• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Diggs, Damn Diggs and Censorship: R.I.P. Linux?

Substantiated with numerous account names, links and transcripts, Olson’s evidence is nothing if not damning, and more than 500 comments arose in short order as a testament to that fact.

FreakOutNation, meanwhile, added fuel to the fire by publishing a list of hundreds of Digg users who were found to be among Digg Patriots’ primary targets.

The blaze gained entry to FOSS County when Computerworld’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols picked up Olson’s torch and used it to examine the fate of Linux-related stories on Digg.

“In early 2009, new popular Linux stories would pop up every day or two on Digg,” Vaughan-Nichols wrote. “By mid-2010, Linux stories on Digg became popular only once every week or so.”

Indeed, Linux Girl can’t help but note that she has noticed this too!

Desktop

• Desktop Eye Candy

  I chose the “Inverted” Gnome widget theme
  I chose the “Inverted” Window border
  I chose the “Faenza-Dark” Icon set, it can be found here
  I chose the “comfortaa” font that Fedora is using, it can be found here there is a Fedora rpm available for this as well, just search for comfortaa. The Droid fonts also look quite nice.

• It’s Friday, I’m in love

  Ah, love! The Cure’s song that carries today’s blog title bounces gently off the walls of the office while I think about the things I love about GNU/Linux (or Linux, if you’re so inclined).

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 10 Things You Can Do To Make Your Linux Hosted Website More Secure

  • Command Line Audio: Simple as mpg123

  • Avoiding Common Hadoop Administration Issues

Desktop Environments

• GNOME vs KDE: which is right for you?

  For your convenience the article has been broken down into a number of sub-sections which weighs up the various pros and cons for GNOME and KDE in various situation for both users and developers.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma: now comes in tablets

    When designing Plasma Mobile, it was immediately clear that wouldn’t have been possible to do a “one design fits all” application: mobile devices vould have come in pretty diffrent forms:

    * Different resolution
    * Different phisical size
    * That implies, different DPI
    * Different use cases: an internet tablet and a phone put the emphasis on very different primary functions

  • KDE Desktop Activities explained

    This seemed like a redundancy in Linux, what with the existence of the pager and all. But as KDE grew a bit older and wiser, the usage of this feature become more and more clear. Now, in this Ghacks article I am going to help you to understand exactly why this feature is something you will certainly want to use to keep your desktop as organized as possible.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Happy 17th Birthday Debian (And some interesting history)

    You can show your appreciation for Debian by thanking a developer or the community – Debian Appreciation Day (Thanks to a Slashdot commentator for this)

  • Why prefer Debian GNU/Linux over another distribution

    Quite some time ago I wrote a blog post explaining why I preferred Mandriva over other distributions. But I have now switched to Debian GNU/Linux, so it is time for an update. I will mostly compare with Mandriva because that is where I come from and what I know the best, although most points are rather universal.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Peppermint OS review

        Here’s something I haven’t done in far too long..an OS review of course. So, my latest offering is called Peppermint OS. Yes, the name is why I chose to review it (she says defensively) This particular Linux OS has two versions..One and Ice. I am reviewing Peppermint OS One. The Ice version is all cloud based. The operating system is a fork of Lubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop environment, a lightweight desktop.

      • Linux Mint 9: Installation Review – A Not-So-Happy Story

        Fed up with my buggy PCLinuxOS, I decided to install the new Linux Mint 9. After burning the installation DVD image (which is just over 700MB), I decided to install it on my Lenovo Thinkpad Z60m.

        The loading process of the Live DVD was relatively smooth, though it felt a little slow to load the live image. (PCinux is still faster in the Live CD department)

        I then decided to install, and it asked for the customary questions like location, keyboard etc.

      • Thoughts on Linux Mint 9

        If I were to recommend a Linux distro for a desktop user with no background in Linux, it would be Linux Mint. Actually, Linux Mint is a great release for anyone who wants a easy to install, work out-of-the-box desktop environment. Great job guys.

Devices/Embedded

• Reviewed: Pandora Console

  If you’re familiar with the original GP2X and GP2X Wiz, the Linux-based handhelds produced by Korean techno-alchemists Game Park Holdings, you’ll be acutely aware of just how close they came to greatness; both consoles suffered from compromises that prevented them from truly fulfilling their potential. Interestingly, some of the guys in charge of distributing these two machines internationally felt the same way and back in 2008 they set about creating their own dream machine that would avoid the pitfalls that afflicted those two consoles. Read on to discover whether it was worth the effort.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Intel, Nokia tout MeeGo as inclusive alternative to Android

      During the annual LinuxCon conference last week in Boston, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin moderated a discussion panel about the Linux-based MeeGo platform with Nokia’s MeeGo Ecosystem Development head Thomas Miller and Intel open source technologist Derek Speed. During the panel, Miller and Speed discussed some of the technical and logistical characteristics that differentiate MeeGo from other mobile platforms.

• Tablets

  • Motorola DROID Pro, World Edition and Tablet all found in Verizon Wireless systems

    The Motorola DROID Pro, the handset with a 4″ display, 1.3GHz CPU, and global roaming capability gets the model number A957, and is set for a November launch. Motorola is also apparently working on a more business-focused version of the DROID 2 with a World Edition global roaming feature, and it looks like that device will launch relatively soon with the model number A956. If that’s not enough, it also appears that the phone will come in two color choices, black and white.

  • WeTab Set for September German Release, Other Countries to Follow

    Our friends in Germany are proud to release the new WeTab (formerly known as the WePad) next month to retail stores (or pre-order online now.)

  • The $35 tablet isn’t hogwash

    Given India’s chequered history of non-deliverable low-cost devices, it’s easy to believe the sceptics of India’s $35 tablet.

    But this device might just turn the tables.

    While the media disses and dismisses the ultra low-cost tablet, Microsoft and Google are apparently fighting a pitched battle to place their operating systems on the device aimed at school children of the world. Microsoft has come forth and offered its Windows CE OS to run on the device which currently runs Google’s open source Android OS.

The Decompiler Dilemma

The whole advantage to free software is that you can take it apart and look at it, right? That is what most free software advocates would have you believe. So what would happen if the GNU Project released a Perfect Decompiler, a decompiler that could perfectly decode any binary into source code understandable by humans? (For the theoretical purposes of this discussion, let us also assume the impossible case that the binary is decompiled into a verbatim copy of the original source code.) Would this help or hurt the Free Software Movement?

