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11.05.10

Links 5/11/2010: Google Chrome OS Enters Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google open sources Apache server speed mod

    Google has open sourced an Apache server module designed to speed website performance. Presumably, the module is based on the mystery Google Web Server the company uses to serve its own pages.

    Known as “mod_pagespeed,” the Apache module speeds performance “on the fly” in 15 separate ways, which include optimizing page caching, minimizing client-server round trips, and reducing payload size. “mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them,” Google says. “It does this by rewriting the resources using filters that implement web performance best practices. Webmasters and web developers can use mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages when serving content with the Apache HTTP Server.”

  • The Apache way meets the Oracle way

    There is nothing in open source quite like the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

    To outsiders it can be maddening. I just finished keynoting ApacheCon and I still don’t get it.

    Jim Jagielski (right) is currently Apache’s president, but having been with the group since its start he’s also an unofficial historian.

  • Open Source Lights Up Darkest Africa

    Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria….countries in Africa that some people have to use an atlas (or at least Google Maps) to locate. While low cost computers, networking hardware and software are helping these countries develop the computer infrastructure they need those are only part of the answer. To really establish a sustainable infrastructure a lot of these countries, who may have been under colonial rule for decades, also need training in entrepreneurship and capacity building.

    A number of years ago I started working with a company called InWent Capacity Building International. Based in Germany, InWent works with the German government, the United Nations and various countries on projects to “teach the teachers” and build economic capacity. Since the German government had embraced Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) early on, it was fairly easy to get InWent to recognize FOSS as advantageous for some of the projects the countries were undertaking.

  • 8 (More) Free and Open Source Project Management Software

    A few months ago, we have featured here some of the best free and open-source project management software. To recap, project management software covers many types of applications that may include scheduling, tracking, reporting, resource allocation, communication and administration among others. It is designed to help companies or organizations complete a project quickly and efficiently.

    For those of you who are interested, here is another round of excellent free and open-source project management software (in no particular order) that we have not included on our previous list.

  • Events

    • Updated open source presentation

      Last spring I gave a talk at OSBC called “Asking the Hard Questions About Open Source Software.” Since that time I’ve given the talk several times to customers and partners, have added some more material about IBM’s use of open source, and tweaked it here and there.

    • Open Source Initiative Bash! – Logitech Loft SF Party
    • Linux Plumber’s Conference Day 1

      First there was an opening talk by Jonathan Corbet, which was a report on the current state of the kernel. Some take-aways I got from the talk is we have about 1100 kernel developers currently, 300 are very active, and the pace is very fast. There isn’t any concern over attracting additional kernel developers as there is a steady influx. Jonathan went over various new features in the kernel, including a few long-term cleanup efforts that are finally getting finished up.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile is Now Faster and Sleeker

        We received a lot of great feedback on the previous beta and addressed many of the issues reported, including reduced memory usage, improved text rendering and a 60% install size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB).

  • Databases

    • The 2010 Elections, Reflections, Lessons and Taking Stock

      Disappointed when the Department of Justice allowed Oracle to acquire the assets of MySQL, putting together in one company the leading free software platform and the leading commercial platform for database services. Not surprisingly, Oracle has introduced sharp fee hikes to support MySQL, killed off low-priced support options, and more than doubled what it charges for the commercial versions of the database. More here and here.

  • Oracle

    • Key Java figure says ‘JCP no longer credible’

      A senior member of the Java Community Process has resigned from his position on the board’s Executive Committee citing Oracle’s role within the committee’s processes as a driving factor.

      Doug Lea —whose position on the board was due for renewal this year— won’t be reapplying to sit on the JCP’s executive committee in future years as he feels that “there is no remaining useful role for an independent advocate for the academic and research community on the EC,” he said in his explanatory departure letter sent on Friday. “I believe that the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body,” he added.

    • New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m92) available
    • The Unsaid Document Foundation (talkbacks)

      Michael Meeks, famous hacker and LibreOffice advocate, replied to my earlier post giving his perspectives on many different subjects related to LibreOffice development.

      Having read his views with great attention – and keeping in mind his long coding experience with OpenOffice.org, as well as his ability to dig deep into complex subjects like copyright assignment – I want to take a chance to go deeper into some points.

  • CMS

    • Six Secrets of Open Source Community Building

      The Drupal content management system (CMS) is one of the most successful open source projects on the Internet today, thanks in no small part to its community.

      At the head of the Drupal community is the project’s founder, Dries Buytaert, who started the project ten years ago in his dorm room. In 2008, Buytaert helped to found Acquia which is a commercial support vendor for Drupal, which to date has raised over $20 million in startup capital. The road from dorm room to open source rock star has given Buytaert some insight into how to build a successful open source community. Speaking at the Zendcon PHP conference this week, Buytaert detailed six key secrets to open source success.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Government

    • Cabinet Office managers ban talks on Government IT

      Senior officials in the Cabinet Office have banned their colleagues from talking publicly about Government IT, which will stop reformers arguing the need for radical change.

      In recent weeks several officials in the Cabinet Office have spoken in public on the massive inefficiencies within Government administration. They have set out plans for reducing or cutting out widespread duplication of business processes and IT.

    • The White House gets open source

      I love this video from Dave Cole (Senior Advisor to the CIO, Executive Office of the President) and Macon Phillips (White House Director of New Media). You hear the feds talk a lot about openness and transparency, but not often specifically about open source. But here, you can see that the White House really gets it.

    • Whitehouse.gov Wins OSFA Award

      Melanie Chernoff, Public Policy Manager for Red Hat, posted a story on opensource.com about the recent Open Source for America awards handed out at the Government Open Source Conference.

    • Governments want more commercial out of commercial open source

      The theme of this year’s GOSCON, from my perspective, was that governments remain eager to embrace open source software, and are no doubt already doing so in many cases, but there is still a great demand for more commercial backing of more open source. Even though we continue to see more official adoption and procurement of open source among public organizations, it seems clear after GOSCON there is a need for more awareness, but also for more commercial support of open source.

  • Licensing

    • Is Your Business Compliant with Open Source Licenses?

      There are many ways that vendors of proprietary products try to scare business customers away from open source software, and one of the more commonly heard examples involves vague fears about compliance with open source licenses. There’s nothing like the specter of a good lawsuit to scare a company back into a paid vendor’s welcoming arms.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Zimmer Twins: Crowdsourced animation for kids
    • New user group aims to take on the super vendors

      Open Data Center Alliance, with more than $50B in collective IT spending, hope to yield a big stick

    • Powerhouse Museum to launch open access image repository

      The Powerhouse Museum has moved to embrace Gov 2.0 principles, announcing plans to create an open-access image repository to showcase the organisations’ extensive image archive.

      The portal will initially begin with about 5000 images and grow to include the museum’s glass-plate negatives collection, including some 7903 images from the Tyrrell Photographic Collection, which documents city and country life in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

    • Open Data

      • National Rail Have Killed My UK Train Times App

        Data came from a free API which National Rail (a body representing the UK’s train companies) has run for years. Output was presented in the cleanest way possible – people on the move don’t want to be encumbered with advertising or excessive page furniture!

    • Open Access/Content

      • Flat World Knowledge’s Eric Frank: 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.

        One major venue for the advancement of OER is through the development and support of businesses that levage openly licensed content in support of education. Eric Frank is Founder and President of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of openly-licensed college textbooks. We spoke with Eric about faculty perceptions of open textbooks, customization enabled by open licensing, and the future of “free online and affordable offline” business models.

    • Open Hardware

      • Getting hooked on open source prosthetics

        The Open Prosthetics Project has outlined the different ways members of their community can help and ingeniously spelled out how they need help within the list. Whether you’re new to their community or returning, it’s very clear how to get started. On their website, participation is as easy a being a user, donor, grant writer, service provider, researcher, or helping with their legal team.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Oracle Proposes Cloud Management API Based on Open Standards

      Oracle has released details of a proposed standard API for managing the cloud. The draft specification, released Wednesday, has been submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for inclusion with the organization’s proposed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) standard.

    • Mark Zuckerberg on HTML5 at Facebook

      If a company like Facebook sees the value in an HTML5-based web application that can run across many modern mobile devices, that, to me is a great testament to the power of the web vs. native mobile apps. Clearly native apps have their place but the more fragmentation we see in the mobile space in both operating systems as well as devices (there are now tablet devices coming out in many different sizes from 11 inches to 7 inches an every size in between) the more important the web will be.

Leftovers

  • Bully-claim dinner lady sacked due to ‘embarrassment’

    A dinner lady who told parents their child was being bullied was sacked as governors were “embarrassed by the public outcry”, a tribunal has heard.

    Carol Hill, 61, had made her bosses at Great Tey Primary School in Essex “cross” and was unfairly dismissed, her lawyer Claire Darwin told the hearing.

    She was sacked from the school in September last year.

  • With the Jack PC, the computer’s in the wall!

    The Jack PC from Chip PC Technologies offers a neat and novel thin-client desktop computing solution where the computer doesn’t just plug into the wall, it is the plug in the wall. Running on power provided by the ethernet cable that also connects it to the data center server, the computer-in-a-wall-socket supports wireless connectivity, has dual display capabilities and runs on the RISC processor architecture – which gives the solution the equivalent of 1.2GHz of x86 processing power.

  • News Corporation’s bid for BSkyB faces probe

    The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has ordered Ofcom to investigate News Corporation’s plan to take full control of broadcaster BSkyB.

  • NI clearly threw in the kitchen sink to get Times online past the magic 100,000 mark

    Raymond Snoddy reveals all from the MediaPro conference – Guardian News and Media is making more money from its online dating service than NI is from Times online; The Independent’s new i has only been selling around 125,000 a day; and Lebedev says the Standard and The Independent are “definitely doomed” if they stay as they are…

  • ‘Pervy’ private chat case springs back into life

    The issue, described by one legal commenter as “the most significant obscenity case so far this century”, centres on a prosecution originally brought in May of this year against Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe, whose log of a private online chat he had with another individual was deemed by Kent Police to be obscene.

  • Inside the Google Books Algorithm
  • FTC Names Edward W. Felten as Agency’s Chief Technologist; Eileen Harrington as Executive Director

    Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz today announced the appointment of Edward W. Felten as the agency’s first Chief Technologist. In his new position, Dr. Felten will advise the agency on evolving technology and policy issues.

    Dr. Felten is a professor of computer science and public affairs and founding director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He has served as a consultant to federal agencies, including the FTC, and departments of Justice and Defense, and has testified before Congress on a range of technology, computer security, and privacy issues. He is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and recipient of the Scientific American 50 Award. Felten holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington.

  • Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?

    On Sept. 22, Netflix began offering its streaming movie service in Canada. This was Netflix’s first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn’t offering its traditional DVD-by-mail plan to Canadians, its prospects seemed questionable. How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted?

  • New Surveys Say Publishers Expect Mobile To Pay Off Big Within Two Years

    Two new publishing surveys predict rapid revenue growth for mobile apps in the next few years, although one shows most publishers rejecting the switch to an all-digital format.

  • BBC facing news blackout as journalists strike over pensions

    The BBC faces a news blackout tomorrow across its main TV and radio news programmes, including Radio 4′s Today, BBC1′s 10pm bulletin and Newsnight, as star presenters including Fiona Bruce and Kirsty Wark join a 48-hour strike over pensions.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Medicine: A Contagious Cancer?

      At first it sounded like a macabre coincidence. Within three days in March 1983, two California cousins learned from their doctors that they had non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. One month earlier, a sister-in-law of one of them, living in Washington, had received the same diagnosis. The family was stunned. What could be causing their unbelievable misfortune?

      In Georgia, a few months later, when the married daughter of one of the victims discovered that she too had the malignancy, the family could not avoid what had earlier seemed an illogical, incredible conclusion: four of them had “caught” cancer from a 63-year-old South African aunt who in 1982 had crisscrossed the U.S., visiting her late husband’s relatives.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • In new memoir, Bush makes clear he approved use of waterboarding

      Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.

      In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

    • Brussels blocks UK from biometric superdatabase

      European judges have rejected an attempt by British security officials to gain access to a huge new store of visa application data being set up to combat illegal immigration, organised crime and terrorism.

      The government went to court to force the EU to allow agencies such as MI5, SOCA and the UK Border Agency to use the Visa Information System (VIS), which will store details of every foreigner who applies to enter the bloc, including their fingerprints and photograph. Intelligence on those who have previously been refused a visa by another country is seen as particularly valuable.

    • Cops Pay $4,000 to Man Who Flipped Them Off

      A suburban Oregon police department is paying a local man $4,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit in which he claimed he was pulled over for flipping off the cops in traffic.

      Twice he saluted with his middle finger while driving, and was pulled over each time by a Clackamas County patrol officer, resulting in what he said was a tongue lashing and “bogus” citations that were later dismissed. He sued (.pdf) in March.

    • Watch Out: The World Bank Is Quietly Funding a Massive Corporate Water Grab

      Even though water privatization has been a massive failure around the world, the World Bank just quietly gave $139 million to its latest corporate buddy.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

      Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

      The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.

      It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

    • Clearing tropical forests is a lose-lose

      Clearing tropical forests for farmland is bad for the climate – no surprises there. But now we’ve learned that it’s also an inefficient way to feed people.

      Paul West of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues worked out the potential yields of 175 different crops if they were planted in different parts of the world.

      Then they estimated how much carbon would be released into the atmosphere by clearing these areas of wild plants.

    • Icelandic volcano showing signs of erupting

      An Icelandic volcano is showing signs of erupting, months after ash wreaked chaos on European air travel.

      Flood water is pouring out of the Grimsvotn volcano in southern Iceland – a sign, scientists say, that an eruption could be imminent.

    • The real reason (climate) scientists don’t want to release their code

      Recently there have been three articles that discuss releasing scientific software. Nature had a piece called Computational science: …Error, the bloggers at RealClimate wrote about Climate code archiving: an open and shut case? and Communications of the ACM has an article entitled Should code be released?.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Civil Liberties Watchdog Feingold Loses Senate Seat

      Civil liberties advocates lost a Senate stalwart Tuesday night when Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) was defeated by Ron Johnson, a little-known plastics manufacturer whose shibboleths against health care reform and government spending tapped into populist anger.

      For years, Feingold was one of the few — and sometimes the only — voice in the Senate skeptical of the government’s increasing demands for domestic surveillance power and control of the internet. He was one of 16 Senators who voted against the Communications Decency Act of 1996, an internet censorship bill later struck down by the Supreme Court, was the only Senator in 2001 to vote against the USA Patriot Act, and he introduced a measure to censure President Bush for his illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

    • Going to the movies? Prepare to be watched while you watch

      Gaining entry to some movie theaters lately gives patrons an experience that is on par with going through a TSA security checkpoint at the airport. Then once you’ve gained access, there are cameras strategically positioned that record your every move. Unfortunately, the extent to which these companies monitor movie-goers is only going to get worse.

    • Chinese general gets shanzhai Peace Prize

      As Ban Ki-moon finalized his preparations for his visit this week to Beijing, one of his top advisors, Sha Zukang, traveled to China to present an award to a retired Chinese general who had authority over troops that fired on unarmed civilians during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

    • Tougher privacy rules on way in Europe

      The European Union looks set to adopt tougher privacy laws for online companies. It’s looking into ways to update rules in line with technical advances, most notably the increase in data that is stored online rather than on a user’s computer.

    • QQ vs 360 – on the Chinese Internet users lose

      There are many aspects of the Internet in China that make it unique (see Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China, a page that is no doubt blocked from view in China.)

      * state censorship of non-Chinese content via the Great Firewall
      * internal (to China) censorship of content by Chinese Internet companies
      * self-censorship that is a hallmark of any regime that does not have free speech laws

      These are but 3 of the many differences of the Internet in China vs. elsewhere.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Libraries Say ‘No DRM’; Springer Agrees
    • New Congress, same approach to hot-button Internet issues?

      Amidst all the shouting over Tuesday’s transfer of the House of Representatives to Republican control, a distinct cry of pain could be heard for the loss of one voice—Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA). Republican Morgan Griffith, majority leader of Virginia’s House of Delegates, has taken Boucher’s seat.

      As Chair of the influential Subcommittee on the Internet of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Boucher’s imprint on tech issues—particularly online privacy—was clear as a bell. Now he is gone.

      “Tonight the Congress has lost one of its most intelligent and tech-saavy members,” a press statement from Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge declared late Tuesday. “Rick Boucher has been one of the most moderate and thoughtful voices on communications and intellectual property policy.”

    • Audio Podcast #65: Usage-Based Billing: The House Wins Again
    • The TPM Provisions in Bill C-32 Are Not In Compliance With The WIPO Internet Treaties

      Unlike most of the rest of the people commenting on Bill C-32 I’ve actually read the WIPO Internet Treaties. Heck, I’ve even quoted them often enough. You can read the specific treaty in question in PDF form here or read the text online here. At this point I’m going to be really nasty. Have you ever wondered why I’m the only person who is willing to post a link to the treaty? Don’t you think that it’s curious that Michael Geist, Barry Sookman, James Gannon, Howard Knopf, etc., etc., etc. never give you a link so that you can read the treaty on your own? Curious, isn’t it.

      [...]

      The problem is that the Recording Industry (as separate from the Music Industry) is suffering from sales drops, and is panicking. In effect the Recording Industry has become obsolete, and they are fighting to try and retain some relevance. Any relevance. And they probably could except for one thing. A couple of days ago I published an article on Canadian military procurement titled F35 Joint Strike Fighter – The Biggest Procurement Mistake Ever in which I mentioned political instability in the United States. The article was published before their election, and my concerns about American political instability were based solely on the news articles of the time. It appears that things may be far worse than I thought. The new composition of the House of Representatives are going to push for enormous spending cuts, which is almost certain to turn the current Recession into a Depression, right behind the Brits and Irish. As the economy gets worse, they will probably attempt to cut spending further, possibly putting the United States economy into a death spiral. And of course if consumers don’t have money, they don’t spend it on things like music. It is quite possible that we could see one or more of the large Recording Industry companies forced into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the near future, because their customers won’t have any money to spend.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Anti-Piracy Tool For Cinemas Will Recognize Emotions

        For most people going to a cinema is a good night out. Only a few realize that they are often subjecting themselves to extreme and privacy invading security measures that most airports could only dream of. Filmgoers are already being carefully watched for suspicious behavior by Big Brother’s cameras, but soon this technology will be upgraded with sophisticated emotion recognition software.

      • Copyright Enforcer Righthaven Faces A New Obstacle

        Righthaven is a company that was formed earlier this year with a novel business model: find websites that have copied newspaper articles without permission, and sue them for copyright infringement. Since March, it has sued more than 150 websites and reached settlements with more than 50. But now Righthaven faces its biggest challenge yet.

        In its lawsuits, Righthaven typically asks for attorney’s fees and threatens to take over defendants’ domain names. It has used both of those demands very effectively as a hammer to force its targets to settle the lawsuit. A new motion filed by digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that Righthaven doesn’t have the right to demand attorney’s fees or take over defendants’ domains, even if it wins its lawsuits.

      • How The DMCA Is Restricting Online Radio In Ridiculous Ways

        Yet another case of the DMCA putting in place ridiculous restrictions that do nothing to actually stop unauthorized copying.

      • Porn maker sues 7,098 alleged film pirates

        In a move sure to outrage both file-traders on BitTorrent networks and legal watchdogs, a well-known pornographer has filed a federal copyright suit against 7,098 individuals.

      • File-Sharers To Receive Warning Letters, But No 3 Strikes

        In an effort to reduce illicit file-sharing, draft legislation was passed in Finland last week which will require Internet service providers to send letters to customers suspected of unauthorized sharing. The warnings will be initiated by copyright owners, but at no stage will Internet subscribers’ identities be compromised. A three strikes-style regime is not on the agenda.

      • Ministry of Sound Forced To Suspend File-Sharing Shakedown

        World famous nightclub and independent music label Ministry of Sound have been forced to suspend their planned shakedown of tens of thousands of alleged file-sharers. The company had planned to send 25,000 letters demanding hundreds of pounds in compensation to customers of Internet service provider, BT. However, BT has deleted more than 20,000 of those records which now makes the identification of the account holders impossible.

      • Apple’s tough iTunes note meant for indie labels
      • Video: Pandora Founder Tim Westergren, Unplugged

        Westergren has had a struggle to get to the top. If not battling the RIAA or pitching venture capitalists that would eventually turn him down, what kept him going was his belief in his idea of personalizing music. He shares his thoughts about building great teams, and inspiring faith and courage amongst his team members.

      • Third P2P verdict for Jammie Thomas: $1.5 million

        The first P2P case to come to trial in the US has lasted five years and now has three verdicts, this one coming after just two hours of deliberation. Jammie Thomas-Rasset must pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs at issue in the case, for total of $1.5 million.

        “We are again thankful to the jury for its service in this matter and that they recognized the severity of the defendant’s misconduct,” said the RIAA after the case wrapped up. “Now with three jury decisions behind us along with a clear affirmation of Ms. Thomas-Rasset’s willful liability, it is our hope that she finally accepts responsibility for her actions.”

      • Ministry of Sound gives up P2P claims

        Last month we reported on an interesting development taking place in the copyright enforcement front. Law firm Gallant Macmillan requested a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO) against BT in order to identify thousands of alleged copyright infringers of its music. Because of the ACS:Law email leak debacle, BT decided to fight the NPO, heralding the end of the assumption that IP evidence should never be contended by ISPs.

      • ACTA

Clip of the Day

Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys


Credit: TinyOgg

11.04.10

Links 4/11/2010: Red Hat in Dubai, Unity on Wayland

Posted in News Roundup at 5:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • China Is A Major Linux Market, Contributor

    In recent years, China has played an increasingly important role in Linux. Chinese developers have contributed to Linux kernel development, and Linux has been widely used in commerce and education in China. According to a research report jointly issued by Springboard Research and Spiceworks, the utilization rate of Linux servers among SMEs in the Asia Pacific region now exceeds 25 percent, which is higher than the world average.

  • Updated Windows Vs. Ubuntu hardware requirements

    I have updated the Ubuntu vs Windows Hardware requirements to include Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 10.04, memory requirements still remains a humble 256MB which hasn’t changed in the last 10 releases :-)

  • New Linux software targeted at schools

    Based on Ubuntu, Userful MultiSeat offers the ability to turn one Linux computer into 11 independent computer stations, while providing users with the same set of features as Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010.

  • Desktop

    • Why can’t we get Linux on the desktop right?

      To be honest, I think the problem with Linux at the moment is that it’s a desktop operating system solution looking for a problem. Most users are happy either with the stability and style of Mac OS X, or Windows 7 with its vastly improved stability and its top-level application compatibility. There really isn’t much reason to switch at the moment.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Activities

        Activities

        So, work on activities has been so overwhelming that I’ve had no time to do anything else lately (KDE-related).

        Service

        First, the kded module and the nepomuk service that were present in KDE SC 4.5 are no more – they are now merged into one application called kactivitymanagerd (KDE ActivityManager Dæmon). The reason behind this rewrite was to have a more stable system (no crashing kded on dbus locks etc.) and to make it easier to maintain.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Red Hat not worried about Ubuntu Unity for Linux

        As far as Ubuntu’s decision to abandon GNOME Shell, Smith sees it as a matter of choice.

        “Different distributions will do different things and I think that’s a healthy part of the open source way – people get lots of choice,” Smith said. “That may influence some people not to participate in GNOME Shell and it may encourage others to step up and do more.”

  • Distributions

    • Top 5 Best Popular Linux Distributions

      Interestingly, a large number of Linux distributions are available, may be cause it comes free of cost and there are a lot of unique reasons to like them. Well, why not try reading this and figure out for yourself as to which open-source operating systems inspired our readers to provide our biggest Hive Five response to date.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat (RHT) Approaches New Upside Target of $43.37
      • Above Resistance – Red Hat
      • Trading Alert for Red Hat
      • Hilal Computers hosts Red Hat seminar

        Guest speakers from Red Hat in Dubai and Europe delivered keynote presentations on topics including the operational and cost benefits of Red Hat Linux; and Red Hat Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions.

      • Linux software offers advantages to users

        Top IT professionals from large enterprises in Bahrain gathered yesterday at an exclusive high-level seminar to hear the latest updates of Red Hat Enterprise Linux open source software.

      • Fedora

        • What’s new in Fedora 14

          For virtualisation of desktop PCs, Fedora 14 includes SPICE, originally developed by Qumranet, the company behind KVM. “Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments” offers numerous functions for efficient communication between virtualised systems and computers displaying guest system desktops. This should allow thin clients to display GUIs for virtualised RHEL and Windows systems sufficiently quickly to allow HD videos to be replayed fluently and to allow bi-directional audio and video communication. It should also permit the use of multiple screens and of client-side USB devices in the guest system. This is know as Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and is a component of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for Desktops 2.3.

        • Linux users excited about Fedora 14 features

          The Fedora Project announced the release of Fedora 14, codenamed Laughlin, on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. A week later than originally scheduled, the release is packed with bleeding edge features that have Linux users pretty excited. You can download the live CD now.

        • At Work with Linux: VirtualBox 3.2.10 and Fedora 14

          The only nit I have with the distribution so far is that it came with Firefox 3.6.10. I need to update to 3.6.12 due to a security issue.

          Other than that, Fedora 14 runs just fine, without any drama. And that’s the way it should be.

        • My First Experiences With Fedora 14 and LibreOffice

          I upgraded my IBM T40 laptop to Fedora 14 today using the “preupgrade” command. I may post an article a little bit later with more of the technical details of the upgrade. Today, I just want to share some of my first impressions. I also tried to unsuccessfully run Libreoffice. I was able to get Libreoffice installed, but it will not run. It crashes every time. I will look for solutions to this problem because I REALLY want to switch to Libreoffice as soon as possible. I am even willing to run a beta version of Libreoffice once I can get it to run reliably.

        • Fedora 14

          Pros: Solid desktop; relatively easy to install; stable and reasonably fast.
          Cons: Software manager needs to be updated to match the Ubuntu Software Center and Linux Mint’s Software Manager. Installer needs to be tweaked just a bit to be more intuitive.
          Suitable For: Intermediate and advanced Linux users.
          Summary: Fedora 14 remains a solid choice for those with prior Linux experience. Newbies would be better off with a more consumer-oriented distribution.
          Rating: 3.5/5

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 43% slower than 10.10
        • Weathering the Ubuntu brainstorm
        • Ubuntu Bug Reporting
        • Ask Ubuntu Review
        • Natty free culture showcase to have theme, gets schedule
        • Am I going to have to abandon Ubuntu?

          I see in the news that Canonical has decided to ship the next version of Ubuntu with the Unity desktop instead of Gnome.

        • Comparing Netbook Desktops – Part 1, Ubuntu Unity

          At this point I was just about ready to send my beloved Samsung netbook out the window, so I decided to stop. I would summarize my investigation of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 Unity desktop by saying it is maddeningly inconsistent to use, amazingly inflexible and un-configurable, it does not make the best use of the limited screen space on a netbook, and in fact seems to specifically waste quite a bit of space, and it still seems to have quite a lot of bugs in it. I honestly could not use it as a notebook desktop at this time, and I would not recommend it or install it for anyone else. I hope that they are able to make a lot more progress with it over the next six months, not only in fixing the bugs that I came across but more importantly in making it more consistent, more intuitive and a lot easier to use.

        • Don’t Underestimate Ubuntu

          I see users who dismiss Ubuntu as a lightweight distro for newbies only. I see them disrespecting its leader and founder. It has become a bit of a pastime for some.

        • Unity on Wayland

          The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linx offers a wallet friendly Android tablet

      The Linx Commtiva N700 touchscreen tablet has 512MB of RAM and a 4GB microSD card and comes with the Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’ mobile operating system. Although relatively cheap at £329 it is “cutting edge and chic”, according to the firm.

    • OLPC’s $75 tablet debut delayed by 45 days

      Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop Per Child said that the XO-3 tablet computer will debut sometime in February 2011, about 45 days later than originally planned.

      Negroponte said that he wants the screen to be flexible so that it is more resistant to breaking, but that it doesn’t need to roll up.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Toshiba AC100 Android smartbook

        And here is the archetypal ARM-based “smartbook” so many of us have been waiting for for more than a year now. Other vendors’ efforts stumbled at the first, iPad-shaped hurdle, but here we have, at last, an Android-running netbook.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Comparing open source and proprietary software markets

    So there you have it. My initial estimate of a generic FOSS Intangible Market Factor (FIMF) is 21. To be accurate you’d need to estimate the FIMF for each open source offering within a given market.

