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10.30.12

Links 31/10/2012: Valve Likes GNU/Linux. EFF Does Not Like Unity in Ubuntu 12.10

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • “Jitsi”… la alternativa libre a “Skype”.

    Como “todos” sabéis, “Skype” fue adquirido por Microsoft, y en su momento les prometí una alternativa libre. Pues bien, esa alternativa se llama “Jitsi”, antes conocido como “SIP Communicator”.

  • Day of Reckoning For Open Source Software May Be Coming
  • Open Source Orion 1.0 Browser based Code Editor Goes Live

    Back in January of 2011, the Eclipse Foundation announced the development of Orion, a browser/cloud based IDE. At the time, Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation told me that Orion is more than just Eclipse in a browser. It’s a view that he re-iterated today with the official launch of Orion 1.0

  • Gild Source helps startups mine for developer talent gold
  • Architecture 3.0 and Open Source
  • Five More Common Myths Around Open Source Adoption [Slideshare]
  • Open source: not always a successful course

    In my early-October discussion of tech simplification at my former primary home, I’d mentioned that I was able to dispense with my powerline networking setup. But when I re-visited the CA residence a couple of weekends ago, I realized I’d forgotten about one particular node; my Power Mac G4 Cube upstairs. Instead of resurrecting a powerline spur, which would have necessitated a re-expansion beyond my solitary eight-port switch at the router, I instead decided to connect the G4 Cube to the LAN via an Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi bridge.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Cloud Apache OpenOffice plans to be discussed next month

      OpenOffice’s graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365′s debut nears. Plans for “Cloud Apache OpenOffice” will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks

    • LibreOffice Quantal features: Unity Integration, PackageKit and Templates

      The PackageKit/Session Installer integration is implemented in UNO, that allow extensions and macro creators to trigger the installation of software from trusted archives in general — quite a nifty feature in itself. As we have this now in place, in the future we can also use it to complete the LibreOffice install by adding missing packages for certain actions that are not available in the default Ubuntu installation (which leaves out some parts of LibreOffice).

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Nearing End Of Stage One Development

      Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek issued a new 4.8.0 status report where he mentions “I’d like to close the stage 1 phase of GCC 4.8 development on Monday, November 5th. If you have still patches for new features you’d like to see in GCC 4.8, please post them for review soon. Patches posted before the freeze, but reviewed shortly after the freeze, may still go in, further changes should be just bugfixes and documentation fixes.”

  • Project Releases

    • Open source NAC system PacketFence 3.6 released

      PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, free and open source network access control (NAC) system.

    • Clementine music player adds podcast support

      The latest major update to Clementine, version 1.1, expands the open source media player’s streaming support and adds long-awaited podcast functionality. Clementine is a cross-platform program that, its developers say, is designed to be both fast and easy-to-use, and was inspired by version 1.4 of Amarok (the current release is Amarok 2.6). It supports playback of local music libraries and streaming of online radio stations, and can be used to transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC and AAC files.

    • Sourcefabric’s Airtime 2.2 gets smart blocks

      Sourcefabric has released a new version of its open source radio automation software that brings with it several new features. Airtime 2.2 includes improvements to the rebroadcasting features of the application as well as new “Smart Blocks” that allow users to automatically assemble randomised playlists according to a set of parameters.

    • Bootstrap 2.2 becomes more flexible with new templates

      The Bootstrap developers have announced the release of version 2.2.0 of their open source web front-end toolkit. This new major update is the project’s first release since leaving Twitter, which made the framework available as open source in August of last year, and brings with it dozens of fixes as well as new templates and a new media component.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • From Open Source to Crowdfunding

      One of the premises of this blog is that the success and methodology of open source are not one-offs, but part of a larger move towards open, collaborative activity. Thus, by observing what open source does well – and not so well – lessons can be learned that can be applied in quite different fields.

    • Open Access/Content

      • The Open Textbook Challenge [Infographic]

        With the cost of college textbooks as high as they are, students are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. The edtech world is finally starting to take notice: companies and edtech leaders are working to create resources for open-source textbooks. Online Colleges has created an infographic on the numbers behind the shift toward open-source textbooks, and some of the statistics will surprise you.

    • Open Hardware

      • Off to the Future with a new Soccer Robot

        Computer scientists from the University of Bonn have developed a new robot whose source code and design plan is publicly accessible. It is intended to facilitate the entry into research on humanoids, in particular, the TeenSize Class of the RoboCup. The scientists recently introduced the new robot at the IROS Conference (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Portugal.

  • Programming

    • GCC 4.8 Compiler On AMD’s Eight-Core Piledriver

      This month from CPUs based upon AMD’s new Piledriver micro-architecture I have delivered results of compiler tuning on AMD’s Open64 compiler as well as GCC bdver2 tuning. That initial testing from an AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core processor didn’t show any big boost out of the “bdver2″ target with the new BMI/TBM/F16C/FMA3 instruction set extensions. Testing in this article from the AMD FX-8350 are GCC compiler benchmarks of the 4.6.3, 4.7.2, and 4.8.0 development snapshots to look for performance improvements on this new high-end AMD processor when using the very latest GCC compiler code.

Leftovers

  • Nothing Is Foreign to the Liar Willard Romney Anymore

    It was early in the proceedings here on Monday night when I was struck with a horrible vision. It may have been right about that moment in the final presidential debate when Willard Romney — who, for most of the past two years, has been the most bellicose Mormon since they disbanded the Nauvoo Legion — looked deeply into the camera’s eye and, inches from actual sincerity, said, “We can’t kill our way out of this mess.” Or, perhaps, it was when, in a discussion of his newfound dedication to comprehensive solutions to complex problems, he announced his devotion to “a peaceful planet,” or when he cited a group of Arab scholars in support of loosening the grip of theocratic tyranny in the Middle East.

  • Tim Cook calls Surface tablet confusing

    Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took a dig at Microsoft’s soon-to-be released Surface tablet during Apple’s earnings call on Thursday, referring to it as a “fairly compromised, confusing product”.

    “I haven’t personally played with a Surface yet,” Tim Cook said in response to a question about the Surface and the competitive landscape in the tablet market overall.

    “What we’re reading about it is that it’s a fairly compromised, confusing product.”