The only barriers ensuring that proprietary software remains proprietary would be those of law. In a pure state of anarchy, a perfect decompiler would be indistinguishable from having all software released as free software. It would essentially render the Free Software Movement perfectly successful in anarchist states. Complete access to the source code of any application could be obtained with little effort, and modification would be limited only by the quality of the newfound code. In the world as it exists today, however, this would not be the case. Proprietary software licenses across the board prohibit disassembling in the first place, and copyright laws prohibit the possibility of doing anything interesting with the decompiled code. It would seem that, besides abandonware and oddly-permissive proprietary licenses, a perfect decompiler would be meaningless to the Free Software Movement due to the artificially imposed limits of the government. Is that necessarily so?

An Organic Open Source Movement?

Where open source has the open source definition, the organic food business has a community which has created a number of now internationally recognised definitions of what makes food organic and now has organisations that certify the organic compliance of companies that claim to make organic products.

Web Browsers

• Five lesser-known browsers

  We’ve all heard of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari. But have you heard of IceCat, Maxathon or NetSurf? There are literally hundreds of different web browsers available to users. We look at some of the lesser-known browsers available.

SaaS

• Eben Moglen Calls To Free the Cloud

  At Debconf 10 this month, Moglen went further, and shared his vision of a free, private, and secure Net architecture relying on (‘for lack of a better term’) freedom boxes — low-price, ultra-small, plug it into the wall personal servers.

Healthcare

• Systems biology software package developed at VBI is now open source for all users

  A software package developed by a professor at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) and his colleagues to help researchers better understand the workings of biochemical networks now features an open source license, offering an ever wider range of benefits to its users.

Standards/Consortia

• 15 HTML5 Demos Showcasing Prowess of HTML5 Over Adobe Flash

  HTML is basically a standard for structuring and presenting content in the internet and HTML5 is the newest incarnation of HTML. HTML5 is supposed to have features like video playback which currently depends upon third-party(and proprietary) browser plug-ins like Adobe Flash. And please do keep in mind that, HTML5 itself is still a work in progress and hence these 15 demos are far from perfect. But they are all you need to get inspired and start learning more about HTML5(I hope).

Science

• Sun’s ‘quiet period’ explained

  Solar physicists may have discovered why the Sun recently experienced a prolonged period of weak activity.

  The most recent so-called “solar minimum” occurred in December 2008.

  Its drawn-out nature extended the total length of the last solar cycle – the repeating cycle of the Sun’s activity – to 12.6 years, making it the longest in almost 200 years.

Security/Aggression

• More than 500,000 (or 5,000,000 according to Yahoo) Network Solutions parked domains actively serving malware

• Michael Howard backs calls for inquest into death of David Kelly

  The former Conservative leader Michael Howard today backed calls for a a full inquest into the death of the government weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

  His call came after a group of prominent experts described the official explanation for the scientist’s death in 2003 as “extremely unlikely”.

  Howard, who is now a Tory peer, said their intervention confirmed his belief that there should now be a proper inquest.

  “In view of the growing number of relevant questions that have arisen and cast doubt on the conclusions reached by Lord Hutton, I believe it would now be appropriate for a full inquest to be held,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

• Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That

  On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a gathering in London that the secret-spilling website is moving ahead with plans to publish the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs, despite a demand from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks “return” its entire cache of published and unpublished classified U.S. documents.

• Elderly widow threatened with £2,500 fine for dropping cigarette ash

  Mrs Martin, from Oldbury, West Mids, was hit with the original fine by the Sandwell Council warden while at the bus stop on May 25.

  She said: “I still can’t believe what happened.

  “I was just sat at a bus stop quietly enjoying my cigarette and from nowhere a warden appeared and accused me of littering.

• The Digital Surveillance State: Vast, Secret, and Dangerous

  Illustrating this More-Surveillance-is-Always-Better mindset is what happened after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony, “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal, there was no accountability of any kind. The opposite is true: the telecom corporations which enabled and participated in this lawbreaking were immunized by a 2008 law supported by Barack Obama and enacted by the Democratic Congress. And that same Congress twice legalized the bulk of the warrantless eavesdropping powers which The New York Times had exposed: first with the 2007 Protect America Act, and then with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which, for good measure, even added new warrantless surveillance authorities.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Ascent of Middle East Food and Energy Demand

  At the EIA’s International Energy Outlook (IEO) presentation this May the issue of future oil exports from OPEC nations came up, and in an interesting way. Readers may be familiar with the phenomenon of declining net exports, from major oil producing nations, as a result of internal demand from growing, domestic populations. The phenomenon was modelled last decade by Jeffrey Brown and Samuel Foucher. Their Export-Land Model showed that the rate of decline from oil exporters can become quite accelerated. While that may seem obvious, it was a point worth making last decade when it was widely presumed that gross production from large oil producing nations was largely available for export. The tipping, of both the UK and Indonesia, from net oil exporters to net oil importers should have put an end to such a presumption. More importantly, the rise of domestic oil consumption in Saudi Arabia was also a warning. Saudi oil exports have declined now for five years.

• The Dirtiest Sport

  Since its inception, NASCAR has not received adequate scrutiny for the environmental impact it causes. There seem to be more positive references to NASCAR (conservative romanticizing of NASCAR dads) than there are serious investigations into the problems associated with the sport. What is most striking is that NASCAR stock cars are unregulated by Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA mandates certain levels of of cleanliness from everyday passenger cars, but the machines of NASCAR have been granted a loophole and can spew toxins in the air without using mufflers, catalytic converters or any sort of emissions control device.

• BP to Pay Record Fine for Refinery

  BP has agreed to pay a record $50.6 million fine to the federal government for safety violations found by regulators last year at its troubled refinery in Texas City, Tex., where 15 workers died in a 2005 explosion.

• The Federal Reserve Enters Decline

  The Federal Reserve came into existence during the fattest part of the abundance curve, made possible by the extraction of energy-dense fossil fuels. The early part of the last century was the moment when the world started to transition from Coal to Oil, with the fullness of oil’s resource spread out before the industrial economy like a broad forest.

Finance

• US unemployment: Don’t let the elite pass the buck

  Growth is slowing and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care – that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is becoming the norm. And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural”, a permanent part of the economic landscape – and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.

• Reagan insider: ‘GOP destroyed U.S. economy’

  “How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Lawmakers Worry Meritless Lawsuits Threaten Free Speech

  When Dallas developer H. Walker Royall found out about an impending book digging into one of his projects, he went on a lawsuit bender.

  He sued the author, Carla Main, and her publisher, Encounter Books. He sued Richard Epstein — the prominent libertarian academic — for a blurb he wrote praising the book. He sued Mark Lardas, who reviewed the book, and the Galveston County Daily News for publishing the review. His suit against Main and her publisher — the lower court dropped Epstein as a defendant on jurisdictional grounds, and Lardas and his newspaper settled with Royall out of court — has since become a poster child for so-called SLAPPs: strategic lawsuits against public participation.

