• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Operating Systems in Schools

  GNU/Linux is the clear choice for me. Here is an article written by one who shares my views. He describes use of GNU/Linux in schools in British Columbia, Canada. Wherever cost-effective performance is wanted GNU/Linux should be the first choice. I cannot imagine a more appropriate situation than schools. Students and staff need reliable IT and students need IT that is transparent and affordable to them so they can tinker as needed. Students learn by doing. They do not learn by doing what M$ wants them to do.

  A teachable moment with GNU/Linux happened in my classroom yesterday. My students have seen the inner workings of a PC, installed GNU/Linux and used GNU/Linux since school began.

Server

• Current Operating Systems May Only Make Sense Up To 48 Cores

  MIT’s Frans Kaashoek has provided some clues and said that current operating systems, especially Linux can scale to take advantage of multiple cores with minor modifications to the underlying OS code. He and his team simulated a 48-core chip through an 8 x 6 core setup and monitored the performance change when cores were activated one by one. “At some point, the addition of extra cores began slowing the system down rather than speeding it up.” The explanation is that multiple cores often do redundant work and process the same data, which needs to be kept in the chip’s memory for that time. As long as the memory is used, it is not available for other tasks and a performance bottleneck is the result: When the number of cores increases, tasks that depend on the same data get split up into smaller and smaller chunks.

• Multicore may not be so scary

  Research suggests that the free operating system Linux will keep up with the addition of more ‘cores,’ or processing units, to computer chips.

Applications

• Hotot Twitter application gets a Daily Build PPA for Ubuntu users

  Users of the visually impressive Twitter application ‘Hotot’ may wish to add the projects’ daily-build PPA to automatically gain the latest features and fixes as the app strides towards a stable release.

• Novacut distributed video editor has 40 hours left to reach reality

  Time is running out for an innovative new video editor inspired by collaborative distribution tools like bzr and git to gather enough ‘crowd-sourced’ funding to make it into reality.

• CLI Companion Makes It Easier To Use The Terminal

  CLI Companion is a tool aimed at making the terminal easier to use: it’s a GUI that displays a list of commands and an embedded terminal under it. The application comes with a list of commonly used commands by default, each having a short description and if you want to find out more about a certain command, simply right click it and select “Help”. This will display the “man” (manual) for the selected command.

• Penguin in the picture: top video editors for Linux fans

  When it comes to video editing platforms, Windows and Mac own the field. They run the software from Adobe, Apple, and Avid that’s preferred by professionals, and most –including all Windows machines – come with free, basic editing software for everybody else.

  In my third piece on how media and storage applications for Linux – and particularly Ubuntu – compare, I’ll be looking at how Linux stacks up against Windows and OS X in what seems a closed race.

• Simple Scan: Linux Finally has a Scanner Anyone could Use

  Sometimes we don’t change our habits even when we have the opportunty to make our lives easier. At least it’s true of me in terms of scanning after upgrading to Ubuntu Lynx (10.04). I don’t know why, but even though I saw that extra possibilitiy in the menu when I needed to scan, I continued using SANE — good, but a bit complicated.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • New book: “The Linux Programming Interface”

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.3

• Games

  • Primal Carnage Says Goodbye To Unigine

    The only problem is we have yet to see a Linux client make a premiere yet for any title using the Unreal Engine 3. We will not see that until Valve’s Steam Client makes a premiere on Linux in the coming months. At that point, it’s a matter of whether a Linux version of Primal Carnage for Linux is actually released. Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux has still not been released, or will it likely ever be.

  • Pioneers – a strategy board game for Ubuntu

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Stormy weather – Stormy Peter’s talks GNOME 3′s release date, open source management & more

    Stormy Peters has been a champion of the GNOME platform since 2000, and in 2008 became the executive director of the non-profit Foundation that oversees GNOME development. She chatted with us about the future of GNOME, the history of the project and how computers can change the world even in places without power or internet access…

Distributions

• The Ideal Linux Distribution, As I See It

  The ideal candidates for this are PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint “Debian”; both are rolling-release distributions but test their packages extensively to ensure the stability and high quality of the packages. Both include Mozilla Firefox, but only Linux Mint “Debian” offers OpenOffice.org. Both include graphical package managers and most proprietary codecs (out-of-the-box). Finally, both have excellent support for mice, webcams, and printers. As PCLinuxOS doesn’t have OpenOffice.org, I’m going to continue with just Linux Mint “Debian”.

• In praise of floppies

  Are you a Linux guru? Do you want to be a Linux guru? You’ll dazzle them at your Linux guru job interview by mentioning that you always install grub to a floppy, so your computer is unbootable without it. It’s like a primitive boot lock!

• Reviews

  • Salix OS Live 13.1.1 LXDE

    Salix OS is a distro based on Slackware. Slackware, as you probably already know, has not had a reputation as being the easiest distro to use. Salix OS makes Slackware accessible to more users by making it easier to install, configure and manage. You can get Salix OS with the Xfce or LXDE desktop environments. For this review, I decided to use the LXDE version of Salix OS.

• New Releases

  • Press Release: Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 5.4 GNOME and KDE

• Red Hat Family

  • Reports: Red Hat eyeing Austin among cities for possible new headquarters

    Red Hat Inc., a leading provider of Linux software, is looking at Austin among other cities as it considers possibly moving its headquarters from Raleigh, N.C., according to news reports and Raleigh’s mayor.

    Mayor Charles Meeker said Wednesday that Red Hat reportedly is looking at cities including Austin, Atlanta and Boston as it evaluates its need for additional space. It now occupies more than 188,000 square feet at its headquarters at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus, the Raleigh News & Observer reported Tuesday.

    “They’re a prominent company headquartered here, and naturally we’d like to see them stay,” Meeker said.

    Red Hat reported revenue of $748 million last year. It has 3,400 employees worldwide, including more than 600 in Raleigh. The company also has 65 offices around the world, including one in Austin on MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1).

  • Software-maker Red Hat considers Austin HQ

    Software company Red Hat Inc. is eyeing Austin for a possible headquarters move, potentially bringing hundreds of white-collar jobs.

  • Red Hat Linux is Mad Money

    He clearly understood that Red Hat doesn’t sell software license, they sell the support and services around the software. Whitehurst explained that the Open Source business model is about providing the mission critical support and reliability that big companies need.
    At one point, Cramer asked why Red Hat isn’t selling him Linux for his desktop. Whitehurst’s response was classic – desktop users are used to the Blue Screen of Death and don’t need mission critical support.

  • Sitting at the intersection of brand and culture

    But my experience running People & Brand at Red Hat has shown me there are endless opportunities to better connect HR and brand efforts within organizations. If making an organizational change is out of the question, I’d definitely recommend getting the HR and brand groups together to look for additional opportunities to collaborate.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora ♥’s Python 3

      Awhile ago Dave Malcolm transferred to the Fedora team inside Red Hat to sort out the issues looming with the Python stack within our distribution. Red Hat and Fedora has always been huge admirers of the Python programming language, using it to build a large part of our tools and infrastructure. When the opportunity arrived to build an operating system that children could tinker with and customise, we decided to base the application and desktop layer on top of Python – a tradition SugarLabs continued when they took over the development of Sugar.

      Because we value the huge benefits Python has brought to Fedora and Linux, it isn’t enough for us to simply build on top of a great system. We feel the infrastructure and Python upstream communities themselves are worthy of investing in and have taken an active role in helping to port and maintain a number of Python 3 modules.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu font set as default for Ubuntu 10.10

      Ubuntu’s newly designed font, the work of typographers Dalton Maag, will indeed be used as the default desktop font in Ubuntu 10.10.

      Whilst the new font will only be used in the interface of the desktop, with it being held back as the default for documents and the Terminal, it will certainly make a wonderful first impression on Ubuntu users – both new and old.

    • Fingerprint Reader from Validity Inc. getting official Ubuntu support

      OMG! reader Tobias Knight faced such a situation with a fingerprint reader made by Validity Inc. With the open-source driver on-hold, and wanting to make use of the device, he asked Validity Inc. whether they had any plans to provide support for Ubuntu users of their devices.

      They replied with some good news: -

      “We plan to release Ubuntu support package by the end of the year. It will include proprietary sensor daemon with sample for fprint. We do not have plans for Fedora, but the same package might work (no guarantee).”

    • Ubuntu on ARM, the best since sliced bread !!

      Have you already heard about the new shiny TI OMAP4 CPU ? If you haven’t yet and are interested in ARM stuff you surely will very soon. Ubuntu will additionally to the already known OMAP3 images release images for the OMAP4 architecture with the 10.10 Maverick release.

    • ‘Party the real way for Ubuntu 10.10’ says Vancouver LoCo team

      “Don’t Call It A ‘Party’ If It’s Not!” yells the catchy slogan from the Ubuntu Vancouver LoCo team in their promotional call-to-arms for celebrating Ubuntu 10.10’s release next month.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 beta preview

      Perhaps the most important evolution is the updated Ubuntu Software Center. The application store now has more than just free software, and installation of third party applications is just as easy as Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market. The changes from 10.04 are subtle but it’s easy to see that the Ubuntu Software Center could become a major selling point and a money-spinner for Canonical.

      There are the usual accoutrements of updates to the kernel and applications software such as browsers, productivity applications, social networking clients and media players. Ubuntu One, the cloud based storage system that is in public beta, has been intertwined more deeply within the operating system, allowing users to backup folders with a simple right click.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Tuxrace for the Nokia N900

      A top speed of 75km/h, 3D, a good object to use and an objective, its called Tuxrace! It is compatible with your Nokia N900. Use a penguin to catch each fish with many different levels. The sliding penguins name is Tux. That is the origin of the name of the game.

  • Android

    • Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers

      They used TaintDroid to test 30 popular free Android applications selected at random from the Android market and found that half were sending private information to advertising servers, including the user’s location and phone number. In some cases, they found that applications were relaying GPS coordinates to remote advertising network servers as frequently as every 30 seconds, even when not displaying advertisements. These findings raise concern about the extent to which mobile platforms can insulate users from unwanted invasions of privacy.

    • Star Wars DROID R2-D2 Available

      The limited edition DROID R2-D2 will be available online at www.verizonwireless.com and in select Verizon Wireless Communication stores beginning Sept. 30.

      With a graphic design to look like the iconic Astromech Droid from the Star Wars Saga, the DROID R2-D2 by Motorola will be packaged in a custom box resembling carbonite and come with a Star Wars media dock and wired stereo headset. Exclusive content comes pre-loaded on the special edition smartphone, including:

      * R2-D2 notification sounds and ringtones
      * Four live wallpapers
      * R2-D2 Clock Widget
      * “The Best of R2-D2″ video with the original Cantina music
      * Exclusive Binoculars App

Events

• StopBadware Bay Area Event October 4

  StopBadware is offering an exciting opportunity for anyone in the Bay Area interested in Internet security: Join StopBadware and The Commonwealth Club the evening of Monday, October 4 in Menlo Park, CA, for a discussion on how to keep the Net safe. Three Internet pioneers—all StopBadware Board members—will lead a conversation entitled Keeping the Net Healthy: How Can We Develop an Immune System for the Internet? with opening and closing remarks by StopBadware’s Executive Director, Maxim Weinstein.

• ICT2010 OFF TO GREAT START

Databases

• What’s New in CUBRID Community

Oracle

• Lustre file system finds life post-Oracle

  Despite reassurances from Oracle, advocates of yet another ex-Sun Microsystems technology are voicing concern about the future of their software. In this latest case, the technology is Lustre, a file system widely used across the supercomputing community.

  “Lustre is in a bit of a flux at the moment. The community feels a little bit that Oracle is turning its back to them, and there is discussion going on over whether or not Oracle is forking the code,” said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud, a San Francisco-based, venture capital-funded company recently started to service the potential market of HPC (high-performance computing), Linux-based Lustre users.

• Oracle’s New Kernel: Custom Tuning or Proprietary Lock-In?

  In a year, “my guess is they’ll roll out a new Sun Solaris setup with a nice sticker that says, ‘Optimized for Oracle Database,’ and while they’ll pay lip service to Linux, they will wind down and then kill off their Linux offering,” predicted Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “And while Linux guys will scream it will make tons of money because it gives a corporation ONE vendor to deal with.”

• Sun Employees Leaving Oracle In Lockstep

  It has not been easy for Oracle, for as many employees of Sun were supposed to remain, it now is beginning to look as though they are all getting fed up and leaving, perhaps because they were sold a bill of goods, and now they find no merchandise.

  Over at TechEye, the news of two more major players are found to be leaving Oracle as quickly as they can disentangle themselves.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free Software PDF Readers

  What would you think about a sign on the highway stating “You need a Volkswagen to drive on this road. Contact your Volkswagen dealer for a gratis test drive – Your Government”? When it comes to PDF reading software, many governments do this every day. With the pdfreaders.org campaign we will turn the spotlight on public institutions who behave in this way, exposing how frequently such non-Free advertisements appear.

Government

• UK Open Government Licence removes barriers to re-use of public sector information

  Launched today by the National Archives, a new UK Open Government Licence (UK OGL) is said to remove many of the existing barriers to re-use of government held information. The new licence is claimed to be simple. flexible and compatible with other recognised licensing models such as the Creative Commons licence.

  The UK OGL will be applicable across the entire public sector throughout England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Replacing the existing Click-Use Licence it will enable the free re-use of a broad range of public sector information, including Crown Copyright, databases and source code. Users will not be required to register or formally apply for permission to re-use data.

• Pirate Bay User Database Exploited By Spammers

  A large number of The Pirate Bay users have received an email, allegedly from the site’s operators, inviting them to join the private BitTorrent tracker Demunoid. The Pirate Bay team has distanced itself from the senders, but it remains a mystery how the spammers gained access to the site’s user database.

• Access Copyright Strikes Back re Status of 99 of 101 Objectors

  Here’s an update on the Access Copyright (“AC”) proposed tariff that would, if approved, result in a cost if about $60 million a year to the Canadian post-secondary educational sector. There is no such mechanism in place in the USA, where much of the money collected will inevitably end up.

Openness/Sharing

• Transparency, participation, and collaboration: The distinguishing principles of open source

  Collaboration is about collective engagement for the common good and is the fastest route to open source project success. If an open source project is a neighborhood, then collaboration is the barn raising. Distinguishing this from “participation,” collaboration is about helping others in the community because doing so advances the project and its usefulness for everyone.

  My favorite example of collaboration is knowledge sharing through forums, blogs, and idea exchanges (in some circles, called ideagoras). On JasperForge, Jaspersoft’s open source community web site, there are more than 160,000 registered members who have collectively offered nearly 80,000 forum entries across all the listed top-level projects. The variety of questions and issues being addressed by and for community members within the forums is staggering. And, the vibrancy that emerges through this exchange of skill is core to large-scale community success.

• South Africa welcomes POSSE

  One of the most important programs at Teaching Open Source is the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE). POSSE is a weeklong bootcamp that gets professors and POSSE instructors productively lost. The idea is to help educators understand how to include being productively lost in their curriculum.

  Being lost is a special state in open source projects. Although we discuss the open source way of doing things and most of us seem to practice similar techniques, the actual navigation within a project is always unique. Getting a first patch accepted for even a small bug involves the issue/bug tracker, coding practices, patch submission processes, and at least a few rounds of human interaction with people in different roles and different timezones. The same is true for any contribution, from documentation to translation.

Standards/Consortia

• WebP, a new image format for the Web

  As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

  Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

Coalition Movement Camp work party set for 10/10/10

You’ve seen the film, Coalition of the Willing and perhaps read the opensource.com interview. On October 10, 2010, Coalition of the Willing launches the second phase of the Coalition project: the Coalition Movement Camp 10/10/10 Work Party — a flash mob development party for the climate movement. This is your opportunity to log on, converge, and swarm!

Science

• Levitating graphene is fastest-spinning object ever

  A flake of exotic carbon a few atoms thick has claimed a record: the speck has been spun faster than any other object, at a clip of 60 million rotations per minute.

  Graphite is made of stacks of carbon sheets. Separate these, and the result is graphene, which shows a suite of novel properties, including incredible strength.

  Bruce Kane at the University of Maryland in College Park sprayed charged graphene flakes a micrometre wide into a vacuum chamber. Once there, oscillating electric fields trapped the flakes in mid-air.

Security

• Thursday’s security advisories

Finance

• Bailout Not Over, Taxpayers Still Owed $2 Trillion In Federal Reserve Loans and TARP Program Funds

  While it is true that many TARP bailout programs have ended, Center for Media and Democracy research shows that money is still due to taxpayers under the TARP. More importantly, the research shows that the U.S. Treasury Department’s ten TARP programs represent less than seven percent of the $4.7 trillion disbursed by the U.S. government in an effort to aid the financial services industry. Far more money has been disbursed by the Federal Reserve to prop up the financial system than by the U.S. Treasury, and those loans are still outstanding.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Democracy After Citizens United

  Lawrence Lessig argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will lead to further corruption of Congress by making legislators more dependent on special interests rather than on voters. Allison R. Hayward, John Bonifaz, and Gabriel Lenz join the discussion. Moderated by Stephen Ansolabehere, Professor of Political Science at Harvard University.

• US demands right to snoop the world

  No sooner does the world agree to one request from US law enforcers for the right to snoop on its citizens than they are back with yet more demands. This week, however, the US may finally have pushed too far: the EU is not happy – and it is pushing back.

  First up is the news that, little over a month since signing up to the Swift agreement that both enables and restricts the US’ right to collect information about bank transfers in and out of the United States, the Obama administration has unilaterally decided to tear up the agreement and claim the right to monitor any and every financial transaction, whether it can show good cause or not.
  Click here to find out more!

• Thursday’s security advisories

  Translation: The Senate Judiciary Committee won’t be considering the dangerously flawed “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) bill until after the midterm elections, at least.

  This is a real victory! The entertainment industry and their allies in Congress had hoped this bill would be quickly approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee with no debate before the Senators went home for the October recess.

• Wiretapping the Internet

  The government wants to force companies to redesign their communications systems and information networks to facilitate surveillance, and to provide law enforcement with back doors that enable them to bypass any security measures.

  The proposal may seem extreme, but — unfortunately — it’s not unique. Just a few months ago, the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India threatened to ban BlackBerry devices unless the company made eavesdropping easier. China has already built a massive internet surveillance system to better control its citizens.

• “Piracy” & Privacy – Can the UK ever get it right?

  What a great place the UK is for Web users. We have reports of law firms making “requests” for information about accounts alleged to be downloading pornography with personal details linked to that pornography leaked on the Web. Phorm with its Webwise allegedly snooping in on your browsing usage for directed advertising and the DEB looming on the horizon…..what a lovely picture of “Digital Britain”.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Public consultation on the open internet and net neutrality

  DG Information Society and Media has launched a public consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality. European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, announced in April 2010 her intention to launch this consultation in order to take forward Europe’s net neutrality debate. The consultation is part of the Commission’s follow-up to its commitment – one of the prerequisites for the successful conclusion of the 2009 EU telecoms reform package – to scrutinise closely the open and neutral nature of the internet and to report on the state of play to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Drug Rep Accidentally Admits There’s No Justification For Massive Markup Over Generics

  In other words, there’s simply no good reason. Of course, the monopoly rents afforded to the branded drug maker through patents probably helps. Combine that with the amount of money dumped into highly questionable and dangerous advertising, and you get a bit closer to the answer…

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 116

Windows users face as many choices as Linux users

When I want to install Windows or Linux, I can opt for support by a company, or not. If I want support for Windows, I have to buy it from Microsoft or one of their resellers. When I want support for Linux, I have to buy it from RedHat, Novell, Oracle or Canonical.

When defining a distribution as a ‘collection of software’, Microsoft offers different distributions of Windows for different goals. Microsoft offers ten different Windows distributions for servers, called Windows 2008, and six distributions for desktops, called ’7′. If I want, I can still buy the older six distributions of Windows Vista.

Those distributions are aimed at different needs: Microsoft has a software collection for netbooks, another for developing countries, one for enthusiasts and small businesses, one for the family, one distribution with all those features included, and one for large enterprises – which has its own distribution channel. Because of a requirement of the EU, all those have a distribution with or without Windows Media Player. The cheaper versions have different distributions per language.

Looking at corporate backed Linux, the situation is not that different: There are different distributions for different goals. The only difference is, there are more companies to buy from if you want ‘enterprise Linux’. When it comes to ‘consumer Linux’, not so much, Canonical seems about the only choice, now Mandriva seems fading and Linspire disappeared. Most Linux distributions include all languages and a media player, leading to less choices to be made.

Real Men Run Linux (and not Windows)

Last Wednesday was The Day. IE9 had me convinced that it was time to finally leave Vista behind and move to Windows 7, ignoring the iron rule that you should never change a running (Windows) system. I got what I deserved: A failed Windows 7 upgrade that destroyed my Vista installation, a screwed up hard drive with new partitions and useless support from Microsoft. Having spent more than 40 hours to restore my PC, once again, I am ready to leave my wimpy self behind. It is time to switch to Linux.

Server

• Data centres increasing reliability on Linux

  “The penetration of Linux has been going up even in the data centre, and this has been to Dell’s advantage and benefit,” he said. “Linux is replacing Unix based systems with more growth coming from open source.”

  [...]

  “We now see as much as 40 per cent of data centres being built on Linux,” he said. “When you look at cloud computing, you’re seeing higher penetration of software companies which are open source, and I think this trend will only continue.”

• XtreemOS Consortium Announces Public Access to Open Test Bed

  The XtreemOS consortium, an FP6 European research project, funded in part by the European Commission, is pleased to announce the opening of a publicly accessible test bed.

Applications

• Twitter and Identica support with Bitlbee

  First off, before beginning, make sure you have the latest version of Bitlbee. The options I’ll be going through in this tutorial require version 1.2.8 or later. If you don’t have at least this version, this tutorial might not work for you completely. Twitter support was added in 1.2.6, but getting it to work with Identica might not work. I’ll outline both Twitter and Identica, as they have different setup requirements.

• 5 of the Best Free Linux Comic Book Viewers

  A comic book is a magazine which consists of narrative artwork in the form of sequential images with text that represent individual scenes. Comics are used to tell a story, and are published in a number of different formats including comic strips, comic books, webcomics, Manga, and graphic novels. Some comics have been published in a tabloid form.

• Emacs in the real world – part 2

  Forget Perl’s claims, Emacs really is the Swiss Army chainsaw of the *NIX world. Join Richard Smedley for the second of a three-part series revealing how you can do most of your day-to-day tasks without leaving Emacs – from contacts and appointments to GTD, there’s an Emacs way to productivity paradise…

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Use Ubuntu Tweak to Purge and Downgrade Third-Party Apps

  • Marketing Bug: How Do I Contact You?

  • 10 Ways to Generate a Random Password from the Command Line

  • Install LibreOffice on Ubuntu and Debian-based Distros

  • 30+ useful Linux commands list

  • Linux Tip: What are Input/Output Redirection in Unix?