  • Microsoft’s Pivot — A Plan to Dominate “Devices and Services”
  • Surface is ‘a quirky cat,’ teardown shows

    iFixit determines Microsoft’s tablet is pretty tough to repair, coming in only slightly easier than the iPad.

  • Poll shows tepid interest in Windows 8

    52 percent of respondents had not heard of Windows 8 and that 61 percent had “little or no interest”

  • Mobile Devices Beating PCs As Default Gateway To The Internet
  • Windows 8: Does Microsoft’s Split-Personality OS Make Sense?

    In studies conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, a software consultancy, experienced Windows users had trouble finding applications on the Desktop interface.

  • Bizarre Trend: Journalism Professors Using Klout Scores As Part Of Students’ Grades

    We’ve raised questions in the past about the relevance of “Klout” scores. If you don’t know, Klout is one of a few companies that try to measure “influence” online by looking at your social media activity. The whole process seems kind of silly, but for whatever reason, once you put a number on things, people take it seriously, no matter how bogus the number might be. Lots of companies now use Klout scores to determine who they should give special perks to, leading to plenty of people just trying to game their scores. However, should Klout scores count towards your grade as a student? Adam Singer sent over examples of two separate journalism professors who think so.

  • Why We Have So Many Dumb Rules: A Case Study

    New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten a lot of abuse for his campaign to ban the sale of sugary drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. There are lots of reasons for this, but among the economically literate his proposal is widely viewed as gratuitously inefficient. Simply taxing sugary sodas would be a lot more sensible, so why not do that instead?

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Supreme Court and the death of progress

      In tonight’s ‘Conversations with Great Minds,’ Thom talks with Frederick Kaufman, author and Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine. Tonight’s ‘Big Picture Rumble’ panel discusses Romney campaign Co-Chair John Sununu’s racist comments on Colin Powell, how simply living near foreclosed homes has cost families trillions and whether Hurricane Sandy will prevent the oligarchs from stealing the election.

    • Amid Cutbacks, Greek Doctors Offer Message to Poor: You Are Not Alone

      As the head of Greece’s largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Ex-CIA Officer, Torture Whistleblower to Be Sentenced for Leak
    • Video: Police Brutalize Defenseless Man at Aliya

      Over the next couple of minutes the man is also pepper-sprayed and beaten with a truncheon by the female officer, all while posing no threat to the officers’ well-being whatsoever.

      After a good two minutes of sadistic thrashing, the officers are joined by a squadron of their peers, and successfully put him in handcuffs and under arrest.

      A source confirmed with CrownHeights.info that the man had full permission to be there, and had been living there for a month without any trouble. It is unknown who called the police or why.

    • Capitol Hill’s Rabid, Ravaging Republicans

      Has there ever been a more crazed, cruel, anti-people, corporate-indentured, militaristic and monetized Republican Party in its 154-year history? An about-to-be-released list of some of the actual brutish votes by the House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor, will soon be available to you from the House Democratic Caucus.

    • Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists

      Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

  • Leaks

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Meet the Network Hiding the Koch Money: “Donors Trust” and “Donors Capital Fund”

      Earlier this year internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a major hub of climate change denial and right-wing extremism, were publicly leaked. The documents exposed the Heartland Institute’s funders and strategies for attacking climate science, and led to a mass exodus of Heartland’s corporate funders.

    • Einhorn Family Foundation Behind Voter Suppression Billboards

      One Wisconsin Now and theGrio have uncovered that the Milwaukee-based Einhorn Family Foundation is the “private family foundation” that funded controversial billboards in Milwaukee which warned: “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY! 3 1/2 years and a $10,000 fine.” The billboards were denounced as voter suppression by Mike Wilder, director of the African-American Round Table, and other community groups. The billboards were put up in largely African-American and Latino communities in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Columbus by media behemoth Clear Channel, but the client remained anonymous.

    • Groups Use Fake Letters, Felony Threats to Suppress Vote

      When Phyllis Cleveland first saw the billboard on East 35th Street warning of prison time and a $10,000 fine for voter fraud, the city councilwoman concluded it had one purpose: to intimidate the constituents of her predominantly low-income ward in Cleveland, Ohio.

    • Telling Truths about Israel, Palestine

  • Censorship

    • Judge Rejects Request To Seal Filings In Case Over Miami Heat Owner’s Unflattering Photo

      Earlier this year, we wrote about how a minority owner of the Miami Heat, Ranaan Katz, was so upset about an “unflattering photo” that a blogger/critic had posted of him, that he apparently bought the copyright on the photo and sued the blogger, claiming copyright infringement.

    • The Year In SLAPPs: From The Oatmeal To Pink Slime

      2012 has been yet another year filled with meritless lawsuits filed solely to chill First Amendment free speech rights — so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP). As websites relying on user-generated content continue to increase in popularity, we also see a rise in SLAPPs targeting online speech, from the everyday blogger to the one-time online reviewer. Some of the most talked about SLAPPs this year include:

    • Greek journalists warn over press freedom

      Tension rises between Greek government and media after TV presenters are suspended over criticism of public order minister

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • America’s Schools: Breeding grounds for compliant citizens

      For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • ORG says IP Committee has missed the point

      Reacting to the All Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group’s report, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:

      “We welcome the group’s desire for evidence based policy but think this sits ill with its’ call to move the Intellectual Property Office to the Department of Culture Media and Sport, which has had a dire record of inventing policy initiatives without a shred of evidence.

    • Three former Environment Ministers speak out on NK603 and Roundup
    • Of Course Monsanto Says It’s Safe

      If you’ve been paying attention to the news about food lately, you’ve probably read about the now infamous “Seralini study,” in which University of Caen (France) molecular biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini demonstrated major health issues associated with eating Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) corn and the herbicide used in conjunction with it, RoundUp.

    • The Proposed U.S. – EU FTA: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

      Over the past year or so, there has been a slow and steady effort to generate support for a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. The Obama administration is now behind this, and there is no reason to think a President Romney would change gears. Thus, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election, this trade initiative is likely to go forward.