• EFF to Verizon: Etisalat Certificate Authority Threatens Web Security

Intellectual Monopolies

• Geek Squad owners send cease-and-desist letter to God Squad

  Virus infected your computer? Call the Geek Squad.

  Temptation infected your soul? Ring up the God Squad – just don’t expect Father Luke Strand to show up in the same clever little car he’s been driving since his days in the seminary.

  The young priest’s attempt to add a little fun to his ministry has apparently run afoul of some corporate lawyers who care more about strictly enforcing trademarks than eternal salvation.

  Best Buy, the Minnesota-based electronics retailing giant, recently sent Strand a cease-and-desist letter concerning his car. The black Volkswagen Beetle has oval door stickers that read “God Squad” in a logo very similar to the black, white and orange logos on black-and-white Geek Squad Beetles driven by the computer and electronics trouble-shooters.

  The car has been around for at least two years, when it was featured in a photo of Strand and his then-colleagues at St. Francis de Sales Seminary. The car has a white square on the hood, to mimic a priest’s collar, and the license plate reads, GODLVYA.

• Wisconsin ‘God Squad’ gets cease-and-desist letter

• 4th Circuit: Post-Purchase Confused Restroom Users

  GP licenses the ENMOTION towel dispenser to distributors who license it to restroom operators. The restroom operators are contractually obligated to use only ENMOTION brand toweling. Von Drehle created compatible (and allegedly inferior) paper for the ENMOTION dispenser.

• Copyrights

  • Comically Absurd IP

    Certain arguments come up over and over again in copyright debates. Mike recently wrote about copyright monopolists calling Free Culture “neo Marxist.”

  • More And More People Seeing How Collection Societies Have Distorted Copyright

    Over the last few years, we’ve seen a trend around the world for various collection societies to become increasingly more aggressive. More aggressive in trying to increase the statutorily-defined rates. More aggressive in expanding what it is they cover. More aggressive in finding small businesses to pay up. And, more recently, more aggressive in lashing out at any organization that seeks to help musicians embrace alternatives. There are a few reasons for this. Obviously, the recorded music side of the music business has seen revenue decrease, so collection societies have tried to pick up the slack. But, more generally speaking, it’s an indication that the process of collection societies is broken. From their very design, they’re set up to allow certain industry interests to take charge and influence them, and then to aggressively seek to expand their own rights, influence and ability to collect.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Yet Another ARMed Server Project

  That other OS doesn’t work on them so this is another growth opportunity for GNU/Linux. This all comes together when folks are looking at virtual desktops, too. These things could compete very well with blade servers.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Main development phase for Linux kernel 2.6.36 concluded

    Linus Torvalds has released the first pre-release version of Linux 2.6.36 and closed the merge window – the first phase in the development cycle, during which the bulk of changes for a new kernel version are merged into the main development tree. The usual announcement mail for the new kernel is currently nowhere to be found, but the RC1 is tagged in the Kernel Git tree and available for download on Kernel.org.

Applications

• Using Some Imagination

• Instructionals/Technical

  • rBuilder Offers Powerful, Bare-Bones Approach to Appliance Building

• Games

  • Gaming Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

    The results from this OpenGL game testing are similar to that of our workstation results earlier this month: for the most part, there is not a huge difference in performance between Microsoft Windows 7 Professional and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. With Lightsmark and Nexuiz when more taxing on the graphics card the NVIDIA graphics driver under Windows moved forward, but with the most demanding Unigine tests the performance was about the same. Of course, these results are just representative with regard to NVIDIA’s proprietary driver on both platforms, with the results likely to be different when using the ATI Catalyst driver or if comparing the performance to the Linux Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack, in which case the Linux performance would be abysmal.

Distributions

• My first pocket Operating System – Slax

  I never owned a USB flash drive, until recently. I needed one not just for data transfer requirements but because I always wanted to carry an operating system with me. While trying out differnet OSs with various installation methods, my system sometimes had tremendous breakdowns and the only way to access & backup the data was to boot into a LIVE session. Luckily, I came across this really small pocket operating system, Slax. Its just 200 mb and the method to get it bootable on a flash drive is probably the quickest and most effortless of all I have ever used.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Community Simple – PCLinuxOS in Action

    I have mentioned PCLinuxOS in my other Linux posts because it is a good solid distribution, and works well with any computer I have installed it on. I downloaded the latest PCLinuxOS iso using Gnome desktop, and copied it to CD. It booted up and ran as it always does, perfectly. The real test was the wireless connection. I set up the wireless, and the network was waiting as it should be. The biggest hurdle was solved.

    I proceeded to install PCLinuxOS on all the laptops, and for the most part they all work identically with the exception of two. One of the Laptops occasionally drops the wireless in Windows, and another occasionally drops it in Linux. I do not think that is a fault of the operating systems, but rather the nature of the network itself.

    If you read some of what various Linux Guru’s write, they will tell you Linux is Linux. It is the Kernel that makes Linux unique and everything else is programming to support the Kernel functions. While there is no doubt this is true, it is PCLinuxOS going the extra step to include an older wireless driver in the right rev that made it possible for those Laptops to use Linux, and enjoy a solid eight month uptime as of this writing.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Comments on Fedora 13

      I installed Fedora 13 on Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th as unlucky day may be a myth, but my experience with Fedora 13 was not.

      The first problem ws the install DVD boot menu. If I touched any key, including the cursor keys, the boot menu would hang. The only option was to let the clock run down to perform an install. It acted like the GRUB 2 menu problem that I encounter with Linux Mint 8. After the boot menu, there were no problems with the install.

      I installed Fedora on an HP Pavilion ze4300 laptop that only has 512 megabytes of memory. Since Fedora 13 includes XFCE as a graphical desktop, I decided to try it, instead of Gnome. Alas, the venture with XFCE came to a quick end.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Linux to go multi-touch

      This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu is heading toward making a Linux for tablets ala Android or MeeGo.

    • Multi-touch Support Lands in Maverick

      Canonical is pleased to announce the release of uTouch 1.0, Ubuntu’s multi-touch and gesture stack. With Ubuntu 10.10 (the Maverick Meerkat), users and developers will have an end-to-end touch-screen framework — from the kernel all the way through to applications. Our multi-touch team has worked closely with the Linux kernel and X.org communities to improve drivers, add support for missing features, and participate in the touch advances being made in open source world. To complete the stack, we’ve created an open source gesture recognition engine and defined |a gesture API that provides a means for applications to obtain and use gesture events from the uTouch gesture engine.