  • Use msmtp with Mutt to send email

  • 10 Killer Firefox Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

  • How To Add MPD To The Ubuntu Sound Menu

  • Unix How-To: More Alias Quickies to Save You Time

  • Improved Font Rendering in Gentoo

  • Script to backup your MySQL tables and send them to your email

  • Consolidate: Put Your Servers into a VirtualBox VM

  • linux take screenshot from command line

  • AWN Window Manager (Tile) – New Avant Window Navigator Applet

  • How To: 2 Methods To Change TimeZone in Linux

  • The Right Approach to Deprecation

• Games

  • First Content Update to Quake Live

    In my previous article about Quake Live’s subscription, I questioned if the money you are paying to play Quake Live is worth the content updates. Today marks the first content update to the game. If you want to get your hands on this new content, you will have to be a subscriber.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Download Faenza Icon Theme For KDE4

    KDE4 users will be glad to know that the gorgeous Faenza icons theme has been ported to KDE4. Unfortunately since this pack is not supported by Thieum (the original Faenza icon theme author), the package is not available in the Equinox PPA – but that shouldn’t be such a big issue since the icons are very easy to install.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2.32 released

    The GNOME development team has released version 2.32 of the GNOME desktop for GNU / Linux and Unix. It includes numerous bug fixes, but relatively few significant new features because many GNOME developers have moved on to working on GNOME 3. Version 3 of GNOME was originally scheduled for release about now, but in July the release date was put back by six months to April 2011 because the GNOME release team felt it wasn’t sufficiently mature.

  • Celebrating the release of GNOME 2.32!

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Is Red Hat Just Too Red Hot?

    “When it comes to tech,” Cramer said Tuesday, “value destruction is far more important than value creation.”

    [...]

    Of course, you may wonder how Red Hat makes its money given that open-source software is free for anyone to use. Well, it earns revenues through services. Any system, open source or not, needs maintenance and that’s where Red Hat comes in. The company presently controls 75% of the pay-for-support Linux market, but has also used acquisitions to move into virtualization, consulting, middleware and storage-infrastructure software, expanding its addressable market to $50 billion.

  • Red Hat: The New Big Monopoly?

    First, I think it’s misleading (at best) to say these companies are “stealing” Linux. How is what they are doing any different from what Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat do to Linux? Are they also “stealing” Linux to make their own distribution? I feel like this is the point of free software — allowing anyone to build customized versions of software to fit their own needs; good for Oracle and Amazon for taking full advantage of the benefits of Linux and free software. I don’t think Oracle and Amazon are going to prevent loading other Linux distributions; it’s just that the bundled distribution will be Oracle Linux or Amazon Linux AMI, as opposed to Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu.

  • Mad Money goes up close, personal with Red Hat CEO

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 14 beta takes MeeGo for a spin

      This release will also see the expansion of Fedora’s netbook “spin” – as the Fedora project calls them – integrating MeeGo for mobile devices. For most users that means netbooks, though MeeGo is designed to support multiple platforms – think in-dash car systems, handsets and more.

    • Security features of Linpus Lite 1.4

      Linpus Lite 1.4 is the latest update to the Linux distribution published by Linpus Technologies, Inc. of Taipei, Taiwan. Though designed for use on netbooks and low-power computers, it is one of the best distributions that I have reviewed for publication on this website. It boots up real fast and shuts down even faster. It features a slick installation program (see the screenshots) and a Simple Mode interface that would make it an ideal distribution for tablet computers.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Release Candidate Is Out – See What’s New!

      Ubuntu 10.10 Release Candidate has just been released. There aren’t too many visual changes since the beta version (most of the visual changes happened before the beta so see THIS post), but there are a few things worth mentioning. Read on to see what’s new in Ubuntu 10.10 Release Candidate (since Ubuntu 10.10 beta)!

    • Ubuntu developing open source font family

      In his blog Tuesday, Ubuntu creator and lead developer Mark Shuttleworth announced the publishing of the first source code for Ubuntu — the font — and revealed plans for an entire open source font family.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint: the tastier Ubuntu

        So what’s the bottom line on Linux Mint? Actually, I like it a lot! So much so that I just might decide to blow away my main desktop’s long-standing Ubuntu OS in favor of a tasty new Linux Mint alternative.

      • The Gaia ’10 Linux Desktop

        Reader gabriela2400′s desktop uses the Gaia customization set to completely revamp the Linux interface into a beautiful work of art, complete with wallpapers, icons, and a custom GTK theme.

Devices/Embedded

• Minimalist kiosk distro revs to Ubuntu 10.04 foundation

  Linutop released version 4.0 of a Ubuntu Linux-based distro optimized for kiosk applications on small, energy-efficient fanless PCs, including legacy 386-based PCs and the company’s own mini-PCs. Linutop OS 4.0 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”), has a 700MB footprint, is available in a bootable USB key, and offers a variety of display and security features, says the company.

• Vision control PC supports six IP video cameras

  Lanner announced an Atom-based PC that supports up to six IP video cameras and is designed for vision control applications. Featuring a separate Ethernet controller for each port, the LEC-2026 runs fanlessly, supports either hard disk or CompactFlash storage, and has connectors for both a VGA monitor and a serial console, the company says.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Life-sized robotic android running Android

      Check out this fantastic life-sized robotic RIC Android from RT Corporation and Brilliant Service. The arms and head are controllable, walks on two legs, and can be controlled via an Android smartphone

Teambox is an Open Source, Social Network-Influenced Online Project Management App

Teambox is a neat online project management app that integrates what works with social networking to try to make a more enjoyable and effective collaborative experience. Plus it’s open source, so you can fully customize it, too.

While the idea of bringing a Twitter-like experience into a working environment doesn’t really sound too appealing at first, it’s actually a more speed-appropriate channel for communication (which we like). It’s good for reducing email volume, plus project communication is heavily status updates anyhow. While I found the idea off-putting at first, it really looks to be an effective means of communication in the workplace.

Events

• Open World Forum opens with optimism

  The Open World Forum began this morning in Paris with several keynotes that were universally optimistic about the future of open source and the importance of openness.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Six kick-ass add-ons that already work with Firefox 4.0

Databases

• Couchapp Walkthrough: Part 2: The couchapp tool

• MySQL fork Drizzle goes beta

  With the release of Build 1802, Drizzle, the community driven fork of MySQL, is now officially “beta” software. The new version includes an enhanced version of drizzledump which can now be used to migrate databases from MySQL to Drizzle without any intermediate files. When connected to a Drizzle server it will perform a normal dump, but it it detects a MySQL server it converts all structures and data into a Drizzle compatible format which can be sent directly to a Drizzle server.

  Other improvements in what is officially referred to as Drizzle7, include the introduction of Sphinx based documentation and the ability for the Drizzle server to understand MySQL’s network protocol, which should allow MySQL applications to run with Drizzle with only minor changes. The current development work is expected to be completed in February 2011.

Oracle

• Everyone but Oracle demands Java independence

  Earlier this month, the Java Community Process (JCP) – the only body with the power to ratify and approve changes to Java – passed a resolution calling on Oracle to spin the group out as an as a independent, vendor-neutral body where all members are equal. In 2007, Oracle itself called for such a spin-out, and this month’s resolution insists that Oracle live up to its three-year-old proclamation.

Blender/Video/Graphics

• Online film release: September 30

  Well you never know… Amsterdam can flood or so. But we target at next week thursday for spreading our film online! Work on the DVD with the loads of extras still continues, when this goes to be duplicated I’ll notify you!

• OpenShot bug suggests UI redesign

• Novacut – FLOSS ideals for Video editing

  Why am I excited about this and telling you about it (and aside from them seeking donations via Kickstarter)? Because in their video (embedded below) they sold me with the promise that not only will artists be able to share their final product, but Novacut will also allow others to see the process that the creator took to make that product. In effect, the source files of the video. We have this for code, most definitely. We also are starting to have this more often for music with people uploading the individual tracks to community sites like ccmixter.org. But aside from really awesome projects like the Blender Foundation, there isn’t much of this for the video world.

• Inkscape is finalist of Open Source Awards 2010

  Packt Publishing announced finalists of the Open Source Awards 2010, and Inkscape is among them in the Open Source Graphics Software category! Voting for the winner among finalists started this Monday and will last till November 5.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman and the free software movement

  Richard Stallman is something of a legend in the global software community. In 1983 he created the free software movement, through which highly trained and often highly paid professionals give their time to producing software for the public good.

  The movement produced the GNU operating system, a free alternative to proprietary software such as the Microsoft or Apple operating systems. GNU is a both a humorous “recursive acronym” standing for “GNU is Not Unix”, and the animal mascot of the GNU system and GNU Project.

• Quillen: The curse of Ref. A

  In the fall of 2003, I was getting comfortable with GNU/Linux after ditching Microsoft Windows because I was sick of the Blue Screen of Death. In Linux, I found many new programs to play with, among them one called “wget,” which would fetch the entire contents of a website and store it on my computer.

• Free Form: Free Software News for September 29th 2010

Government

• UK.gov refines pub sector software code, database re-use licence

  UK public sector workers have been handed a new Open Government licence this morning from The National Archives office that allows easier re-use of some gov data.

  It is interoperable with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence, but it also comes loaded with a number of restrictions.

  Public sector employees throughout Blighty can use the licence, which covers databases and software source codes to copy, publish and distribute information. Data can additionally be adapted and “exploited” commercially, said The National Archives office.

Late Night Frustrations

I use Evolution as my mail/contacts/calendar/task manager. About three days ago my outgoing email stopped working. I could access the incoming email, but all outgoing email simply stayed in the outbox of Evolution. When I tried to schedule the email for delivery, dialog boxes would come up telling me that my smtp server was denying access. Almost simultaneously I saw a brief tweet from my ISP mentioning that they were “working on a problem” (but no real description of the problem), so at first I thought the issue was with the ISP.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• UK to Europe: Trees Not Tricks!

• Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life

  A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It’s called Gliese 581g, and the ‘g’ may very well stand for Goldilocks.

  Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that’s the right size and location for life.

  “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,” Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Singer imprisoned for publishing “subversive songs”

  ‘Torture Without Trace’ was banned by Chinese authorities in central Henan province in November 2009 after 3,000–5,000 copies of the album had already been sold within a month after its October-2009-release in the Amdo region of eastern Tibet. A member of the Henan Mongolian Autonomous Region Arts Troupe, Tashi Dondrup is a popular music star in the region.

• Privacy Is Ultimately about Liberty While Surveillance Is Always about Control

  Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly challenge and defy any such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and personal dignity seem most threatened at present.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Putting the EU in (Net) Neutrality

  The deadline is 30 September, and the address for submitting comments is mailto:INFSO-NETNEUTRALITY@ec.europa.eu. The document also asks for “the name of a contact person in your organisation for any questions on your contribution .”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Internet Access And Human Rights Highlighted Alongside UN Human Rights Council

  Can the digital environment be used in a way that promotes real human rights? A group of activists speaking yesterday alongside the ongoing UN Human Rights Council believes that it can, and provided several examples of work they are doing to make that happen.

  The internet can facilitate community building, and help coordinate the activities of human rights activists, speakers said. But there are dangers. There is a new action before the European Parliament that would challenge anonymity online, which demonstrates the risk that new technologies could become new tools in the hands of governments in order to control, rather than to encourage more participation, said Marco Perduca, a member of the Italian Senate for the Nonviolent Radical Party, Transnational & Transparty.

• Trademark Rights for Sound Recordings

  Recently, the USPTO issued a trademark registration certificate for his “sensory mark.” The mark consists of a sixteen-second musical introduction that Oppedahl uses for his recorded lectures on patent law practice.

  [...]

  The USPTO has registered a number of sound marks, including the NBC chimes in 1972. Harley Davidson eventually withdrew its application to register a mark on the sound made by the roar of its V-Twin engine.

• Copyrights

  • Guest column: Copyright is no justification for digital locks

    Many creators start with views similar to what Stephen Ellis wrote in this space on Friday. While some retain this naive view, others take the time to learn how the technology in question works. They change their views once they speak with independent technical people, and go through the legal and economic analysis of real-world technology. Far from digital locks protecting copyright, they are the greatest threat to copyright and the interests of creators.

    I will not speak about audiences of copyrighted works. I am a creators’ rights activist trying to protect the interests of fellow creators, and oppose the C-32 digital locks based on this. The fact that digital locks also harm the interests of consumers is in addition to its harm to creators, not a matter of allegedly balancing the interests of one over the other.

  • Cmec Copyright Consortium Pursues Legal Option On Fair Dealing Rights For Students In Canadian Schools

    The Copyright Consortium of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), is appealing the July decision of the Federal Court of Appeal upholding the Copyright Board of Canada’s photocopying tariff for K-12 educational institutions. This decision establishes a narrow interpretation of “fair dealing” in the federal Copyright Act as it pertains to making copies of learning materials for distribution to students.

  • The Pirate Bay Appeal Day 2: Lost Sales

    The Pirate Bay appeal is moving forward faster than expected. On the second day representatives for the music and movie industries talked about lost sales and revenues they claim can be attributed to The Pirate Bay. In addition, the prosecution uncovered ad sales and money trails to portray The Pirate Bay as a commercial organization.

  • ACTA

    • ACTA Negotiators ‘Meeting’ With Consumer Advocates Involved ‘Negotiators Eating With Negotiators’

      We already discussed how ACTA negotiators last week announced the timing of a “meeting” lunch for negotiators with consumer rights groups in such a way that it was impossible for most of those groups to attend, and then the negotiators refused to reschedule to a more convenient time. Of course, some people were able to make it, and their reports suggest that ACTA negotiators never really intended to talk to consumer rights groups in the first place…

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux in Schools

France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the national police force, is in the process of switching its 90,000 workstations to Ubuntu Linux.

[...]

In 2006, the Kamloops School District started its journey into Linux at the Barriere Secondary School when the principal, Dean Coder, switched the entire school over to Linux. After the success of that pilot project the school district had difficulty keeping up with the demand from schools to help them switch. In September 2009, the transition was largely complete throughout the school district.

[...]

Linux is no longer a fringe operating system, but has widespread adoption at the high end of the market with organizations and companies at the leading edge of science and technology. Students who learn Linux may find a substantial advantage in job opportunities compared to those trained in Windows only.

Schools can benefit by lower costs. In these days of tight education budgets, money saved on computers can be put toward special programs, teachers and assistants, or reduced school fees.

Desktop

• Loss Leaders and Linux

  This also highlights what I believe to be the single biggest factor which limits widespread adoption of Linux on the consumer desktop: the lack of preloaded systems in retail stores. Yes, you can order a system with Linux preloaded from Dell or from Linux boutique vendors like System76, ZaReason or LinPC.us and that probably has helped with the growth of Linux desktop market share a little. However, until Linux systems are available side by side with Windows systems and are price competitive with Windows systems, including loss leaders, I don’t see how Microsoft’s hold on at least 80% of the market is going to be broken. This is particularly galling when systems that are sold with Windows perform so poorly when compared with the same system running Linux.

Server

• Tesla GPUs Come to IBM BladeCenter

  I think the most significant announcement at this year’s GPU Technology Conference was the one that didn’t get a press release. You have to forgive IBM, as they had a lot of Deep Things going on, I guess, but this is a big deal; Tesla M2070 GPUs are coming to BladeCenter.

Applications

• Portable Linux Apps: Not Always an Easy Schlep

  Portable Linux applications are versions of familiar apps like GIMP and OpenOffice that can reside on a USB drive and be carried around from computer to computer with the user’s settings and preferences intact. There are several places to find a variety of portable apps, but sometimes getting them to work correctly is more hassle than it’s worth.

• Nmap the port scanner

  Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing.

• Xnoise 0.1.11 released

  Lightweight music player Xnoise 0.1.11 has been released, adding support for Ubuntu 10.10′s new sound menu amongst many other changes.

• GIMPBox gives stable versions of The GIMP single window mode

  Gimpbox is not a fork or a depreciated build of GIMP but exists to provide a single window mode to users of the image editor on version 2.6.10 or earlier.

  The main sell of the script is that it does not require users to install any extra development packages, compile any builds form source or even add a PPA – all you need is your already installed version of GIMP and the script does the rest!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On CentOS 5.5

  • From Zero to Mobile Inventor in 10 Minutes

  • Getting Started with OpenStreetMap

  • Internationalizing Those Bash Scripts

  • Develop for Google Chrome – making apps and extensions

  • UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition)

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released

    PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released, it was a silent release and no changelog has been provided by the PlayOnLinux team.

    When a changlog becomes available I will post it here. In the mean time here is all the news releases since 3.8.1 shipped last month.

  • MN Company Lets You Run Windows Apps on a Mac the Easy Way

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2.32 Release Notes

    GNOME 2.32 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment for your computer. GNOME’s focus is ease of use, stability and first-class internationalisation and accessibility support. GNOME is Free and Open Source Software and provides all of the common tools computer users expect of a modern computing environment, such as e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia, and games. Furthermore, GNOME provides a flexible and powerful platform for software developers, both on the desktop and in mobile applications.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 14 Preview: What’s New in Fedora 14?

      Fedora 14 is on track for a final release date of November 02, 2010. If all 14 does is improve upon 13, Fedora will have another winner on its hands. Why? Fedora 13 was one of the strongest releases the Red Hat sandbox has had in a while. And with what Fedora 14 has under and above its hood, the next release should up the ante yet again for the Fedora distribution.

    • Spicy Fedora 14 Adds New Linux Flavor

      One new feature that desktop users may benefit from is the SPICE virtualization support included in Fedora 14. SPICE, the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment, is technology that Red Hat gained as part of its acquisition of Qumranet in 2008.

    • Fedora 14 adds MeeGo — and spiced-up virtualization

      The Fedora Project announced the Beta release of “Fedora 14 “Laughlin,” featuring faster JPEG downloads and MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks. The Fedora 14 Beta also adds improved debugging and IPMI server management, and debuts the “Spice” virtualization desktop framework and “Systemd” management technology for faster start-ups.

• Debian Family

  • Quick Impressions – Linux Mint Debian

    Linux Mint is exploring the “Rolling Distro” route.

    Recently they launched Linux Mint Debian Edition, or LMDE. I took some time to play with it, waiting for a proper time to do a full install and review.

    My impressions so far are largely positive though…

    [...]

    In short, I think that LMDE is a good direction for Linux mint, should they decide to go this direction. I believe that the six month upgrade cycle is beginning to irk some Ubuntu users, and a rolling distro can be a solution to the upgrade cycle.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • What is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud?

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Preview: Steady Progress for Maverick

      Maverick Meerkat, the next release of Ubuntu and its official derivatives, is scheduled to hit the Internet in two weeks’ time. When it does, users will find a more polished release that continues Canonical’s five-year trend of providing steady incremental improvements. Ubuntu continues to make small usability changes that push each desktop experience slightly forward without tripping up users, but all most people will notice is a faster, more stable Linux distribution.

      The public release of Maverick is slated for October 10 in order to play off of the day’s binary-like date (10/10/10). ISO images of the beta release are available (via both HTTP and Bittorrent) through ubuntu.com for Ubuntu Desktop, Netbook, and Server, as well as mainline variants such as Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and several others. I tested the Desktop release for several days, as it is the most commonly-selected option.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo Looks Pretty Great On Everyone Else’s Phones

      Just because Nokia’s been slow to deploy MeeGo doesn’t mean the developers over at MeeGo Wiki have to be. They’ve already managed to port the operating system to a Nexus One, Dell Streak, and HTC Desire.

    • MeeGo Gets Ported to Additional Smartphones

      Intel and Nokia have been stingy about showing off official MeeGo hardware, but that hasn’t stopped intrepid members of the MeeGo community from porting the open source mobile OS to other mobile devices.

  • Android

    • Coders tip Google Android for eclipse of the Steve

      Seventy-two per cent of developers believe that Google’s Android is “best positioned to power a large number and variety of connected devices in the future,” whereas only 25 per cent favor Apple’s iOS, according to a new study.

      Appcelerator – the outfit whose Titanium dev kit was recently freed from the threat of Jobsian destruction – has now teamed with tech research mainstay IDC on its regular mobile developer studies, and their first joint effort indicates that although developers are currently more interested in Apple’s platform, they see lots o’ Google in the future.

• Tablets

  • 7-Inch Tablet Will Launch in Coming Weeks, Says Dell

    That 7-inch tablet Michael Dell confirmed the other week? It’s launching in a matter of weeks, and an even larger one similar to the iPad’s size will trot out in 6 – 12 months’ time.

Events

• ElastixWorld 2010

  PaloSanto Solutions is pleased to announce that the inaugural ElastixWorld 2010 will take place over two days on November 18-19, 2010 in Quito, Ecuador, and you’re invited!!

  The main objective of this event is to share a common area with community members, hardware vendors, resellers and Elastix users alike, where we can exchange and expand on ideas related to product capabilities, future development and direction, experiences from implementers, feedback from users, and other related topics.

Web Browsers

• Chrome 60 times faster

  According to its Chromium blog the version 7 of the Chrome browser could get a healthy speed boost.

  Chrome already holds a strong position when it comes to speedy performance so increasing this even more could leave all other browsers in the dust.

• Mozilla

  • Jetpack 0.8 helps automate web site mashups

    Until recently, if you wanted to automatically modify the display of web site pages when you accessed them, you needed the Greasemonkey extension, but now the latest version of the still-in-development Jetpack, you can do the same with JavaScript. Jetpack 0.8 adds the PageMod API, which allows JavaScript code to be registered for execution when specified pages are loaded. Users can then add their own JavaScript instructions to the registered code to modify the formatting or the colour scheme. More advanced users and developers can add new interactive elements into the page to add functionality to an existing web page.

  • Firefox Never Coming to iPhone

    I a recent blog post on the official Mozilla blog, Prabhakar Raghavan laid out future plans for Firefox Home and in the process put the question of whether the popular open source browser would ever make the jump to the iPhone.

    The blog, titled “Firefox Home — looking to the future,” Raghavan outlined new features for Firefox Home, the cloud-based iOS app that synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and tabs between Firefox and an iOS device. Some new features mentioned in the post include the ability to share links, reviews, and comments directly with Facebook friends and Twitter followers via Firefox Home.

Oracle

• How Should OpenOffice.org Fix Itself?

  OpenOffice.org has established itself as the free alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite—but not necessarily the better alternative. Now the project heads are breaking off and starting LibreOffice. It’s a great chance to remake the project. So, what should they prioritize?

• New: OOo-DEV 3.3.x Developer Snapshot (build OOO330m9) available

• OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 needs QA

  People interested into good quality of OpenOffice.org 3.3 should at least start now to check the current OOO330m9 developer milestone to find show stopper issues. In a few weeks we will start OpenOffice.org’s release candidate phase. Please have a look at the new implemented features.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The FSF and Project Harmony

  We just published an article about contribution agreements for free software projects from our president Richard Stallman. You should read it if you haven’t already, but put briefly, it makes the point that organizations that collect contribution agreements for free software projects should not make that software proprietary, and recommends you ask for specific language in the contributor agreements you sign to ensure that your code is always available as free software.

Project Releases

• vtiger CRM 5.2.0 released

  The vtiger developers have announced the release of vtiger 5.2.0 with over 50 new features / enhancements and over 350 bug fixes. A popular, community developed Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), vtiger claims over 1.5 million downloads to date and is used by Nokia and the German Postbank, among other corporate customers.

Government

• Estonian Government publishes open source policy

  According to a report on osor.eu, the Open Source Observatory, the government of Estonia has published its policy on open source software. Estonia plans to recommend use of the EUPL for code developed or funded by Estonian public administrations and plans to create a software forge for this software.

• Calls for action on UK Government Open Source

  Among the other speeches at the event, Glyn Moody’s speech that emphasised that open source and open standards were good for everyone was well received as was Alan Lord of the Open Learning Centre (OLC) who spoke of the challenges faced by small, medium and large organisations implementing Free and Open Source Software.