    Then again, I’m a code jockey, not an analyst. Maybe they can estimate each of these factors more accurately.

  • Multimedia, Education, and Free Software

    I was surprised today. A colleague showed me a CD that someone gave her in a course related to the Ministry of Education of my country. According to her, the CD contained “software for audio activities.”

  • November Project of the Month: Gutenprint
  • Control and Community – and the future of commercial open source strategies

    In comparison, the formation of vendors using the strategies associated with multi-participant open source projects has been increasing since 2002 (non-copyleft licences, distributed copyright ownership), 2004 (single open source licensing), 2006 (community development model), and 2007 (bazaar development model).

  • Events

    • Linux Plumbers Conference In Cambridge

      Plumbers conference consists of two plenary opening and closing keynotes, with the rest of the time being divided amongst three concurrent tracks: One track of traditional presentations and two tracks of MicroConferences.

  • Oracle

    • Scott McNealy defends Oracle CEO from criticism

      Asked about Oracle’s patent infringement lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android, McNealy said he finds it ironic that Oracle used to ask Sun to loosen its licensing terms for Java. But he said he’s also a “raging capitalist” and defended Oracle’s right to protect its intellectual property. “I’m giving Larry a little grief but there are copyright laws, there are patents and I believe in patents,” McNealy said.

  • BSD

    • First PC-BSD 9.0 Alpha Snapshot Available for Testing

      Kris Moore has just announced that the first testing snapshot is available for download (both 32 and 64 bit versions). You can help us make 9.0 an awesome release by trying out the snapshots (there will be many between now and the first beta some time next spring) and providing feedback about any bugs you find. Since these are testing snapshots, it is recommended that you try them out on a spare system or using a virtual environment such as VirtualBox. If you’re planning on trying out all of the new desktop environments, you should use a virtual machine of at least 20 GB.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Anti-FSF Sentiment: Truth Not Relevant

      I find the current VLC in the App Store discussion quite interesting on a number of different fronts, but there is a specific one I’d like to point out here for the Gentle Reader’s edification:

      Anti-FSF People Don’t Care About The Truth

      Bold claim? Not really, because there are 2 ways we can come to this unassailable conclusion. People that are interested in finding the truth of the matter, and then acting accordingly do NOT:

      1. Resort to illogical arguments
      2. Come right out and say “this is not about the correctness” of the situation

      You see, people that DO resort to illogical arguments and people that DO attempt to put aside the question of “correctness” have already come to a conclusion – they are simply attempting to rationalize their position.

      In fact, one can see by the embrace of falacy and rejection of “correctness”, not only are they not interested in changing their position – but the position itself must be founded in illogic and incorrectness. It is a doubly bad position to be in, which brings to mind one of my favorite quotes: “you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.”

      The best one can hope for in such cases is to point out the illogic of the position, and hope to innoculate the innocent.

    • GCC 4.6 Leaves Stage 1 With New Features

      Novell’s Richard Guenther has just announced that GCC 4.6.0 has now left stage one of development and has immediately entered the third stage. This means no new features or other major work aside from bug-fixes will be accepted into this next major release of the GNU Compiler Collection.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Homeland Security Giving Extra Political Scrutiny To ‘Activist’ Groups FOIA Requests, Singles Out EFF

      When President Obama first came into office, one of the things he pledged was greater transparency, including in responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As we’ve seen with things like ACTA, where the USTR refused FOIA requests with a totally bogus claim of “national security,” the administration has regularly failed to live up to that promise and at times appears to be even worse than previous administrations.

    • Government Withholds Records on Need for Expanded Surveillance Law

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against three agencies of the Department of Justice (DOJ) today, demanding records about problems or limitations that hamper electronic surveillance and potentially justify or undermine the Administration’s new calls for expanded surveillance powers.

    • Contribute your expertise to an open source textbook

      The textbook itself is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license, and needs contributions compatible with that license. If you are an open source software development expert, or at least a decent writer who is good at researching instructional materials distributed under permissive licenses, this could be a good way to get your name into the credits for a book and “give something back” to the open source communities that provide the software you use.

Leftovers

  • Vans drive themselves across the world

    Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 13,000-kilometre test drive from Italy to China which mirrored the journey from East to West carried out by Marco Polo in the Middle Ages.

    The four vans, packed with navigation gear and other computer software drove themselves Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert without getting lost.

  • Geeky Songs

  • UK

    • Cameron ‘red carpet’ offer to foreign entrepreneurs

      In Thursday’s speech, Mr Cameron also promised to work to help London’s East End become a “world-leading technology city” to rival Silicon Valley in California, announcing that Google, Facebook and Intel were among the firms investing in the area.

    • NY Company Threatens 800Notes Via UK In Legal Comedy Of Threats & Errors

      We’ve recently had our own run-in with a ridiculous threat of a libel lawsuit from the UK, in what appeared to be a clear attempt to intimidate us, rather than an action with any serious legal basis. As we mentioned in that post, thankfully, the US recently passed an important and broad anti-libel tourism law that protects US websites against overreaching foreign libel claims that go against US laws, such as Section 230 safe harbors for service providers.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Adobe Reader browse-and-get-pwned 0day under attack
    • The unvarnished truth about unsecured Wi-Fi
    • Cybersecurity and National Policy

      Those with either an engineering or management background are aware that one cannot optimize everything at once ­ that requirements are balanced by constraints. I am not aware of another domain where this is as true as it is in cybersecurity and the question of a policy response to cyber insecurity at the national level. In engineering, this is said as “Fast, Cheap, Reliable: Choose Two.” In the public policy arena, we must first remember the definition of a free country: a place where that which is not forbidden is permitted. As we consider the pursuit of cybersecurity, we will return to that idea time and time again; I believe that we are now faced with “Freedom, Security, Convenience: Choose Two.”

    • Russian-Armenian botnet suspect raked in €100,000 a month

      Avanesov allegedly rented and sold part of his botnet, a common business model for those who run the networks. Other cybercriminals can rent the hacked machines for a specific time for their own purposes, such as sending a spam run or mining the PCs for personal details and files, among other nefarious actions.

      Dutch prosecutors believe that Avanesov made up to €100,000 ($139,000) a month from renting and selling his botnet just for spam, said Wim De Bruin, spokesman for the Public Prosecution Service in Rotterdam. Avanesov was able to sell parts of the botnet off “because it was very easy for him to extend the botnet again,” by infecting more PCs, he said.

    • Russian spammer is in the slammer

      Igor Gusev, the general director of Despmedia is being accused of sending out emails advertising Viagra. Despmedia is a partner of the Russian pill pusher Glavmed, which authorities allege managed to rake in $120 million over the last three and a half years by flogging pills over the Internet.

    • Palin email hacker asks judge for leniency

      The man convicted of breaching then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account has asked a federal judge to spare him a prison sentence and instead put him on probation.

      David C. Kernell’s request for a downward departure comes six months after a federal jury found him guilty of felony obstruction of justice and a misdemeanor count of unauthorized access to a computer. The same jury acquitted Kernell on a felony charge of wire fraud and deadlocked on a charge of identity theft.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • 419ers threaten terrorism charges

      Advance-fee fraudsters have joined the fight against international terrorism, worried Reg reader Guy reports.

    • Silver Tail Systems Receives Strategic Investment from CIA’s Venture Capital Arm

      Silver Tail Systems, a provider of fraud prevention solutions for Web sites, received solid validation of its products and business model this week. The company has entered into a strategic investment and development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit, venture capital arm of the CIA.

    • The Online Threat

      The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, according to a former senior intelligence official.

    • How The Defense Department And NSA Is Hyping Cyberwar To Better Spy On You
    • Despite Scare Talk, Attacks on Pentagon Networks Drop
    • Privatized prisons in Arizona helped draft laws to send people to prison

      The story of industries paying lobbyists to influence legislation that benefits their business is nothing new—but what about when that industry is a privately-owned and operated prison system?

    • For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

      This past Wednesday, I showed up at Baltimore-Washington International for a flight to Providence, R.I. I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack — a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.

    • Season of the Regulator

      Nonetheless, authorities around the country have fought the phantom threat in a variety of ways, up to and including rounding up all the sex offenders in one Texas county and storing them in the Adult Probation Office for the evening. In Maryland, offenders have been required to post a paper pumpkin on the door with the message “NO CANDY AT THIS RESIDENCE.” More frequently, jurisdictions have told offenders not to put up anything Halloween-related at all.

    • When, not if, will full-body “naked scans” become mandatory in the USA?

      Travel blogger Christopher Elliot has an informed post up about the odd timing of the latest terror scare, and a theory that this might be “just another cleverly-timed event that pushes us toward mandatory full-body scans at the airport,” just like the underwear failbomber conveniently ended a lively debate about the privacy issues posed by “strip-search machines.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The importance of Indonesia

      As a result, Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and many of its species – the ones that Wallace studied – are losing their territories and even habitats terrifyingly quickly. Some – the Sumatra tiger and the orang-utan, for instance – are at risk of extinction. That’s not to mention the tens of millions of Indonesian people who depend on these disappearing forests for their livelihoods, including indigenous communities who rely on the forests for everything: food, shelter, medicine and identity.

    • Japanese Government Lagging at UN Biodiversity Summit

      I briefed the journalists on the Japanese government’s role, as chair of this enormous meeting, and how biodiversity conservation is a huge challenge for them at the moment. Just recently, the Japanese Ministry of Environment announced that they will make a list of endangered marine species, a step forward, yes, but not yet action to save said endangered species.

    • A win on Trident?

      Yesterday’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) gave us the welcome news that plans to replace Trident have been put on hold and reductions will be made to our existing nuclear weapons. “Five year delay” shouted the papers who widely interpreted the move as a compromise to keep the coalition government together.

      The reality is that in the face of military cuts and a National Security Review (which concluded the threats we face are cyber crime, terrorism, a foreign crisis “drawing in Britain”, and natural disasters) it’s hard to imagine how David Cameron could have ticked the yes box on spending £97bn replacing Trident. Particularly as there was already a joker in the SDSR pack in the shape of the aircraft carriers.

    • Game for Change: Fate of the World

      A British company has developed a new computer game that allows players to save the planet from the effects of global warming — at least in a simulated setting.

    • Energy Past, Energy Future

      That low price per watt scares the crap out of BP and will change the geopolitical balance in the world within a decade, making the Middle East maybe a little less important.

    • Gold, Energy, and the Problem of Capital Storage

      One of the reasons that gold retains its competitiveness as a capital-storage unit is the rather slow and plodding rate at which supply is brought to market. Since 1900, compound annual growth of world gold production comes in at 1.098%. That is below the increase for a number of other natural resources but in particular it’s well, well below the rate of credit production–the “resource” which now plagues the developed world. Indeed, the over-production of credit the past twenty-five years has once again driven capital back into hard assets such as gold.

    • Food and Energy Clarion Call from India

  • Finance

    • Obama Economic Team Passes Out the Kool-Aid

      In case they had not noticed, Democrats across the country were getting hammered on the charge of exporting jobs to China via the stimulus package. It does not matter that the charge is false and that Democrats jumped into action to block U.S. companies who were considering ordering wind turbines from their subsidiaries in China. The Republican ads, which ran in key races nationwide, cleverly turned a Democratic advantage on fair trade for some candidates into a Republican advantage nationwide.

  • Hacking

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • “Secret Money from God Knows Where”

      Democratic donors are catching up. The biggest special interest donors on the Democratic side have long been public sector unions. While the National Education Association has dominated the Democratic donor list for years, in this cycle the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) blew past the teachers, giving a total of $87.5 million so far, including taking out a loan to give another $2 million as the race barrels toward the finish line. That total makes AFSCME the biggest outside spender of this election cycle. And no matter what Obama and Pelosi imply, those millions aren’t going to Republicans.

    • The Incumbent Protection Racket

      California exemplifies the disconnect between voters who want to exercise authentic self-government and elected officials who prefer not to let a little thing like democracy deprive them of their livelihood. The latter group is very good at stifling competition at the polls.

    • Corporate campaign ads haven’t followed Supreme Court’s prediction

      Reporting from Washington —
      The Supreme Court sent a wave of corporate and union money flooding into campaign ads this year, but it did so with the promise that the public would know — almost instantly — who was paying for them.

      “With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in January. “This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

    • Can We Really Call the AFSCME the “Big Dog?”

      First, although AFSCME may be the single biggest spender, the “big dog” title is a little disingenuous, as the corporate-funded interest groups supposedly outspent by the union are numerous and coordinated. Karl Rove’s organization, American Crossroads, is spending $65 million, and it shares office space and harmonizes its activities with American Action Network, which is spending $25 million.

    • The Illicit Action Network

      Our past articles have suggested that AAN is attacking Russ Feingold as revenge for his votes for financial reform, and against TARP and the Wall Street bailout. We have demonstrated that some of AAN’s board members benefited personally from TARP and the Wall Street bailout, and are trying to convince voters to support corporatist candidates who will do their bidding and stall needed financial reforms. We’ve also noted how the Washington, D.C.-based AAN operates under a veil of secrecy, collecting over $25 million from anonymous corporate donors. American Action Network Chair Fred Malek is well versed in punishing those considered “disloyal” and carrying out acts of deception.

    • Voter Intimidation in Wisconsin

      The progressive advocacy group One Wisconsin Now has uncovered a plan by the Wisconsin Republican Party, Americans for Prosperity, and local Tea Party groups to engage in what One Wisconsin Now is calling a “voter suppression” scheme. The GOP and Tea Party groups have denied the existence of such a plan, instead claiming that their efforts are aimed at preventing alleged “voter fraud.”

    • Juan Williams: Busted
    • Malicious RoboCalls Aim at Suppressing Election Day Turnout

      Nefarious operatives apparently intent on deterring certain voters from casting their ballots on Tuesday have distributed flyers and robocalls disseminating misinformation about the date of the election and how they should cast their ballot.

      According to the Election Protection Coalition, which has received more than 10,000 calls to its national election hotline, Latino voters in the Los Angeles area have been targeted by so-called robocalls — recorded messages — reminding them to vote Nov. 3, instead of the real date, Nov. 2.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Your Rooms Smell, and I Hate Them

      24grille isn’t alone in pursuing legal action. According to the Times, hundreds of hotels are planning to sue TripAdvisor over negative reviews. They say the site—which hosts millions of reviews of hotels and restaurants around the world—has failed to aggressively police potentially libelous reviews that accuse hotel staff of serious criminal activities. Chris Emmins, a founder of the British “reputation management” company that is organizing one lawsuit, tells the paper that “the world of the Internet and particularly social media has pretty much outstripped ethical guidelines, and some legal ones as well.”

    • Judge Halts Massachusetts “Harmful to Minors” Law

      A federal judge today halted the implementation of a Massachusetts law that would ban certain works from the Internet and punish distributors of works deemed to be “harmful to minors,” deeming it overly broad and in violation of the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Rya W. Zobel said the law, Chapter 74 of the Acts of 2010, was too broadly written because it did not require that materials in question be “purposefully sent to a person the sender knew to be a minor.” Signed into law this past April, the statute made anyone who operates a Web site or communicates through an electronic listserv criminally liable for nudity or sexually related material deemed harmful to minors, and subjected violators to a $10,000 and to up to five years in prison.

    • Facebook app developers sold user info
    • Free speech battle over ‘Girls Gone Wild’ lawsuit

      A lawsuit filed by four women against Joe Francis, producer of the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, has prompted an unusual free speech battle over whether the identities of the four should be kept under wraps.

      Attorneys for the women, who were between 13 and 17 years old when the footage was shot, asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday to allow them to press their civil suit against the Girls Gone Wild chief executive without being named.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • [Canada] Where The Parties Stand on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions

      Yesterday’s opening debate on Bill C-32 gave each party the opportunity to outline its specific concerns and perspectives on the copyright reform proposal. The comments from the lead critic on digital locks provides a good sense of the broad opposition to the current C-32 approach to the issue…

    • Linux and borrowing library ebooks

      This was the most difficult part, for you can’t download the acsm file using Linux, since you get the whole Unix-Dos text file incompatibility thing. For those that want to download to their reader (for me Sony PRS700), you are again screwed since DE can’t handle the DRM crap right to the sony. You have to do something Linuxy! I don’t want to tell, but it’s quite simple, involving installing Python 2.7 on wine, installing the xp binary for Pycrypto, and running 2 magic ‘inept’ scripts to ‘D-DRM’ the epub file. Then just use your standard sony usb disk connection to put it in the ‘books’ folder. Nobody’s out of pocket since you are just reading the book! Don’t put the clean epub on the internet, since I like it for authors to eat and write new stuff! and erase the book after the lending period.

      The principle of the drm is fascinating in its stupidity. DE requires you to ‘register’ with your email and password. You are only allowed to do this on 6 machines (or OS versions), and if you screwed up a lot, you can’t read old books you bought. From this registration, DE creates a powerful RSA encryption key, which on the surface seems unbreakable. It communicates with the library, which pays big bucks for a DE server. But, the program must have the ability to store the key, and de-en-crypt. This is held sloppily, and the scripts extract it.

      When you buy books, the same drm works, and you can lose the key, so you can’t access them anymore, even though you paid for it! So, I would always clean the epub for bought books for archival purpose, and you can put them on any reader, since the epub standard is common and open.

    • Comcast Redefines ‘Cord Cutter’ So Trend Is Easier To Ignore

      As we noted this morning, Comcast lost 275,000 video subscribers during the third quarter. It’s further evidence of the more statistically relevant TV cord cutting trend we began to see last quarter, when cable providers collectively lost 711,000 subscribers, and six out of the top ten cable operators saw their biggest subscriber drop ever. Why? High cable prices and bi-annual rate hikes during a recession. Comcast’s 275k lost subscribers was higher than Wall Street analysts estimated, forcing Comcast to try and argue that people dropping cable due to cost aren’t cord cutters…

    • Verizon Strikes $25 Million FCC Settlement Over Bogus Fee

      For years we’ve been tracking how Verizon socks wireless customers with a bogus $1.99 per MB data access fee — incurred even if the user’s phone is off or the battery was dead. Even users who had data access on their phones blocked were socked by the fee — given that the message sent to users to tell them they couldn’t get data consumed 0.06 kilobytes of data — resulting in a $1.99 data fee.

    • UPD UK Government Wants to Make ISPs Responsible for Third Party Content Online

      The UK governments Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, has ominously proposed that broadband ISPs could introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint.

    • Publisher sells DRM-free ebooks to libraries

      German publisher Springer Verlag decided not to infect the 40,000 ebook titles it sells to libraries with DRM — though the booksellers that carry Springer titles still insist on DRM for their proprietary stores. As a result, “once libraries have paid for the content, the e-books are available without charge to everyone at these institutions, so there’s no need to repost or redistribute it online. Once the e-book is downloaded from the library, no return is necessary.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Study with the Leader of the Resistance

      I am very happy that Stephan Kinsella is finally teaching a class on intellectual property, which is surely one of the most important issues of our time. We need desperately to spread education about this topic, which is a difficult one. It is not one of the “armchair” issues that you can solve without much thought or serious study.

    • Etsy’s crafty balance: Fans vs. trademark holders

      For legal reasons, Etsy’s Feingold declined to comment on these reports or on which specific brands’ trademark holders have called up the company with takedown notices, and Summit representatives did not respond to a request for comment. But considering Summit’s history of filing suit against unofficial Twilight media, it’s not surprising.

    • One Congressional Loss That Hurts: Rick Boucher

      This is bad news for copyright and for consumers. Not that he was all that successful in passing the laws that mattered on that subject, but he was one of the few who would ask the key questions, and actually try to fix those broken laws — such as his repeated attempts to fix the DMCA and support fair use, as well as more recent attempts to stop the massive boondoggle that is the Universal Service Fund.

    • EXCLUSIVE: Fox Sued Over Upcoming Celebrity Prank Show

      Now, however, the Morabito Picture Company has stepped up claiming that the new show rips off a format from its Italian show entitled Indovina Chi Viene Cena (Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner), which premiered in 2001. That show also features people bringing home celebrity boyfriends and girlfriends to their family’s surprise.

    • Copyrights

      • No NZers will have internet access terminated in Copyright Bill

        Let’s be very clear about this. If Labour and the National Government had not agreed on a compromise around the temination clause in the Copyright Bill, we would have a piece of legislation coming back to the House which could cut off NZers internet accounts for six months.

        Labour would have opposed the Bill. It might have been a high moral stand but it would have resulted in a bad law.

      • The Bill C-32 Debate Begins: Locks, Levies & Misinformation on Fair Dealing

        Second reading of Bill C-32 kicked off yesterday with hours of discussion from MPs from all political parties. Six months after the bill was first introduced, the debate offered the first opportunity to get a sense of where the various parties stand and which issues will be most contentious when the committee tasked with review the bill begins hearings within the next couple of weeks (coverage from PostMedia).

      • Zaptunes Gets Killed, Claims Site Wasn’t A Fraud

        After three short months, Zaptunes, a site claiming to offer users unlimited music downloads, died. Their take on these events are quite amusing. Apparently, many of their users thought the site was “the best service” they had ever used. It gets even better. Their PR agent claims that angry music bloggers despised all the attention the site received and went as far as accusing the site to be a fraud – without any “proper evidence”. Why would they do such a thing? Because, they argue, we were determined to “ruin Zaptunes popularity.”

      • The $105 Fix That Could Protect You From Copyright-Troll Lawsuits

        Call it ingenious, call it evil or call it a little of both: Copyright troll Righthaven is exploiting a loophole in intellectual property law, suing websites that might have avoided any trace of civil liability had they spent a mere $105.

        That’s the fee for a blog or other website to register a DMCA takedown agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, an obscure bureaucratic prerequisite to enjoying a legal “safe harbor” from copyright lawsuits over third-party posts, such as reader comments.

      • Elastic Wristband Maker Sues Walmart For Copyright Infringement

        You know those silly elastic wristbands that kids wear? Yeah, well, apparently the company BCP Imports makes the (apparently?) popular brand of them called Silly Bandz, and has somehow copyrighted some aspect of the bands.

      • Oprah Sued For Copyright Infringement After Quoting A Book On TV Without Credit
      • Irony: Book About Recording Industry’s Mishandling Of Digital Priced Higher As Ebook Than Physical Book

        A few weeks back, we noted that book publishers apparently simply did not learn from the mistakes of the recording industry — specifically pointing to DRM and (more importantly) the fact that they’ve started pricing ebooks higher than physical books. Now, in a moment of supreme irony, Copycense (who has been highlighting various ebooks priced over corresponding physical books) is noting that Steve Knopper’s excellent book Appetite for Self-Destruction (subtitled “The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age”) is one of those books. Indeed, Amazon shows the ebook priced at $17.99, while the paperback is $11.53 from Amazon (and available new from others at $7.50 or used at $4.42).

      • Thank Copyright Infringers For Still Being Able To Hear Great Moments In World Series History
      • Good Morning to Happy Birthday for All

        One of the English language’s most recognized and performed songs is Happy Birthday to You (HBTY), which likely first appeared between 1893 and 1912 as new age-grading standards in American schools increased the need for a common celebratory song.

        [...]

        “Good Morning to All” sheet music

        Good Morning to All sheet music

        Today, after a series of mergers and acquisitions the Warner Music Group claims copyright on HBTY, and current law states it will remain rightful owner in the U.S. Until 2030.

      • EFF Defends Former Prosecutor From Righthaven Copyright Suit

        In September, the EFF decided to defend Democratic Underground, which Righthaven is suing for a user of the site posting four paragraphs and a link to a 34-paragraph Review-Journal story. In both cases, EFF has counter sued.

        What’s more, EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl said the group is fighting Righthhaven’s bid to require forfeiture of its targets’ domains.

      • YouTube Star VenetianPrincess Silenced By Music Publishers Claiming Parody Isn’t Fair Use

        Danny points us to yet another story of copyright being used to stifle creativity, rather than enhance it. It’s the story of Jodie Rivera, better known as VenetianPrincess, for years “the most subscribed to female on YouTube.” She creates video parodies of famous pop songs, such as the Lady Gaga parody below, which has nearly three million views…

      • DMCA: Restricting college radio without benefit
      • Colgate accused of toothpaste recipe theft

        A LEGAL dispute between the US and India over a herbal toothpaste is leaving a bitter aftertaste between the two countries, with Colgate Palmolive accused of filing a bogus patent.

        Colgate, the world’s largest producer of toothpaste, patented a toothcleaning powder in the hope that it would take the multibillion-dollar Indian oral hygiene market by storm.

      • Sharron Angle Gets Cease And Desist Letter From Hasbro Over ‘Harry Reid’s Amnesty Game’

        Toymaker Hasbro has sent Sharron Angle’s Senate campaign a cease and desist letter, saying the Nevada Republican never received permission to use the rights to Monopoly for its “Harry Reid Amnesty Game” website.

        “The MONOPOLY image that you are referring to was used without permission — and our legal department sent a cease and desist letter via fax to Ms. Angle’s offices on Friday,” said Hasbro spokesman Pat Riso in a statement to The Huffington Post on Monday.

      • ACTA

        • How ACTA Turns Limited Secondary Liability In Copyright Into Broad Criminal Aiding & Abetting

          We’ve noted that one of the serious problems with ACTA is the fact that it locks in this idea of secondary liability in copyright law, making it such that third parties can be liable for actions of their users’ infringement in certain cases. Secondary liability in copryight law is caselaw driven. Congress had a chance a few years back to put “inducement” into copyright law with the INDUCE Act, but chose not to. So I find it strange that the courts have simply interpreted copyright law to include such an inducement standard anyway. One of the problems with ACTA is that it takes this highly dynamic part of the law, and effectively locks it in, such that Congress cannot tell the courts it made a mistake, should it decide to do so.

Clip of the Day

Lula habla sobre el Software LIbre (traducido español)


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 4/11/2010: Fedora 15 to be Called Lovelock, Many Fedora 14 Reviews Now Available, OpenOffice.org Analyses

Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Daily Giveaways the Entire Month of November

    What does a Recompute DIY kit, a Brain Machine, and an Ice Tube Clock all have in common? The question is, Alex, What Are Things You Can Win From Linux Journal This Month. That’s right, we’re celebrating 200 issues in a big way this November and have rounded up some pretty cool prizes to give away each and every day.

  • I am a Linux Geek (and Proud of it!)

    But then, I don’t think many of us do. It is 2011, Linux users come in all shapes and sizes today. If anyone asks me I will tell them:

    I am a Linux Geek – and I am proud of it!

    Have you ever come to this same realization about yourself? If so, what caused it?

  • Talking Point: Could Linux Abandon Directories In Favour Of Tagging?

    For a fairly scruffy looking guy, I have a surprisingly healthy approach to organising my files. However, I’m constantly pushing up against the limitations of a system that is based around directories. I’m convinced that Linux needs to make greater use of tagging, but I’m also beginning to wonder if desktop Linux could abandon the hierarchical directory structure entirely.

  • Desktop

    • A Tale of Two Computers

      My wife and I bought two computers at the same time. Hers was a laptop and mine was a desktop computer. Both came with Windows XP pre-installed. She uses Windows every day and I never use Windows, but instead have run a version of Kubuntu or Ubuntu since the day that I bought it, almost five years ago. Those are the facts.

      In all of that time I have but one problem with my desktop computer; I had to replace the power supply and bumped up the RAM to run VMs. I have had no software issues. I have re-installed Ubuntu every six months or gone the upgrade route once or twice. I have run alpha versions to final releases of many distributions including the above mentioned.

      My wife has had problems with several viruses, trojans and the like. She has used anti-virus software from all of the major distributors, Symantic, AVG, Panda, Avast, Kaspersky, and Trend. In addition, she runs anti-malware and anti-hijacking software that detects changes to the registry. She does not indulge in any risky practices. She uses lots of email and clicks on links that people send her. In short, she is a typical user with average skills.

      Her computer slows down to a crawl much to her frustration every month or two and it needs to be defragmented, the system tray needs to be cleaned out, her desktop needs tidying, her menu need to be cleaned up, her temporary files need to be wiped, and her registry tidied up. I am not making that up. She cannot do these things herself, so I do it.