    • Ubuntu Linux: I like it, but it doesn’t like me

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Xubuntu 10.10: Becoming More Unique

        The upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.10 promises a variety of new features for Ubuntu’s desktop and server editions. But it will also bring significant changes for Ubuntu’s lightweight cousin, Xubuntu. Here’s a look at some of the most important updates for the Xfce-based Ubuntu variant, including several that will increase its independence from standard Ubuntu.

        Admittedly, until I downloaded the Xubuntu alpha 3 release, it had been a while since I tried the distribution. I used to run it on some lower-end machines, but I gave it up a couple years ago because the performance improvement over Gnome-based Ubuntu was not drastic enough to justify the features missing in Xfce, at least for me.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo: Where Are We Now?

      We established a robust governance structure led by our Technical Steering Group with people leading all of the various aspects of the project: program management, architecture, maintainers, community and more. While we have quite a few of the people identified for key areas, we are still in the process of continuing to add more details and beginning to define how the working groups and compliance efforts will be structured.

Openness/Sharing

• The Evolution of Sharing

  Sharing is an invaluable and valueless transaction fundamental to our daily lives. We are social animals all invested in a massive species-wide collaboration to survive and thrive. We share for mutual benefit, for altruism, for deferred returns, and, increasingly, because we are compelled to contribute to the global brain. Facebook & Twitter are perhaps the latest apotheosis of this shift towards the compulsive sharing of everything in our lives. And it is this condition that seems to represent something uniquely spiritual, or at least inchoate and just beyond rational apprehension, about our progression into the 21st century: the boundaries around the Other and shadows held within are falling to the illumination of the global consciousness.

• Open Data/Government Transparency

  • It’s Official: People In Power Act As If They Have Brain Damage

    So, how do you fix the mess? Well, transparency seems to be the main suggestion — which is why it’s so troubling that our government seems to continually move away from transparency (even if it gives lip service to greater transparency). The WSJ article highlights how some basic transparency for those in power tends to actually decrease some of the more corrupt activities, while a decrease in oversight tends to lead to greater corruption. This is, of course, no surprise, but acts as yet another reminder for why greater transparency in government is important — and why those in power are so often against it.

  • You’ve Changed, Man

  • The Power Trip

  • Tech Policy Scorecard

  • The Guardian launches governmental pledge-tracking tool

• Open Access/Content

  • BMJ Open: accessible medical research

    BMJ Open is an open access journal for general medical research. Using a continuous publication model the journal will provide rapid publication for research from any medical discipline or therapeutic area.

Health

• Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people

  This week the drug company AstraZeneca paid out £125m to settle a class action. More than 17,500 patients claim the company withheld information showing that schizophrenia drug quetiapine (tradename Seroquel) can cause diabetes. So why do companies pay out money before cases get to court?

  An interesting feature of litigation is that various documents enter the public domain. This is how we know about the tobacco industry’s evil plans to target children, the fake academic journal that Elsevier created for Merck’s marketing department, and so on.

  One of the most revealing documents ever to come out of a drug company emerged from an earlier quetiapine case: an email from John Tumas, publications manager at AstraZeneca. In it, he helpfully admits that they do everything I say drug companies do.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Russia launches inquiry into Pavlovsk seed bank after Twitter campaign

  The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has ordered an immediate inquiry into the potential destruction of the world’s oldest seed bank following a court case and a Twitter campaign by Guardian readers and others.

  The fate of the station appeared to be sealed last week when a court ruled in favour of the Pavlovsk research station and its surrounding farmland being turned into private housing. It holds the world’s largest fruit collections and was protected by 12 Russian scientists during the second world war who chose to starve to death rather than eat the unique collection of seeds and plants which they were guarding during the 900-day siege of Leningrad.

• Pakistan flood response prompts rising anti-government resentment

  The agricultural heartland has been wiped out, which will cause spiralling food prices and shortages. Many roads and irrigation canals have been destroyed, along with electricity supply infrastructure.

• BP to pay $50m fine for safety violations after Texas City explosion

  Beleaguered oil giant BP has agreed to pay a record $50.6m (£32.5m) fine for failing to fix hazards at its Texas City oil refinery in the wake of a disastrous explosion that killed 15 people five years ago.

  The fine imposed by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is the largest penalty ever issued by the watchdog, although it is dwarfed by the billions that BP is set to pay out for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

• Fishing legacy fades from some New England ports

  Tourists swarmed the town pier in the 1970s and ’80s, snapping pictures and bantering with commercial fishermen as they unloaded another shimmering haul for Secondo’s company, Reliable Fish, to truck to points south.

Finance

• China overtakes Japan as world’s second-largest economy

  Japan lost its place as the world’s second-largest economy to China in the second quarter as receding global growth sapped momentum and stunted a shaky recovery.

  Gross domestic product grew at an annualised rate of just 0.4%, the Japanese government said today, far below the annualised 4.4% expansion in the first quarter. The news added to evidence that the global recovery is facing strong headwinds.

• Pensions and the Public

  One of the conservative causes du jour is the parlous state of public employee pensions these days. And there’s no question that this really is a problem. Thanks to years of overoptimistic economic projections and the habit of politicians to prefer future cost increases to current cost increases, public pension funds are pretty seriously underfunded right now. That means taxpayers are going to have to come up with many billions of additional dollars to fund pensions at the levels that have been promised to public workers.

• Attacking Social Security

  Meanwhile, an aging population will eventually (over the course of the next 20 years) cause the cost of paying Social Security benefits to rise from its current 4.8 percent of G.D.P. to about 6 percent of G.D.P. To give you some perspective, that’s a significantly smaller increase than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which Washington certainly didn’t consider a crisis, or even a reason to rethink some of the Bush tax cuts.

• Obama claims GOP trying to destroy Social Security

  President Barack Obama used the anniversary of Social Security to trumpet Democrats’ support for the popular program and accuse Republicans of trying to destroy it.

• Construction Workers’ Union to Rejoin A.F.L.-C.I.O.

  A spokesman for the laborers, David Miller, declined to confirm the decision. But he said that leaders of his union, which has 800,000 members and represents construction workers, would have more to say after a meeting on Sunday. Mr. Trumka told the federation’s executive council last week that the move would become final in October.

• Destroying Social Security to ‘Save’ It: the Arithmetic of Benefit Cuts

  We know what the Trustees say: 100% of scheduled benefits payable through 2037 and 78% after that declining to 75% at the end of the projection period. Meaning that any proposal based on a crisis defined by “threatened future benefits” that produces a worse result in 2037 and after is some mixture of ineffectiveness and bait and switch, particularly if if also cuts benefits BEFORE 2037, from the perspective of the future retiree no matter what the age that proposal represents a dead loss. For workers the simplest benchmark is ’22%’, any ‘fix’ in excess of that is just theft from workers serving to advance some other purpose. Those purposes might be worthwhile on their own, but it is up to proponents to make the case to a democratic majority why the tradeoff is actually either in the interest of the nation and/or the vast majority of that nation that participates in Social Security.

