• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

HP Declares its (web)Os Independence

Last week at HP CEO’s Leo Apotheker’s coming out party, he came off as a smart, competent leader with a vision for taking his organization forward, while helping us leave the whole sordid Mark Hurd affair in the rear view.

I wrote a post (HP Jumps on Cloud Bandwagon) concentrating on Apotheker’s cloud vision, but there was much more to the speech than that, chiefly a declaration of (web)OS Independence from Microsoft with a promise of webOS running on every HP consumer device (including printers).

Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth

66% Pass Rate For East Africa Linux Training Workshop

10 Ways Linux Is Making Life Better

Linux has long played a leading role in the world of servers, due in large part to its stability, security and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What many don’t realize, however, is just how ubiquitous it’s becoming in other parts of life as well.

Desktop

• Installation Report: My Mother

  First, she requested the KDE main menu to be switched to classic mode, calling it more familiar.

• A Compliment for the Linux Adoption Curve!

  I believe this is a mis-calculation. The hardware vendors will only invest in our ecosystem, when we are attractive compliments to their products. But they aren’t going to invest in their old discontinued products, but only into their new products. This leaves the old products without support and it just so happens that a great number of our main-stream users have made investments into hardware and are not willing to simply buy new hardware just yet. in conclusion, I think we can count on hardware makers providing us with drivers eventually; but for as long as they are not, we should be investing in all their old product lines and making sure they work with our desktop distributions.

• Long live the laptop

  Good one, Tom. The fact of the matter is — and Tom eloquently outlines it in his blog, so I won’t be echoing it here (except to say, “I agree!”) — there’s a big difference between the tablet which, for all its conveniences, isn’t really a computer, and the desktop or laptop you use for getting things done.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland

    In the early 1980s, MIT computer scientist Bob Scheifler set about laying down the principles for a new windowing system. He had decided to call it X, because it was an improvement on the W graphical system, which naturally resided on the V operating system. Little did Bob know at the time, but the X Window System that he and fellow researches would eventually create would go on to cause a revolution. It became the standard graphical interface of virtually all UNIX based operating systems, because it provided features and concepts far superior to its competition. It took only a few short years for the UNIX community to embrace the X windowing system en masse.

    In this article, we’ll take a look at the development of the Linux graphics stack, from the initial X client/server system to the modern Wayland effort.

    [...]

    X is the oldest lady at the dance, and she insists on dancing with everyone. X has millions of lines of source, but most of it was written long ago, when there were no GPUs, and no specialized transistors to do programmable shading or rotation and translation of vertexes. The hardware had no notion of oversampling and interpolation to reduce aliasing, nor was it capable of producing extremely precise color spaces. The time has come for the old lady to take a chair.

Applications

• Four open source online image editors

  If you use a photo editor to crop or convert your images, or to improve brightness, color balance and contrast, then you probably don’t need a professional image processing suite. Personally, I use GIMP for more advanced tasks, but for basic image editing simple, web-based tools are sufficient. They allow user to work on any computer and to save photos online, so you can avoid having to install desktop software.

• Linux: Bacula is for Everyone* (backup software)

  Here is how it works on Linux in a nutshell. One installs an SQL database back-end, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. Then one installs the Bacula components from one’s distribution or downloads and compiles the Bacula components oneself. (The former method is recommended unless one needs to compile Bacula from source for some reason.) Then, one runs these commands to set up the Bacula database (In our system these are in /usr/lib/bacula and are symbolically linked to the actual script to run for the database chosen.):

  * create_bacula_database
  * make_bacula_tables
  * grant_bacula_privileges

• How to use your cam as a Security video camera with Zoneminder

• Complete Your Linux Design Toolkit with ‘Ardesia’

  Ardesia is one best of the design applications available for Linux which can be used to create mockups, sketches, hand drawn annotations, interactive presentations, live demos etc. with ease right on your current desktop view or with custom images.

• Whirlwind Intro to Audacity on Linux: From Recording to CD in One Lesson

  When you want to hear what you have recorded, use the Device Toolbar to select your playback device. This can be a bit confusing as it displays every possible virtual audio device on your system, which is a lot, especially on a soundcard that support multi-channel surround. Try the Default first. “Front” and devices named hw:0,0 and hw:0,1 should work. USB devices will be clearly indicated with their own names just like in the recording device picker. Don’t be afraid to try all of them.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Working with Ecomorph in Bodhi Linux

  • Share your 3G Internet connection over wifi (Linux / iPod Touch)

  • How to install and configure SpamAssassin.

  • find with Multiple Expressions

  • How To Install And Use MyDLP

  • Sleep Timer For Automatic System Shutdown

  • Application : Caffeine – for pleasure of uninterrupted viewing

  • find with Multiple Expressions

  • How to flush DNS cache Linux, Mac OS X, Windows

  • Tutorial: Translating Scanned Docs

  • Performance tweaking with tmpfs

  • Working with Ecomorph in Bodhi Linux

  • Install Skype in EL6 (RHEL 6/ Scientificlinux 6/ Centos 6)

  • Demotivational Posters with GIMP

• Games

  • Wikinews interviews 0 A.D. game development team

    Wikinews waves Left.pngBDWikinews waves Right.png Why did you choose a free license?

    Wikinews waves Left.pngASWikinews waves Right.png People are spending more money, time and attention on playing computer games than ever before, and games are constantly evolving into a more nuanced medium of expression and a greater part of our culture. Just observe how much people play on Facebook and their mobile devices. We think this culture should allow gamers to learn how their games work, change them, share them and redistribute their works. This freedom to tinker is what Free, Open-Source Software (FOSS) is all about and so we hope a lot of people tinker with 0 A.D.

Desktop Environments

• Linux for seniors? KiWi PC builds a Linux PC for grandma and grandpa

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • shoot the messenger

    This really isn’t about individual developers, and I do not paint every person in GNOME with the same brush in my mind. I don’t do that for KDE, either: there is variety, some productive and some counter-productive, in any large group of people and our communities are not exceptions to that. However, casting me as some sort of “I hate all of you!” villain is not useful. Even if it were true, then people should simply ignore me as an individual actor in it and look at the large, long-term patterns that really do exist and really do need fixing. I am not personally responsible for everything, I was not even involved most of episodes that exhibited the unfortunate patterns we’ve been experiencing. So even if the messenger really, truly sucks and you really don’t like them as a person, try to address the issues anyways. Avoid indulging in shooting the messenger as a way of dismissing issues and thereby relieving the perceived pain. It’s only a distraction, and nothing gets improved that way.

  • Battling Misconceptions: What is KDE?

    Now, Tony is an experienced user of free software as well as a scientist and – from his emails – clearly an intelligent and inquisitive man. So it was a real surprise to me that he and other LXer readers were so ignorant about how KDE works. I do not mean ‘ignorant’ in any kind of offensive sense here, merely that both Tony and the other LXer readers really did not seem to understand how KDE operates or who we are. Here are a few questions (paraphrased) that really took my by surprise:

    * Who controls KDE?
    * Who funds KDE?
    * Can we contact KDE?

    These show a few things to me. First, some (many?) people think of us as having a hierarchy like a company, as if we have a leader or set of leaders who tell everyone else what to do. Maybe these are the people who pay us and if it is possible to get in contact with those leaders then they might be persuaded to redirect the efforts of all the code monkeys.

  • 
    battling misconceptions, even within KDE

    One of Stuart’s points was that KDE doesn’t have top-down leaders that can tell random other people what to do in a way that they are beholden to follow. This is quite true, and it’s a strength in that it prevents KDE from hijacked by any one interest, or requiring that we bet our future on any one group consistently and always making the best decisions.