      In comparison, my computer which runs Linux needs none of that. I run no anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-torjan, anti hijacking software in the background. My system tray has no applications running in memory that did not come with the OS. My desktop is clean of shortcuts. My menu does not need to be re-ordered. My computer runs as fast as it did when I got it almost five years ago.

    • 2D musings

      QML fundamentally changes the way we create interfaces and it’s very neat. From the api perspective it’s not much different from JavaFX and one could argue which one is neater/better but QML allows us to almost completely get rid of the old 2D rendering model and that’s why I love it! A side-effect of moving to QML is likely the most significant change we’ve done to accelerated 2D in a long time. The new Qt scene graph is a very important project that can make a huge difference to the performance, look and feel of 2D interfaces.
      Give it a try. If you don’t have OpenGL working, no worries it will work fine with Mesa3D on top of llvmpipe.

    • Toshiba NB250 review

      It’s fast and responsive for realistic netbook usage and the six-cell battery boasts a good seven or so hours of life, but the shoddy materials, weak keyboard layout and appalling aesthetics are enough to send us looking elsewhere. In short then: solid performance, brick-like appeal.

    • Acer Aspire One D260 review

      Verdict: 5/5
      The Acer Aspire One D260 is the best netbook we’ve reviewed in some time. Its chassis is TARDIS-like in design, managing to house a competitive array of netbook hardware in a thin, light and supremely attractive package. Definitely the benchmark against which the next round of netbook releases will be scored.

  • Server

    • Turquoise trading shutdown may have been sabotage, LSE says

      By tonight, the LSE admitted the problem may have been caused deliberately. A spokeswoman said: “Preliminary investigations indicate that this human error may have occurred in suspicious circumstances. The LSE takes this matter very seriously and a full internal investigation has now begun. The relevant authorities have been informed.”

      The problems at Turquoise, known in the City as a “dark pool” which allows participants to trade anonymously with each another, had major repercussions for the LSE which had been planning to transfer its entire share trading business, known as the main market, to a new system today.

      The LSE had been under pressure from its customers to delay the introduction of the new computer system to allow further network upgrades even before the latest problems but has now been forced to abandon any updates until next year.

    • London Stock Exchange halts Linux migration after network hit in ‘suspicious circumstances’

      The London Stock Exchange has put the brakes on its cash markets migration to a Linux-based system after human error in “suspicious circumstances” floored the network on its Turquoise alternative trading venue.

      Turquoise, a dark pool or anonymous trading platform, uses the same system, and this morning took trading offline for two hours after a “network issue”.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Linux Audio Blog #1

      Been experimenting with a dynamic microphone (the Shure SM-58) and so here is the first in a series of audio blog entries.

  • Kernel Space

    • Five Years Of Linux Kernel Benchmarks: 2.6.12 Through 2.6.37

      Benchmarking 26 kernels was no easy feat with running nearly two dozen tests each time and each test being run multiple times (usually three to five times as a minimum). Fortunately, with the Phoronix Test Suite combined with an Intel Core i7 “Gulftown” made this process much faster, easier, and more reliable than what would otherwise have been possible. A huge thank you goes out to Intel for supplying Phoronix with the Intel Core i7 970, which is their 32nm Gulftown processor with six physical cores plus Hyper Threading to provide a total of 12 threads. The Core i7 970 has 12MB of L3 cache and is clocked at 3.20GHz while having a maximum turbo frequency of 3.46GHz. This is one very fast desktop processor as shown in our Intel Core i7 970 Linux review and more recently within our LLVMpipe Scaling On Gulftown article where the performance of this Intel LGA-1366 CPU was looked at when running Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe when enabling 1/2/3/4/5/6/12-threads. While the i7-970 is very fast, it’s also very expensive at approximately $900 USD (NewEgg.com and Amazon.com), but it allowed this major Linux kernel comparison to happen in just under a week of constant testing, which is significantly less time than it would have required if using one of the less powerful Intel or AMD CPUs.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Ships November Updates: 4.5.3

        Today, KDE has made available 4.5.3, the November updates to the Plasma workspaces, the applications built on top of KDE’s platform, and the platform itself. This release, as all x.y.z updates, contains bugfixes, performance improvements and localization updates only. As such, it’s a safe upgrade and recommended for everyone running 4.5.2 or earlier. The update contains a number of fixes in Okular, Dolphin and a series of KDE games. Also, the new shared data cache continues to mature.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Using Unity – Day 7

        Unity is still very fresh – if you do an online search for it you find very little about it. In fact, Day Four is the only proper result Google returns for giving Unity a custom Skin.

        Will I switch back to regular Gnome now that this series is done? No. I will stick to Unity whenever using Ubuntu – I kinda enjoy the newness of it. It is quite a fun interface to use.

      • Split – Beautiful New Theme from Bisigi
      • GNOME 3′s new theme lands & Mutter gets ace

        A new default GTK and Metacity* theme for Gnome 3 landed in the Gnome Shell git a few days back. Called Adwaita it looks very similar to the design mock-ups displayed at GUADEC earlier this year.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Slackware review

        Slackware is a great Linux Distribution, and often called the one you need to work with if you want to learn Linux, people usually say:

        If you learn RHEL, you know RHEL, if you learn Slackware you know Linux.

        — Disclaimer:

        I am new to Slackware, please let me know if I’m wrong in anything of the above said. Once again, I am new to Slackware but I’m already in love with it.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 14 installation guide

          Fedora 14 is the latest update to the Red Hat-sponsored, Linux distribution. It is one of a handful of Linux distributions that use LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, as the default disk partitioning scheme. The installer creates three logical volumes by default, besides the non-LVM /boot partition. The three logical volumes, for /home, /, and swap, are the minimum recommended for a desktop installation. The problem with the default installation is that all available disk space is allocated to the logical volumes, living none for future use when it might be needed to grow a partition, or create a new logical volume. This installation guide takes you through the process of editing each logical volume to free up disk space, space that is not needed for the system to run. At the end (of this tutorial), I will show an example of how to resize (grow) a logical volumes, a basic LVM management task.

        • Fedora14 ‘Laughlin’ screenshots tour

          Fedora 14 linux distribution code named ‘Laughlin’ is out. This new release comes with many new features and improvements for developers, system administrators and open source enthusiasts. if you are already a fedora user and you want to upgrade to this new release, please check our previous post. Find in this post screenshots for Fedora14, also installation steps for newbies(screenshots).

        • Fedora 14 (Laughlin) Released

          If you like Fedora, or if you prefer to get your Linux distribution from a large organization with a lot of resources behind it, the Fedora 14 release is very good news. It is solid, stable, it works well on everything I have tried it on, and it includes pretty much the latest versions of everything. My only reservation about it is that it does not include some of the things that I always want installed (Java, Flash and OpenOffice.org for example). None of these are hard to install, but my recent experience with PCLinuxOS has made me prefer that. So perhaps it really comes down to a choice based on the size and character of the organization behind the distribution. As far as I am concerned, either way you win.

        • Fedora 14 vs Ubuntu 10.10: Comparative Review

          In my meetings with Red Hat executives, I found the company had no intention of making Fedora a competitor to Windows or Mac at home user end. Enterprise or business customers were the company’s target.

        • Review: Fedora 14 (Laughlin)

          Honestly I think the Fusion beta 14 I reviewed ealier was a bit more stable in some ways, as I noticed the Desktop screen would “crackle” and flash when opening apps or menus. I would say it’s probably the old mx4000 nVidia card in this old testbed PC, a AMD AthlonXP 2400+ with 768mb RAM, but the Fusion beta 14 did not have these issues. Overall Fedora 14 is a sharp, beautiful, and well supported full-featured linux distribution with a reputation for providing an easy to use system that’s always up-to-date.

        • Fedora 14: haven for Ubuntu’s homeless GNOMEs

          While it may lack some of the flashier “everyday user” features Ubuntu has been focusing on, Fedora is still a very user-friendly distro, especially for those just looking to get work done without the bells and whistles of Ubuntu.

          In the end both are great desktop releases, the main difference is that Fedora has more to offer once you scrape below the glossy surface.

        • [Adam Williamson:] Board elections: vote Adam to revise the Fedora release process! Also, hot dogs.

          I’ve been thinking about this for the last week or two, and I’ve decided to run for the Fedora Board elections. I felt a bit reluctant to do this since I’m a Red Hat employee and I’d like to see more non-RHers on the Board and other committees, but in the end I decided it was the best way to move forward with my idea.

        • Fedora 14 Laughlin Desktop Gnome Quick LOOK Screenshots | Screencast

          Used the live session for Fedora 14 Laughlin Desktop edition ” Gnome “, looks really good, Fedora Art team work did a great job on new backgrounds, and many great enhancements will talk about it in another post, for now we will take a quick look to Fedora 14 with screenshots and quick screencast.

        • Pick me up, no. 9247.

          So anyhow, we watched TS3 and greatly enjoyed it for the second time (having seen it in 3D in the theater with our kids this past summer). But then I got an extra bonus when I popped in Disc 2 of the set, the disc that includes a bunch of supplements. During the supplements, the filmmakers and crew at Pixar show off a lot of the work that goes into making one of these groundbreaking films. And thanks to the exceptional resolution of the Blu-ray format, you can pick out a lot of detail in the material they show.

          Including the fact that the animators were running Fedora on a number of their systems!

        • Fedora 15 Just Received Lovelock As Its Codename

          It’s official: “Lovelock” is the Fedora 15 codename.

          After the community proposed a variety of codenames, the choices were narrowed down to Asturias, Lovelock, Pushcart, Sturgis, and Blarney. My pick was on Blarney or Pushcart, but in fact winning by 28 votes was the Lovelock name.

    • Debian Family

      • Mini-DebConf in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam during FOSSASIA 2010

        FOSSASIA 2010, one of the top Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events for developers, enterprises, governments, and users in Vietnam, will take place in Ho Chi Minh City on November 12-14, 2010.

        The event will feature the first mini-DebConf in Vietnam. After Beijing, China (2005), Taipei, Taiwan (2009), Khon Kaen, Thailand (March 2010), and Pune, India (August, 2010) this will be the fifth mini-DebConf in Asia.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • It’s official, over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!

          We’ve known for a couple weeks that one more woman becoming an Ubuntu Member would cause the Ubuntu Member statistics to to go from 4.98% and nudge us over that 5% mark – and it happened today!

        • It’s official, over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!
        • Over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women. Rock and Roll.

          I am delighted to see that over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women. That is 5% of active contributors who have performed significant and sustained contributions are women. For the full scoop, read Lyz’s post.

          I just want to offer my congratulations to the awesome Ubuntu Women team for all their hard work. It was also great to see the team’s continued hard work and participation at the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

        • Your Ideal Workstation
        • Unity: Ubuntu’s Descent Into Madness!

          Canonical’s decision opens the door for Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint and others to gain more users, at Ubuntu’s expense. I suspect that many faithful Ubuntu users will be casting around for alternatives the minute they see what Unity looks like on their computer screens.

          We are blessed with choices in Linux, and switching away from generic Ubuntu to one of its derivatives or a completely non-Ubuntu distro is probably going to happen once long-time Ubuntu users experience Unity.

          If you are unhappy about Canonical’s foolish decision to make Unity its default interface, I recommend that you consider Linux Mint Debian Edition instead. LMDE gives you all of the advantages of Debian (and the excellent Linux Mint tools & utilities) without any of Canonical’s poor choices and silly design decisions.

        • From Arch to Ubuntu

          I just wished Ubuntu would give a bit more back to a community it takes so much from.

        • UDS-N Poll: Why are you working on Ubuntu?

          One of my goals of UDS was to do a little survey on the floor to get a feel for why participants were contributing to Ubuntu and how they see the reason for doing all this work. I set out a simple 5 questions and asked attendees one after another and recorded them on my phone. The Data Source was then compiled into the following statistics with some answers folded into each other since spellings and meanings of difference words meant the same thing.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Tired Of Tweaking Ubuntu? Try Pinguy OS 10.10 Beta 2! [Ubuntu Remaster]

            The remastered “Ubuntu after a week of customizations” Pinguy OS 10.10 beta 2 has just been released. For those of you who are not familiar with Pinguy: it’s an Ubuntu remaster with a lot of useful default applications “built to have eye candy (Gloobus Preview, GNOME Do, Docky, Elementary*) and for every part of it to be user-friendly”.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Automotive infotainment middleware debuts

      Jungo Ltd. announced a Linux-ready middleware stack for automotive infotainment applications. The Automotive Connectivity Middleware offers a complete media and networking infrastructure, including wireless connectivity, phone management, and integration with mapping and telematics functionality, says the company.

    • Tablets

      • Hands on: MeeGo-based WeTab tablet is no iPad killer—yet

        Unlike Android and iOS, the WeTab software environment uses a conventional window manager that allows the user to resize windows, drag them around the screen, and view multiple overlapping windows at the same time. Due to this capability and the performance characteristics of the device’s Atom processor, the WeTab software experience feels more like a netbook than a tablet. It has a lot of rough edges and doesn’t come with much out of the box, but it’s very open and quite conducive to running ported desktop Linux applications, which could make it appealing to enthusiasts who are looking for a more flexible device than the iPad or Android-based tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Do open-source projects need strong leaders?

    How important our “leaders” to open-source projects? We tend to think of open-source projects being lead by top developers. Sometimes that’s true. Without Linus Torvalds, the top developer, would we have Linux, the major operating system or, as is the case the BSD Unix family, a handful of relatively minor operating systems? I don’t think so.

  • Oracle

    • Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support

      Oracle has hiked up the price of MySQL, killing low-priced support options and more than doubling what it charges for the commercial versions of the database.

    • Oracle’s War on Open Source Is the Tip of a Bigger Management Problem

      There is no inherent reason to think that open source software is free. And there is no reason that software source shouldn’t be available, should a company decide to make it so. But getting stuck in between the two camps can be sticky, and that’s exactly what has happened at Oracle. The company asked almost three dozen developers to leave OpenOffice.org, the open source office application product line that came along with all of Sun Microsystem’s other belongings. Set aside who’s right and who’s wrong here for a moment, and the situation brings two important management lessons into clear relief.

      The developers, disappointed with how Oracle managed the OpenOffice project, split off the open source code into a new version, free of the database company, called LibreOffice. This made Oracle management none too happy, particularly as one of the big supporters of LibreOffice is Google (GOOG), which Oracle is currently suing for patent and copyright infringement over its Java implementation on Android. (It must be the season for legal arm twisting as Google, whose own Apps are a LibreOffice competitor, has sued the Interior Department over alleged favoritism toward Microsoft (MSFT) in a search for a new email system.)

    • The Unsaid Document Foundation

      TDF Fast Start, not without complications.

      The TDF Steering Committee (SC) invited Oracle to join, asking them to give away the OpenOffice.org mark. Inviting a corporation to join a will-be foundation without a document describing a draft legal and governance structure sounds a bit naïve, though.

      Why the SC gave such a short notice is unclear. OpenOffice.org community members have been treated like second citizens, while TDF first-hour supporters have been giving all the time to provide feedback and quotes.

      As a long time member of the OpenOffice.org community and as a founding member of one the oldiest OpenOffice.org associations ( PLIO), I found odd myself being noticed only two days in advance. Knowing about the decision to go without Oracle, some of us would have asked time for a second thought, maybe coming up with better alternatives.

    • Why Oracle Wants LibreOffice to Succeed

      The thought has occurred to me, though, that this may be about much more than Oracle not sharing its community. In fact, given the past history of how Oracle treats open source projects in general, I believe any strengthening of the LibreOffice community, whether through new developers or from developers migrating from OpenOffice.org, will ultimately benefit OpenOffice.org far more than a weaker LibreOffice.

      An outcome, by the way, I believe Oracle planned all along.

      Here’s my thought process: Oracle is trying to keep OpenOffice.org going, but only in a certain direction. No one if quite sure what that direction is right now, but I think it’s fair to assume there is a definite plan.

      LibreOffice, for whatever reason, does not fit in that plan. Or Oracle is worried that LibreOffice is in sync now, but won’t be later.

    • Office Clones: It’s About to Get Complicated

      This is about to get more complicated as a slew of OpenOffice developers have abandoned ship to create the Document Foundation where they are using the OpenOffice open-source code to produce a fork development effort called LibreOffice. You can download the current version of LibreOffice and give it a try.

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • End non-free advertisement: stamp out the ads!

      One month, one campaign, one goal: getting rid of non-free software advertisements on public websites. In four weeks, FSFE received reports concerning 2162 European institutions who advertise non-free PDF readers. Apart from the 305 activists who participated to the search, 1500 individuals, 46 businesses and 38 organisations signed our Petition For The Removal Of Proprietary Software Advertising On Public Websites. Now that the hunt is over, it’s time to chase up those websites which encourage visitors to jeopardise their freedom. It’s time to stamp out the ads!

    • Model letter to contact the institutions

  • Project Releases

    • MyPaint hits 0.9 and is looking good

      MyPaint is an easy to use paint program. It supports several popular image formats, comes with a load of brushes, and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. After 5 years of development, version 0.9.0 was released on November 2 with some nice new features.

  • Government

    • Should governments promote open source software?

      Discussing the optimal mix between open-source software (OSS) and closed-source software, Andreas Freytag, Stephen M. Maurer and Sebastian von Engelhardt argue that “pro-OSS [government] interventions make very little sense if there are too many OSS firms already”.

      [...]

      Almost every company, not just software editors, relies on software. But companies are not at all homogeneous as is implied here. Using the same OSS software will not cut it in an environment of diversified business models. Companies will have to write (or have someone write) modifications to the software, or even brand new software, to fit the business process.

      Then, if they release as open-source, will every competitor immediately benefit for free? It seems like a long shot. It is one thing to have access to the code, another thing to adapt it to the specificities of your business, teach it to your employees, etc.

      If however you choose to adopt the newly released OSS, you will probably need to have some “integration” work done to combine the software with your specific needs and practices. Being forced to release this additional code as open-source as well, you contribute to the innovative iterations. It doesn’t mean, however, that you will immediately ruin your competitive edge.

  • Licensing

    • A Look at the Linux Foundation Self Assessment Checklist

      The checklist is available from the Linux Foundation site, with a list of more than 100 guidelines to follow. The items are comprehensive but not overly detailed. The PDF weighs in at just 22 pages, and the idea is that it’s a starting point for organizations to help develop their own internal processes. For companies that are new to the open source community, or simply feel they’d like to have expert assistance in developing policies, the Linux Foundation is also offering several training options to help organizations come up to speed.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Simple UK Train Times App – Still Dead and I’m Not Supposed to Talk About It

        Consensus is that train times are best disseminated as widely and openly as possible. The more chance us folks have of finding a train the likelier we are to ride on it. Keeping the details of train times a secret or charging people for non-profitmaking uses is perverse and a retrograde step from when they were supplied freely to the public through an API.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Politically selective calls for open access

        What should we think about politically selective calls for OA? For now, put aside those that are yoked to general calls for OA and framed as politically realistic first steps. What about those that are not yoked to general calls for OA, and whose narrowness suggests political opportunism more than political realism? Here are five quick examples from the US to show what I have in mind.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • ODF Wallpaper

      I’ve spend a lot of time on the past years trying to make a wallpaper with the ODF logo for my smartphone, but as I don’t have the necessary graphical skills, I never got anything that could be useful…

      Few weeks ago, I was searching the Internet to find some cool ODF logos, and finally found one very well done on a site andy.fitzsimon.com.au. I contacted Andy and asked his permission to use the logo. He authorize me and even send me an SVG file with other ideas…

      Based on this file I created the wallpaper below, in two versions: BlackBerry (which also fits on desktops and other smartphones with keyboards) and Android (which by the size of the screen had the main logo reduced).

Leftovers

  • The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment

    Back in June, News Corp put two more of its newspapers, other than the Wall Street Journal, behind a paywall: The Times of London and the Sunday Times. We kind of expected it to be a disaster, but now we actually have some results. The company announced that it signed up 105,000 paying subscribers, plus another 100,000 who were already subscribers to the print newspaper.

    But what did the Times lose? According to comScore, the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

  • Exploring Software—Free Shared Libraries!

    It is time that package-management applications free shared libraries from artificial shackles, and create a more dynamic and versatile distribution.

    The first time I came across UNIX shared libraries was with UNIX SVR3.2. The ability to work with multiple versions of libraries concurrently seemed impressive; as I recollect, the shared libraries we were using on mainframes did not offer such capabilities.
    After about a year of using Linux, I found that I required that capability: we were using the Slackware distribution, and needed to install an additional package. We could get a binary version; however, it needed a lower version of a shared library. It was fairly simple to install the alternate version of the library as well, and get on with the work.

  • Science

  • Security

    • Security update for ProFTPD FTP server
    • Firesheep, a week later: Ethics and Legality

      While the answer to this question is likely dependent on many variables and will almost certainly be debated for months or years to come, it should not matter to anyone reading this. It goes without saying that harassing or attacking people is a terrible thing to do. To suggest Firesheep was created for this purpose is completely false; Firesheep was created to raise awareness about an existing and frequently ignored problem. As I’ve said before, I reject the notion that something like Firesheep turns otherwise innocent people evil.

      Reports have been trickling in that Microsoft’s anti-virus software is now detecting Firesheep as a threat, despite the fact that Firesheep poses absolutely no threat to the integrity of the system it’s installed on, and as mentioned earlier, has many legitimate uses.

  • Finance

    • Ferris: Government is being advised by the bond holders

      The Sinn Féin Spokesperson on Workers Rights, Martin Ferris TD has claimed that the Government’s austerity programme is not only designed to pay for failed bondholders and speculators but is being advised by them. He referred to the fact that the Chairperson of Goldman Sachs Peter Sutherland whose Asset Management section holds Anglo Bonds has been advising the Government on the cuts.

      Deputy Ferris said: “Apart from the economic and financial issues that we have discussed here for the past few days there is the whole moral and ethical aspect of the situation.

    • Power Shift in U.S. Stirs Economic Worries Overseas

      As Republicans prepare to assert new authority in Congress, America’s overseas trading partners worry that Washington’s political upheaval may pose fresh challenges to the global economy.

    • Americans likely took retail breather in October

      After a last-minute back-to-school buying spree, Americans appeared to have taken a shopping pause in October, resulting in a mixed retail sales picture.

      That lull could continue until the day after Thanksgiving, the unofficial start of the Christmas season, as shoppers wait for big bargains, many analysts say.

    • The Fed’s big gamble: Here’s what could go wrong

      The Federal Reserve is making a high-stakes bet in the hope of getting the economy steaming along again. Nobody is sure the Fed’s best efforts will work, and they may actually backfire.

      The Fed announced a plan to buy $600 billion in government debt, aimed at driving already low long-term interest rates even lower. The central bank would buy the debt in chunks of $75 billion a month through June of next year.

    • SKorea: G20 leaders need ‘concrete agreements’

      Group of 20 leaders know they must achieve “concrete agreements” including goals for reducing current account and trade gaps at next week’s summit or risk having their leadership of the world economy called into question, South Korea’s president said Wednesday.

      Finance ministers and central bank governors from the group of leading rich and developing nations met last month in South Korea ahead of the summit scheduled for Nov. 11-12. They vowed to avoid using their currencies as trade weapons and promised to come up with a way to measure the reduction of destabilizing trade gaps.

    • The Failure of Mortgage Modification

      The Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program for reducing mortgages of homeowners who owe more than their houses are worth has fallen far short of its objectives. Officials seem surprised by that outcome and blame the result on administrative problems. But, all along, the program’s bad economics doomed it to failure.

    • The White House Needs Elizabeth Warren, Now More Than Ever

      The White House today is under pressure, with insiders asking: After the strong showing of the Republicans in the midterm elections, should the president move to the right or to the left?

      This is entirely the wrong way to think about the problem – the administration needs to get beyond its mental framework of early 2009, which led it sadly astray with regard to the financial sector. The President needs to find people and themes capable of cutting across the political spectrum; specifically he needs to promote strongly the ideas of Elizabeth Warren – what we need in financial services, above all else, is much more transparency.

    • What’s next for President Obama?

      Obama has since led a relatively charmed political life, savoring a series of thrilling victories. His election nights have largely lacked the sting of defeat his opponents know well, and the words “record landslide” and “historic and decisive” have accompanied his successes.

    • Fed poised to unveil new program to aid economy

      The Federal Reserve is poised to adopt a new plan to jolt the economy. It’s a high-stakes gamble that could shape Chairman Ben Bernanke’s legacy.

      The Fed is all but certain to detail its plan for buying more government bonds when it wraps up its two-day meeting Wednesday. Those purchases should further lower interest rates on mortgages and other loans. Cheaper loans could lead people and companies to borrow and spend. That might help invigorate the economy, and lead companies to step up hiring.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Chomsky: 10 steps every day to manipulate the truth

      Another trick, the fourth, the strategy of delay. “Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as” painful and necessary, “gaining public acceptance, in time, for future application.” It ‘s easier to accept a sacrifice but a sacrifice immediate future, Chomsky argues, because the effort is not used immediately, and because the public, mass, always has a tendency to naively hope that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Opposition threatens to unplug digital copyright legislation

        The federal government’s proposal to make consumers liable for legal damages of up to $5,000 if they break digital locks to copy movies, video games and electronic books for their own personal use appears dead on arrival — with all three opposition parties on Tuesday speaking out against this key provision of the Conservative’s copyright bill.

        The controversial legislation to modernize Canada’s copyright law is expected to clear a key parliamentary hurdle as early as this week when MPs vote to send it to a House of Commons committee for closer scrutiny. Critics for the Liberals, the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democrats all stood up in the House of Commons Tuesday to support updating the law, but said they will be proposing amendments to the digital encryption provisions before a final vote.

      • Making of Sintel Open Movie – Documentary Video

        Sintel Open Movie was released last month and it was an instant hit among developers and movie lovers alike. Now it’s time for some real learning. If those awesome blender tutorials were not enough for you, may be you should watch this making of Sintel Open Movie documentary video as a first step.

      • 3 Strikes Still On Agenda, But Only If Kiwis Keep On Pirating

        New Zealand’s Parliament Commerce Committee has reported back on the Copyright Infringing File Sharing Bill and it will now move to parliament for its second reading. The controversial 3 strikes provision is still included, but will now only be implemented if a letter writing scheme to educate citizens fails, and people continue to share illicit files during the next two years.

      • “It is Groundhog Day”: Third Jammie Thomas P2P trial begins

        Michael J. Davis, Chief Judge for the District of Minnesota, opened the remarkable third trial of peer-to-peer file-swapper Jammie Thomas-Rasset today with a quip. “It is Groundhog Day,” he said, looking out over the lawyers gathered before him.

      • Belgian Court recognises CC licences

        This is an extremely interesting ruling for various reasons. Firstly, it helps to eliminate the typical FUD that tries to undermine Creative Commons as licences that are not valid because they lack case law. Secondly, it will also serve to answer another common piece of FUD, which tries to imply that CC licences are American-centric documents that are not valid and/or enforceable in Civil Law jurisdictions. Finally, it is interesting to see how a court may consider the fact that a licence is non-commercial when calculating damages, a solution which I tend to agree with.

Clip of the Day

Who Killed The Electric Car?


Credit: TinyOgg

11.02.10

Links 02/11/2010: GNOME Executive Director Resigns, Ted Ts’o on EXT4, Fedora 14 and OpenBSD 4.8 Released

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • I’m back again ( GNU/Linux retrospection )

    Just a few weeks ago, I decided I should try something new to refresh my development inventory. I decided I should learn QT. After installing it, suddenly I remembered the good old GNU/Linux day’s and that was it. I was back, After trying various distributions I decided I should go on with Gentoo. Now I’m back and I’m planning to stay for a while. I’m about to rediscover my native world with all it’s pros and con’s. To join the community again. I’m glad I’m back….

  • Official Mac and Linux ID Card Software Released

    As of today, people using Macintosh and Linux operating systems can use Estonian ID cards with official software from a government agency rather than stopgap volunteer-developed programs.

    The official Macintosh ID software is available for OS 10.5 and 10.6 while the Linux versions were developed for the three most common Linux systems in Estonia: Ubuntu 10.04, Open Suse 11.3, and Fedora 13.