• Don’t like your banking fees? Tell the FDIC.

  In the financial world, we’re fed up with a lot of things. For example, it’s time for a Slater Slide for offensively high overdraft fees and bank check-cashing policies that can boost those fees.

• New Rules on Finance to Be Done in the Open

  The Federal Reserve, which was given expanded responsibilities to protect the financial system, plans to require all staff members, not just senior officials, to keep track of every meeting with private sector representatives about the rule-writing required under the new law, including who was present and what was discussed. Summaries of the meetings will be routinely released on the Fed’s Web site.

• Rising Profits Are Good, but There’s a Catch

  While higher profits are normally deemed good news, it matters why they are rising. “The same thing that caused the profit gains is squeezing now,” Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S.& P., said. “It is the lack of jobs.”

• ‘Good ol’ boys’ in Warren’s way?

  She can’t get 60 votes in the Senate, some say — too polarizing. Others say Warren’s outspoken public persona and left-leaning impulses are an uncomfortable fit for the new post riding herd on Wall Street, where she has few backers.

• Techno-Thriller: Why Was Goldman Sachs So Worried About One Nerdy Sentence?

  It sounds like the plot to a dozen movies: Picture a corporation so powerful that its tentacles circle the globe and reach into the highest corridors of power. Yet a single sentence on an ex-employee’s obscure website forces it to move into action. That sentence is so important that it leaves the corporation with no choice but to make that employee …

  No, not disappear. They just made him delete it. (This is where the movie comparisons end.) But the question is, why? The sentence described the Goldman Sachs risk system, SecDB (which stands for securities database). It read: “Unbeknownst to most of the non-strategists, you could see basically every position and holding across the company, whether you were supposed to or not.”

• In This Play, One Role Is Enough

  These companies — the biggest are Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citibank — operate as the back office for the mortgage lending industry. In good times, their tasks are fairly simple: they take in monthly mortgage payments and distribute them to whoever owns the loans. In many cases, large institutions like pension funds or mutual funds own the mortgages, and servicers are obligated to act in their interests at all times.

  When borrowers are defaulting in droves, as they are now, loan servicing becomes much more complex and laborious. Servicers must chase delinquent borrowers for payments and otherwise manage these uneasy relationships, possibly into foreclosure.

• Why Girly Jobs Don’t Pay Well

  More than 97 percent of employees in kindergarten and preschool teaching are women. Though women now average higher levels of educational attainment than men, many continue to enter occupations dominated by women where wages are relatively low.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record

  Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a great way of making public statements that are at once frank, unorthodox, thought provoking – and a little frightening. This weekend The Wall St. Journal ran an interview with Schmidt that offered tidbits like that on a wide range of topics. One statement in particular, that Schmidt thinks teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions, is something worth stopping to take note of.

• South African journalists condemn efforts to silence them

  Royal sex scandals rarely come riper. A government minister is caught in bed with the king’s wife – in fact, one of the king’s 14 wives. Ndumiso Mamba, justice minister in Swaziland, is forced to resign and could yet face much worse from King Mswati III.

  But just about the last people to read this story were those in Swaziland itself. The censorious atmosphere in the tiny, impoverished kingdom contrasts with South Africa, where newspapers had a field day.

• Clueless Commentators Think That It’s Possible To Stop Wikileaks

  Marc Thiessen is a former Bush speechwriter, who seems to have tried to make a second career out of saying really clueless things as loudly as possible. Lately he’s been on a rampage against Wikileaks, first suggesting that it somehow made sense to use US military power to track down and capture Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. This resulted in a reporter pointing out that Thiessen’s response to Wikileaks is like the RIAA’s response to Napster: destined to backfire due to a basic misunderstanding of the internet.

  Apparently Thiessen either didn’t read or understand that response. Or, perhaps in the business of being loud and wrong, he just doesn’t care. He’s since written a few more pieces attacking Wikileaks, including directly blaming it for an Afghan tribal leader being killed… though in the very next sentence he admits he doesn’t know if that had anything to do with Wikileaks. Accuse first, find out the truth later, huh?

• A war on drugs? No, this is a war on the Mexican people

• Russian police arrest 35 to prevent protest at Moscow mayor’s office

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Net Neutrality: what does the Google Verizon proposal mean for GNU Linux?

  With GNU/Linux on the desktop and the server, costs can be reduced considerably. what a pity it would be to see those savings frittered away by having to purchase premium access in a net un-neutral world. The irony is that if the internet loses net neutrality where will the next Google or Napster, dreamed up in a suburban garage by citizen programmers, come from? If Microsoft Windows had been the only platform available when Google was starting up, the cost of Windows licences for their first server farm might have sunk them before they got off the ground; but they had free and open source software, and they should remember that.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future

    Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

    The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”

    “Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.”

  • The Insanity Of Music Licensing: In One Single Graphic

    What you see there is basically the result of a century or so of “bolting on” new licenses due to changes in the market, rather than any concerted effort to look at whether or not the underlying laws or licenses make sense. It’s the result of massive regulatory capture, as industries unwilling to change just run to the gov’t and demand to be compensated even as their old business models are going away. At what point do people say it’s time to scrap this mess and start from scratch?

  • Freakonomics Flips The Window: Releasing Movie Online Before In Theaters

    We’ve talked numerous times about the movie industry’s love affair with release windows, where they basically try to get people to pay for things multiple times by releasing them in different formats at different times. The first window, normally, is the theatrical release — and the theaters go absolutely livid if anyone suggests shortening the theatrical release window. Heaven forbid anyone go so far as to suggest something as “radical” as a so-called day and date release, where it’s released in all formats at the same time, and watch the theaters go ballistic and boycott the film, as a startling admission that they don’t think they can compete with home theaters.

    So, it’s quite interesting to see that the Freakonomics movie that’s coming out in the fall is apparently going to flip the windows over.

  • Hollywood Targets 8.2 Million Torrents at Bitsnoop

    While Bitsnoop may not have the profile of The Pirate Bay, make no mistake, this site is a major BitTorrent player. The site indexes more than 8 million torrents linking to roughly 9 petabytes of data. In the last few days Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN began threatening the site with the clear aim of bringing its activities to an end.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

TV

• The Netflix Linux Conjecture: How Netflix snubs the Linux comunity

  Conjecture: A conjecture is a proposition that is unproven but appears correct and has not been disproved. If that statement confuses you (and it may if you’re not a student of math), then you understand exactly how I felt during a discussion with Netflix’ Steve Swasey (VP of Corporate Communications – aka “Spin Doctor”). Quite frankly, the man didn’t spin the discussion in such a way to make Netflix anything but a tiny bit ignorant of the topic at hand.

