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02.26.11

Links 26/2/2011: More GNU/Linux in Schools, Including Punjab’s

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • SCALE: The Best Little-Big Open Source Conference

      The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is happening this weekend Feb. 25-27 and is, simply, awesome! I heard about it during its infancy but never even looked into it thinking it would be just as expensive as OSCON. Boy was I wrong! The first year I attended, it cost $60. This year the cost is $70. That’s $70 for THREE days, which is a steal! Factor in the discounts provided to local open source user groups & it is downright highway robbery. You really cannot beat it.

    • 2010 FLOSS Workshop Aftershock: An Unexpected Invitation

      1. How to install Ubuntu/Mandriva (I’d like to add Mepis, Pardus and Mint, haha)
      2. How to work with open word processors, spreadsheets, electronic presentations
      3. How to save documents in compatibility mode (This one is funny. People still fail to see that incompatibility issues spring from Microsoft, not from open documents)
      4. How to dual boot Linux/Windows.

      This hands-on workshop is again addressed to professors. They chose us, it turns out, because both Megatotoro and I are not technical users, which proves that ANYONE can use Linux.

    • Are you ready for SCALE 9X?

      The flights have been confirmed for some time and they’re now being boarded. Speakers are packing and heading to Los Angeles, ready to rehearse their presentations before they go on sometime between Friday and Sunday. Exhibitors prepare to set up their booths. Registrations for the expo continue to roll in. Are you ready for some Linux The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo is set to start tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 25, at the Hllton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

    • What are you doing Friday? We’re Building a Cloud with Cloud.com, Openstack, and Opscode

      Heading to Southern California Linux Expo, SCaLE 9x? If so, join us this Friday, along with Cloud.com, Opscode, and Openstack, for a free Cloud building event in Los Angeles.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 10: Lean and mean

        Google released a stable version of Chrome 9 earlier this month but now the company has also pushed out a beta version of Chrome 10. As usual, there are many speed enhancements as well as changes in synchronisation and some of the dialog boxes.

      • Google updates Chrome developer tools
      • Run Google Chrome Apps In Background

        What do you prefer, keeping your Chrome browser open to get notifications about incoming mails, calender and chat or close the browser yet let these services run in the background? There can be many such service which will become more useful if they run in the background and notify a user if there is any update.

        There are many useful hosted apps, extensions available from Google’s Chrome Webstore which will become more useful if they get the capability of running in the background.

  • Sun/Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Joomla 1.6 – A detailed review from a user

      Joomla has been one of my favourite CMS’s for a while but I left it behind when WordPress answered the last questions I had with version 3. Secretly however, I have been waiting for J1.6 to come out in the hope that it also answered some of the questions I had about the last versions.

      Frankly speaking I always thought that Joomla had a better Content Management interface than WordPress, it was just easier to find stuff with bigger sites in Joomla. The massive draw back was the imposed Information Architecture due to Joomla’s content hierarchy.

    • Tiny blogs: When WordPress is too damn big

      So … FlatPress is mostly PHP, Blosxom and Ode are Perl, PyBlosxom is Python, NanoBlogger is a collection of Bash scripts.

      No databases. All “flat” files. You can see the code. It’s definitely non-commercial.

  • Funding

  • Government

    • Government IT suppliers claim procurement system excludes open source

      Systems integrators took on a disapproving audience of open source advocates this week after the government told its biggest suppliers to explain why its open source policy has been thwarted for so long.

      Five executives braved public censure to tell a meeting of the BCS Open Source Group that the fault was an industry ecosystem built over 20 years on principles inimical to the open source model. The hostile ecosystem sustained itself – they merely operated within it, they said.

    • Cabinet Office pushes suppliers on open source

      Bill McCluggage met with suppliers this week to make clear that the Cabinet Office, which leads on ICT policy, wishes to increase the deployment of open source across government.

      He emphasised that the government wishes to see the industry offer more solutions based on open source, and listed a number of approaches that it expects it to follow. These include: evaluating open source solutions in all future proposals; including open standards and interoperability as key components in IT systems; and moving towards the use of open source as normal practice.

    • UK finally moves on Open Standards

      This is one of the stronger policies that we’ve seen from European governments. It certainly is a leap ahead for the UK, which until now has lagged behind many other European countries in terms of Free Software adoption in the public sector. We’d like to see similarly well-considered steps from more European governments.

