infringers are disconnected from the Internet for six months, without a refund. According to a company representative, the DMCA requires them to take such drastic measures.

      • Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

        My real point — and the point that drives a lot of what I write on this blog — is that we confuse things and act to our cultural detriment when we treat intellectual “property” like we treat real property. And that confusion of course extends to the ways we give dead people continued influence over their intellectual and artistic creations. So it seems serendipitous that in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine Elif Bautman has an article about the ongoing legal battle in the Israeli courts over the fate of Franz Kafka’s personal papers.

      • Music streaming service rejects Canada

        Millions of people in the United States and Europe are using these and other services to stream music to their mobile devices. For monthly fees ranging from free to $15 (U.S.) (usually depending on whether you’re willing to pay to avoid embedded advertisements), users can choose from millions of songs — simply type in the name of a tune and enjoy it anywhere there’s a decent cell signal.

      • Piracy threats lawyer mocks 4chan DDoS attack

        ACS:Law obtains court orders to force ISPs to reveal the identities of customers linked to IP addresses observed sharing copyright files in BitTorrent swarms. It then sends letters demanding payment of several hundred pounds to avoid a civil lawsuit.

        The files are typically video games or pornographic films, with copyrights held by Digiprotect, a specialist German monitoring firm that aims to profit from piracy. ACS:Law does not usually take anyone who refuses to pay to court, however, and is currently under investigation by the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority. A tribunal is expected next year.

      • US broadcasters group accuses Ivi of copyright abuse

        INTERNET TV BROADCASTER Ivi didn’t have to wait long before hearing a response from the US broadcasters’ mouthpiece after filing for a judgment to stop lengthy court battles.

        The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), an “advocacy association” for US broadcasters, issued a statement shortly after we reported that the Internet TV upstart issued a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment of Copyright Noninfringement in US District Court in Seattle, Washington. It is hoping that the judgment will help it avoid lengthy and costly legal battles.

      • Broadcasting group issues statement on ivi Inc.’s TV service

        Since launching the ivi live television service on September 13, several major broadcasters (including NBC Universal, Fox Television Stations and CBS Broadcasting) have issued cease-and-desist letters to the company. As a preemptive move, ivi filed a lawsuit Monday against those broadcasters and others arguing that it had rights to rebroadcast the live feeds from TV stations in New York and Seattle under the Copyright Act.

      • Guest Post: Open Season on Copyright Infringement Claims? All Hail, or Hate, the “Troll”?

        Is it me, or has there been a noticeable uptick in publicity about copyright infringement claims in 2010? There is the prolific new so-called “copyright troll,” Righthaven LLC, which has sued more than 120 parties on behalf of its sole newspaper client, the Las Vegas Journal-Review (including against some high-profile defendants, such as politician Sharron Angle). The Fox network has been defending against claims that it violated a plaintiff’s copyright when it ran footage of Bernard Madoff, and now the Fox network (in an unrelated claim) is suing politician Robin Carnahan for alleged unauthorized use of Fox clip in a political ad. Some blame the poor economy, some blame the lawyers, some blame a heated election season. Maybe it is all of those reasons, or none of those. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t appear that anything has really changed in the substantive copyright law.

      • ACTA

        • ACTA Negotiators Refuse To Set Up More Timely Meeting For Consumer Advocates

          Talk about lip service to transparency while at the same time mocking it. Also, while some supporters of ACTA seem to claim that because the documents were shown once to such public interest groups everything’s perfectly transparent, it seems pretty damn obvious that those working on ACTA have done their best to keep rather important stakeholders very much out of the conversation. Of course, the industries, who are such fans of ACTA, may discover that screwing over consumers and consumer advocates comes back to bite them. You don’t have much of a business without consumers after all.

Clip of the Day

Christian Grothoff – “Introduction to GNUnet”


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 26/9/2010: Many New GNU/Linux Releases, Free Software in British Government

Posted in News Roundup at 2:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Proof of Concept PSGroove ported to PlayStation 3 Sixaxis/DualShock 3

    There were reports of people trying to use the SixAxis controller to Jailbreak the PS3. However, we stopped hearing about any progress on it and heard more about clones such as the PS3Key and P3Free and many others. Now, there seems to be proof of a PSGroove port on a PlayStation 3 SixAxis/DualShock 3 controller! Forum user hasuky from http://www.elotrolado.net/ stated that he’ll be putting more info online tomorrow.

  • Are Platform Vendors Stealing Linux?

    Of course, such advantages are good for the companies, but not so much the end user. As I already pointed out, trying to un-do the commoditization of Linux does the customer a huge disservice, because you’re essentially introducing vendor lock in again. Ultimately, I think the customers should get wise to this and resist such “tuned” versions of Linux.

    But what if they don’t? If a vendor can tune a Linux enough, customers might want to stick with the vendor’s brand. Make the pricing and implementation simple–as Sprint did with its cellular pricing plans a couple of years ago–and customers may even pay an extra premium for the platform vendor’s Linux.

    The success of just such a plan hinges on just how much “better” a platform vendor’s Linux is and how compatible its application space is with other Linux distros. Not to mention what the response of Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical will be for their respective RHEL, SUSE Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu Server offerings.

    It will need to be an interesting response, because right now Oracle and Amazon have something these other three companies don’t: a platform (be it physical or virtual). That will be a tricky thing to negate.

  • Kernel Space

    • The People Who Support Linux: “My Heart for Open Source Began with Linux”

      Linux has a way of inspiring all of us. Joshua Drake is a major contributor to the PostgreSQL.org community, lead consultant at Command Prompt, Inc., and is president of United States PosgreSQL, but he says his love for open source began with Linux.