  • Kupfer v204 (QuickLauncher) Released With New Gwibber Plugin, Lots More [PPA]

    Kupfer v204 was released a couple of days ago and today it was finally uploaded to the Kupfer PPA. The most interesting new feature in this new Kupfer version is a Gwibber plugin which allows you to easily send an update to Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook and so on (all the services supported by Gwibber). I’ll tell you how to use this later on.

  • New Features in digiKam 2.0: Color Labels and Picks

    To add a color label to an individual photo, right-click on it, choose Assign Labels » Color, and pick the color you want. Each color label has its own shortcut, so you can quickly label photos using the keyboard. For example, to assign the Magenta label, press Ctrl+Alt+6. To quickly remove a color label from a photo, press Ctrl+Alt+0. The Picks feature works in a similar manner: you can assign one of three picks — Pending, Accepted, or Rejected — to any photo in digiKam via the Assign Labels » Pick context menu, or using the default shortcuts.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME marketing contract: week 3

    Last week, most of my contract time was taken up with two big tasks. I wrote a history of the GNOME 3 design for a press query, and I also wrote the first draft of the release notes (woo hoo!) That draft will be going off to various people for feedback and fact checking very soon.

  • Will GNOME 3.0 Repeat the User Revolt of KDE 4.0?

    KDE 4.0 was too radical a change, too lacking in features or stability, too much a triumph of developer’s interests over user’s — the accusations seemed endless, and only began to quiet six months later when KDE 4.1 began addressing the shortcomings. Partly, the hostility continues to this day, although for many the KDE 4 series has long ago proved itself.

    This April, GNOME 3.0 is scheduled for release. Just as KDE 4.0 was a radical departure from KDE 3.5, so GNOME 3.0 is a radical departure from GNOME 2.32. But will its release trigger another user revolt? Or has the GNOME project — perhaps learning from KDE’s experience — managed expectations well enough to prevent history from repeating itself?

    Certainly, GNOME has tried much harder to handle its own break with the past differently than KDE managed KDE 4.0. But the KDE revolt resulted from multiple causes, and, although GNOME has addressed some of those causes, the underlying problems of the project’s relationship to its users remains in some ways disturbingly similar to those faced by KDE three years ago.

Distributions

• 7 Surprises From Turkey

  I made several reviews of Operation systems originating from Eastern Europe: SLAX, Agilia Linux, Alt Linux, Austrumi. This time I will aim little bit to the South, on the place where Europe meets Asia.
  How many countries do you know which are placed in Europe and Asia both? Russia? Anything else? Yes, that is Turkey. Not the most well known country in the world, although European culture would be different if this country would not exist. Byzantium, Constantinople… They are all parts of Turkish history.

• Bodhi Linux: E17 and Ubuntu make a great combination

  As anyone who has read my ramblings long enough knows, I am a big fan of the Enlightenment desktop. I’ve been enjoying this take on the Linux desktop since the early E16 days. For a while, however, I left E17 for GNOME simply because the combination of Ubuntu and GNOME made perfect sense. Not only was Ubuntu a very stable distribution, GNOME had come a long, long way.

  You will also have more than likely read my recent trepidation regarding the changes coming to the Ubuntu desktop (Unity). Although Ubuntu 11.04 will offer a traditional GNOME desktop selection at log in, I realized that Ubuntu Unity is just not the desktop for me. So, I decided it was time to head back to the land of Enlightenment. But instead of going through the paces of installing E17 on top of Ubuntu, I decided to search out a distribution that would combine the two.

• Reviews

  • Lazy Linux Distro Reviews

    Whenever I took the time to write a distribution review, I always made it a point to actually install the distribution on my system and use it as my main operating system for a minimum of a few days. Sure this takes a little bit more effort, but it is necessary if you are going to write an informed article. I amazes me how many people that write reviews simply boot a distribution in virtual box (some don’t even install it!) take a few screen shots and then call it a day. Some don’t even load any of the default applications or even look at the project’s website. Sure it is OK to load the distribution as a virtual machine, but this should not be the only method of testing it for the purposes of a review.

  • Review: Chakra 2011.02 “Cyrus”

    The live and installed sessions worked quite well, the latter certainly much better than in the last version, where X11 refused to start.

• New Releases

  • Saline 1.3

  • AUSTRUMI 2.3.2

  • Chakra 2011.04-ms3

  • Macpup 520

    Macpup 520 is the latest and is based on Puppy Linux 5.2 ,”Lucid Puppy”, An official woof build of puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages. MP520 contains all the apps from Lucid puppy with the addition of Firefox 4 RC 1. Extra apps like Opera or Gimp are available for easy download from the Quickpet App on the ibar or the Puppy Package Manager. MP511 also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.0 and E17 version 55225 where compiled and installed from source.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 Includes Enterprise-Class Open Source Data Virtualization Solution

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, which includes new extensions for data services integration.

  • Red Hat Puts Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to the Test

    When we released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in November 2010, we discussed the many performance improvements featured in the release – these included improvements in network rates, multi-user filesystem workloads and virtualization I/O enhancements allowing for increased consolidation while simultaneously reducing I/O overhead in comparison to baremetal.

    Today, we’re excited to announce that in internal testing conducted by Red Hat engineering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has set a new standard in storage performance. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Intel-based systems and Fusion-io Solid State Storage devices delivered results measuring 30 percent faster performance than previously published results* based on proprietary systems.

• Debian Family

  • DEX: Bridging Gaps Between Debian and Derivatives

  • Extending Perfect Server – Debian Squeeze [ISPConfig 3]

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • 
      Install Full Ubuntu on Motorola Atrix

    • Installing Ubuntu from a USB memory stick

    • Unity Video Mockup: Better Menus, Social Networking Widget Layer

      Frederico Araújo Mendes has created a very interesting Unity mockup (video) in which he proposes better menus and a social networking widget layer.

    • My Thoughts On Unity: 1 Month On

      The install process was fine, and once again – as mentioned previously – it crashed far too frequently upon login. Then I managed to install the nvidia drivers, which helped…a little. After I’d ran update-manager, and installed all the latest updates, things seemed to settle down a little, and the crashes were less often, but still present. This did, however, allow me an opportunity to try things out properly, and for the last 5 days or so, I’ve effectively been running Natty as my main OS (having 2 hard drives is handy…).

    • Karmasphere and Canonical Announce Partnership

      Karmasphere™, a Big Data Analytics company, today announced a partnership with Canonical, the company that leads Ubuntu Linux development and provides support, custom engineering and training for the industry-leading Ubuntu Linux distribution. As part of the relationship, Karmasphere gains direct access to Canonical Linux expertise and support, ensuring a superior user experience for Karmasphere customers hosting Big Data development on Linux workstations.

    • Unity: Now more handsy than the TSA

      Not very long ago, if you had asked me if I was excited about touch in Ubuntu, I would have told you it’s a passing fad. Well my friends, I am here to say I was wrong. This weekend and today has landed some significant new touch work into Unity that has instantly and dramatically changed how I use my desktop. Unity now supports (in trunk, release is thursday) two new touch interactions:

      * Four finger press to toggle dash visibility
      * Four finger drag to reveal/hide the launcher

    • Want Multiarch Support In Ubuntu? Help Steve!

      Steve Langasek, a Debain/Ubuntu developer has announced on a mailing list that from Natty onwards Ubuntu will have better multiarch support.