      The policy note is refreshingly clear on what constitutes an Open Standard. The requirement that patents which are included in Open Standards should be made available royalty-free is a welcome improvement over the fudged compromise in the new European Interoperability Framework. It’s good to see the UK government take leadership on this important issue, in its own interest and that of its citizens.

      As the lamentable OOXML charade has shown, it’s important that standards are developed in a process that’s independent of any particular vendor, and open to all competitors and third parties. We commend the UK government for making this an explicit requirement. The definition of Open Standards could have been even further improved by demanding a reference implementation in Free Software.

    • Government pushes for open standards

      Open standards should be sought in all government IT procurement specifications, the Cabinet Office has said in a policy note.

      When purchasing software, ICT infrastructure, security and other ICT goods and services, where possible government departments should deploy open standards, according to the note published with little fanfare on the department’s web site last week.

      Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses, said the Cabinet Office.

    • NL: Three nominees for the ‘Open call for tenders of the year’

      The programme office of ‘Netherlands in Open Connection’ (NoiV), the Dutch government resource centre on open standards and open source, announced the nomination of three authorities for the ‘Open call for tenders of the year’.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • How public is public data? With Public Engines v. ReportSee, new access standards could emerge

        In the settlement between the two websites, a new question arises: Just what constitutes publicly available data? Is it raw statistics or refined numbers presented by a third party? Governments regularly farm out their data to companies that prepare and package records, but what stands out in this case is that Public Engines effectively laid claimed to the information provided to it by law enforcement. This could be problematic to news organizations, developers, and citizens looking to get their hands on data. While still open and available to the public, the information (and the timing of its release) could potentially be dictated by a private company.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Converting ODF documents to PDF with WebODF

      It is quite common that one wants to send ODF files to people that lack the software to display ODF. One workaround is to convert the ODF to PDF. Most office suites that support ODF can export to PDF. To compare how different office suites do this conversion one can use the website OfficeShots. This website offers the ability to perform this conversion in many office suites at once and to compare the results.

Leftovers

  • Two Latino Leaders Arrested for Showing Up To The Senate Building. Yes, In Arizona.

    Details the events of that lead to the arrests of to Latino leaders who tried to enter the Senate building in Arizona. They were blacklisted from entering the building by senate leader, Russell Pearce. That’s right. Blacklisted. Without trail or notice.

  • The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies

    The video is called “The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies” and was created by FeministFrequency. It describes a test for all movies with three simple qualifications:

    1. Is there more than one woman in the movie who has a name?
    2. Do the women talk to each other?
    3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

  • When The Net Was Young

    His and the other bureaucrats and politicians who supported the plan tried to assert that, like the Interstate Highway system has always been justified, long-distance data networks for use by the public are just too expensive for “private” efforts to successfully build. The backbone would have to be so big that only the Federal Government could successfully build it.

    Since I was working graveyard, then evening shift (graveyard and I don’t get along), I don’t recall the exact date that the change occurred, but here’s what it was: The National Science Foundation released control of the routing tables and eliminated the rules against commercial use. In fact and effect, they threw open the “Internet” to anyone and everyone that agreed to use the Internet protocols as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

  • How Apple Dodged a Sun Buyout: Former CEOs McNealy, Zander Tell All

    At a Churchill Club dinner, former Sun CEOs Scott McNealy and Ed Zander discuss why the company didn’t buy Apple in 1996, the real beginnings of cloud computing and why Linux should never have come into existence.

  • Hardware

    • All this has happened before: NVIDIA 3.0, ARM, and the fate of x86

      At a dinner this week with members of the press, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang laid out his view of NVIDIA’s past, present, and future in light of recent developments in the processor market. Jen-Hsun’s remarks are worth looking at in some detail, as much for what they say about Intel as what they say about NVIDIA. We’ll recap Jen-Hsun’s take on the processor and GPU markets, followed by a look at the implications of the trends he references for the future of Intel, the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), ARM, and the CPU market as a whole. Ultimately, we could even see Intel get back into the ARM market, a market where it had considerable success with its XScale line before betting the farm on x86.