  The obstacles currently facing advocates of public use of open source are rarely anything to do with the software itself. As Mark Taylor of Sirius IT pointed out in his speech, the top five companies take 80% of the governments IT spending. In the US, this figure is 50% and in the Netherlands as low as 20%. This means that UK Government IT projects is centered around these incumbent companies, who have historically supplied proprietary software.

Openness/Sharing

• Fund-raising and self-publishing (the open source way), Part one

  The primary open source graphics offering is a package named Scribus, a desktop publishing tool based on the same Qt framework as KDE, Skype, and LyX. Proprietary equivalents of Scribus are Adobe PageMaker, PagePlus, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. However, Scribus cannot read these formats as developers were concerned with copyright and the complexity of working backwards through the code.

  This program was developed by the Scribus team, a group of programmers who evidently did not promote themselves. The earliest reference on Wikipedia is from 2001, and the nicks of programmers presently maintaining the program were all that could be found through the Scribus website.

• Open Hardware

  • Arduino launches two new boards

    Open source hardware group, the Arduino Team, has announced two new Arduino micro-controller boards for open source hackers and developers to experiment with. Arduino’s board designs offer a micro-controller with numerous analogue and digital connections and a USB / Serial interface. The board designs are open source and there is a thriving community which uses the boards to create interactive objects and experiment with electronics. Some community members even use the design to build their own version of the Arduino board themselves.

Standards/Consortia

• Interested in free video formats? We need your help!

  We’re looking for a few volunteers willing to commit an average of a few hours per week as reliable technical consultants helping people transcode their videos to free formats like WebM and Ogg Theora.

  In particular, we want to provide this assistance for people who record videos of Richard Stallman’s speeches around the world, and other FSF events.

Funeral Directors Want To Put Monks In Jail For Offering ‘Unauthorized’ Coffins

Ah, regulatory capture. Down in Louisiana, there’s a law that makes it a crime (yes, a crime) for anyone other than a funeral parlor to sell “funeral merchandise.” This rule is enforced by the state’s “funeral regulatory board,” which (you guessed it) is mostly dominated by funeral parlor industry insiders. Now, a few years back, you may remember, there was a big Hurricane called Katrina. Among the massive damage done to the state of Louisiana, it also knocked down much of a large forest of pine trees on the property of the Benedictine monks at St. Joseph Abbey. With so many downed pine trees, the monks, in a lemons-into-lemonade type of moment, decided to use the downed trees to make hand-crafted caskets.

The Internet Needs a Dewey Decimal System

I need for people to be able to carry to the library the word processing they’ve done on donated computers to print on our library printers. These $2 flash drives are ideal for that. The fact that these flash drives come with a bootable version of Linux, well, that’s even nicer.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Arresting your customers isn’t the best PR

    One of the great things about the Internet is accessible information. The point is that it is a network of interconnectivity… that’s why it’s called the INTERnet.

    Many people still don’t get this. So sometimes old articles disappear. Which can lead to broken links.

    I just discovered a whole pile of broken links in my ACTA Articles, A.C.T.A. is BAD, errata: A.C.T.A. is BAD and A.C.T.A. is still BAD

    The Chicago Sun Times has removed the articles about Samantha Tumpach, the 22 year old Chicago woman who spent two nights in jail for videorecording her sister’s 29th birthday party.

    [...]

    Statements made by movie company executives in the articles I had linked to indicated they believed this arrest was justified under existing US law (DMCA).

    The Press Association story about the New Moon Director trying to make it up to her is also gone. (Funny how that served to point up the corporate heartlessness.)

    I don’t know whether the articles being expunged is a case of the Chicago Sun-Times not grasping the way the Internet is supposed to work, or if the embarassment factor (the theater chain, the movie company and the laws that allowed the arrest come out of this look very bad) had anything to do with it. Either way, my blog posts are left riddled with broken links as a result. Even the Wayback Machine can’t help (lending credence to the embarassment theory)

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Mocking fortunes

X windows:

The ultimate bottleneck.

Flawed beyond belief.

The only thing you have to fear.

Somewhere between chaos and insanity.

On autopilot to oblivion.

The joke that kills.

A disgrace you can be proud of.

A mistake carried out to perfection.

Belongs more to the problem set than the solution set.

To err is X windows.

The joy of installing hardware in Linux

I want to write about the bright side of Linux hardware management and support.

IS THERE A BRIGHT SIDE?

Contrary to what many believe, Linux hardware support is superb, which is not the same as saying it supports every single hardware part or device under the sun. This is a key concept that has been misinterpreted (and misused at times).

Desktop

• Chasms and Imagination

  GNU/Linux on the desktop has long ago ceased to be a geek/early-adopter thing. It is being accepted on the mainstream/mom and pop desktop now. That started happening with the netbook. Many millions of netbook users are not geeks and don’t know an OS from an application. They know GNU/Linux works and love it. OEMs have passed up that opportunity in some ways but consumers have not. They have bought GNU/Linux whenever and wherever it has been offered.

• Uncluttered Minds Do Not Care…

  Chase, Ami and Zeneda are three fairly recent recipients of HeliOS Project computers, ages 12, 13 and 11 respectively.

  When we go into a home to give a child a computer, one of the first things we do is explain to them that we have installed Linux on their computer, not Windows.

  This announcement is usually met with even stares or shrugs.

• How I converted my Office to Linux

  I use Linux for my TV, notebook, development (work & hobbies), electronics and thin clients.

  [...]

  Im a programmer at heart and although I do a lot of administration at work I try my best to minimise this with the use of technology be it hardware, software or scripts. What we had to start with Mixture of large noisy desktops Running Windows XP 100Mbps 24port switch 6 Staff, with requirements for 10 desktops (display screens, boardroom, casual employee and test computers) Safety net I had many safety nets as I was migrating…

Server

• Dell Servers Certified to Run Ubuntu Server Edition

  It’s a small step for Dell and symbolic victory for Ubuntu Server Edition, Canonical’s Linux distribution. Specifically, selected Dell PowerEdge servers are now certified to run Ubuntu Server Edition. Does that mean Dell is shifting away from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux? And what are the implications for Linux channel partners?

• Amazon Web Services unveils PHP tool kit

  Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a toolkit to make it easier to develop applications in PHP that will run on Amazon’s cloud, the company said on Wednesday.

  Using the AWS SDK for PHP, which works with PHP 5.2 or later versions, developers can build applications that use different parts of Amazon’s cloud, including Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for computing capacity, and the SimpleDB database.

• Red Hat KVM Virtualization Powers Banking Startup

  Financial services firm Ganart’s experience with the open source code as the basis for its check cashing kiosks indicates how Red Hat is positioning itself for growth in private clouds.

Applications

• Tuxpaint: hook ‘em on open source graphics while they’re young

  Tuxpaint is an open source graphics program that occupies a special niche: it is designed for children. This makes it a rarity in the software community known for every developer scratching his or her own itch. Thankfully there are developers reaching out of their comfort zone to write applications for those too young to learn Bash and Python on their own — without that effort, kids might not get exposed to free software until they took programming. If you have never looked at it, Tuxpaint deserves some attention, both because it is a great product for kids, and because it may make you rethink the approaches we take to user interfaces. On top of that, there are some intriguing raster graphics functions hidden behind that seemingly simple interface….

• OpenRUU For Linux And Mac OSX Users…

  The official HTC RUU files are only available for Windows, however if you are using either Linux or Mac OSX there is now a way to run a modified version of the RUU to enable you to update using the same official ROM, just read down through this guide and follow the instructions below.

• The fbida project contains a few applications for viewing and editing images.

  The fbida project contains a few applications for viewing and editing images, with the main focus being photos. The applications are:

  fbi
  This is a image viewer for the linux framebuffer console.

  fbgs
  A wrapper script for viewing ps/pdf files on the framebuffer console using fbi.

  ida
  This is a X11 application (Motif based) for viewing images. Some basic editing functions are available too.

• Proprietary

  • Graebert Releases ARES Commander for Linux

    Graebert GmbH, one of the pioneering companies in high-performance CAD solutions for desktop and mobile devices, today announced that its award-winning ARES Commander Edition 2D/3D CAD software for Linux is now immediately shipping and available. Offered at an introductory price of $495 through the end of October, this represents a 50% discount from the standard retail pricing of $995.

  • Popper – Email Notifier

    Popper reads the new emails from POP3 and IMAP email servers and notifies about the number, subject, sender and time of new emails in the indicator applet and via a notification bubble.

  • OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 2.2 released!

    After four months of development, the OpenGeo Suite team is happy to announce the new OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 2.2. In addition to performance improvements and increased stability this release includes a whole host of new features.

    With major improvements to Styler and GeoExplorer—as well as enhanced versions of PostGIS, GeoServer, and GeoWebCache—the new OpenGeo Suite 2.2 enables users to quickly perform more complex styling and composition. Responding to user requests, this new version also introduces printing, improved raster support, the Google Maps v3 API, and an improved GeoWebCache to provide seamless configuration of layer groups and control flow.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 6 Useful Nautilus Extensions and Scripts You Should Know

  • Linux Tip: How and when to use the dd command?

  • Upgrade Ubuntu from 10.04 to 10.10

  • How to Install / Configure / Use μTorrent Server on Linux system

  • Recover Lost or Deleted Partitions in Linux Using TestDisk

  • Autokey: Make Your Own Keyboard Shortcuts In Linux

  • Enable MP3, MPEG4, AAC, and Xvid etc for FFmpeg Ubuntu 10.04

  • Synaptic Package Manager Beginners Guide For Ubuntu Users

  • Drupal Site Configuration: Performance, Maintenance, Logging and Errors and Reports

  • OMG! 5! – Five Docky tips for docky-diehards

  • Steadyflow,simple download manager for Gnome

  • Bcache Testing: Large Files and a Wrap-Up

  • Open Source: My Migration from Kontact to Evolution

• Games

  • Welcome to Ubuntu Gamer!

    Ubuntu Gamer extends the Ohso network of sites even further, but this time specializing in gaming on Ubuntu. You will probably notice that a lot of elements bare a very close similarity to OMG! Ubuntu! – this is entirely on purpose. We have re-used a lot of the code for Ubuntu Gamer to make sure it has that consistent Ohso network feel.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Harmony brush adoption in Krita: Sketch

    Besides my sponsored work on Krita, I work in my spare time (if I find some) on some new features. I did a thesis about brush painting and I still enjoy this topic. So when I find some new interesting brush, that might be usable, I’m trying to adopt it in Krita as a new brush engine. Few months ago I discovered project Harmony and I liked the brushes there. Especially Sketchy, Shaded, Chrome, Fur and Long Fur. The idea for those brushes comes from concept of connecting neighbour points. The concept was realized first in Scribbler and Harmony was inspired. Then I adopted the Harmony version in Krita.

  • 5 Intriguing KDE Apps

    The beauty of an open development platform is that anyone can take a stab at creating an application. KDE, which is built upon the Qt application and UI framework, is a shining example of this. A quick look at KDE-Apps.org reveals that new apps are added daily. I periodically browse through the latest KDE apps to see if anything stands out, and I found these five, some of which are in early development.

• GNOME Desktop

  • How will GNOME 3.0 be Received?

    After a week of using GNOME Shell, the preview of GNOME 3.0, on Fedora 13, that is the closest I can come to a prediction about how GNOME’s new desktop will be received when it is officially released in the spring of 2011.

    On the one hand, GNOME Shell is an attractive and easy to use interface that integrates multiple workspaces better than any desktop that I’ve seen. On the other hand, it requires some adjustments in the way you work, and, in its present form, feels inflexible — although part of that inflexibility may be due to features that haven’t been implemented yet.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Spotlight on Linux: SliTaz GNU/Linux 3.0

    In the world of small size distributions, SliTaz is one of the most remarkable. Not only does it have one of the smallest download images, but it can also run on modest hardware while offering graphical applications with familiar interfaces. It’s one of the wonders of the Linux world.

    SliTaz ships as an installable live CD and features an attractively configured OpenBox window environment. Not only is it attractive, but also very familiar. Expected elements are in place on a lower panel such as an application launcher, system tray, task manager, pager, and traditional menu system. With the 30 MB ISO, one might expect only commandline applications, but SliTaz offers graphical applications for many tasks. For example, the Midori Web browser is featured and it offers many of the amenities that other more popular browsers have such as Speed Dial (visual bookmark page), tabs, and Private Browsing. Using the SliTaz Package Manager, get-flash-plugin can be installed to fetch and install Adobe’s Flash Player.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Best of Proposed Mageia Logo

    The Mageia project is a fork of Mandriva Linux. It is a brand new project, announced on September 18, 2010. There is an ongoing discussion about different aspects of the project, and one of those discussion revolves around the project’s logo. There have been some very good and some not so good logos proposed by community members, and what is being presented in this article are some of the proposed logos.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) CEO & President James M Whitehurst sells 25,000 Shares

    Red Hat Inc. has a market cap of $7.8 billion; its shares were traded at around $41.27 with a P/E ratio of 75 and P/S ratio of 10.4. Red Hat Inc. had an annual average earning growth of 22.7% over the past 5 years.

  • Pre-Market Update – Gapping Stocks (GMCR, HPQ, HAL, CRUS, RHT )

    Red Hat has been consolidating just below $42 for the past 5 trading sessions.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Software Center will have Zeitgeist Integration in Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’

      Ubuntu Software Center will have Zeitgeist integration in Ubuntu 11.04 as announced by Michael Vogt on his blog. Seif Lotfy, from Zeitgeist Developers’ Team proposed the idea of possible integration of Zeitgeist into Ubuntu Software Center.

    • zeitgeist support landed in software-center trunk

    • Googlubuntu Aims To Make Your Linux Mint / (K)Ubuntu Searches More Relevant

      Thanks to a tip from a friend, and the newly redesigned (and much maligned) Digg, a really handy, highly customized search engine was recently brought to our attention named Googlubuntu. How did we miss it? What Googlubuntu is, as you might guess, is a specialized search engine that pries through relevant ‘buntu domains in order to help you get your ‘buntu-fied answers faster – and presumably to weed out the nonsense stuff.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Beta 1 and a Dell M4500

      My Linux life has been pretty stable and mundane lately (other than a DAVMail outage, mentioned below). The main desktop runs Ubuntu 10.04, and it has been humming along without issue. Every now and then the summer rainstorms come along and pop the mains, and it and its companion PC, a Windows 7 system, crash to the ground. When power returns, the Linux system spins right back up and keeps right on going. The Windows 7 system committed Harikiri a couple weeks ago after one of the power hits, and it was a slow painful process to get it put back together. The office UPS system went to meet its maker a few month back, and I guess I should have replaced it sooner. I did not replace it because I had a new laptop coming, and I was rethinking the need for desktop PC’s at all. Laptops have their own built in UPS’s.

    • mFatOS – A fat Ubuntu

      mFatOS has a few big issues that need to be smoothed out.

      First, there are just too many programs available. I can understand variety and color, but it’s just too much. Adding applications for the sake of adding them does not help the average user. Sometimes, less is more.

      Second, the integration of various elements. Ubuntu logos all over the place, hard-coded repositories for developer’s country, applets in non-English configuration, browser history, GRUB menu layout, all of these are not done with enough care to make it feel professional enough.

      mFatOS joins a long series of quickly remastered Ubuntu forks, including OzOS, MoonOS, Zorin, Ultimate Edition, and some others. Like most of these, the integration of elements is not good enough. The magic is in the little details. Unfortunately, it takes months and months of dedicated work by entire developer teams and can’t be done easily.

      It’s very decent, it works well, it’s fairly suitable for the typical Linux user, and the offline stuff is a blessing for people with bad Internet. However, mFatOS does not have a critical WOW factor. If you’re looking for a heavily loaded distro that has it all, take a look at openSUSE Edu-Li-f-e. You may even want to consider PCLinuxOS. Another suitable choice could be Scientific Linux. Last but not the least, let’s not forget the one true fork of the highly successful Ubuntu family, Linux Mint, which really takes the remastering business to another level.

Devices/Embedded

• Tablets

  • Dell to Launch 7-Inch Tablet in Weeks Ahead

    Dell Inc. will launch its seven-inch tablet in the next few weeks and a 10-inch tablet within 6-12 months, Dell Greater China President Amit Midha said Wednesday.

  • Next Up for Netflix: Android Phones and Tablets?

    Now that Netflix has an app on the iPad and the iPhone, it could soon make a push into the Android ecosystem, based on job postings that have cropped up on the company’s website recently. The creation of an Android app could expand Netflix’s addressable audience on consumer electronic devices even further, especially with a group of new Android-based tablets set to launch.

Databases

• Open Source Databases Have Come of Age

  Client/server systems with SQL interfaces jockey for position against upstart NoSQL systems with intimidating (and exciting) new models for data representation, distribution and consistency. In addition, more than a dozen embedded and special purpose databases have grown up to serve the needs of applications too small or too agile to require a full RDBMS.

Oracle

• New: OOo-DEV 3.3.x Developer Snapshot (build OOO330m9) available

  Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev OOO330m9 is available for download.

  OOO330 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.3.x releases.

Government

• UK: Open source gets a place in long-term strategy city councils

  City councils in the United Kingdom are turning to using open source software to reach long-term goals to battle vendor lock-in, increase interoperability and save costs. The national government meanwhile is asking for business cases proving that using open source is cheaper.

• EE: Government publishes open source policy and starts repository

  The open source policy should help the public sector to cut costs and make the government more open. Other goals are to increase re-use and to make the government less dependent on certain software products.

Licensing

• The “Free Beer” Hangover

  Changes to the way mailing lists work are nothing new. I am a member of several Yahoo Groups. But I am also a member of a number of Google Groups and a mess of mailing lists running on Mailman. While reading the complaint, I had two thoughts.

  First, I was reminded of comments made by Stormy Peters at LinuxCon this year. She was talking about Facebook and Google and by implication Yahoo, when asking us if we were aware of all the things that these services provide and the licenses, for lack of a better word, that they provide them under. She pointed out that they are essentially offering free beer and we, as users are drinking it up without any thought of the costs afterwards. And as the folks decrying the changes in Yahoo’s Groups are discovering, some of those costs are pretty high.

Openness/Sharing

• Wikipedia Adds BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

  Streaming capabilities have been added to BitTorrent via the Tribler client, and more recently uTorrent. Thus far the implementation of these technologies into major websites has been lacking. That position changed this week as the Wikimedia Foundation partnered with P2P Next to use BitTorrent-powered streaming for their video content.

• Tunnel vision: Sydney movie maker stopped from listing free BitTorrent film

  A top movie website has rejected a thriller about a TV crew being hunted in tunnels – and the producers, including Andrew Denton, believe it’s because they want to give it away free.

  Sydney independent film producer Enzo Tedeschi said he tried five times since June to get the film, The Tunnel listed on the Internet Movie Database, IMDb.com.

  But each time it has been rejected and Mr Tedeschi – who has had other films accepted – believes it is because he wants to distribute it through BitTorrent – which is best known for the illegal sharing of movies and music.

  Getting listed on IMDb is important to a producer, as the site is considered the premier database used by industry professionals, including those in Hollywood.

  “Some people think that by releasing our film legitimately on peer-to-peer networks that we are condoning piracy,” said Tedeschi, who has worked in television and film for a decade.

Security

• Security advisories for Wednesday

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Mark Saunders siege police ‘had more than 100 guns’

  Police marksmen surrounding a gun-wielding barrister in a siege in west London were carrying more than 100 guns, an inquest has heard.

Finance

• Home prices to take hit next year in many markets

  Don’t take the latest snapshot of U.S. home prices too seriously.

  The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city index released Tuesday ticked up in July from June. But the gain is merely temporary, analysts say. They see home values taking a dive in many major markets well into next year.

  That’s because the peak home-buying season is now ending after a dismal summer. The hardest-hit markets, already battered by foreclosures, are bracing for a bigger wave of homes sold at foreclosure or through short sales. A short sale is when a lender lets a homeowner sell for less than the mortgage is worth.

• Recession rips at US marriages, expands income gap

  The recession seems to be socking Americans in the heart as well as the wallet: Marriages have hit an all-time low while pleas for food stamps have reached a record high and the gap between rich and poor has grown to its widest ever.

• Sour economic mood in living room and boardroom

  Americans in both the living room and the boardroom are growing more fearful about the economy, creating a Catch-22 for the job market: Shoppers won’t spend until they feel more secure, and business won’t hire until people start spending.

  The eroding views were revealed Tuesday by two separate surveys, one that found everyday Americans are increasingly pessimistic about jobs and another that found CEOs have grimmer predictions about upcoming sales.

• Biz leaders gloomy on economy

  A wide swath of U.S. businesses Tuesday reported that the economy has slowed significantly in the last few months, and they said that the tax stalemate in Washington was a major reason that flagging consumer sentiment is now endangering the recovery.

  In separate reports, big business members of the Business Roundtable, along with manufacturers, home builders and the oil industry gave gloomy assessments of the recovery and said Congress’ decision to postpone action on tax cuts until after the election was weighing heavily on consumer sentiment.

• Where Are All the Prosecutions From the Crisis?

  A consistent question since the financial crisis in 2008 is why has the federal government not prosecuted any senior executives for their roles in the collapse of firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns or the risky investments that led to bailouts of onetime financial giants like the American International Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How can companies worth billions of dollars just a few months earlier suddenly collapse in 2008 without someone being held responsible?

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• New sex laws: Conservatives ‘very concerned’

  Toronto judge Susan Himel says Canada’s prostitution laws meant to protect women and residential neighbourhoods are endangering sex workers’ lives.

  If her decision to strike down the laws stands, “prostitutes will be able to communicate freely with customers on the street, conduct business in their homes or brothels and hire bodyguards and accountants without exposing them to the risk of criminal sanctions”, says the Toronto Star.

  But the Stephen Harper government is “seriously considering” an appeal against the decision, says Xtra!.

  “Yesterday we had the naming of the commissioner for the Public Inquiry in Vancouver for the missing women,” NDP MP Libby Davies, part of a special parliamentary committee on sex laws, is quoted as saying in the story, going on:

  “These are related issues — what happens to women who are on the street who are involved in the sex trade, and the risks that they’re at. This is something that can’t just be swept under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

• People Behind the Internet Question Plan to Block Piracy Sites

  A group of engineers with legitimate claims to helping invent the Internet — and we’re not talking about Al Gore — are opposing a Senate bill intended to fight copyright infringement, saying it would endanger the system of domain names that underlies the Interne

• Political Porn Scandal Revealed as Internet Bungle

  The arch-conservative Christian Democratic Party is staunchly against pornography and defended the allegations, claiming any website visits logged were for “research purposes.”

  But Paul McLeay, the minister for the state’s ports and waterways, resigned after admitting he looked at adult and gambling websites on his parliamentary computer.

  However, further investigation revealed that McLeay — guilt aside — possibly resigned prematurely, while Nile probably was using the Internet for research purposes.

  Analysis of the audit left investigators red-faced when it was discovered that mainstream news websites had been classified as “adult” because of advertisements or links to matchmaking and dating sites.

• Thai Webmaster Arrested for Online Speech

  On Friday, the Director of a popular alternative Thai news portal Prachatai was arrested by the Thai government. Chiranuch Premchaipoen — popularly known as Jiew — was charged under the intermediary liability provisions of the 2007 Computer Crime Act and for “Lèse Majesté,” or defamation of the Thai royal family. She faces a 32-year prison sentence.