    • Canonical’s Dell and Lenovo love lets Ubuntu down

Devices/Embedded

• An introduction to Embedded Linux, BeagleBoard & its Linux kernel port

  BeagleBoard comes with a 4GB microSD card containing validation software that you can use (actually, a release of the Angstrom distribution) and which should boot after you insert the card and power on the board. If you have set things up correctly, you will see a simple banner and be able to type shell commands. There are various alternative images available on the BeagleBoard website, so you can replace the ‘validation’ factory image with a version of Android built for BeagleBoard, or Ubuntu, and so on. I chose to install Debian Squeeze on my BeagleBoard, following instructions on the BeagleBoard wiki and using the updated kernel images available from Robert Nelson to get started. At this point, the latest upstream kernels (from 2.6.38 onwards) support most of the hardware out of the box without requiring patching or modification.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Digia to acquire Qt commercial licensing business from Nokia

    • The Linux Foundation Announces MeeGo TV Working Group

      MeeGo Smart TV Working Group begins its work to bring open framework and innovation to television ecosystem

      LONDON {IPTV World Forum}, March 22, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the formation of the MeeGo™ Smart TV Working Group.

      MeeGo is an open source Linux project targeting multiple segments including automotive systems, netbooks, tablets, TV’s, and set-top boxes, among others, and uses Qt to enable cross-device applications. The Working Group is designed to help drive the evolution of MeeGo within the television ecosystem and provide an open framework for industry creativity and innovation.

  • Android

    • Sencha Releases Android Event Recorder to Speed Development of Android Web Apps

    • Android media players hot up

      Android’s default media players are reasonable enough but if you want a little more from your mobile media player then there is good news. The number of great media players now available for Android is growing daily and includes the likes of stalwarts such as Winamp as well as some new names.

    • A Look at Firefox Mobile

      As Firefox inches slowly towards its March 26 release date, the Mozilla folks are also working on Firefox Mobile for Android — a port of the beloved Firefox browser to the Android platform. Can Mozilla make significant headway on mobile devices? Signs point to yes.

      Bearing in mind that Firefox 4 on Android is still in beta, I went to try it out for a bit and see how well it fares on my Nexus One. Note that I recently got the Gingerbread update on the Nexus, though I’m not sure if that has any impact on Firefox performance or not compared to earlier Android releases.

Top open source developers coming

This week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — is bringing some of the nation’s leading software developers to Columbia.

The conference, which will be held Wednesday through Friday at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, will focus on the latest issues for developers, executives, government leaders and educators.

The conference is unique on the East Coast, said conference chairman Todd Lewis, managing partner of Columbia’s Palmetto Computer Labs. Most open source conferences are held on the West Coast, such as in Silicon Valley. And it is significantly cheaper — $99 for advance tickets and $149 at the door — compared with $800 and up for West Coast conferences, Lewis said.

Events

• Seats Are Still Available for the Open Compliance Training Class Offered in Conjunction with Collaboration Summit

  “Overview of Open Source Compliance End-to-End Process” will be offered Saturday, April 9. The course focuses on how to organize and manage the compliance function so that your company can benefit from free and open source software while complying with all license obligations.

• Registration Open for 2011 OpenClinica Global Conference

  The 2011 OpenClinica Global Conference will be held May 8-9 in Boston, Massachusetts.

• Ubuntu Cloud Days approaching

• Celebrate Innovation with Chicago’s Linux & Open-source Software Enthusiasts at Flourish! 2011

  An annual gathering of, for, and by enthusiasts of open-source software, technology, and culture, taking place at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Download Firefox 4 Final for Linux

    Ladies and gentlemen, Mozilla has finally made available for download the latest and stable version of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 4.0 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are supported!

    Yes! The final version of Firefox 4 is finally here, and it brings an amazing new look, faster start-up times, lots and lots of improvements, support for 3D graphics, HTML5, WebM, CSS3, SVG, hardware acceleration, JavaScript improvements, privacy enhancements, crash protection, and much more!

  • Mozilla Firefox 4 Improves Memory Use

    That’s no longer the case as the browser is set to exit development and become generally available on March 22.

  • FireSSH – SSH in a Browser (Firefox addon)

    FireSSH is a free, cross-platform SSH terminal client for Mozilla Firefox. Written entirely in Javascript!

  • Mozilla’s Leaner, Meaner Firefox 4 Arrives

  • Mozilla’s Firefox 4 bags 1M downloads in 3 hours

    Firefox 4 got off to a strong start today, with 1 million copies of the new browser downloaded in the first three hours.

    If it keeps up the early pace, Firefox 4 will easily beat Microsoft’s claim that users downloaded 2.4 million copies of its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the first 24 hours of availability last week.

  • Firefox 4 Heats Up the Browser Wars

  • The 10 Best Features In Firefox 4

  • 12 new features in Mozilla Firefox 4

    D-day is here for Mozilla Firefox 4, almost 8 months after its first beta release. The launch comes eight days after Microsoft IE 9′s official launch. Firefox 4 was originally scheduled to launch in November 2010. Damon Sicore, Mozilla’s senior director of platform engineering, said in a message on a company forum, “Today’s triage session concluded with all systems go for a Firefox 4 launch on March 22.”

  • Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 and Delivers a Fast, Sleek and Customizable Browsing Experience to More Than 400 Million Users Worldwide

    Mozilla, a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better, is proud to release Mozilla Firefox 4, the newest version of the popular, free and open source Web browser. Firefox puts users in control of their Web experience, providing a streamlined user interface, fun new features, a boost in speed and support for modern Web technologies.

SaaS

• What the Cloud Means for the Open-Source Desktop

  In this scenario, open-source operating systems win big. They’re free, but even more importantly, they’re highly modular and scalable, making it simple for vendors and users to cut out overhead that becomes useless in a cloud-based world.

• Zarafa CEO Brian Joseph On Open-Source, the Cloud, and the World

  While cautioning that the open-source licensing of Zarafa’s software is “not the most important” factor in its success, Joseph emphasized the unique selling points that the product enjoys vis-à-vis proprietary competitors because of its open-source nature. Above all, the ability of customers to tweak the software freely provides an advantage wholly unavailable from most of Zarafa’s competitors.

Databases

• Percona Delivers MySQL Support to 1000th Customer

  Percona, the oldest and largest independent provider of support and consulting services for the MySQL database, is proud to celebrate the 1000-customer milestone. Percona was founded in 2006 and employs a staff of nearly 50 people globally. Customers include Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Groupon, the BBC, and StumbleUpon. Companies who purchase MySQL support contracts from Percona testify that they enjoy lower system downtime, faster time to market, cost savings, access to state-of-the-art solutions that raise their capabilities to the next level, and greater business agility.

• Ingres Announces Innovative Cloud Solutions and Strategic Roadmap

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle puts out Solaris 11 compatibility tester

  The Oracle Technology Network Garage – the blog where system administrators and developers hang out in the World According to Larry – has announced that the software giant has put out a tool to help customers figure out if their Solaris applications will be compatible with the upcoming Solaris 11.

• LibreOffice 3.3.2 is released! With installation instructions

• LibreOffice 3.3.2 is now available

• New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m103) available

  Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m103 is available for download.

• emerge libreoffice-bin

  libreofficeFrom today i’ve switched, on my Gentoo,from openoffice 3.2 to libreoffice 3.3 and for sure i’ve no regret.

CMS

• Acquia Launches Web Solution Powerhouse Drupal Gardens 1.0

  Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, today announced the general availability release of Drupal Gardens 1.0 with new capabilities and pricing plans. The powerful new Views functionality makes Drupal Gardens the most robust web solution to rapidly assemble and deploy extraordinary social sites. With more than 40,000 sites created in the last year, Drupal Gardens is the fastest way to build content-rich, dynamic sites.

