07.21.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Less than three weeks after the Times paywall went up, data shows a massive decline in web traffic
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For quite some time now there have been reports about how carmakers have been forcing car owners to take cars to the dealers for (expensive) repairs, by using special software to diagnose problems in the computer system, and only giving the necessary software to dealers. This is actually one of many nasty consequences of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules (pay attention Canada), whereby it should be perfectly legal for anyone you ask to work on your car — but thanks to digital locks placed on your car’s computer by automakers, other mechanics would be breaking the law just to figure out how to get around the locks. Every year for the past decade, there are attempts to pass a national “right to repair” act at the federal level to take care of this, but it never goes anywhere.
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AFP reports that the US Senate has passed (by a ‘unanimous consent’ voice vote) a bill that prevents US federal courts from recognizing or enforcing a foreign judgment for defamation that is inconsistent with the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. If the bill becomes law it will shield US journalists, authors, and publishers from ‘libel tourists’ who file suit in countries where they expect to get the most favorable ruling.
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Digital Politics
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A COUNCILLOR is facing a disciplinary hearing after calling the Church of Scientology “stupid” in a post on the Twitter website.
Wales’ public standards watchdog said John Dixon is likely to have breached the code of conduct for local authority members with his short message last year.
The Church of Scientology, whose followers include entertainers Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirsty Allie, made an official complaint after spotting the posting last year.
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It was a Wednesday night in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, and Jared Cohen, the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and Alec Ross, the first senior adviser for innovation to the secretary of state, were taking their tweeting very seriously. Cohen had spent the day in transit from D.C.; Ross hadn’t eaten anything besides a morning muffin. Yet they were in the mood to share, and dinner could wait. It wasn’t every day they got to tweet about visiting the headquarters of Twitter.
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It is quite obvious that the social networking boom of the recent years has resulted in abundance of social networks that probably cover all the niches of society. It is quite obvious that in some countries (like Russia where I live) this process is taking longer than it did in the US because all the trends arrive here with a noticeable delay. So while the US has social networks for everything already, in Russia we are now witnessing yet another novelty – a social network intended specifically for state officials.
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Finance
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Congress gave final approval Thursday to the most ambitious overhaul of financial regulation in generations, ending more than a year of wrangling over the shape of the new rules and shifting the government’s focus to the monumental task of implementing them.
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In modern American life, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stands out as amazingly resilient and remarkably lucky – despite presiding over or being deeply involved in a series of political debacles, he has gone from strength to strength. After at least eight improbably bounce backs, he might seem unassailable. But his latest mistake – blocking Elizabeth Warren from heading the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – may well prove politically fatal.
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Stock futures are headed for a higher opening after Apple and Coca-Cola turned in stronger earnings results.
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Congress approved a sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation on Thursday, reflecting a renewed mistrust of financial markets after decades in which Washington stood back from Wall Street with wide-eyed admiration.
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Depending upon who you listened to, the financial reform bill that passed yesterday was lionized by some as the most awesome thing since condoms, or derided by others as totally insufficient to protect us from the indiscretions of happy-go-lucky banks.
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Congress on Thursday passed the stiffest restrictions on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression, clamping down on lending practices and expanding consumer protections to prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown that knocked the economy to its knees.
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Banks had always coveted the exorbitant fees collected by their “cousins” in the investment banking industry, but the Glass-Steagall Act blocked access to this lucrative capital raising business. The Act, passed during the Great Depression, was created to prevent both styles of banking from destroying one another. Merchant banks, as they were called at the time, helped companies raise capital, but took no deposits. Traditional banks took deposits and made loans. In 1999, a Republican Congress removed the prohibitions of the Act altogether.
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Banks often try to emulate the success of Goldman Sachs. Now would be a good time to avoid one of its blunders.
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Brazil’s federal police are investigating Goldman Sachs Group Inc for the alleged use of insider information in the takeover of pulp company Ripasa by rival Suzano Celulose in 2004, Brazilian newspaper Valor Economico reported on Tuesday.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and dozens more bank and brokerages were sued by a Boston area-based fund seeking reimbursement for losses related to subprime loans.
Cambridge Place Investment Management Inc., founded by ex- Goldman Sachs Group bankers Martin Finegold and Robert Kramer, lost more than $1.2 billion as a result of the banks’ untrue statements, according to a copy of the complaint filed July 9 in state court in Massachusetts.
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Rosalyn Dalebout rents out space in her home to three tenants, has cut off her phone service and canceled her earthquake and life insurance – all to pay her mortgage every month.
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Ms. Sadler, who lost her job at an automotive parts plant in October 2008, learned last month that her unemployment insurance had been cut off. She is one of an estimated 2.1 million Americans whose benefits have expired and who are waiting for an end to an impasse that has lasted months in the Senate over extending the payments once more to the long-term unemployed.
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JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Thursday its second-quarter net income soared 77 percent to $4.8 billion as a slowdown in losses from failed loans helped offset a difficult spring in trading and investment banking.
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Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the largest penalties ever paid by a Wall Street firm, to settle charges of securities fraud linked to mortgage investments.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and the Securities and Exchange Commission recently held discussions about a possible settlement to simultaneously resolve the fraud lawsuit against Goldman and some of the agency’s lower-profile probes of the Wall Street firm’s mortgage department, according to people familiar with the situation.
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LAST Wednesday at around 3 p.m., the Securities and Exchange Commission and Goldman Sachs settled an epic, seismic battle — one waged over whether the storied investment bank defrauded investors in a transaction that regulators said Goldman had built to self-destruct.
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Threadneedle Asset Management Ltd. said it hired Jim Cielinski as head of fixed income from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
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As Goldman Sachs (GS) continues to seek a settlement with federal securities over probes into its business practice, people inside the company are bracing a significant change in senior management that goes beyond the possibility of CEO Lloyd Blankfein losing his job, FOX Business has learned.
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Fabrice Tourre was so loyal to Goldman Sachs. Why wouldn’t he have been? They had been good to him. After the subprime market tanked, his bosses had praised his creation of Abacus, a collection of crappy mortgage securities he had created so that hedge-funder John Paulson could short it, and cemented his status in the firm by giving him a promotion and a raise. So when the SEC sued Goldman for fraud over the deal, and certain embarrassing e-mails Fab had written about it came to light, he believed they would have his back, even after they put him on suspended leave.
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Investment giant Goldman Sachs on Tuesday said its profits fell 82 percent in the second quarter of the year against the same period last year.
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KUDOS to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the crippled mortgage finance giants. While some in Washington have continued to coddle the big banks even after they drove our economy into the ditch, this agency seems serious about recovering money for taxpayers by holding bad financial actors to account.
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I’ll be frank: the discussion of fiscal stimulus this past year and a half has filled me with despair over the state of the economics profession. If you believe stimulus is a bad idea, fine; but surely the least one could have expected is that opponents would listen, even a bit, to what proponents were saying. In particular, the case for stimulus has always been highly conditional. Fiscal stimulus is what you do only if two conditions are satisfied: high unemployment, so that the proximate risk is deflation, not inflation; and monetary policy constrained by the zero lower bound.
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With unemployment high and inflation low, a question is being asked more often and more loudly: Can and should the Federal Reserve do more to get the economy moving?
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Sometime next week, President Obama will finally sign a financial reform bill. Plenty of banks will have to deal with messy new rules, but one big winner in the “spare me from further regulation” sweepstakes was auto dealers.