  • The Corporate Hoax on Linux Revisited, or I Said It Once…

    As for “no Linux drivers,” I’m not sure where that comes from. Yes, there is some hardware out there with no readily available Linux drivers, but I’m hard-pressed to name any. I’m sure readers can provide their lists. Still, I’ve seen no evidence Linux is more deficient in available drivers. Anecdotally, my personal experience has been the opposite.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung, Google said to be launching Nexus Two Android phone

      Samsung and Google are planning to announce a “Nexus Two” heir to the Galaxy S smartphone on Nov. 8 based on Android 2.3, says industry reports. Another report says the Nexus Two will go on sale exclusively in the U.K. for the holiday season.

  • Kernel Space

    • China Mobile Joins Linux Foundation as Gold Member

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that China Mobile Communications Corporation (”China Mobile”), whose holding company is majority shareholder of China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL), has become a Gold member, marking the first time a Chinese enterprise has joined The Linux Foundation.

    • Ted Ts’o: EXT4 Within Striking Distance Of XFS

      Our most recent desktop testing of the EXT4 file-system (along with Btrfs) indicate performance regressions in the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, while previous to that we also compared these two latest Linux file-systems to the ZFS-FUSE file-system, and when using these file-systems on a solid-state drive. Benchmarks of both EXT4 and Btrfs atop the latest Linux 2.6.37 kernel development code will be available in the coming weeks.

    • I have the money shot for my LCA presentation

      Thanks to Eric Whitney’s benchmarking results, I have my money shot for my upcoming 2011 LCA talk in Brisbane, which will be about how to improve scalability in the Linux kernel, using the case study of the work that I did to improve scalability via a series of scalability patches that were developed during 2.6.34, 2.6.35, and 2.6.36 (and went into the the kernel during subsequent merge window).

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Improving The Linux Desktop: 20 Needed Fixes

      1) Focus on the casual user first, geek second. Many among you will likely point out that nine times out of ten, a Google search holds the answer to the most common questions people have when working with desktop Linux.

      Unfortunately, not everyone out there knows the right questions to ask Google in the first place. What’s needed is some kind of easy-to-use GUI troubleshooting tool that can be used to gather debugging information. This would make a trip to the various Linux forums a lot more productive for everyone involved.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • What Will Happen to GNOME Now?

        Those who remember a time before Ubuntu will undoubtedly also remember that GNOME, although probably the second most popular desktop manager, didn’t hold too much share of the Linux desktop market. KDE was king, and GNOME was a distant second. Then Ubuntu appeared and not only climbed its way to the top of the distribution game, but brought GNOME with it. Polls over the last few years have shown its use increasing to the point that it is oftentimes equalling or out-ranking KDE. But what will happen to GNOME now that Ubuntu 11.04 is going to ship with Unity?

      • Changing Roles

        I have really enjoyed working with GNOME over the past 2+ years. Working with the GNOME community on creating a free desktop accessible to everyone has been fun and exciting – as well as challenging – which is part of the fun. :) It is the community that makes GNOME, and it’s working with that community, in particular the board, that has made my job so much fun.

        Over the past two years I think we’ve made great progress with the GNOME Foundation. We’ve more than doubled our income both from corporate investors and individuals. We’ve made great technical progress especially with all of the hackfests. And we’re well on our way to GNOME 3.0 which is looking like a solid release at this time. In addition we’ve grown teams and processes like the marketing team, the sys admin team and the travel committee. And you know all this because we’ve also improved our communication processes with things like the quarterly report and more active use of the GNOME Foundation blog.

      • Ubuntu’s Game-Changing Quest for ‘Unity’

        Yes, for those who missed it, Natty Narwhal — or Ubuntu 11.04 — will not use the distribution’s longtime GNOME Shell as the default desktop interface. Rather, it will feature the 3D and multitouch-enabled Unity, which just appeared in the netbook edition of Maverick Meerkat earlier this month.

      • Using Unity – Day 6

        Today I will tackle one of the areas where Unity irritates me a bit: Notifying me of actionable windows/programs.

      • Is Ubuntu Forking Gnome With Unity?
      • Install Unity to experience the future of Ubuntu

        Unless you’ve had your head in the sand the last couple of days, you know that Canonical has announced it is moving away from GNOME being the default desktop and switching to it’s netbook-centric desktop Unity. Why was this done? Mark Shuttleworth said that having a single interface for both netbook and desktop would improve quality assurance and make it easier for OEMs to integrate and support the desktop. I want to believe the reason is because Canonical has big, very big, things in store for the planet’s favorite Linux distribution.

      • Thoughts on Ubuntu and (dis-)Unity(?)

        Ok, so now pretty much anyone who is interested in this sort of thing has heard that Ubuntu will be changing from Gnome to the Unity desktop for their standard distribution in the 11.04 release. There are so many sides to this, and so many different ways to look at it, that I start getting dizzy every time I really try to get into it.

      • gtk hackfest summary

        perhaps the most surprising takeaway from the hackfest is that gtk4 is coming quite soon. we plan to do the bulk of the work required to get it out the door in 2011.

  • Distributions

    • Are there too many Linux Distributions?

      Only the newbies or newcomers are confused at first about the options. But they usually does not have hundreds of choice, they only have to choose one out of five.

      When someone tells me he wants to run Linux instead of Windows, and asks me which one to choose, I in no way face him with 20 or 200 options, I only gave him five at the most, usually only three, or even two.

      If we see the distrowatch home page, we can see the five most popular distributions in this order:

      1. Ubuntu
      2. Fedora
      3. Mint
      4. openSUSE
      5. Debian

    • What is today’s most popular linux distribution?

      Distrowatch, which ranks the popularity of Linux distributions based on page hits, does not include Android on its list. The top 10 Linux distributions there, as of this writing and with data based on the last 6 months, are:

      1. Ubuntu
      2. Fedora
      3. Mint
      4. OpenSUSE
      5. Debian
      6. PCLinuxOS
      7. Mandriva
      8. Sabayon
      9. Arch
      10. Puppy

    • Reviews

      • ZEN-Mini Gnome 2010.10 Reviewed! “Flying Under the Radar”

        Conclusion:

        Pros:

        * Small and light
        * Great Desktop look
        * Easy to use Package Manager
        * Great support via forums and PCLinuOS emagazine
        * Can be remastered easily

        Cons:

        * Gnome panel still buggy
        * Mount other partitions at boot with no easy way to turn off
        * Overall limited package selection
        * Long term support unknown
        * Need for 3rd-party repository similar to ARCH’s AUR

    • New Releases

      • Trisquel GNU/Linux 4.0 International DVD

        Today we announce the availability of the international Trisquel 4.0.1 LTS DVD images, which include 50 language translation packs with up to 130 dialectal variants and come complete with writing tools, input methods, unicode fonts and spell checkers. This new edition was already used as the base for the current FSF live membercard system.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2010.10 Distribution Available

        If you haven’t tried PCLinuxOS until now, this would be a good time to do so. If you are already running it, make a note to update your installation media, so that installing it for your friends and family when they see how nice it is and how well it works. Good stuff, congratulations once again to everyone involved in the PCLinuxOS distribution.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat near Key Resistance Area

        Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $42.73 with the current price action closing at just $42.26 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.

      • RHN Satellite 5.4, first analysis

        In another post, I was speculating about the upstream version. Now, Sat540 seems to be based on Spacewalk 1.2 which is not yet released. I was quite puzzled about that fact. Usually upstream (Fedora) projects are ahead of its commercial counterparts, this time it seems to be the other way round.

      • Fedora

        • ITworld review: Fedora 14 is leading-edge Linux

          The full distribution also includes the newest version of the KDE desktop, KDE 4.5.2, but I’ll be darned if I ever met a Fedora user who used KDE. Fedora has long been known as the GNOME’s user GNOME Linux of choice.

        • Fedora 14 vs. Ubuntu Maverick: Distinct Differences

          As contemporaries, Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10 provide an apt comparison. In past releases, the two distributions have been the most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch — although Ubuntu usually has 20-40% more downloads — and there is no reason to think these latest releases will be much different.

        • Fedora 14 Desktop Edition
        • Fedora 14 released with new features for developers

          The Fedora development community announced on Tuesday the official release of Fedora 14, codenamed Laughlin. The new version is a bit light on user-facing changes, but adds some useful features for developers. Fedora typically issues a new release every six months and is loosely aligned with the GNOME development cycle. Each release brings updated software and some new packages.

          Fedora 14 ships with GNOME 2.32, a transitional GNOME release that introduces some important architectural changes under the hood in preparation for GNOME 3. There aren’t many new GNOME features on the surface, however, because the GNOME developers are largely focused on preparing a new shell that will significantly overhaul the next version of the desktop. KDE 4.5, which was released in August, is also available in Fedora 14. It has a new notification system and preliminary support for tiling in the KWin window manager.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, Is it a perfect 10/10 ? : A Review

          For a convert from Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, the new Ubuntu 10.10 feels tempting to use! But, a regular Ubuntu user wont find anything ground breaking in the new release, although it can be considered a polished Lucid. However, the improvements in the sound applet are worth mentioning.

          Lucid Lynx was a big leap in terms of UI from Karmic by trashing the old brown theme and functionality by replacing Gimp as the default Photo Editor. Maverick improves on that. The next iteration in the Ubuntu release, 11.04 Natty Narwhal will come under the lime light on April 28, 2011.

          By the way we are going to give Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat a 9/10 rating.

        • Ending Another Chapter

          So for the last 5 years I’ve been associated with the Ubuntu ecosystems and dedicated a large chunk of my time trying to get the distro properly translated into Brazilian Portuguese and doing a lot of advocating along the way. I even got to attend the very first UDS-MTV and meet some of those guys and gals I had spent so much time talking/working online. It was a bitter sweet moment and an eye opener, as I was able to see first hand the direction that the distribution was heading to. Not too long after that I started moving away from my involvement, resigning from several groups I had belonged to to a very minimum core associations.

          Why I kept the Ubuntu Members membership for the past 3 years is a bit hard to explain in a few paragraphs, so I’ll save it for another time. I guess I had hoped that things would be a bit different and that Ubuntu would indeed become the contender for making sure that FLOSS projects would be first citizens in their plans. I also hoped that all of my hard work and the ground work I laid out for my successors would be acknowledged but it seems that the past has been forgotten by all.

          So in 6 days my membership will expire and with it the last thread still connecting me to Ubuntu will expire. I will remove my blog from Ubuntu Planet (I can hear a few cheers already for I have deliberately been harsh towards the directions Canonical has taken the distribution) and all of my efforts will be directed at helping the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME 3.0 release.

        • PPAs Turning Ubuntu into Arch?

          A few years ago I started hearing about ppas everywhere. More and more, I see developers telling people that if they want the latest of program X, they should load the developer’s ppa. A ppa is a repository of software that is neither maintained by Canonical nor the Ubuntu community.

        • Dell PowerEdge Ubuntu certifications

          I hope you didn’t miss the fantastic news that Dell has expanded the PowerEdge servers that are certified for Ubuntu Server Edition. We’ve also worked with them to port and package OpenManage 6.3 to Ubuntu which is important for anyone who uses this systems management framework.

        • The Major Happenings From The Ubuntu 11.04 Summit

          UDS Natty also resulted in discussions for better helping free software developers in their contributions to Ubuntu to make them easier and for advancing work in areas like multi-touch and gestures. There’s also work planned on tools and resources for game developers. Lastly, with the Ubuntu Software Center they will begin working on a feature for adding support to donate money to free software projects through this “Ubuntu app store.”

        • Living with a Maverick Meerkat

          The verdict? Change is a really difficult process. But it is those little steps that keep you moving forward. This is true for both Ubuntu and me. The Ubuntu OS still has a few more steps to go before it can be truly consumer-friendly. As for myself, to be honest, I was tempted to revert back to Windows on a number of occasions. On the other hand, after more than a week, I am still playing with Maverick Meerkat even as I write this very piece.

        • Move to Ubuntu

          A recent post in Planet Gnome about moving away from Arch into Ubuntu got me thinking, because I just did the same thing a few weeks ago, when Ubuntu 10.10 was released. But I didn’t really liked the reasons I did so.

          First, I love Arch Linux. It’s simplicity and speed are amazing. It’s clearly focused on power users, which is great for me. It’s package manager (Pacman) is very fast and powerful, while still easy to use. I love how I can search and query packages both installed and from the cache with concise commands that usually do what you want at the first time. Compared to Ubuntu’s apt-cache and apt-get, which I usually have to read the man page to remember a few commands and to Fedora’s yum, which I’m never comfortable with, Pacman is always the winner. If that was not enough, you can create useful packages in under 10 minutes. Better yet if you can find a pre-made PKGBUILD in AUR, which contains thousands of recipes to build packages. The binary packages are usually enough for a desktop, but sometimes you do need to dig into Yaourt, which automatically downloads and compiles recipes. It is time-consuming sometimes, but comparing to finding a PPA with a decent enough version of a package that you can’t find in Ubuntu, it’s not much different.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Introducing Pinguy OS 10.04 LTS

            In the end, I think Pinguy OS has a good concept, but at this stage it needs some polish in the implementation. The idea of taking Ubuntu and adding popular software and giving the system a familiar interface is a good one (it has served the Mint community well). However, the approach feels unfocused. Including popular codecs and software for a wide range of activities is a good plan, but in Pinguy’s case it makes the menu feel cluttered. Sometimes unnecessarily. For instance, why do I have five image viewers/editors, but no GIMP? If the distro is targeting newcomers then why include VirtualBox? For that matter, I find it odd that the system includes three graphical package managers. Likewise, there are two CPU usage monitors on the desktop, two network monitors and two clocks. All four sides of the desktop covered with panels which will cover up windows when they are moved into the same space. It feels crowded visually and takes up a noticeable amount of resources. I feel Pinguy OS would benefit from looking at Zenwalk and following the clean and integrated one-app-per-task approach and avoid making users choose between three different video players.

            Granted, this is early in the project’s development and it’s not reasonable to expect perfection the first time. And to Mr Norman’s credit, this initial release does achieve its goal of giving the user almost all of the software they need straight out of the box without requiring additional configuration. I’m hoping we see a new version of Pinguy down the line which combines the large selection of pre-installed software with a less busy interface.

          • Lubuntu Screencast: Install Apps from Terminal

            This Screencast gives you an introduction on how to install, delete and search for software from the terminal with the command line tool apt-get.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo

        • An Improved Experience With Qt Scene Graph

          Just days after blogging about Gallium3D and the TGSI IR that could be replaced with LLVM IR in LunarGLASS, Zack Rusin has written a new entry regarding 2D acceleration and the lack of really any innovation or major changes to this area of graphics processing in recent years. However, that is beginning to change at least in the Nokia world when it comes to QML and Qt Scene Graph.

          Zack basically goes on to say in his latest blog post that the 2D rendering model really hasn’t changed in years and that there’s much more that could be done to speed-up the process and make it more efficient. Among the 2D model shortcomings mentioned by Zack are pixmaps and surfaces are created too many times when they could be reused when the window and its widgets don’t change (or change minimally), pushing the data from every draw call into a temporary buffer and then copying it all at once, creating a shader cache for fill and composition modes, and the GPU downloading the same data with every frame being rendered.

      • Android

        • Android Continues to Gobble Up Mobile OS Share

          Google’s wildly popular Android mobile operating system gained even more momentum in the third quarter at the expense, primarily, of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices, according to latest smartphone industry data.

          According to market researcher NPD Group, Android expanded its lead among mobile operating system providers with 44 percent of smartphones sold in the quarter, up 11 percent from what was a blowout second quarter.

          Meanwhile, Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ: RIM) BlackBerry OS tumbled to third place in the third quarter, slipping from 28 percent to 22 percent. Apple’s iOS inched up 1 percent to 23 percent, good enough to take over the No. 2 spot among mobile OS installed on new smartphones sold in the quarter.

        • Highlights of the upcoming release

          Hannes lately implemented a lot of new features that were listed in the Roadmap, and I just made available a new apk on our google code page. The contributions have been merged in the main repository a few moments ago, and the changelog is in the message that Hannes sent to our mailing list. You can get an overview of the new features by looking at the following pictures and videos that Hannes made and shared.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Would the Amish Use This Hand-Cranked Laptop?

        The answer, basically, is yes.

        For the Amish, the bigger issue relates to connecting to the outside world. “Not being on the grid continues to be universal in Amish life,” explains professor David L. Weaver-Zercher, author of The Amish Way. “There is kind of a symbolic thing with the grid, that the wires themselves are physically connecting your house. That is a clear connection to worldly ways of doing things that we want to avoid.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • For the Symbian Foundation, Time Wasn’t the Only Problem

    It was all the way back in October of 2009 that an open kernel for the Symbian platform was released to the world. It’s important to note that at that time, the Symbian platform had 50 percent share in the smartphone market. It’s also important to note that the Symbian Foundation had hoped to deliver its open source tools much earlier than that.

    [...]

    The Symbian Foundation simply didn’t find the right ways and the right pace at which to challenge the smartphone platforms that were beginning to move with great momentum. This was a colossal failure of judgment from an extremely well-funded organization, and at this point, there is not likely to be a turnaround for the Symbian platform.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • 4 Better Web Browsers for Linux and Everyone Else

        Just about all the mainstream web browsers today are available for download in Linux. Since most of your computing time is likely spent in front of the browser, you shouldn’t just settle with the one that came preinstalled with your distribution. We’ll review four different browsers you can use in Linux, where you can pick the one that’s best for you.

      • Does Firefox Tuning Make Firefox Faster?

        Like Chrome, Firefox has a somewhat hidden configuration area that enables users to adjust certain features of the browser. It this feature that you will have to access when you stumble across Firefox tuning tips that have been posted for years across the web. Do they work and if so, what effect do they have. We took the regular and modified Firefox out for a spin.

      • Mozilla: 10 Bugs Left In Firefox 4 Beta 7

        They may be serious this time: Mozilla just announced that there are only 10 bugs left to fix in the current pre-release version of the Firefox 4 Beta 7. It appears that the software could be released to the public within two weeks. The mobile Beta 2 for Firefox 4, known as Fennec, is already in testing and work on Beta 3 has begun.

      • Implementing A High-Performance Emulator In Javascript Using Run-Time Code Generation

        For a while I’ve been thinking about exploiting fast browser JITs and JS “eval()” to build really fast emulators and other language runtimes. Tonight I was feeling jumpy so I went ahead and hacked something up.

  • Oracle

    • Mass resignations from OpenOffice.org

      Oracle’s decision to decline to get involved with the Document Foundation and its announcement that it planned to continue to develop OpenOffice was followed by a call from an Oracle employee and OpenOffice.org council member Louis Suárez-Potts for council members with a connection with the Document Foundation to resign due to a conflict of interest.

    • The Oracle Fiasco’s Impact

      I now feel confident that things such as Firefox, Chrome, Linux, and the like are safe from megacorps. They’re safe from the hands of those who seek to control markets and products. Users are safe to consider the software they purchase their own without fear of prosecution should they need to change the software in some or redistribute the software for some reason.

    • Integration Watch: Oracle, IBM, and Google… and Java

      The early-October announcement from IBM that it was joining the OpenJDK project and abandoning Apache Harmony sent immediate ripples through the Java community. The predictable early reaction was that this was another step in Oracle’s litigation-based attack on Google. That dispute centers on a handful of software patents that Oracle claims were violated by Google’s use of technology that derived in part from Apache Harmony. According to this scheming view, by convincing IBM to support Harmony’s competitor, OpenJDK, Oracle marooned the search giant on an island of technology that had no future, save whatever enhancements Google might care to make.

    • New: OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 3 (build OOO330m13) available
    • New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m91) available
    • OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Almost Here – Is It the Last?

      OpenOffice.org 3.3 Release Candidate 3 was released on November 1 with many updates and new features that have been in development for the last six months or more. This comes when as many as 33 OpenOffice.org developers are handing in their resignations. While the loss of the German team is unlikely to affect this release, one has to wonder what the future holds for OpenOffice.org.

    • Go LibreOffice !!!

      I have also sent a trivial cleanup patch in that was accepted, so now I know that if I ever have an annoying bug in LibreOffice I will not treat it with a shrug as I would do with proprietary software and as until now but will feel confident diving in the code.

    • Open letter to the JCP Executive Committee calling for JCP reform

      Indeed, the central problem with the current JCP is lack of transparency and openness. Although the JCP defines itself as “the open, participative process to develop and revise the Java technology specifications, reference implementations and test suites”, it’s not very open nor participative in practice. The community is almost entirely excluded when developing so called “open standards”.

    • 2010 JCP EC Election Results
    • Inside the OpenOffice.org coup
    • Fork off: mass exodus from OOo as contributors join LibreOffice

      The OpenOffice.org (OOo) community has declared independence from Oracle as members have joined the LibreOffice project, a fork of the open source office suite. In an open letter published on the OOo mailing list, a group of over 30 contributors affirmed their intention to abandon Oracle’s code base in favor of LibreOffice. They say that the fork’s more inclusive environment and community-driven management offer a powerful opportunity to advance the software.

      The LibreOffice project launched last month amid concerns that Oracle would not rectify the long-standing problems with the OOo development process and governance model. The fork was backed by The Document Foundation, a newly formed organization that includes Linux heavyweights Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Canonical among its supporters. The group initially hoped that Oracle would agree to participate, but the enterprise software giant appears to have no interest in finding a middle ground. Oracle insists that participating in both projects poses a conflict of interest and responded to the fork by forcing TDF members who have seats on the OOo community council to step down from their elected roles in OOo leadership. Oracle’s uncompromising attitude has now instigated a mass exodus of OOo community members as independent contributors flock to LibreOffice.

  • CMS

    • Open Source Software Firm Acquia Raises Another $8.5 Million

      Acquia, a company that sells products and services for popular open source content management system Drupal, has announced an $8.5 million round of funding led by by North Bridge Venture Partners.

      Although open source and capitalism may seem fundamentally opposed, Acquia — which has now brought in a total of $23.5 million of funding over three rounds — continues to highlight the commercial potential of open source projects. Other commercial open source business models include Automattic’s WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPressWordPressWordPress.org and Dotnetnuke’s enterprise solutions.

    • Drupal Founder on Why Open Source is Good for Business [INTERVIEW]

      One of the things I’ve learned from Drupal is that commercial interests are a really good thing. But they have to be managed properly. For example, I think that the reason Drupal is successful is the community. I think the reason we have such a large community is because so many people make money with Drupal. They use Drupal to build websites for their customers. So it’s a tool that allows people to make money, and because they’re making money with Drupal, they’re invested in the project and they contribute to the project because their business depends on it.

  • Business

    • Community Escrow

      The story can easily be different with open source. If there is a market demand large enough to justify starting a new business to take on the code, as was the case for ForgeRock, it’s entirely possible there will be someone ready to provide seamless continuity. Otherwise, the businesses who have been working in the community are likely to have solutions for you. The fact they have been free to study and modify the code means they will have skills that only the staff of the vendor can have in the case of proprietary software. They may be able to provide continuity; at a minimum they will be able to support you as you plan a graceful migration.

      What can prevent this option existing? A community escrow option can only exist if your software freedoms have been respected and the sorts of measures in addition to open source licencing that Andy Updegrove mentions have been taken. If the product was “open core” – with the key commercial features kept proprietary – it will be very hard for anyone to provide continuity. This is especially true if you are using the software as a service, because the critical know-how to make the software reliably run in the cloud is unlikely to be included in the open source project. If your vendor scorns co-developers, there may well be no-one out there ready to step in. It’s thus not a matter of mere philosophy to check your software freedoms are protected; your ability to use community escrow to manage a vendor failure may be at stake.

  • Funding

    • Who Really Pays for Open Source Software?

      There has been significant growth in the open source software market over the last decade and as popularity continues to grow, the market doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. The Open Source community frequently attracts very intelligent, motivated and experienced developers driven by pride, personal curiosity and peer recognition to develop valuable solutions. No matter how much personal satisfaction developers receive from seeing the result of their efforts however, software developers still have to pay the bills and have some money left over to eat. So, how can software that isn’t for sale actually make money?

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 4.8 released

      We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.8. This is our 28th release on CD-ROM (and 29th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install.

    • OpenBSD 4.8 Brings Improved Hardware Support

      OpenBSD 4.7 came out this past summer, but OpenBSD 4.8 is now available for those interested in this BSD operating system that focuses on providing portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography. With OpenBSD 4.8 there is now ACPI-based suspend-and-resume support for most systems utilizing Intel or ATI graphics, but the suspend-and-resume support when utilizing NVIDIA graphics is still problematic. There’s also other hardware support improvements, new tools, daemon improvements, and various other improvements to this free software operating system.

    • DragonFly BSD 2.8 adds root partition encryption

      Developer Matthew Dillon has announced the release of version 2.8 of DragonFly BSD, a FreeBSD fork. Dillon notes that this major release features the return of the GUI and a larger 4GB USB image, which includes several additional packages, a functional X environment and full sources and Git repositories. According to Dillon, the developers are seeking feedback on this release and will “likely expand the number of packages and improve the environment in future releases”.

  • Project Releases

    • Release Notes for Rockbox 3.7

      The Rockbox project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Rockbox 3.7. Five months have passed since the last release, and in that time we’ve been busy adding new supported devices, adding features and fixing bugs to give you the best Rockbox experience yet on the widest range of targets ever.

  • Government

    • Taking Collaborative Risk at The State Department

      One success factor for Richard and his team as they guide the work style shift is focusing on “the how rather than the what” for starters and saving the “thorniest issues” for last. By thorniest issues, Richard means U.S. policy and diplomacy. Meantime, he and his colleagues are encouraging culture shift and emphasizing use of collaborative tools for brainstorming improvements in “how” policy can be crafted. As the culture warms to the new way of working, the change agents believe diplomats will more collaboratively create policy itself.

    • Productively lost in Cape Town: POSSE goes South Africa

      What can you do with a boardroom, a projector, and a wifi access point? A movie night, you say? Nope. Just a few tools is all it took to get Mel Chua and Jan Wildeboer (from Red Hat) and Pierros Papadeas (from Fedora) together with local organizer Michael Adeyeye from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The event? A week-long workshop on the principles of open source communities and how to employ these in university-level teaching–in Cape Town, South Africa.

  • Licensing

    • Are You in Compliance with Open Source?

      At the LinuxCon event this past August, the Linux Foundation officially announced a new license compliance program to help ease adoption of open source technologies. The checklist is one of the deliverables of the new compliance program, though it’s not a complete solution to ensure that an enterprise is fully open source license compliance.

      The self-assessment checklist for open source compliance provides enterprises with best practices on how to properly comply with open source license requirements. The checklist does not, however, provide a scoring mechanism by which enterprises can gauge their own levels of compliance.

    • The VLC-iOS license dispute and how it could spread to Android

      Video fanatics were thrilled when an iOS version of VLC made its way to the App Store recently. Finally, users could watch all manner of videos in a number of codecs from their iPhones or iPads, just like they do with the (ever-popular) VLC desktop clients. That may not last forever, though: a wrench has now been thrown into the mix by one of the many VLC code contributors, leading to a complex dispute over VLC’s GNU Public License (GPL) and whether an app released through the App Store—or any mobile OS store, for that matter—violates that license.

      Many of our readers are already quite familiar with VLC—the software is available for many platforms as open source through the GPLv2. VLC is promoted and managed by the nonprofit association VideoLAN, and the code itself is constantly being developed and improved by hundreds of programmers around the world. So, how did the VLC iOS app get into this mess, and what’s really going on?

    • FSF position on GPLv2 & current App Store terms

      salsaman asked me to come on this list and explain the FSF’s position on the current terms of service for Apple’s App Store, and how those relate to GPLv2. There have been changes to the terms since our original blog post on the topic. I confirmed that the changes did not affect the GPLv2 analysis before I blogged about Rémi’s enforcement action, but it’s fair to ask me to show my work and I’m happy to do that here.

      That’s all I’m here to do: point out the facts and explain the FSF’s analysis. If you all have questions about what I’ve written here, just ask and I’ll be happy to answer those too, publicly or privately. I only ask that you have a little patience when you’re expecting a reply: I’m several time zones behind most of you.

    • Why Apple may never reach the mass market and why it’s so obvious

      There is no mass market for Apple goods and there never will be.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Hardware & Arduino

        Usually I work only with the software, I’m not an expert of the hardware, but the excellent presentation by Riccardo Lemmi made me want to read a bit of material on the world of open hardware in general and Arduino in particular.