    • Trademarks

      • The Proposed U.S. – EU FTA: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

        A couple years ago, we wrote about Hebrew University suing GM for using an image of Albert Einstein in an ad without first getting permission (i.e., paying up). Einstein left his assets to Hebrew University (of which he was a founder and a big supporter), and Hebrew University has taken that to an extreme, more or less arguing near complete ownership over Einstein’s likeness, and has been ridiculously aggressive in trying to enforce those rights — to the point of tricking print shops into printing Einstein images, only to threaten them with lawsuits. All this despite the concept of publicity rights barely even existing in Einstein’s time, and no indication that he cared one way or the other about such things.

    • Copyrights

      • Have EU orphans found a caring home?

        As promptly reported yesterday by the IPKat, the Orphan Works Directive has just been published in Official Journal of the European Union, thus becoming Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works. This Kat agrees with Jeremy that there’s plenty of material for preliminary references to the Court of Justice of the European Union, as the various provisions in the Directive look, to say the least, open to various interpretations.

      • Memo To Congress: Stop Trying To Fix Silicon Valley

        But the more urgent motivator for lawmakers was the bruising battle early this year over SOPA—a bill aimed at reducing online copyright infringement that would have dramatically increased civil and criminal penalties associated with even minor violations of the law.

        What looked like a slam dunk for the entertainment industry, which authored the bill, instead sparked a revolt among Internet users that culminated in a day of website blackouts. Millions of average citizens called and wrote to Congress to complain, bitterly, about lawmakers’ casual and admittedly inexpert tinkering with the one growing sector we have left.

      • Exploring The Earnings Of A Humble Bundle Author
      • Yet Another Musician Discovers That Free, Implemented Well, Can Increase Fans & Make You More Money
      • Your Right to Own, Under Threat

10.29.12

Microsoft is AstroTurfing for Vista 8

Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Vista 7, Vista 8, Windows at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Desperate and expensive measures include AstroTurfing tactics and blocking of Linux by subversive technical means

IN ORDER to avoid clutter and repetition we no longer post many articles about Vista 8 like we did Vista 7. Vista 8 is also self-destroying (there’s some short burst of links about it in Twitter, Identi.ca, etc. for those who follow me more closely).

As Cringely put it over the weekend, “Windows is doomed.”

To quote further: “Having not invented any of the products it is known for, why should we expect Microsoft to invent its way out of declining markets? We shouldn’t.”

Microsoft has begun doing what it does best with a budget of (reportedly) a billion and a half dollars. Through its PR proxies, which have astroturf patents, it is planting favourable coverage and there is aid from former Microsoft staff with a “journalist” hat (offering no disclosure of that conflict of interests). Microsoft also fakes excitement. It knows it won’t get sued for it.

Additionally, Microsoft has made it harder to install or run GNU/Linux and it shows:

This is how SecureBoot is managed in Ubuntu and Fedora. Debian is still unclear as how they will manage SecureBoot.

The second stage features a GURB2 bootloader which does usual tasks as before. Earlier Canonical had plans to use a non GPL bootloader here, but they were thrashed.

Langasek says that they will backport the secure boot mechanism to Ubuntu 12.04 release as well, so that the LTS version can be installed in Secure Boot devices. So the next major service pack of Ubuntu Precise (12.04.2) will include support for SecureBoot.

Steam, in the mean time, targets Ubuntu because Vista 8 sucks. Microsoft is alienating developers further and further on all fronts, not just the desktop:

Microsoft annoys developers with Windows Phone 8 secrecy

The company is accepting requests for the Windows Phone 8 software development kit (SDK), but only from a select few. The rest will have to wait, as Microsoft is trying to keep some of the OS’s features secret for now.

This closed-source nonsense in due course annoys developers, many of whom already move to Android. Open Source and Free software empower developers. giving them greater advantages. No wonder Android is taking over and becoming the dominant OS. Windows revenue is down sharply. █

Appalling Apple Apology

Posted in Apple, Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Google at 11:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple gets yet more flak for retracting none of the FUD it spreads against Linux-based and Open Source rivals

Apple refuses to issue a real apology for lying about Android devices [1, 2]. Humility is a weakness — not a merit — at Apple. Apology is only Apple mythology. The company continues to be criticised for this. See the following:

  • Does Apple’s website notice satisfy the court order?

    For a company (and whose website) known for simplicity and brevity, the notice is surprisingly cluttered.

  • What Apple Gets Wrong In Its Samsung Apology

    That Apple statement is something of a masterpiece actually. Absolutely true in each and every word and sentence and rather misleading as a whole.

  • Apple turns U.K. legal loss into new Samsung attack

    A week after Apple lost an appeal at the U.K. High Court, the iPhone and iPad maker has followed the court’s requirement to publish a notice its U.K. home page stating the court’s finding that Samsung didn’t infringe its patents.

    But not in a way that shows any contrition. Instead, Apple used the notice as a new opportunity to make its case against its tablet rival.

What will the British court have to say?

Here in the UK, Dr. Glyn Moody highlights an “excellent historical summary” of what has been happening with software patents in the EU. It comes from a pro-software patents blogs run by lawyers in London, but it is based on Engelfreit’s understanding and opens as follows:

Whatever happened to all those unending and vitriolic arguments over patent protection for software in Europe? The following is a special treat for those readers who yearn for those far-off days when anonymous and occasionally even named commentators could hurl abuse at one another, armed mainly with a battery of unsupported assertions, religiously-held beliefs and appeals to self-evident truth. It is a guest post by Arnoud Engelfriet — a man who, by qualification and technical skill — is at least as well qualified…

For Apple to stop hurling abuse at Linux outside the US it is essential that software patents are kept out of Europe (and beyond). It’s only the US where Apple is treated favourably.

We are satisfied to see many who cease buying Apple. Voting with one’s wallet can be effective. The OSI’s president recently dumped his Apple gear as well. Apple is not a friend of FOSS; not even close. █

Links 29/10/2012: Steam For Linux Beta Needs Testers, GNOME 3.7.1

Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Another Look at the $180M HP Contract

    Mostly, we use the operating system called Linux, and we use it on those HP machines. One reason we use it is because it’s free — literally, downloadable for free, no strings, no catch. All the software we use on it, ranging from close equivalents to Windows Office to browsers to desktop publishing and technical software, and a good deal more, is also free. It ranges the Internet even better than Windows, no surprise since the bulk of Web server computers worldwide are run on Linux or on closely allied software. And not only that, it’s “open source,” which means you can (if you choose) go into the guts of the program, and change anything you want. Can’t do that with proprietary programs.