  Before I go any further, I should probably tell you what this is all about. Netflix has a feature that allows members to stream movies directly to their PCs. To accomplish this, they use Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. Silverlight is basically a web-application framework that provides functions similar to that of Adobe Flash.

  Now, with that out of the way, let me give you the gist of the conversation between myself and Mr. Swasey:

  ME: Hello, I am a freelance writer for Techrepublic (CNET), Linux.com, and Ghacks.net and I get a LOT of readers asking why Netflix does not support Linux. I plan on doing an article on this very subject and was wondering if I could get your official statement on this very subject.

  Steve: Jack, Netflix wants to be ubiquitous on any screen you want to watch TV shows and movies on and we’re working to get on as many platforms as we can. However, Linux currently does not have a Microsoft Silverlight plug-in that’s comparable with Netflix playback. Please let me know if you have other questions.

• CWTV adds Support for Streaming to Linux

  Back in March I had mentioned that one of the only issues I had to deal with when converting my girlfriend’s laptop to Linux Mint was that her favourite TV show would not stream to Linux. The reason for this is that CWTV, instead of using Adobe Flash, uses Move Media player to stream to Windows and OSX (Move does not support Linux). Because of this if you are on a Linux system you would simply receive an “operating system not supported” message when browsing the page with the stream.

Versus Windows

• The Fanboi Stops Here

  My company computers were hacked in 2005…a three city network went down due to the Bagle virus, specifically referred to as W32/Bagle.J@MM

  It was fast, it was tenacious, it spread through Outlook and it was devastating.

  That was when I migrated my company computers and network to Linux. Of course I had help and without a good friend who knew what he was doing, it would have never happened…

  But it did and it worked for us….Professionally

• Windesperation

  In Linux, the ritual of rebooting after an install becomes a hazy memory buried in the back of your brain. But this WAS Windows, not Mandriva Linux. With full lungs, XP said to me, “I don’t care what you do in Sparta, but THIS-IS- BOOTLAND!!!” and I had to reboot to try the program… After almost an hour, I was getting closer to getting things done at last.

  But then the firewall blocked the anti-Malware program. When I was trying to solve the problem, the firewall showed an alert of a high-rate attempt to access my computer from the outside. And then, it flashed a warning: “the Win32 Sality Virus that disables antivirus programs is becoming too common. Your version of the firewall cannot stop it, but an upgrade of the program can. Do you want to upgrade for free?” A year ago, I would have clicked YES immediately. However, more than an hour and 15 minutes had elapsed and I had not accomplished anything. The missing installation required me to knock off the firewall, but the firewall was asking me to update! This was too much. I felt completely unproductive in front of the computer. I was mad while I thought that this was XP, the most popular OS today. From what I have seen happening to happy users, Windows 7 performs pretty much in the same fashion, except that it requires more computer resources to run properly. That, in itself, is a funny paradox. I buy clothes that fit me; I do not buy shoes too wide for my feet hoping to fatten until the shoes fit. However, Microsoft expects you to drop XP and buy Windows 7 and to buy new hardware if your PC does not fulfill the requirements for 7. So, Windows is an OS to which the computer has to accommodate! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 162 – Neckbeards Unite!

  This week on the show: The Google/Verizon deal, the SFLC defends the GPL again, Canonical tracking Ubuntu installations, Google kills Wave, the Illumos Project revealed and of course lots of neckbeard action.

• Episode 29 – How to get a job as a Linux Admin….

  1) Introduction

  We talk about an E-Mail from Matt. Matt wants to know how to get a job as a Jr. Linux Admin. We discuss some things we think anyone looking to make this career choice should do.

  [...]

Applications

• Not So Simple Backup (NSS Backup) suite – Backup solution for common desktop use

• Backup your Linux desktop with Simple Backup

  Simple Backup works to make the backup process simple. In this article I am going to show you how to install and use this handy Linux backup tool.

• 5 (More) Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux

  I have already featured here some of the best web eCommerce software available for Linux. However, I’ve noticed that I left out several other high-quality web e-commerce solutions.

• wxbanker desktop app makes keeping track of your money simple, pretty

• 4 tools open source for amateur radio applications.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Batch Convert Nikon RAW (NEF) Files to JPEG

  • How To Make Single-Click Links for Software Installation [Ubuntu]

  • quicky: changing your shell prompt

  • urxvt – the unbeatable terminal

  • OpenOffice – Page Numbers in a Click

  • Removing a Background with Gimp and the Quick Mask Tool

  • Live Bandwidth monitoring became easy with Netmonitor screenlet

  • Broken every other week

  • Linux kernel error levels (Value, Name and Meanings)

  • Connecting to wireless LAN on Arch linux

  • Wall Poster of Linux source Code

  • Changing Hostnames and Making it Stick

  • The worst code snippet I’ve ever seen

  • Upgrade kernel from backports in Debian Stable

  • Open Firefox Links In Other Web Browsers

  • Installing PEAR framework and packages

• Games

  • The Chzo Mythos comes Linux

    After several months work, Hamish Paul Wilson has announced the release of The Chzo Mythos GNU/Linux Binaries. The Chzo Mythos are a series of adventure games created by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame.

  • Play Dune 2 Natively on Linux with Dune Legacy

    Good news to old time gamers, now you can play Dune 2 on Linux operating system natively (without dosbox or other emulator) with Dune Legacy project. For the uninitiated, (to my best knowledge), Dune 2 is the first RTS game for DOS (by Westwood, then acquired by EA Games) that spawn several other popular games in the genre such as C&C, Red Alert, Red Alert 2, etc.

  • Tankaar 10.08

  • XreaL Is Switching To The Enemy Territory Engine

    As was reported earlier this week, id Software has open-sourced Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Opening up these older games under the GNU GPL was done as part of id’s long-standing tradition of putting out the code into the public domain once it makes sense for them a few years after their succeeding engine updates have fully replaced them in the marketplace. The developers behind ioquake3, the project that’s based around the Quake 3 engine that was previously opened up by id Software, is already working on iowolfet and iortcw forks to incorporate this new code, but other free software developers are already utilizing this code too.

  • Warzone 2100 2.3.4

    Warzone 2100 is a 3D real-time strategy game in a post-apocalyptic setting with a single player campaign and skirmish games against the computer and/or other players over the network. It was commercially published in 1999 for Windows PCs and the Playstation, and in December 2004, the source code and assets were released under the GPL.