    • Godson: China shuns US silicon with faux x86 superchip

      If the Chinese government is scaring the world with its hybrid CPU-GPU clusters, what do you think the reaction will be when Chinese supercomputers shun American-made x64 processors and GPU co-processors and start using their own energy-efficient, MIPS-derived, x86-emulating Godson line of 64-bit processors?

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Don’t Buy Insurance Industry’s “Objective Analysis”

      There are two things lawmakers can be certain of. One, “the study” they will get from AHIP, which was behind the successful effort to keep the federal government from creating a public option, will be anything but objective. And two, it will be the centerpiece of a multi-pronged strategic effort to scare people into believing, erroneously, that SustiNet will cost jobs, lead to higher taxes and bring to an abrupt halt the “market-based solutions” AHIP maintains insurers have brought to Connecticut.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Injustice Everywhere: The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project
    • Sex Crimes, Cell Phones and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

      If anyone deserves a longer sentence, it is a sex offender who victimizes minors. But no one would ever have anticipated that a sex offender would receive extra prison time for using a basic cell phone in the furtherance of his crime. Last week the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the enhanced sentence of the defendant Neil Kramer who pleaded guilty to transporting a female minor in interstate commerce with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, Title 18, U.S.C. § 2423(a). Kramer’s prison sentence was increased by an extra 2 1/3 years because he had used his cell phone to make calls and text messages to the victim for a six-month period leading up to the offense. U.S. v. Kramer, 2011 WL 383710 (8th Cir. Feb. 8, 2011). In total Kramer was sentenced to over 13 years in prison.

  • Cablegate

    • Bush nixes Denver visit, citing invite to Assange

      George W. Bush said Friday he will not visit Denver this weekend as planned because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was invited to attend one of the same events as the former president.

      Bush planned to be at a Young Presidents’ Organization “Global Leadership Summit” Saturday but backed out when he learned Assange was invited, Bush spokesman David Sherzer said.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Who is Caving to Pressure Against Josh Fox’s Oscar-Nominated Documentary, GASLAND?

      Something bizarre just happened at the Wall St. Journal. At 6pm I was reading a home page story on WSJ.com called “Oscar’s Attention Irks Gas Industry” by Ben Casselman which contained perhaps the most honest and revealing quote from the gas industry that I have read to date about their obsession with attacking my film GASLAND. The quote reads “We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,” said Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp. Just thirty minutes later the quote mysteriously disappears, edited out and in its place is a far more typical spin controlled statement from Tom Price of Chesapeake energy saying, “We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately.” Sounds like a robot at a PR agency, more than a person.

  • Finance

    • How Wall Street and Wisconsin Officials Blew Up the State’s Pension Fund

      Wisconsin state employees fighting for their jobs should ask Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein for their money back.

      What’s the connection? During the dog days of the financial crisis in 2008, the investment bank advised clients to bet that Wisconsin and 10 other U.S. states would go broke by purchasing credit default swaps against their debt. For Goldman and other Wall Street firms that used this ploy, the beauty part was that they had also previously earned millions in fees by helping most of those states sell municipal bonds.

    • How Public Employees and Taxpayers Got Scammed

      Public employees have been cramming the Wisconsin state Capitol to protest the governor’s plan to cut their take-home pay and gut their collective bargaining rights. You can’t blame them for objecting when the state reneges on a deal. But they should have been protesting years ago, when politicians and union leaders struck a bargain that was too good to be true.

    • Politicians Slash Budget of Watchdog Agencies … Guaranteeing that Financial Fraud Won’t Be Investigated or Prosecuted

      It is very telling that we have enough money to extend the Bush tax cuts, to throw boatloads of cash at the big banks so that they can give lavish bonuses, and to continue fighting never-ending wars on multiple fronts giving no-bid contracts to favored contractors, but we can’t scrape together a little spare change to fund the regulators and prosecutors.

  • Wisconsin/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Caller posing as major GOP contributor dupes Walker

      Scott Walker took a prank phone call Tuesday, and Wisconsin learned a lot about its new governor.

      A recording of the call released Wednesday spelled out Walker’s strategies for dealing with protesting union workers and trying to lure Democrats boycotting the state Senate back to Wisconsin.

      Speaking with whom he believed to be billionaire conservative activist David Koch, Walker said he considered – but rejected – planting troublemakers amid protesters who have rocked the Capitol for a week.

    • What’s Really Going on in Wisconsin?