    This software is coded so efficiently that everything I use on my Linux machines can nearly fit onto a single CD; you’d need shelves of CDs to contain Windows or Windows Office. It can run more efficiently on smaller and older computers than Windows can, and run longer on them as they age. A nonprofit in Portland (called Free Geek) for years has been reconditioning old and small-capacity computers, outfitting them with Linux, and sending them to local nonprofits and to underdeveloped countries around the globe; those machines are great for education, and they cost a pittance. Open source runs faster, with fewer errors, and is nearly impervious to viruses, worms and the like. (No need for expensive anti-virus software.) The main area where Windows and Mac’s OS X clearly surpass it is in the realm of computer games. One of the main world headquarters for open source development is the Pacific Northwest; the original developer of Linux, a Finn named Linus Torvalds, lives outside Portland.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Hurricane Sandy: Climate Change Activists Offer Stark Reminder Before Storm Hits

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • onwards to Four

        Not being the sort who rest much, we’re already at work on Plasma Active Four. We met up on irc to firm up our plans. You can read the minutes here, thanks to Thomas who took the time to summarize the multi-hour session.

        We are moving to a devel workflow in which we aim to have an “always-releasable” master branch. All development will happen in branches, something we essentially do already, but we will now also have an integration branch so we can bring the various branches together for testing before merging them when ready, branch by branch, into master. We have been working towards for some time, adjusting our habits one step at a time. This will only cover the plasma-mobile, share-like-connect and plasma-active-maliit repositories for now, but my hope is that as Frameworks 5 arrives we’ll be able to broaden this to the bigger shared repositories such as kde-workspace.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd September 2012
      • KDE Commit-Digest for 9th September 2012

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3.7.1 Is Now Ready for Testing

        Matthias Clasen has announced a few hours ago, October 26th, the first development release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.

        After a two day delay, GNOME 3.7.1 is now available for testing, bringing lots of updated applications, new features, and numerous bug fixes.

        “GNOME 3.7 development is getting underway, with the 3.7.1 snapshot that is marking the beginning of this development cycle. Features are still being proposed and discussed. This release allows some early glimpses of whats to come.”

      • Gnome & Wayland

        Wayland is the next big thing in Linux Desktop since ..the beginning? It is meant to work aside with the problematic X (with the tremendous amount of functionality) and eventually (in many years!) is going to replace it.

  • Distributions

    • From Junk to a Security Station; How Mepis Gave New Life to a Discarded Computer

      Last week, a project that had been brewing for quite a while became a reality.

      We wanted to set up a basic security camera for the office where I work but, as the University is short of budget, all we were given was a webcam. With that contribution, the whole idea was pretty much a long-term goal (or a dream, to be more honest, given the circumstances).

    • DEFT 7.2 Screenshots

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Looks To An SDK, Improved App Development

            Canonical and the Ubuntu development community hope to improve application development for developers targeting Ubuntu 13.04.

            Another one of the popular topics for the UDS Copenhagen summit next week for Ubuntu 13.04 is the “app development” track. There’s several different items to be discussed about Ubuntu app development from an Ubuntu SDK to improving the online documentation and support for those developers targeting Ubuntu support.

          • OpenERP and Ubuntu Unity Desktop Integration

            Ubuntu has been in the news quite a lot recently with the release of version 12.10 including the Amazon shopping lens and next week some game shop thing called Steam is going to be announced. It isn’t all toys and shopping though, some of the new features make a heap of sense for serious business applications too. One really interesting area for me is the webapp integration, this is an extension for Firefox and Chromium that allows stuff running in the web browser to integrate with the Unity desktop in a variety of ways, making the distinction between a web application and a desktop application a bit more blurry – which is a good thing. There is built in integration for an assortment of popular consumer websites like youtube, twitter, facebook etc. but it isn’t limited to these single domain software as a service sites. Any web site or web application can test for the presence of the extension then export it’s menu items, do notifications and other actions.

          • Time for an Upgrade
          • Ubuntu 11.04 Ends Support

            Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal released almost one and a half years ago will end support today. This comes according to the policy of drastic six months of OS upgrades and a support for one and half years for each. Long term support Ubuntu releases have a greater support period, extending upto five years for Ubuntu 12.04. These long term support releases are more suitable for business and enterprise environments can can be used in servers and workstations as the main OS.

          • Ubuntu 13.04 May Come Packed With An SDK
          • Join Us At the Ubuntu Developer Summit This Week!

            This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place in Copenhagen from Monday – Thursday. This is the event where we plan the features and goals for the next release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Xubuntu 12.10 Review

              Xubuntu is the lighter weight brother of the ever popular Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. At the forefront, XFCE is the desktop environment of choice and it removes all the bells and whistles that we currently see in the star of the show, Ubuntu. It’s not just focused on older systems but those who want a great looking desktop and don’t need the extras.

              XFCE 4.10 is the forefront of this distribution and it uses less CPU and memory compared to its bigger siblings Ubuntu and KUbuntu as XFCE is focused on using less resources. What also makes XFCE also popular is the fact we don’t see drastic changes from one version to another which we see from Gnome or KDE.

            • Linux Mint Katya Reaches End Of Life

              The Linux Mint Team has announced the end of life of Linux Mint 11 “Katya”. This means users using this OS will not be able to get any security updates and the system will be open to venerabilities. Users still using Linux Mint 11 are highly advised to upgrade their system to Linux Mint Maya.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Can European IT teams seriously consider open source?

    European businesses have long used IT to automate processes and drive down the cost of doing business. This pressure has increased in the current economic climate, and new issues such as bring-your-own-device and the ever increasing amount of data continue to appear.

    One of the solutions to the cost of software is to use open source solutions, but many businesses are fearful of the implications and potential hidden costs in the skills needed to manage open source technology. So what are the real challenges and can businesses across Europe really take advantage of open source?

  • Tiki Wiki 9.2 can now check system requirements

    The current 6.x and 9.x long term support (LTS) branches of the open source Tiki wiki, CMS and groupware solution have been updated to versions 6.8 and 9.2 respectively. Whereas Tiki 9.2 has more than 500 code changes, focuses on fixing various bugs and also includes several improvements, the 6.8 release only includes a patch to close an undisclosed security hole.