        Open source hardware ( OSHW ) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software (FOSS). Open source hardware is part of the open source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e.schematics, bill of materials and PCB layout data) in addition to the software that drives the hardware are all released with the FOSS approach .

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The Filesystem Hierarchal Standard

      If you open nautilus and browse to the root filesystem, you’ll see something that looks like the image to the left.

      This is the default layout of the filesystem in Ubuntu 10.10, and is a peek into the ancient (by computer science standards) history and genealogy of Linux. The directories listed above are holdouts from one of the oldest standards, the Filesystem Hierarchal Standard, FHS. FHS is the system that defines what belongs where.

    • Introducing: the Simple Java API for ODF

      We really want your help with this API. This is not one of those faux-open source projects, where all the code is developed by one company. We want to have a real community around this project. So if you are at all interested in ODF and Java, I invite you to take a look:

      1. Download the 0.2 release of the Simple Java API for ODF. The wiki also has important info on install pre-reqs.
      2. Work through some of the cookbook to get an idea on how the API works.
      3. Sign up and join the ODF Toolkit Union project.
      4. Join the users mailing list and ask questions. Defect reports can go to our Bugzilla tracker.
      5. If you want to contribute patches, more info on the wiki for how to access our repository.

    • A Presidenta Dilma Rousseff dá grande apoio ao Software Livre

Leftovers

  • Being untouchable no longer

    When President Obama visits India next month, it is quite certain that he will pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, perceived around the world as one of history’s most celebrated symbols of liberation, and a source of inspiration for the US president himself.

    But there are calls within India for Obama to look further than Gandhi in paying homage to Indian heroes. For India’s community of 167 million Dalits, once known as “untouchables”, the true icon is Dr B R Ambedkar. Himself an untouchable, Dr Ambedkar gained doctorates from Columbia University, where President Obama, too, was educated, and at the London School of Economics, before becoming the architect of independent India’s new constitution.

  • Judge realizes: on the Internet, no one can tell you’re a kid

    A federal judge today issued an injunction against a new Massachusetts law that tried to apply its “matter harmful to minors” law to the Internet. Because it’s difficult to ascertain someone’s age on the ‘Net, that attempt turned out to be far too broad.

  • Shocker! Kids spending too much time in front of TV screens, too little in loving parents’ embrace

    When Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore told an IP conference last June that only two groups of radical extremists were opposed to Bill C-32, most assumed that he had user groups in mind. Yet as various groups begin to publicly make their positions known, few have been as critical as a creator coalition that includes ACTRA, a writers’ coalition, visual arts coalition, and Quebec artists groups. In a backgrounder on the bill, those groups oppose nearly all the major reform elements of Bill C-32, with the notable exception of digital locks (on which they remain silent).

  • http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/02/shocker-kids-spending-too-much-time-in-front-of-tv-screens-too/

    There was an interesting story on WXYZ ABC Channel 7 television out of Detroit last week about how auto thieves just love GM’s $60,000 plus Cadillac Escalade as well as GM’s Tahoe and Yukon Denali. Apparently, experienced thieves can steal a Cadillac Escalade in about 14 seconds, and have it totally stripped in about 20 minutes.

    How?

    Well, the old fashion way.

  • Another Extremist+Engineering Data Point?

    The just-barely-thwarted printer cartridge bomb attempt of last week represents an interesting data point in the question of why Are So Many Political Extremists Engineers.

  • Radio 3 survey analyses the happiness of the nation

    When asked what caused personal unhappiness, 65% of the 2,000 respondents cited finances – putting it way beyond family problems (32%), health (27%) and the welfare of their children (21%). In addition:

    * 63% of people feel they need a salary of 40k or more to be happy and 68% would need a better salary to make them happier in their employment
    * 88% of those surveyed said that winning the lottery would make them happier
    * Money was the one thing that would make 50% of respondents happier overnight – far outweighing spending more time with family which was the top priority for only 9% of participants, better health (9%) or a new job (8%)

  • In which we betray our gender

    The comic below is a compulsive response to a recent, entirely unremarkable little dust-up over on Twitter concerning the excruciatingly polite, brief comments of a certain cartoonist concerning the way dudes talk about women cartoonists — and the shitstorm of whiny nonsensical defensive outrage that inevitably followed, just like any other time anyone on the internet has ever hinted at the possibility that perhaps, maybe, women could be treated a little more like, you know, humans.

  • Police Issued Guidelines On How To Behave While Trapped In A Wicker Man

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Haitian cholera epidemic preventable

      The cholera outbreak in Haiti need not have happened.

      In just a few days, cholera has killed more than 250 Haitians, with more than 3,500 becoming ill. Cholera is caused by drinking dirty water or eating food cooked in contaminated water.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Leak ‘did not compromise sources’

      The posting of tens of thousands of secret Afghan war logs by the WikiLeaks website earlier this year compromised no sensitive intelligence sources or practices, the US Defence Department has said.

      But the military said the leak’s disclosure in July of the names of Afghans who co-operated with the US put them at risk, and would probably cause significant harm to US national security interests.

    • US army amasses biometric data in Afghanistan

      Since the Guardian witnessed that incident, which occurred near the southern city of Kandahar earlier this year, US soldiers have been dramatically increasing the vast database of biometric information collected from Afghans living in the most wartorn parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan.

      The US army now has information on 800,000 people, while another database developed by the country’s interior ministry has records on 250,000 people.

    • F35 Joint Strike Fighter – The Biggest Procurement Mistake Ever

      What exactly does Canada plan to do with the JFS? That may sound like a stupid question. It’s a fighter aircraft. You use it to fight. But what specifically are the targets? What is the range required? How many of them do we need to defend Canada?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • BP was warned about cement at gulf disaster well

      Halliburton, the US company responsible for the cement that was supposed to seal the well and prevent the fatal blow-out, carried out two tests of the mixture in February.

    • One-fifth of world’s back-boned animals face extinction, study warns

      One species is added to the endangered list every week as the risk of extinction spreads to almost one-fifth of the world’s vertebrates, according to a landmark study released today.

      The Evolution Lost report, published in the journal Science by more than 100 of the world’s leading zoologists and botanists, found that populations of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species had declined by an average of 30% in the past 40 years.

    • In this remote town in Mali, climate change takes on a sinister reality

      This is another paradox of climate-change politics: it is in remote places like this that climate change will hit first and hardest. It is cultures built on deep understanding of their environment – whether the Sami of the Arctic or the Dogon of the Sahara – whose way of life is the first to be threatened. Anakila’s residents are the canaries down the mine, their experience a foretaste of an Earth hostile to human inhabitation. But their experience of threat, potential devastation and loss of livelihood is discounted and ignored. No dunes are threatening Manchester.

  • Finance

    • More on the Mortgage Mess

      Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said recently that federal regulators are “looking intensively” at banks’ foreclosure practices. An investigation is long overdue, though it shouldn’t take a lot of digging.

    • How the Banks Put the Economy Underwater

      IN Congressional hearings last week, Obama administration officials acknowledged that uncertainty over foreclosures could delay the recovery of the housing market. The implications for the economy are serious. For instance, the International Monetary Fund found that the persistently high unemployment in the United States is largely the result of foreclosures and underwater mortgages, rather than widely cited causes like mismatches between job requirements and worker skills.

    • What would the 2010 deficit have been without the financial crisis?
    • Why growth will stay too weak to ease unemployment
    • Irish Court Backs ‘Bad Bank’ Structure
    • AIG set to repay $37 billion in bailout money

      AIG said Monday it raised nearly $37 billion from the divestment of two foreign insurance units and will use that money to repay a government bailout.

      The sale of the two units fits into AIG’s previously announced plan to repay the government’s bailout in full. The repayment will include the government taking a bigger stake in the company and eventually needing to sell common stock in AIG to recoup its money, similar to what it is doing right now with Citigroup Inc. shares.

    • Debt Collectors Face a Hazard: Writer’s Cramp

      The debt in these cases — typically from credit cards, auto loans, utility bills and so on — is sold by finance companies and banks in a vast secondary market, bundled in huge portfolios, for pennies on the dollar. Debt buyers often hire collectors to commence a campaign of insistent letters and regular phone calls. Or, in a tactic that is becoming increasingly popular, they sue.

  • Scams

    • NHS funding for homeopathy risks misleading patients, says chief scientist

      Professor Beddington said ministers agreed to fund homeopathy on the grounds of “public choice”, despite there being “no real evidence” that the remedies work.

      “I have made it completely clear that there is no scientific basis for homeopathy beyond the placebo effect and that there are serious concerns about its efficacy,” Professor Beddington told the Commons science and technology committee today.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Total Election Awareness: Watch Voting Problem Reports in Real Time

      This election day, EFF is once again assisting the Election Protection Coalition (EPC) in their nationwide voter-protection efforts. Right now, you can follow their work and keep an eye on election problems across the US live at OurVoteLive.org. We’ve already logged over 1,000 reports today (November 1), and are expecting to see tens of thousands tomorrow on election day.

    • Morocco bars al-Jazeera for ‘unfair’ coverage

      Morocco has suspended the activities of al-Jazeera on its territory for what it said was unfair reporting that had damaged the country’s reputation.

      The Moroccan communications ministry said it had noted several incidents in which the Qatar-based television station had violated journalistic standards for accuracy and objectivity.

    • Military wants to scan communications to find internal threats

      Now a Pentagon research arm is asking scientists to create a way to scan billions of e-mails to identify suspects in advance so that crimes can be stopped before they are committed.

      That’s the goal of the latest $35 million project announced by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is credited with breakthroughs like the internet, GPS and stealth technology.

      But this latest idea is already is drawing fire from privacy and security experts.

    • No terror arrests in 100,000 police counter-terror searches, figures show

      The statistics show that 504 people out of the 101,248 searches were arrested for any offence – an arrest rate of 0.5%, compared with an average 10% arrest rate for street searches under normal police powers.

      The figures prompted the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis to call for the controversial policy to be scrapped.

    • Arundhati Roy faces arrest over Kashmir remark

      The Booker prize-winning novelist and human rights campaigner Arundhati Roy is facing the threat of arrest after claiming that the disputed territory of Kashmir was not an integral part of India.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Nifty: Kindle owners in China gain access to banned web pages

      The 3rd Generation Kindle with built-in Wi-Fi ($139, $189 for 3G) is one of the best gadgets on the market. It’s bookishly chic, weighing only 8.7oz (the iPad weighs 1.6lbs), boasts a month of battery life and provides storage for about 3,500 books.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Access Copyright to the Supreme Court: No Need for Greater Fair Dealing Certainty

        It is important to stress once again – as the Federal Court of Canada did – that the inclusion of education as a fair dealing category will not open the floodgates to copying, but rather open the door to analysis of whether particular copying meets the fair dealing test that Access Copyright itself is now defending. One would hope that Access Copyright would maintain the same position on C-32 – bright line tests are not possible, the courts have guidance from the six fairness factors, and it is better to maintain flexiblity in the fair dealing doctrine to allow the courts to address on a case-by-case basis using well known criteria.

      • Why The Recording Industry Is A Bad Investment

        There’s a ton more. All of them point to one thing. Musicians aren’t in it for the money, because they could make far better money doing honest work.

        So if musicians are paid so badly, why is the Canadian Recording Industry Association screaming so loudly about how Bill C-32 will help musicians? Simple. If they screamed about how much it would help the recording industry, no one would care. That Bill C-32 won’t help musicians doesn’t bother the CRIA member companies. Lying doesn’t bother them either. All that matters is that they make money.

      • Against Bill C-32: Creator Groups Stake Out Strong Anti-Copyright Bill Position

        When Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore told an IP conference last June that only two groups of radical extremists were opposed to Bill C-32, most assumed that he had user groups in mind. Yet as various groups begin to publicly make their positions known, few have been as critical as a creator coalition that includes ACTRA, a writers’ coalition, visual arts coalition, and Quebec artists groups. In a backgrounder on the bill, those groups oppose nearly all the major reform elements of Bill C-32, with the notable exception of digital locks (on which they remain silent).

      • Second Reading for Bill C-32

        The copying levy actually works against the truly Independent recording artists (who comprised 30% of the Canadian Recording Industry at last count) who do not in fact share in the proceeds, but rather have to pay the levy themselves on the CDs they sell containing their own original material.

      • Copyrighted howl

Clip of the Day

Ubuntu Unity desktop environment


Credit: TinyOgg

11.01.10

Links 1/11/2010: Linux 2.6.37 RC1, KDE’s KWin 4.6 and KWin Discussed

Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Russia Plans Secure Operating System

    “Rather than opting for an existing Linux distribution instead, Russia will invest $4.9 million creating its own OS based on Linux for use across all government departments,” writes Geek.com’s Matthew Humphries.

  • Desktop

    • Facade

      There are plenty of folks selling PCs with another OS. Just use Google or go to LXer. The most popular brand of GNU/Linux for newbies is Ubuntu on desktops and notebooks and Android for smart-thingies. Ubuntu really makes an effort to produce a system easy for newbies. Once you are comfortable with GNU/Linux in Ubuntu, I would recommend Debian GNU/Linux because it gives much more control over the system. Android is a quite different GUI placed on top of GNU/Linux designed specifically for smart-thingies. It is probably the best OS for smart-thingies because of the huge number of applications you can get for it.

      Do not accept the facade of Wintel. There are other platforms out there and they will work for you. You will be able to save money and/or get better hardware too.

    • LOTD: GNU/Linux On The Desktop

      I believe that the year GNU/Linux became widely accepted on the desktop was 2009. The netbook settled that discussion as far as I can tell.

    • Acer Keeps Growing

      Acer sells lots of GNU/Linux PCs if you can figure out how to find them on their site. Acer.co.uk points to Ebuyer.com. Acer expects 25-35% of their growth for 2011 to come from the Founder deal.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Performance Optimizations For KDE’s KWin 4.6

        While some developers and other KDE contributors are busy voicing their opinions over merging the KDE libraries into the upstream Qt, which would lead to either KDE 5.0 or KDE 6.0 depending upon how it’s implemented and if it’s actually carried out, KDE Software Compilation 4.6 is still on the way and should officially arrive by the end of January. Martin Graesslin, who works on much of the KWin compositing manager and previously said KDE SC 4.7 may support OpenGL 3.x for compositing, has written about some of the KWin changes for KDE 4.6.

      • Declarative Knowledge Base

        As I described in the latest entry, with the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.6 there will be a new feature that will be a key one for the future evolution of the Plasma platform: the ability to write plasmoids with just QML and Javascript.

      • KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt

        Well, here’s some interesting weekend news: there’s a polarized discussion taking place right now among core KDE developers about merging the KDE libraries into upstream Qt. Cornelius Schumacher, a long-time German KDE developer and currently the KDE e.V. president, has come out yesterday saying, “Let’s merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let’s put all KDE libraries, support libraries, platform modules into Qt, remove the redundancies in Qt, and polish it into one nice consistent set of APIs, providing both, the wonderful KDE integration, consistency and convenience, as well as the simplicity and portability of the Qt platform.”

      • Optimization in KWin 4.6

        Improving the performance is of course an ongoing issue and there are still some areas where we can get some clever caching in place. For example blur might be a good candidate for improvements. But this is topic for a blog post “Optimization in KWin 4.7″.

      • The Chakra Project – Innovating on KDE and Arch Linux

        The Chakra project started out releasing a live CD based on Arch Linux with KDE 4 for the desktop, initially to make it easier and quicker to install an Arch system with their favorite environment, while also providing an unofficial Arch live CD to test drive the distribution. It is in their own words for anyone who likes the KISS principle of Arch and the elegance of KDE and the Plasma desktop. The project is providing images for both the i686 and x86_64 architectures.

        [...]

        Chakra GNU/Linux is a very interesting and well thought out project. It responded well on the desktop and was noticeably faster than the Kubuntu install on another partition once booted. I don’t mean to put another distribution down, but the difference in speed was very obvious. On the other hand, it did not enable desktop effects in KDE due to a problem with the current 2.6.36 kernel and ATI drivers. Suspending, hibernating and resuming were enabled and worked from the start without me having to install laptop-mode-tools, but wireless started to stutter after resuming and never recovered. Being based on Arch Linux should mean that, although availability of applications and in particular non KDE applications is limited and the bundles system not yet fully developed, everything should be available from the Arch repositories and in theory should run in Chakra too. Full localization will require more work.
        It certainly is a beautiful looking distribution that is KDE-centric with some unique customizations, that also introduces innovative features like the click’n’run bundle installer and its own live scripts. Although these features are not fully developed yet they have a lot of potential and, given enough time, Chakra could really make its mark. After all, it all appeared to work perfectly. The only limitation seems to be the availability of bundles, which can be easily remedied if enough people contribute builds for their favorite programs.
        For support, there are user friendly links in Konqueror and in the main menu structure (under Chakra) to the web site, for bug submission, to the documentation and to the forum, and the extensive Arch Linux documentation and wiki should also apply.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 14 Release Party in Bucharest

          This is pretty much a tradition in our (Romanian) community: at the moment of a new Fedora release we are partying. This time we’ll meet (again) at Curtea Berarilor in the old city of Bucharest, Tuesday 2 November 2010, starting hour 19:00. You know you want to be there.

        • “Fedora Pumpkin”
        • I Voted

          I just voted for the release name of Fedora 15

          * Asturias
          * Blarney
          * Lovelock
          * Pushcart
          * Sturgis

        • Jumping the shark, no. 14.

          Once preupgrade downloaded everything it needed, it presented a dialog telling me I could reboot any time to finish the upgrade. After saving my work, I rebooted and the upgrade process started with no intervention needed. For 1549 packages, the final step of the process — upgrading the packages after rebooting — took approximately 75 minutes. A yum update process performs a lot of work beyond simply copying files onto the disk, to ensure your system’s integrity, so this extra time is to be expected. I like to wander off and work on something else while preupgrade runs, so the computer’s not wasting my time!

    • Debian Family

      • Mini DebConf Paris 2010

        So, I’m (almost) back from the first edition of MiniDebConf Paris, which was a success thanks to the great organizing skills in panic mode of Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy. I think that everybody is already looking forward to the next edition.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 11.04 (Desktop) Will Get The Global Menu (AppMenu) By Default

          Even though Unity as been confirmed as default for Ubuntu 11.04 – desktop edition, there were still talks if the desktop version should also use the global menu (AppMenu).

        • AskUbuntu reaches 3000 questions – 7000 answers – 5000 users – 30000 votes
        • Desktop Unity: Your questions Answered

          Since the announcement last week that Ubuntu 11.04 will be shipping with a desktop-orientated version of the Unity interface as default the OMG! Inbox! has been inundated by anxious readers.

        • Ubuntu 10.10 upgrade woes

          Thank goodness today I discovered the Super Grub2 boot disk — what a life saver!

        • Using Unity – Day 5 How Does It Compare to Gnome Shell?

          Okay, so today is Sunday, so I am not spending a lot of time on the laptop. I decided to test Unity with the SaGeek 25 Part test to see how it fares.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 won’t be the same old Linux desktop

          Ubuntu’s new Unity Linux desktop interface is the change that everyone is talking about, but it was far from the only change that Canonical and Ubuntu’s developers are making to Ubuntu’s desktop. In fact, even without the change from straight GNOME to Unity, the developers are planning on major changes to the Ubuntu desktop.

          We knew some of these changes were coming. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, had already announced that Ubuntu would be moving from OpenOffice to LibreOffice for its default office suite. At this point, LibreOffice is 99.9% identical to OpenOffice. By the time Ubuntu 11.04 is released in April, LibreOffice is expected to have improved performance and increased interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 formats.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android is Still HOT!

          Canalys reports Nokia has slipped to 33% global share of smart-phones but Android is now up to 25%. It looks like it’s not a matter of if but when Android will catch up with Nokia.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Netbooks: XO, Intel, Asus EEE Usability Test

        The XO combined with Sugar is supposed to help collaborative efforts, as well as enable students to work on their own work. The visualization of the writing activity that I posted a week or so ago, shows how sugar can spark interactivity.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Links: Case Studies In Corporate Open Source

    At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference last week, executives repositioned Silverlight – Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash – as a framework for mobile applications rather than for all rich media applications, and talked up the emerging HTML 5 standard as the best approach for closs-platform rich media applications.

    While not directly related to open source, this is a very interesting development from Microsoft (which was also covered at GigaOm). Microsoft are trying to lead the race to the bottom with HTML 5, presumably in the hope of killing Adobe, rather than cascading money faster and faster into Silverlight in an attempt to fight the old way using proprietary might as if it were possible to hire all the smart people into one team. They only place Silverlight is still strategic is on mobile, and honestly they probably realise HTML 5 is the future there too.

    [...]

    As GNOME is one of the most successful communities of co-developing competitors in open source, this is a serious faux pas and I am very surprised Canonical have sailed into it – no matter how much “clarification” they give. Presumably we now know one of the key motivations for Project Harmony, which they are sponsoring.

  • Report: Open Source Developers a Bunch of Moochers?

    A new bit of analyst data crossed my radar this weekend, this time from the annual Evans Data survey of over 400 Linux developers, “OSS/Linux Development Survey 2010.” While I haven’t read the entire report, the one bit of information that Evans is pushing from the report is, naturally, the most controversial.

    It turns out, according to the report, that nearly two-thirds of open source developers do some of their non-work related open source project work on their employers’ time.

    Whether that figure is accurate or not, I expect we’ll see a whole new line of FUD coming soon from those software companies which are less-than-enthused about open source software: open source projects steals your employees’ time and reduces their efficiency.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Featured Superhero: Mitchell Baker, Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation

        I’m pleased to introduce Mitchell Baker, the next of our exceptional CC Superheroes to tell you in her own words why she supports Creative Commons and why you should too. As the leader of the Mozilla Project, she is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products. Here is her story. Join Mitchell in supporting Creative Commons with a donation today.

  • Oracle

    • Oracle doesn’t understand ‘community’

      Asked about the friction that has lead to the forming of the Document Foundation and the community’s very public split from Oracle, Meeks told us: “The Oracle people have decided that all of the non-Oracle people on the Community Council, which is there to govern the community, should be recused – as in, kicked off the council – because they have a ‘conflict of interest’ with the OpenOffice.org community that they’re supposed to be governing.”

    • 33 Lead Developers Leave OpenOffice in Favor of LibreOffice

      As announced in this letter, 33 lead developers of the OpenOffice project have decided to leave OpenOffice and instead support LibreOffice and the Document Foundation in the future.

      As, was previously reported on this site, Oracle is not willing not make the necessary changes to not only make this project benefit its own corporate goals, but also the community and the vast amount of contributions made by individuals and other entities that have been essential for the success of OpenOffice.

    • Community Rights and Community Wrongs

      Yes, today’s restrictive licenses embody powerful rights, but those rights are no stronger than the ability of their owners to assert them. Placing all one’s defensive reliance on a single legal tool can make no more sense than relying on a single weapons system. Why? Because it’s all too easy to be outflanked by an enemy with a more diverse armament. And ever since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, the traditional defenses of open source developers have been about as effective as France’s post-World War I Maginot Line.

    • Google’s ‘copied Java code’ disowned by Apache

      When Oracle sued Google over Android, many assumed the database giant would target code Google lifted from the Apache Foundation’s open source Java incarnation, Project Harmony. But Oracle just pinpointed six pages of Google code, claiming they were “directly copied” from copyrighted Oracle material, and according to Apache, this code is not part of Harmony.

    • Criminal Justice Blog Battles Copyright Troll

      A criminal justice blog that provides resources for difficult-to-prosecute murder cases is fighting bogus infringement claims from copyright troll Righthaven LLC and asked a Las Vegas judge Friday to dismiss Righthaven’s baseless attempt to seize his domain name.

      “Righthaven’s efforts to restrict what information is available to help police, prosecutors, and grieving families catch murderers is not only unlawful and an affront to the First Amendment, it’s just shameful,” said Thomas DiBiase, the former prosecutor and web publisher who was wrongly targeted in this case.

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Colleen Bal and Bart Volkmer from the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and attorney Chad Bowers are representing DiBiase, an attorney who consults with law enforcement across the country on “no body” cases — where the victim is missing and presumed dead, but no body has been found. DiBiase runs a website at www.nobodycases.com to gather information on these complex investigations in order to help other prosecutors as well as family and friends of “no body” murder victims.

  • CMS

    • Source wars: Blackboard sets its sights on being more “free” than Moodle

      Recently Blackboard, the learning management system (LMS) company, announced its plans to seek new business using one of the open source way’s most attractive tools to educators: offering their services for free (as-in-no-cost).

      Meanwhile, Moodle, the free and open source software LMS, is working to maximize community resources and sharing in its next release (see the Moodle 2.0 release preview).

      With this path, Blackboard looks to be going after the low-hanging fruit that was formerly a major argument for Moodle adoption.

      [...]

      To apply an idea from Chris Anderson, author of Free, Blackboard might beat Moodle’s “free” by becoming even more free. Blackboard is taking aim to undercut Moodle. For years Moodle has leveraged its zero cost to attract organizations with the wherewithal to install and manage the software. With this move, however, Blackboard eliminates barriers that previously prevented individual teachers from adopting an LMS.

    • LAMP stack Halloween cake

      Barry Jaspan and his wife Heather spent 20 hours creating this incredible cake for Acquia’s Halloween party. Creative duo! Not only did it look great, it was yummy. Trick or treat!

  • Project Releases

    • Midori 0.2.9 released with private browsing, Google reader fix & more

      A new version of lightweight webkit-based web-browser Midori has been released, adding support for private browsing, privacy improvements and fixes galore.

      Writing in the announcement post, Midori developer Christian Dywan says that a prime focus of Midori 0.2.9 was on privacy – with features such as improving cookie preferences, optimising HTML5 databases and the ability to clear form history all added.

  • Government

    • Cause and Effect

      Some folks budget $1000 per year per PC with that other OS when $200 year would be enough with GNU/Linux. Some people just don’t get Free Software. It will work for them. Special applications that only run on that other OS? The Scottish police force is big enough (12000 PCs) to write their own applications for less money than they pay in licensing fees if they used FLOSS.

  • Licensing

    • Self-Assessment Checklist: A Measuring Stick for Open Compliance Efforts

      If you’re serious about improving your company’s business practices, you probably want answers to some simple questions: “What’s important?” “What should I focus on and where do I start?” “What are best-in-class companies doing that I ought to be doing, too, and what can I learn from them?”

      That’s what the free Self-Assessment Checklist from The Linux Foundation’s Open Compliance Program is all about. We’ve compiled an extensive list of open source compliance practices found in industry-leading compliance programs. And to be clear, compliance is essential if companies are to gain the maximum benefit from use of free and open source software while respecting license obligations.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Crowdsourcing search relevancy

      As a 20-person startup, we asked ourselves how blekko could assemble this essential data. Hire contractors? Use Mechanical Turk? Elance?

      But – of course! – we know a much better way…. A way you can get orders of magnitude greater participation, while at the same time being very open about the process.

    • International Commons Conference Kicks Off

      The International Commons Conference starts in Berlin today — with the aim of “Constructing a Commons-Based Policy Platform”.

      Essentially the aim is to bring together representatives from all the open, free and “commons” movements to discuss what they share in common — in the hope that a more unified approach will emerge, and the necessary networks will be created to enable the larger movement become more politically effective.

    • Spec Work and Contests Part Two

      Don’t let our Free / Libre software culture inadvertently shout out the wrong message to the precise people we should be addressing. Don’t let people that know nothing and care less about the subject erroneously mix up and confuse the terms.

    • Open innovation and open source innovation: what do they share and where do they differ?

      STEFAN: You are right about this. Big companies engage with open innovation because the combination of their internal resources and the external resources provides more innovation opportunities that they can feed their corporate engines with. They want to increase revenues and profits, and they definitely put this focus first rather than “just” trying to do good things.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Dr. Double Down

    Halloween, computer science professor Hanna Wallach—a.k.a. El Estómago—decided to honor this year’s unhealthiest sandwich by making her own Double Down suit. Wallach, who tried the Double Down at 12:01am on April 12 and says she would be a competitive eater if she weren’t a professor, constructed the suit in under four hours. To test the suit’s efficacy, Wallach and her colleagues Tim Vieira (vegan) and Jason Naradowsky (dieting) paid a visit to the Colonel’s temple in Hadley, MA for a Double Down showdown. Employees were so impressed that they rewarded Wallach with a free Double Down.