      But now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, conservative, anti-labor politicians like Governor Walker are trying out a new and potentially more potent anti-union argument: We can no longer afford collective bargaining. The wages, health benefits, and pensions of government workers, these opponents say, are driving states into deep and dangerous deficits.

    • Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Violates Reagan’s Legacy

      In his attack on workers’ right to bargain collectively, Scott Walker is diametrically opposing the legacy of former President Ronald Reagan — the same conservative figure Walker idolized in his prank phone call with a blogger posing as “David Koch.”

    • CMD Submits Open Records Requests to Governor’s Office

      Before news broke of the prank call from a David Koch impersonator to Governor Walker’s office, CMD had submitted the below open records request to the Wisconsin Department of Administration for all phone calls to-and-from the governor’s office since January 1. CMD confirmed receipt of the request via telephone on February 18 and expects a reply promptly. We have also submitted open records requests directly to the governor’s office for copies of all email and visitor log records.

    • The Mighty Mighty Teamsters Lend Support

      On the first day protesters occupied the Wisconsin Capitol building a young man held a sign, “Where is Jimmy Hoffa when you need him?” Well, International Brotherhood of the Teamsters President James Hoffa rolled into town today with a group of Wisconsin Teamster members to lend support to the Capitol protesters. Three members I spoke to were UPS drivers, private sector workers lending support to public sector nurses and teachers. I asked Hoffa about the news this morning that Governor Scott Walker had been caught on tape with a blogger who he thought was David Koch, of Koch Industries, specifically about Walker’s comments that he would “crank up” pressure on the workers with layoff notices. “We’ll announce Thursday, they’ll go out early next week and we’ll probably get five to six thousand state workers will get at-risk notices for layoffs. We might ratchet that up a little bit too,” says Walker on the call.

    • Billionaire Right-Wing Koch Brothers Fund Wisconsin Governor Campaign and Anti-Union Push

      In Madison, Wisconsin, record numbers of protesters have entered the 11th day of their fight to preserve union rights and collective bargaining for public employees, inspiring similar protests in the states of Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. The protests have also helped expose the close ties between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who helped bankroll the Tea Party movement. On Wednesday, blogger Ian Murphy revealed he had impersonated David Koch in a recorded phone conversation with an unsuspecting Walker. We play highlights of the recording and discuss the Koch brothers’ influence in Wisconsin with Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy.

    • Koch Lobbying Office Draws Protest; Building Employees Gawk From Windows

      Cars, SUVs and buses whoosh down Madison’s King Street Thursday afternoon, honking, windows rolled down, thumbs up in solidarity as neon-vested police officers direct traffic.

      “Stay strong!” shouted a man out the driver’s-side window of a State Employee Vanpool van. A Madison Metro bus driver drives by, honking and cheering.

    • Wisconsin Protests, Tuesday, February 22, 2011

      News reports indicate that legislators in Indiana have crossed state lines to protest votes on legislation that would savage the right of working people to collectively bargain. McClatchy Newspapers summarizes the rustbelt rebellion: “In Wisconsin, where the state Senate has been paralyzed because Democrats fled to block Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from government workers, the governor warned he would send 1,500 layoff notices unless his proposal passes. In Indiana, Democrats in the state Assembly vanished, depriving that body of the quorum needed to pass a right-to-work law and limit government unions’ powers. And in Ohio, an estimated 5,500 protesters stood elbow to elbow in and outside the Capitol chanting “Kill the bill!” as a legislative committee took up a proposal that would similarly neuter government unions.”

    • Transcript of prank call to Walker

      Here’s a complete transcript of the Buffalo Beast prank conversation with Gov. Scott Walker Tuesday, from recordings by the Beast. Ian Murphy of the Beast poses in the call as David Koch, a billionaire contributor of Walker’s.

    • Full Transcript of Walker-”Koch” Call
    • 50 Rallies in 50 State Capitols to Support Wisconsin

      In Wisconsin and around our country, the American Dream is under fierce attack. Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich—and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response, and vital human services.

    • Wisconsin Protests, Thursday, February 24, 2011
    • Walker’s Budget Plan Is a Three-Part Roadmap for the Right

      There’s a three-prong approach in Governor Walker’s plan that highlights a blueprint for conservative governorship after the 2010 election. The first is breaking public sector unions and public sector workers generally. The second is streamlining benefits away from legislative authority, especially for health care and in fighting the Health Care Reform Act. The third is the selling of public assets to private interests under firesale and crony capitalist situations.