  Views, a capability unique to Drupal, provides Drupal Gardens with an incomparable collection of tools for site builders with the simplicity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery. Without writing any code, Views makes it possible to create custom mashups or combinations of content, media, user profiles, and more. Site builders can point and click to pull together any information on their site and craft dynamic lists, grids, tables, reports, RSS feeds, and navigation. Views can also be configured to display different results based on visitor interactions, such as displaying posts submitted over the past month versus the most popular. With Views, Drupal Gardens sites can be easily assembled and deployed with completely custom dynamic content.

• Investor.gov using Drupal

  Investor.gov recently switched to Drupal from WordPress. The site houses a lot of information for investors.

  The new investor.gov is a good looking site that also seems to be 508 compliant (for accessibility). The site is easy to use, making it easy for users to get the information they need without being overwhelmed.

Education

• Open University offers Linux certification

  The six month OU course, from which students gain credits towards their degree, has been running for one year, during which over 1,000 students completed the program. A further 500 are expected to register for the third course, starting in May 2011. The course is aimed at complete beginners, and introduces them to the history and value of open source, installation and management of the operating system and web server, and basic functionality.

• PL: School curriculum to be modernised with courses on free software

  The Polish Foundation on Open and Free Software (Fwioo) is establishing a team of ten experts to help develop courses on free and open source software, meant to be used in secondary schools as well as in technical schools.

Business

• Addressing a Big New Audience: VMware Acquires WaveMaker

  This acquisition furthers VMware’s cloud application platform strategy by empowering additional developers to build and run modern applications that share information with underlying infrastructure to maximize performance, quality of service and infrastructure utilization.

• When commercial open source goes bad

  Another example involves a company set up by some prominent former employees of one of the big names in open source software. The first version was released using an open source license but was never updated, as the company focused all its attention on the closed source version instead.

  Meanwhile one of the prominent “open source” systems management vendors appears to have removed all mention of its Community Edition software from its website, while the Community Edition itself has not been updated for 15 months. While the project is not officially “dead” it is, to say the least, “pining for the fjords” and the company in question could be said to be open source in name only.

Funding

• My Thoughts on Simplifying Monetary Contributions to Free and Open Source Projects

• Clustercorp Closes $3 Million Investment Round

  Clustercorp also announced that Joe Markee, founder of Copper Mountain Networks, has joined the team as CEO and chairman of the board. Mason Katz and Greg Bruno, co-founders of the open-source Rocks Cluster Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), have joined the company full time as CTO and vice president of engineering respectively.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Call: An open source Skype

  Free software world announces ambitious plans to build an open source Skype alternative.

  In an effort to create a free software alternative to Skype the GNU Project has announced plans for GNU Call. The project hopes to provide secure over-the-internet calls to all users and rival the popular Skype VoIP service.

• Gnash 0.8.9 advances open source Flash

  The new 0.8.9 release improves on the usability and stability of the platform.

Government

• AU: Government moves to encourage use of Open Source Software

  On 27 January 2011, Special Minister of State Gary Gray released the revised Australian Government Open Source Software Policy, which requires agencies to consider both open source and proprietary software for all ICT procurements.

  Mr Gray said: “The revised policy further strengthens agency software procurement processes by requiring agencies to consider both open source and proprietary software when undertaking all software procurement.”

  The government’s previous position on open source software, established in 2005, was one of ‘informed neutrality’. This ensured an unbiased position that did not favour the selection of either open source or proprietary software. Both the previous and the new policy positions ensure ‘value for money’ and ‘fit for purpose’ decisions in accordance with the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines.

Licensing

• Google GPL violation claims speculative: expert

  He pointed out that the same thing had been done twice before with glibc and uClibc, both under a weak LGPL licence. Google had merely provided a third alternative.

• Open source and app stores: Where they mix, where they don’t

  App stores are all the rage these days, with companies vying to release their software ahead of competitors. Not surprisingly, open source components are being used to speed development of these applications. But companies need to ensure their open source usage fits within the requirements of both the app stores and open source component licenses — or risk removal from these outlets (and not just Apple’s).

• Linus on Android headers: claims “seem totally bogus”

  The recent uncertainty cast over Android’s Bionic library and its use of Linux kernel headers “seems totally bogus”, according to Linus Torvalds. In an interview with Brian Proffitt at ITWorld, Torvalds said “I haven’t looked at exactly what Google does with the kernel headers but I can’t see they they’d want to do anything fundamentally different from glibc in this respect”. He also pointed out that he has said making use of the kernel’s system call interfaces, as described in the headers, does not “in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL”.

Openness/Sharing

• Open source Kimono Lanterns to the rescue

  The devastation in Japan is heart rending and compels each of one of us to contribute to help improve the situation. Similar thoughts have been running through developers at Freaklabs . At the hackerspace they are involved with, a solar rechargeable lantern was designed for garden and patio use. Called the Kimono Lantern, today they are able to put it to better use. Donating the complete design to the open source hardware community, they are indeed standing true to the commitments of the Open Source community.

Programming

• Allura, the Open Source Forge

  So in kind of a soft launch, SourceForge released the project I’ve been working on (Allura) under the Apache license last month. The project happens to be the actual software underlying the SourceForge.net ‘beta’ tools, and we’re hoping to get lots of community involvement, starting at PyCon.

• Eclipse sings open-web tune: No framework, no problem

  Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich wants to make one thing perfectly clear: Project Orion is not Eclipse.

• Pre vs Post Increment & Performance Impact

• PHP developer wiki server hacked

Standards/Consortia

• Still no Google Instant for Opera browser fans

Science

• The tiny cube that could cut your cell phone bill

  It’s called lightRadio, a Rubik’s cube-sized device made by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) that takes all of the components of a cell phone tower and compresses them down into a 2.3-inch block. Unlike today’s cell towers and antennas, which are large, inefficient and expensive to maintain, lightRadio is tiny, capacious and power-sipping.

Security

• PHP.net breach: Concern over safety of source code

  Maintainers of the PHP programming language spent the past few days scouring their source code for malicious modifications after discovering the security of one of their servers had been breached.

  The compromise of wiki.php.net allowed the intruders to steal account credentials that could be used to access the PHP repository, the maintainers wrote in a brief note. They continue to investigate details of the attack, which exploited a vulnerability in the Wiki software and a separate security flaw in Linux. The site has been down since at least Friday.

Finance

• Is Goldman Sachs Skirting The Volcker Rule?

  Anyone who thinks it’s business as usual on Wall Street in the wake of regulatory overhaul just got some more evidence of that.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

A bid to keep LUGs relevant

Hence the question of the relevancy of LUGs does come up for discussion at least occasionally. It’s something the president of the Perth Linux User Group, James Bromberger, has been thinking about.

“For a LUG to survive, it needs energy from the members. There’s a lot to talk about on this subject,” Bromberger told iTWire. “Linux is mainstream these days compared with 10 years ago, and access to remote resources is trivial. LUGs used to be the only lifeline that people had to share ideas, but as an enabling technology, the internet has shifted people’s reliance on local resources.”

Desktop

• Introducing Your Honey to Linux

  “A couple years ago, I bought my wife a new Thinkpad,” Slashdot blogger Chris Travers recalled. “She made a specific request: ‘I don’t want to use something weird, like Linux.’” Though the laptop came with Vista, it “never worked right. It had video card issues, power management issues and networking issues.” After a few days, Travers’ wife asked him to “‘do anything you can to make this work or return it,’” he said. “So I installed Fedora Linux.”

• Should I Switch to Linux?