  • LLVMpipe Scaling With Intel’s Core i7 Gulftown

    From the BIOS of the Intel X58 motherboard we used for testing, the number of enabled cores can be configured (from one through six) and Hyper Threading is easily controlled. This makes for very easy testing to see how well LLVMpipe is able to scale on the Core i7 970 and the performance of Intel’s Hyper Threading on their modern CPUs.

  • No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

    As far as I can tell, only Queen Mary College has undergrads bright enough not to be scared of C++, and even then less than half take the option. Kings College students/victims told me that they do operating system internals in Java, and no they weren’t joking. That pitiful process is actually better than the average CS undergrad, who seems to regard the insides of operating systems with the same superstitious fear experienced by greens over nuclear energy.

  • Bell Systems Technical Journals Published

    A small example of this exists in the name UNIX itself. Most people today write “UNIX” as “Unix”, but in these original typeset and scanned PDFs, you can see that the developers consistently spelled it “UNIX”, with all capital letters.

  • Science

    • The galaxy (probably) abounds in Earth-like planets

      What percentage of Sun-like stars have earth-like planets orbiting them? As many as one-fourth, according to a new survey performed by astronomers at the University of California. This result contradicts previous theories of planet formation, but is a tantalizing prediction that finding extraterrestrial life, or at least Earth’s twin, is not impossible.

  • Security

    • Keep Your Eyes on this Adobe Zero Day
    • 88 High-Risk Defects Found in Android Kernel
    • surrenders
    • Android faces critical security study
    • The Message of Firesheep: “Baaaad Websites, Implement Sitewide HTTPS Now!”

      The Firesheep Firefox extension has been scaring users across the Internet since its introduction at the Toorcon security conference this past weekend by security researchers Eric Butler and Ian Gallagher. Firesheep demonstrates a security flaw that the computer security community has been concerned about for years — that any network eavesdropper can take over another user’s session (say, a login to a webmail or social networking account) just by sniffing packets and copying the victim’s cookie. In other words, if the websites you visit are not taking steps to encrypt your communications, or you’re not taking advantage of the encryption they offer, it’s now an obvious and trivial fact that anyone else on that same network can use features from your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, and a number of other popular web sites. Since Firesheep is extensible, people will probably teach it to “support” more web sites in short order.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

      In part because of the back-scatter imager’s invasiveness (a TSA employee in Miami was arrested recently after he physically assaulted a colleague who had mocked his modestly sized penis, which was fully apparent in a captured back-scatter image), the TSA is allowing passengers to opt-out of the back-scatter and choose instead a pat-down. I’ve complained about TSA pat-downs in the past, because they, too, were more security theater than anything else. They are, as I would learn, becoming more serious, as well.

      At BWI, I told the officer who directed me to the back-scatter that I preferred a pat-down. I did this in order to see how effective the manual search would be. When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why. One of them — the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down — said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. “No way. You think Congress would allow that?”

    • MI6 chief red-faced over daughter’s FaceBook page

      Spy chief Sir John Sawers, head of MI6, is having touble keeping things secret.

      Not only did his missus, Lady Sawers, post details of their domestic arrangements on FaceBook in June last year, including a picture of Sir John wearing in skimpy Speedos, but now his daughter is at it, using the anti-social vanity site to post a picture of herself posing by the Christmas tree with one of Sadaam Hussein’s golden Kalashnikovs.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Petroleum Broadcast System Owes Us an Apology

      Last night, my dog Pluto and I watched the Public Broadcast System’s (PBS) “Frontline” investigation of BP, “The Spill.”

      PBS has uncovered a real shocker: BP neglected safety!

      Well, no shit, Sherlock!

      Pluto rolled over on the rug and looked at me as if to say, “Don’t we already know this?”

      Then PBS told us – get ready – that BP has neglected warnings about oil safety for years!

      That’s true. But so has PBS. The Petroleum Broadcast System has turned a blind eye to BP perfidy for decades.

      If the broadcast had come six months before the Gulf blowout, after the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas or after the 2006 Alaska pipeline disaster or after the years of government fines that flashed DANGER-DANGER, I would say, “Damn, that ‘Frontline’ sure is courageous.” But six months after the blowout, PBS has shown us it only has the courage to shoot the wounded.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • One month without Facebook

      So essentially I’m continuing my Facebook hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. I just wonder how to inform my Facebook friends that are expecting my back anytime soon … and I do hope they’ll at some point realize that some of their friends are not on Facebook by choice, but still deserve to be invited to parties and such.

    • [Old:] How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In 2004

      Nevertheless, during 2004, Mark Zuckerberg still appeared to be obsessed with ConnectU. Specifically, he appears to have hacked into ConnectU’s site and made changes to multiple user profiles, including Cameron Winklevoss’s.

    • [Old:] In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg Broke Into A Facebook User’s Private Email Account

      As we’ve reported in detail in a separate story, the launch of TheFacebook.com was not without controversy. Just six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Mark of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.

    • [Old:] At Last — The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded

      Back then, Mark was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a “Hot Or Not” clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.

      The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard’s Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness.

      On Harvard’s politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon hauled in front of Harvard’s disciplinary board for students.

    • DHS Singles Out EFF’s FOIA Requests for Unprecedented Extra Layer of Review

      The Identity Project notes on its blog today that the Department of Homeland Security singled out EFF, along with other activist groups and media representatives such as the ACLU, EPIC, Human Rights Watch, AP, etc, for an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests. Records posted online by the DHS in response to one of the Identity Project’s FOIA requests show that the agency passed certain requests through extra levels of screening. According to a policy memo from DHS’s Chief FOIA Officer and Chief Privacy Officer, Mary Ellen Callahan, DHS components were required to report “significant FOIA activities” in weekly reports to the Privacy Office, which the Privacy Office then integrated into its weekly report to the White House Liason. Included among these designated “significant FOIA activities” were requests from any members of “an activist group, watchdog organization, special interest group, etc. “ and “requested documents [that] will garner media attention or [are] receiving media attention.”

    • You Can’t Tell Your USB from a Hole in the Wall

      Aram Bartholl is mortaring USB drives into walls, curbs, and buildings around New York. These dead drops, as he terms them, are peer-to-peer file transfer points with true anonymity. Bartholl has a residency with EYEBEAM, a truly fascinating incubator of and studio for new ideas in technology and art.

Clip of the Day

[Ubuntu Ad] Got tired of that?


Credit: TinyOgg

10.31.10

Links 31/10/2010: Motorola Wins With Linux, Acer to Put Linux on Tablet (Out in November)

Posted in News Roundup at 8:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 11 Uses for an Old PC

    You’ve heard about this Linux thing, and maybe you’d like to give it a whirl. But the thought of trying to create a dual-boot system on your primary PC leaves you a little green around the gills. Now you can experiment to your heart’s content on your old box.

    Check out Ubuntu, the sexy Linux distro that geeks love to, well, love. The neat thing about Linux is all the built-in support for older hardware, so installation is usually easy. In fact, installing Ubuntu is sometimes simpler than installing Windows. And there’s a wealth of free software for Linux just waiting to be tried out.

  • Mock-up: intelligent, ambient Boot Splash

    Reader Cullum Saunders pinged us with an interesting concept for an intelligent, friendly ambient boot screen, which he demoes in the video below.

  • Desktop

    • People Who Should Not Run Linux

      1) People with money to burn. There are people who buy a new car every year, have a chateau in the south of France and do not have to save to buy a house. That’s not me, but I hear that they exist. So if you are not money conscious, then you can afford to pay Microsoft or Apple for their latest creation. In fact, you can buy their super, deluxe edition with all of the bells and whistles and probably pay someone else to install it for you. For the rest of us, there is Linux, which is free as in beer and free as in speech, meaning that it costs you nothing and you can give away the disk after you have installed it.

  • Server

    • IBM: The Mainframe Is Back, Baby

      IBM announced third-quarter 2010 net income of $3.6 billion, compared with $3.2 billion for the third quarter of 2009, an increase of 12 percent driven by significant increases in systems and technology sales and IBM services as well as a boost in growth markets.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Linux Outlaws 172 – Port 25

      This week on the show: Ubuntu switching to Unity as their default desktop, Linux breaks world speed record at London Stock Exchange, more problems at Nokia, Apple violates Launchpad trademark and more…

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Vector Linux 7.0 Alpha 3 Reviewed!

        Pros:

        * Sharp Desktop layout
        * Fast with no-lag
        * Very stable Slackware 13.0/13.1 base
        * Great for low-ram and older PC’s

        Cons:

        * Installer doesn’t allow grub to be installed to extended partition
        * Lilo installation ends in error with no manual way to fix it ala Slackware
        * Some of the Wbar apps don’t work
        * No way to install proprietary video drivers except manually
        * Limited package selection and availability

    • Debian Family

      • Latest features of dpkg-dev: debian packaging tools

        I’m attending the mini-Debconf Paris and I just gave a talk about the latest improvement of dpkg-dev—the package providing the basic tools used to build Debian packages. Latest is a bit stretched since it embraces the last 2-3 years of development.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu To Challenge… Facebook?

          At the Ubuntu Developer Summit tomorrow there will be a session on the “WeMenu” (not to be confused with the “MeMenu”) the idea behind it is to bring the real relationships you have and the very real communities around you to your desktop.

        • Unity: Some Further Clarification Points

          So, I just wanted to clarify some of the key points regarding the transition to Unity by default in Ubuntu 11.04 to make sure these facts are clearly communicated:

          * Ubuntu is not ditching/forking GNOME – Unity is a shell for GNOME, but not GNOME shell. Ubuntu is still a GNOME platform. 11.04 will ship all the components required for GNOME application authors to have their software run out of the box in Ubuntu, and we will still ship all the GNOME apps you know and love in Ubuntu 11.04. The only change is that Unity will be the default shell. Likewise, this is not a fork: we are not diverging away from GNOME, just producing a different shell in much the same way others have (e.g. Meego). It is just a different porthole looking at the awesome GNOME platform.
          * Unity is the 3D experience, Classic GNOME is the 2D interface – if your graphics hardware cannot sufficiently run Unity, Ubuntu will present the 2D experience which is the two-panel GNOME desktop we currently ship, complete with all the Ayatana improvements such as application indicators, global menu, system indicators etc.

        • Maverick Meerkat on a Mac Machine – Lots of M!

          I don’t have anything too grand to say. Compare this experience with my Windows 7 installation on the Pavilion laptop and you’ll get the general idea how simple things are. Ubuntu, as the leading Linux distro, offers a smooth and seamless experience on pretty much any hardware, including the not-so-trivial Mac. This means that should you decide to explore the brave new world of geekdom, you probably have the ultimate testbed. And this includes you, the high-income Maccers.

          Ubuntu will work well with your Wireless adapters, even install them for you offline, your Nvidia and ATI cards, your USB and FireWire devices, including the HFS filesystem. Really great. The notion of dual-boot has never been more appealing. And so it begins. One distro to rule them all. Aha!

        • A week in Orlando (Ubuntu Developer Summit – Natty Narwhal)

          Currently flying from Orlando, FL where I had an awesome Ubuntu Developer Summit I wanted to quickly share what happened this week.

        • Coming Soon!

          Here is what I have been working on for Ubuntu Forum recently. At a session at UDS this week, we discuss the forums and how to bring it up to date with the new Ubuntu branding. There will be some big changes upcoming in the forums.

        • Happy Halloween With Ubuntu Pumpkin

          We are soon going to announce the launch of Cult Of Ubuntu, a website dedicated to Ubuntu Cult.

        • 4 steps to freedom

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Because I know you’re dying to know

            So far I’m quite liking Xubuntu 10.10. My only disappointment is that Chromium, which is Google’s Chrome browser for Linux, gets progressively slower on it, so I got rid of it and have stuck with Firefox for the time being. I recently moved away from Firefox because it just felt bloated and slow. But aside from that, it’s running smoothly overall. Also, I can’t play DVDs on the laptop, even after installing the necessary extra software to allow the decoding. I think it may be a hardware issue, though; this baby isn’t as spry as it once was. Whatever the case, it’s nice to be able to play around with all this FREE SOFTWARE.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • “Mint to Xbox… come in Xbox”

      The third option that I had planned to test was a program called Fuppes, however after an hour of failed installations, errors and generally getting quite hacked off with the whole thing, I have decided that if it cant be installed that easily then it cant make the list. I apologise in advance to all who use Fuppes without a problem as most forums seem to say that it is OK. Several attempts in different directories and after installing and reinstalling the necessary packages it refused to work so I am happy to put this one down as a win for Linux over my knowledge. I have decided to console myself by watching a film via PS3 with a smug “In your face Fuppes” look on my face.

    • Phones

    • Tablets

      • Acer preps for November tablet launch

        Adding to the impending glut of tablet-style devices crowding a market resurrected by Apple’s iPad, computer maker Acer ‘s CEO Gianfranco Lanci told Dow Jones Newswire the company is planning to introduce a family of tablet computers in November, including Android and Windows models. The tablets will sell for between $299-$699 and will be unveiled during a press conference Nov. 23, says the story.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Advocacy doesn’t work if you tell someone they’re wrong

    Generally it isn’t a good idea to offend someone you’re trying to convince. This is sounding almost too obvious, but offending someone we are trying to get to free software is a tactic we often use unconsciously. Instead of getting your point across it will likely lead the other to strengthen or adopt a contrary believe. There’s much we can learn from social psychology in advocating free software.

  • Asterisk plots the end of the phone network

    It’s called Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework, or Asterisk SCF.

  • Eating Your Own Dogfood

    One of the reasons given for the writing of Free Software is to “scratch our own itch”, to create software the way we want it to work. If you then do not use it, how can you tell that the scratching satisfied the itch?

  • Events

  • Oracle

    • Take a Deep Breath, Then Vote for Eclipse: Our View on the JCP

      There is one thing that Matt, Ian Skerrett and others have gotten exactly right: the failure to communicate effectively with the Java community is costing Oracle dearly. They have got to fix that, and soon. The problem is that Oracle has always been an enterprise software company, with PR and AR people who think that controlling the message is the path to success. Oracle as an organization has a lot of internal institutional challenges to overcome before they can learn how to communicate with a community like Java’s. It will take time and there will be mistakes along the way, but I think they will. They have to, because as we have recently observed, silence is significantly worse than delivering even bad news in a clear and honest manner.

    • Read Beyond the Headers

      Recent reports on various blogs have attributed to the ASF a number of the source files identified by Oracle as ones that they believe infringe on their copyrights. The code in question has an header that mentions Apache, and perhaps that is the source of the confusion. The code itself is using a license that is named after our foundation, is in fact the license that we ourselves use. Many others use it too, as the license was explicitly designed to allow such uses.

      Even though the code in question has an Apache license, it is not part of Harmony. PolicyNodeImpl.java is simply not a Harmony class.

    • Have Oracle just made it worse for everyone?

      I guess everybody has heard that a majority of the key developers in the OpenOffice.org community decided to set up the Document Foundation: an independent foundation to continue and manage work on the Openoffice.org codebase. If you’ve not, then I can recommend Terry Hancock’s piece as a starting point (and a good summary of why forking is vital). To recap: Oracle are not behind the move so the foundation temporarily named their product LibreOffice. It was not, we were told, a fork. Oracle were invited to the party and asked if they would consider donating the OpenOffice.org brand to the foundation. After the mess with MySQL, here was an opportunity for Oracle to vastly improve relations with the free software community and their own reputation. In short Oracle missed their chance like an English footballer taking a penalty.

  • CMS

    • Reorganising The Screencast

      In the Drupal episodes I want to cover little known modules as well as Drupal Basics. The plan there is to explain basic concepts of Drupal such as blocks, regions, where to install modules to etc. In other words, the types of things that can help people get over the initial learning hump with Drupal with some basics of what not to do.

  • Business

    • Lighting the Fuse for an Enterprise FOSS Explosion

      The FUSE family of software is now under the FuseSource name and has gained new autonomy from Progress Software with its own corporate identity.

      Part of the IONA Technologies acquisition by Progress Software in 2008, FuseSource has now become its own company, owned by Progress, but now more independent, to aggressively pursue its open source business model and to leverage the community development process strengths.

      In anticipation of the news, our discussion here targets the rapid growth, increased relevance, and new market direction for major open source middleware and integration software under the Apache license.

    • Civil Rights Concerns as DHS Formalizes Military Role in ‘Civilian Cybersecurity’

      Speaking today at the National Symposium on Homeland Security and Defense, Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano announced that the National Security Agency and the US Cyber Command will be used in civilian cybersecurity matters, insisting it was perfectly appropriate to give the military this role.

  • Project Releases

    • PTS3 Iveland Development Update

      For those interested in the development activity of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 “Iveland”, here’s an update as to the progress with a few notes.

  • Government

  • Programming

    • What Developers Think

      Nearly four out of five developers use some open source software for application development or deployment, little changed from last year. What has changed is the kind of open source software being used. Use of open source operating systems, primarily Linux distributions, jumped to 61% from 48% in 2009.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • What the Pro-MS Office video does not say

      In addition, Microsoft is also slanting information to favor adoption of its office solution. I have heard several times that .docx is an ISO standard, just like .odt. That is simply not true. Basically, ISO approved .docx if certain changes were made to the format. This format version is called ISO/IEC 29500 “strict”. The reality is that neither Office 2007 nor Office 2010 can generate the ISO standardized “strict” format and Microsoft has not committed to implement it.

      The format that the company is using today is the version known as ISO/IEC 29500 “transitional”, which ISO determined was not to be used for the creation of new documents. In other words, it can never be the default format for saving new documents as it does not have the status of an international standard and, therefore, it should not be used for electronic transmission or storage of documents.

      This distinction is significant because official documents produced by government institutions, such as schools, have to be created following a principle of interoperability, which Microsoft has admitted not to follow with its default-save .docx.

Leftovers

  • Lillian McEwen breaks her 19-year silence about Justice Clarence Thomas

    For nearly two decades, Lillian McEwen has been silent — a part of history, yet absent from it.

    When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his explosive 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Thomas vehemently denied the allegations and his handlers cited his steady relationship with another woman in an effort to deflect Hill’s allegations.

    Lillian McEwen was that woman.

  • Law Prof: Entire Supreme Court Should Decide Recusal Due to Activist Wife

    A Northwestern University law professor notes that Justice Clarence Thomas may find himself in a controversial position when the health-care reform issue reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, most likely in 2012.

    Thomas’ wife, Virginia Thomas, is a leading opponent of health care reform legislation that passed this spring, law professor Steven Lubet notes in a Chicago Tribune opinion column. A memo briefly posted at the Liberty Central website founded by Virginia Thomas called the law unconstitutional, and it had Virginia Thomas’ signature. The memo was later taken down; the group’s chief operating officer explained that Virginia Thomas had neither seen nor signed the memo, and it should not have been posted.

  • Supreme Court bolsters protection of media’s confidential sources

    The Supreme Court of Canada has endorsed the public need to shield whistleblowers and bolstered the ability of journalists in Quebec to protect confidential sources, a significant ruling for media rights in this country.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Buy Wikileaks’ founder a beer

      Closing Wikileaks and executing Julian Assange won’t change this. Hundreds of such sites will follow it, each with its own agenda. Files will be leaked to the darknet and find their way out in unexpected ways.

      The only cure for Wikileaks is to eliminate this medium. The only cure for this light is a return to the darkness.

      David would have you think Wikileaks is a bug that must be squashed. I disagree. It’s a feature that must be protected, whatever the cost.

  • Finance

    • Kansas reaches $800K settlement with Goldman Sachs

      The office of Kansas’ securities commissioner, Marc Wilson, announced Friday that the state has reached an $800,000 settlement with Goldman, Sachs & Co.

    • Hedge Fund Fraud Alleged in Connecticut

      Hedge fund manager Stephen Hicks used his two unregistered hedge fund advisory companies to defraud investors “in three different ways,” after taking millions of dollars from them, the SEC says. The agency sued Hicks, 52, of Ridgefield, Conn., and his companies, Southridge Capital Management and Southridge Advisors.

      The three defendants defrauded customers “in three different ways,” the SEC says in its federal complaint.

    • Tribune investors sue banks that arranged financing

      A group of investors in bankrupt Tribune Co sued JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp and Bank of America, claiming the banks arranged $3.7 billion in loans in 2007 they knew the company could never repay.

      “The Lead Banks knew that this financing was barred by the terms of the Credit Agreement and it was tainted with fraud and other misconduct,” said the lawsuit, which was filed late on Friday.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • A Web Pioneer Profiles Users by Name

      In the weeks before the New Hampshire primary last month, Linda Twombly of Nashua says she was peppered with online ads for Republican Senate hopeful Jim Bender.

      It was no accident. An online tracking company called RapLeaf Inc. had correctly identified her as a conservative who is interested in Republican politics, has an interest in the Bible and contributes to political and environmental causes. Mrs. Twombly’s profile is part of RapLeaf’s rich trove of data, garnered from a variety of sources and which both political parties have tapped.

    • FTC ends probe into Google’s Wi-Fi snooping

      The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has closed an investigation into Google Street View cars snooping into open Wi-Fi networks, with the agency declining to take action.

      Google’s announcement in May that its Street View cars mistakenly collected data from open Wi-Fi networks raised FTC concerns “about the internal policies and procedures that gave rise to this data collection,” wrote David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a Wednesday letter to Google.

    • HTTPS Everywhere is in Beta!

      HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Prosecutors Seek to Block Xbox Hacking Pioneer From Mod-Chip Trial

      Want a live tutorial on how to hack an Xbox by the guy who actually wrote the book on it?

      If so, you should plan to attend what likely will be the nation’s first federal jury trial of a defendant accused of jailbreaking Xbox 360s — installing mod chips that allow the console to run pirated or home-brew games and applications.

      Celebrity geek Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, the designer of the Chumby and author of the 2003 title Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, has agreed to testify for a southern California man charged under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • How LimeWire’s Shutdown May Impact Urban Sustainability
      • LimeWire Today, and What’s in Store for the Future

        During this challenging time, we are excited about the future. The injunction applies only to the LimeWire product. Our company remains open for business.

      • ACTA

        • The Proposed New Copyright Crime of “Aiding and Abetting”

          The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has caused concern for many reasons, such as secret negotiations and controversial provisions. Today, more than 70 law professors sent a letter to President Obama asking that he “direct the [U.S. Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to a meaningful participation process that can influence the shape of the agreement going forward.”

          Despite this beneficial attention, one clause has slipped under the radar. Article 2.14 of ACTA would require participating nations to “ensure that criminal liability for aiding and abetting is available.”

          This liability would apply to parties that assist others in engaging in “willful . . . copyright . . . piracy on a commercial scale.” Such scale includes “commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage.” These terms are not defined in the agreement. As a result, it would appear that any activity that would give an “indirect” commercial advantage (including the downloading of a single copyrighted song) could lead to criminal liability.

Clip of the Day

MeeGo OS running on a Mobile phone


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 31/10/2010: SplashTop Updates, Salix KDE Releases, Debian Installer 6.0 @ Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 3:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • B3 Wi-Fi home server review

      Operating system Debian Squeeze-based (2.6.32.6 kernel)
      Processor ARM 1.2GHz
      Memory 512MB DDR2-800
      Ports 2x USB 2.0 and one eSATA

    • High Performance Community

      Now consider the Open Source mantra “give a little, get a lot.” All the organizations benefit from the combined efforts and the cost is cheaper than if they were to go at it alone or try to create complex IP agreements among the interested parties. A fair sharing model based on copyright, like the GNU license, short circuits many of the traditional impediments to cooperation. In addition, you get this thing called “a community” around your project. Within this community are your beta-testers, developers, reviewers, first customers, and most importantly conversations about your project/product.

    • Chinese Supercomputer Blazes Path to Glory

      The Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia. One petaflop is a thousand trillion instructions per second.

    • LPI Exam Labs with InWent/FOSSFA in Africa

      The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) with the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) on November 13, 2010 (Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya) and February 12, 2010 in South Africa (location to be announced). These exam labs are part of a larger “train-the-trainers” program jointly sponsored by FOSSFA and InWEnt Capacity Building International of Germany (InWEnt).

    • Should Servers Be Rebooted?

      Another exception is that some AIX systems need significant uptime, greater than a few weeks, to obtain maximum efficiency as the system is self tuning and needs time to obtain usage information and to adjust itself accordingly. This tends to be limited to large, seldom-changing database servers and similar use scenarios that are less common than other platforms.

      In IT we often worship the concept of “uptime” – how long a system can run without needing to restart. But “uptime” is not a concept that brings value to the business, and IT needs to keep the business’ needs in mind at all times rather than focusing on artificial metrics. The business is not concerned with how long a server has managed to stay online without rebooting – they only care that the server is available and ready when needed for business processing. These are very different concepts.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Android PMP open for pre-orders

      French online retailer Material.net has begun taking pre-orders for an Android portable media player (PMP) spinoff of Samsung’s Galaxy S phones. Aiming to compete head-on with Apple’s iPod Touch, the Samsung Galaxy Player 50 offers a 3.2-inch 400 x 240 pixel display, a two-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and GPS.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Gentoo PAM developments

      You might remember that last time I stated that only two patches were applied on version 1.1.2. Well, this time around no patches are applied over the released Linux-PAM! This makes it the first version in five years that Gentoo is shipping without custom patches at all, and thus without needing re-building autotools. It is indeed a milestone for us.

    • Remember SplashTop? Here’s An Update On Them

      At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, DeviceVM launched SplashTop 2.0 with a redesign application dock, customization wizard, tailored themes, personalized packages, instant search, and other features. Previous to that the last time talking about SplashTop on Phoronix was when Lenovo began deploying SplashTop as QuickStart OS and then within the Phoronix Forums there were some users that hacked SplashTop to allow it to run on other devices from a USB device. During this time there’s also been the emergence of Phoenix HyperSpace as another instant-on Linux environment, and to a lesser extent, the once-popular gOS and Linpus Linux QuickOS.

    • New Releases

      • Salix KDE 13.1.2 releases are available!

        The Salix team is proud to announce the very first official release of Salix KDE edition. A collection of three KDE iso images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as a live image that can be burned to a CD or used with a USB drive.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 13 sailing along

          As I said at the beginning of this entry, I’ll very likely spend at least a few more months in this Fedora 13 Xfce environment since it’s working so very well (and I’ve cranked through most of the configuration-related surprises and arrived at a pretty good place audio, video and suspend/resume-wise).

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Installer 6.0 Reaches Beta

        With the upcoming release of Debian Squeeze, the Debian Installer team has announced the first beta release of the Debian Installer 6.0. This version of the Debian Installer brings several fixes, package updates, and new features.

        Among the new capabilities of the Debian Installer 6.0 Beta 1 include the auto-selection of the kernel for the Sony PlayStation 3, recovery partitions for Microsoft Windows are properly recognized, support for new platforms, support for isohybrid images when using cdrom-detect/try-usb, the installer now looks for Debian firmware packages within the firmware/ folder on the installation media for bundling hardware firmware, hardware-specific packages are now installed automatically, and there’s improved localization.

      • Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release
      • Debian totally flies (rant on the general state of Linux and my laptop included)

        Debian is fast. It’s always been so. I’ve run Debian on a half-dozen different machines since I downloaded my first Etch installer in April 2007. At the time I had just started getting interested in Linux, and the release of Etch just happened to dovetail with my growing ability to grab ISOs and try them out on test machines. I eventually spent considerable time running both Etch and Lenny on both Intel (Pentium II, Celeron and VIA C3) and PowerPC (Mac G4) architectures. (I could never get Sarge onto my Sparcstation 20, not that I didn’t try. I still don’t have enough geek skills for that one.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Adoption of Unity is the Most Significant Change Ever for Ubuntu, Says Mark Shuttleworth

          It’s going to be Unity all the way for Ubuntu’s next major release codenamed Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”. During Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) at Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the Unity shell will become Ubuntu’s default interface not just for netbook editions, but also for Ubuntu desktop editions.

          [...]

          But our experience with Ubuntu Unity has not been good so far. While GNOME Shell was really easy to learn and adapt to(even the keyboard shortcuts work as you expect it to), Unity is no piece of cake yet. It’s not even stable in my Intel dual core Lenovo laptop.

        • Unity thoughts…..
        • Unity workspace mock-up; 4 workspace limit in Ubuntu 11.04

          In the above picture, the purple boxes represent workspaces. The user can also move windows among workspaces easily.