      “I honestly don’t know exactly how long {I’ve been using Linux} but my first distribution was SLS and then Yggdrasil. It was pre-Linux 1.0 IIRC.”

      Five points to each of our readers who can say the same.

    • Graphics Stack

      • For Those Interested In Direct3D Over Gallium3D

        There still is great interest and discussion among many users interested in Direct3D 10 and 11 being natively implemented on Linux using a new state tracker that was published this week for the Gallium3D driver architecture. It seems some Wine developers are still in opposition to this effort even though their Direct3D 10 implementation within Wine is still very limited in terms of translating the calls to OpenGL and their Direct3D 11 support really hasn’t taken off.

        Besides our links to the original Git commits and mailing list posts, for those wishing to follow the development of this “D3D1X” state tracker and Wine, there’s a few more links to pass along.

      • Keith & Peter Talking About X.Org Development

        The 2010 X.Org Developers’ Summit in Toulouse has been over for a week, but the disappointing weather in Munich today Oktoberfest finally made it sound more enticing to take care of the remaining XDS 2010 coverage rather than drinking Augustiner in a wet pair of lederhosens. With that said, below are the video recordings of when Keith Packard and Peter Hutterer were talking about the X.Org Server development process changes that have resulted in surprisingly on-time releases.

  • Applications

    • Lightspark’s Advanced Graphics Engine Progresses

      For those interested in the state of the “advanced graphics engine” for Lightspark, the newest and promising open-source project to implement support for Adobe’s Flash/SWF specification, there’s an update. This graphics engine is progressing, according to Alessandro Pignotti, the lead developer of Lightspark.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Organizing photos with jBrout
      • User Riots: What Does Not Work with Launcher Menus (Part 2)
      • UNetbootin – Bootable USB Media Made Easy

        I think that one of the most useful developments of the past couple of years has been bootable USB sticks. Not just “LiveUSB” sticks, from which you can actually run Linux, although those are wonderful too, but just plain old bootable distribution installers. They keep me from having piles of used CD/DVD discs around my desk, save me time in creating and booting the installation media, and even give me a bit better conscience about not continuously using discs for Alpha/Beta/RC/whatever releases one or two times and then tossing them on the pile.

    • Games

      • Lost Luggage Studios “Anirah” Mac and Linux Versions Released

        Lost Luggage Studios releases v1.2 of “Anirah: Riddle of the Pharaohs,” an ancient Egyptian-themed puzzle game best described as, “Similar to MahJongg, but with math.”

        Not the typical Match-3 type of game, in Anirah you are given a target number and can select as many tiles as it takes to total that number. Tiles can be selected if they can freely slide off the board – straight up, down, left, or right. You can make a match with three tiles, ten tiles, or even just one tile. The goal is to clear the board and proceed to the next round.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Amarok 2.3.2 Raises The Bar On Linux Media Players Another Notch

        A heads up, for those who haven’t heard: the venerable flagship media player Amarok has released a new version upon the masses. 2.3.2, Codenamed “Moonshine”, includes a series of bug fixes along with some cool new features as well.

      • be vewwwwy quiet .. i’m hunting pixmaps.

        The impact on Plasma mobile should be even larger, as “bunches of things of the same size” is a very common occurrence (e.g.a phone dialer, a grid of app icons, ..) and graphics performance is a rare commodity. Keeping the animations tamed through fewer generated pixmaps, only generating pixmaps actually pushed to screen, etc. helps out as well. I don’t yet have numbers of the impact on the N900, but it can only be good news there if it’s noticeable on a desktop system.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • 200th Post: Preview: ArchBang 2010.09 “apeiro”

        I think ArchBang has a lot of potential as a usable, modern desktop for old computers. I’m a little confused about the whole “stable release” thing, given that Arch Linux is a rolling-release distribution. More importantly, however, ArchBang is another example of the identity issues LXDE has, in that it uses some LX-tools like LXAppearance and LXTerminal, but it advertises its DE as Openbox (not LXDE) and uses tint2 instead of the LXPanel. That’s not meant as a ding on ArchBang at all. If you’re even remotely interested, please do go try it out!

    • New Releases

      • SuliX 5
      • SMS 1.5.3
      • NEW! CAINE 2.0 – NewLight is out!
      • Toorox 09.2010 “GNOME”
      • 16th September 2010: PLD Live with KDE4 4.4.5 is out!
      • Pardus 2-preview (Corporate)
      • aptosid 2010-02

        Now that aptosid has opened its gates, we have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the aptosid 2010-02 “Κῆρες” release. Aptosid is created by the same team of volunteers developing software under the Debian Free Software Guidelines and continues what has been started in November 2006 under the name “sidux”. This release is shipping in the following flavours:

      • Salix Live 13.1.1 Xfce and LXDE editions

        It has been exactly one year, day for day, since Salix OS has published its very first public release.

        One year which has also seen the birth of a 64 Bit version, new and improved GTK+ system utilities (mostly written in Python), Salix Live, Salix LXDE, considerably improved localization (thanks to the great contributions of dedicated translators and Transifex coordination: http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/salix/) and the establishment of one of the largest repository of fully compatible Slackware packages with full dependency management. Thus getting ever closer to one of our ambitions which is to extend the wonderful simplicity of Slackware KISS design to daily ease of use as well.

      • Nexenta Core Platform 3.0.1 released

        NCP 3.0.1 has been released. This includes few more backports from future releases, and also fixes for nexenta zones. Grab the iso from here.