  • DARPA’s Robotics Challenge Marches On

    Now DARPA is opening the door to anyone, accepting admissions through February 2013 of “virtual robots” created using a free open source software program, the DRC Simulator, that DARPA has made available for download on its DRC website.

  • SaaS

    • Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies

      Big Data is on every CIO’s mind this quarter, and for good reason. Companies will have spent $4.3 billion on Big Data technologies by the end of 2012.

      But here’s where it gets interesting. Those initial investments will in turn trigger a domino effect of upgrades and new initiatives that are valued at $34 billion for 2013, per Gartner. Over a 5 year period, spend is estimated at $232 billion.

      What you’re seeing right now is only the tip of a gigantic iceberg.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Does OpenOffice have a future?

      The Apache Software Foundation has made OpenOffice a top-level project but will that be enough to make OpenOffice matter? Should OpenOffice remain an independent open-source project?

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A GNU Protest Against Windows 8

      The Free Software Foundation, in the form of a GNU, crashed the Windows 8 launch event in an effort to persuade Windows users not to upgrade to Windows 8 but move to GNU/Linux instead.

      Activists, one of them in the shape of a GNU, the FSF movement’s buffalo-like mascot, greeted visitors to Microsoft’s launch event on October 25. We can’t say if Microsoft actually noticed their gate crasher but Gnus probably find it difficult to conceal themselves at software launches.

      The GNU’s pumpkin bucket contained DVDs loaded with Trisquel, a free software distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. Volunteers also handed out FSF stickers and pamphlets about the dangers of Windows 8 urging you to sign a pledge to upgrade to free software instead.

    • MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign launches!

      Today we’re excited to announce a crowdfunding campaign to support MediaGoblin run in coordination with the Free Software Foundation! You may have heard that I quit my job as senior software engineer / tech lead at Creative Commons to pursue MediaGoblin fulltime and fund development. Instead of using one of the more mainstream crowdfunding sites, we decided to team up with the Free Software Foundation, who is supporting our fundraising infrastructure.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Don’t Like Partisan Politics? Then Don’t Vote By Party – Just Vote Pro-Science!

    We see Independent 40%, Democrat 31%, and Republican 27%! That’s right, the Republicans are in the minority, at just over a quarter of those surveyed!

  • A Linux User’s Perspective Of Microsoft Windows 8

    Also, I was *livid* when Microsoft’s highly-touted software failed and didn’t provide any meaningful error messages and left my system unbootable. I mean, this is the kind of shit that Lennart Poettering pulls off in Fedora Rawhide when he breaks systemd or dracut. This isn’t something I expect out of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate pushing out production software on millions of people.

    Next, on my ThinkPad T530, I tried upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro. The upgrade failed the first time, but the rollback to Windows 7 was perfect — I had upgraded from Windows 7 to… Windows 7. This Microsoft software is just unbelievably magical. You can’t make this up.

  • The Case for Irrational Voting

    Some smart friends of mine argue for a particular type of quasi-rational voting in such situations. Because of our antiquated electoral college that pretends an entire state voted for Tweedledee even if 49% of it voted for Tweedledum, moral voters should, this argument goes, vote for truly good candidates — even write-in candidates — in most states, in order to send a message. But they should only do so because there are too few such informed ethical strategic voters to actually swing the state. In the all-important handful of Swing States, however, where the contest between the two Tweedles is too close to call, we are advised to vote for the less hideous of the two.

  • Thoughts on Voting “Third Party”

    …we vote FOR things and not AGAINST things.

    This is the real, deeper problem behind a two-party system.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Binders Full of Generals

      Mr. Romney has promised to shoot the defense budget into the stratosphere at levels that have been unseen since the height of the Korean War. As in a past column, I have inserted here a chart that I think is one of the most significant of the presidential campaign, and it should be passed around to as many people possible before the election.

    • ‘They Brought an Army to Take Out a 16-Year-Old Boy,’ Says Father of Suicidal Teen Killed by Police Sniper
    • Researchers Expose Illegal Detention and Torture in Ivory Coast

      Amnesty International said today more than 200 people, including members of former President Laurent Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front, are being illegally detained and tortured months after he was arrested and turned over to the International Criminal Court.

      Researchers spent one month in Ivory Coast interviewing dozens of people who described torture. In addition, Amnesty International met four detainees at the Génie militaire, a military barracks in Abidjan, who have been held incommunicado for more than a month.

    • WikiLeaks Releases US Military Policies for Detention & Avoiding Accountability for Torture

      The media organization WikiLeaks has released the first of more than one hundred classified or “otherwise restricted” policies from the US Department of Defense that lay out rules and procedures for detainees in US military custody. The “Detainee Policies” show how the US military has handled detention for the past decade and will be released over the course of the next month, according to a press release.

      On the first day of the release, five policies have been posted. The most significant of the postings is the 2002 manual for Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

    • Protesters steal the show at Seattle police gathering to explain intended use of drones

      It was hard to hear Thursday night what Assistant Chief Paul McDonagh was trying to say about how the Seattle Police Department hopes to use drones to save lives and increase public safety — what with the chanting of “no drones” and the loud cries of “murderer” and “shame” drowning him out.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs and the sophisticated investor: Who’s duping whom?

      By all accounts, neither Michael Lewis nor Frank Serpico should be concerned about competition from Greg Smith, the erstwhile Goldman Sachs vice president whose supposed tell-all, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs,” was published Monday. I’ve only read the first chapter excerpt that’s been floating around the Internet since last week, but Smith clearly lacks Lewis’s humor and narrative verve, and reviewers who read advance copies of the entire book have said there’s not much substance to his assertions about Goldman’s culture. I suspect that Smith will have a short shelf life as a Wall Street chronicler and whistle-blower.

    • Greens chair shoots down Fennovoima nuclear project

      Green League Chairman Ville Niinistö has described the nuclear power project by the public power consortium Fennovoima as unprofitable nonsense. He said that the project should also be rejected by municipal decision makers.

    • Ten filthy rich, tax-dodging hypocrites

      The irony is that CEOs in the coalition’s leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who’ve mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they’ve boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

    • The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

      There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

      Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

      Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

      Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

    • Greece arrests editor for ‘Lagarde list’ leak

      Detained journalist defends publishing list of well-known Greeks who allegedly use Swiss banks to evade national taxes.