    • What Else is in Walker’s Bill?

      While most news coverage has focused on how Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill attacks the state’s 200,000 public sector workers (and by extension, the entire middle class), the law is increasingly recognized as an attack on the poor. It curtails (and perhaps eliminates) access to the Medicaid programs relied upon by 1.2 million Wisconsinites, limits access to public transportation, and hinders rural community access to broadband internet. The bill keeps the poor sick, stranded, and stupid.

    • Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White

      Outside of services offered during crises and protests, the street medic ethic is one of “community medicine” where medical providers reach out to the community, build trust, and participate in education. In Madison, he said, street medics offer free clinics in the summer months, and free meals on Sundays as part of the “savory Sundays” program. The latter is aimed at the poor and homeless, and includes medical care and education; foot care, Brian says, is particularly important. These community events aimed at the most vulnerable populations also build relationships and allow the medics to better connect the disadvantaged with available resources.

  • Civil Rights

    • Feds Appeal Warrantless-Wiretapping Defeat

      The Obama administration is appealing the first — and likely only — lawsuit resulting in a ruling against the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless-surveillance program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

      A San Francisco federal judge in December awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their attorneys $2.5 million for the costs of litigating the case for more than four years.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

  • DRM

    • Sony’s PS3 Lawsuit Is About Control, Not Piracy

      We actually wrote about Sony’s response to AIBO hacks a decade ago, and it’s absolutely true. Copyright is supposed to be about incentives to create. But it’s generally been twisted into a tool for control against “stuff we don’t like.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Chilean and NZ Proposals for TPP IP Chapter: Counter IP Abuse, Support Public Domain

      The Chilean and New Zealand proposals for the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership have leaked (Canada has been excluded from the talks so far). The leaks demonstrate how much different many other countries view the inclusion of IP in trade agreements when compared to the U.S. and Europe.

    • Copyright Interlude: What is the Public Domain?

      Ironically (and without comment from the district court), the particular identifiable traits of the characters identified here (apart from the portraying actors) were all derived directly from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel that is now out of copyright.

    • Copyrights

      • MP3.com’s Robertson Has A New Startup—And He Might Not Get Sued This Time

        Michael Robertson, an online music entrepreneur who has been something of a lawsuit-magnet for record labels, has launched his newest venture, DAR.fm, and has high hopes that it will stay litigation-free. DAR.fm is a “digital audio recorder” that allows users to record their favorite internet radio shows and store them in a cloud-based service. In an interview with paidContent, Robertson explained that the legal path for such a service should be perfectly clear now, since an appeals court already ruled in 2008 that it’s not a copyright violation to offer users remote, cloud-based DVR services.

      • iiNet fights off AFACT’s piracy appeal

        The trial has been viewed by Australia’s ISP industry as a major landmark case to help determine how ISPs will react in future to users using their networks to download copyrighted material. iiNet had not been forwarding email communication from AFACT to users who AFACT had alleged had breached copyright, whereas some other ISPs have been complying with the request.

      • Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson

        Last week, I reported on a major Canadian lawsuit filed by 26 record labels against isoHunt. The legal action, filed in May 2010 without any press releases or public disclosure by CRIA, seeks millions in damages and an order shutting down the controversial website. At the same time as the labels filed the statement of claim, the four major labels responded to isoHunt’s effort to obtain a declaration that it operating lawfully in Canada. Their Statement of Defence (posted here – excuse the poor scan) also makes the case that isoHunt currently violates Canadian copyright law.

      • Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson

        The McTeague comments – along with his positions at the C-32 committee – raise important questions about how the Liberal Opposition Critic for Consumer and Consular Affairs has emerged as the most anti-consumer MP on the committee from any party (a point noted in a follow-up letter to the editor). Even more troubling is evidence to suggest that McTeague’s comments are being actively fed by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, with McTeague using his platform on the committee to effectively become an unofficial spokesperson.