Audiocasts/Shows

• Going Linux Mar 20: #133

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Gallium3D OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker Redux

    There was a Gallium3D OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker proposed for this year’s Google Summer of Code to benefit X.Org / Mesa. As this state tracker was going to be written from scratch and without any dependence on Mesa itself, the consensus among the core developers was that the work was simply too ambitious for a lone student developer to complete over the course of a summer. A new proposal has now been drafted by Denis Steckelmacher, the Belgian student developer interested in open-source OpenGL 4.1 support.

  • Gordon’s Thoughts On Open-Source GPU Drivers

    Being discussed this week in our forums is an interview that Ryan “Icculus” Gordon gave last week to the Czech AbcLinuxu web-site. In particular, comments made by Ryan regarding the state of open-source graphics drivers and how they basically are just in bad shape.

    Ryan Gordon is perhaps the most well known Linux game developer that began at Loki Software and since then has independently been responsible for porting various games to Linux and Mac OS X such as Unreal Tournament 2004, America’s Army, and many others. He’s also been involved with Google Earth on Linux and various other projects, including the defunct Unreal Tournament 3 port.

  • Nouveau’s OpenGL Performance Approaches The NVIDIA Driver

Applications

• Nautilus Elementary Lives On, Version 2.32.2 Will Land In Ubuntu Maverick And Natty Soon

  An update should come in the Nautilus Elementary PPA in the next couple of hours for both Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 so keep an eye on your update manager if you’ve added the PPA. But don’t worry, we’ll make a brand new post when it happens.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Squid Proxy Server: Tips and Tricks

  • Exercise #8: Counting and Sums with awk

  • Creating and Manipulating PDFs with PHP and FPDF

  • Generate random numbers with $RANDOM

  • How to install and configure SpamAssassin.

  • Ubuntu Tip:How to open a file manager of the current directory in the terminal

  • Five tips for troubleshooting Linux desktops

  • 2.5 Methods to Mount Windows Share

  • How to Reorder Linux Drive Partition Numbers

  • Ubuntu Tips: Manage CPU temperature

  • Wall paper slide show on Kubuntu

  • How do I autostart application after login to KDE4

  • How to download Flash Files : No Flash files in /tmp ?

  • Use the lscpu command to get CPU/Processor information on Linux

  • Ubuntu Tip:How to open a file manager of the current directory in the terminal

  • add timestamp to a picture with free open source software

  • Resize Pictures With Picture Resizer XnConvert

  • top: The poor man’s performance analyzer

  • Tip for Diagnosing Linux Audio Failure

  • Install Firefox 4 In Ubuntu 10.04 / 10.10 Via PPA Repository – The Proper Way

• Games

  • Molten Sky Linux version

    ICWL has reported on reddit that there will be a linux version of Big little Teams game Molten Sky.

Desktop Environments

• Holding on to KDE 3.5.x and Gnome 2.x in 2011

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Towards a declarative Plasma: Containments and tablets

    In the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.6 there was for the first time the possibility to write Plasmoids completely with a mix of the QML declarative language and Javascript, part of QtQUICK, this makes development dramatically faster (and with dramatically I mean that in around 2 days, c++ plasmoids developed since 4.0 can been rewritten from scratch)

  • Small applications missing in KDE 4

    I have been working in the last weeks in the removal of the last pieces of KDE 3 from the Debian archive and I have found there are a lot of packages that is sad having to remove.

  • KDE Look Part 6: 4 Months In

    So, in general, I’m still loving KDE. I hate that I can’t use it at work. It makes everything about using a computer a pleasure. I love that I’ve been able to customize it to my specific needs and I look forward to doing that even more once KDE 4.6 lands in Fedora and I can make better use of Activities. It makes me really feel that Gnome 3 and its rigidity is probably not for me. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t do radical customization of my desktops. But I do like to make it work for my unique situation. I’m going to reserve final judgement until I get to use it. Who knows, maybe it sucks me into its madness. But somehow I doubt that will be the case. I’m really loving KDE too much.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3 Live image, release 0.1.1

    This week release is a polish release :

    * very few package changes
    * many services are disabled when booting live CD, improving its loading speed
    * password is no longer asked at all in live CD for root or standard (tux) user
    * when installing the image on a system (add liveinstall parameter on bootloader), some services are enabled back (apparmor, preload, firewall), thanks to Chris comments

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Looking over Crux again

    If you recall a speed jump when you moved from something gluttonous and bloated, like Ubuntu, to something sparse and clean, like Arch … well, you’ll see the same improvement when you move to something skeletal and streamlined.

• New Releases

  • Gentoo Linux 11.0 Released, Try It Now

    Gentoo team has announced the release of version 11.0. Gentoo is traditionally known for geeks who want to compile the distro from scratch to optimize performance. But, Gentoo is well suited for regular users as well, if you are successful in installing it.

• Red Hat Family

  • GPL expert gives Red Hat the all-clear

    Well-known free software activist and GPL expert Bradley Kuhn says Red Hat’s recent change of policy with regard to provision of its kernel source appears, on the surface, to be GPL-compliant.

  • Red Hat Global Support Team Honored As A Leader In Support Excellence

    “Red Hat’s Global Support Services team is responsible for earning and maintaining the loyalty of our subscribing customers. Through the reliable products we offer, the collaborative work we engage in with customers and partners and the high level of service we provide, we place our customer needs first,” said Marco Bill-Peter, vice president, Global Support Services at Red Hat. “We’re excited to be recognized by HDI for the updates we have been driving to improve our support delivery to our global customers and extend the value of our subscriptions.”

• Debian Family

  • Debian Sqeeze Gets First Update

    The Debian project has announced the first update for the stable version of Debian, 6.0 aka Squeeze. According to the mailing list post, this udate mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

    This version doesn’t mean a new version of Debian, it just updates some of the packages. There is no need to throw away 6.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

  • “It’s called Debian”

  • DEX: Bridging Gaps Between Debian and Derivatives

    Zimmerman explains, “DEX is all about action: merging patches, fixing bugs, crunching data, whatever is necessary to get changes from derivatives into Debian proper. DEX doesn’t try to change the way any existing project works, but adds a “fast path” for getting code from one place to another.”

    Ubuntu has been accused of not contributing code back to upstream projects, but Debain acknowledged that the process for this has been difficult to navigate. The Debian Front Desk seems limited to linking interested parties, but DEX is an attempt to grease the wheels by actually merging code, recording statistics, and updating bug reports. It appears it is going to do the dirty work.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Is Natty Heading In The Wrong Direction?

      Canonical is investing quite a lot of resources in 11.04. I do appreciate the way Natty looks and feels at the moment, but to whom does it matter? When you tested Alpha of Natty what was the new feature that amazed you? Was there a new application that let you do things in a better way? Did Natty address any problem which GNU/Linux distros face in general?

      I like Ubuntu for 3 reasons: 1) It is based on Debian and I love the way apt-get resolves dependencies. 2) I like Ubuntu Software Center as it makes my job quite easier to install apps. 3) PPAs allow me to add applications without much worry.

    • Yay for Open Source!

      So I’ve avoided talking about the latest kerfuffle in Ubuntuland because I might be biased, working as I do for Canonical.

      [...]

      Not that such discussions aren’t worth having, but it’s easy to get caught up in navel-gazing. We’re all on the same team. We’re trying to change the world, and it’s worth remembering every now and then that we are succeeding!

    • Ubuntu Manual Project calling for Project Leader, Editor-in-Chief

    • An Interview with CharlesA

    • Open Ballot: is Canonical good for free software?