      • IPFire Core Update 40
      • “0.1、1.0.0、4年” Qomo Linux 1.0正式发布
      • NuTyX Attapu
      • The Next Stable Clonezilla Live – 1.2.6-24

        This release of Clonezilla live includes major enhancements, changes
        and bug fixes.

      • Quirky 1.3
      • VortexBox 1.5 released

        We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.5. As always our goal it to make VortexBox work with any media player. The recent release of iTunes 10 does not work work with the old VortexBox DAAP server. We took this opportunity to replace the DAAP server in VortexBox with a better one. The new DAAP server not only works with iTunes 10 but it can server FLAC files to iTunes by encoding them as WAV files inline. This reduces the need to keep a mirror of your music files in mp3 format.

      • ArchBang-2010.09 – RELOADED is out!

        It’s entitled RELOADED because we went back to our orginal combo (AB=Arch Linux + OpenBox) & also because I’m back in action (after months with no laptop lol). The 64 bit version is the only one available @ this time but by the end of the week the 32 bit version should be available as well. Enjoy!

      • 23 September 2010 : GParted 0.6.3

        This release of GParted improves motherboard BIOS RAID support and includes bug fixes, and language translation updates.

      • SchilliX 0.7.2 [Not Linux]
      • Openwall Current-20100924

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Texas Mint Tea, anyone?

        PCLinuxOS, originally based upon Mandrake/Mandriva and its RPM Package Manager, PC championed the notion of “use the best of the best” in its rolling release distro. PC has been active since late 2003.

        LinuxMint championed “take the best and make it better.” Starting with Ubuntu and tweaking it with their own additions and new tools. Mint uses the .deb package system, offering package management with its own Software Manager or Synaptic. Mint has been around since mid-2006.

      • PCLinuxOS Progresses Undeterred

        #2 PCLinuxOS magazine: These days PCLinuxOS has bringing out its monthly magazine regularly religiously. I am sure it won’t win a FOSS award for the literature. But it has a lot to make us mortals happy and engaged in Linux. The mag has a system approach to teach newbies essential commandline magic, use/management of popular desktop environments and developments specific to PCLinuxOS. It has those fun stuff elements also that you expect from a community or school magazine.

      • Developers fork Mandriva Linux – Welcome Mageia

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-based signal processing system from Spectrum Signal Processing uses PCI Express form factor for embedded systems

      Engineers at Spectrum Signal Processing by Vecima (TSX:VCM) in Burnaby, British Columbia showcased their Linux-based signal processing platform — the SDR-2010 at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston. The SDR-2010 targets electronic warfare, signals intelligence including wideband spectral analysis and multi-channel direction finding, and military satellite communications applications.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • I Don’t Want a Tablet, So When Can I Get One?

          What about the software, you ask? Funny thing: it’s juts not the priority for me – I’m far more concerned with the hardware. Any of Android, Chrome OS or webOS would probably be acceptable as a tablet operating system. For me, anyway. Google’s Director of Mobile Products, Hugo Barra, was unequivocal in his belief that Android isn’t ready for that device type, which while technically true probably isn’t going to help Samsung’s marketing efforts.

        • Should Android be Startups’ First Choice?

          Yes, Android has been slower to pay dividends to its third-party developer community than Apple’s iOS, in part because of its platform fragmentation problems. However, this strikes me as a transitory problem: one that is being resolved by Google, and that entrepreneurial developers are likely to help fix. There’s simply too much money at stake for the problem not to be solved.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Students to Take Computers and Wikipedia to Africa

    The students were also trained to use Ubuntu, the free operating system based on Linux on which the software was installed, in order to be able to teach the locals how to use it.

  • Events

    • OWF Open Source Barometer 2010 is coming…

      Next week at the Open World Forum on the 30 September will take place the “Open Analysts summit: The 2010 barometer of Open Source“, a session bringing together leading open source analysts Matthew Aslett, Jeffrey Hammond and Mathieu Poujol.

  • SaaS

    • Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services

      Initially believed to be an Ubuntu derivative, which would have been an even more interesting choice, Amazon’s new custom Linux distribution is actually binary compatible with CentOS, which is itself a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. All of which means, effectively, that Amazon is following in the footsteps of Oracle [coverage] and getting into the Linux distribution game via Red Hat. By leveraging the availability of open source assets, they are systematically bootstrapping themselves into markets that have, historically, been vigorously defended by their respective dominant players.

    • Scality Launches Open Source Cloud Program with $100,000 Incentive Fund for Software Developers

      SNIA Software Developers Conference, Santa Clara, California, 21st September 2010 – Scality, the pioneer of object-based cloud storage, today announced plans to open-source the Software Development Kit (SDK) of its patented RING technology. As a kickoff incentive, Scality is offering contributing developers bounties from a $100,000 USD fund.

    • EMC Greenplum and Cloudera Form Alliance to Tackle Big Data Challenge

      EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced a new alliance to enable integration of technology from Cloudera, a leading provider of Hadoop-based data management software and services, with the EMC® Data Computing Products division’s Greenplum technology to help businesses better manage and analyze large and continuously growing amounts of structured and unstructured information such as log files, sensor data, streaming data, sales receipts, e-mails, research data and images collectively known as “big data.”

    • Twitter Analytics Lead, Kevin Weil, and a Presenter at Hadoop World Interviewed

      Prior to Hadoop, we had a MySQL-based data warehouse and ETL system, like many companies start with. It worked for a while, but over time the daily job began taking 16, 18, 20 hours. That’s never been an issue since we switched to Hadoop because it allows us to scale our cluster horizontally as Twitter usage grows. It would probably take 2 weeks to run a day’s worth of numbers today if we had to go back to our old system.