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Some day growth will pickup again. The debt problems will be with us for some time, but one of the keys for more growth is absorption of excess capacity. New investment is already happening for semiconductor manufacturing (see AMAT and other semi-equipment manufactures, and the WSJ Applied Materials Boosts Revenue Forecast)
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“Another World Is Possible” is the slogan of the World Social Forum, an event first convened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as a challenge to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world’s political and corporate leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
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This post is going to be a bit different, at least for me. Generally I like to write things that are more data oriented, and that involve some pictures and figures. But this is a little story that happened to my wife and me, only a few weeks back, and I think it provides a bit of an illustration about how the economy works, or doesn’t, in these post-Housing Bubble days. Its an absurd story, it makes no sense whatsoever, it cannot possibly happen in a civilized country, much less one that calls itself capitalist, but every word is true. So here goes…
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Labor’s internet filtering policy isn’t being discussed in the run-up to the election but its impact on Australia is significant.
Championed by Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, the $30million+ filter is being sold by Labor as an internet block for child pornography, bestiality and extreme pornography with ‘wide ranging support from the Australian public’ and ‘only minimal opposition against’.
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We’ve covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin’s “Browse the Web without a Trace”, January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I’m justified in featuring it this month.
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The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who’s reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED’s Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished — and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.
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John Young was one of Wikileaks’ early founders. Now he’s one of the organization’s more prominent critics.
Young, a 74-year-old architect who lives in Manhattan, publishes a document-leaking Web site called Cryptome.org that predates Wikileaks by over a decade. He’s drawn fire from Microsoft after posting leaked internal documents about police requests, irked the U.K. government for disclosing the names of possible spies, and annoyed Homeland Security by disclosing a review of Democratic National Convention security measures.
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Policemen in Hubei have actually apologized for beating “a petitioner”… because it wasn’t a petitioner at all. Rather, poor Mrs. Chen Yulian, 58, was the wife of a Hubei provincial politics and law committee official who was walking to the gate of the provincial party committee’s office buildings on June 23.
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Anti-war protestor and near-permanent fixture across from the Commons, Brian Haw, will be subject to another attempted eviction when the Government rushes through special laws to oust him, according to the Standard.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again Net Neutrality is a double edged sword. Sure I want the Internet to be free and return back to the good ‘ol days, no blocking of torrents or filtering my data.
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Digital Restrictions Management consumer control.
It goes around and around and around and spinning it — again — is Sony which, with BMG, its former partner, injected DRM and rootkit spyware into the computers of people who’d bought some of its music CDs. The software, equally dangerous to users and computers, was hidden on Sony BMG discs, secretly installing itself when buyers played the music.
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The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) is moving forward with a brand name and a beta test for its cloud-based “digital locker” system. The name for the technology will be UltraViolet and the beta test will begin this fall, while the specs and licensing details are expected to be ready by the end of 2010.
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Copyrights
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A few days ago, with no small amount of glee, Ray Beckerman from the Recording Industry vs The People blog suggested that $16m in legal fees had netted the Recording Industry Association of America less than $400,000 in court judgements against pirates in 2008. (You can see for yourself just how much glee Beckerman felt by reading his post title, which is: “Ha ha ha ha ha. RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000!!!”.)
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After months of waiting, it’s finally here. Streaming music service MOG has launched its mobile applications for Android and iPhone, giving subscribers unlimited access to its library of 8 million songs, which can be streamed or downloaded over both 3G and WiFi. If you listen to a lot of music, or just like being able to listen to music on-demand without having to sync to your PC, this is definitely worth checking out. Access to the mobile service costs $9.99 a month, but MOG is offering free 3-day trials when you download the apps (no credit card is required).
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Roku, the set-top box known for streaming Netflix movies from the Web to users’ television sets, has teamed with MP3tunes.com to offer users the ability to stream their iTunes music libraries to their TVs.
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Two years ago, we wrote about how a court had ruled against a documentary filmmaker who was upset that the producers of the Hollywood film We Are Marshall hadn’t paid them for the story. The documentary filmmakers had made a (what else?) documentary about the story of the football team at Marshall, where a plane crash killed the team, and then the school rebuilt its football program. The Warner Bros. film was about the same story, but as we pointed out at the time, facts aren’t copyrightable, and anyone can make a film based on historical facts. It is true that Hollywood studios often will pay for the “rights” to a story from a newspaper or author, even though they don’t need to secure the “rights” that way. They do so for a variety of reasons, such as getting more in-depth access to the writers for accuracy purposes or just for general endorsement. But there’s no legal requirement to do so.
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The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the country’s ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.
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Two administrators of Filesoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – have been charged with conspiracy to infringe copyright for their involvement with the site. The case is the second against UK-based BitTorrent site operators. The first case was brought against the owner of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, who was later cleared of all charges.
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ACTA
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Canada is currently negotiating two major international trade agreements and my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that while it may seem hard to believe, their successful completion may ultimately depend on the level of protection provided to Parma ham. The Canada – European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are both facing increasing opposition based on European demands to expand protection for “geographical indications.”
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Article 2.3 of the July 1, 2010 version of the ACTA text provides for “Other Remedies” for infringement. The Japan, Switzerland and EU versions of the text appear to be overreaching, including for example by directly conflicting with explicit TRIPS provisions and provisions in the laws of ACTA negotiating countries, including several European Countries.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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There are “continuing concerns” surrounding open Wi-Fi under the Digital Economy Act, according to Dr Damian Tambini, member of the Communications Consumer Panel and senior lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
“This is an area where there could be considerable consumer detriment over the next 12 months,” Dr Tambini said.
CLUG Talk – 08 Apr 2008 – DBus and other freedesktop stuff (introducing pyglue) (2008)
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup, OSI at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With people like Simon Phipps in its house, the OSI regains credibility
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Open core, Open core, more Open core… the debate goes on and on, with Monty the latest to weigh in.
When you get down to it this is a fight over branding – which is why the issue is so important to the OSI folks (who are all about the brand). I don’t actually care that much how SugarCRM, Jahia, Alfresco et al make the software they sell to their customers. As a customer I’m asking a whole different set of questions to “is this product open source?” I want to know how good the service and support is, how good the product is, and above all, does it solve the problem I have at a price point I’m comfortable with. The license doesn’t enter into consideration.
So if that’s the case (and I believe it is), why the fighting? Because of the Open Source brand, and all the warm-and-fuzzies that procures. “Open solutions” are the flavour of the decade, and as a small ISV building a global brand, being known as Open Source is a positive marketing attribute. The only problem is that the warm-and-fuzzies implied by Open source – freedom to change supplier or improve the software, freedom to try the software before purchasing, the existence of a diverse community of people with knowledge, skills and willingness to help a user in difficulty – don’s exist in the Open Core world. The problem is that for the most part, the Open Core which you can obtain under the OSI-approved license is not that useful.
Yesterday on Twitter, I said “Open Core is annoying because the “open core” bit is pretty much useless. It doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.”
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Recently, there has been debate in the press about “Open Core”. I don’t care to debate the minor points but make a simple declaration:
* “Open Core” has NOTHING to do with “Open Source”. Nearly all proprietary software, at this point, has various degrees of open source-licensed source code in its core.
* “Open Core” has none of the advantages of open source to the user and is merely a proprietary software company.