Desktop Environments

• A Common Compositing Window Manager Specification

  Martin Gräßlin, one of the KDE developers that works on the KWin window manager, when not working towards OpenGL 3.0 support for KWin in KDE SC 4.7 has been writing a draft specification for what he proposes as a unified specification for compositing window managers. Martin hopes for this to become a FreeDesktop.org specification and that KWin/Plasma, Compiz, and other compositing window managers would implement this common specification.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE’s New Releases Make a Splash

    The new software from KDE’s recent 4.5 Release Day has been well received by the technical media with widespread positive reviews and recognition of the focus on quality for this set of releases.

  • Install KDE SC 4.5 on Mandriva Linux Spring 2010

  • Update KDE to 4.5 and experience true improvement

  • REVIEW: KDE SC 4.5.0

    The wait is finally over: KDE SC 4.5.0 finally came to my PCLinuxOS 2010 tablet today as part of a distribution upgrade. There are loads of improvements and new features, so I want to run through a very high level review to give readers a hint of what they are in for.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Collection of nice looking themes for Gnome and Ubuntu| August

  • Nautilus update in Maverick bring many new fixes, changes

    A new upstream version of Nautilus, Ubuntu’s default file browser, has landed in Maverick.

  • Open source contributors

    The vast majority of developers that worked on the Gnome project described themselves as volunteers. More than 70% of developers surveyed said that they contributed to Gnome in their spare time. Another 19.93% of developers said they worked on Gnome both professionally and in their spare time. The portion of developers that worked on Gnome as paid professionals was close to 10%.

Distributions

• How much of an Open Source Gypsy are you?

  On the next step down, we have desktop gypsies. These folks might well stay in a distro they know well, but might switch between KDE, Gnome, Xfce, LXDE, and others as their mood strikes. Again, I think it can only help everyone if we try and help these folks make the easiest and smoothest transition between them. Some will stick with a desktop, and some won’t, but making it easier for them to do so helps everyone who switches to that desktop.

• Reviews

  • Puppy 5.1 “Lucid Puppy” Review

    The most recent release of Puppy Linux, version 5.1 “Lucid Puppy” has some huge changes which include binary compatibility with Ubuntu 10.04 packages, easier package installation with Quickpet and in the Puppy Package Manager, a new Simple Network Setup utility and more. The official release announcement is here.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLINUXOS

    I have been using linux for about 4 years. I am by no means an expert but I would consider myself a little bit above average. I don’t usually write on my blog but something urged me to do it this time just so I can spread the word about Linux and this wonderful distro.

• Debian Family

  • Happy Birthday, Debian!

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Gestures with multitouch in Ubuntu 10.10

      Multitouch is just as useful on a desktop as it is on a phone or tablet, so I’m delighted that the first cut of Canonical’s UTouch framework has landed in Maverick and will be there for its release on 10.10.10.

      You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today. By release, we expect you’ll be able to use it with a range of devices from major manufacturers, and with addons like Apple’s Magic Trackpad.

      The design team has lead the way, developing a “touch language” which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”.

    • Stunning New Gnome Shell Motion Design Mock Up[Video]

    • 10 Beautiful Wallpapers For Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ From Official Ubuntu Artwork Pool

      Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr is buzzing with activity once again. With the release date of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick getting nearer everyday, the submissions onto Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr keeps piling on. Here are a few of those wallpapers that I think, are worth mentioning. Click on the links provided to get wallpapers with different resolutions.

    • Maverick Ubuntu

      No Gnome 3.0

      One of the big changes that most users have been waiting for is the Gnome 3.0 desktop. The brand new desktop interface won’t be making it into this release however. Originally Gnome 3.0 was scheduled for release in early October which was already cutting it fine for Ubuntu developers to include it. However, the Gnome developers have pushed back the release of Gnome 3.0 by another six months which means that the new desktop may not in fact reach Ubuntu until October 2011.

    • Trying Out The New Ubuntu 10.10 Installer

      Following last week’s Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 3 release but landing before the Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” feature freeze this week were a number of last-minute features like X Server 1.9 integration and other updated packages along with the committing of the revamped Ubuntu desktop installer to Maverick. Via this revamped Ubuntu installer it’s possible to install proprietary bits directly like support for MP3 audio files and proprietary graphics drivers.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 1 – Lubuntu

        Our candidate? Lubuntu, a Ubuntu flavor that uses LXDE as its desktop environment. I has everything that Ubuntu has going for it; large community support, tons of packages in the repositories and years of Ubuntu legacy and know-how.

      • Ubuntu Studio Sound Theme is Old But Still Really Good

        Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia enhanced Ubuntu variant packed with custom wallpapers, themes, screensavers, system sounds and more. With Canonical in the lookout for a new System Sounds theme for upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, all those who want to contribute may want to check out the original Ubuntu Studio sound theme for inspiration. They are pretty darn good IMO.

Devices/Embedded

• Amazon Is Said to Look at Hardware Beyond Kindle

  Some of the people hired for these positions will most likely work on the next versions of the Kindle, possibly integrating touch screens or even creating a color version of the device. But there’s also a good chance these engineers will be recruited to build other gadgets that Amazon is prototyping in its secret labs.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Froyo for HTC EVO 4G And Droid Incredible Goes Open Source

We should all be using free software

By free software, they do not mean software that is given away at no cost. Lifelong free software activist Richard Stallman uses the French word “libre” to describe his ideal software; it’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) defines four criteria for this freedom: the freedom to run the software for any purpose; to study how it works (to have access to its source code); to redistribute copies; and to publish modified and improved versions.

Top tips for a successful open source project

Events

• LinuxCon Day 3: Now Get Out There and Do Something!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • TabCandy becomes tab sets for Firefox 4

    Latest Firefox 4 nightly builds now feature Tab Sets, the ability to organize your tabs by visually grouping them to match your browsing style, introduced a few weeks ago as TabCandy.

    If you have tried the experimental build released at that time, you won’t notice much change except some important bug fixing for improved stability.

Oracle

• Considerations For FLOSS Hackers About Oracle vs. Google

  James Gosling is usually pretty cryptic in his non-technical writing, but I think if you read carefully, it seems to me that Gosling regrets that Oracle now holds his patents on Java. I know developers get nice bonuses if they let their company apply for patents on their work. I also know there’s pressure in most large companies to get more patents. We, as developers, must simply refuse this. We invent this stuff, not the suits and the lawyers who want to exploit our work for larger and larger profits. As a community of developers and computer scientists, we must simply refuse to ever let someone patent our work. In a phrase: just say no.

• Oracle Scorns Open Source: How to Respond?