  • Databases

    • Guest Post: Do we need a new programming language for Big Data?

      Could the Big Data complexity be factored out somehow with a new general purpose programming language? No doubt. Having worked with Anders on the creation of Delphi many years back, this is right up his alley. Or maybe we already have a good starting point with Erlang, Scala, and Google’s Go. Go is particularly interesting having been designed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs / Unix fame.

  • CMS

    • VideoEgg to Acquire Six Apart and Create SAY Media

      Mena Trott, Six Apart co-founder: “SAY Media continues Six Apart’s mission to make passionate creators successful. Whether on TypePad or another platform, developing a game or an application, the company will empower people to create great content and make money doing it. This acquisition marks a new beginning as we launch a modern media company centered on the creators, the content, and the audiences that are redefining media.”

  • Semi-Open Source

  • MySQL

    • Oracle Announces MySQL 5.5 Release Candidate
    • Founding SkySQL

      Another question presented to us by many is what our relationship is to Michael “Monty” Widenius and his company Monty Program. To ease some curiosity, let me explain the situation.

      * Monty Program will be a close business partner with SkySQL, and provide deepest-level engineering backing to the MySQL part of SkySQL’s product offering, and provide SkySQL with access to top development talent on the product.
      * However, both companies are completely separate and have different owners and goals.
      o a) Monty and his company are focusing on future community development of MariaDB. The company is practically owned by the personnel, and has the goal of i) being a great place for engineers to work, ii) ensuring long term survival of the MySQL technology in the world, and iii) not be driven by outside investors, but share profits to personnel and not to owners. (BTW: number iii is the main reason why Open Ocean is not an investor in MP).
      o b) SkySQL Corporation Ab is a commercial, for-profit company. It focuses on serving customers with MySQL and MySQL-related products and services, to enable the customers to be successful in using the products in all their needs, at affordable cost, long term. As indicated by “MySQL-related” we plan to expand both the technology (through own development and through partners) and the service offering beyond what MySQL AB did, in line with how the industry and customer needs have developed and are expected to develop.
      * Monty himself has no active role in SkySQL. Yet, as a close partner through Monty Program, he is logically very supportive of our operation.

      Now, the work begins.

  • Government

    • Bristol councillor makes stand for open source

      The political head of ICT at a city struggling to wrestle free of Microsoft has declared it will give up its open source ambitions “over my dead body”.

      Mark Wright, the Bristol City councillor who handles the cabinet portfolio for ICT, made the stand at a political meeting in London yesterday.

      Bristol’s attempts to use open source software instead of Microsoft on its desktop computers have been hampered by the widespread use of proprietary Microsoft standards in Britain’s public sector. But Wright said the council would not give up the fight.

      “I was put in charge of IT in Bristol. I made it very clear to the department that we would retreat from open source over my dead body,” Wright told the Westminster eForum in London yesterday.

      Bristol spent five years trying to use open source software on 5,500 desktop computers, but its staff became isolated and unproductive, as they were unable to use the Microsoft file formats used almost everywhere else in the UK.

    • Open Source Community Welcomes Government Support

      “Free software is an idea whose time has come,” said Taylor, at the Westminster eForum today, predicting that it would finally break through in the public sector because of the coalition’s twin ideas – cuts to deal with the deficit and the “big society”, in which the government will cease to do things that people can do for themselves.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Save only in ODF
    • European Parliament takes clear stance on openness in the context of completing the internal market

      Earlier this week the European Parliament finished its “Report on completing the internal market for e-commerce” (2010/2012(INI)). It is a very interesting document, very comprehensively addressing the full spectrum of electronic commerce in relation to the internal marekt – and definitely worth reading.

      In this report, once again, the Parliament takes a very clear stance on openness as critical for the internal market in many ways. It acknowledges the “importance of open and neutral access to a high-speed internet connection, without which e-commerce would be impossible” (clause 43). And it asks the Commission “to work towards creating rules and standards” to overcome the “non-interoperability of software on commercial and social networking websites” (clause 47).

      [...]

      More specifically, the parliament clearly requires the use of an open standard in the area of document formats. As stated in clause 41 the parliament “Highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread”. For sure, the Open Document Format (ODF) standard which was developed by OASIS and approved by ISO (ISO/IEC 26300) is the standard available for use today. It has been implemented in multiple competing products and is demonstrating interoperability in real life on a daily basis.

    • Large-scale migration to an open source office suite: An innovation adoption study in Finland [PDF]

Leftovers

  • Intel unveils controversial PC upgrade scheme

    Critics have derided the idea as a way for Intel to charge customers for something the chip can already do.

    Intel said the scheme was about offering “choice and flexibility”.

    “The pilot in a limited number of retail stores will centre on one Pentium processor, one of our value brands, and will enable a consumer to upgrade the performance of their PC online,” Intel spokesman George Alfs told BBC News.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • New Health Care Provisions Begin to Pay Off for All Ages

      For those who think the law should be repealed, I ask them to just stop and think how their loved ones might already be bet­ter off than they were six months ago — and how much bet­ter off we all will be when the law has been fully imple­mented in 2014.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Bountiful crop lands farmer in legal trouble

      A Georgia man is headed to court over how many vegetables he can grow on his land. Code enforcement says until recently, the farmer had too many vegetable plants for his property in Clarkston, just outside Atlanta.

      Steve Miller’s profession is landscaping, but his passion is growing organic vegetables. That passion landed the Clarkston man in court. Before he rezoned the land two months ago, DeKalb County Code Enforcement cited him for illegal growing crops and using unpermitted workers.