      On the other hand, Canonical would argue that it’s trying hard to give back to the community, for instance with the new DEX project. We want your opinions for our upcoming podcast: do you think, on the whole, that Canonical is a good or bad force for free software and Linux?

    • Ubuntu is NOT part of Google Summer of Code 2011

    • Razing the Stakes

      Ubuntu cheerleading blog OMG! Ubuntu asks the question, “Has the new Ubuntu One Control Panel raised the stakes in app appearances?”

    • Has the new Ubuntu One Control Panel raised the stakes in app appearances?

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Expect Better Collaboration Between Linux Mint And Lancelot

        Ivan Čukić recently blogged about the status of collaboration within FOSS projects. He was pointing at one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions Linux Mint. The Debian/Ubuntu based operating system uses Lancelot as the default menu in Linux Mint. But it seems Ivan was not even aware of it. He wrote that he found about it through a bug report.

        The report stated that, “This is also the reason Mint 10 KDE could not use Lancelot as the default launcher. This bug was considered a showstopper for one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions.”

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Apple and Android app marketplace insight

      Apple still dominates the mobile device app market but Android is gaining strength

      For some time Apple has dominated the app marketplace space, outpacing rivals with literally hundreds of thousands of applications on offer – but Android is catching up and could well surpass Apple’s app share.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Best Linux distros for netbooks

    There are now some fantastic varieties of Linux that make ideal replacements for the operating system that’s currently installed on your netbook.

    The latest version of Ubuntu UNR, for example, features brilliant hardware support alongside the expanding Unity interface, which Canonical is pinning its hopes on as a Gnome replacement for the next mainstream Ubuntu release.

  • Killing Linpus Linux, reaching for Ubuntu on netbooks

    One final note, Ubuntu on an Acer netbook is sweet, but it is slower than Linpus, so balance that factor too before you go diving in.

• Tablets

  • Creative Upgrades ZiiO Tablet To Android 2.2, 10 Inch Tablet Expected In April

    Creative has upgraded its Android powered tablet ZiiO 7″ to the version 2.2. The company says in a statement that “Current Creative ZiiO 7″ owners will be able to enjoy a free upgrade via support.creative.com or the ZiiO Space portal found on their tablets, beginning 25 March 2011.”

    The company will also start shipping new Creative ZiiO 7″ with Android 2.2 on 18 March 2011. The 10″ version of ZiiO is expected to ship with Android 2.2 by April 2011.

OSI Landmark

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board meet this weekend in San Francisco for its annual face-to-face meeting. There were two significant topics on the agenda. First, we had to review the substantial number of nominations for the two Board seats that become vacant on March 31st when Danese Cooper and Russ Nelson leave the Board due to term limits after a decade each of service.

After a long series of discussions which finally had to come down to a vote, we elected Karl Fogel, Jim Jagielski and Mike Godwin (yes, that Godwin) serve as Board members in 2011-12. That’s one more than the number of new vacancies, but we really could not pick between the three successful candidates so we used our discretion to create an eleventh Board seat to accommodate all three of them. If it’s not obvious to you why, just take a look at their respective web pages!

Web Browsers

• No FAFSA for FOSS Users

  Now even though three of these browsers are cross platform, the only operating systems you are able to use with these browsers are Windows and OSX. The kicker at the end of all this? At the very bottom of the page there is a citing of standards compliance as the reason for certain browsers being redirected:

  “For the past few years, every major Web browser released has been built around a set of open standards designated by the World Wide Web Consortium, a non-profit organization charged with overseeing the continuing development of the Web. What this means is that one piece of code now looks the same on every modern browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or others. The majority of our users are using these modern browsers, so we can present content which is optimized for them. “

• Mozilla

  • Taming Firefox 4 – The annoyance-less guide

    Firefox 4 remains utterly configurable, as it always was, which is one of its strongest selling points. You will be able to restore old looks and feel easily, with a bit of hard work and only a handful of extra extensions. That said, I expect existing profiles not to be changed and not to remove the Status bar for Firefox 3.6 users.

  • Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 RC2

    It turns out that we were a bit quick to quote Mozilla that the first release candidate of Firefox 4 would also be the last and be published as the final version of the browser. Mozilla unexpectedly released a second release candidate. Future Firefox updates will not be referred to by version numbers anymore, but by codenames, which will be released in alphabetical order.

Education

• Not enough open source in schools?

  FOSS is a feminist issue.

  Schools are highly feminised workplaces. Overall over 70% of the teachers are women and 90% of the admin and class support staff (which broadly are equal in number to the teaching staff) which means that the overwhelming majority of adult computer users in schools are female.

  So unless you believe that men and women have similar attitudes and dispositions to technology, schools present a gender-skewed marketing challenge.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• News: Gnash 0.8.9 released

  …Gnash community are happy to announce the release of Gnash v0.8.9. Gnash the GNU Flash player is a free/libre SWF movie player, with all the source code released under GPLv3.

Openness/Sharing

• ‘Free’ Culture Folks Discuss Models For Sustainable Creativity

  Last year, I was invited to attend the FCForum’s event on creating sustainable models for creativity in the digital age in Barcelona. Unfortunately, due to timing and conflicts, I was unable to attend, though I heard from many who were able to make it and enjoyed it. Out of that event, the FCForum has released their version 1.0 document which is described as a “How to for Sustainable Creativity.” I take a bit of an issue with the title, which implicitly seems to suggest that creativity isn’t naturally sustainable, and needs some sort of outside help. However, the document itself is an interesting read. It digs into what the current state of the market is in music, filmmaking, writing & publishing, fashion and software, and then looks at various economic models that can be used to support all of those.

• Crowd-sourcing aids Japan crisis

  People living close to the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan are collaborating to plot local radiation levels.

  The RDTN.org website allows people to submit their own radiation readings and maps them alongside official data.

• Open Data

  • TileMill Puts Web GIS on the Map

    If you’re anything like me, you love a good map graphic, particularly one that brings what would otherwise be dull and boring data to life. The technical term for tools that render statistics into visual form with maps are geographic information systems (GIS). Open source has a wealth of top-notch GIS tools like GRASS and gvSIG, but their power comes with a learning curve. TileMill is a new tool that bucks the trend, letting complete newcomers to GIS build slick looking static or interactive maps with minimal fuss.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Launches Compact XML Spec for Smartphones and Devices

  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a new standard that will enable users to employ XML in new ways, such as in smartphones, embedded systems and a range of devices.

Five Things the Internet Brought About That I Can Live Without…

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Ellsberg: Wikileaks Logs Show Clear US War Crimes in Iraq—Manning Was Reportedly Motivated By Conscience

  Edited transcript of today’s Democracy Now interview with Daniel Ellsberg

  ELLSBERG: The conditions under which Manning is being held clearly violate the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution against cruel and unusual punishment—even for someone being punished, having been convicted. Here we have someone who has not yet been tried, not yet convicted, being held in isolation, solitary confinement, for something over 9 months. This is something that is likely to drive a person mad, and may be the intent of what’s going on here.

  The Wikileaks revelations that Manning is charged with having revealed, having to do with Iraq, show that in fact the US military in which Manning was a part, turns over suspect to the Iraqis with the knowledge that they will be and are being tortured. Turning these suspects over, with that knowledge, is a clear violation of our own laws and of international law. It makes us as much culpable for the torture as if we were doing it ourselves.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A legacy from the 1800s leaves Tokyo facing blackouts

  East Japan entered its fifth day of power rationing on Friday, with no end to the planned blackouts in sight. The power shortages began last week when a massive earthquake and tsunami knocked nuclear power stations offline. The local electrical utility can’t make up the shortfall by importing power from another region, though, because Japan lacks a national power grid, a consequence of a decision taken in the late 1800s.