    • Steve Jobs’ Yacht, ‘Venus,’ Sets Sail

  • Privacy

    • CDB: Not Dead Yet

      My main point was that the Bill creates an unprecedented resource for the security services to “go fishing” in everyone’s private affairs. “Communications Data” means “everything that’s not the message” for every kind of internet use (e-mail, instant messaging, voice communication, streaming and so on), and collecting all of it from everyone in Britain on a rolling 12-month basis (with some information held indefinitely) offers a massive pool in which to use heuristics to pattern match answers to open questions.

    • Verizon’s ‘Precision Market Insights’ Data Mining Policy Raising Privacy Concerns

      A new initiative from Verizon is raising questions about the telecom giant’s commitment to protecting the privacy of its customers.

      The company’s new marketing program, Precision Market Insights, collects data information from iOS and Android users, based on geographic location gleaned from apps and sites being accessed. Verizon plans to continue to share that information with potential advertisers.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • What’s behind the science academies’ attack on Seralini?

      It could hardly have been more damning – six French science academies jointly dismissing Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini’s recent paper in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology as a “scientific non-event.”

    • Agriculture Is The Number One Choice of Voters…

      “The appointment of Kofi Annan as AGRA’s chairman was a strategic decision that the Gates Foundation made to silence criticisms that its agricultural development agenda was a “White Man’s Dream for Africa.” In fact, this more reeks of Monsanto’s campaign: “Let the Harvest Begin.” Launched in 1998 to gain acceptance of GE crops around the world by projecting the benefits of the Green Revolution in Asia and its potential in Africa, Monsanto’s campaign managed to draw several respected African leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, to speak for a new Green Revolution in Africa. In response, all of the African delegates (except South Africa) to the UN Food and Agriculture Negotiations on the International Undertaking for Plant Genetic Resources in June 1998 issued a counter statement, “Let Nature’s Harvest Continue.” The delegates clearly stated their objection to multinational companies’ use of the image of the poor and hungry from African countries to push technology that is not safe, environmentally friendly, or economically beneficial.” Voices From Africa: African Farmers & Environmentalists Speak Out Against a New Green Revolution in Africa.

    • How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

    • Copyrights

10.28.12

IRC Proceedings: October 21st-October 27th, 2012

Posted in IRC Logs at 7:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: October 21st, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: October 22nd, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: October 23rd, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: October 24th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: October 25th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: October 14th-October 20th, 2012

Posted in IRC Logs at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: October 14th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: October 19th, 2012

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10.27.12

Links 27/10/2012: KDE Plasma Active 3, Raspberry Pi WebIDE

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A New Era of Operating System Competition Dawns

    …it has been many years since we’ve seen such healthy competition among operating systems.

  • Windows 8 launch – Jim Zemlin and the Free Software Foundation have their say
  • Share Will Shrink to ~30% for That Other OS in a Few Years

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • LG Gets Serious About Linux, Joins ARM Focused Linaro

      LG is in limelight these days, yesterday we posted a story about LG working on open source implementation of WebOS for their SmartTVs, then they announced 4K TV (UHDTV) and now they are joining the Linux for ARM expert Linaro to cooperate on new ARM technologies.

      According to a press statement LG will contribute resources to work together with the resources from existing Linaro members. Linaro uses a unique business model where multiple companies create core open source software once with a shared investment in a single software engineering team, rather than by creating multiple, fragmented software solutions in isolation.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Releases Plasma Active 3

        KDE has released a new version of Plasma Active. According to the announcement, the Plasma Active user interface is touch-friendly and works well across a range of devices, giving users a natural way to organize and access their applications, files, and information. Version 3 features an enhanced and expanded set of apps, improved performance, and a new virtual keyboard.

      • KDE Manifesto in action: bodega server

        I wrote the other day about why the KDE Manifesto is important for the KDE community. Today I’d like to show how it can be used in practice with a real-world case study: the bodega server. Coherent Theory has been working on this content distribution system for a while and it does things rather differently in a variety of ways including:

        * Free software licensed :)
        * multiple owner-defined store fronts to the same (or different) bodies of hosted content thanks to a tag-based metadata system
        * able to federate external content (a feature set I expect will evolve significantly over time)
        * good for books, music, services, artwork, etc. as well as for applications; essentially any content or artifact that can be delivered over the network works just fine (which is why we don’t call it an “app store”)
        * built-in purchasing system using a points mechanism which can be tied to monetary purchases (swipe integration is included), gift cards or pretty much any other system you can think of (e.g. in a school environment students could earn points through their performance in class)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • What’s New in GNOME 3.7.1

        Matthias Clasen has just posted the news that GNOME 3.7.1 will be released sometime today and then takes readers on a tour. The latest on Nautilus, tweeks to the control center, and other tidbits are discussed.

      • The First GNOME 3.8 Development Release
      • Announcing Every Detail Matters, Round 2

        Details matter. Small aspects of a user interface make a huge difference. Get them right, and the experience becomes beautiful, satisfying and easy. Get them wrong, and it can be clunky, awkward and ugly. It’s only by paying attention to the details that we can raise the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience and make it fantastic.

      • Every Detail Matters 2 is open for Hacking!
      • Gnome 3.7.1 Out With OwnCloud Support, Some Screenshots

        he first release of Gnome desktop in 3.7 cycle is out. Among the most exciting features, this release comes with OwnCloud support in Online Accounts and support for faster recursive searching in Nautilus. This release is a early version of the next major release of Gnome 3.8.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Cubieboard is like a Raspberry Pi on Steroids

      Here at GeekTech, we’re big fans of tiny Linux computer boards like the Raspberry Pi. If you wanted even more power after the Raspberry Pi got itsturbo on and a serious RAM upgrade, you might want to take a look at the amped up specs on the Cubieboard.

    • Mobile Devices Will Replace PC In The Workplace

      on26Oct

      Over the next five years, 65 percent of enterprises will adopt a mobile device management (MDM) solution for their corporate liable users, according to Gartner, Inc. With the increased functionality of smartphones, and the increasing popularity of tablets, much of the network traffic and corporate data that was once the primary domain of enterprise PCs is now being shifted to mobile devices.