  Jiew’s crime? In 2008, Prachatai published an interview with Chotisak Onsoong, a Thai man known for refusing to stand at attention during the Thai Royal Anthem — a dangerous political act in Thailand, though not technically a crime. The interview received huge attention, drawing over 200 comments from Thai citizens. On April 28, 2008, complaints were filed against Prachatai alleging that several comments on that interview were a defamation to the Monarchy. An arrest warrant for Jiew was issued on Septemeber 8, 2009, but no summons was received by Jiew until her arrest this past Friday.

• Which words does Google Instant blacklist?

  Some folks at the Hacker publication 2600 decided to compile a list of words that are restricted by Google Instant.

  Except in extreme and special cases, Google is known for anything but censorship, but as we’ve said before, there are some terms the web giant’s new instant search feature won’t work with.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Public consultation on the open internet and net neutrality

  DG Information Society and Media has launched a public consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality. European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, announced in April 2010 her intention to launch this consultation in order to take forward Europe’s net neutrality debate. The consultation is part of the Commission’s follow-up to its commitment – one of the prerequisites for the successful conclusion of the 2009 EU telecoms reform package – to scrutinise closely the open and neutral nature of the internet and to report on the state of play to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Seriously? ASCAP Still Wants A Performance License on Downloads

    The download part of the decision may seem rather obvious to the outside observer, though in the post-analog land grab, traditional definitions seem to carry little weight. “[We] are, of course, disappointed in the Court’s decision that there is no public performance in the transmission of certain musical downloads,” ASCAP told Digital Music News. “We are studying the decision and will determine what further action is appropriate.”

  • A Field Guide to Copyright Trolls

    With all of this talk about copyright trolls and spamigation, it is easy to get confused. Who is suing over copies of Far Cry and The Hurt Locker? Who is suing bloggers? Who is trying to protect their anonymity? Who is defending fair use? What do newspapers have to do with any of this? In order to cut through the confusion, here’s a concise guide to copyright trolls currently in the wild, with status updates.

  • BT embroiled in ACS:Law porn list breach

    BT has admitted it sent the personal details of more than 500 customers as an unsecured document to legal firm ACS:Law, following a court order.

    The news could put BT in breach of the Data Protection Act, which requires firms to keep customers’ data secure at all times.

    The e-mails emerged following a security lapse at ACS:Law.

    A BT official admitted “unencrypted” personal data was sent, adding it “would not happen again”.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Linux 2.6.35.7

  I’m announcing the release of the 2.6.35.7 kernel. This is only needed if you run Xen, there was a typo that caused problems. My fault, sorry.

• Linux 2.6.36-rc6 Kernel Released

  The Linux 2.6.36 kernel is just about here. Linus Torvalds has now released the sixth RC build of this upcoming 2.6.36 build. In the past week since 2.6.36-rc5 was released, there’s been many more regression fixes going into the kernel, but still it’s not in a state ready for release by Linus’ standards.

• Graphics Stack

  • The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

    We’ve said it a few times already that the R600g driver continues to advance, but this open-source Gallium3D graphics driver that provides hardware acceleration for ATI R600/R700/Evergreen ASICs (the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 graphics cards) has now received another huge boost with what has been dubbed as the “new design” and with the latest Mesa Git code these new code paths are used by default.

    Jerome Glisse describes the R600g driver’s “new design” on the Mesa development list for those interested in all of the technical details behind it and/or were curious what the stream of Git commits against Mesa master referencing this new design were all about.

Applications

• Xnoise music player adds Sound Menu integration

• OpenShot 1.2.2 Now Supports Export of Video in HTML5 WebM Format

  As you should know already, the WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. Latest Open Shot 1.2.2 now has an option to export your videos in WebM format.

• Rhythmbox Needs an Overhaul, 100(or less) Papercuts for Rhythmbox Maybe?

  Rhythmbox is, as you all know, the default gnome music player and default music player for Ubuntu as well. Canonical integrated Ubuntu One Music Store with Rhythmbox through a plugin with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” and the implementation works pretty good. The store has a discreet selection of music if you live in UK or USA, for everyone else it’s a very small selection of music, but that’s another story.

• gThumb 2.12.0 (Stable) Has Been Released [Ubuntu PPA]

  Finally, after a long period of development, a new stable gThumb version has been released: 2.12.0. We’ve been following the gThumb development here at WebUpd8 so you should already be up to date with all the changes. To mention just a few new features since the last stable version (not development!): Facebook, Flickr, PicasaWeb and Photobucket export, import from Flickr and PicasaWeb, gThumb can now play videos and many many other new features and improvements which I’ll not cover since we already talked about all of them throughout the gThumb 2.12 development posts (gThumb 2.11.x was the development branch for gThumb 2.12). You can read all about the gThumb 2.12.0 new features by browsing our gThumb posts.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • An Inconvenient Truth

• GNOME Desktop

  • Software Center with a dose of Zeitgeist and maybe Teamgeist

    Today the Zeitgeist team showed Michael Vogt a possible integration of Zeitgeist with Software Center. And guess what he likes it and he will look into making it become a soft dependency. He will look into merging our branch soon. All it does is tell you how many times you used an application in the detailed view.

  • Ubuntu Software Centre with a pinch of Zeitgeist? More please!

    Stat fans looking to get a informational fix on the applications they use may be interested to hear news on semantic tracking tool Zeitgeist’s latest possible excursion into the desktop – via the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat v. Oracle: Which is More Standards Compliant?

    RHEL 5 was released in February 2007, while LSB 3.2 was still being put together for its January 2008 release. So Red Hat did put a little effort into getting compliant with the then-cutting edge LSB release. I might suspect that when RHEL 6 comes out, it will be compliant with LSB 4.0 (or whatever’s available at that time). But I have some concerns: Red Hat hasn’t gotten any of its RHEL-5 point releases updated to LSB 4.0 yet, even though it has had plenty of opportunity to do so.

    While I have issues with Oracle’s spin-doctor moves to lock more users into its hardware offerings, I think I will be a little hard-pressed to call Oracle Linux a complete knock-off of RHEL. In this instance, it seems clear that Oracle, which has not always been the best open-source player, has actually put in the extra effort to maintain current LSB certification.

  • Red Hot?

  • Fedora

    • Is Fedora’s Boot Time Increasing?

      The last time we closely examined the boot performance of Fedora Linux was in 2008 when comparing the boot times from Fedora Core 4 through Fedora 8. However, with more distributions taking pride in recent months over shortening their boot time — with Canonical for example having worked towards a ten second Ubuntu boot time — we decided to see how long it’s taking Fedora to put its hat on these days. With the three Intel notebooks we used from our recent Fedora power consumption review, we measured the boot times using Bootchart on the Fedora 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 Alpha releases.

    • Graphics Test Week starts tomorrow!

      It’s been creeping up, and now it’s time: the world-famous Graphics Test Week begins tomorrow, with the Fedora 14 Nouveau Test Day! That is 2010-09-28. As always, the event runs all day in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC (you can connect with WebIRC). To complete Graphics Test Week, the Radeon Test Day takes place the following day, Wednesday 2010-09-29, and Intel Test Day takes place Thursday 2010-09-30.

      As always, we’ll be testing a range of graphics driver functions, and we need as many people as possible to join in so we can evaluate the widest possible range of hardware and identify as many bugs as possible for the developers to fix. You can do all the testing from a live image – no need for an installed copy of Fedora 14, though you can test that way too if you like – and the testing is very easy, there are step-by-step instructions for each test and for entering your results. And of course, there’ll be many people in IRC to help with testing and debugging.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Community Artwork – Building Bridges

      With nearly all of the design work complete for Maverick Meerkat some folks are reflecting on Community and the path which lead to here. The Ubuntu Artwork Team and perhaps others are trapped by the pressure to produce in a manner which competes with established professional players and finding resources with the time and skills to complete tasks on time. With the desire to move Ubuntu into the mainstream, Canonical added talented resources to the design team leaving Community members standing on the side line to wonder how they can get back into the game. To add additional confusion to the mix the paradigm changed as new players entered and challenged existing norms.

    • Ubuntu Hardware Summit Success !

    • ARM A15: A Game Changer

      ARM based devices are ubiquitous, just like Linux. You may of not of even heard of ARM, just like you may not of heard of Linux, but making a phone call or searching on Google means you could already using their technologies.

      ARM, just like Linux, is a quiet pioneer, prevalent in the background just waiting for the opportunity to become mainstream. Whether mainstream is the goal, prevalence most definitely is on the agenda.

    • Something New and Beautiful: Ubuntu, distilled, in type

      Ubuntu is a global phenomenon, and we knew at the start we didn’t have the breadth of eyeballs close at hand to keep the font on track as it expanded. So we planned a process of expanding consultation. First within Canonical, which has folks from nearly 30 countries, and then within the Ubuntu community. We published the font to Ubuntu Members, because we wanted folks who participate and contribute directly to Ubuntu to have the strongest say in the public process of designing the font. We heard from Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, Chinese and many other cultures. Not everyone has glyphs in this first round, but everyone has had a hand in bringing us to this milestone.

    • Interview with Leann Ogasawara

      My name is Leann Ogasawara and I’ve been working for Canonical for the past 3 years. Since joining the Ubuntu Kernel Team, I’ve been involved with QA and triaging, stable maintenance, and am now this cycle’s Ubuntu 10.10 kernel release manager.

    • ‘Party the real way for Ubuntu 10.10’ says Vancouver LoCo team

      “Don’t Call It A ‘Party’ If It’s Not!” yells the catchy slogan from the Ubuntu Vancouver LoCo team in their promotional call-to-arms for celebrating Ubuntu 10.10’s release next month.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • LMNR (Linux Mint Netbook Remix)

        I’ve stumbled upon a version of an as-yet-unnanounced new edition of Linux Mint, LMNR (Linux Mint Netbook Remix). It appears to be a netbook UI on top of the regular Linux Mint 9 Gnome edition. It looks very nice, and appears to be the answer to those with small screen netbooks who want the polish of Linux Mint.

      • Edubuntu 10.10 boasts many surprises

        Ubuntu’s education spin ‘Edubuntu’ has gained a new-look installer, some new applications and much more for its 10.10 release coming next month.

        Talking about the changes Edubuntu’s Jonathan Carter notes that whilst 10.10 doesn’t see the spin receive as big a overhaul as 10.04 had it nevertheless continues to build on the work laid down then, making for a ‘very good’ release.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo port for Dell Streak, HTC Desire and Nexus One

      Various developers have ported the handset variant of MeeGo, a platform mainly sponsored by Intel and Nokia, to a variety of smartphones that ship with Google’s Android. A page in the MeeGo wiki provides details about the ports’ current state of development and shows a Nexus One and a HTC Desire with the MeeGo handset user interface. Another photo shows a MeeGo command line log-in prompt on a Dell Streak.

• Tablets

  • Chromium OS infiltrates iPad, makes itself comfortable

    What is this madness we see before us? Hexxeh, he who provides your nightly Chromium builds, has dropped a small but perfectly formed bombshell by revealing that he’s managed to install Google’s nascent OS onto Apple’s hotcake of a tablet, the iPad.

Practical Open Source Software Exploration

What makes Zeitgeist tick

Zeitgeist is a prototype developed by BBC Research & Development to discover and track the most shared BBC webpages on Twitter. An overview of the project has already covered in our previous post.

Today we’re publishing the full source code of this system under the GNU GPLv3 licence on github at http://github.com/bbcrd/zeitgeist.

This post will discuss the technical architecture of the system, how we approached various problems, and our technical learnings from building the system.

From a research point of view, we were particularly interested in two things:

* The Twitter Streaming API and how it worked in practice
* Whether a messaging pipeline architecture would be a good fit for this problem domain

The system consists of an interface to the Twitter Streaming API which passes tweets to a processing pipeline. The pipeline finds and extracts links to the BBC, resolving shortened and redirected urls. Continuously-running background jobs extract page metadata and handle retweets and deletions. Finally, there’s a web interface to present the results to end users, which was written using the well-tested software stack of Sinatra, Thin and nginx, all fronted by a Squid proxy. The Zeitgeist database is mysql, the modelling done using Datamapper.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Elementary Firefox hits version 2.0

    An updated version of elementary styled Firefox theme ‘Firefox elementary’ has been released today.

    The theme helps to seamlessly integrate Ubuntu’s default web browser into your Elementary themed desktop.

Databases

• Couchapp Walkthrough – Part 1

  Couchapps are a particular way of using couchdb that allow you to serve web applications directly from the database. These applications generate HTML and javascript to present data from couchdb to the user, and then update the database and the UI based on their actions.

  Of course there are plenty of frameworks out there that do this sort of thing, and more and more of them are adding couchdb support. What makes couchapps particularly interesting are two things. Firstly, the ease with which they can be developed and deployed. As they are served directly from couchdb they require little infrastructure, and the couchapp tool allows for a rapid iteration. In addition, the conveniences that are provided mean that simple things can be done very quickly with little code.

  [...]

  In addition to all the client-side tools for interacting with the database, it is also possible to make use of couchdb features such as shows, lists, update handlers validation functions in order to move some of the processing server-side. This is useful for various reasons, including being more accessible, allowing search engines to index the content, and not having to trust the client not to take malicious actions.

Oracle

• James Gosling Interview – 9/22/10

  James Gosling: Well, the tshirt had been kinda fun. I am yet to see anyone wear one.

  Moderator: (jokingly) yeah, we’ve been all “taken care of” by the Oracle employees already, that’s why you don’t see us wearing them.

  James Gosling: Various Oracle employees have been instructed not to wear them. I’ve noticed this is a great tshirt to wear in big crowds around here because the seas just parts, ‘cuz people are like, ‘I don’t want to be near that.’ Which I find really funny. And the whole free java thing is kind of a weird history with me because Sun from day zero is an open source company and this whole weirdness that we have about open source was not a weirdness open source but a weirdness about the actors and the games in the drama. So when the start of the Java foundation thing happened in 2007 what we have to understand is that that was entirely orchestrated by Oracle. Oracle wrote that bizarre clause that went in that one set of meeting minutes, they wrote that. They went around to everyone in DC and said it is the sense of the executive committee that the Java community would be best served by the established new Java and Java foundation. And so if you’re an open source contributor, participant, that all sounds really good. And fundamentally we agreed with that. The problem was that A. it was driven by Oracle whose motives were more than slightly not what we wanted them to be, and they had strong-armed a bunch of people into signing in ways that made them uncomfortable. And some folks like IBM I mean, IBM’s been kind of weird on the whole topic because on the one hand they do everything they can to try and screw Sun over, I mean they didn’t name eclipse casually

  Moderator: I was surprised that they aren’t the ones that bought Sun

BSD

• I brought out the OpenBSD 4.7-stable laptop and ran the latest patch

  I managed to get sshd running (I declined to do this during the installation), allow X over ssh and connect and run X sessions from both my Fedora 13 laptop and Windows XP box (the latter running PuTTY and Xming).

  So X over SSH is working on the OpenBSD box.

Openness/Sharing

• Generation Facebook and higher education

  Many challenges lurk at the intersection of the open world of FOSS and the (traditionally) closed world of the college classroom. Perhaps it is because I’m reading The Starfish and the Spider with my first-year students right now, but I believe there are a lot of opportunities for educators who embrace the chaos and find ways to support their students in entering into and flourishing in the connected world of decentralized learning.

Programming

• Interview with James Gosling

  About a half hour into our libations in walks a legend: James Gosling, creator of Java itself. Nervously, but keeping our cool, we approached and introduced ourselves. We left it at that. As the beers flowed, our courage and machinations began too as well. “What if, now just what if, we could get Gosling to do a cast?” But doubting thoughts prevailed: “Nah we aren’t big enough” “Do we really want to disturb a guy drinking his beer?” Quickly some of the Coder’s wives keyed into our anxiety over the issue. Wanting to play match maker, they approached James and asked him if he’d be willing to do a podcast with us. And wouldn’t you know it, he whipped out his iPhone (yay James!), opened his calendar and said “Sure! What works for you guys?”

Once More, With Feeling: Embracing ‘Free’ Doesn’t Mean You Make No Money

I usually like The Guardian, but Lindvall’s work is not up to its normal standards. Free is a part of a business model. That’s all anyone’s saying. And when you say that it means you do believe in a larger business model, which means making money. I’m always amazed at how people like Lindvall seem to have their brains stop in their tracks when they get to the big 0, and never reach the other side of the tracks where it’s explained how you use that $0 to make money elsewhere.

AOL Acquires TechCrunch

The rumors have proven true: AOL is snapping up Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch family of sites. The site will share a stable with AOL’s other major tech property, Engadget, along with TUAW, Switched, and DownloadSquad. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Business Insider has a source claiming the site went for $25 million.

Science

• Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans

  Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

• PICTURES & VIDEO: British team proves flapless flight with Demon UAV

  Manoeuvring without the aid of control surfaces has been demonstrated by an unmanned air vehicle designed by a British team of industry and academic specialists.

• Why cell phone talkers are annoys-makers

  Cell phone users irritate so mightily because their background chatter forcibly yanks listeners’ attention away from whatever they’re doing, says psychology graduate student Lauren Emberson of Cornell University. Overhearing someone spewing intermittent exclamations into a handheld gadget lacks the predictability of hearing a two-way exchange and thus proves inherently unsettling, Emberson and her colleagues report in an upcoming Psychological Science.

• Solar cells thinner than wavelengths of light hold huge power potential, Stanford researchers say

  In the smooth, white, bunny-suited clean-room world of silicon wafers and solar cells, it turns out that a little roughness may go a long way, perhaps all the way to making solar power an affordable energy source, say Stanford engineers.

  Their research shows that light ricocheting around inside the polymer film of a solar cell behaves differently when the film is ultra thin. A film that’s nanoscale-thin and has been roughed up a bit can absorb more than 10 times the energy predicted by conventional theory.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• DHS Launches Cyber Attack Exercise

  For three or four days this week, the Internet will come under a virtual attack from an unknown adversary, and it will be up to the government and private sector’s coordinated efforts to root out the cause and work together to keep systems up and running — at least within the simulated confines of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Storm III exercise, which begins Tuesday.

  The Cyber Storm series of exercises simulates large cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and government IT assets in order to test the government’s preparedness. Specifically, this year’s exercise will be the first time DHS will test both the draft National Cyber Incident Response Plan (an effort to provide a coordinated response to major cybersecurity incidents) that will be publicly released later this year and the new National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (the hub of DHS’ cybersecurity coordination efforts).

• Soldier confesses to ‘thrill kill’

  In a disturbing video, a young corporal admits his role in the killings of unarmed Afghan civilians — alleging that his superior egged him on

• FBI drive for encryption backdoors is déjà vu for security experts

  The FBI now wants to require all encrypted communications systems to have backdoors for surveillance, according to a New York Times report, and to the nation’s top crypto experts it sounds like a battle they’ve fought before.

  Back in the 1990s, in what’s remembered as the crypto wars, the FBI and NSA argued that national security would be endangered if they did not have a way to spy on encrypted e-mails, IMs and phone calls. After a long protracted battle, the security community prevailed after mustering detailed technical studies and research that concluded that national security was actually strengthened by wide use of encryption to secure computers and sensitive business and government communications.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Shell in row over Brazilian Indian land grab

  Brazilian authorities have written to energy giant Shell expressing concern over the activities of its new Brazilian joint-venture partner, which is producing biofuels from land taken from an impoverished Indian tribe.

  Last month, Shell signed a $12 billion deal to produce biofuels from sugar cane with Brazilian biofuels giant Cosan. But some of Cosan’s sugar cane is grown on land officially recognized as belonging to Guarani Indians.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Motorcyclist wins taping case against state police

  A Harford County Circuit Court judge ruled this afternoon that a motorcyclist who was arrested for videotaping his traffic stop by a Maryland State Trooper was within his rights to record the confrontation.

  Judge Emory A Pitt Jr. tossed all the charges filed against Anthony Graber, leaving only speeding and other traffic violations, and most likely sparing him a trial that had been scheduled for Oct. 12. The judge ruled that Maryland’s wire tap law allows recording of both voice and sound in areas where privacy cannot be expected. He ruled that a police officer on a traffic stop has no expectation of privacy.

• An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee

  Today, 89 prominent Internet engineers sent a joint letter the US Senate Judiciary Committee, declaring their opposition to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA). The text of the letter is below.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Guest column: Copyright is no justification for digital locks

  Many creators start with views similar to what Stephen Ellis wrote in this space on Friday. While some retain this naive view, others take the time to learn how the technology in question works. They change their views once they speak with independent technical people, and go through the legal and economic analysis of real-world technology. Far from digital locks protecting copyright, they are the greatest threat to copyright and the interests of creators.

  I will not speak about audiences of copyrighted works. I am a creators’ rights activist trying to protect the interests of fellow creators, and oppose the C-32 digital locks based on this. The fact that digital locks also harm the interests of consumers is in addition to its harm to creators, not a matter of allegedly balancing the interests of one over the other.

• TalkTalk, BT: we’d put iPlayer in the slow lane

  The UK’s two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they’d give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so.

  Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Challenge To Graham Henderson: Please Point Out Who Believes Music Should Just Be A Hobby

    There’s been a bizarre shift lately in the recording industry’s attempt to demonize people who believe in embracing new business models and new technologies in the music business. We just wrote about Universal Music’s Jim Urie claiming that “copyleft” supporters don’t care about art, and along those same lines, Zeropaid points us to Graham Henderson, the head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA — which is almost entirely dominated by foreign companies) going to Washington DC to lobby in favor of more draconian copyright laws.

  • Appeals Court Tells ASCAP: A Download Is Not A Performance

    A few years back, we covered the legal fight pitting ASCAP against Yahoo and RealNetworks, where the two internet companies were told to pay up based on a ridiculously arbitrary fee formula, including a totally made up multiplier called the “music-use-adjustment-fraction.” The really scary part was that it calculated the revenue based on all of Yahoo’s revenue. So, yes, even though Yahoo makes most of its revenue in ways that have nothing to do with music, its total revenue is used as part of the calculation. The one good thing that came out of the legal fight was the court making it clear to ASCAP that a download is not a performance, which requires a separate fee. As you may recall, ASCAP has been trying to claim just about anything involving music is a “public performance,” in a weak attempt to get more cash.

  • The “legal blackmail” business: inside a P2P settlement factory

    UK pornographer Jasper Feversham was fed up. The Internets were sharing his films, quality work like Catch Her in the Eye, Skin City, and MILF Magic 3. He wanted revenge—or at least a cut. So Feversham signed on to a relatively new scheme: track down BitTorrent infringers, convert their IP addresses into real names, and blast out warning letters threatening litigation if they didn’t cough up a few hundred quid.

    “Much looking forward to sending letters to these f—ers,” he wrote in an email earlier this year.

    The law firm he ended up with was ACS Law, run by middle-aged lawyer Andrew Crossley. ACS Law had, after a process of attrition, become one of the only UK firms to engage in such work. Unfortunately for Crossley, mainstream film studios had decided that suing file-sharers brought little apart from negative publicity, and so Crossley was left defending a heap of pornography, some video games, and a few musical tracks.

  • Law firm faces huge fine over leak of personal files

    A law firm that pursues the owners of internet accounts linked to alleged illegal downloads of music and films was warned yesterday it faces a swingeing fine after the personal details of a further 8,000 people were leaked online.

    The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said that ACS:Law, which has sent thousands of letters to suspected internet “pirates” asking them to pay compensation of £500, could be forced to pay up to £500,000 if it is found that the company has flouted data protection law by failing to safeguard personal details on its computer system.