* “Open Core” puts the software user at a disadvantage in the same way that all proprietary software puts the user at a disadvantage.
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While their marketing guy may claim “that overall, Sugar 6 is an open source product from an open source company”, it’s hard to see how they are anything other than a proprietary software company who share some code with a related open source project. Claiming to be “an open source company” seems an unacceptable use of the open source brand to me.
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Once more there is a lot of heated discussion about what constitutes a “real” open source business model – that is, one that remains true to the spirit of open source, and doesn’t just use it as a trendy badge to attract customers. But such business models address only a tiny part of running a company – how it generates money. What about the many other aspects of a firm?
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Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere. A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers. In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it. Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.
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Free whitepaper – 10 top tips for getting IT into your CMO’s good books
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can’t achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn’t entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform’s code is open and some isn’t. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project’s founders.
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I was surprised to see that Larry Augustin had posted to his blog, since he does that pretty infrequently, so I assume all of the questioning about whether or not SugarCRM is open source is hitting close to home. Not as bad as a flawed cell phone antenna design, but I guess bad enough.
While his post is very heartfelt, it is full of misdirection about the meaning of the term “open source”. He refers to the word “open” a lot, but “open” and “open source” are two different things. Heck, one of the most popular network management product suites of all time was called OpenView, but the “open” in the name had nothing to do with open source software.
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I’ve been staying out of the recent resurgence in the “open core” debate (check out the 451 Group for a summary). If these fauxpen source vendors would simply call their product “open core” versus “open source” there wouldn’t be anything to talk about, but they need to market themselves as “open source” as opposed to “just another commercial software company with a great API” to get any traction.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Grouping of recent news on Free software, including the hotly-debated WordPress controversy
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Project London movie is the triumph of community spirit, togetherness or whatever you call it over money. A team of online volunteers using free software, created the movie, Project London, with as many as 650 VFX shots! Isn’t that awesome?
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While thinking of the next article for the Open Sound Series, I was listening to some music via Ampache. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ampache, it is simply a piece of software that allows you to upload, download, and stream music (and now videos) from a collection of media residing on a server. It features the ability to have multiple catalogs, ratings of songs and videos, playlist creation (including “democratic playlists” that users vote for), tag editing, album art and streaming various formats of music. While most software designed to listen to music does many of the same things, Ampache is then able to take it a step further by adding the idea of concurrent users of a single instance of the software.
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Canonical has gathered open source enthusiasts to help Ubuntu make its mark on the business landscape in the UK.
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Mozilla
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For the last couple of years I’ve been responsible for our wonderful Evangelism group at Mozilla. We’ve been responsible for a combination of developer relations, standards work and outbound developer-focused communications. If you’ve followed our work on hacks and devmo, especially around the release of 3.5 and 3.6 then you’ve familiar with the pretty amazing work of this team.
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Licensing
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If there is any failing on the part of the GPL here, it is not in the eyes of the second party – that person doesn’t want to share his code anyway. If there is a failing it is that the GPL has failed to enforce the terms that the first party expected – which I think are in line with the expectations of Free Software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The new coalition government’s commitment to transparency heralds an exciting time for the possibilities of open data. The data release movement is relatively new and it’s difficult to predict its full economic impact in advance.
The US leads the way in encouraging and financially incentivising the software community to develop new apps based on publicly available data. The first round of the Apps for Democracy competition in Washington DC saw 50 new apps created in 30 days. The city gained $2.5m in development work outlaying just $50,000 in prize money for the winner. The Californian government introduced a transparency website costing $21k with $40k annual operational costs. As a result of citizens reporting on unnecessary spending the state saved a whopping $20m in a few short months. A similar website in Texas saw $5m savings, again within a few months of operation according to an EU e-gov survey.
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Technology has placed vast amounts of medical information literally a mouse click away. Yet what often may be central – a doctor’s notes about a patient visit – has traditionally not been part of the discussion. In effect, such records have long been out of bounds.
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Apparently, when it’s been released under a freedom of information (FOI) request!
This is not, I imagine, the answer you, gentle reader, expected:)
Pangloss was recently asked by an acquantance, X, if he ran any legal risk by publishing on a website some emails he had obtained from the local council, as part of a local campaign against certain alleged illicit acts by that council. According to X, the emails could destroy the reputation of certain local councillors involved, and that they had had great difficulty extracting the emails, but finally succeeded. Obviously the value to the public in terms of access to the facts – surely the whole point of FOI legislation – would be massively enhanced if the obtained emails could be put on the campaign website.
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Yesterday I was invited to a meeting at the Department for Communities and Local Government with the key players in the local spending/Spikes Cavell issue that I’ve written about previous (see The open data that isn’t and Update on the local spending data scandal… the empire strikes back).
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The following guest post is from Katleen Janssen, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data.
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Open Access/Content
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The MIX website has been up for a few months now, and it looks like there are 2-3 new hacks being put up each day. What’s more, all of the work on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which is awesome (although they chose the “no derivatives” version, which is less awesome, and perhaps a bit misaligned with the vision of the project to me).
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Open Hardware
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There are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field.
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Programming
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Today SourceForge is announcing an open beta period for a new set of tools for developers. Specifically, our engineers have begun work on new and better tools for project members who want to use our tracker, wiki, and source code management. We also have a new open source project management environment. And there’s more to come.
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Python developers have their choice of shells – command-line interpreters that let you write Python code and execute it immediately. Israeli developer Noam Yorav-Raphael used IDLE, the graphical shell shipped with Python, for many years, and even contributed to its code. But IDLE was originally created to run as a single process, so the client-server model was “quite hacky,” he says, and it was written using the outdated TkInter GUI toolkit. Yorav-Raphael decided that writing a new shell was the way to go.
“I started to gather ideas for a new shell in the summer of 2007, started writing it in the summer of 2008 (so I had a working but not really usable shell), worked on it again in the summer of 2009 (which made it actually usable), and added some cool features in the end of 2009. I released the first public version of DreamPie in February 2010.” Today he released the latest version.
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Open source software development in Mexico.
Guest: Guillermo Amaral
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HTML5
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If you want to watch Internet-delivered video on your PC, the vast majority of Web sites have settled on a single, consistent way to do that. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this single, consistent delivery system is Adobe Flash, with all its security and stability issues.
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Aloha Editor is an easy to use WYSIWYG HTML editor, featuring fast editing, floating menu, and support for HTML5 ContentEditable. It provides WYSIWYG editor to any website content instantaneously, enabling content editors to see the changes the moment they type.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, News Roundup at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Android grows not just in phones anymore
Nokia/MeeGo
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If indeed Nokia is interviewing for a new CEO, it should hire the candidate who tells the mobile giant this:
“I don’t want the job unless Nokia is going with Android.”
Tablets
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Android tablets are making their way way into the world and what we’ve seen so far hasn’t been so impressive. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is by far the most appealing. Lenovo is planning on launching their own Android tablet this year. According to Liu Jun, the Senior vice president for Lenovo’s Consumer Business Group, has announced that they will be bringing the Lenovo LePad to compete directly with Apple’s iPad. While the LePad will first be available in their home market of China before they reach out to other markets. Below is an image of their Lenovo LePhone just to give you an idea of what they are capable of.
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HP is postponing, if not cancelling, its Android-powered version of its Slate tablet, says All Things Digital. Meanwhile, DigiTimes says Acer will launch both seven-inch and ten-inch ARM-based Android tablets in the fourth quarter.