        • Generative wallpapers for Ubuntu: Game of Life

          We love the idea of Generative Wallpapers – self-updating ever-changing backgrounds – here on OMG! Ubuntu! and, seemingly, so do you!

        • Official Ubuntu Advert at Its Awesome Best!
        • Ubuntu 10.10 Release Forecasts Cloudy Skies Ahead

          I recently upgraded my trusty Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook from Ubuntu Netbook remix version 10.04 to the recently released version 10.10. Canonical and the Ubuntu community have made some very significant changes to the user interface, but the changes were pretty intuitive, so they did not take a lot of getting used to. In this article, I will reveal some of the insights that I have had over the last several days using the latest Ubuntu, and how I think that Ubuntu is really going to help cloud computing become more popular.

          [...]

          Ubuntu 10.10 is the best Ubuntu yet. It is clean, polished, user-friendly, and very functional.

        • Ubuntu Makes Private Clouds a Breeze

          The tools you use to accomplish this feat are all found on one simple platform: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is found on Ubuntu Server. Using an Ubuntu Server 10.10 disc, I was able to install all of the software I needed within a half-hour’s time: and a chunk of that time was downloading the software I needed, including Ubuntu.

        • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • MontaVista Android platform targets single-Watt ARM11 SoCs

      MontaVista Software announced the availability of an Android reference platform for the Econa CNS3xxx ARM11-based processors manufactured by its parent company Cavium Networks. The reference platform offers support for on-chip hardware acceleration blocks, and integrates drivers for peripherals including Bluetooth, 802.11n, and touchscreens, says MontaVista.

    • Full of Little Bugs but not without potential – First impression of the OYO

      The new e-reader on the European block was just released…

    • Huawei S7 Android tablet review
    • Android DIY kit builds on BeagleBoard platform

      LiquidWare announced an open source hardware development platform for Android-based tablet or HMI devices. Designed for rapid prototyping, the DIY Android Modular Gadget Platform is based on modular hardware, including a 720MHz TI OMAP3530-based BeagleBoard, a 4.3-inch OLED touchscreen, and a “BeagleJuice” battery pack.

    • PandaBoard opens up Cortex-A9 SoC to developers

      Digi-key is shipping a 1080p-ready development board based on Texas Instruments’ Cortex-A9-based, dual-core, 1GHz OMAP4430 system-on-chip (SoC). The $174 “PandaBoard” offers 1GB of DRAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, DVI, and HDMI connections, and targets smartphone and mobile device development using open source Linux distributions such as Android, Angstrom, Chrome, MeeGo, and Ubuntu.

    • PogoPlug Biz Review: File Sharing and Remote Access

      Enter the PogoPlug Biz, which aims to be an alternative to cloud-based storage, file sharing or collaboration services; it builds on the capabilities of the consumer-focused PogoPlug with some added features that offer small businesses more flexibility and control over remote access and file sharing.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo

      • Android

        • Firefox’s Android play

          The mobile version of Firefox was originally only available for the Nokia’s Maemo platform which is not in widespread use. Now there is a version for Android, the rapidly growing mobile OS from Google.

        • Desktop Linux is Dead, but Linux is Still the Future

          Even if the train has left now, I think this approach is clearly working in other areas in which Linux indeed is a success. Google doesn’t sell “Linux OS”. They sell “Android”, and when people talk about Android they barely even think of “Linux”, let alone the whole debate over whether the name refers only to the Glossary Link kernel or to an entire OS. By treating it as an independent brand of its own, not tied to the confused legacy of the Linux ecosystem with all its antics, Google made Android seem like a platform that stands on its own even while it is actually “Linux in disguise”.

        • 10 great Android apps

          There are around 90 000 apps in the Android marketplace. We suggest 10 worth looking at.

        • The Gingerbread Man Cometh

          There’s still a bit of confusion swirling around Gingerbread. It’s not yet clear whether the OS will be dubbed Android 2.3 or 3.0. Further, Gingerbread is reportedly more suited for tablets than smartphones.

        • Android Gingerbread Baking Design, Video Chat Goodies
        • ObamaBerry tech heading to Android phones

          Although initially available for Android, the underlying security solution, described in a newly available white paper, could be applied to other open source operating systems, such as Linux or Symbian, says OK Labs.

        • Freescale’s Cortex-A8 SoC jumps into Android phones

          Lumigon Corp. announced three Android 2.1 phones — the T1, S1, and E1 — touted as the first smartphones to use Freescale’s 1GHz i.MX51 system-on-chip. Meanwhile, the company also reported contributing to Ulysse Nardin’s Chairman, an Android handset that will start at over $13,000, and Freescale announced an Android evaluation kit for the i.MX51.

        • Asustek, Garmin ending joint smartphone development
        • 10 Tips for Tricking Out and Optimizing your Android Smartphone

          Make no mistake, Android devices are amazingly powerful and useful right out of the box. Still, if you are a newcomer to Google’s mobile operating system, you may find yourself quickly overwhelmed by the configuration and accessory options available to you. If you look at a lot of the advertising, the convenience and productivity gains that a smartphone brings to your daily activities will be about the unique mobile apps that you download and install. I’ve found that being a satisfied Android user is not just about the apps — settings, configuration and accessories can make an enormous difference. Here are 10 practical tips that will enhance your complete Android experience.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Asterisk SCF Goes for Scale in New Open Source VoIP Project

    The open source Asterisk project started off as an effort to be an on-premise IP-PBX. Over the years, demand for increasingly scalable and modular approaches for voice communications has grown, which is why a new Asterisk project is being announced this week.

    The Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) is a new project sponsored by Digium that aims to build an open source VoIP system for large-scale deployments.

  • Asterisk 1.8 Secures Open Source VoIP

    The new Asterisk 1.8 release is intended to be supported for at least the next four years, as part of a new support model the project first discussed earlier this year. Asterisk 1.8 packs in a long list of new features, including reverse call display and integrated Google Voice support.

  • How Open Source Can Help Real People

    The success of open source is undeniable. Just about any website you visit today is running on some kind of open source software. Your shiny new Mac is running FreeBSD under its beautiful surface. Google uses open source software. So does Facebook. Yet if you mention open source software to most people, they probably will give you a blank look. Few non-technies know what it is, even though they use it countless times everyday.

  • OpenERP Makes Open Source Business Software Work

    OpenERP seems to be a rarity among open source business software companies. There are no special enterprise editions — open source and paying customers get the exact same software and features — yet the company has managed to turn a profit on services and hosted solutions.

    “Exactly the same software is available for both customers and downloads,” OpenERP COO Marc Laporte told eCRMguide. “We don’t have an enterprise edition.”

  • The Opening up of GSM

    Traditionally the development of GSM technology has been largely the reserve of GSM Association members and their partners, subcontractors and licensees. This was due in part to the complexity of GSM but perhaps also as a result of concerns over the legality of any entirely independent grassroots initiative. In addition it is quite likely that a fear of being perceived as a black hat hacker has played some part. However, the situation has started to change over the last few years and we are now seeing the opening up of GSM technology via a number of open source efforts.

  • Events

    • Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers Conference Announced

      In an effort to bring Open Source education to America’s Heartland, a group of volunteers have teamed up to host the Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers Conference on May 6-7, 2011. These dedicated volunteers have attended, spoken at and sponsored other similar events in far flung parts of the United States and the world, from Florida and California to The Netherlands and Australia.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Wants You to Build Your Own Browser

        Mozilla has officially revealed “Chromeless,” an experimental project by the Firefox creator that lets developers create their own browser interfaces using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies.

  • SaaS

    • Building a Test Platform in the Cloud with Open Source Technologies

      Cloud computing, which aims to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services on demand, offers new possibilities for testing. A cloud-based test platform delivers automated scaling — up or down — of testing infrastructure, which overcomes many challenges of traditional test environments.

  • Oracle

    • Every end is a new beginning

      the past days and weeks here in the project were marked by sometimes heated discussions, about how we perceive the cooperation in the project and how we make this more willing and able. Unfortunately, this discussion has not always been objective, problem- and goal-oriented, as it would have been desirable, but sometimes very emotional.

      [..]

      Oracle’s official response to the announcement of The Document Foundation was clear – Oracle will continue OpenOffice.org as usual. The result is now indeed the lately postulated conflict of interest for those community members who are in charge of or representing project, but to whom it is not enough “to continue working as we always did”. Although it has been stressed several times that there will be collaboration on a technical level, and changes are possible – there is no indication from Oracle to change it’s mind on the question of the project organization and management. For those who want to achieve such a change, but see no realistic opportunity within the current project and are therefore involved in the TDF, unfortunately this results in an “either / or” question.

      The answer for us who sign this letter is clear: We want a change to give the community as well as the software it develops the opportunity to evolve. For this reason, from now on we will support The Document Foundation and will – as a team – develop and promote LibreOffice. We hope that many are going to join us on this path.

    • My dream: Java SE on Android Linux

      Although the Oracle – Google Java lawsuit looks ugly, there is a possibility that something good comes out of it: full Java SE appications running on Android.

      That would be an awesome success for Oracle since it is by nature (steward of Java) interested in running Java applications in Android devices. Devices shipping with Android (tablets with dual-core ARM processor and 512Mb to 1 GB of RAM) are powerful enough to run full Java applications, even with Swing. Desktop applications are quite common in the enterprise space and would make Android devices very appealing in this segment. Especially in the tablet form factor.

    • SAP concedes role in pirating Oracle software, moves to shorten trial

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Commons Prosperity by Sharing
    • [Blender] Yafaray Shaders Database

      So this database now has 18 shaders and several categories, and you can help it growing.

      The site is hosted at Yafaray Shaders Database. Feel free to browse it, download and test any shader you want. You can also upload some worth-posting shaders, if you’re proud of your Yafaray work !

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Curiosity is banned at Westfield High

    Westfield High School in Fairfax County is one of the largest and most competitive public schools in America. It is not unusual that 180 sophomores enrolled in Advanced Placement World History this year, more students than most U.S. high schools have taking AP courses of any kind.

  • New York Judge rules 6-year-old can be sued

    A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled.

  • Pressure group calls for TV licence boycott over S4C

    A Welsh-language pressure group is calling for people to refuse to pay the TV licence fee unless the independence of S4C is guaranteed.

    The Welsh Language Society is urging the action from 1 December unless plans for the BBC to take over part funding of the channel are stopped.

    [...]

    The BBC will take over part-funding of S4C from 2013, with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reducing its grant by 94% over the next five years.

  • Science

  • Security

    • Kernel vulnerabilities: old or new?
    • Metasploit Goes Pro for Security Testing
    • D.C. hacking raises questions about future of online voting

      For the upcoming election, Washington, D.C., was preparing to allow some voters to send their ballots in over the internet. It’s a good thing election officials tested the system first.

      Just two days after the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics opened the application for the public to experiment with this fall, the system was hacked. Unbeknownst to D.C. officials, a team of computer scientists from the University of Michigan took control of the Web site, and changed the code to make it play the school’s fight song.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • BP to link pay to safety after Gulf spill

      BP is to link staff bonuses just to improvements in safety standards in its fourth quarter, in an attempt to improve its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

      Bob Dudley, BP’s new chief executive, announced the move in an email to employees seen by the Wall Street Journal. He said the sole criterion for judging performance in the fourth quarter would be “each business’s progress in reducing operational risks and achieving excellent safety and compliance standards”.

    • Drought brings Amazon tributary to lowest level in a century

      One of the most important tributaries of the Amazon river has fallen to its lowest level in over a century, following a fierce drought that has isolated tens of thousands of rainforest inhabitants and raised concerns about the possible impact of climate change on the region.

      The drought currently affecting swaths of north and west Amazonia has been described as the one of the worst in the last 40 years, with the Rio Negro or Black river, which flows into the world-famous Rio Amazonas, reportedly hitting its lowest levels since records began in 1902 on Sunday.

    • Nagoya biodiversity summit is showing depressing parallels with Copenhagen

      Without a deal on these issues, Brazil and other developing nations – which are home to most of the world’s natural capital – are holding up international efforts to establish a strategic plan to halt biodiversity loss by 2020.

      [...]

      In other words, Nagoya is another ill-tempered bout between the global haves and wanna-haves in which the fiercest blows are landing on the natural world that both sides claim to be protecting.

    • India examines cost of mining more closely

      Citing the need to protect the environment and local residents, Indian courts and government bodies have started blocking – or even cancelling – a growing number of industrial projects. Last month the high court in Madras ordered the closure of a copper smelter operated by the London-listed mining conglomerate Vedanta, to protect “mother nature” from “unabated air and water pollution”.

    • Borneo’s majestic rainforest is being killed by the timber mafia

      The cows are afloat, with squawking chickens sharing their sturdy bamboo rafts. Children splash and swim in and around their homes, keeping away from the deeper channel of peat-coloured water that powers through the village of Meliau. Adults tightrope-walk across makeshift paths of hardwood thrown over huge floating logs. Others paddle around in long wooden boats. Everything that floats is lashed to everything that doesn’t.

    • Rare scaled mammal threatened by traditional medicine

      An unprecedented haul of records from wildlife smugglers in Borneo has revealed the scale of the illegal trade in pangolins. They show that between May 2007 and December 2008, the smugglers bought at least 22,200 endangered Sunda pangolins, or spiny anteaters, and nearly a tonne of their scales, for export.

      By contrast, local police seized only 654 illegally shipped pangolins between 2001 and 2008. A report on the smugglers’ records from Traffic, the group that monitors wildlife trade for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says that this “raises serious concerns for the continued survival of the species”.

    • Seed saver with a germ of an idea

      Despite training as a nuclear physicist at an elite Mumbai research reactor and then gaining a PhD in quantum physics from a top overseas university, Shiva switched to environmental activism.

      “I went from nuclear science to quantum physics and then to being a natural philosopher,” she says. “I would describe my vocation as a combination of natural philosopher – the old, old notion of trying to understand nature in all the complexity, which is the original form of science – and as a protector of the Earth.”

      Shiva’s attempts to protect the Earth have brought her into regular conflict with big corporations, especially those patenting genetically engineered seeds.

  • Finance

    • Book by PM’s economic advisor wins award

      The book looks at the hard choices that will prevent another recession like the one in 2008, following the financial collapse of 2007.

    • Benefits cut, rents up: this is Britain’s housing time bomb

      At last the Tories have a final solution for the poor – send them to distant dumping grounds where there are no jobs

    • Pakistan’s feudalism boosts Taliban cause

      Millions of peasants, who in many places work as virtual slaves, have long demanded reform, but to no avail.

      “It’s to reduce the wide disparity of income and opportunity between rich landlords and poor tillers of the soil and to maximise the agriculture output,” said Farooq Sattar, a mover of the bill and leader of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) that dominates the politics of the commercial hub of Karachi.

      Tenants in Pakistan work the land for no pay because of debts owed to landlords, often incurred generations before.

    • Vodafone shops blockaded in tax protest

      Campaigners claiming Vodafone has been let off an unpaid tax bill of £6bn spent the day blockading several shops.

      Campaigner Ed Brompton said: “This money – £6bn – could be spent on schools, housing and hospitals.”

      But a Vodafone spokesman denied the tax bill reports, adding: “We pay our taxes in the UK and all of the other countries in which we operate.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Joe Miller Security Guards Handcuff & Detain ‘Alaska Dispatch’ Editor (VIDEO)

      Security guards for Alaska senate candidate Joe Miller handcuffed and detained the editor of the online magazine “Alaska Dispatch” on Sunday while he tried to interview the Republican nominee, according to multiple reports.

    • The Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires

      The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

      An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

      Charles and David Koch own 84% of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. It runs oil refineries, coal suppliers, chemical plants and logging firms, and turns over roughly $100bn a year; the brothers are each worth $21bn. The company has had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements for oil and chemical spills and other industrial accidents. The Kochs want to pay less tax, keep more profits and be restrained by less regulation. Their challenge has been to persuade the people harmed by this agenda that it’s good for them.

    • Leading scientists accuse thinktanks of being logging lobbyists

      Twelve leading scientists, including the former head of Kew Gardens and the biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank, have written an open letter accusing two international thinktanks of “distortions, misrepresentations, or misinterpretations of fact” in their analysis and writings about rainforests and logging.

    • EU food safety chief forced to quit GM lobby role

      Questions raised over why European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) chair Diana Banati failed to make clear her connections to International Life Science Institute (ILSI), which advises biotech giants like Monsanto, Bayer and BASF

      A key figure in charge of food safety within the EU has been forced to quit her director role at a pro-GM group.

      European Green MEPs had called for EFSA chair Diana Banati’s resignation after she had failed to disclose her seat on the board of directors of the International Life Science Institute (ILSI), which advises biotech corporations including Monsanto, Bayer and BASF.

    • Distorting Irish History, the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography

      The Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, who died recently at the age of 46, stimulated a debate on sectarianism within Irish nationalism and on the nature and conduct of the Irish War of Independence (WoI). He provoked controversy and subsequent research that has helped to clarify differences over the interpretation not only of Irish history but also of Irish society. Professor Paul (now Lord) Bew of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), said of Hart’s landmark The IRA and its Enemies (OUP, 1998), ‘The first work on the Irish revolution which can stand comparison with the best of the historiography of the French Revolution: brilliantly documented, statistically sophisticated, and superbly written’.[1] The weight of academic opinion afforded Hart numerous prizes and plaudits.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • YouTube removes video on torture of Papuans

      The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | A four-minute video depicting Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan separatists has been removed from YouTube because of its “shocking and disgusting content.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Clip of the Day

Linutop OS 4.0, custom Ubuntu for web-kiosks


Credit: TinyOgg

10.30.10

Links 29/10/2010: ‘The Year of the Linux Desktop’ Again, China Has Biggest Computer (Runs GNU/Linux), Wine 1.3.6, Sub-notebooks Around

Posted in News Roundup at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Enterprise Linux Weekly Snapshot

    Following a New York Times story (subscription required) from a couple months ago, Russia announced this week it would reduce its dependence on Windows and work toward a national Linux-based operating system. As Katherine Noyes points out on NetworkWorld, we’ll have to wait to see how this unfolds given that this isn’t the first time Russia has said this. Noyes’ story includes some good information on what businesses can learn from this.

  • Readers’ Choice Awards 2010

    Welcome to the 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. We love doing these awards because we get to interact with you, our readers, more than usual. This year, more than 12,000 of you generously took time to participate and share your perspectives on what tools are helping you work and play. We always are fascinated by your preferences and how your usage patterns change over time. This year, we have more categories than ever, so let’s get right to the results. Here, ladies and gentlemen, Linux geeks of all kinds, are the winners of your 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards.

  • Russian Teacher Fired For Complaining About Having To Use Microsoft Software

    In response to this high profile case, many Russian schools started to switch to Linux, and in response to that, Russia apparently declared that all schools should switch to Linux-based software by 2008.

    However, apparently that didn’t actually happen. Glyn Moody points us to the news that another Russian school teacher has been fired for complaining that his school still used Microsoft software. Even though the 2007 order required schools to switch to Linux, apparently a training system the government is making the school use requires Microsoft Office. So the teacher filed a complaint, pointing out the contradiction in orders… and for his efforts he was fired.

  • 2011: The Year of the Linux Desktop

    With penetration of Android will come mobile developers and with them will come a large application suite. Those applications will automatically run on an Android desktop.

    [...]

    It is for this reason that I think it’s too early to write off Linux on the Desktop.

  • Desktop Linux, Where the Fun Begins

    Linux is my sandbox. It is where I go to play. It is also where many people go to be productive. Desktop Linux has many millions of users. You probably have not heard much about it because of the way that it is developed and promoted.

  • Linux Can Be Complicated … Or Not!

    On the desktop, you can run over 300 distributions or varieties of Linux.

  • Linux/Unix Horror Stories for Halloween

    For this Halloween season, I decided to post a few old but entertaining and somewhat educational Linux/Unix horror stories that were compiled by Anatoly Ivasyuk. Actually, Anatoly has created an entire page filled with Unix-related horror stories and I just picked a few interesting entries to share with you all. Don’t worry, I will provide you the link to the complete horror stories page right after my choices. Enjoy!

  • Linux Halloween Pumpkin Carving Kit

    It’s Halloween and nothing scares proprietary companies more than the cute little Linux Tux. Our Editor set out to a mission to carve a Linux Penguin on our pumpkin and scare some non-free companies. Here is the step by step creation. The process has not been patented, you are free to copy, modify and distribute it, as long as you maintain the attribution.

  • Tech That Tried to Kill Us! How Hollywood Puts the Horror in Horrible

    Yes. We actually watched these movies. We suffered through them for you. We tracked them down in video stores and on Netflix, and sorted through piles of rubbish and even the Youtubes. We watched them all, and this is what we have gleaned: technology, guys, is scary. It causes addiction, it connects us with weirdos, and it is responsible, we suppose, for Emmerich-style mass destruction. Yet, Hollywood seems to be most fascinated with that last bit — and when it comes to attempting to scare the bejeezus out of its horror-loving public, current tech trends are unfortunately ripe for the picking.

  • The Linux credit card — with Tux on the front and everything

    I couldn’t make this up if I tried: The Linux Foundation is offering a platinum rewards Visa credit card. There is no annual fee, a low introductory APR — in fact, it’s a normal credit card with Tux on the front.

  • Server

    • China has the top supercomputer in the world, but it still runs Linux

      If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means “Milky Way,” at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Galaxy Tab launches in India; Available from Nov 10 [Update]

      Samsung today launched its much anticipated Android 2.2 tablet Galaxy Tab in India. Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available in India from November 10, right right after Diwali festivities, but if you are too excited, you can pre-book one now. It is available for pre-order on Samsung website as well as on Flipkart and Future Bazaar.

    • Samsung GT-P1010 WiFi-only Galaxy Tab clears FCC

      The WiFi-only version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has shown up in the FCC’s testing database, complete with the model number GT-P1010. The Froyo slate differs from its GT-P1000 sibling by omitting the 3G chipset and instead relying on WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 for its connectivity; otherwise it has the same 7-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, the 3-megapixel rear camera and front-facing 1.3-megapixel webcam.

  • Kernel Space

    • Stable kernel updates

      Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three stable kernel updates: 2.6.27.55, 2.6.32.25, and 2.6.35.8. Users of these kernel series “must upgrade”. Also there will be only one more update for the 2.6.35 series, “so you should be using .36 instead.”

    • Linux Kernel Now Supports TILE Architecture

      The integration of the TILE architecture in the Linux kernel enables many open source projects to support Tilera natively and start optimizing their code for many-core. It also allows Tilera customers across embedded and cloud markets to run their Linux applications on Tilera’s technology without software change.

    • LF destroyed CELF
    • The end of the road for Linux kernel 2.4

      Kernel 2.4 was revolutionary because it was the first kernel release that was truly embraced by enterprise users for use in their operations. Linux had had support for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing – another term for multiple CPUs) since 2.0, but the improvements in 2.4 driven by the newly involved big players (such as IBM) brought improved scalability, stability and new features that finally pushed it over the edge as a serious contender to proprietary UNIX systems of old.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Patches So Nouveau Users Can Try Out Wayland

        Chia-I Wu, the open-source developer who previously worked to bring Mesa to Android devices and worked on the new EGL state tracker, is now working for LunarG and has just published a patch-set that enables the Nouveau graphics driver to run the Wayland Display Server.

      • Wayland Becomes A FreeDesktop.org Project

        Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Pardus 2011 Beta with new Package Manager

      Pardus have its own package management system: PiSi (For more information about pisi you can checkout development page). Package-manager uses its backend. As you may remember from my previous posts, we are using an infrastructrure for managing operations called Çomar. Package-manager calls Çomar where it can check that if the user have necessary priveleges to use PiSi by using PolicyKit (which calls PolicyKitKde on KDE). You may see that this operation resembles KAuth. One can ask why we are using this method, instead of KAuth. Well, the simple answer is that this infrastructure is nearly 4 years old. :-)

    • Reviews

      • Spotlight on Linux: Arch Linux 2010.05

        It attracts a lot of users because of its ability to give the user a feeling of ownership without an excessive amount of time and effort.

      • Quick Look: Tiny Core Linux 3.2

        Tiny Core Linux 3.2 is truly the polar opposite of Ultimate Edition 2.8; it provides the absolute minimum necessary to get you going and from there it’s really up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You’ll need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you want to use it for before it has the possibility of creating real value for you. So it’s definitely helpful if you know in advance what you want to get out of it before you attempt an install.

        I suggest that intermediate and advanced Linux users use Tiny Core Linux 3.2. Beginners can certainly give it a whirl in a virtual machine, but the install might prove to be a bit overwhelming to those who are completely new to Linux.

        Click to the next page to view the full image gallery (9 screenshots) of Tiny Core Linux 3.2 screenshots.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian totally flies (rant on the general state of Linux and my laptop included)

        As I’ve written more times than most any of you would probably care to read, the six or so months during which I ran Debian Lenny as my main desktop were some of the smoothest months I’ve experienced in my FOSS-running life. That’s because Debian releases are conservatively built and never change. Security updates are pretty much it; the kernel stays the same, with patches backported into the same version and then pushed to users via apt/Aptitude. I’m sure the occasional critical bug-fix comes through as well, but often a broken piece of a stable Debian release stays broken (e.g. the Ted RTF word processor in Etch, thankfully fixed in Lenny).

        But if your particular Debian setup (system and applications) is running well, you’re good for at least two and maybe even three years if you don’t want or need newer versions of your applications. I have yet to explore Debian Backports or pinning apps to Testing or Unstable. I might need to do that to get a 2.11/2.12 version of gThumb (I could also just install a .deb package with dpkg or gDebi).

      • Squeezing Linux Mint Debian Edition

        Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is awesome! Based on Debian Testing it is a rolling distro. That means if you are running LMDE you will always have an up-to-date system running, and as the saying and experiences go, Debian testing base is more stable than the so called final/stable releases of most other distros. But if you are a stability freak like me, you can make your Linux Mint Debian stable by pointing the apt sources.lst to squeeze. This ways you won’t have to install point updates of applications every now and then. You will always have the most stable and workable system for quite a long period, till squeeze becomes obsolete. Here is how I did it.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Mock-up of Unity with widgets

          Widgets on the desktop; some people can be quite snooty about them but there is a reason they are available by default on two of the most popular Operating Systems.

        • Ubuntu Software Center ratings and reviews to come by Christmas

          As if it were a Christmas gift to all ubuntu users, it has been announced at the UDS that a development version of Ubuntu Software Center with ‘Ratings and Reviews’ feature will arrive by Christmas.

        • Ubuntu Cloud Community needs You

          “I’m interested in Ubuntu and the cloud, how do I get involved” is a question I got a few times already. I thought it would be a good idea to answer this as a blog post. I believe one of the very first things you’d want to do, is to make sure you’re on the main communication channels, talking to the community, asking questions, seeing other questions being answered, trying to answer some yourself, sharing opinions and generally “connecting” with the rest of the community. That is a great first step. So I’ll highlight the main communication venues for the Ubuntu cloud community, as well as way to get kick-started.

        • Day 5 – Community Day (Live from UDS)

          Translators, educators, school children and students all have a natural home in Ubuntu too, I believe, and Edubuntu and a bunch of other efforts will continue to try and reach out to them.

          There are many many, more, I don’t doubt.

          A further benefit of reaching out to groups who tend to be more mixed in gender and background than the Linux community is that it brings that diversity into the Ubuntu community. It will be interesting to watch these efforts develop.

          But back to UDS. It’s been a great week.

        • Ubuntu Developer Summit Natty, Tuesday and Wednesday
        • Cutting through the noise about Unity

          Tonight I will concentrate on answering your questions about Unity on Ask Ubuntu. Questions will be answered based on the number of votes they receive and ones that I can answer.

          Unity developers will be advising me best on how to answer your questions and we can continue to develop the answers based on feedback. If you’ve already asked then we’ll keep working on our answers to be better.

        • Is Canonical Off its Rocker with its Unity Decision?

          Ask many Linux users about the concept of “fragmentation,” and they’ll pooh-pooh the very concept. They’ll argue that the beauty of open source is the rich array of software flavors that open platform components give rise to. Canonical is a business, though, and at a certain point it has to evaluate whether a “rich array” of desktop interface flavors is necessarily in Ubuntu’s best interests. Yes, Unity is new, and will have to go through bug testing and other challenges, but it is also a standardized desktop that Canonical can command control of.