  • 7 Bit Torrent Piracy Suits Target 5,469

    In one of the largest swoops targeting bit torrent piracy, numerous suits were filed Friday against 5,469 suspected of poaching porn off the Internet, XBIZ has learned.

    West Coast Productions, Combat Zone, Third World Media and Patrick Collins Inc. filed seven suits at U.S. District Court in Martinsburg, W. Va., against the bit torrent users whose IP addresses were tracked.

    All of the suits were filed by attorney Kenneth J. Ford at U.S. District Court in Martinsburg, W. Va., and seek to identify each user through their Internet service providers. Each asks for injunctive relief and damages.

  • A Look At The Technologies & Industries Senators Leahy & Hatch Would Have Banned In The Past

    The more I look at the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA) bill proposed by Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch (and co-sponsored by Sens. Herb Kohl, Arlen Specter, Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Evan Bayh and George Voinovich) the worse it looks. The idea behind the bill is to give the Justice Department the ability to avoid due process in shutting down or blocking access to sites deemed “dedicated to infringing activities.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Migrating to GNU/Linux

  I am fortunate. My IT is straight forward. I set up GNU/Linux servers and GNU/Linux desktops and everyone (almost) is happy. It works reliably and I don’t need to fix much. Others have a more challenging task. Leaving the servers GNU/Linux and migrating the desktops to the next version of that other OS did not work for them. Perhaps eventually they will be able to make the desktops GNU/Linux and life will be easier. If you read the comments, you will find others did.

• Children in Brazil and Asia get computers for first time with low-cost Linux software

  A Linux-based software that lets you use one computer to control ten separate ones has been in “overwhelming demand” from schools in Asia and South America according the makers Userful.

  The computer system called Userful Multiseat Linux lets anyone provide desktop computers at a fraction of traditional costs, which opens up computers to places with less money to spend.

• M$ v World

  UPDATE At the end of an article linked from the one mentioned above, ARS Technica reported in July 2010 that only 63% of their visitors used that other OS and 6% used GNU/Linux. Clearly, they have different visitors than NetApplications counts. ARS shows 26% use MacOS although Apple says they produce only about 3% of PCs.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • [ANNOUNCE] xf86-video-ati 6.13.2

  • [Mesa-announce] Mesa 7.9-rc1

Applications

• Shotwell – The New Photo Manager in Ubuntu 10.10

  As many of you already know, Shotwell will replace F-Spot in the next Ubuntu release, Maverick Meerkat, which is scheduled for October 10. Shotwell is a GTK photo management application which organizes your photos in a collection, allows them to be tagged and rated, and more.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Softlinks vs. Hardlinks: A Quick Explanation

  • How To Integrate ClamAV Into PureFTPd For Virus Scanning On Fedora 13

  • Login to Ubuntu using your face

  • Bash Programming Tutorial 2 – More about Bash Programming

  • Bash Programming Tutorial 2 – More about Bash Programming

  • Safely Remove PPAs and Roll Back to Stable Versions in Ubuntu

  • Top 10 Beginner Level Video Tutorials To Learn GIMP Fast

  • The easiest way to set up Samba for file-sharing

  • Lock package versions,keep application at specific version in Ubuntu

  • Linux Server Monitoring with Bijk

  • Using the SHA2 hash family with OpenGPGv2 cards and GnuPG

  • Turn off modeline support in Vim

  • Some tips for troubleshooting packages on your system or Ouch! the Pain!

  • Restricting a user’s shell permissions on Ubuntu Server 10.04 with lshell

  • How to use rsync to backup and synchronize files to USB drive

  • What’s the Difference Between Single and Double Quotes in the Bash Shell?

  • Open Source Software Shortcut — Escaping SSH With ‘~’

  • 6 Useful Linux One Liners

  • Flash Movie Running on Linux with GNU Gnash

    Flash movie is an animation file format is quite popular. The file format contains animated interactive and can run the content contains audio and video. Often used to make the website more interactive with various animations, run the file formats such as mp3 audio and video as flv, up to to create an online game.

    In Linux, the file format flash movie that contains the extension .Swf can be run using the GNU Gnash. This lightweight application functions to run the flash movie file, capable of running many features of SWF version 7, and several features of version 8 and version 9. Although not yet support the Gnash SWF version 10, but Gnash is more than enough to run the flash movie files in Linux.

• Games

  • Krum – Hack-N-Slash cRPG Under Development !

    Krum is an open source hack-n-slash cRPG that is being developed with Blender by one man named haidme from Bulgaria.
    The game would be combat oriented 3rd person, gore heavy cRPG in which you will be in complete control of your moves and slice enemies to pieces.
    You will have many weapons to choose from and attack to perform.
    It’s a very professional and impressive looking game even for a team of developers, while the release date is unknown Krum promises a lot already.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Commit-Digest September 26, 2010

Distributions

• Measured in geologic time…

• Clonezilla: Recovery for many file systems

  Clonezilla, a disaster recovery, disk cloning, disk imaging and deployment solution, features major enhancements and updates in its latest release. The new version 1.2.6-24 comes with Linux kernel 2.6.32-23 and is based on the Debian Sid repository. Support for the Btrfs file system has been added, and the release was successfully tested with Ubuntu Maverick beta and OpenSuse 11.3 restoration. However, author Steven Shiau cautions that the Btrfs file system is still in beta and therefore unsupported.

• Pinguy OS

  • Pinguy OS 10.04.1.2 released and Review included

    Pinguy OS should run reasonably well on a computer with the following minimum hardware specification. However, features such as visual effects may not run smoothly.

    * 700 MHz x86 processor
    * 384 MB of system memory (RAM)
    * 8 GB of disk space

    [...]

  • Pinguy OS 10.04.1.2

    Summary: Pinguy OS provides a complete desktop distro solution that newbies and experienced users alike can enjoy.

    Rating: 4/5

• Red Hat Family

  • 3 Stocks That Blew the Market Away

    Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is another welcome overachiever in enterprise software. The company building cost-effective subscriptions on top of open-source Linux software generated a profit of $0.19 a share in its latest quarter. Wall Street was settling for net income to clock in at $0.18 a share.

  • 2 Tech Firms Toast Feats

    Allis said his goal is to create a homegrown, publicly traded success story, like Raleigh-based Red Hat, a software company known for its worker-friendly culture of ice cream socials and fine art on the walls.

  • Notable Stock Earnings Surprises

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) shares surged 11.24% to $40.83 following a fall of 4.40% in the regular hours. The company late Wednesday reported its fiscal second-quarter results, that easily beat the analysts’ consensus.

  • Red Hat Priced Like It’s 1999: Expect a Hangover Like 2001 – cbl

  • Why is Red Hat promoting Flash video content?

    One thing I find annoying is that all of the videos from the KVM Forum 2010 event have been posted to Vimeo… and seem only available in streaming Flash format.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 14 on System Z alive and kicking!

      The Fedora s390x team[1] is happy to announce the first installable Fedora on IBM System Z (aka s390x) since Fedora 6!

      It’s been a long time in the making, but after several Fedora releases since we started getting everything up into shape again we’ve finally reached a point where we can provide an installable version of Fedora on IBM System Z again.

    • Announcing the release of Fedora 14 Beta!!

    • Get the next Fedora, right now.

    • Fedora 14 Beta Emerges with Latest in Open Source Software

      Emergence is the process by which simple interactions give rise to more complex and ordered patterns and systems, such as the intricacies we see in snowflakes. The Beta release of Fedora 14 “Laughlin” similarly provides a preview of some of the best free and open source technology currently under development, integrated into an ordered distribution that anyone can freely download, use, modify, and redistribute.

    • Fedora presents…Graphics Test Week this week

      It’s been creeping up, and now it’s time: the world-famous Graphics Test Week begins tomorrow, with the Fedora 14 Nouveau Test Day! That is 2010-09-28. As always, the event runs all day in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC (you can connect with WebIRC). To complete Graphics Test Week, the Radeon Test Day takes place the following day, Wednesday 2010-09-29, and Intel Test Day takes place Thursday 2010-09-30.

• Debian Family

  • Debian != Ubuntu! — “Please download the voice plugin to make a call”

    No, this isn’t Debian’s fault. This is Google’s fault. Google didn’t clue in that Debian and Ubuntu aren’t the same distribution. Sure, they both use dpkg, but saying that makes them compatible is like saying Slackware and Linux-From-Scratch are the same because they both use tarballs for packages, or like saying RedHat and OpenSuSE are the same because they both use rpm.

  • Review: aptosid 2010-02 “Keres” KDE

    As aptosid is based off of Debian (and is tied even more closely to Debian than Ubuntu is), I am rather shocked that for all the odd networking tools included, Synaptic Package Manager is not included; there are 0 GUI tools for installing packages. Given how good Synaptic Package Manager is and given that aptosid is closely tied to Debian, even if this is a distribution meant for more advanced Linux users, I think this omission is inexcusable.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 212

      In This Issue

      * Ubuntu 9.04 reaches end of life
      * Announcing the Ubuntu Application Review Process
      * Taking a Step Back With Fresh Eyes
      * Behind the Circle: Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda)
      * Ubuntu Stats
      * LoCo News
      * Launchpad News
      * Growing List of Schools Using Ubuntu
      * The Growing Linux Multi-touch Community
      * Edubuntu Makeover
      * Test your might!
      * Debian-Ubuntu Community Conference
      * My experience upgrading UNE 10.04 to Maverick (and yours!)
      * What I do
      * Know of a cool app that deserves more attention? Nominate it for the next Ubuntu post-install guide!
      * Artwork Team – What are we doing here?
      * Ubuntu Artwork Crisis
      * In The Press
      * In The Blogosphere
      * Canonical Showcases at IDF San Francisco
      * Ubuntu, Canonical Wallow in Muddy Waters with Contributors’ Agreements
      * Can Ubuntu Attract More Hardware Partners?
      * Making a Difference; Selling a Difference
      * UCLALUG Fall 2010 Installfest
      * Do you dent or tweet ?
      * Join the openSUSE Conference 2010!
      * OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2010
      * Full Circle Magazine – Issue #41
      * Featured Podcasts
      * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
      * Upcoming Meetings and Events
      * Updates and Security
      * UWN Sneak Peek
      * And much much more!

    • The Ubuntu Font Family Is Now Available In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (Officially)

      If you’re not using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, you can download the Ubuntu Font Family as an archive or deb from HERE although the recommended way of getting the font is through the official PPA (still private, hopefully it will be made public soon) so you can get updates!

    • New Ubuntu font lands in Maverick for all users

      The new Ubuntu font that Canonical commissioned typeface designers Dalton Maag to develop for the Ubuntu operating system has landed in Ubuntu 10.10 for all users.

    • Hiding In Plain Sight: On Being More Transparent

      Thus, we had a discussion at UDS and broke the problem into two areas: the technical implementation which I openly vetoed myself having any view on as I believe I lack the technical expertize, and the governance process part, which I volunteered to craft a process for. Before the UDS session I produced a rough draft on the Ubuntu Wiki and presented it to the room in the session.

    • Interesting uses for Ubuntu One

      Ubuntu One is a great program/service with many uses, some obvious some not so obvious. Here are a few creative uses for Ubuntu One that some people have come up with.

    • Canonical cutting the edge of interface design

      For those of you who deny that any Linux distribution innovates, I give you Parallax. Parallax is an interface, written for the Ubuntu environment, that allows the operating system to be aware of its physical context. That is, where the user is in relation to cameras. For example: The user is watching a video and the user moves farther away from the screen. When the system picks this up (via cameras) the image on the screen then pans out.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • More Delays For Firefox 4 Feature Freeze Release

        Linux Mint 7 Gloria will reach end of life on October 23, 2010. This release was based on Ubuntu 9.04 which is planned to reach end-of-life at the same date.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-ready SoCs sip half a Watt

  Freescale Semiconductor announced a Linux-ready, ARM9-based i.MX28x SoC and a Coldfire-based MCF5441x MCU, both targeting fanless industrial applications as well as automotive systems. The i.MX28x and MCF5441x each consume less than half a Watt, support extended temperatures, offer clock synchronized Ethernet, and with some models, include a Layer 2 switch for low-cost daisy-chaining of devices.

  The i.MX28x and MCF5441x are aimed at low-power applications, including appliances, portable and diagnostic medical devices, energy distribution equipment, meters, human machine interfaces (HMIs), motor control, and industrial controllers, says Freescale. The MCF5441x provides customer benefits tailored for motor control, while the i.MX28x is oriented more at display applications, says the company.

• Rugged, fanless PCs report for duty

• Phones

  • Android

    • Sony Ericsson Drops Symbian OS for Android OS

      Google’s Android OS gets a boost as Sony Ericsson announces it is dropping Symbian for the open-source Android OS.

    • Rumor: An Amazon Android Tablet May Follow The Amazon Android App Store

      Okay, we know now that Amazon is on the verge of releasing an Android-based app store. But last week, before we knew that, we got an interesting tip that such a move was coming soon — this week, actually. And that tip came with a bonus attached — the tipster also heard that Amazon was going to be releasing an iPad competitor alongside the store.

    • Why Nokia now needs to embrace Android

      Nokia’s open source adventure has come to a grinding halt as Sony Ericsson drops the Symbian platform in favour of Android.

      Given the choice between Symbian and Android, Symbian Foundation members such as Sony Ericsson and Samsung are going for Android.

      Maybe Nokia needs to do the same.

    • Sony Ericsson LiveView acts as a 1.3-inch remote control for your smartphone, requires Android 2.0

      You’ve been asking for someone, anyone, to please kick out a tiny remote control display that can save you from having to whip your smartphone out for every little thing and Sony Ericsson, it seems, has listened. The 1.3-inch OLED screen above is a new Bluetooth accessory for Android 2.x phones that’s said to function very much like a desktop widget.

    • HTC to ship 7-8 million smartphones in 3Q, and 9-10 million in 4Q10, say Taiwan makers

      Taiwan-based vendor HTC will ship an estimated 7-8 million smartphones in the third quarter of 2010 and 9-10 million units in the fourth quarter, and its second-half 2010 smartphone shipment volume will rank fourth behind Nokia, RIM (Research in Motion) and Apple, according to Taiwan-based makers of handset components.

    • T-Mobile G2 preview

      * Software: The G2 runs Android 2.2, and at first glance it really does appear to be running an untarnished, stock build. Unlike the Desire Z, there’s no Sense skin, but, of course, there are some tweaks. We’re assuming these have been made on T-Mobile’s end, but there’s an added pane shortcut, which like Moto’s new skin, lets you jump to different screens without having to swipe through. The app drawer interface has also be beautified with a 3D-like shelf. Still, the experience feels a lot closer to stock Android than anything we’ve seen in a long time, and it feels pretty darn good.

    • T-Mobile G2 Will Not Support Tethering At Launch

    • Android: Open Source or Just an Open Mess?

      I believe, from Archos to Samsung, we should have the ability to use or purchase plain Android at the current version to any device we want. If/when this happens, Google will have achieved its original goal of taking costs out of handsets and allowing anybody to run Android on “any” device. Currently Android is being watered down and neutered by Motorola and Samsung UI’s and carrier chatzki. We are at the carrier’s and manufacturer’s mercy and we will continue to be the loser until Google inserts their power. And it may be too late in light of the recent failure of the Nexus One which was at a least back-handed effort to poke a sharp stick in the eyes of the carriers.

The (r)evolution of operating systems.

During the proprietary operating systems evolution, a revolution in operating systems started. This open source (which is a special sauce all of it’s own) operating system revolution started out simply enough and was also quite basic. It did have a recipe to follow although the ingredients were all home grown.

Like the proprietary operating systems these revolutionary operating systems evolved as well. However they were not and would never be a homogenised franchise chain, more like fine restaurants, independently run, offering different, customisable delights yet still following the same basic model. Contrary to the real world, these fine operating system restaurants are free in all respects whereas the proprietary franchises are not.

This revolution in open source operating systems started out quite a bit later than the proprietary operating systems did. The horse had already left the gate so to speak. This means that the proprietary operating systems had taken just about all of the cake to themselves are were happily munching away.

Open Source and Sustainability

So, people ask me, how does this reduce carbon emissions? There are obviously small energy savings (related to DVD production, packaging, transportation, etc) when an individual downloads software instead of buying it off the shelf. However the big emissions savings occur when large companies that maintain vast amounts of data switch to Open Source. Recently the Bank of New Zealand reduced their energy costs and carbon emissions by converting their front end systems to Open Source.

Is Adobe’s open source strategy a commercial consulting trap?

Adobe Altruism?

So is Abobe using these open source code dissemination techniques to genuinely “give back” to the community, or it simply “seeding” its software development methodologies more deeply and laying a child-snatching trap for programmers as a result?

Events

• Report from PyCon India 2010

  So I am back from PyCon India 2010. I missed last year, so was waiting for this year’s event. Met many faces after very long time and to be in a place with so many other python lovers is always a nice experience. The total attendance was around 700 but the venue was too big for that number , so except the lunch time, corridors had lesser number of people discussing. The selection of the talks were also matching the environment as they came from different directions. We saw talks with hardware accessibility to web development to GUI application toolkits, network programming, scientific computing, terminal based works etc.

Web Browsers

• Why Google Will Dominate The Browser Wars

• Mozilla

  • More Delays For Firefox 4 Feature Freeze Release

Oracle

• And now, page 2

  After 20 incredible years at Sun/Oracle, I have decided to try something new.

  This was a very hard decision, and not one made lightly. I have always enjoyed my work, and still do — everything from MTS-2 to Sun Fellow to Oracle VP. I love the people I work with and the technology we’ve created together, which is why I’ve been doing it for so long. But I have always wanted to try doing a startup, and recently identified an opportunity that I just can’t resist. (We are in stealth mode, so that’s all I can say for now.)

• OpenOffice goes its own way

  After Firefox, OpenOffice may be open-source software’s greatest desktop success story. For years though OpenOffice has stagnated. While under Sun’s management, OpenOffice got off to a great start, the program hasn’t been doing much of anywhere lately. That may be about to change under an independent non-profit group called The Document Foundation.

• LibreOffice is Born! – Updated

  LibreOffice is being welcomed by Red Hat, Canonical, Google, and Novell, among others, and by both FSF and OSI. Canonical has already committed to shipping LibreOffice. And others are welcome to join the party, including Oracle. If Oracle does jump in, then the name may revert, but in either case, I think it’s a wonderfully refreshing development. I can’t wait to use it. You can download a beta version here already.

• Larry wants triple money back from Micron

Document Foundation/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice.org community members launch the Document Foundation

• LibreOffice – a community fork for OpenOffice.org

• LibreOffice – A fresh page for OpenOffice

  While development of the new fork will focus around the developers inherited from Novell, Red Hat and Debian, the project has the support of the great majority of the community surrounding OpenOffice.org; Among those who have expressed support for LibreOffice and the Document Foundation are the Free Software Foundation, the OSI, OASIS, Canonical, credativ and Collabora and the GNOME Foundation.

  The Document Foundation has been presented not so much as a fork as a chance to refresh the development of OpenOffice.org around a broad-based ecosystem that is no longer reliant on the commercial interests of a single company. LibreOffice is not the first fork of OpenOffice.org that has taken place, but previous forks or branches such as Go-OO have only enjoyed limited community support.

• LibreOffice: OpenOffice.org Liberated

  The idea of creating an OpenOffice.org fork and creating an independent foundation is not new and it has been discussed several times by the OpenOffice.org community and developers outside Sun Microsystems, the previous steward of the OpenOffice.org project. Sun has been often criticized for the way it managed the project. But apparently the hassle of forking OpenOffice.org outweighed the benefits of such move. The acquisition of Sun by Oracle changed the situation.

• OpenOffice.org Discovers the Joy of Forking

  Rather cheekily, the Document Foundation writes:

  Q: And why are you calling the software “LibreOffice” instead of “OpenOffice.org”?

  A: The OpenOffice.org trademark is owned by Oracle Corporation. Our hope is that Oracle will donate this to to the Foundation, along with the other assets it holds in trust for the Community, in due course, once legal etc issues are resolved. However, we need to continue work in the meantime – hence “LibreOffice” (“free office”).

  Yeah, good luck with that one, people: I can really see Larry handing those “assets” over; not.

  Still, such naïve optimism aside, this is incredibly good news for free software. For some years, I have been worried about the dependence of OpenOffice.org on a commercial sponsor – first Sun, now Oracle. I have long thought that a foundation would be far better for users and coders. Interestingly, the new foundation will not be asking for an assignment of copyright:

• Hello LibreOffice. One question: Have you played into Ellison’s hand?

  Losing the legal protection afforded to StarOffice/OpenOffice by SUN-Microsoft patent agreement is a worry. But lets put it in perspective. It is at least a year or so away. Microsoft knows that the first thing LibreOffice will do if Microsoft makes any move in this direction is to run to the European Commission and file an antitrust suit on Office (again), draining resources it could use to fight the more important battleground of so-called ‘Cloud’-based services.

  How about the business dimension? Oracle, under Larry Ellison, is know to be ‘predatory’ towards Open Source. They do contributes to open source, in particular, the Linux Kernel. Other than that, the best I can describe their behaviour is a business’ vulture. Don’t believe me, see the Unbreakable Linux campaign or Ellison’s proclamation that “If an Open Source Product Gets Good Enough, We’ll Simply Take It.” What Oracle is doing is above board, but they leave a bad taste in the mouth. So I guess Oracle philosophy is the same as mine: Do as little as possible.

  [...]

  Finally, note that I do not share Alex Brown’s optimism for OOXML adoption in LibreOffice. They are staffed by the same people who rejected it in the first place.

• Welcome The Document Foundation and LibreOffice

• Give up spoon-feeding: Use a fork instead.

  Now let’s dwell a bit deeper on what we announced. So why did we announce the birth of The Document Foundation? Why not? A foundation for OpenOffice.org had always been planned. But after ten years, this promise was never fulfilled, and it would seem that the new owner of Sun Microsystems, Oracle, is not keen on engaging too much with the community about this. So we decided to move on by ourselves, and move this project forward. Let’s be frank: Every FLOSS project has its own set of issues. Inside OpenOffice.org we have many issues, even though it’s one of the friendliest and most welcoming community you’ll ever find. But 10 million lines of code that are not easily hackable, a certain heaviness in our process and governance structure made us feel like we had to change something. In fact, I would go as far as claiming that the Document Foundation is the ultimate victory of the old “StarDivision” and I do feel this is their moment of glory, even more so if they choose to join us. We feel that what we’re doing is fundamentally right and is a real opportunity to deliver the promise of Free, Libre and Open Source Software.

• LibreOffice: The newest member of the ODF family

  So I am very pleased to read in their press release that the Document Foundation is firmly committed to the ODF standard. I encourage them to turn those words into actions and to join the OASIS ODF TC and to participate in the ODF Plugfests. As OASIS ODF TC Chair, I extend to them a warm welcome.

• OpenOffice.org developers move to break ties with Oracle

  Some developers of the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite announced a break from Oracle on Tuesday, introducing a new name for the project and establishing a new foundation to guide its future.

  They will distribute a version of the open-source office productivity suite under the name “LibreOffice,” under the purview of an independent organization called The Document Foundation.

• LibreOffice – Google, Novell sponsored OpenOffice fork launched

  The OpenOffice development community have today announced the launch of a new foundation – The Document Foundation – that will oversee, guide and develop a new fork of OpenOffice named ‘LibreOffice’.