  Japan’s electricity system got its start in 1883 with the founding of Tokyo Electric Light Co. Demand quickly grew and in 1895 the company bought electricity generation equipment from Germany’s AEG. In west Japan the same evolution was taking place, and Osaka Electric Lamp imported equipment from General Electric.

Finance

• Ex-Goldman Banker Behind WSJ ‘Smear Campaign’ Against Elizabeth Warren

  A Wall Street Journal editorial writer who has been closely involved with the paper’s recent attacks on Elizabeth Warren is a former Goldman Sachs banker. The same editorial writer, Mary Kissel, is readying another piece critical of Warren and the new consumer agency, according to a source familiar with the coming article.

  Like most major newspapers, the Journal does not disclose the authors of its editorials. Kissel recently appeared on the John Batchelor radio show as a representative of the Journal’s editorial board to discuss Warren, and repeated the main arguments used in the editorials.

• Let Them Eat…iPads!: William Dudley Antoinette Visits Queens

  Dudley, a former chief economist for Goldman Sachs, gave a speech in Queens in which he spoke about the economy’s progress and the Fed’s successes. When the question and answer period rolled around, people in the audience wanted to know why the prices for food and gas were rising. As noted in a Wall Street Journal article—“the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of “core” inflation.”

  Dudley told his listeners that the economy was recovering and that inflation was under control. He tried to explain to his audience that the prices of some goods and products were indeed falling. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said. “You have to look at the prices of all things.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• ISPs defend plans for two-tier net

  ISPs have defended their right to operate a two-speed internet, at a key debate into the future of the web.

  The debate was organised by the government, which is keen to see the principles of a free and equal net maintained.

  ISPs are increasingly looking to prioritise some traffic on their networks and block some.

  After the meeting the BBC called for the creation of a broadband content group to represent content providers.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Clickety clack, Linux won’t bite back.

It seems to be human nature to fear the unknown. Sure there are a lot of brave souls who love to go out in to the unkown and learn new things. To those we are greatfull. Without those types of people we would not have the technological toys that are so much fun to play with.

The average human is different. We seem to get stuck in a rut. We wake up, go through our morning rituals, hopefully go to work, then come home, play a bit and off to bed. Only to repeat this same cycle for as long as our health allows. We are fine with that, in fact we are downright comfortable with it. We are happy and secure in the little comfort zone we have carved out for ourselves in this big bad old world.

Desktop

• Growing Linux Users

  There are two things that can be associated to new Linux users and that is tragic and magic. And as to what part an individual would experience depends on a lot of factors. The first factor would be the ease of use, certainly Linux would be a user friendly application but since you are not used to it, the first experience on Linux would really be difficult. If the new user will tend to see things so complex to understand, he will surely forget about the idea and carry on with using his old operating system.

• HeliOS is on the Move…

  They were impressed enough to offer us an extremely generous deal on a 2200 square foot building for our use.

  [...]

  This is a huge step in the evolution of The HeliOS Project. We will be able to impact entire neighborhoods and area’s, not households in one’s and two’s. We will finally have some autonomy and freedom in our operation, and as always, it will be the Free Software and Linux Communities that makes it happen.

• Windows Vs. Linux: The Breakdown

  The graphical user interface (GUI) is certainly one of the most sought-after features of any operating system. A typical Ubuntu setup can have one of the three major Linux GUIs, including XFCE, KDE, and the most popular, Gnome.

• Windows Users: Here Is Why You Need A Linux Live CD

  In my experience Windows tends to have a habit of going wrong when you least expect, and at crucial moments. If you dread that sinking feeling as your system screws the pooch on startup, maybe it’s time to make a Linux live CD.

  There are plenty of reasons the average Windows user may want to create a Linux live CD or USB stick before it’s too late. A USB-based distribution will be speedier (you’ll need Unetbootin) or you can simply burn a CD/DVD with something like ImgBurn.

Kernel Space

• Tim Burke: ext4 Is Not Going Anywhere Any Time Soon

  To add some details that they did not mention in either summary, we also have a lot of new code in the NFS client in 2.6.38 that will be the building blocks for parallel NFS (a way to make clustered NFS servers much higher performance).

• ZFS for Linux 0.7.0 released

  The ZFS for Linux FUSE (File-systems in User Space) driver has been updated to version 0.7.0, nine months after it’s last release (0.6.9). New features in the version include updates to pool version 23 of the Sun code and the incorporation of all of Sun’s bug fixes, robust rollback handling, improved init scripts, bash completion and a more reliable zpool export and destroy.

• PingWin Software Joins Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that PingWin Software is its newest member.

  PingWin Software is a leading systems integrator in Russia and is focused on Linux and open source software integration. PingWin Software is the first Russian company to join The Linux Foundation.

• Graphics Stack

  • On Low-End GPUs, Nouveau Speeds Past The NVIDIA Driver

    While the Linux 2.6.38 kernel has been out for less than one week, if you use NVIDIA graphics, particularly with a low-end GPU, start counting down the days to the release of the Linux 2.6.39 kernel. Particularly on lower-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau driver now meets or exceeds the speed of NVIDIA’s official proprietary driver in a number of OpenGL test cases.

  • Does Compiz Still Slow Down Your System?

    The test system was an AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core CPU with an ECS A70-GXM-A motherboard, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, and 250GB Seagate SATA HDD.

  • There’s More Hope For Mesa & X This Summer

    There’s also a brand new GSoC proposal this morning. An Indian student developer has proposed XCB keyboard support in this e-mail.

  • Will The Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Bring Graphics Magic?

Applications

• Apt-Fast Speeds Up Package Downloads In Ubuntu

  Linux: Apt-Get is a great command line tool for downloading apps in Linux, but if you’re looking for even faster downloads, Apt-Fast can nearly double your download speeds in Ubuntu.

• ContextJournal: an activity-aware app

  What is this? it’s a neat little app that automates away the tedium of my personal journal system. Running KDE trunk, and having a strange knack for hitting freaky PIM bugs, I end up with my most important things stored in plain text. It’s grown into quite a system, one file per day with ascii todolists and stuff – add to that the need to do timetracking on one project, and, well, a bit of automation does wonders.

• 5 Excellent Linux Media Servers for the Enterprise

  You can share your music, videos, and photos on your network via regular folder shares, but using a media server gives you additional functionality and lets you stream to more devices. A Linux media server has a home in the enterprise because it’s a superior tool for storing, archiving, and sharing company multimedia presentations.

• 15 Must-Have Linux Desktop Apps

  To address this need, I’ve rounded up fifteen powerful Linux applications that reflect the best that Linux has to offer the desktop user, both in and out of the enterprise environment.

• Easy, powerful, stable: Pick two with OpenShot 1.3

  OpenShot is a video editor for Linux that aspires to be simple, powerful, and “the very best open source video editor.” OpenShot 1.3, which was released on February 13, brings it a little closer to that goal. This release brings a theme for the UI, support for adding multiple clips, new 3D animations, and a wizard for uploading video directly to YouTube or Vimeo. It may be the best open source video editor, but only if one is willing to overlook some stability issues.

• Audacity: The Free Dimensional Sound Editor, Part Two

  This article focuses on Audacity 1.3.12 Beta on Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and uses a Logitech 350 USB Headset with built-in microphone. I selected two audio files for this project: A 30 second music clip and an 11 second voice-over clip. Mixed together with a little advanced Audacity magic creates a studio-quality introduction that costs nothing and only takes about 30 minutes to perform.