    • CIA used ‘illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones’

      The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it’s claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software “hack” to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.

      The target of the court action is Netezza, the data warehousing firm that IBM bid $1.7bn for on Monday. The case raises serious questions about the conduct of Netezza executives, and the conduct of CIA’s clandestine war against senior jihadis in Afganistan and Pakistan.

    • THE IRAQ WAR — PART I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001

      Following instructions from President George W. Bush to develop an updated war plan for Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered CENTCOM Commander Gen. Tommy Franks in November 2001 to initiate planning for the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government and the empowerment of a “Provisional Government” to take its place.

    • Six held after allegedly burning Qur’ans

      A security expert warned yesterday that the alleged burning of two Qur’ans in northern England risked making Britain more of a terrorist target and endangering British troops.

      Police have arrested six men over the apparent burning of the Muslim holy book behind a pub in Gateshead on the anniversary of the 11 September attacks on the US. Police refused to say whether those arrested were connected to the far right English Defence League (EDL). A witness said the pub had been the subject of police attention because some customers were alleged to have links to the EDL.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Volcker Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy

      Listen to a top economist in the Obama administration describe Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who endorsed Mr. Obama early in his election campaign and who stood by his side during the financial crisis.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • The risks of Facebook’s Instant Personalization program

      In April, Facebook unveiled a new technology called Instant Personalization. Initially released to just Yelp, Pandora, and Docs.com, Instant Personalization has been widely misunderstood by the media and Facebook users alike.

      Instant personalization allows any site that Facebook chooses to partner with to use your current Facebook session as its own authentication system. In other words, if you are logged into Facebook when you visit Yelp.com, Yelp will immediately know who you are and some basic information about you (such as your profile photo and friends list) without any further action on your part.

    • Google releases censorship tools

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • US communities pin hopes on ‘super wi-fi’

      Wi-fi as most people know it is about to get a major shot in the arm in the US. After two years of talks, officials have approved the use of “white spaces” that will enable wireless broadband to reach greater distances than ever before, as the BBC’s Marc Adams reports.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Benjamin Franklin, the first IP pirate?

      In his essays, letters, and actions, Franklin was a “commonwealth man in the style of Jefferson,” Hyde writes. He understood the United States Constitution’s copyright language “as a balance between a short-term monopoly and a long-term grant to the public. That the clause might become the ground for creating a perpetual property right for individuals and private corporations would have astounded him.”

      Benjamin Franklin rebelled against knowledge as eternal property through his whole life. Hyde gives us a portrait of him that reveals this in his writings and works.

    • Copyrights

      • An Explanation Of My Views On Copyright Part Four The Sky Is Falling
      • Copyright enforcement firm ACS:Law hit by embarrassing email leak

        More seriously there is discussion about how they could “scare” people into paying by pursuing them directly, and allegedly an email with attached file containing the names and addresses of thousands of Sky broadband users (plus the names of pornographic movies they’re supposed to have downloaded) which if true constitutes a serious breach of the data protection act.

        File sharing news site Torrent Freak is busy sifting through the messages and has uncovered all kinds of worrying information, including emails from couples complaining that accusations of gay porn downloads have caused trouble with their marriage and desperate letters from people who can’t afford the fines.

        The leak further confirms the suspicion that ACS:Law seems more concerned about how much money it can get than protecting intellectual property. One email found by TF shows the company accepting a settlement figure despite having acknowledged the accused wasn’t responsible for any infringment, and giving up on chasing someone else because they’re bankrupt and won’t be able to pay. It also reveals that in some cases Crossley’s firm is netting over 50% of the cash received, the rest being split between the copyright owner and other third parties

        At a time when the company is under investigation from the SRA for its questionable tactics this has to come as a major embarrassment, and should there be anything in there which breaks the law or breaches ethical guidelines it could lead to serious repercussions for Crossley and his company.

      • Citigroup uses copyright to censor a critic

        Brad DeLong reports that Citigroup published an appraisal of the Obama administration’s bank reform policy in 2009 link here. It was mild and viewed the changes favorably, so the report conveyed a sense of relief at the bank. Come 2010, the bank has now sent a blog which posted the report, a take-down notice for violating its DCMA link here.

Clip of the Day

Martin Pool – “Bazaar – a distributed version control system for free software communities”


Credit: TinyOgg

09.25.10

Links 25/9/2010: The 5 Dollar KDE Challenge, Etc.

Posted in News Roundup at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • How do you copy 60m files?

    So the best way to move 60 million files from one Windows server to another turns out to be: use Linux.

  • Desktop

    • Making a Difference; Selling a Difference

      Some will argue that the desktop no longer matters or if it does, it won’t for long. They will tell you that the age of mobile technology is here, that Web apps do it all, and that since Linux, in its Android persona, is on its way to ruling the mobile roost, that we should all sit back happily and congratulate ourselves on finally achieving Linux World Domination.

      They are wrong.

      Sure, mobile devices are cool. But for the foreseeable future, the desktop will continue to be the place where the real work gets done. It’s the place where large scale productivity applications will continue to dominate. It’s still where you’re going to do your accounting, write letters, create cool graphics, edit video, and so on. Try to imagine creating a complex marketing presentation on your iPhone just for fun. See if you can find many businesses out there that have plans in the next 5 years to dump all their desktop systems in favor of everyone typing on their smartphone touchpads. Uh huh. The desktop matters as much as it ever did and there’s a damn good chance that it’s never going away, at least not anytime soon. Barring some truly revolutionary *ahem* paradigm shift in the way we interface with computers, of course. That revolutionary shift hasn’t happened. Not yet anyhow.