Hewlett Packard (HP) is working on a variety of tablet PCs, including WebOS, Windows, and Android, reports All Things Digital. However, citing “sources in position to know,” the story says that an Android tablet originally rumored to be due in the fourth quarter will be delayed until next year.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, News Roundup at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Accumulation of Linux and GNU news including a Zenwalk 6.4 review
Graphics Stack
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Last month we reported on the status of kernel mode-setting with the Glint driver that’s being done as a Google Summer of Code project to provide KMS support for the ancient 3Dlabs Permedia 3 and Permedia 4 graphics cards and to better document the Linux KMS/DRM driver writing process. As part of the Glint KMS discussion, it emerged that an independent developer (James Simmons) happened to hack together a 3dfx DRM driver. This was interesting as the work was never published or accepted into the mainline kernel, but today we finally are able to lay our eyes on this open-source 3dfx driver for the Banshee, Voodoo 3, and Voodoo 5 graphics cards.
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Userspace file systems are one of the coolest storage options in Linux. They allow really creative file systems to be developed without having to go through the kernel gauntlet. This article presents one of them, SSHFS, that allows you to remotely mount a file system using ssh (sftp).
Applications
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Most Linux users are familiar with the top command. Top shows you a list of processes on your system and provides a ton of useful information such as their CPU usage and owner. Unfortunately, this isn’t always enough data and many people don’t know where to turn next. This article covers three performance monitoring applications that show information top doesn’t tell you, and can greatly help in troubleshooting bottlenecks or just finding out more about your system. These utilities are iftop, iotop, and pv.
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digiKam is undoubtedly a powerful application for processing and managing your photos, but there are situations when you need something lighter. For example, I use my netbook when I’m on the move to off load photos from my camera and quickly go through them. For this, I use Geeqie, a lightweight image viewer that offers a slew of nifty features that make it an indispensable tool in my arsenal.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Earlier this month the developers behind the Unigine Engine shared their latest update on this advanced 3D engine that’s fully supported under Linux. With the latest work on this game engine, there are significant performance optimizations to UnigineScript (the developers say these optimizations are “HUGE”), volumetric light shafts, optimized rendering of meshes in non-instanced mode, optimizations of the Unigine math library, and a note there is a new terrain system on the way, among other changes. Unigine Corp also dropped their first public confirmation of a new strategy game they are developing.
Desktop Environments/WMs
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This time around, in our Alternative desktops series, we’re going seriously old-school Linux with Fvwm. Although using Fvwm will make you feel like you’ve gone back in time, it still has it’s place in today’s world. Where speed and simplicity are the single most important desire on a desktop, you really can’t go wrong with Fvwm. The only problem with this wonderful little desktop is getting used to the configuration.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Most of you probably haven’t heard about Clementine before. But every linux music enthusiast must be aware of Amarok 1.4, which for many like me, was the best open source music player for Linux. Even though it was KDE app, I used it as my default music player in Ubuntu Gnome. It was that good. But everything changed once KDE developers decided to rewrite Amarok.
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GNOME Desktop
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I can’t stand the default menu Ubuntu comes with and I only keep it because I have to know under which submenu the user can find an installed application when posting on WebUpd8. This wouldn’t be needed if people used a menu with a search function but anyway. Also, since I install quite a few applications, half of it requires scrolling and makes it almost unusable.
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There are gazillions of people on this planet right now. Not all of them will ever care to build their own flavor of Linux. But Linux gives you the ability to choose how YOU want things, and then share it with the world. I’ve talked before about where you can go to build your own version of Linux. It’s not as difficult as you might think it is… so what are you waiting for?
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Reviews
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It’s been a long time since I last took a look at Zenwalk. I’ve always had a sweet spot for it, though I haven’t had a chance to really give it a full spin in quite some time. Although I am primarily a KDE user, there’s something about Zenwalk that always keeps my attention: It’s simple, fast, and gets the job done. Not only that, but its one of the best lightweight distros around.
Zenwalk uses XFCE as it’s desktop of choice (though other versions are available) and from the past times I’ve used it, it appears to be focused on allowing your system to run free, rather than bog it down with unnecessary eye candy and bloat. Zenwalk manages to pack a punch with a large variety of useful applications preinstalled, without slowing you down in the process.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux now comes with built-in virtualization (KVM) but is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) about to go to the virtual mat with VMware? If you look at their RHEL video, you’ll come away with a resounding ‘Yes’ to that question.
Red Hat purchased Qumranet in 2008 to acquire their KVM-based virtualization solution and SolidICE product based on the SPICE protocol.
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Fedora
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As Ian and Ryan already blogged, the Fedora Design Team is evaluating new branding fonts: Comfortaa for headings and either Cantarell or Droid Sans for body text.
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Debian Family
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After ten editions in nine countries spanning four continents, and for the first time in the US, the Debian project is holding the annual Debian Developer conference, DebConf, at Columbia University in New York City on August 1.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I believe such a philosophy, like Ubuntu’s code of conduct, is important and every project should have one.
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Flavours and Variants
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Huzzah! So, the official (and huge) ISO for the second release of Netrunner is up, out and available right now! (torrent)
Here’s the distrowatch announcement.
Moving to KDE
The biggest change in this version is moving to KDE for the desktop.
Something important to understand about that: when I say “KDE for the desktop”, that doesn’t mean Netrunner is running all KDE apps. There are a lot of GNOME (and other) apps in there, because we are trying to present the best selection of applications and for some reason some people like some of the non-KDE apps better.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, News Roundup, Servers, Ubuntu at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Further catch-up with GNU/Linux news (mostly from last week)
GNU/Linux
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Currently, Linux systems take the very high end machines (any machine more powerful than a fully tricked out MacPro {read supercomputers and mainframes}) and the very low end machines (phones, routers, palm-tops, PVRs).
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There’s almost nothing that desktop Linux can’t do. A modern Linux desktop is probably a better choice for 95% of the heavy Internet service using population than the big commercial behemoth that dominates the desktop. I’m not saying Windows doesn’t have its place or that it doesn’t do the job for a lot of people, but Linux is better, faster, stronger, safer, and sexier than anything else out there. It’s cool. It rocks. It dramatically increases your sex appeal. And if you’ve got a 64 bit processor instead of 32, that goes double. What more do you want?
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Fun
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You’ve seen the wobbly windows, you’ve seen the cube, you’ve seen the raindrops. Compiz is just a bunch of useless eye candy right? Wrong. While the flashy effects get most of the attention, Compiz is a top-notch window manager in its own right. In fact, it’s got so many workspace and window management tools that many people use Compiz for years without ever knowing about some of the most useful features. This guide will cover each of the best window management plugins for Compiz and explain how each can be used to create a more productive desktop, with or without wobbly windows.
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Linux, which I’m using at the moment, comes with a pretty standard blue-themed Gnome desktop common to several distros- Debian, Mandriva and Fedora- distinguished only by a branded wallpaper.
It’s a simple and elegant theme, but over the last few days I’ve been customising my desktop, changing the theme and icons. The new theme is a dark one which I think suits my laptop with its grey-bordered screen.