  The ‘fork’ seeks to build upon the last 10 years of work that OpenOffice.org and the OpenOffice.org Community have built with the hope that the hand of an independent foundation will guide the software to an even brighter future.

  In contrary to OpenOffice.org it is expected that LibreOffice will no longer recommend the installation of non-open-source extensions.

• The Launch of the Document Foundation and the Oxymoron of Corporate Controlled “Community” Projects

  …Sun maintained too much control. This reality has played out over and over during the past 30 years – when one or a few companies maintain too much control, others stay away, because they can’t be sure that the project will be managed for everyone’s benefit.

  Knowing that an organization is “safe” to join, and will be managed for the benefit of the many and not of the privileged few, is one of the key attributes and assurances of “openness.”

• Create an independent OpenOffice.org-Foundation

• OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers

  Until there’s a decision from Oracle the OpenOffice.org suite will be retain the LibreOffice name. Based on Oracle’s history of responding to community ultimatums, we suggest you get used to LibreOffice.

• OpenOffice.org Declares Independence From Oracle, Becomes LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation on Facebook

• The Document Foundation (LinkedIn)

  The Document Foundation continues to build on the Foundation of ten years’ dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an independent Foundation is the best fit to the Community’s core values of openness, transparency, and valuing people for their contribution. It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community.

• LibreOffice

  OpenOffice.org has been the killer app for GNU/Linux in schools. The savings on licences for Office alone can justify migrating to GNU/Linux. As Oracle seem not particularly friendly/responsive to FLOSS, this fork may have been inevitable or just a good thing on its own. This action may briefly distrub development but I see a bright future for the software in GNU/Linux.

• OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

Education

• Educational Tools for my School

  Today I finally got Moodle up and running. It is functioning which is the good news. I still need to add the classes and students to our Moodle instance but within a week, teachers will be able to use it with their class. Moodle is an open source learning management system popular around the world. I am a Sakai guy myself but it is actually more difficult to install and maintain than Moodle.

Funding

• Snort rival launches threat-detection start-up

  The company’s founder, Matt Jonkman, is also president of OISF, which has been receiving funding from the Deptartment of Homeland Security. Jonkman says Emerging Threats Pro depends on private and undisclosed funding not related to OISF.

Project Releases

• GNU Libtasn1 2.8 released

  GNU Libtasn1 is a standalone library written in C for manipulating ASN.1 objects including DER/BER encoding/decoding. GNU Libtasn1 is used by GnuTLS to handle X.509 structures and by GNU Shishi to handle Kerberos V5 structures.

Government

• The Estonian Interoperability Framework adopts the European Licence

  Compiled in 2010 by the Department of State Information Systems (RISO) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia, the Information Society Yearbook reports that software developments done for the government or produced by the government in Estonia will be distributed under the EUPL licence.

Licensing

• Scanning tunneling microscope under GPL3

  ChemHacker has posted schematics and code for a scanning tunneling microscope. [Sacha De'Angeli] finalized the proof-of-concept design for version 0.1 and released all of the information under the Gnu general public license version 3. You’ll need to build a sensor from a combination of a needle, a piezo, and a ring of magnets. There’s an analog circuit that gathers data from the probe, which is then formatted by and Arduino and sent to your computer.

Openness/Sharing

• Feedback is a gift

  In the open source software world, the people who give feedback by pointing out bugs in the software are the heroes. In the world of human resources or legal affairs, when I get feedback, it is often not exactly what I am hoping for, but I have found that if I stay open to the possibility that the feedback I am receiving will help the end product, it can be a great source for improvement.

  [...]

  At Red Hat, we have an internal mailing list called memo-list that, since the early days of the company, has been a way for any employee to provide feedback and suggestions. When I first joined the company, I found the open forum, with frequent criticisms and suggestions, to be a “problem.” But over the years, I have observed that some of the ideas shared on memo-list have been true gifts, giving the company feedback that has changed the company for the better. Some feedback on memo-list is simple criticism, without accompanying source code providing a fix, but I would rather know that the concern is there than for people to keep their concerns to themselves. While I find the former ultimately more constructive and helpful, I have come to learn that both forms of feedback are gifts. The real problem would be if we weren’t receiving any gifts of feedback at all.

• Transparency

  With the Internet having established itself as cheap and omnipresent way of transmitting information, of reaching many many people (given you reach the right multiplicators) we’ve also seen many organizations and groups of people step up to the task and fight for transparency: The EFF, the CCC or projects like the now famous Wikileaks (among others).

  They fight governments and cooperations who hide the “truth” from the public, who make deals against the public interest or funnel away public money into their own pockets and we all should be thankful for those organizations and their work. The world needs whistleblowers and people who dig in the darkness till they find what’s what.

• Open Data

  • data.open.ac.uk

    data.open.ac.uk is the home of open linked data from The Open University. It is a platform currently developed as part of the LUCERO JISC Project to extract, interlink and expose data available in various institutional repositories of the University and make it available openly for reuse.

Programming

• First service release of Eclipse Helios

  The Eclipse development team has released version 3.6.1 of the open source development environment. This is a first service release of the IDE, which was released in the summer as part of Helios and consists of around 40 Eclipse projects. The new version is primarily a bug fix version and does not contain any new functionality. The release notes provide detailed information on what’s new in Eclipse 3.6.1. The Helios release is made available in more than ten packages which contain pre-configured components for different areas of use, including IDEs for Java, C/C++, RCP/RAP and mobile developers.

Taking on Too Much – From Burnout out to Balance one moment at a time!

I’ve been traveling and speaking more at events, I’ve been helping plan more events and writing blog posts and articles for Linux Pro and Ubuntu User Magazine. As well as staying involved in the Ubuntu Community with my LoCo team, Ubuntu News, and the various Ubuntu Weeks. Needless to say – I love it. But like the saying goes – Too much of a good thing isn’t.

Cross-platform bookmark sync service XMarks shutting down

The plug will be pulled on cross-browser bookmark sync service XMarks in 3 months time, Xmarks CTO Todd Agulnick has announced today, forcing its 2 million users to go elsewhere.

AOL reportedly in talks to buy influential tech blog TechCrunch

Obama highlights IPv6 issue

IPv6 is the biggest upgrade in the history of the Internet, but the Obama Administration has only just begun to give IPv6 its attention

Interview with Vinton Cerf at Internet Governance Forum 2010

Here is a transcript and video of the interview I had with Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet and Vice President, Chief Evangelist, Google at the Internet Governance Forum 2010. It followed the session on Managing the Network at the Internet Governance Forum, where a wide range of issues were brought up on the net neutrality debate. I wanted to get his view on how he thought developing countries can ensure that they have access, promote net neutrality as well as use the internet to realise their development goals. He gave a very open, interesting and insightful response and I think that internet stakeholders in developing countries need to look at these issues more closely to ensure that they are connected in a way which is appropriate to the local context, as he points out. Read the transcript and summaries and look at the videos of the interview below.

Blue Shield faces class action for physican rating program

The California Medical Association filed a class action Friday that alleges Blue Shield of California has launched an inaccurate physician rating program that potentially harms doctors and their patients by spreading misinformation and failing to accurately assess patient care.

Filed in Alameda County Superior Court, the lawsuit alleges Blue Shield went public with the program in June even though the company was aware it was flawed. The complaint seeks a court order to halt the program and inform the public of its deficiencies. It also demands monetary relief and damages.

Science

• Digital Agenda: European Commission announces €780 million boost for strategic ICT research

  Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said: “Increasing overall investment into ICT research is crucial for our future. The EU’s support to our world-class researchers announced today must be accompanied by substantial additional investments by the beneficiaries themselves. This research will help Europe’s industry to strengthen its competitiveness.”

• Digital Agenda: Major ICT companies join European Commission initiative to reduce electricity consumption

• NASA v. The Scientists

  Just weeks before the Supreme Court is due to hear a case that has dominated his life for the past three years—and may affect the lives of thousands of fellow government contractors—Robert Nelson’s thoughts are a billion miles away. “Right now I’m sitting at my desk looking at a spectral image of the surface of Titan,” he says by phone from his office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he’s a planetary astronomer.

  Nelson’s role in NASA’s Cassini mission is to pore over data coming back from the probe, which is now in orbit around Saturn. He and his colleagues are investigating evidence that the planet’s largest moon is volcanically active. One of their theories is that ice volcanoes spew a slurry of frozen water and liquid methane onto Titan’s frigid surface.

Health/Nutrition

• Just because GM is gaining popularity doesn’t make it right

  To approve or not to approve? The transgenic question is back in the form of the super salmon or the Frankenfish (which sobriquet you pick depends on how GM-tolerant you are). Take a growth gene from another type of salmon, mix with a bit of DNA from the eel-like ocean pout, as US biotech firm, AquaBounty has done, and you get a creature with all the appearance of an Atlantic salmon that is actually produced in a giant, inland tank. AquaBounty has spent 15 years trying to get US regulators to approve the advanced hybrid fish for supermarket shelves and now appears to be very close.

Security

• Tuesday’s security updates

• Comcast Hackers Get 18-Month Prison Sentences

• WTF worm makes Twitterers declare goat lust

  Another malicious worm hit Twitter over the weekend, days after the micro-blogging site reached near-meltdown from a technically similar attack.

  This time around the danger came from clicking links contained in micro-blogging messages beginning “WTF [URL]“. Last week’s more serious onMouseOver problem struck when users moved their mouse cursor over an infected tweet. These messages contained hidden JavaScript code that exploited a cross-site scripting problem – in the case of the WTF worm a CSRF (cross-site request forgery) technique is in play.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• ✈ Travel Security – A Modest Proposal

  In future, all passengers aboard planes must:

  * Wear secured headphones for safety education and approved entertainment throughout flights, so that passengers cannot communicate with each other for co-ordinated attacks. It’s possible Apple or Sony might sponsor these, reducing costs. This measure will also reduce incidents of unlicensed use of music, especially as people cross market boundaries, so maybe the RIAA will support this.
  * Travel blindfolded. This prevents any awareness of location or time and ensures no targetted use of devices. This additionally defeats attempts to benefit from unlicensed movies, so MPAA sponsorship for the blindfolds is possible.
  * Travel naked. This reduces opportunities for concealment of devices, although security staff will still need to use powerful scanners pre-boarding.
  * Undergo sensory disorientation pre-travel, so that passengers do not know where they are seated or what the time is. This could be combined with the blindfolds and headsets.

• ICO lets police maintain ANPR location secrecy

  The Information Commissioner’s Office has decided against forcing police to disclose the locations of vehicle tracking cameras.

  The ICO said that Devon and Cornwall Police was correct in refusing to provide the locations of automatic numberplate recognition cameras (ANPR) that it ran in its area following a Freedom of Information request by Kable.

• More Stories Of People Arrested For Making Joke Threats On Social Networks

  Earlier this year. we wrote about a guy in the UK, Paul Chambers, who was arrested after he tweeted a message about blowing up his local airport if it didn’t reopen in time for the flight he had to take the following week. The message was clearly a joke. Now, as I mentioned at the time, I have no problem with the police doing a quick check to make sure it’s really a joke, but that’s as far as it should go. Instead, the police ended up arresting him under the Terrorist Act and eventually charged him with a crime. They did not charge him with making a fake bomb threat (which is a crime) because they knew that such a charge wouldn’t stand up in court. Instead, they charged him with using the internet to send a “message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” Chambers is back in the news, as he’s now appealing his ridiculous conviction.

• U.S. Uses Domain Names As New Way to Regulate the Net

  Governments have long sought ways to regulate Internet activity, whether for the purposes of taxation, content regulation, or the application of national laws. Effective regulatory measures have often proven elusive, however, since, unlike the Internet, national laws typically end at the border. Earlier this month, the United States began to move aggressively toward a new way of confronting the Internet’s jurisdictional limitations – the domain name system.

  Domain names are widely used to ensure that email is delivered to the right inbox or to allow users to access a particular website. The system includes a large database that matches the domain name (e.g. michaelgeist.ca) to a specific IP address (i.e. the location of the computer server). The system is used billions of times every day to route Internet traffic to its intended destination.

• Stop the Internet Blacklist!

• Cocaine detectors for parents are a terrible idea

  Nearly being arrested for drug smuggling provided me with an excellent introduction to the problem of false positives

• Afghan stringers are the bedrock of our reporting

  Stringers in Afghanistan, where I am the correspondent for al-Jazeera, are the eyes and ears of the world’s media. Without them, getting a picture of what is going on outside Kabul is almost impossible for a western journalist. Most correspondents don’t often stray from the capital and those embedded with security forces struggle to witness anything not cleared by military censors.

• Bill Would Give Justice Department Power to Shutter Piracy Sites Worldwide

• Council workmen blast residents for sweeping up leaves ‘because it’s against the rules’

  Community-minded residents have had a ticking off for sweeping up leaves from outside their homes – because it is against council rules.

  With the first autumn leaves falling onto their street, families in Blakenall, West Midlands, have dutifully been sweeping them up and putting them into their garden recycling bins.

• Pentagon destroys thousands of copies of Army officer’s memoir

  The Department of Defense recently purchased and destroyed thousands of copies of an Army Reserve officer’s memoir in an effort to safeguard state secrets, a spokeswoman said Saturday.

  “DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security,” Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham said.

• Misbehaving Federal Prosecutors

  Last week, USA Today published the results of a six-month investigation into misconduct by America’s federal prosecutors. The investigation turned up what Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman called a pattern of “serious, glaring misconduct.” Reporters Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy documented 201 cases in which federal prosecutors were chastised by federal judges for serious ethical breaches, ranging from withholding important exculpatory evidence to lying in court to making incriminating but improper remarks in front of juries.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• We can’t use it – so why the heck are we prospecting for new oil?

  Forget, for a moment, the fragility of the Arctic environment and the likely consequences of a spill there. Forget the dangers of deepwater drilling in a strait plagued by storms and icebergs, and the difficulties – greater than in the Gulf of Mexico – of capping a leaking well there. There’s an even bigger question raised by a British company’s discovery of oil off the coast of Greenland. It’s the same question that is invoked by the decision the British government is expected to make tomorrow: to allow exploration wells to be drilled in deep waters to the west of Shetland. Why the heck are we prospecting for new oil anyway?

• “Sea Snot” Explosion Caused by Gulf Oil Spill?

  In the weeks after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, scientists surveying the surface near the drill site spotted relatively huge particles—several centimeters across—of sea snot.

  These particularly slimy flakes of “marine snow” are made up of tiny dead and living organic matter, according to Uta Passow, a biological oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

• How global warming is aiding – and frustrating – archaeologists

  Archaeologists have gained an unexpected benefit from global warming. They have discovered melting ice sheets and glaciers are exposing ancient artefacts that had been covered with thick layers of ice for millennia.

  The discoveries are providing new insights into the behaviour of our ancestors – but they come at a price. So rapid is the rise in global temperatures, and so great is the rate of disintegration of the world’s glaciers, that archaeologists risk losing precious relics freed from the icy tombs. Wood rots in a few years once freed from ice while rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather, crumble to dust in days unless stored in a freezer. As a result, archaeologists are racing against time to find and save these newly exposed wonders.

• Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger

  As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says (sea “mucus” blob pictures).

  And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant.

  Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season’s warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map).

• An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism

  By liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume, climate catastrophe can be averted without recourse to authoritarianism

Finance

• Senators Slam Goldman, Schiff Slams Senators: “They Have Some Nerve”

• The Angry Rich

  Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.

  No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.

  These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.

  Yet if you want to find real political rage – the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason – you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

• New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified

  New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It’s so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being “rich”, or what tax rate is “too much.” But I’ve done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

• HMRC letters target taxpayers with Swiss bank accounts

  Hundreds of wealthy UK taxpayers have been sent letters by HM Revenue & Customs over possible large-scale tax evasion, the BBC has learned.

• Resale Fees That Only Developers Could Love

  But four months later, when a local television reporter was doing a story on housing taxes in their subdivision, the Dupaixs discovered that their sales contract included a “resale fee” that allows the developer to collect 1 percent of the sales price from the seller every time the property changes hands — for the next 99 years.

  Mrs. Dupaix, 34, says she and her husband had no clue about the fee when they closed on the house. “Of course we were upset,” she says. “We didn’t know about it, and our closer at the title company didn’t know about it.”

• Lies in the Name of the Free Market

  A powerful advocacy organization has made a big impact on this midterm election cycle in states across the country. Americans for Job Security (AJS) has spent millions of dollars on attack ads targeting candidates they view as anti-free market. While this group believes in the free exchange of capital, they are vehemently opposed to the free exchange of information, at least when it comes to their sponsors. AJS has routinely denied requests for a list of donors. As a 501(c)(6), they do not have to reveal this information. But the IRS has stated that any 501(c)(6) group whose “primary purpose” is political activity, must name their donors. The Washington Post reports that AJS spends the vast majority of its budget on television and radio ads before elections. Groups such as Public Citizen have complained to the IRS about AJS’ abuse of its tax-exempt status. But the ambiguous nature of the IRS’ “primary purpose” standard has allowed AJS to continue spewing attack ads every election cycle.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Pesticide Industry to Use Tax Dollars to Attack Critics

  The California Department of Food and Agriculture has awarded $180,000 in federal funds to finance an agribusiness-chemical industry plan to combat its critics – Environmental Working Group and other health, consumer and organic farming advocates who have campaigned against overuse of pesticides on food crops.

  The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF), a Watsonville, California, trade association representing more than 50 large produce growers and marketers and pesticide and fertilizer suppliers, is slated for a slice of California’s $17.5 million share of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Specialty Crops Block Grant program, which Congress set up in 2004 to improve “efficiency, productivity and profitability” in farming of vegetables, fruits, nuts and flowers. The 2008 farm bill expanded the specialty crops program, mandating that USDA distribute $55 million in state block grants in 2010, and the same for 2011 and 2012, to advance “buy local” campaigns and other efforts to make produce, nuts and flower crops more competitive.

• Honda secures naming rights for Rose Parade

  The three-year deal marks the first time the iconic parade will have a corporate sponsor and the first name change in the parade’s 121-year history.

• Pastors plan to ‘bait’ IRS with pulpit politics

  On Sunday, a group of 100 preachers nationwide will step into the pulpit and say the only words they’re forbidden by law from speaking in a church.

  They plan to use the pulpit as a platform for political endorsements, flouting a federal law that threatens churches with the loss of their nonprofit status if they stray too far into partisan politics.

  While other church and nonprofit leaders cringe at the deliberate mix of the secular and the religious, participants in the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday protest hope this act of deliberate lawbreaking will lead to a change in the law.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Proposal Could Expand Government’s Web Wiretapping Efforts

  RAY SUAREZ: It’s story that pits secrecy vs. privacy. The New York Times reported this morning that the Obama administration is drafting legislative proposals that would make more of the Internet open to court-ordered wiretaps. That could include currently encrypted e-mails, possibly social networking Web sites like Facebook, and Web phone conversations on services like Skype. The reported proposals have raised concerns among privacy advocates.

• Internet freedom is dead. Long live Internet freedom.

• “The Case for Personal Information Empowerment”: Mydex publishes groundbreaking White Paper

• Nobel committee warned not to award peace prize to Chinese dissident

  Awarding the Nobel peace prize to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo would contradict its founding principles, China’s foreign ministry said today.

  Its comments came after the director of Norway’s Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, said a senior Chinese official had warned him that giving the author the award would affect relations between the two countries.

• High court takes case on corporate privacy

  The Supreme Court is getting involved in an unusual freedom of information dispute over whether corporations may assert personal privacy interests to prevent the government from releasing documents about them.

  The court on Tuesday agreed to a request from the Obama administration to take up a case involving claims made by telecommunications giant AT&T to keep secret the information gathered by the Federal Communications Commission during an investigation.

• Canadian-Iranian blogger sentenced to 19 years in prison

  An Iranian court sentenced the founder of one of the first Farsi-language blogs, credited with sparking the boom in Iranian reform bloggers, to more than 19 years in prison for his writings, a news web site reported Tuesday.

• Canadian/Iranian blogfather Hoder faces death penalty; will Canada intervene?

• Jewish activists set sail for Gaza planning to break blockade

• Israeli action against Gaza flotilla ‘unlawful’ – UN Human Rights Council panel

• Call for ‘Gaza style’ inquiry on Afghan deaths

  Former UN official demands investigation into coalition link to deaths revealed by WikiLeaks

• Cambodia: Trade Union leaders at risk

  Several union leaders and activists organizing a nationwide strike of garment factory workers in Cambodia are at risk of arrest and legal action. The five day national strike was called by a coalition of garment industry unions in protest at a new minimum wage set for the garment and footwear industry. Union officials say that 200,000 workers around the country joined the strike.

• Tim Berners-Lee Comes Out Against COICA Censorship Bill; Shouldn’t You?

  Apparently over 20,000 people signed the petition in the first day it was available, and it would be great to get a lot more involved.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Buckyballs magnet magnates bully scrappy Zen Magnets: video response

  Basically, this video’s got everything: consumer advocacy, magnets, science, copyright abuse. It’s about the classiest response I can imagine to a legal threat. Let’s hope Zen sells a lot of magnets off the back of it.

• Copyrights

  • ACS:Law: When bad things happen to bad people

    For some time now English law firm ACS:Law has been in the middle of controversy for its use of dubious tactics against copyright infringers. ACS:Law’s cause célèbre is that they became famous when they teamed-up with porn producers and then they started sending cease-and-desist letters to people claiming that they had been sharing adult content, including some German gay porn (why is Germany the home of gay porn by the way? Inquiring minds demand to know). The business model seemed to be to ask for off-court settlement, or the allegations would be taken to court. Most people paid off to have the accusations go away, possibly to avoid embarrassment. However, many of the targets got together and complained to consumer-rights magazine Which? who in turn filed a complaint to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA). The complaint was serious enough that it got referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT), who are currently investigating ACS:Law for unethical practices.

  • Political Forum Fights Back Against Righthaven Copyright Troll Suit

    The online political discussion forum Democratic Underground is fighting back against a lawsuit filed by copyright troll Righthaven LLC, arguing in court documents filed Monday that the short excerpt of a news article at issue in the suit is a clear case of fair use.

    Democratic Underground — represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Winston & Strawn LLP, and attorney Chad Bowers — was sued by Righthaven on August 10 for a five-sentence excerpt of a Las Vegas Review-Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, with a link back to the Review-Journal website. Righthaven has brought over 130 lawsuits in Nevada federal court claiming copyright infringement, even though they do not create, produce or distribute any content. Instead, they create lawsuits by scouring the Internet for content from Review-Journal stories posted on blogs and online forums, acquiring the copyright to that particular story from Stephens Media LLC (the Review-Journal’s publisher), and then suing the poster for infringement.

  • Pandora and Canadian Copyright Royalties

    And therein lies the crux of this story: Pandora and Re:Sound, one of the copyright collectives from which Pandora needs to obtain a license to stream music in Canada, are still in the midst of negotiations about the royalties which Pandora would be obliged to pay.

  • US ISP Suddenlink Claims The DMCA Requires They Disconnect Users

    The DMCA has no requirement that ISPs disconnect people after three accusations (not convictions) — and it especially doesn’t say that ISPs don’t need to offer a refund when they do this. For all the fighting by the record labels trying to get a three strikes policy into law and complaining about the DMCA, perhaps it makes them happy to know that some ISPs are simply pretending the DMCA is a three strikes policy.