  • Ballnux

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Linux’s new Gnome desktop to take on KDE and Windows

      The next major release of Gnome promises to re-define the Linux desktop the way KDE has. Ashton Mills previews the new shell for Ubuntu’s default desktop.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • The 5 Dollar KDE Challenge

        Anyways this is not meant to be a review of Choqok, cool as it is, but to allow me to make a point: We are lucky to have many great applications in KDE. Everything from financial apps to great media players to CD/DVD authoring tools to a full-fledged office suite. Great games. And on and on it goes. Not to mention to gorgeous KDE Workspaces we luckily get to look at every day. And let’s not forget all the work and costs associated with running the KDE e.V. as it supports and funds so many KDE activities. And it’s all free! And while we’re at it let’s not forget the individual distributions out there that put it all together for us. And the bloggers and all of the people who donate their time in order to promote and support KDE in many ways every day.

      • The future of KDE

        MeeGo is less than a year old. KDE, by contrast, has 14 years of experience in building the Linux desktop. Even with the backing of the world’s largest mobile phone and processor vendors, it takes a bold man to turn up at Akademy, KDE’s annual global conference, and announce that MeeGo is “redefining the Linux desktop landscape”.

      • Linux finally matches Windows’ eye candy with the KDE desktop

        KDE is an interesting beast: up to version 3.0 it competed with Gnome for the mind share of Linux desktop users. KDE 3.0 was an excellent alternative, often favoured by the power users for its emphasis on configurability and flexibility.

        For version 4.0, the KDE team took the drastic action of re-inventing and re-building KDE almost from the ground up. This included re-designing the desktop paradigm and breaking functionality into core components that include Plasma (desktop display and effects), Phonon (multimedia backend) and Solid (hardware abstraction layer).

  • Distributions

    • Linux: Paradox of choice

      Are hundreds of different Linux versions a good or a bad thing for open source?

      Every so often every Linux advocate is subjected, yet again, to the question: “Are there too many Linux distributions?”

      The answer is both simple (“no”), while at the same time being a lot more complicated than that.

    • New Releases

      • Momonga 7
      • SystemRescueCd 1.6.0
      • Absolute 13.1.5 released

        Security updates including mozilla-nss package, (and Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird on CD2.) Icewm menu fixes and re-arrangement and AbiWord is back in base install with gtk printing preview by epdfview (so no more abiWords crashes… right?) Also several package updates including OpenOffice, Imagemagick, Inkscape, Chromium Browser, and new default sound mixer – alsamixer-qt4. New script in menu to change screen locker mode and updated find-installed script.

      • Tiny Core 3.1
      • Parted Magic 5.5
      • Kongoni 1.12.3 (Cicero) released!

        This is the final and stable release of Kongoni 1.12.3 (Cicero). With this release most issues and problems should be solved, also most packages where cleaned-up, updated to the latest version. Kernel upgraded to version 2.6.35.4-libre, improved the stability and speed, re-build with support for more hardware devices, cleaned-up the kernel configuration, set Rekonq browser as the default web browser, Gnash upgraded to verison 0.8.8, KDE upgraded to version 4.5.1, removed Ktorrent and replaced it with qBittorrent, which should be much more faster and lightweight.

      • PelicanHPC 2.2

    • Red Hat Family

      • Amid Oracle Threats, Red Hat Remains In Growth Mode

        Oracle is making some lofty claims about its Linux strategy, but entrenched rival Red Hat continues to gain momentum with its three-pronged open source strategy: Linux, virtualization and middleware. Here’s the update, which includes Red Hat’s first $1 million-plus private cloud deal.

        After the markets closed today, Red Hat said its Q2 2011 total revenue was $219.8 million, up 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year. Although net income fell to $23.7 million (down about $5.2 million), Red Hat’s earnings still beat Wall Street’s expectations.

      • What’s Next for Java at Oracle?

        The future of Java under Oracle’s leadership is one that includes continued innovation across multiple deployment areas including servers, desktops and mobile devices. That’s the message delivered by Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Product Development during a JavaOne keynote address detailing the road ahead for Java.

        New graphics, performance and enhanced programming capabilities are all on Oracle’s roadmap for Java development. Oracle took over the stewardship of Java as part of its acquisition of Sun which closed earlier this year.

    • Debian Family

      • aptosid 2010-02

        I recently reviewed Linux Mint Debian, a very user-friendly version of Linux Mint based on Debian. This time I looked at another distro based on Debian, called aptosid.

        Aptosid, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is actually made by the same developers that created the popular distro Sidux. There was apparently some conflict and controversy within the Sidux e.V association that resulted in Sidux morphing into Aptosid.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Apple’s multi-touch Magic Trackpad tested in Ubuntu 10.10

          Today I got my hands on Apple’s new cool peripheral that everyone is talking about, the Magic Trackpad. When it was first released, a lot of people said that this was the beginning of the end of the humble and trusty mouse. I’m not entirely convinced that the magic trackpad spells the end, but this idea of bringing laptop multitouch to the desktop is certainly is an interesting concept.

        • Tale of two Ubuntus

          The console version of Ubuntu 10.04, as I expected, wouldn’t even start. My experiences earlier this year foretold that a machine with a meager 32Mb of memory wouldn’t get past the grub menu.

        • Ubuntu Netbook Edition Review

          I got a very good conditioned asus eeepc 701 and the first distro of choice after chatting on freenode channel #eeepc was ubuntu netbook edition or une for short (10.04 Lucid).