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Desktop
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Even I have done it. I don’t think you can be a Linux blogger without having done at least one post about how this year is the year the Linux desktop will take over the world. However, no matter how many people seem to write about it. The year the Linux desktop takes over the world always seems to fall through the cracks. Sometimes I think that there must be some Pinky foiling the Linux Brains plans 
But! The pundits cry, Linux is gaining market share every year. Surely it will win the Linux desktop prize soon. Nay! Say the naysayers, at the rate Linux is gaining desktop market share even those not born yet will have one foot in the grave before Linux has any significant rating. Which one is right?
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GNU/Linux has the answer to these annoyances, and it is this: they are simply not there. Why? Because the software is written by developers that are not trying to sell you something.
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It’s an old joke by now that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop – just like last year, and the year before that. But now there’s a new twist: that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux smartphone – with the difference that it’s really happening.
That’s mainly being driven by the huge success of the Linux-based Android system, but it’s not the only open source system here. There’s also webOS and MeeGo, both of which have their loyal fans. What that means is that whichever of these takes off, the open source world will benefit.
[...]
If Baidu does come out with its own Android rival, that could help to achieve two things. It would finally take open source into the Chinese mainstream, and help to ensure that Linux unequivocally becomes the world’s leading operating system for smartphones – if not on the desktop.
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Almost all school children in Portugal are becoming familiar with using open source, including the Linux operating system, says Paulo Trezentos, founder of Caixa Mágica Software.
By the end of this year, the company’s eponymous Linux-based operating system will have been installed on 890,000 school PCs and school laptops, he says. “In a country with a population of 10 million, this means that Linux is reaching the majority of the young people.”
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In the almost 20 years since Linux was first released into the world, free for anyone to use and modify however they like, the operating system has been put to a lot of uses. Today, a vast number of servers run Linux to serve up Web pages and applications, while user-friendly versions of Linux run PCs, netbooks, and even Android and WebOS phones.
One incredibly useful way that Linux has been adapted to the needs of modern computer users is as a “live CD,” a version of the operating system that can be booted from a CD (or a DVD or, in some cases, a USB drive) without actually being installed on the computer’s hard drive. Given the massive RAM and fast CPUs available on even the lowest-end computers today, along with Linux’s generally lower system requirements compared to Windows and Mac OS X, you can run Linux quite comfortably from a CD drive.
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Server
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Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.
The free appliance, which features Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04, also can be deployed in private cloud configurations.
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07.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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That’s what led to a woman and her son getting charged with a $4,000 fine for picking up a discarded air conditioner. The Consumerist lets us know that, thankfully, a judge has tossed this fine. There are so many ridiculous angles to this case, even if you believe the law is reasonable. First, two people were fined. The guy who picked up the air conditioning unit… and his aunt, who owned the car, but was not in it at the time. That seems pretty questionable as well. It’s a bad application of liability. Just because the nephew put the AC unit in the car, why should the aunt be subject to the fine?
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The UK Government will overhaul libel laws in the new year. It said that it will publish a Defamation Bill early next year in an attempt to give publishers more rights and clamp down on ‘libel tourism’.
All the major political parties pledged to reform the laws of libel in the run up to this year’s general election. Libel laws in England and Wales are widely seen as being very favourable to people suing for libel to protect their reputations.
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Amazon’s Kindle eReader has long been a great device. Unfortunately, for much of its life, it has been far too expensive. And now with Apple’s iPad out there, it seems a bit too, well, monochrome. But Amazon did a smart thing recently, they slashed the price of the device, down to $189. As a result, growth is accelerating once again, Amazon says.
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In short, it doesn’t necessarily matter that the Mail is different. Perhaps its success merely prompts other news sites to be different as well. Not one site covering all, but many sites offering alternative things. Not one site ruling the world, but many sites carving up the globe.
And once we’re dealing in niches and targeting – for readers, for ads – then paywalls become merely part of the debate: not Rupert’s (or David’s) last weapon of every resort.
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It is with great regret that I am writing this. Scienceblogs.com has been a big part of my life for four years now and it is hard to say good bye.
Everything that follows is my own personal thinking and may not apply to other people, including other bloggers on this platform. The new contact information is at the end of the post, but please come back up here and read the whole thing – why I feel like I must leave now.
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Security/Aggression
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In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
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Environment
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Recycled Island is a great idea for getting rid of the floating plastic dump in the Pacific. The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite cutting down on cleanup and building costs. It would be between Hawaii and San Francisco in the heart of the Pacific Ocean’s currents.
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Fishermen in Mississippi say they are angry that under the terms of BP’s $20 billion oil spill fund, money they earn doing clean-up will be subtracted from their claim against the company.
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South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off.
Wildlife officials say poaching for the prized horns has now reached an all-time high. “Last year, 129 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa. This year, we have already had 136 deaths,” said Japie Mostert, chief game ranger at the 1,500-hectare Krugersdorp game reserve.
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Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have “signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP’s toxic black tide. The contract, the Mobile Press-Register has learned, “prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.”
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Finance
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One of the dire unintended consequences of that maneuver, however, was that municipal governments across the country have been saddled with very costly bad derivatives bets. They were persuaded by their Wall Street advisers to buy municipal swaps to protect their loans against interest rates shooting up. Instead, rates proceeded to drop through the floor, a wholly unforeseeable and unnatural market condition caused by rate manipulations by the Fed. Instead of the banks bearing the losses in return for premiums paid by municipal governments, the governments have had to pay massive sums to the banks – to the point of pushing at least one county to the brink of bankruptcy (Jefferson County, Alabama).
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Financial speculators have come under renewed fire from anti-poverty campaigners for their bets on food prices, blamed for raising the costs of goods such as coffee and chocolate and threatening the livelihoods of farmers in developing countries.
The World Development Movement (WDM) will issue a damning report today on the growing role of hedge funds and banks in the commodities markets in recent years, during which time cocoa prices have more than doubled, energy prices have soared and coffee has fluctuated dramatically.
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Food speculation is one of the ways bankers’ greed harms the poor and puts us all at risk, and the huge investment bank Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest culprits.
Our financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority or FSA, is charged with keeping the financial system stable and safe. We should look to them to rein in the irresponsible food gambling of Goldman Sachs and banks like them.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Federal agents appeared at a hacker conference Friday morning looking for Julian Assange, the controversial figure who has become the public face of Wikileaks, an organizer said.
Eric Corley, publisher of 2600 Magazine and organizer of The Next HOPE conference in midtown Manhattan, said five Homeland Security agents appeared at the conference a day before Wikileaks Editor in Chief Assange was scheduled to speak.
The conference program lists Assange–who has been at the center of a maelstrom of positive and negative publicity relating to the arrest of a U.S. serviceman and videos the serviceman may have provided to the document-sharing site–as speaking at 1 p.m. ET on Saturday.
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The use of contracts and technologies to bypass copyright law and users’ rights must be investigated by academics, a review of contract and copyright law by a government advisory body has said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Adrian Ramsay, deputy leader of the Green Party, has endorsed TalkTalk and BT’s challenge of the recently ratified Digital Economy Act. The two Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies are seeking a judicial review of the legislation.
The Digital Economy Act places an obligations on ISPs to block sites accused of hosting copyrighted material. ISPs are also being asked to retain and manipulate data on its subscribers’ internet activity.