        • Using Unity – Day 2

          One thing that I have noticed with Unity so far, is that heavy usage seems to have a greater impact on the performance of Unity than with Gnome or KDE.

        • Using Unity – Day 3

          RAM wise Unity is awesome, but the spikes in CPU usage tends to kill the interface, and often you need to wait for ten or more seconds between clicking a launcher and actual response. But there is hope…

        • Using Unity – Day 4 Custom Unity Launcher Colors and Patterns

          This day is starting early. We are going to a family get together in a few hours (why is the end of the year always to crazy!?) and I want to get something readable for you guys who are following this series before I am Internetless for a few hours.

          I have something interesting for you folks – a custom unity launcher…

          SUCCESS!!!

        • It’s my Linux. I will distribute it how I want to.

          So what if Ubuntu does not have the user interface you want. You don’t have to use it. You can change it. You can do anything you want with it. You can even release your own distribution based on Ubuntu with your changes. Waaaiiit a minute….hasn’t that already happened? Something Minty I believe?

          If this Unity is more popular than Gnome then it will succeed. If not, well then back to the Gnome board. If the Ubuntu distributions users like what Canonical will do then Ubuntu will be more popular than ever before. If not then some other distribution will.

        • Ubuntu Unity Widgets Concept
        • Ubuntu’s “risky step” of standardizing on Unity instead of GNOME

          But while the decision may be in keeping with the times, it’s still every bit the ‘risky step’ that Mark Shuttleworth described it as when he made the announcement earlier this week.

        • Unity Clouding Up The Desktop

          It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don’t see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a “Mobile Internet Device”. Their use cases do not overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.

        • Compiz based Unity will be available to test ‘ASAP’

          Ubuntu’s Jorge Castro has confirmed that Maverick users will be able to test the newly announced Compiz port of Unity via a PPA ‘as soon as possible’.

        • Do Artists Use Ubuntu?

          To celebrate the 500th member of the Ubuntu DeviantArt group. I’ve put together some stats for Operating System Use based on self stated use on profile pages:

          Windows 7/Vista/XP – 410,000 (76.9%)
          Mac – 87,700 (16.3%)
          Ubuntu – 20,300 (3.7%)
          Linux – 16,000 (3%)
          Total: 533,300

        • Opinion: Who’s afraid of the Maverick Meerkat?

          You may have heard this before, but the latest release of Ubuntu – Maverick Meerkat – shows that Linux is ready for the prime time. The reason? The unifying nature of the web.

        • 6 Fun Ways To Explore Ubuntu 10.10 [Linux]

          Learning a new operating system can be difficult, but is also really fun. If you’ve recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 on your computer and want to explore what this operating system is capable of, don’t panic: you’ll enjoy it.

        • Nautilus Terminal
        • 5 Things to Do First with Ubuntu

          It has often been said that the vibrant community of users and developers surrounding each distribution is Linux’s “killer app,” and I think in many ways that is true. Ubuntu is no exception. Not only is there free documentation and live support chat for help with the distribution, but there are also Web forums, mailing lists and a Launchpad-based Q&A system, among other resources.

          Even before you have any specific questions, it’s a good idea to begin to explore this community so that you know what’s out there when you need it. The resources available far outshine what any proprietary vendor’s 800-number could ever provide.

        • Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook review

          After reviewing Ubuntu 10.10 and Kubuntu 10.10, the next logical Ubuntu edition to review I think should be the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, or UNE. As the name implies, UNE is the edition of Ubuntu optimized for small screens, such as you will find on netbooks and tablet computers.

        • Canonical – Ubuntu 10.10 review

          Released at ten past ten on the 10th October 2010 (all the tens – get it?), Ubuntu 10.10 is the latest version of the popular Linux distro to hit the streets. If you were expecting a slew of new features and functionality, however, disappointment beckons. New features there are, but the expected headliners didn’t quite make it. Indeed, Ubuntu 10.10, or Maverick Meerkat as it’s known, is more about polishing the big changes of the last release, Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), than adding much that’s new.

        • [Full Circle Magazine] It’s number 42!

          See, 42 really is the answer to everything. We’ve got issue #42 out for all of our readers and it’s packed with all the goodness you’ve come to expect from a FCM issue. This month, we’ve got an exciting new feature called Linux Lab. Take a look!

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why consolidation will boost use of open-source systems

    Most IT managers are well aware of the LAMP stack, which includes the Linux operating system, an Apache Web server, a MySQL database and a dynamic programming language such as Perl, PHP or Python. But other open-source system groups are growing rapidly. Some obvious examples are the JBoss Application Server with a JAX-WS Web services stack, the Zope object-oriented Web application server — written in Python — and the Plone open-source content management system that works with Zope.

  • Events

    • [NL:] Open Source

      Are you interested in Open Source? At the exhibition, you will find several companies and parties who have specialized in or work with Open Source software and/or applications. Not only in the field of data security, but also storage. The seminar programme also contains sessions specifically dealing with Open Source.

    • Call for participation Med-e-Tel FLOSS-HC track (6-8 April 2011, Luxembourg)

      We also want to especially encourage open source software companies to provide some insights in their open source based business model, offered services and products.

    • Guest Post: Apache Software Foundation on Servers, Innovation and the Cloud

      The ApacheCon conference–dedicated to all of the influential Apache-backed platforms and applications, ranging from Hadoop to Cassandra–is coming up Nov. 1st through 5th in Atlanta, Georgia, and we’ve been doing a series of guest posts in conjunction with it. Members of the Apache Software Foundation have weighed in on the foundation’s approach to open source projects, and now, Sally Khudairi, a VP at the foundation, has written a guest post focused on servers, innovation and the cloud. Here it is.

    • An Uncommon Conference on the Commons

      As you can see from the list of participants, yours truly will also be attending. Apparently, there will be a live video stream of some of the sessions: not sure whether mine will be one of them. If it is, you can see me spouting my common commons nonsense around 11am CEST, 10am GMT.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Women & Mozilla Survey Results

        WoMoz internal survey results and conclusions are now available. The blog post says that the main purpose of the survey was to “… detect areas of improvement related to gender issues in Mozilla and FLOSS communities,” but also notes that finding women who are active contributors to Mozilla was a challenge. Only 18 of the 30 women contacted responded to the survey. From these responses, the survey team concluded that many of the women have experience with the Ubuntu project, so reaching out to Ubuntu Women might help attract more contributors. Some of the women who are contributing to Mozilla are doing so as a result of being contacted from somebody already involved with the Mozilla project. Also, “lack of time” seems to hold women back from contributing to Mozilla.

      • Rainbow Firefox Add-in Brings Advanced Video, Audio to the Browser

        As noted on Slashdot, which also has an interesting discussion from readers about Rainbow, support for live streaming and WebM are planned as additions.

  • Oracle

    • More API copyright nonsense

      # Boggled at Oracle’s amended complaint against Google. Havn’t investigated the verbatim code copying claims in detail – which are of course fair game for copyright enforcement – but what interests me -far- more are the API copyright claims:
      # As I wrote before, I believe that Java has rather weak patent protection, not being particularly innovative or novel really – rather a collection of existing techniques packed together into one (useful) package. With a load of design artefacts in the API that can be claimed as in some sense ‘novel’ though of little intrinsic technical merit. I wrote a long screed on the background to this: Why Oracle’s Java Copyrights Might Matter in August. As I also wrote before: I am not a Lawyer, and have no very deep understanding of the Java situation.

    • Oracle vs. LibreOffice

      My first question would be, why is the majority of council members stacked with Oracle employees in the first place? It is a community council, not the project steering board, it should represent the mostly volunteer community, which has certainly different interests than the a for profit corporation. Hence, the people with a conflict of interest all along have never stepped down in the first place.

    • Copyright Assignments & the Document Foundation

      I would like to discuss a bit the position of the Document Foundationwith respect to copyright assignments. I understand there have been questions here and there about this topic, and it’s perhaps necessary to explain our position.

    • Oracle copying SCO playbook for Google fight

      The problem is that most of the people who are looking at the “line by line” example don’t actually understand code. SCO did this, through the same legal team (Boies Schiller) with its claims that Linux had direct copied code from UnixWare. That was debunked pretty quickly. The only thing missing here is Larry Ellison running around issuing open letters or ranting about Google to anyone who will listen. Never let it be said that Ellison isn’t classier than Darl McBride.

    • POOF! Go Oracle’s Claims Against Android

      Within hours Groklaw has an update that shows the “example” is from OpenJDK and was released under the GPL. Further, the “example” is not a copy but a derived work. This is like SCOG v World in fast motion.

    • Oracle Gets Specific — Files Amended Complaint – Updated 3Xs: And More, More, More

      Oracle Gets Specific — Files Amended Complaint – Updated 3Xs: And More, More, More

    • Into the sunset

      After four years working with the MySQL team, under three different companies, it’s time for me to pursue a new career.

  • CMS

    • DIASPORA* October Update

      Diaspora is getting better every day. Here are some of the features we’ve added over the last month:

      * Public messages are can now be posted to Twitter and Facebook
      * Friends can now be in multiple aspects
      * Re-sharing of status messages to aspects other than the one originally posted to
      * An invite system for inviting your friends not hip to Diaspora yet
      * Email notifications on new friend request and acceptance
      * Account data is exportable
      * A more friendly “getting started” experience

  • Education

    • Open education resources: Moving from sharing to adopting

      What is anything but inevitable is the adoption of any of these open educational resources. As a thought experiment, pick your favorite institution you believe is committed to open education. Have they ever adopted an open education resource produced at another institution for in-class use? If they have an open courseware collection, can you find a single third-party OER in the collection? If even the institutions that claim to be committed to open educational resources aren’t reusing them, who will?

  • Healthcare

    • Open source needs an attack of the heart

      Last Friday, I had a heart attack. As I was rushed to the hospital by the superb ambulance crews and through the operating theatre and onwards to the recovery room by the skilled surgeons, one thing stuck in my mind; how badly open source, and software development in general, has let down health care professionals, who I watched handle bundles of notes and forms which contained the crucial patient care information.

      [..]

      It’s not just a software problem though; we need to come up with new ways of rapidly capturing the health care professionals thoughts and information, ones which are as fast as handwriting, with devices which aren’t going to act as a vector for infection. To create those devices and the software, we, as an open source and IT community, need to create the framework and intelligence pool so that we can approach the severely time constrained doctors, nurses and other professionals, and find out what they need and how we can build it.

    • Implementing FreeMED in Guatemala

      Through the efforts of the FreeMED Software Foundation, many generous donors and help from the Pop-Wuj Spanish Language School, we were able to install an advanced electronic medical record, somewhat customized, for the a clinic in Quezeltenagno, Guatemala.

  • Funding

    • Elspeth Revere of the MacArthur Foundation

      MacArthur is one of the nation’s largest independent foundations. The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society.

      With assets over $5 billion, MacArthur will award approximately $230 million in grants this year. Through the support it provides, the Foundation fosters the development of knowledge, nurtures individual creativity, strengthens institutions, helps improve public policy, and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 2010 Summit Presentations Now Online

      For those interested in compilers, particularly GCC, or are interested in some technical slides to look over this weekend, the presentations from the 2010 GNU Compiler Collection Summit are now available online.

      Some of the potential papers/slides that may be of interest are on GRAPHITE-OpenCL to generate OpenCL code from parallel loops, optimizing real-world applications with GCC LTO, real-time debugging with GDB trace-points, improving GCC’s auto-vectorization, the Google Go front-end to GCC, enabling more optimizations in GCC Graphite, GNU Tools for ARM, and the issues of supporting GCC on Microsoft Windows.

    • How to upload a video to YouTube and ensure it is viewable in WebM

      We’ve just posted a recipe to follow for converting your videos to the new free WebM format, using VLC.

  • Project Releases

    • monotone 0.99 released

      We, the monotone developers, are very proud to release version 0.99 of our distributed version control system.

  • Government

    • Open Source for Amercia Honors Open Source Advocates

      Award winners were announced during the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) 2010, in Portland, Oregon today. Winners include:

      Open Source Deployment in Government: honors a U.S. government agency or body that has shown commitment to the use of open sourcee, through policy and/or adoption. The 2010 winner is Whitehouse.gov and the Executive Office for their deployment of Drupal open source content management system in October 2009.

    • ES: Andalusia: ‘Open source has helped save millions of Euro’

      On Twitter, Eduardo Romero, involved in the city of Zaragoza’s move to an open source desktop, was one of those who quoted the Secretary General: “Free software is in the heart of policy and strategies of Andalusia.”

    • DE: Resource centre helps public administrations implement open source

      Germany’s Competence Centre for Open Source Software’ (Ccoss), part of the country’s Federal Office for Information Technology, helps public authorities implement open source. The Ccoss website was renewed this summer and unveiled at the Linux Tag conference, which took place in Berlin last June.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Sharing and the Creative Economy

      Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age builds upon “Internet & Creation : how to recognize non-market exchanges over the internet while funding creation” published in French in October 2008 by InLibroVeritas. See the French page for details on Internet & Création. Sharing and the Creative Economy has now found a publisher, and we are proceeding with finalizing the manuscript as soon as possible. The book is likely to be out in early 2011.

    • Open Services Innovation: An Open Your World Forum webcast with Henry Chesbrough and Gary Hamel

      Open means different things to different people. To some, open source and open innovation mean free access and a requirement to return enhancements back to a broader community. But businesses ask: where’s the competitive advantage? How can the two paradigms co-exist, for mutual benefit?

    • Open Data

      • Government not closing the loop on open data

        This week I attended a panel session on open data and mobile government. In simple terms, open data is about governments making public data available in a way that lets clever people do useful things with it, such as an iPhone app that tells you when your bus will arrive.

        A good panel had been pulled together. Chaired by Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone R&D and Mobile Monday London, it comprised David Mann from the DirectGov innovation team, Phil Archer of Talis, and Kenton Price of Little Fluffy Toys (makers of a Boris Bikes app). Broadly speaking they represented the owners, providers and developers

      • Open data in public private partnerships: how citizens can become true watchdogs

        Though anecdotal in many ways, Where’s My Villo?’s experiment shows that open- data allowing citizens to monitor the performance of a service of which they are the final users should be required in all public-private partnership contracts. Down the line, this may even play an ex-ante role by discouraging companies who intend to deliver frivolous services from chasing public-private contracts, as well as allowing citizens to demand better service ex-post.

  • Programming

    • ASCII crimps program development, coder says

      Programming languages are unnecessarily difficult to work with because they rely on the artificial constraint of using only ASCII characters, a noted programmer argues in the November issue of the flagship publication of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

  • Standards/Consortia

    • ODF Plugfest — Brussels

      Some good demos of new ODF-supporting software, including LetterGen, OFS Collaboration Suite, ODT2EPub and odt2braille.

Leftovers

  • China’s Internet Imperils Corrupt Officials, but Not Regime

    The Chinese Internet has been abuzz over a hit-and-run incident involving the young son of a high-level security official in Hebei Province, outside Beijing.

    The episode shows how quickly outrage over abuses by privileged Chinese officials can come to a boil, as well as the power of Internet-fueled popular pressure in today’s China.

    Still, many experts caution that while the Internet has become an outlet for anger against local officials, it is not a significant threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.

    What sparked the uproar was not only the hit-and-run itself, but the young man’s lack of remorse and high-handed attitude. “Go ahead and sue me, I’m Li Gang’s son,” he reportedly said, just after the accident.

  • Carbon trading project a world first

    A WORLD-FIRST trial of a personal carbon trading scheme that will also target obesity, is to be conducted by Southern Cross University on Norfolk Island.

    The three-year project will involve giving everyone on the island a card loaded with carbon units, according to the man leading it, Garry Egger.

  • Humans could form wireless nodes for high speed networks

    Now, this is a weird one. A team of Irish engineers says it could be possible to minimise the need for mobile base stations by getting phone users to act as base stations themselves.

  • Jade Goody website ‘troll’ from Manchester jailed

    An “internet troll” who posted obscene messages on Facebook sites set up in memory of dead people has been jailed.

    Colm Coss, of Ardwick, Manchester, posted on a memorial page for Big Brother star Jade Goody and a tribute site to John Paul Massey, a Liverpool boy mauled to death by a dog.

  • Twenty-First Century Stoic — Insult Pacifism
  • Save the world: Answer the FEMA challenge

    FEMA exists to help after a disaster. And when disasters strike, over and over again, we see communities working together to help within themselves and to help each other. But FEMA is hoping that people who are willing to help after a disaster are also willing to help before one. Those are the ideas they’re looking for. You might have an emergency kit if you live in a hurricane- or earthquake-prone area. But what else could we proactively do to help each other and ourselves on a larger scale before the need arises?

  • Head-stomping Rand Paul volunteer demands an apology from lady whose head he stomped.

    He wants an apology.

    Tim Profitt — the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist — told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped and that she started the whole thing.

    “I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt said. “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you.”..

    Profitt also blamed the incident on his back pain.

  • Comparing leadership cultures and creating change

    The topic of the panel was “Cultural Leadership: Forging a Shared Kernel While Preserving Individual Differences.” In other words, how can leaders inspire today’s workforces across geographical and cultural boundaries and through times of uncertainty.

  • Hu Xingdou: Wen Jiabao, Hero of the Chinese People

    China’s Premier Wen Jiabao really has been on a roll in the past 8 months, seemingly mentioning the need for political reform and the importance of universal values like human rights, freedom and democracy on every possible occasion, starting with his prominently featured article about his former mentor Hu Yaobang in March.

  • Web Linking Gets Deeper with New Standard for Link Relations

    What does that mean? “Web linking is the most fundamental web building block,” says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. “Typed links – links with a clear semantic meaning – existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition… Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features.”

  • Science

    • Toolmaking technique 55,000 years older than we thought

      Pressure flaking is a retouching technique that was used by prehistoric toolmakers to shape stone tips. They pressed the narrow end of a tool close to the edge of a piece they were working on to create rectangular, parallel marks; these are considered the hallmark of pressure flaking. This technique allowed them to more finely control the final shape and thinness of the tool edge than direct percussion could, and yielded sharp, thin, V-shaped tips with straight edges. The earliest evidence for pressure flaking came from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean industry of Western Europe, and dates from around 20,000 years ago.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Biodiversity talks: Ministers in Nagoya adopt new strategy

      Environment ministers from almost 200 nations agreed late tonight to adopt a new United Nations strategy that aims to stem the worst loss of life on earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.

      With a typhoon looming outside and cheering inside the Nagoya conference hall, the Japanese chair of the UN biodiversity talks gavelled into effect the Aichi Targets, set to at least halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land area by 2020 up from less than 10% today.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs Hire at Bank of Canada Followed Guidelines, Flaherty Says

      Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the country’s central bank followed conflict of interest guidelines when it hired an adviser from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

      Bloc Quebecois lawmaker Daniel Paille and Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party both asked about the hiring of Timothy Hodgson for an 18-month term. Flaherty said in response that the bank makes its own staffing decisions and that Hodgson has “severed” his ties to the private sector.

    • U.S. asks to seal courtroom to guard Goldman secrets

      Prosecutors asked a federal judge to seal the courtroom for part of the upcoming criminal trial of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programer, an effort to protect the secrecy of the bank’s high-frequency trading platform.

    • Who’s In Charge Here? Not The G20

      Most accounts of the ministerial meeting last weekend of the Group of 20 — 19 nations plus the European Union that represent the world’s wealthiest economies —implied that it continued to perform sterling service – heading off currency wars, keeping explicit protectionism under control and deftly managing the process of reforming governance at the International Monetary Fund.

      Post-financial crisis, middle-income countries continue to rise in economic importance, and the recent shift in global leadership from the Group of 7 (the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) to the G-20 is commonly supposed to accommodate the growing claims of “emerging markets” on the world stage.

    • Administration to get freer with trade

      U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been a genial caretaker for an Obama administration trade agenda mostly aimed at placating labor unions and their Democratic allies by erecting barriers to imports.

      With the public more opposed to free trade than ever, and Democrats running hard against it this fall, the White House has shown no interest in the issue. Completed trade deals with other countries haven’t been sent to Congress, leaving U.S. allies hanging. Obama hasn’t even sought congressional authority for new agreements, a foreign policy tool presidents have cherished for 30 years.

    • Who wants to watch ‘Bank Bailout 2′?

      Life has been so dull since the nation’s major banks had their last existential crisis a year or so ago. Right now, it’s like watching a beloved rerun.

      We know how the story is most likely to end. The banks will lose billions. It will take a decade or so to drain the swamps — also known as the balance sheets of institutions like the Bank of America and Citigroup — of overvalued and underperforming assets. In the meantime, however, the government will probably jump in and save the banks from themselves once again.

    • The Post Election GOP War on Financial Reform

      Here’s the crucial thing to remember about financial reform: the status quo previous to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act financial reform bill was entirely favorable to Wall Street and the largest banks.

      [...]

      They have already signaled to Wall Street that, starting the morning of November 3rd, 2010, the GOP will be the party that fights sensible Wall Street reform and returns us to the world of 2009, the world most favorable to Wall Street.

    • Tim Fernholz on Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the CFPB
    • Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims decrease

      This is the lowest level for weekly claims and the 4-week average since July, however the 4-week moving average has been moving sideways at an elevated level for almost a year – and that suggests a weak job market.

    • Foreclosure activity up across most US metro areas

      The foreclosure crisis intensified across a majority of large U.S. metropolitan areas this summer, with Chicago and Seattle – cities outside of the states that have shouldered the worst of the housing downturn – seeing a sharp increase in foreclosure warnings.

    • Foreclosure Error May Bring Home Break-In by Bank: Ann Woolner

      For all the scandalous news about systemically sloppy foreclosure documentation, bankers are trying to reassure the public that no undeserved evictions resulted.

      “At the end of the day, the underlying substance was accurate,” JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told reporters on a conference call this week. “There’s almost no chance that we’ve made a mistake”

      That misses a key point, which I’ll get to shortly.

    • America By The Numbers

      Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show.

      Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Johann Hari: Protest works. Just look at the proof

      There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.

    • UK.gov plans net censor service

      The minister responsible for internet regulation is planning a new mediation service to encourage ISPs and websites to censor material in response to public complaints.

      Ed Vaizey said internet users could use the service to ask for material that is “inaccurate” or infringes their privacy to be removed. It would offer a low cost alternative to court action, he suggested, and be modelled on Nominet’s mediation service for domain disputes.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • CRTC Renegs – UBB is Coming Soon

      This means Usage Based Billing could begin implementation as early as January 2011. This will be a truly rude awakening for the many Canadians who are unaware that this is coming. Imaging getting an Internet bill for double what you are used to paying for monthly access. Just at the time Canadians are digging their way out of the seasonal spending chasm.

    • Overturn the CRTC Ruling
    • Internet usage: How do you preferred to be billed?
    • VLC developer takes a stand against DRM enforcement in Apple’s App Store

      Rémi Denis-Courmont is one of the primary developers of the VLC media player, which is free software and distributed under the GPL. Earlier this week, he wrote to Apple to complain that his work was being distributed through their App Store, under terms that contradict the GPL’s conditions and prohibit users from sharing the program.

    • From information overload to Dark Ages 2.0?

      Open standards for file formats ensure portability of the content artifact (often with relevant metadata or context) across authoring or viewing applications. The emergence of the PDF/A standard, for example, as an ISO-managed specification outside the corporate control of a sole vendor happened because of the reluctance of many public sector agencies to accept a proprietary format and risk losing the opportunity to preserve essential content for the long term.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Eye for an eye – RIAA & Limewire no score draw? & what LOIC users should consider.

        Limewire is probably more popular with the casual downloader who has maybe had use of the Limewire client for a number a years. Its certainly a simple application to use. The problem with Limewire seemed to me that the average user was not tech savvy and so Limewire became a haven for malware and all other sorts of nastiness. Its not a p2p Client I would have ever considered using nor would I have recommended it to anyone else.

        For me the loss (in respect of the “service”) is no loss. On 26th October 2010 when Judge Wood served an injunction on Limewire, I saw no loss (from a contributory point of view) but what was worrying were the implications it could have for other p2p services in the future.

        Whatever your views on copyright infringement, the technology behind it is not designed to infringe anything. As a user in a BT swarm for example, the sensible position is to give responsibility of any alleged infringement to the users engaging in it not a provider of a tracker or service where users frequent. If we look at this in the real world, it would be like holding a bus driver responsible for a robbery on his vehicle, a landlord responsible for their tenants behavior whilst renting his/her property. The idea that Limewire can be held responsible is to me as inconceivable as any of the above examples I have given.

      • RUSHKOFF: Why I Left My Publisher in Order to Publish a Book

        I’m getting more questions about my latest book than about any other I’ve written. And this is before the book is even out—before anyone has even read the galleys.

        That’s because the questions aren’t about what I wrote, but about how I ended up publishing it: with an independent publisher, for very little money, and through a distribution model that makes it available on only one website. Could I be doing this of sound mind and my own volition? Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house?

      • Former Movie Piracy Scene Member Speaks Out

        To many people the movie piracy Scene is something mythical or at least hard to comprehend. Who are these people who are the source for the majority of the pirated movies online? In a rare conversation, TorrentFreak had the chance to pick the brain of a former member of one of the world’s largest movie piracy groups, who speaks out about pride, ego, money and the changes that the Scene has gone through in recent years.

      • Reminder: Despite What You May Have Heard, Happy Birthday Should Be In The Public Domain
      • The ‘Dancing Baby’ Lawsuit Will Shape Future of Fair Use

        When a Universal Music Group employee sent a routine notice to a San Francisco Bay Area mother back in 2007 ordering her to take down a grainy YouTube video of her son dancing, there’s no way he could have known what he was about to stir up.

      • Governments demonstrating leadership in openness with Creative Commons

        Governmental bodies around the world are adopting Creative Commons licenses and signaling to their constituencies that these works can be shared in simple, interoperable ways. Just this week, the current Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco Silva released his official photostream under CC BY, while also posting a CC BY-licensed announcement to run for re-election on SoundCloud.

      • ACTA

        • Over 75 Law Profs Call for Halt of ACTA

          Dear President Obama,

          As academics dedicated to promoting robust public debate on the laws and public policies affecting the Internet, intellectual property, global innovation policy and the worldwide trade in knowledge goods and services, we write to express our grave concern that your Administration is negotiating a far-reaching international intellectual property agreement behind a shroud of secrecy, with little opportunity for public input, and with active participation by special interests who stand to gain from restrictive new international rules that may harm the public interest.

        • Memo to World: Stop ACTA Now!

          Funny, even though consensus couldn’t be reached, the ACTA countries have each taken the agreement back to their respective governments to try and get it signed. They have all agreed that there will be no further rounds of negotiation.

          Apparently though, changes can still be made to the text. Since I am a citizen, not a diplomat, I have to wonder if this means that each country can sign a version of ACTA that they are comfortable with, respective of the wants and needs of the others? If so, it would detract from the point of having one universal treaty.

        • Challenges to ACTA Mount: The week in Review

          In the midst of increasing controversy on the extent to which ACTA would alter current or proposed changes to U.S. law, over 75 law professors sent a sharply worded letter to President Obama asking him to “direct the USTR [US Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to a meaningful participation process that can influence the shape of the agreement going forward.” The letter comes as U.S. government officials having been informing public interest advocates that this is last week of consideration of the text, even while reports are increasing that the text as written conflicts with current and proposed US intellectual property law.

        • How ACTA Turns Limited Secondary Liability In Copyright Into Broad Criminal Aiding & Abetting

          However, some are noticing that it’s actually even worse than that. While I already disagree with the court’s interpretation of various forms of secondary liability, at least they’ve included some safeguards in terms of what standards need to be met before secondary liability might apply by looking at things like whether or not there are substantial non-infringing uses and whether or not there’s intent or knowledge. Unfortunately, it looks like ACTA partly seeks to wipe these out by changing these more nuanced standards into a simple “aiding and abetting” standard, which could lead to criminal infringement claims. As we’ve already noted, ACTA has already broadened the definition of “commercial scale” in order to increase criminal liability for infringement, but law professor Michael Carrier’s analysis suggests the “aiding and abetting” language also greatly broadens the liability for secondary liability as well

Clip of the Day

Android Netbook – Acer D250-1613


Credit: TinyOgg

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