        • Can Ubuntu Linux Attract More Hardware Partners?

          This is the second year Canonical is hosting the Ubuntu Hardware Summit. The event, located in Taipei, Taiwan, arrives roughly five months after Canonical shipped Ubuntu 10.04, a long term support (LTS) release designed for servers, desktops, mobile devices and private clouds. As an LTS release, Ubuntu 10.04 potentially provides customers and partners with long-term peace of mind on the support front.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • More than Twenty Cities Rally for Bradley Manning

      From September 16-19, supporters of Bradley Manning held public rallies and vigils for the accused WikiLeaks whistleblower, currently imprisoned in Quantico. Events were held in twenty-one cities in the United States, Canada and Australia in response to a call for action sent by the Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist.

    • “Welcome Home, War!”: Pennsylvania and the Marcellus Shale

      Activists, concerned citizens, and democrats (written purposely with a lower “d”), watch out. As George Orwell stated in his ominous book 1984, “Big Brother is watching you.” One need to look no further than the creepy and covert Orwellian events that were recently unearthed in Pennsylvania as Exhibit A for a reflection of the current horrifying environment that exists for those who choose to speak out against governmental and corporate injustices and in this instance, against fracking in the Marcellus Shale.

  • Finance

    • Millennium Development Goals- Another Awesome Joke on the Poor!

      it is being received.

      I would not go into the economics of why this ‘project’ is a joke. This piece originally tweeted by William Esterly really brings the point home. Forget about aid and all the other philanthropic overtures. Take away the subsidies that have killed the farming businesses of hundreds of thousands of petty farmers in all poor countries, let there be a little fairness in trading between the haves and have-not countries.

    • SPIN METER: Largest tax increase ever? Not quite

      The expiration of Bush-era tax cuts in January has sparked a partisan bickering match this election season, and much of the rhetoric from both Democrats and Republicans is misleading. Here’s a look at three prominent arguments, sorting the spin from the facts:

      ___

      THE SPIN:

      Republicans warn that America faces the largest tax increase ever if Congress doesn’t extend the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, which are due to expire in January.

      “Democrats in Washington are now plotting the largest tax increase in history,” says the website for Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, makes a similar claim in a press release, and so does Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, chairman of the Republican Study Committee.

      ___

      THE FACTS:

      Few members of Congress want to let all the tax cuts expire. Republicans want to extend all the tax cuts, and President Barack Obama — along with Democratic leaders in Congress — want to extend them for individuals making less than $200,000 and married couples making less than $250,000.

    • Spinning the Tax Cuts

      A 1942 tax increase accounted for over 71 percent of federal revenues. By contrast, the currently-proposed potential tax increase would raise revenues less than ten percent. Republicans also argue that the dollar amount of next year’s potential increase would be the largest ever, even accounting for inflation.

    • Already Elizabeth Warren Deserves a Promotion

      She appears to be happy about all this, but it leaves us here at BanksterUSA unsatisfied. This is a temporary appointment. What is she? A Kelly Girl? We are sick of temporary jobs. We prefer permanent things like a title, a salary, benefits, five years guaranteed, and most importantly, power.

    • Tell Larry Summers, “Don’t Delay!”

      A Resume Only Wall Street Could Love

      Summers has a long resume that makes him an ideal candidate for a job on the Street. For years, he promoted the concept of “a post-industrial age” where manufacturing takes a back seat. An expression he was fond of repeating was, “Financial markets do not just oil the wheels of economic growth. They are the wheels.” And has he worked very hard his entire career to grease those wheels.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • In Wake of Ballot Initiatives, Questions About the National Organization for Marriage’s Funding

      Add to that list a donation of a whopping $1.4 million in 2009 to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a nonprofit group dedicated to fighting same-sex marriage through the ballot initiative system in California, Maine and other states. While NOM hasn’t yet made public its 2009 fundraising numbers, the amount of charitable contributions it received in 2008 totaled approximately $2.9 million.

    • Netflix apologizes for using actors to meet press at Canadian launch

      Problem is, many of those in the crowd were actors who were paid to be there. Many of the “extras” on hand were interviewed by journalists, who didn’t realize they weren’t real consumers interested in the product.

    • Ad Campaign Aims to Change Americans’ Image of Mormons

      The Mormon Church has launched a television ad campaign in nine test markets. The ads contain no Bible verses or doctrinal discussions … just everyday folks talking about their everyday lives. And, oh, by the way … they practice a faith that nearly half of Americans know little to nothing about.

    • Mormons Use PR Campaign to Boost Their Image

      The Utah-based Mormon church is running a television ad campaign to try and address stereotypes about their adherents. The TV ads show regular people doing regular things, and then saying they are Mormon. The ads attempt to influence how people think of the religion, and drive traffic to the church’s official web site, Mormon.org.

    • Journalists Flee Utah Newspaper Overtaken by PR

      Journalists working for Utah’s oldest continuously-published daily newspaper, the Deseret News, are leaving the paper in a dispute over the new direction in the paper’s journalism. The problem started when the paper published a front-page story written entirely by Michael Purdy, the head of the LDS Church’s public relations department.

    • Open Container: D-News Exodus

      The Mormon Media Observer, Joel Campbell, leaves the Deseret News because of ethical conflicts. Senior political reporter Lee Davidson is also leaving.