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Back in 2005, we wrote about the rather crazy case of Leo Stoller, the “trademark troll,” who claimed incredibly broad trademarks on single words (sometimes through questionable means) and then tried to shakedown pretty much anyone who used those words for cash. The key trademark he claimed to hold was on the word “stealth” for “all goods and services.” Among those he demanded money from were Columbia Pictures for the movie Stealth, baseball player George Brett for selling a “Stealth” brand baseball bat and (my favorite) Northrup Grumman for making the stealth bomber.
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One of the biggest problems we have with copyright policy today is the simple fact that it’s almost entirely “faith-based,” with no real evidence showing that current copyright laws benefit society. In fact, most specific studies show the opposite — that copyright laws, as they exist today, tend to do more harm than good (except, potentially for middlemen). That’s why international agreements that lock in certain forms of copyright law around the globe are so problematic. They don’t allow countries to experiment with different types of copyright law to see if they work better. That, of course, is one reason why ACTA is so troubling. However, before ACTA there were other such international agreements, such as WIPO and, most famously, the Berne Convention.
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Forward-thinking technologists, including me, have been predicting for some time that adaptive mesh networking would be the doom of the telecomms-carrier and broadband oligopoly. Now comes a scientist from Australia with an idea so diabolically clever that I’m annoyed with myself for not thinking of it sooner: put the mesh networking in smartphones!
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Some of the biggest Internet brands have declared their love for BitTorrent in recent months. Both Facebook and Twitter are using BitTorrent to update their networks and not without success. In Twitter’s new setup the BitTorrent-powered system has made their server deployment 75 times faster than before.
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Lawyers have abandoned a closely watched lawsuit against the document-sharing site Scribd that alleged the site’s copyright filtering technology is itself a form of copyright infringement.
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Even without copyright laws, programmers would continue to produce software. They might engineer the software to work only with permission from the software firm, requiring the consumer to pay for it.
A second profitable business model is to allow consumers to use to the software for free, courtesy of advertisers. Google follows this model.
A third option, and probably most preferable from the consumer’s perspective, is the open-source freeware/shareware model, or software written by volunteers/hobbyists and made freely available without difficult licensing restrictions. Users may copy, edit, modify, sell, or pretty much do anything with the software. (For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.)
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We’ve talked in the past about what a complete joke the USTR’s “special 301″ process is. That’s when a bunch of industry lobbyists say which countries are the most annoying to them on intellectual property issues. Then, the USTR sums it all up and says “these countries are problems” and tells US diplomats to go browbeat those countries to have better intellectual property laws and enforcement. Of course, the problem is that there’s no objective research being done. All of the information is heavily biased, and it doesn’t take into account either the actual laws or enforcement in a country (just what industry reps say is going on) or the rights of those countries to make their own decisions when it comes to IP laws.
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I like Will Page, the chief economist for PRS for Music (a UK collection society), quite a bit. We’ve had a number of fun conversations about the music industry and music industry economics — some of which we’ve published here. While there are plenty of things I agree with him about, there are still many points on which we disagree. His most recent paper, advocating a mandatory ISP fee for file sharing (pdf) is a point where we completely disagree. Page’s paper is getting some attention, and he presented it at the same event where Peter Jenner just called for a blanket license as well. But I fear that Page’s paper, while it digs into some economic concepts, includes a few mistaken assumptions that drives the entire paper offline (though, in fairness to Page, he clearly states that for you to accept his thesis, you need to accept his assumptions).
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Before anyone else excitedly emails the IPKat to tell him, let him announce on this weblog of record that the new UK Business Secretary Vince Cable has today axed a number of Department for Business quangos — the top of the list being the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property policy (SABIP). The body — along with everyone else — must have foreseen its demise, since it has already posted this statement on its own dissolution:
“On 19 July the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced changes in order to streamline its partner organizations by reducing the number of ‘Arm’s Length Bodies’. This includes the dissolution of the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP).
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Copyrights
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In the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands, the referee, Howard Webb, handed out a record 14 yellow cards. Nonetheless, the game turned nasty, as the players apparently concluded that Mr. Webb was all bark and no bite.
Is something similar happening in the French government’s high-profile battle against digital piracy of music, movies and other media content?
Nearly three years ago President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed what was to have been the world’s toughest crackdown on illegal file-sharing. After two years of political, judicial and regulatory setbacks, the legislation was approved last September, authorizing the suspension of Internet access to pirates who ignored two warnings to quit. Early this year, the government set up an agency to implement the law.
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Solicitors for dance music label Ministry of Sound have sent letters to thousands of internet users it believes have illegally downloaded music and says it is determined to take them to court – and extract substantial damages – unless they immediately pay compensation, typically around £350.
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An anti-piracy group has revealed that when it comes to shutting down torrent sites, it is the undisputed king of the Internet. BREIN, which works on behalf of the Hollywood movie studios, says that not only has it shut down several Usenet indexers and streaming sites already in 2010, but hundreds of torrent sites too. There is torrent site carnage going on in The Netherlands and we’ve failed to report on any of it.
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In a full trial the Amsterdam Court has confirmed an earlier judgment and ordered The Pirate Bay to stop all their activities in The Netherlands. The Court ruled that the site’s operators were assisting copyright infringement. If the three ‘operators’ fail to ban Dutch users, they will have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day.
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A Dutch court has ruled that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don’t have block customer access to The Pirate Bay. According to the court, there is no evidence that the majority of the ISPs’ users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.
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The troubles for U.S. based BitTorrent users who share movies without permission is far from over. The United States Copyright Group (USCG) has called in the help of 15 law firms to file lawsuits against BitTorrent users who refuse to settle. For those who are willing to pay, the USCG has set up a portal where alleged file-sharers can conveniently pay their settlements online.
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“It seems to me that in the online world, the marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero,” he says, making it an “inescapable reality” that the digital world is pushing the price of music towards zero.
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You’ve got to love it when you find out you are making a difference. And you know you are making a difference when after you write an article critical of a politician, the politician in question blocks you from following them on Twitter. Seriously. I’m a Canadian citizen, interested in Canadian Heritage, who’s Mother-In-Law is Poet Laureate for her city, who’s wife is a Canadian singer-song writer, who’s daughter is a Canadian photographer, who’s son is a Canadian videographer, who’s brother-in-law is a graphics artist/novelist, who’s sister-in-law is a graphics artist, and who has a lot of friends who are artists.
[...]
In my opinion his best option at this point is to issue an apology to everyone who doesn’t agree with Bill C-32, all of whom he insulted by calling them radical extremists. Of course because this is his best option, it doesn’t mean that he will do it. I suspect that he’s really annoyed with me at present, and that I made the suggestion will annoy him further.
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And, again, no one is saying that creators shouldn’t get paid or shouldn’t make a living. They’re just saying that it’s your responsibility to find the right business model, and to adapt when the market changes. That’s not “amazing.” It’s basic economics.
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She claims that her image is one of the main reasons the album sold so well, so she wants $2 million. Does she really think that if the band had put a different image of a girl staring off into space on the cover, there would have been noticeably different sales?
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The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) claims it’s the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies. No, it’s not. It’s designed to support a broken, old business model of selling CDs to frightened music lovers. No where do you see that more than the RIAA spending $17.6 million in 2007 to recover a mere $391,000.