      • Re:Sound Proposed Tariff for Use of Soundtracks in Theatres & TV Nixed (Again)

        Presumably, very few copyright lawyers will be surprised to learn that the Federal Court of Appeal has just decisively (three days after the hearing) dismissed the application for judicial review brought by the collective Re:Sound (formerly NRCC) in its attempt to impose tariffs when a published sound recording is part of the soundtrack that accompanies a motion picture that is performed in public (i.e. movie theatres) or a television program that is communicated to the public by telecommunication (i.e. on TV).

      • Piracy Once Again Fails To Get In Way Of Record Box Office

        The movie business has — yet again — run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up eight percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren’t affecting box office receipts.

      • Google is still fighting the Belgian copyright cops

        The firm is responding to a court ruling from 2007 that found it in breach of copyright laws by reproducing some of the exciting and groundbreaking news that comes out of Belgium.

        Google is arguing that there is nothing wrong with what it does, which is to take something that someone else has written and use it on its own webpages, and in a bullish statement Google rejected everything that the Belgian courts had said about it.

      • Is Copying The Idea For A Magazine Cover Infringement?

        We’re always told by copyright system defenders that there’s an “idea/expression dichotomy” in copyright law that prevents copyright from really getting in the way of free speech. This is supposed to mean that it’s perfectly fine to copy the idea, so long as you don’t copy the fixed expression of that idea. In practice, this gets a lot trickier, with courts seeming to find all sorts of copied “ideas” infringing, even if they don’t copy specific expression. So where is the line?

      • Musician Sues Summit Entertainment For Taking Down His Song In Twilight Dispute

        This one is a bit confusing, but an artist named Matthew Smith apparently wrote a song back in 2002, but late last year he tried to re-market the song by trying to associate it with the Twilight Saga movies. He did so by doing some sort of deal with the company that sells pre-movie ads to promote the song in various theaters… and by getting an image designed as the “cover” image for the song that was inspired by the Twilight Saga — using a moon and a similar font to the movie’s advertisement. Summit — who has shown itself to be ridiculously overprotective of its trademarks and copyrights issued a takedown to YouTube, where the song was hosted. This part isn’t clear, because I’m not sure where the song image was included on the YouTube page. I guess in the video, but the article linked above doesn’t say.

      • Florida Court Realizes Its Mistake, Reverses Order For Ripoff Report To Take Down Content

        At the beginning of January, we wrote about a troubling court ruling in Florida, where a judge ordered XCentric, the operators of Ripoff Report, to remove some content from their website, despite the company’s policy against such removals and the clear and well-established safe harbors for Ripoff Report from Section 230. There were some serious problems with this ruling beyond just the Section 230 questions, including the prior restraint issue, whereby content was ordered taken offline despite the lack of a full evidentiary hearing on the merits.

      • Smarter Copyright Shills, Please

        In a Feb. 15 op-ed for the New York Times, three representatives of the Authors Guild — Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro — raise the question “Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?”

        In my opinion they have it just about backward. They’d have been better off asking whether the Bard would have survived copyright.

        In the course of this piece, the authors manage to recycle just about every pro-copyright cliche and strawman known to humankind.

        Their central focus is on the novel potential for making money through paid performances in Shakespeare’s day (“for the first time ever it was possible to earn a living writing for the public”), and the role of that development in the literary explosion of the English Renaissance.

      • Great Artists Steal

Clip of the Day

Android/iPhone/iPad Development with Corona-sound effects


Credit: TinyOgg

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  12. When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO

    Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management

  13. No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council

    In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash

  14. FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union

    A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)

  15. EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)

    The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?

  16. Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1

    Links for the day

  17. 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”

    A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli

  18. Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”

    Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli

  19. EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media

    Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office

  20. Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence

    The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger

  21. 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017

    A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end

  22. Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East

    Links for the day

  23. Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement

    An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations

  24. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC

    The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil

  25. Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0

    Links for the day

  26. Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It

    The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)

  27. 2016 Was a Terrible Year for Patent Trolls and 2017 Will Probably be a Lot Worse for Them

    The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside

  28. Fitbit’s Decision to Drop Patent Case Against Jawbone Shows Decreased Potency of Abstract Patents, Not Jawbone’s Weakness

    The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust

  29. The EPO Under Benoît Battistelli Makes the Mafia Look Like Rookies

    Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises

  30. Links 29/12/2016: OpenELEC 7.0, Android Wear 2.0 Smartwatches Coming

    Links for the day

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