      With most employees coming to work nowadays toting their smartphone, and or Tablet, and it makes sense for businesses to adopt MDM. With more and more enterprise apps coming on the market and as remote access technology improves, more enterprise content will be stored on these devices. Users are already synchronizing corporate content into public clouds for later retrieval on the devices.

    • LG Working on an Open WebOS-Powered Smart TV
    • Raspberry Pi WebIDE

      If you are serious about using your Raspberry Pi (RPi) as a platform for writing and testing code, you’ll appreciate the WebIDE software developed by Adafruit. This server-based solution turns your RPi into a flexible coding environment which you can access and use from any machine with a browser. Although WebIDE is geared towards Python, it can handle other languages, including Ruby, JavaScript, and shell scripts. Better yet, WebIDE seamlessly integrates with the Bitbucket code hosting service.

      Using the provided installer script, you can deploy WebIDE in an RPi in a matter of minutes. Alternatively, WebIDE can be installed manually, and the project’s website provides instructions on how this is done. By default, WebIDE is configured to run on port 80, which can be a problem if your RPi is already running the Apache web server on that port. In this case, you need to configure WebIDE to run on another port. To do this, open the config.js file in the nano editor using the sudo nano /usr/share/adafruit/webide/config/config.js command, specify an alternative port, and restart WebIDE.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google’s Top 4 Free Android Apps

          Google’s top 4 free Android apps are available via Google Play. In order of downloads, they are – Facebook, Pandora Internet Radio, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

        • Android to beat Windows in 2016: Gartner

          Google’s Android operating system will be used on more computing devices than Microsoft’s Windows within four years, data from research firm Gartner showed on Wednesday, underlining the massive shift in the technology sector.

        • Samsung Releasing Arndale Community Development Board

          Samsung announced today the immediate availability of Arndale, a new community development board designed around its Exynos 5 Dual system-on-chip (SoC).

          It features the implementation of both the world’s first dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processor and the world’s first quad-core ARM Mali-T604 GPU based on 32nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology.

        • Samsung Galaxy Premier clears the NCC, shows its hardware
        • Nexus Wireless Charging Pad Shows Up

          We are already pretty well acquainted with the upcoming Nexus devices thanks to all the leaked photos of Quick Start Guide, camera photos, photos of the devices themselves and LG executive revealing info, Nexus is all over the internet. Since we already know so much about the new devices, let’s digest some news about the new accessory they will come with i.e. the wireless charging pad.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • NRO Readies Open Source Cloud For Launch
  • Tiki Wiki 9.2 can now check system requirements

    The current 6.x and 9.x long term support (LTS) branches of the open source Tiki wiki, CMS and groupware solution have been updated to versions 6.8 and 9.2 respectively. Whereas Tiki 9.2 has more than 500 code changes, focuses on fixing various bugs and also includes several improvements, the 6.8 release only includes a patch to close an undisclosed security hole.

  • SaaS

    • Cloudera Open Source Impala Brings Real Time Queries to Hadoop

      Cloudera, one of the leading commercial sponsors of Hadoop, is now aiming to enable faster Big Data queries by introducing a new technology codenamed Impala. The goal with Impala is to enable rapid and interactive queries.

    • OpenStack Foundation Board is all about Blocking and Tackling

      The name Alan Clark is a familiar one to those who follow open source governance. Clark sits on the Board of Directors at the Linux Foundation. He was also the former Chairman of the Board of the openSUSE Foundation, and Clark was recently selected to be the first Chairman of the newly formed OpenStack Foundation Board.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • CoffeeScript 1.4.0 released

      CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas has announced the release of version 1.4.0 of his programming language that compiles into JavaScript. The first upgrade to the language since mid-May brings relatively few changes. Among them, the CoffeeScript compiler has been updated to allow developers to strip Microsoft’s UTF-8 BOM (byte order mark) from source files before compiling them.

    • Proxmox VE works with KVM and OpenVZ containers

      After six months of development, Proxmox Server Solutions has released version 2.2 of its Virtual Environment (VE) virtualisation platform. The system supports virtual machines running both under a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and in OpenVZ containers. Both can be simultaneously and transparently operated and managed on one system. While KVM completely virtualises almost every operating system, OpenVZ conserves resources by only running Linux guests on a common kernel in isolated containers. The company says that this strategy puts its product ahead of alternatives like VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix’s XenServer.

    • Google Web Toolkit 2.5 with leaner code

      According to its developers, version 2.5 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based open source web framework for Ajax applications, offers significant performance improvements. Apparently, the overall code base has been reduced by 20 per cent, and the download size of the sample application dropped 39 per cent.

      GWT is built around a Java-to-JavaScript compiler that allows developers to almost exclusively use Java when writing an application’s client and server code. The user interface code is translated into JavaScript and deployed to the browser when required. The technology recently became a discussion topic when Google introduced its Dart alternative to JavaScript; however, Google has assured the GWT community that it will continue to develop GWT for the foreseeable future.

    • Clementine Music Player 1.1 Released

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The future of our open source world

      Open source shouldn’t just stop at the world of software. In fact, more and more manufacturers are warming up to the cause.

    • Open Hardware

      • Willow Garage’s Robotics Work Inspires a Spinoff

        We’ve covered the extraordinary open source robotics work going on over at Willow Garage a number of times. It is a project that originated at Stanford University. Robots being developed within it run the open source ROS (Robot Operating System) software. Now comes Suitable Technologies, a spinoff of Willow Garage doing some innovative things in the arena of remote presence robotics.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C publishes Working Draft for Push API

      The W3C has published a Working Draft for a push notification API for web applications. Currently, there are more than a dozen different approaches to sending push notifications from a server to a client, including EventSockets, PubNub and Urban Airship. The W3C draft, authored by Eduardo Fullea of Telefónica and Bryan Sullivan of AT&T, is a new approach that can use several different protocols and is intended to become a standard endorsed by the W3C.

Leftovers

  • Will Voter Suppression Tactics Threaten Free and Fair Elections?

    The wave of new voter restrictions and scare tactics being implemented for the 2012 elections — such as voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, threatening billboards, misleading mailers and vigilante poll watchers — could intimidate countless numbers of Americans from exercising their right to vote.