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ACTA
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Before examining the changes, it should be noted that there remain doubts about whether this chapter even belongs in ACTA. Both Canada and Mexico have reserved the right to revisit all elements of this chapter at a later date, suggesting that both countries have concerns about the digital enforcement chapter. Moreover, there are still disputes over the scope of the Internet chapter, with the U.S., Australia, NZ, Canada, Singapore and Mexico seeking to limit the chapter to trademark and copyright, while Japan, the EU, and Switzerland want to extend it to all IP rights. Without resolving this issue, there is no digital enforcement in ACTA.
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The main progressive group in the European Parliament today complained to EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, that Euro MPs have been denied the documents on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations.
Mr De Gucht today held a one-hour discussion with members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs at the European Parliament. But S&D MEPs said there could be no serious debate since members do not know the content of the negotiations.
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With yesterday’s leak of the full ACTA text (updated to include the recent round of talks in Lucerne) the simmering fight between the U.S. and the E.U. on ACTA is now being played out in the open. During the first two years of negotations, both sides were at pains to indicate that there was no consensus on transparency and the treaty would not change their domestic rules. Over the past four months, the dynamic on both transparency and substance has changed.
The turning point on transparency came as a result of two events in February and March. First, a Dutch government document leak that identified which specific countries were barriers to transparency. Once identified, the named European countries quickly came onside to support release of the text, leaving the U.S. as the obvious source of the problem. Second, the European Parliament became actively engaged in the ACTA process and demanded greater transparency. As the New Zealand round approached, it was clear that the Europeans needed a resolution on transparency. The U.S. delegation used the transparency issue as a bargaining chip, issuing a release at the start of the talks that it hoped that enough progress could be made to allow for consensus on sharing the text. The U.S. ultimately agreed to release the text, but subsequent events indicate that it still views transparency as a bargaining chip, rather than as a commitment.
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Thanks to La Quadrature Du Net we now have a leak of the consolidated text for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) after the Luzern round of negotiations. It is always difficult to analyse texts that are in the drafting process, but we can now get a better idea of possible changes to national legislation. If the most restrictive aspects of the text were passed tomorrow, what would it change in UK law? This is a wide-ranging agreement, so I will try to concentrate on the copyright aspects. When there are different options in the text, I will choose the one that seems more restrictive, so this analysis is a worst-case scenario. I am also going not going to go in detail into the changes brought about by the Digital Economy Act, as some of the most substantive issues are under consultation.
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What a surprise! Despite the best efforts of at least one negotiating party, the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) text has leaked, again. This post looks at last night’s leak, and at the negotiations. In short, though: the text is an improvement that continues to have significant problems. The negotiations face some significant obstacles right now – but continue at break-neck speed, and I have this sinking feeling that ACTA could be spawning at least one evil little mini-me already…
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CLUG Talk – 11 Mar 2008 – BackupPC with rdiff-backup (2008)
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Free software and Open Source, taken over the past 5 days or so
- Vodafone Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Innovation
Vodafone Group will make its location based services software open source on http://oss.wayfinder.com. The code will be made available on github. The aim is to offer other organisations the opportunity to use a code base which has been developed over the past decade so that they can build new and innovative navigation products which widen choice for consumers.
- Adobe Announces Open-Source Collaboration with Sourceforge
Today, Adobe announced an expansion of its open-source activities and a collaboration with Sourceforge, called “Open@Adobe.”
- Women in free software: Recommendations from the Women’s Caucus
Nearly a year ago the FSF held a mini-summit for women in free software to investigate practical ways to increase the number of women involved in the free software community. Those that attended the summit formed the Women’s Caucus, and have been working to develop practical policy to recommend to the FSF and the wider free software community. Today, we are publishing the Caucus’s initial findings and recommendations.
- Remix This Game — a Free Software Experiment
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Web Browsers
- India Gets a “National Browser”, EpicBrowser – Your Grandma Will Love this
Well, a bunch of geeks still believe that none of the standard browsers cater to India needs and this is what they have done – launched a browser for the Indian market.
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Mozilla
- Can Mozilla Deliver an Open App Store?
In a talk delivered last Wednesday at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada, Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs, asked an audience of more than 150 Web developers a hypothetical question: what would an “open” Web app store look like? The answer could play an important role in the future of personal computing.
- Firefox Home: Adults Only
Apple posted the Firefox Home application, which complies with Apple’s policies by using WebKit as opposed to Gecko. Regardless, for whatever reason Apple feels that Firefox Home is a NC-17 application.
- Mozilla Would Like to Pick Your Brain – Revising the MPL
Can we talk about licenses for a bit? It’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time, and it’s a good time for it, because Mozilla is redrafting its license and would like your input.
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OpenSolaris/Oracle
- A Considered Future For OpenSolaris
You may have seen some of the news reporting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting that was held last Monday (I am an elected member of the Board). At a meeting with an unusually large number of community observers, we discussed how to respond to the 100% radio silence the OGB has experienced from the new owners of the OpenSolaris copyright and infrastructure. I believe we reached a balanced and well-considered conclusion and remain hopeful of a good outcome.
[...]
There are two choices for the final step. In one, the OGB are able to liaise effectively with empowered Oracle staff to devise a new direction for the OpenSolaris community. The other is one we hope we will not need to take, of recognizing we have no further means available to act and using the formal mechanism defined in the OpenSolaris governance for exactly this situation. Here’s hoping.
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WordPress
- Themes are GPL, too
If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preëminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
- The #thesiswp Controversy: WordPress, Themes and the GPL
There are really only two interesting questions here as far as I’m concerned. Does Thesis have the right to not adhere to the terms of the GPL? And independent of that question, does it make business sense for them to not adhere to the license?
- U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs
After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
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Semi-Open Source (“Core”)
- Some Thoughts on Open
Open Source is at the heart of SugarCRM’s business. Well over half of our engineering effort produces code that is released under an OSI approved license. We have three versions of our Sugar CRM product: Community Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is licensed under version 3 of the AGPL, and has been licensed under some version of the GPL or AGPL since early 2007. Prior to that it was available under several variants of the MPL.
- ✍ On the term “open source business”
I’ve been having a number of conversations in e-mail on the subject of open core business models. The problem that keeps coming up is that there are a range of behaviours exhibited, some of which are acceptable to pragmatists and some of which cross the line into abusing the term “open source”. Where should we draw the line in? When is it acceptable for a company to call itself “an open source business” and when is it not?
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The fact is, the community edition and the commercial editions have disjoint user bases. The community edition is used by a group of people who have the time and skills to deploy by themselves and who have no need of the many differences of the commercial versions. The commercial versions are feature-rich and effectively lock their users into a traditional commercial ISV relationship with the vendor. If these two were kept distinct, there would probably be no pragmatic issue (naturally Free Software purists would still protest the existence of closed code, but that’s not a part of this particular argument).
- Really Open Source Cloud Computing Arrives At Last
I’m still waiting to hear back from Eucalyptus about this, but if it’s true it’s a significant case study in the consequences of the open core model, both for the company using it, for their customers and for the community they have gathered around the code. Open core obstructed NASA’s freedom to modify the code to suit their needs as well as leading to the creation of a powerful competitor for Eucalyptus. I wrote recently that open core is bad for you; this seems a powerful demonstration of that observation in action.
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Wine
- Wine Announcement
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is now available.