  • Multinational copyright companies will require French ISPs turn over 150,000 subscriber names and addresses per day

    France’s “3-strikes” rule comes into effect this week, and multinational corporations are already flooding French ISPs with more than 10,000 requests a day for the personal information of accused infringers; they estimate that this number will go up to 150,000 users/day shortly. Once a user has received three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement, the entire household is cut off from the Internet for a year, and it becomes a crime for any other ISP to connect that family or household. The only opportunity to defend yourself from the charge is a brief “traffic-court”-like streamlined judiciary.

  • Pirate Bay filesharing appeal opens in Sweden

    Four founders and financiers of filesharing site The Pirate Bay, who last year were sentenced to a year in prison, opened their appeal bid to get the verdict overturned in Stockholm on Tuesday.

  • ACS:Law gets a threatening letter in the post

    The fallout from the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against ACS:Law’s website has gone far beyond just punting the firm’s website offline. After the attack, the website came back online with a 350MB file containing emails and a list of over 5,000 Sky Broadband customers that the firm has claimed illegally downloaded pornography.

    It is this file that looks to have placed ACS:Law in trouble with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The regulatory body primarily deals with the Data Protection Act, though it also concerns itself with various other privacy and information laws, and earlier this year was given the power to investigate and issue fines of up to £500,000 for such a breach of the Data Protection Act.

  • Porn studios borrowing from RIAA playbook with P2P lawsuits

    The porn industry, long plagued by piracy, has apparently had enough and is beginning to band together to target infringers. Like a move straight out of the RIAA playbook, some companies are beginning to file lawsuits en masse against anonymous P2P users, and have also begun to formulate ways to target sites like YouPorn and PornTube, where users often upload copyrighted clips of their favorite porn movies.

  • ACTA

    • Notes on ACTA Meeting Emerge

      Last Friday September 27, ACTA host Japan sponsored a lunch mixer with NGOs and almost no one came. By one account, there may have been as few at three NGOs there. Requests to the Japan and US delegations to release a list of who attended the meeting have gone unanswered. But a few details have begun to emerge. There is little to counter the widespread perception that the meeting was designed to thwart rather than engage the expression of civil society views on the negotiation.

      The meeting was an informal lunch with negotiators scattered at tables rather than structured in a means for dialogue. This is similar to the D.C. “mixer” and in contrast to Lucerne. In Lucerne the delegates requested written questions in advance and answered them in a structured dialogue around a conference table. Everything was on the record, which led to many news stories based on meeting notes released from those present. In DC and now Tokyo the engagement was more informal with no opportunities for formal question and answers of the group.

    • ACLU Settles Student-Cell-Phone-Search Lawsuit With Northeast Pennsylvania School District

    • MPs have not examined ACTA, says IPO

      The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has confirmed that no text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been shared with MPs or the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.1 Parliament has not been involved in the negotiating process either.

      No democratic institution in the UK has seen the ACTA draft. There has been no democratic scrutiny of the text, Parliament has been shut out of this process. This draft agreement lacks legitimacy before it is even agreed.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • The ACS Law leak shows that the Digital Economy Act carries huge privacy risks

      Unwarranted private surveillance, plus incompetence, have led to a huge leak of sensitive personal data from ACS:Law.

      Information about individual alleged infringers appears to have been contained within the emails leaked at the weekend.

      While reports have concentrated on the “attack” by 4Chan users that brought their webserver down, the more important questions are:

      (a) Why did ACS:Law host email files and sensitive information in a place that could easily be exposed to the public?

      (b) Is it legal and permissible to collect and process such information from torrents without permission or knowledge? As we have reported, the EU Data protection authorities think the answer is probably ‘no’. Now the world can see why.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The first Linux monument unveiled in Russia

Desktop

• Linux – you’ve come a long way baby

  I work in a small mom and pop computer store. I fix up older systems and install linux, then resell. I’ve put quite a few people on the path to open software and the freedoms of linux.

Server

• Turn a Pogoplug into a Full-Featured Linux Web Server

  Pogoplugs are great little storage devices, but they can do more than they let on. Let’s take a look at how you can hack a Pogoplug into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web server.

  This is a fun little project, but it does take some time and patience. Be sure to set aside a few hours this weekend to get it up and running. That said, let’s get started!

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Link Tech Show Sept 22 [Ogg]

• FLOSS Weekly 136: Emacs Org-Mode

  Org-mode is for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, doing project planning, and authoring with a fast and effective plain-text system.

  Guest: Carsten Dominik for Org-mode

• Episode 147: The Looming Tower

• KDEMU – Kolab Groupware

  This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kolab Groupware pusher, Paul Adams.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • nVidia – There is No Optimus Support for Linux

    I must say I am slightly torn, do I snatch up a single GPU nVidia system now – before I can no longer find them, do I wait and see if nVidia releases optimus technology for Linux, or should I just boycott the nVidia cooperation all together since they see Linux as a second class operating system?

  • Fglrx Finally Works With Ubuntu 10.10 (Xorg 1.9, Kernel 2.6.35/36) [ATI]

    Fglrx was updated yesterday in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and what’s special about this is that it finally supports Xorg 1.9 and 2.6.35 kernel. Up until now, ATI users who’ve tried to install Fglrx or upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 would get a blank screen. So if you have an ATI graphics card and want to use Fglrx, you can finally install / upgrade to the latest Ubuntu 10.10.

  • Running The X.Org Server Without Root Privileges

    Thanks to kernel mode-setting and other improvements to the X.Org Server, we are basically there, but it’s something that has been said for over a year. Moblin though has been running the X.Org Server as a user since their Moblin 2.0 release and now with the MeeGo operating system while others are now looking to get in on the root-free action.

  • Intel Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks

    With Mesa 7.9 just around the corner and it sporting a new GLSL compiler, support for new OpenGL extensions, and months worth of other changes to core Mesa and its drivers, we decided to run some benchmarks of the latest Intel Arrandale graphics processor with the past few Mesa releases to see how the performance compares. We also have ATI and Nouveau Mesa benchmarks on the way.

Applications

• Install DeadBeef-Ultimate Music Player in Ubuntu

  DeaDBeeF is an audio player for GNU/Linux systems with X11.It is mainly written by Alexey Yakovenko, with contributions from a lot of different people (see about box in the player for more details).

• FocusWriter 1.3.0 Released – Distraction free writing on Ubuntu

• Pithos Melds Pandora Streaming with Linux Desktops

  Pithos is a free download for Linux systems only, and requires a free Pandora account to use.

• OMG! 5! – Five Rhythmbox extensions

  Ubuntu’s default music player Rhythmbox comes with a host of handy plug-ins either enabled by default or waiting to be enabled via the ‘Edit > Plugins’ menu, but if the default selection leaves you wanting you can easily add more

• Keryx: Offline Package Installation made easy in Ubuntu

• AWN Lucido is an Absolute Delight to Use, Install AWN in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid via PPA

  Avant Window Navigator(AWN) is an awesome dock application for Linux. Over the years, AWN has evolved a lot and is now the almost-perfect dock application for Ubuntu/Linux users.

• Minimum Profit, a programmer’s text editor open source.

  Minimum Profit is a curses/GTK text editor for programmers.

• An rss2email fork that sucks less

• Introducing Irssi-autoghost : Automatically ghost your previous ‘ghost’ nick

• Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools

  System Administrators (SAs) need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments*. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have proven track records and have stood the test of time in the data center.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Command line tool for network analysis

  • Command line tool for network analysis 2

  • Listen to Text and Instant Messages with Gespeaker ‘Text To Speech’ Utility

  • Making a Watercolour-Paint Photograph in GIMP

  • Simple Snort Alert Log Parsing Script

  • Softlinks vs. Hardlinks: A Quick Explanation

  • How to Backup Your Linux PC with Simple Backup

  • Merge, split, and watermark your PDFs with PDF Chain

  • How to read Ext3/Ext4 linux partition from windows 7

  • Listen to Text and Instant Messages with Gespeaker ‘Text To Speech’ Utility

  • Quick Way to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

  • Anatomy of an exploit: CVE-2010-3081

  • Free-form note taking with Xournal

  • Hidden Linux : Sensing temperature

  • Linux Tip: How to set Shell Environment Variables (bash shell)?

  • Ratpoison and dmenu

  • Changing Mouse Sensitivity from the Command Line

  • Free Up Insane Amount of Disk Space in Ubuntu by Deleting Cached Package Files

  • Linux Tip: Understanding file permissions and modifying them using chmod

  • Writing Better Shell Scripts – Part 1

  • Writing Better Shell Scripts – Part 2

  • Writing Better Shell Scripts – Part 3

  • Restore suspend function in Xfce Xubuntu Maverick 10.10

  • Zeya- Streaming music server using HTML 5 | Ubuntu

  • Retrieve mail from Yahoo!’s webmail service – FetchYahoo

  • Building a Security Audit Toolkit

  • Ntop for Network analysis

  • Install Create Background Slideshow (CreBS) On Ubuntu 10.10

  • Free Up Insane Amount of Disk Space in Ubuntu by Deleting Cached Package Files

  • File Associations With Different Applications for KDE Desktop

  • Linux networking made easy

  • Ubuntu Maveric Meerkat

  • Bash Programming Tutorial 1 – A Quick Introduction

  • Compiling and running PulseAudio from git

  • Accessing your encrypted home directory in Ubuntu

  • Queue music into Rhythmbox from Nautilus

  • The GIMP metal wires and abstract background tutorial.

  • 7 Linux sudo Command Tips and Tricks

  • Setting Up An OpenVPN Server With Authentication Against OpenLDAP On Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

  • Matrix in Your Terminal is Cool!

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released

    PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released, it was a silent release and no changelog has been provided by the PlayOnLinux team.

• Games

  • REVIEW: Urban Terror – Linux 32/64bit

    As we see Linux get further penetration on the desktop, we see more Wine compliance, more native titles and traditional Windows packages having a Linux version too (I only need cite Utorrent producing a Linux version of their Windows software due to popular demand)

    The official page for Urban Terror is rather professional looking and there’s nothing to suggest that this is a free title as opposed to one for sale on your console.

  • EDuke32- A first person shooter game for Linux

    Eduke32 is awesome first person shooter game and a cross-platform Duke3D (Duke Nukem 3D) port which provides many new features for mod authors, including an enhanced scripting system and OpenGL renderer. It offers countless platforms on which to build and improve on and with no shortage of Duke Nukem enthusiasts it can only get better, Thanx to Eduke32′s creators we are able to match memory and relive our gaming youth with much greater graphics.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Clementine 0.5: New and Improved KDE4 Port of Amarok 1.4

    Clementine is a port to KDE4 of one of the most beloved music players on Linux, Amarok 1.4. The latest release brings several new features, including iPod, MTP and USB mass storage disks support, queue manager, support for Wii Remote to control it, and numerous bug fixes to already existing features.

  • 15 Cool KDE Wallpapers

    We all need a bit of a change now and again, right? Especially in the desktop department, us Linux people are always changing things around. And we like to shake things up a bit. So here , for your eye candy pleasure, we have hand-selected fifteen KDE-themed wallpapers for you to check out.
    Since the theme this time around was KDE, you’ll see some iteration of KDE branding in each of these desktop wallpapers. So let us present them now, for you, dear reader, and your downloading pleasure.

  • A walk around KDE 4.5

    Recently I did an introductory “walk around” GNOME (see “A walk around the GNOME desktop“) which offered the new users to Linux a look from the ground level at one of the most popular of the Linux desktops. This time around, I will do the same service to the KDE desktop. I will focus on KDE 4.5 (since that is the most recent release) with the goal of showing you just how user-friendly KDE makes the Linux desktop.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2.32 Screenshots needed

    A couple guidelines:

    * Screenshots must use the Clearlooks theme, a GNOME background / wallper and the default GNOME icons
    * The icon in the GNOME menu on the panel must show the GNOME foot, not a distribution logo
    * Your GNOME panel should be as clean as possible (If using Ubuntu, do not show the messaging menu in the panel)
    * If using openSUSE, your panel needs to be on the top
    * Your screenshots will be licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 license

  • A walk around the GNOME desktop

    Recently I had a reader request a bit of a “how to” on the GNOME desktop. After giving it some thought, and at first wondering why anyone would need a walk around for the GNOME desktop, I realized that some users simply don’t have the ability to look at the computer desktop from the same vantage point as those of us who “get it”. With that thought in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to give a sort of walk through of the GNOME desktop from the perspective of the new user.

Distributions

• The also-rans

  I’ve mentioned a few candidates for the 150Mhz, 32Mb machine, which I keep on hand to deliberately confound with software written 14 years after its creation.

• Surprised, and not surprised: Feather Linux at 150Mhz, 32Mb

  I don’t think I made any mention of it here, because if I search this site for “Feather Linux,” not much comes up. And to be honest, outside of this site, I don’t see much mention of it either.

• Red Hat Family

  • Atlanta hopes to draw Red Hat away from N.C.

    Red Hat, the publicly traded software firm that had revenue of $748 million last year, is checking out Atlanta and other cities with strong local universities as it considers a potential move of its headquarters.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Graphics Test Week this week

      As always, we’ll be testing a range of graphics driver functions, and we need as many people as possible to join in so we can evaluate the widest possible range of hardware and identify as many bugs as possible for the developers to fix. You can do all the testing from a live image – no need for an installed copy of Fedora 14, though you can test that way too if you like – and the testing is very easy, there are step-by-step instructions for each test and for entering your results. And of course, there’ll be many people in IRC to help with testing and debugging.

    • Fedora 14 Preview: What’s New in Fedora 14?

      As an end user you might not notice much difference between Fedora 13 and Fedora 14. You should notice an increase in speed overall, but from the perspective of the desktop — nothing much has changed. That doesn’t mean users of Fedora should not be excited. Fedora 14 promises to bring a much improved over all experience for the Linux user. And improving on Fedora 13 only means that Fedora is once again a serious contender for that much beloved best Linux distribution title.

      Although it seems 14 is targeted primary toward developers, it will prove to be a distribution that anyone can happily use. As of this writing, September 25, 2010, Fedora 14 is still in Alpha. The first beta is scheduled to hit the pipes September 28th, 2010. Fedora pre-release images can always be found on the pre-release page.

• Debian Family

  • Small Victories

    hen I patched them all. Some are Debian Lenny GNU/Linux and some are Squeeze. They both seem to work well. Squeeze had a ton of patches over the summer. I changed about 75% of the files on drives.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • How we build Ubuntu

      Freezes

      A freeze is when a particular type of development must stop, typically ready for release. There are different type of freeze, such as UI Freeze (no more changes in user interface elements), string freeze (no more translations), and feature freeze (no more significant feature development).

      Alphas

      Throughout a release cycle we make a number of snapshot releases as the release develops. These alpha releases are sometimes incomplete and buggy (owing to their work-inprogress nature), but provide a good opportunity to target features to them.

      Betas

      Beta release are feature-complete releases that need a lot of testing. We often recommend the beta as a good time for testers to upgrade, stresstest Ubuntu and file bugs.

      Release candidate

      A release candidate comes just before the final version, and is released to spur on a final chunk of testing from the community. This six-month cycle and these different elements are present in every release, and the community is welcome to upgrade to a new development release as soon as it opens for work – though regular users may wish to wait until the later stages of development before they try the new version out.

    • Maverick Meerkat: Can an Application Store Succeed in a Free Operating System?

      Popular open source software is of very high quality, often, e.g. in the case of media player software, surpassing its closed competitors. If the publishers in the Store decided to sell open source software, they would rarely sell anything that wouldn’t be viewed as a donation to support the project. It is a vicious cycle, since Linux users rarely appreciate a closed development model – open sourcing an application on the other hand would effectively eliminate their sales by enabling people to download the source code and simply repackage and redistribute the program. Someone would do it.

    • [Full Circle:] Issue 41

      * Command and Conquer.
      * How-To : Program in Python – Part 15, Virtualize Part 4 – FreeBSD, and Run A Business With Ubuntu.
      * Review – TuxGuitar.
      * Top 5 – Ways To Run Windows Apps.
      * plus: MOTU/Loco/Translation Interviews, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Edubuntu Maverick News

        Close to the end of the Lucid release cycle, I posted an update of what’s been happening in the Edubuntu project. Now seems like a good time to do it again! This release wasn’t as big shake-up as the last one, but it’s still a very good release for Edubuntu that builds on the work we did in the previous release.

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks

  • U.S. Gift for Iraqis Offers a Primer on Corruption

    The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the American taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.

Open Source vs Proprietary Software – The never ending Battle

Open Source provides solutions at the lowest costs possible or at no cost at all while Proprietary Software promises the provision of the best-in-the-business solutions at a higher cost.

Welcoming OpenIndiana

Perhaps it’s not fair to make a judgement call so early given that this is OpenIndiana’s first release and they’re just getting started, but this initial offering felt more like an early beta than a final release. The system is stable and there are some good features in place. I liked the installer and the Device Driver Utility is a great point in the operating system’s favour. Hardware support was a little better this time around than it was a year ago on OpenSolaris. But the heavy nature of the operating system combined with the fickle privilege escalation and small package repository makes OpenIndiana an unappealing choice right now for a desktop system. Hopefully these matters will get ironed out as the project matures.

There is one other thing I feel should be addressed. OpenIndiana seems to be lacking a focus. It has its roots in server technology, but it has become memory hungry, runs a desktop and uses a graphical installer. On the other hand it lacks the range of applications and drivers one might expect in a desktop system. Some people have told me it’s more of a testing ground for people migrating, testing and developing across platforms, but if that’s the case where are the great development tools and virtualization software?

The wonderful tools which were previously attracting people to OpenSolaris (ZFS, DTrace) have been ported to other operating systems. OpenIndiana doesn’t showcase Sun/Oracle technology; all it really does is give people an open source version of Solaris. And, if you’re into tweaking operating systems or you’re considering a migration to Oracle solutions, then I suppose that’s all OpenIndiana needs to be. As a former fan of Solaris, I was hoping to find something which stood out, something the operating system could hang its hat on, and I didn’t find that. OpenIndiana isn’t a bad system by any means, but I haven’t found a reason, besides curiosity, to run it either.

Will Code For Beer

People ask me why programmers write code and give it away “for free”. There are many reasons, but one I often give is that a programmer might end up at a conference and a grateful user of their code might “buy them a beer, or even a dinner.”

It was February or March of 1995, and the port of Linux to the Alpha processor was well underway. In talking with some of the developers over the Internet, I started to hear rumors that the Alpha port would not have “shared libraries”, but instead would have statically-linked binaries.

For those of you who do not understand the ramifications of statically linked binaries, it means that every program has all of the libraries it needs to run linked as one blob on the disk and even in the main memory of the computer with the rest of the code that the programmer wrote.

In the early days of programming this was not as horrible as it sounds, because few libraries existed that could really be “shared”, but as operating systems became more sophisticated and included math libraries, graphics libraries, security libraries and a variety of other functionality that could be shared between programs, the duplication of this code thousands of times on an individual system by linking it into every program took up huge amounts of disk space and additional memory space that became intolerable.

60 Great Open Source Developer Tools

If you’re looking for good open source developer tools, you literally have thousands to choose from. For this list, we focused on 60 of the best and most well known. Rather than trying to rank them, we’ve arranged them into categories and listed them in alphabetical order.

That said, we’re sure to have left off a few (or perhaps even a few dozen) that deserve to be included. Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.

One quick note about operating systems: Many of these open source developer tools run on a wide range of OSes. In some cases, they support more than a hundred different platforms.

For the sake of keeping the list short and readable, we noted whether each developer tool supports the big three – Windows, Linux and OS X. If you want to know whether a particular tool will run on Solaris or FreeBSD or another platform, you can click the link to check its Web site.

Web Browsers

• a bug or a feature?

  Google’s browser tells Google’s Analytics package that it’s a lot more popular than it actually is?

• POLL RESULTS: Best Browser for Linux

  Internet Browser Votes
  Mozilla Firefox 128
  Google Chrome 49
  Opera 35
  Chromium 30
  SwiftFox 6
  SeaMonkey 6
  IE through WINE 4
  Epiphany 4
  Konqueror 3

• Mozilla

  • Seabird – Mind Blowing Community Driven Mobile Phone Concept From Mozilla Labs

    We have featured a number of mobile phone concepts before, Nokia Morph Concept Phone for example. But Seabird concept phone from Mozilla is in a league of its own. Seabird is a community driven mobile phone concept that debuted at Mozilla Labs ‘Concepts’.

CMS/Social

• Highlights of the First Week

  The community’s response to our release has been amazing. Within the first week of releasing code to developers, Diaspora is the 10th most popular project on Github with over 2500+ watchers. We’ve had 412 forks of Diaspora to date, and about a half a million views of the code as well. Many people have gotten the alpha running on their own machines, and have provided countless bug reports and feature requests.

• Beyond Diaspora: Another Facebook alternative has a head start

  StatusNet is a free software, aka “open source”, microblogging platform (e.g. Twitter). It successfully federates, and better yet, Diaspora has promised to implement OStatus, the same set of standards used by StatusNet so that if and when Diaspora goes public, users on each will be able to connect with each other seamlessly. Diaspora also promised to be free software under the GNU AGPL, same as StatusNet.[10] The most popular public instance is Identi.ca and you can sign up to try it for yourself. StatusNet alone may be a suitable replacement for Twitter, but by itself it doesn’t provide the same functionality as Facebook.

  This is where GNU Social comes in. GNU social aims to extend the StatusNet to provide the capabilities of a full social network. It will incorporate additional features for controlling privacy settings and sharing pictures or video, and it will display all of this in an interface that’s designed not for a microblogging site, but rather for a complete social networking site. The distinction between GNU social and StatusNet is a bit confusing as they has a unique relationship: when development on the original version of GNU social stalled, the developers looked for another codebase to work on. The result was the social/status alliance, between GNU social and StatusNet. Both projects are co-dependent and contain code from either other, thanks in no small part to the hard work of Craig Andrews of GNU social, and Evan Prodromou of StatusNet.

• Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress

  Microsoft’s killing another me-too Web 2.0 service, sinking its fledgling Live Spaces blog network and shifting 30 million users to WordPress.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Telephony Statement on new Internet Surveillance Laws

  Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.

  Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.

• Happy 27th Birthday GNU Project!

  A hearty Happy 27th Birthday to the GNU Project! Here is a link to the original announcement of the GNU Project posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Without the GNU project FOSS as we know it today would not exist. Thank You to everyone who works and has worked on the GNU project over the last 27 years. You have helped make the world a better place. We at LXer take our hats off to you.

Government

• Government wants to break free from Microsoft? – France shows you how.

  But then for any Linux user who already knows how good Linux/FOSS is, we have been saying this for years. Maybe the UK government could take the lead from the French who are already experiencing the benefits of migration?

Licensing

• Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works

  What is this “Free Culture” thing? What is “Free Software”? And how do I get my work out there? If you’re looking to participate in the “Commons”, you’ll need to get comfortable with the idea of free, public licenses and how to use them for your works. This won’t be hard at all, especially with this short guide, but there are different traditions that have sprung up around different kinds of works.

Standards/Consortia

• Digital Primer Video Available from the Xiph.Org Foundation

  Today, the Xiph.Org Foundation announced that they have released the first of a series of videos aimed at teaching us geeks what video is really all about. From the xiph.org site:

  “The program offers a brief history of digital media, a quick summary of the sampling theorem, and myriad details of low level audio and video characterization and formatting. It’s intended for budding geeks looking to get into video coding, as well as the technically curious who want to know more about the media they wrangle for work or play.”

Science

• This is a news website article about a scientific paper

  In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

  In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.