  • Science

    • Eating Cooked Food Made Us Human

      A new paper examines the metabolic restrictions of a raw diet, and suggests that our primate cousins are limited by their inability to heat their dinners. It bolsters the cooking hypothesis of Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who believes cooking is our legacy.

      Brazilian biomedical scientists Karina Fonseca-Azevedo and Suzana Herculano-Houzel note that the largest primates do not have the largest brains, a perplexing question. Encephalization (a larger brain size per body size than you’d expect) has long been thought to be a key feature setting humans apart from other primates, and mammals as a whole, but there is no consensus on how or why this happened.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Spanish unemployment tops 25 percent

      Among workers aged 16-24 the jobless rate towered at 52.34 percent in the third quarter, only slightly down from 53.27 percent in the previous quarter, the institute said.

    • Neoliberalism Kills: Part Two

      Neoliberalism is an evolving ideological paradigm which can be traced back to the work of Hayek and von Mises in the 1920s and even earlier than that. I won’t however, do a historical survey here of the various developments and nuances. Instead, I’ll just rely on the definitions and specifications of this body of thought that seem to me to be the clearest statements of the current state of the paradigm.

    • The Price of Monopoly: $100 million
    • Don’t Be Fooled: For Investors, Charter Schools Are Cash Cows

      In Pennsylvania and across the nation, investors are making big bucks off of charter schools, and donating huge sums to the politicians who protect their interests.

    • ‘We Pay More’: US Austerity Well Underway

      Regardless of political persuasion, there isn’t one person I’ve met who isn’t infuriated by the fact that they pay more in federal taxes than a combined majority of most billion-dollar corporations. But what’s even more infuriating is that under the Budget Control Act that was passed after our austerity- crazed Congress forced it into being during the Summer-long debt negotiations of 2011, budgets for numerous essential social programs will be cut to the bone this January, under the false guise that our country is too broke to pay the bills.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • ACLU and EFF are in court against Twitter ID requests

      FREEDOM GROUPS the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be in a US federal appeals court today as they fight government attempts to get internet user IDs without warrants.

      The ACLU and EFF are pushing back government advances on Wikileaks and Twitter where, they argue, there is a threat to liberty and privacy and want it made public whenever the government requests access.

    • How Companies Have Assembled Political Profiles for Millions of Internet Users

      If you’re a registered voter and surf the web, one of the sites you visit has almost certainly placed a tiny piece of data on your computer flagging your political preferences. That piece of data, called a cookie, marks you as a Democrat or Republican, when you last voted, and what contributions you’ve made. It also can include factors like your estimated income, what you do for a living, and what you’ve bought at the local mall.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN Agencies: A growing threat for the Internet?

      The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), led by Russian diplomat, Yury Fedotov, has just released a report (pdf) arguing for more surveillance and retention of data on all communications, even in the total absence of suspicion. Coincidentally, the Coordinator of the elegantly named 1267 Committee that was in charge of the report is British – and the British government recently proposed (even if it is likely to be rejected at national level) the most extensive suspicionless monitoring ever considered in a democratic society – the Communications Data Bill.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • How Food Became Technology [Excerpt]

      Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • No, Copyright Is Not A Human Right

        We recently discussed the common fallacy that “copyright is in the Constitution”, but that’s only one example of copyright defenders misrepresenting a document to support their cause. Another favorite, often invoked by folks like Rob Levine and David Lowery, is the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a relatively toothless document in the US (compared to the Constitution) but one that feels good to have on your side.

      • Sony Sued Over William Faulkner Quote in ‘Midnight in Paris’

        The lawsuit claims a line spoken by actor Owen Wilson in the Woody Allen film infringes on the author’s literary rights; a spokesman for Sony calls the complaint frivolous.

      • Copyright Office fails to protect users from DMCA

        The FSF has fought for years against the threat of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Users should have the right to modify, share and learn from the software on their devices, and technical measures put in place in the name of DRM offer a substantial roadblock. It’s even worse when those measures have the force of criminal law behind them, threatening people who simply want to change the software on their computers with jail time. The FSF wants to create a world in which there is no DRM. Until then, at the very least, users shouldn’t have to worry about legal consequences for disabling these malfeatures on their own devices.

      • Copyright: The New Mercantilism

        We’ve argued for a while that copyright is frequently used as a new form of mercantilism, the mostly discredited economic theory that basically said that the government should be heavily involved in “protecting” local industries with monopolies and tariffs. Adam Smith’s seminal works, which more or less created the field of economics were really, in part, a critique of mercantilism, and how it could cause more economic harm than good. When you take a wider view of copyright law and policy (especially in international trade), it’s not difficult to conclude that it’s very similar to classic 17th century mercantilism.

      • Six-Strikes “Independent Expert” Is RIAA’s Former Lobbying Firm
      • RIAA Failed To Disclose Expert’s Lobbying History to “Six-Strikes” Partners

        A month before the controversial “six strikes” anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the “impartial and independent” technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology.

Cisco’s CEO Would “Completely Throw out Everything” in the US Patent Process, “and Start From the Beginning”

Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Patents at 9:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Fiasco Cisco

Summary: Another CEO of a massive American company wants the patent system to be scraped as it slows down innovation and “[t]here are patent trolls everywhere”

DAYS after the CEO of Amazon slammed the US patent system we find that another CEO of a large company (neither Apple nor Microsoft, obviously) slams the patent system. It’s one of the most popular CEOs (among his employees) and here is what he has to say:

On the subject of intellectual property, Chambers is critical of the U.S. patent process and said he would “completely throw out everything, and start from the beginning.

“It is a mess; There are patent trolls everywhere,” said Chambers, noting that patent problems impose huge costs on every company.

But Chambers was also critical of the trend by tech companies of suing one another over alleged patent violations. He didn’t name names, but, speaking to the audience, he said for “his peers” in the room, “you shouldn’t be suing your peers.”

Patent litigation, he added, slows down innovation.

TechDirt adds:

[I]‘s nice to see Cisco CEO John Chambers speak out against the patent system by calling out both the trolls and the big tech companies for abusing the system and hindering innovation.

Take note, Apple and Microsoft. Fellow monopolies are getting fed up. It’s not even monopolies that always benefit from this system, either, just their lawyers and some collateral damage (patent trolls). █

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