This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Government
- Creating a FLOSS Roadmap, brick by BRIC
Last year I attended Open World Forum in Paris. It was a lively conference with broad representation of industry leaders, community organizers, and government officials and administrators. The warm reception by the Mayor’s office in Paris (at the Hôtel de Ville) underscored what has become increasingly obvious in the analysis of economic statistics: open source software is appreciated, in Paris, France, and Europe. My reflections on the subject of last year’s topic, the digital recovery, were captured in the blog posting From Free to Recovery. This year, the agenda of the Open World Forum (Sept 30-Oct 1, 2010) is more ambitious, and I am pleased to be on the program committee, an editor of the 3rd edition of the FLOSS 2020 Roadmap document, as well as one of the organizers of a think-tank session focused on, and beyond, the role of open source software and the future of the BRIC thesis.
- Italian Industrial Association meets Open Source
Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.
- FR: Defence ministry to test open source office tools
France’s ministry of Defence will next year test open source office productivity tools, according to answers given by the ministry to written questions by Bernard Carayon, a member of France’s parliament, about a framework contract with a proprietary software vendor.
The ministry on 1 June replied it will in 2011 start testing a software architecture including office tools based on open source software. This will be used parallel to the current proprietary tools. The results of the test will be used to decide on the future IT plans, writes the ministry. “The strategy is to have two or three different solutions available, to avoid vendor dependence, strengthen our bargaining position with suppliers and to have a proven alternative ready.”
French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) MP Carayon asked the ministry in Aprilto explain its new framework contract with Microsoft Ireland. Carayon fears that as a consequence of this contract, the ministry will stop all research into alternatives to the proprietary vendor’s software.
- Technology Rivals Lobby to Break Microsoft’s Hold
A European plan to advise governments on software purchases has set off a lobbying battle this summer between the U.S. software giant Microsoft and its rivals Google, I.B.M., Red Hat and Oracle over a set of guidelines that could redefine the competitive landscape for proprietary and open-source software.
The focus is a document called the European Interoperability Framework, a recommendation by the European Commission that national, provincial and local governments in the 27-nation European Union will consult when buying software. Open-source software advocates including Google, International Business Machine, Oracle and Red Hat, through a lobbying group, are pushing for a strong endorsement of open-source platforms in the document.
- EC To Provide Government Software Buying Guidelines
The Commission’s European Interoperability Framework guidelines are expected to provide help to national, local and provincial governments on the best software required to upgrade their systems.
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Licensing
- At Least Motorola Admits It
I’ve written before about the software freedom issues inherent with Android/Linux. Summarized shortly: the software freedom community is fortunate that Google released so much code under Free Software licenses, but since most of the code in the system is Apache-2.0 licensed, we’re going to see a lot of proprietarized, non-user-upgradable versions. In fact, there’s no Android/Linux system that’s fully Free Software yet. (That’s why Aaron Williamson and I try to keep the Replicant project going. We’ve focused on the HTC Dream and the NexusOne, since they are the mobile devices closest to working with only Free Software installed, and because they allow the users to put their own firmware on the device.)
- Western Digital to fix Licensing?
Over the last few months months I’ve been corresponding with Dennis Ulrich of Western Digital (WDC) about my concerns with the EULA for the My Book World Edition (MBWE) and their obligations under the GPL. To say it has been a drawn out process is an understatement.
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Openness/Sharing
- Seeking a New Round of Amazing Stories
It’s me again, asking you, my dedicated readers (Hi Mom) to help paint this really cool white fence. This is for a presentation my friend and colleague John Ittelson asked me to assist with (I bet more of you know John than me, but ask me sometime to tell the story of the lunch we never had in Albuquerque).
Anyhow, John is doing a session July 28 in San Jose for the Adobe Education Leaders, and he asked about doing a reprise of the Amazing Stories of Openness gig I did last year at the Open Education Conference.
- The BookLiberator.
The BookLiberator is an affordable personal book digitizer. We’ve just finalized the hardware design and are now proceeding to manufacturing. We want to have them for sale at our online store as soon as possible; we’re aiming for a price of appx $120 for the kit plus around $200 for the pair of cameras (many customers will already have consumer-grade digital cameras, so we’ll offer the BookLiberator with and without).
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Open Data
- Should the Open Source Initiative adopt the Open Knowledge Definition?
Russ Nelson, License Approval Chair at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), recently proposed a session at OSCON about OSI adopting a definition for open data:
I’m running a BOF at OSCON on Wednesday night July 21st at 7PM, with the declared purpose of adopting an Open Source Definition for Open Data. Safe enough to say that the OSD has been quite successful in laying out a set of criteria for what is, and what is not, Open Source. We should adopt a definition Open Data, even if it means merely endorsing an existing one. Will you join me there?
- Briefing paper on “The Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data”
The Semantic Web, open data, linked data. These phrases are becoming increasingly commonly used in terms of web developments and information architectures. But what do they really mean? Are they, can they be, relevant to education?
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Open Access/Content
- The intranet is dead. Long live the intranet.
Prince was wrong – it’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the intranet. When I talk to clients about intranets as a collaboration hub they cock an eyebrow as if I’m speaking 2003 speak rather than 2010 speak. Some of it may be terminology tedium, but the sentiment is born out of a sense that the intranets of old no longer offer a compelling enough business proposition.
- Free Access to the Sum of all Human Tarkovsky
I love this because it really goes beyond just entries in Wikipedia; it’s about making everything that *can* be made universally available – non-rivalrous, digital content, in other words – freely accessible for all.
It’s one of the key reasons why I think copyright (and patents) need to go: they are predicated on stopping this happening – of *not* sharing what can be shared so easily.
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Update: oh, what a surprise: some of the films have *already* disappeared because of “copyright issues”. Because copyright is so much more important than letting everyone enjoy an artist’s work. (Via Open Education News.)
- CERN supports Creative Commons
Creative Commons is deeply honored to announce CERN corporate support at the “creator level”. CERN is one of the world’s premier scientific institutions–home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web. This donation comes on the occasion of the publication under Creative Commons licenses of the first results of LHC experiments.
- Declaration of Open Government
The central recommendation of the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s report was that the Australian Government makes a declaration of open government. As the Minister responsible for that Taskforce, I am proud to make that Declaration today on behalf of the Australian Government.
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Open Hardware
- TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, Again
- The Real Open Source Hardware Revolution
I recently wrote about the latest iteration of the Open Source Hardware Definition, which provides a framework for crafting open hardware licences. It’s a necessary and important step on the road towards creating a vibrant open source hardware movement. But the kind of open hardware that is commonly being made today – things like the hugely-popular Arduino – is only the beginning.
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Standards/Consortia
- German Federal CIO sides with Open Standards for public sector
Minister of state Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, IT Commissioner of the German government, said in an interview with the newspaper C’t (C’t 2010 Heft 15, S. 150-51) that “only by using Open Standards can [the government] obtain independence from software development companies”. He also recognised that “maximal interoperability can be reached with open IT-Standards”.
For Rogall-Grothe a valid technological standard must first be fully publicized, secondly be unrescritively and consistently used, and thirdly not be subjected to any legal restrictions. “The German government has clearly stated that a technical standard will only be recognised if it can be implemented by all organisations, including Free Software companies and developers”, says Matthias Kirschner, German Coordinator at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
- [ODF Plugfest] Brussels – 14 and 15 October 2010
This international plugfest is jointly organized by the Federal State, the Regions and Communities of Belgium. The event will be held in Brussels on the 14th and 15th of October 2010. The conference room in the “Boudewijn”-building – kindly provided by the Flemish Government – is conveniently located near the Brussels-North railway station.
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