  If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Feds Pushing For New Legally Required Wiretap Backdoor To All Internet Communications

  It’s difficult to see how this is any different than foreign governments demanding access to others’ communications as well. It’s pretty ridiculous for President Obama to talk about open internet principles to the UN, while cooking this up at the same time. Pushing for this also means that the US will have no excuse when the governments of Iran, China and elsewhere also demand backdoors into all US-based communications.

  And, really, that’s the biggest problem with this law. Beyond the inevitable privacy violations by the feds, putting backdoors into communications technologies guarantees that those backdoors will be used by others (outside of the federal government) to snoop on communications. The FBI and the NSA (who are pushing for this) are being totally and completely naive if they think that they’re the only ones who will use this. We’ve pointed out in the past how large scale surveillance systems mean large scale security risks, and this is no different. We showed how a similar surveillance system in Greece was hacked into to spy on government officials. US officials should be aware that they’re opening themselves up to these same potential risks.

• Government Seeks Back Door Into All Our Communications

  For a decade, the government backed off of attempts to force encryption developers to weaken their products and include back doors, and the crypto wars seemed to have been won. (Indeed, journalist Steven Levy declared victory for the civil libertarian side in 2001.) In the past ten years, even as the U.S. government has sought (or simply taken) vastly expanded surveillance powers, it never attempted to ban the development and use of secure encryption.

  Now the government is again proposing to do so, following in the footsteps of regimes like the United Arab Emirates that have recently said some privacy tools are too secure and must be kept out of civilian hands.

• Pentagon Seeks to Establish Basis for 1970`s Espionage Act Against Wikileaks

Finance

• Geithner Calendar: Met Goldman’s Blankfein More Often Than Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, Boehner (EXCLUSIVE)

  Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has shown up on Geithner’s calendar at least 38 times through March 2010 since the Treasury Secretary took office in January 2009, three more entries than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 13 more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly four times as many as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner combined, according to a copy of Geithner’s daily log recently published online by the Treasury Department. The imbalance is striking, considering that Geithner was heavily involved in financial regulatory reform legislation, which Congress was grappling with during the period covered by the calendar.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• PI aims to pursue UK law firm for data breach

  Privacy International has announced that it is planning legal action against a UK law firm for breaching the privacy of internet users after a security breach.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Custom PS3 operating system in the works

PlayOS is Linux-based, will run on firmware 3.41, and will take 730MB of external HDD since it runs off the Backup Manager.

Kernel Space

• 2.6.36-rc5-git7 released

• The 2.6.32.23 and 2.6.35.6 stable kernel updates

• Geek Time with Linus Torvalds

  Linus Torvalds and Jeremy Allision were both in Sao Paolo, Brazil a few weeks ago for LinuxCon, where they were both presenters. Later in the week when they were waiting to go on a safari at the Sao Paolo Zoo, Jeremy seized the opportunity to go on a trip down memory lane when he asked Linus about the Sinclair QL they each owned while growing up. Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland, Linus wrote his own assembler and editor (in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries). They continue to reminisce about more archaic hardware like floppy drives, microdrives, 512 K RAM expansion packs and the Acorn Archimedes.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks

    With Mesa 7.9 just around the corner and it sporting a new GLSL compiler, support for new OpenGL extensions, and months worth of other changes to core Mesa and its drivers, we decided to run some benchmarks of the latest Intel Arrandale graphics processor with the past few Mesa releases to see how the performance compares. We also have ATI and Nouveau Mesa benchmarks on the way.

Applications

• Very Nice Music Player for GNOME: Decibel Audio Player

  Decibel is a music player built in GTK which takes a different approach when it comes to the way features are implemented, and that is, Decibel uses only plug-ins which can be enabled or disabled on demand. This makes it either a pretty featured player, or a very simple and basic one, depending on which plug-ins you need enabled.

• Hotot Twitter Client Feels Sophisticated, Install Hotot in Lucid, Maverick via PPA

  Twitter desktop clients for Linux keeps growing. The latest hottest entrant is called Hotot. It’s pretty hot indeed. Hotot twitter client is still in its early stages of development but already looks quite promising.

• Pylyglot

  Been working on a pet project to help out with the GNOME translations (as well as have a chance to learn more about Django) and the end product is now available at www.pylyglot.org. Basically, it is a database of all strings from all available GNOME packages parsed to (hopefully) help open source translators with their effort by providing suggestions based on existing translations.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Reset The Gnome Panels, Compiz Settings And More

  • Free Up Insane Amount of Disk Space in Ubuntu by Deleting Cached Package Files

  • 100+ basic linux terminal commands and tricks

  • Easily Integrate Thunderbird into the Ubuntu Messaging Menu

  • Beginners Guide: Monitoring Linux System Command

  • Synchronize your BlackBerry with Ubuntu

  • FolderView: Rhythmbox Plugin To Browse Your Music By Folders

  • Broadcast on icecast/shoutcast using ‘Butt’

  • Safely Remove PPAs and Roll Back to Stable Versions in Ubuntu

• Wine

  • Spotify-Notify Brings NotifyOSD Notifications For Spotify Running Under Wine

    Spotify is great for the music it brings to its users but it lacks a lot of features. There are some native Linux Spotify clients (including an official one), but they don’t support free accounts so those using the Windows version of Spotify under Wine (that’s the only way to use Spotify with a free account in Linux) must use tweaks to make it a bit more functional, like the “fix” to make it play local mp3 files we wrote about a while back.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Beats Street

    Red Hat is out with better than expected earnings, with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat president & CEO.

  • IBM benchmark tests show 10 Gigabit Ethernet outperforming InfiniBand

    The software configuration was standards-based as well, running RedHat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2.

  • Raleigh mayor tells Atlanta paper he’s ‘anxious’ to keep Red Hat

    Leaders in Atlanta believe they can lure the headquarters of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) away Raleigh, and N.C. leaders know they are in a fight to keep the Hatters’ red fedoras in the City of Oaks.

    In a report Saturday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said landing Red Hat “would be a huge feather in metro Atlanta’s fedora.”

    Following up on stories first reported by the Triangle Business Journal and the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the Journal-Constitution reported that Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker is concerned about Red Hat.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Standard Ubuntu on the Netbook

      Because I’m not sure about the new UNE layout, and I don’t necessarily want or need desktop effects. Also, I like having more than one desktop, and I found that to be a huge disadvantage to UNE.

    • Canonical to expand cooperation with Taiwan PC makers; launching new OS next month

      Melamut also noted that at the event, the company will discuss about cooperation with PC makers such as Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, Wistron, Inventec, Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and First International Computer (FIC), and expects the event will help the makers understand Ubuntu’s advantages. Most of the makers are giving positive feedback about the event, Melamut noted.

      [...]

      Melamut pointed out that Ubuntu-based PC shipments in 2010 are expected to grow 10 times than in 2009 with Lenovo to ship one million units in China. Shipments in 2011 will be even higher as more players will adopt Ubuntu for their PCs, Melamut added.

    • Interesting uses for Ubuntu One

      Ubuntu One is a great program/service with many uses, some obvious some not so obvious. Here are a few creative uses for Ubuntu One that some people have come up with.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android ‘to be most popular smartphone brand’

      Half a billion people will be using the Android operating system by 2015, according the analysts Inforna. The company also says that there will be more than one billion smartphone subscriptions by 2013.

      “This growth will be driven by the ongoing competition between top tier manufacturers and challengers such as Google, RIM, Apple and Microsoft who are racing to create the best possible user experience at lower pricing points,” the company said.

    • Android edges past Microsoft in U.S. smartphone market

    • Half billion people will use Google Android by 2015

      Half a billion people will be using the Google Android operating system by 2015, according to the analysts Informa.

      “This growth will be driven by the ongoing competition between top tier manufacturers and challengers such as Google, RIM, Apple and Microsoft who are racing to create the best possible user experience at lower pricing points,” Informa said.

    • Project Porting MeeGo OS To Android Phones Starting To Yield Results

      People like Android because they like openness and because they like choice. The ability to boot a second, open-source operating system on your Android device is then a pretty compelling proposition. Following a flurry of activity around various fora, some progress has been made in booting the Linux-based Maemo 5 successor, MeeGo, on select Android devices. These devices, namely the Nexus One, Streak, and Desire are all based on the Snapdragon QSD8250 and it is that chipset the development community is focusing on.

    • Sony Ericsson Focuses On Android With No Symbian Devices In The Pipeline

      The company has mostly started using Android on its latest smartphones, although it also continued to use Symbian, which is the world’s best-selling OS, for its Vivaz-branded line of phones. The company still plans to support Microsoft’s upcoming launch of Windows Phone 7, and had continued building phones on Microsoft’s older Windows Mobile software.

    • Norton Mobile Security Provides Remote Lock and Wipe, Malware Scanning for Android

• Sub-notebooks

  • $1.8 Million in XO Laptops Lost to Corruption in Iraq

    There I am this morning, reading a captivating story in the New York Times. “U.S. Gift for Iraqis Offers a Primer on Corruption” tells the tale of a shipment of laptops destined for Iraqi schoolchildren that was lost in transit…

6 More Blender Made Movies and Animations You Probably Haven’t Seen Before

Like two weeks ago, we featured some of best and most popular blender made short movies in our 8 stunning blender made short films and animations post. Now, let’s take the road less traveled. The blender movies we are going to showcase here are those rare ones which you guys probably haven’t seen before.

The open source organization: good in theory or good in reality?

Most likely, these new employees will rebel with their feet. They’ll join a new breed of organization designed from scratch, like Red Hat, Google, and 100s of other yet unknown companies, built from the ground up to operate efficiently in an open world.

Old-skool companies will have a tough time attracting the best young talent. And if they are losing the race for top talent, they be hard pressed to stay competitive.

So this is why I love to talk about applying the open source way in organizations, even when I know that many of today’s corporate cultures would chew open source principles up and spit them out.

I’m just running with the wind.

Oracle

• Oracle aims to boost client-side Java with JavaFX improvements

  At the Oracle OpenWorld event, the database giant revealed some details about its Java roadmap. Oracle unsurprisingly wants to continue improving Java Enterprise Edition, but the company also highlighted its commitment to improving client-side Web support and mobile application development with JavaFX.

  The Java programming language plays an important role in facilitating third-party mobile application development, but the standard J2ME stack is increasingly being displaced on smartphones by custom frameworks or native toolkits because it doesn’t enable developers to create competitive user experiences. Java has long since lost to Flash for client-side Web development for similar reasons.

Openness/Sharing

• The benefits of publicness

  I’m reworking an early but foundational section of my book, Public Parts, arguing the benefits of publicness, a list I presented at the PII conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. I’d like to bounce my thoughts off you and ask for your views of the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole. I won’t go into great detail in this list because I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

• Learning to Share, Thanks to the Web

• Open Data

  • Small essay on Rewired State, Open Data and future of public service

  • A simple demand: let us record council meetings

    However, let’s step back a bit. This, ultimately, is not about councillors not understanding the web, failing to get get new technology and the ways it can open up debate. This is not even about the somewhat restrictive webcasting system which apparently only has the past six month’s meetings and is somewhat unpleasant to use (particularly if you use a Mac, or Linux — see a debate of the issues here).

The Grumpy Editor’s Twitter experience

Your editor, being the grumpy, older sort that he is, must confess that he has never quite understood the allure of services like Twitter. 140-Character broadcasts look an awful lot like a combination of the worst features of cellular short messaging and Usenet; it’s conversation via bumper sticker. A local disaster recently pushed your editor to spend more time on the site; what follows are some observations, somewhat tenuously tied to the world of free software.

Keynote at the Coffee Party’s Mock Constitutional Convention

25 September, 2010, Louisville, KY: Keynote given at the Coffee Party’s Conference, launching the “mock constitutional convention” that I hosted with Mark McKinnon. This extends the argument for Citizen Funded Elections, linking the movement to what I have elsewhere called “neo-progressives.” ;

Health/Nutrition

• Patients to be frozen into state of suspended animation for surgery

  Patients are to be placed into a state of suspended animation when they undergo surgery by using a ground breaking technique that freezes their bodies to the point of death.

Security

• A Tale of Two Root Exploits, and Why We Shouldn’t Panic

  “The article is alarmist,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson, referring to a warning about a kernel bug. “It was ONE shared-hosting public-facing server at iWeb.com, among their tens of thousands of servers. “Are you running a publicly-facing shared-host server? No? Then don’t worry about it, and when your distro comes out with a new kernel, just update.”

• Man gets 10 years for VoIP hacking

  A Venezuelan man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service.

  Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served.

  Pena was sentenced by Judge Susan Wigenton in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on computer hacking and wire fraud charges.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret”

  At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That’s not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

• Blackwater’s ‘black ops’ for European multinationals

  Here’s a question: what do Monsanto, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and the Netherlands police have in common with the US Military’s European Command?

  The answer, as Jeremy Scahill – author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army – explains in The Nation, is that they have all availed themselves of the services of one of the most controversial private security companies on the planet. Here’s most of the article…

• U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet

• Sept. 26, 1983: The Man Who Saved the World by Doing … Nothing

  A Soviet ballistics officer draws the right conclusion — that a satellite report indicating incoming U.S. nuclear missiles is, in fact, a false alarm — thereby averting a potential nuclear holocaust.

  Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system, when the alarm bells went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites signaled Moscow that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

• ‘The Only Option Left for Me Is an Orderly Departure’

  In an interview with SPIEGEL, Daniel Schmitt — the 32-year-old German spokesman for WikiLeaks who is also the organization’s best-known personality after Julian Assange — discusses his falling out with the website’s founder, his subsequent departure and the considerable growing pains plaguing the whistleblower organization.

• Small Change

  Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

  Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución.

• U.S. should be able to shut Internet, former CIA chief says

  Cyberterrorism is such a threat that the U.S. president should have the authority to shut down the Internet in the event of an attack, Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said.

  Hayden made the comments during a visit to San Antonio where he was meeting with military and civilian officials to discuss cyber security. The U.S. military has a new Cyber Command which is to begin operations on October 1.

Finance

• DMCA As Censorship: Citibank Doesn’t Want You To Remember What It Said About Obama’s Bank Reform Policy

  We’ve been discussing quite a bit lately how copyright law is often used not as a tool to provide incentive to create, but as a tool for censorship. Here’s the latest example. John Bennett points us to the news that Citigroup filed a DMCA takedown request with WordPress.com over the site LBO-news’ 18-month old post that presented a copy a Citigroup analysis of Obama’s (then new) bank reform plan, which noted that it was actually quite bank-friendly. The key quote in the report: “the US government is following a relatively bank-friendly, investor-friendly approach.”

• The Open University’s Patrick McAndrew: Open Education and Policy

  At the beginning of this year we announced a revised approach to our education plans, focusing our activities to support of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. In order to do so we have worked hard to increase the amount of information available on our own site – in addition to an Education landing page and the OER portal explaining Creative Commons’ role as legal and technical infrastructure supporting OER, we have been conducting a series of interviews to help clarify some of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today’s education landscape.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

  In an effort that raises fresh questions about privacy, officials are preparing to seek sweeping new Internet regulations, arguing that they are losing their capability to track suspects.

• PI appeals to European Parliament to reconsider blocking measures

  In an open letter to the European Parliament, PI calls on MEPs to reconsider proposals to introduce internet blocking measures.

• Privacy International launching legal action against ACS Law

  Privacy International (PI) has announced that it is planning legal action against controversial solicitors ACS: Law Solicitors (ACS Law), alleging a breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA).

  ACS Law, which is already under fire for sending letters to people alleged of copyright infringement, had its website hit by a denial of service (DoS) attack last Tuesday.

  The firm quickly suspended the site, but soon afterwards a file alleged to contain an archive of the firm’s email was uploaded to file sharing websites.
  Advertisement

  PI said this has led to the exposure of personal information of around 10,000 people alleged to have been involved in illegal file sharing.

• Adult video-sharing list leaked from law firm

  The personal details of thousands of Sky broadband customers have been leaked on to the internet, alongside a list of pornographic movies they are alleged to have shared online.

  The list, seen by BBC News, details the full names and addresses of over 5,300 people thought by law firm ACS:Law to be illegally sharing adult films.

  It appeared online following an attack on the ACS:Law website.

  The UK’s Information Commissioner said it would investigate the leak.

  Privacy expert Simon Davis has called it “one of the worst breaches” of the Data Protection Act he had ever seen.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• FCC approves white-space use for unlicensed ‘Super WiFi’

  When the Federal Communications Commission issued its press release about the approval of additional unlicensed spectrum in what are called “white spaces,” it referred to the coming technologies as “Super WiFi.”

  In reality, it’s not clear that this previously unavailable set of unused frequencies will necessarily become anything that resembles WiFi. As the FCC points out in its statement, this is spectrum space that’s going to be available to a wide range of technologies, of which wireless broadband is only one. Even if this turns out to be a significant use of these white space frequencies, it’s not clear whether WiFi (or something like it) will be related in any way.

• The Carriers’ Rebellion

  Before the Steve Jobs hypnosis session, AT&T ruled. Handsets, their prices, branding, applications, contractual terms, content sales…AT&T decided everything and made pennies on each bit that flowed through its network. Then the Great Mesmerizer swept the table. Apple provided the hardware, the operating system, and “everything else”: applications, music, ringtones, movies, books… The iTunes cash register rang and AT&T didn’t make a red cent on content.

• Revenge of the Titans 1.52, and Very Cool DRM

  Since the year 350BC, Puppygames have all had DRM. Oh noes!!11!! Shock! Horror! Puppygames have DRM! Boycott all their shitty games! Find inferior open source / Flash alternatives and say you’d rather play them all day than give evil Puppygames a single cent of your filthy lucre! Use DRM as an excuse to install Trojan riddled spyware installs of Puppygames!

  Well, except Puppygames DRM is a bit different to other flavours of DRM.

  Nasty Big Corporation Ltd’s idea of DRM is that you are all thieving piratey scum who shouldn’t be trusted alone in a shop without being closely monitored by a big hairy security guard. Nasty Big Corporation Ltd likes to install rootkits on your PC. They like to insist on always-online validation to a server that sometimes goes titsup and stops you from playing. They’re pretty insistent that if you install the game on a couple of PCs that you’re probably just a filthy pirate, and that if you want to install it on your kid’s computer upstairs as well that you owe them another $59. Certain ones also reckon if you’re dissatisfied with a game in any way and want your money back you damned well can’t have it, and if you then go to the trouble of extracting the money back out of your credit card company, they erase all your games without any comeback, because unfortunately the small print dialog box you clicked through to get to your game said you agreed to this.

  Puppygames does it completely the opposite way around!

  Firstly and foremostly: if you don’t like our games, or they don’t work, we always refund you. Although we say no questions asked, we do like to ask anyway But we’ll never say no. Though we’d like to point out a couple of things: if the demo works, so does the full game, so you’d be kinda daft to buy the game without trying the demo first; and if you honestly didn’t think the full game was worth the cash, don’t be expecting to play it after asking for a refund, because it will mysteriously turn back into a demo again. What! You have a back door! I hear you cry. No, it’s a front door, and here’s me telling you about it. If your game is refunded because it doesn’t work or you don’t like it, it’ll connect to Puppygames, and find out, and turn back into a demo. Which of course should be just fine with you. Can you ever imagine a position where we’ll abuse this ability? No, because we’d look like total dicks.

  To date, only 18 customers have ever asked for a refund in 7 years. Because we use BMTMicro as our payment provider we’ve never had a single chargeback issued to us either, because we always refund.

  Secondly, we want you to share the full game with your friends and family. Yes, that’s right. We encourage you to spread the love to the people you care about. A Puppygames registration has your full name and email address encoded into it from your order (we’ve got your full postal address too, but that doesn’t get sent to the client any more). We think that anyone you care to share this information with, you probably trust enough to share your CDs and books with too, and so we also think you’d share your games with them. Your name flickers up on the title screen for a few seconds when the game starts just to remind everyone whose game it is, and then it fades away.

• BBC DRM response from Ofcom and intial thoughts

  So the key confidential arguments that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 used to convince Ofcom to permit DRM on the HD Freeview signal are to be kept secret because there is no public interest test to compel disclosure of that information under sections 41 and 44 of the Freedom of Information Act.

• DRM In (and Out) of Schools

  There are two major reasons why Kindles and iPads have no place in schools, both of which are related to DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).

  1. DRM prevents learning. It’s the information that is a resource. The access to this information is provided by tools. DRM actually makes it illegal for students to keep learning past a certain point, by preventing them from looking closely at how the devices work or from making their own methods for accessing, using, and sharing the information.
  2. DRM is, in the words of a guy I almost knew, “jus’ morally wrong.” Forcing DRM on people, even more so.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Leaked Emails Reveal Profits of Anti-Piracy Cash Scheme

    Friday night the anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law accidentally published its entire email archive online, effectively revealing how the company managed to extract over a million dollars (£636,758.22) from alleged file-sharers since its operation started. On average, 30% of the victims who were targeted paid up, and this money was divided between the law firm, the copyright holder and the monitoring company.

  • Streaming video introduces a new wave of Internet piracy

    University of Southern California student Elizabeth watched the season finale of HBO’s lusty vampire drama “True Blood” along with about 5.4 million television viewers.

  • Pirate Party Elects New Leader

    The election initially had 4 candidates – Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, Graeme Lambert, and Eric Priezkalns, however Erc and Graeme withdrew before the end of the nominations period, meaning voting was between Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, and the Re-Open Nominations option.

  • High-Profile, High Damages File-Sharing ‘Conviction’ Was a Farce

    In 2008, lawyers Davenport Lyons courted the mainstream media with the news that a court had found a woman guilty of sharing the game Dream Pinball 3D, an action which cost her around £16,000. Anyone with an understanding of these cases knew that something was wrong and now, thanks to yet more information from the leaked ACS:Law emails, we learn that this ‘conviction’ was built on foundations of sand.

  • In Copyright’s Future (IMG)

  • Copyright law needs a digital-age upgrade

    Did you ever imagine you could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends?

    If you did not get the copyright owner’s permission for these actions, you could be violating the law. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works.

    The statutory damage rule of U.S. copyright law originally was designed to provide some compensation to copyright owners when harm from infringement was difficult to prove. U.S. law authorizes judges and juries to award such damages in any amount between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work – and up to $150,000 per work if the infringement is deemed willful – without proof of any actual harm. The statute says the award should be “just” but provides no guidance about what this means. In one extreme case, a jury ordered an individual file sharer to pay nearly $2 million in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs. Is that really “just”?

  • Esther Wojcicki becomes CC’s Vice Chair, focused on learning and education

    We’re excited to announce that Esther Wojcicki, current Chair of the Creative Commons board, esteemed and award-winning teacher, and leader at the nexus of education and technology, will become CC’s Vice Chair focused on learning and education. CC’s current CEO, Joi Ito, will step into the role of both Chair and CEO.

  • The Pirate Bay Appeal Starts Tomorrow

    Last year The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. Tomorrow the appeal of the trial will start, but unlike last time there is is an awkward silence in the media, blogs and even on The Pirate Bay. Is this the proverbial calm before the storm, or perhaps a change of course?

  • ACTA

    • IPRED2 pulled

      Ironically the IPRED2 failed to get Council consensus but the EU is negotiating via the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade agreement criminal measures with third nations which go beyond IPRED2, for instance include patent infringments which were explicitly excluded in the IPRED2 process. The ACTA criminal chapter also does not get the European Parliament involved in the legislative process and includes no fair use clause.