      Joel Campbell (pictured) is moving to the Salt Lake Tribune, effective immediately, because he does not consider the bold, new direction of the paper as journalism. Campbell also said he is not alone, and that there are some other reporters leaving the Deseret News for the same reasons.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Remotely wiping mobile phones

      As Nathan Hamblen reports on his blog, remote wipe is currently being misused by Exchange administrators to punish users who access their corporate email from unapproved devices. In many, perhaps most, cases, those unapproved devices are the personal property of a user who is just trying to get their work done. One can understand administrators wanting to impose draconian access rules, and even to enforce them, but punishing users by deleting their photos, applications, and other personal data seems just a tad beyond the pale.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • A Big Week For Broadband

      But the Internet is not just for developed countries – it should be for everyone, and that’s why I am getting involved in the United Nations Broadband Commission.

      Finally, I am quite inspired by this video (also above) – this is a case of broadband by the people, for the people you might say. I really recommend you watch it. As the women explaining the process says: “if we can you do it, anyone can do it.” That is exactly the spirit we all need in the coming years – our digital future belongs to people willing to get invovled in building it!

    • Gallo report adopted: A stab in the back of citizens’ freedoms

      The European Parliament has just adopted the Gallo report on copyright enforcement by 328 to 245 votes. This very repressive text is one more step in the entertainment industries’ crusade against their own public. The Members of the Parliament have failed to recognize that the measures called for in this non-legislative text profoundly undermine fundamental freedoms1. For the next steps, citizens must remain on their guard and should continue to inform their elected representatives about the lies of the industry, and the importance of the Internet for the future of our societies.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • The Kafkaesque Question Of Who Owns Kafka’s Papers

        Law professor Peter Friedman has an interesting discussion on his blog about who owns Franz Kafka’s papers, based on a recent New York Times piece about a big legal fight over the matter. Yes, Kafka died back in 1924. Apparently, when he died, he left a note to his friend Max Brod, ordering him to burn all of Kafka’s papers (“diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on.”) Much to the benefit of modern literature, Brod totally ignored this request, and published a series of posthumous Kafka works, including some of his most famous and respected works, such as “The Trial.”

      • Kafka’s Last Trial

        The National Library’s argument is complicated by Brod’s so-called gift letter of 1952. The most crucial and enigmatic document in the case, it appears to give all of the Kafka papers outright, during Brod’s lifetime, to Esther Hoffe. The sisters presented the court with a two-page photocopy of this letter. The National Library, however, produced a photocopy of a four-page version of the letter, of which the two missing middle pages appear to clarify the limitations of Brod’s gift. When the court ordered a forensic examination, the sisters were unable to produce the original letter.

        Last year, the court decided to grant the National Library’s request that the papers in the sisters’ possession be inventoried: some evidence suggests that the vaults contain further documentation clarifying Brod’s intentions for the papers. The sisters appealed the decision, maintaining that the state has no right to search private property for documents whose existence can’t be proven beforehand. The hearing I attended was to determine the outcome of their appeal.

      • ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Law Firm Torn Apart By Leaked Emails

        Earlier this week, anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law had their website taken down by a 4chan DDoS attack. Adding insult to injury, owner Andrew Crossley was harassed at home in the middle of the night by prank phone calls. Now, through a fault with his website, hundreds of megabytes of private emails have been exposed to the public and uploaded to The Pirate Bay. To those hoping that this is a MediaDefender-type fiasco all over again, trust us – it is.

        [...]

        Financial problems? Interesting. Many tens of thousands of people who received letters from ACS:Law are also experiencing the same problem, having already paid up several hundred pounds each to make non-existent lawsuits go away.

        “We’re still sorting through it. There’s a lot of stuff here to go through. But, basically, we were told we were less important than a 10 minute late train, or a queue for coffee by Andrew,” the attackers’ spokesman told us, adding:

        “Payback is a bitch, isn’t it Andrew?”

        [...]

        – ACS:Law and USCG (of Hurt Locker fame) appear to be cooperating
        – Crossley boasts that his retained lawyer “literally wrote the SRA rules!”
        – Crossley accuses Which? of ‘defamation’ and articles designed to “demean” and “denigrate”
        – Crossley gives veiled warnings to Which? that he could sue them for libel
        – Internal documents reveal intentions to take down Slyck.com

      • ACS:Law (Gay) Porn Letters Target Pensioners, Married Men

        Last night, the private emails of anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law were spilled onto the Internet. Today, as we continue to dig through the mountain of information, we take a look at some of the human victims of this scheme. From poor people pleading for clemency, to bewildered old age pensioners accused of sharing adult movies, to married men who have been confronted with allegations of sharing gay porn, the cost is significant.

      • Forget digital tunes; analog music on the upswing

        Seventy-two years ago last week, the 33-1/3 long-playing vinyl record was invented. And while most music fans have moved on to streaming Bluetooth audio, MP3s and other digital music formats, LP sales are higher today than at any time in recent history.

      • Sharing is legitimate

        For centuries, people were free to transmit to others cultural works such as books or records as they wished. This was codified under two separate mechanisms: the first sale doctrine and the recognition that acts in the private sphere were none of the business of right holders3. It was accepted that such a transmission of works between individuals is at the root of a shared culture, and in the end benefits authors and other contributors.

        With the development of information technology, digitization and the Internet, the scale and scope of sharing was immensely extended. Its usefulness did not disappear in the process. Actually, sharing has now acquired another function: it counterbalances to a certain degree the ability of centralized media to concentrate attention on a limited number of works for the purpose of maximizing per title profits. In the digital era, in the absence of large scale sharing providing an alternative non-market distribution channel, access to culture would be severely impoverished.

Clip of the Day

Paolo Carlini – “The new C++ Standard and library (C++0x)”


Credit: TinyOgg

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