  This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google is activating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of US market share, Oracle decided to drop the bomb…

• New: OOo-DEV 3.3.x Developer Snapshot (build OOO330m4) available

• Defending Free Software against Oracle’s attack

  I don’t think Google developed Dalvik to work round licensing and patent problems with Java, they developed it simply because Sun’s Java technology wasn’t good enough for what they wanted to do. If you watch Dan Bornstein’s presentation that is abundantly clear. Designing a new virtual machine runtime is hard, but not that hard. The JVM was influenced was influenced by the Pascal pcode system, and the Smalltalk virtual machine architecture from the 1970s has also been very influential. Recently there have been a pile of virtual machines for JavaScript being developed. Thirty years later after Smalltalk-80 the technology of virtual machines and JIT compilation is really mainstream.

Project Releases

• Ruby 1.9.1-p430 is released

Licensing

• Wondermedia WM8505 Linux + u-boot source code

  In recent months, a number of alleged GPL-violation reports regarding products (tablet computers, mini netbooks and the like) using the Wondermedia WM850x line of ARM SoCs. People have been contacting me, as I was working as VIA Open Source Liaison, and there is the general belief that VIA and Wondermedia Technology (WMT) are one company.

Openness/Sharing

• Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking

  At the same time, though, “I welcome die-hard Fox viewers,” Lih says. “I welcome people who think Accuracy in Media is the last word. Because if you can cite from a reliable source — from a congressional record, from the Census Bureau, from the Geological Survey, from CIA Factbook, from something — then by all means, I don’t really care what your political stripes are. Because the facts should win out in the end.”

Grope Claim Against Donald Duck

While visiting Epcot Center in Florida, a Pennsylvania woman alleges that a Disney employee dressed as Donald Duck grabbed her breast and molested her after she sought an autograph.

Health

• Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer

  One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

  [...]

  These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout constitution I might have led a much healthier life thus far. Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Fla. developer sues Halliburton over Gulf spill

  Florida real estate developer St. Joe Co. is suing Halliburton Co. over its role in the rig explosion that led to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

• Confessions of a recovering environmentalist

  I generalise, of course. Environmentalism’s chancel is as accommodating as that of socialism, anarchism or conservatism, and just as capable of generating poisonous internal bickering that will last until the death of the sun. Many who call themselves green have little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it is the mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today, even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to be seen. These are the arguments and the positions that popular environmentalism – now a global force – offers up in its quest for redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But whatever they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn dead end street, where the bins overflow, the lightbulbs have blown and the stray dogs are very hungry indeed.

  What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was perhaps inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers. But for me, now – well, this is no longer mine, that’s all. I can’t make my peace with people who cannibalise the land in the name of saving it. I can’t speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry. I can’t speak with a straight face about saving the planet when what I really mean is saving myself from what is coming.

• Huge ice island could pose threat to oil, shipping

  An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland.

  Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes — and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912.

Finance

• IT Hiring Continues to Improve, According to Surveys

  Hiring for IT jobs continues on the upswing in the U.S. and Canada as recessionary gloom gives way to cautious optimism, according to various recent polls of employers, who cite networking, security, virtualization and database skills as among the most sought-after.

• IMF document illustrates plan to raise global currency

  It’s no secret that many of the world’s largest industrialized nations are somewhat eager to ease their reliance on the U.S. dollar. For months China and Russia have pushed ever subtly, for a new “global reserve currency,” to give governments around the world enhanced economic stability in the event of greater fluctuations in the dollar’s value.

• Financial Fallout: The Surprising Effects of a Recession

  In March 2010, ScienceDaily published a story about an intriguing report investigating the connection between stock-market activity and the frequency of heart attacks.

  The researchers, a team from Duke University Medical Center, discovered an increased incidence of cardiac arrest in the United States between January 2008 and July 2009, precisely when the stock market showed a clear decline in the midst of a massive economic crisis.

  Although the scientists determined in subsequent tests that this inverse relationship wasn’t quite as pronounced as they believed initially (due to seasonal fluctuations in heart attack rates), their study remains groundbreaking in terms of its efforts to explore a rarely covered topic: the impact of economic patterns on cardiovascular events.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Lawmakers Question Data Collection at Major Sites

  Two senior U.S. lawmakers say they’re “troubled” by the collection of personal data at many websites, and they want details on how much data 15 popular sites collect and what the sites do with the data.

• The internet filter is dead! Long live the filter!

  What Tony Smith is going to have to explain to colleagues is why he is rejecting a complaints-based policy that used a URL blacklist that Labor effectively shanghai’d from the Howard Government.

• South Africa media fear new rules on reporting

  Proposed media regulations in South Africa have raised fears that the government is trying to control news coverage, drawing comparisons to apartheid-era censorship.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Net neutrality is foremost free speech issue of our time

  If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we’d be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy.

  Well, our free speech rights are under assault — not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.

  If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.

• Who Will Kill Net Neutrality?

• eBooks, Open and Closed

  This means that I can’t buy an book in EPUB format and read it on my hardware or software EPUB reader of choice. Or rather, I can do so only under limited circumstances. For example, I can read a Sony B&N ebook on a Nook, but I can’t read a B&N ebook on a Sony reader. Or, when I Google anything to do with EPUB and DRM, I get a lot of links that seem to lead to instructions for stripping DRM.

• Simple Coloured Bash Prompts

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Jay-Z spoof Newport State Of Mind removed from YouTube

    The hit internet spoof video Newport State Of Mind which parodies Jay-Z has been removed from YouTube due to a “copyright claim” by EMI Publishing.

  • Once More (With Feeling): There’s Still A Role For Record Labels… But It’s Changing

    But we’ve regularly highlighted smart labels doing cool things, and others are noticing that as well. The New Yorker has a nice article pointing out that there’s still a role for record labels to help a band do all the stuff it doesn’t want to do itself, and that many indie labels have done a good job figuring this out. The article focuses mainly on the band Arcade Fire, and the success it’s had, despite being on a small “indie label.” It mentions the band Vampire Weekend, which has also had similar success.

    There’s nothing revolutionary about what their labels are doing. It’s just that the bands generally have a bit more control and are less a cog in a giant machine, allowing them to stay a bit more true to their musical roots. As the article notes, this is “not a radical change so much as a scaling back, a return to a business model that involves fewer people, and concentrates on the product.” Indeed, it notes that the major record labels are still where bands may go to play the lottery — to try to get that one big check. But these more innovative and nimble indie labels are where a band is likely to go if it actually wants to make a career.

  • ACTA

    • ACTA Talks Resume: Round Ten Opens Today in Washington

      The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement talks resume today as Round Ten opens in Washington, DC. The full agenda indicates that all the issues will be addressed along with discussions of many smaller matters that have been left until the end. Following the last round in Lucerne, Switzerland (which only concluded 47 days ago), I had several posts on the leaked draft that tried to identify the primary areas of disagreement, the Canadian positions, the U.S. decision to cave on anti-circumvention, the importance of geographical indications in the talks, and speculation on the prospect of the EU walking away from ACTA.