• Hotot: A Promising Desktop Twitter Client

  Hotot is a lightweight, python-based, desktop twitter client I tried on my Linux Mint 10 GNOME desktop. I found Hotot to include many features you’d expect in a desktop client and a few you may not. Warning: Hotot is still in heavy development (alpha) but performed quite well for me.

• Photivo – Free and open source photo processor

  Photivo is a free and open source photo processor. It handles your RAW files as well as your bitmap files in a non-destructive 16 bit processing pipe with gimp workflow integration and batch mode.

• Empathy 3.0 adds contact blocking (finally)

  Empathy 3.0 will finally include ‘user blocking/unblocking ‘ – a feature long demanded by users of the multi-protocol chat application.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Add ISO image to apt sources.list

  • Converting IMG files to ISO images

  • OpenOffice Writer Tip: Add Strikethrough Button to Toolbar

  • Share your 3G Internet connection over wifi (Linux / iPod Touch)

  • Restoring configuration files on Gentoo

  • Tutorial: Intersperse a portrait with text

  • Easy Linux Fileserver With WebDav

  • How-to: John the Ripper on a Ubuntu 10.04 MPI Cluster

  • Charting and Graphing Logfiles for Linux Server Admins

  • How to create lists of WordPress posts from the command line

  • Getting Started with Inkscape

  • Squid Proxy Server 3.1: Beginner’s Guide

  • Manager your podcasts in Linux with gpodder

  • Automating virtual server administration using Puppet

  • Set up Ubuntu 11.04 KVM to run in spice session on Fedora 14 KVM Server ( Libvirt Preview Env)

  • Adding visual effects on Bohdi Linux

  • Upgrading Ubuntu with do-release-upgrade

  • Allow the local user to install and update software without root password

  • Three features you may not know XTerm has

  • Missing firmware in Debian? Learn how to deal with the problem

  • How to Disable Pidgin Notifications in Ubuntu

  • PLUG And The Fender Mustang

    I tested the Mustang’s connection to a system running 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04. When I connected the Mustang’s USB port to my computer I immediately had a verifiable hook-up between the amplifier and the machine. Running cat /proc/asound/cards revealed that the Mustang was recognized as a full-speed USB audio device known as “FMIC Mustang Amplifier” (Figure 3).

• Games

  • Quake Live March Content Update

    March’s Quake Live Content Update has been released, which includes 2 New Premium maps, new social networking features and the usual bug fixes and balancing changes.

  • Gameduino is a DIY, Open Source Game Platform Built on Arduino That’s Ridiculously Awesome

    Gameduino is a DIY game platform built on a shield for the Arduino. It’s open source hardware (BSD and, for the code, GPL). Okay, that’s fairly cool. But what makes this project special is that this inexpensive board (a $50 donation buys you one) has hardware that’s capable enough to be interesting, as seen in the video.

  • OilRush: GNU/Linux Native Game Now Available for Pre-order & Public Beta!

  • L.G.C. |B-Reel| — 0 A.D. Alpha 4 Daedalus – First Look

  • Holy Crap! M.A.R.S. 0.7.0!

    I don’t like gravity shooters. In fact I don’t like them so much I don’t play them. They require more precision and skill than I want to give and are unforgiving.

    It is ridiculous that I like one gravity shooter though. A ridiculous one. M.A.R.S.

Desktop Environments

• Webconverger: Linux for Libraries?

  In conclusion, Webconverger is limited, but useful precisely because of its limits. For an initial investment in time and money than can be counted in minutes and cents, those who deploy Webconverger will reap the benefit of never having to even think about the software on their machines, while knowing that their users’ security and privacy are ensured.

• Minty Freshness: New LMDE Theme Based On Orta, Created By SkiesOfAzel

  It appears that SkiesOfAzel, the Orta theme developer was contacted by a LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) developer to create a similar theme for LMDE and the initial result can already be tested (not just on LMDE – you can use it on any Linux distribution obviously). If you thought Orta is amazing,

• Linux: Awesome is Awesome!

  I decided to give Awesome a try. Awesome is a tiling window manager like xmonad. I’ve been using it for about a month, and I like it a lot.

  It integrates with GNOME much better than dwm. Most users of dwm don’t use GNOME, but I do. Its default settings are a lot nicer than xmonad’s. When I use xmonad, I spend all my time futzing with my .xmonad.hs, but I haven’t had to tweak Awesome at all the whole time I’ve used it. For instance, Awesome comes with a ton of layouts built in.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Join KDE for Google Summer of Code 2011

    For the 7th year in a row KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code. We are delighted to be able to work with great students throughout the summer again. To find out more about the program visit the GSoC website and pay special attention to the FAQ and timeline.

  • It’s not an address book

    It began about ten years ago, when I rewrote the KDE address book library. I implemented a nice API, vCard parsing, and a representation of something I called an Addressee back then, a contact, the data belonging to a person or any other entity, closely modelled after the fields of vCard, which is a fine standard for storing and exchanging address book data.

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 6 March 2011

  • Project Neon is back!

    So, without further ado: Project Neon is back with much more stuff in stock. Those of you who have been around KDE for a while might remember the old one developed by everyone’s favourite (or NOT) apachelogger which offered daily builds of Amarok. Well, that one kind of died but new Project Neon Team managed to revive it with new features. Thanks to ingenious Launchpad Source Builds feature we set up nightly builds of the KDE Software Compilation trunk and we are currently working on getting Amarok there too.

  • Design Decisions #1

    I want to thank who ever it was that made the decision to NOT force KDE to develop a composited desktop with a fall-back to a totally different looking un-compositied desktop in the event the computer has a driver failure/poor videocard. (Edit: I know kde has compositing, but those are effects and the overall design of kde looks basically the same whether you have the compositing on or off).

    I say this in light of the development work on Unity and Gnome3. Which falls back to gnome2 when 3d acceleration is not available. Why?

  • On switching to KDE/Xfce

    Unlike with the panel, in GNOME 3, I can no longer choose to have the clock where I want it, remove some of the unnecessary icons, or even add weather applets and information to the screen. At the same time, I am supposed to believe everything is now an “Activity” with a single menu button being used to drive everything I do, rather than various shortcuts and icons around the screen. I can’t even have desktop icons or launch a terminal via the right click menu (which now doesn’t exist in the default setup). I’m also not at all fond of the effects, or the new window manager. In fact, where GNOME 2.x did almost everything I wanted, it seems that GNOME 3 does the opposite. Where it used to be about productivity, it’s now about appearance and effects, at the cost of more experienced users.

• GNOME Desktop

  • gnome tweak tool – A GUI to customize advanced GNOME 3 options

    gnome-tweak-tool is a GUI to customize advanced settings beautify desktop environment in coming Gnome 3.

  • Understanding Gnome 3 – Without the min, max buttons

    While you are waiting for the Gnome 3 impatiently for the April 2011 release, you could attempt peaking at new shell. Those who have had a go at it come away excited at the substantial changes. The desktop design is spanking new and definitely appealing. New intuitive messaging, without have to switch, that allows you to reply are some of the distinctive and immediately identifiable changes. GNOME3 is essentially the next generation shell and several legacies of the GNOME 2 have disappeared because there is no room for them in the new shell design.

  • What will the new GNOME desktops mean for other Linux desktops?

    It’s almost time. Soon a new paradigm of GNOME is going to drop onto the desktops of suspecting (and unsuspecting) users. When this does there is going to be reaction. As with any major change to the computer industry, users are going to have both negative and positive reactions. Some will go so far as to switch distributions to avoid this change. Some users, on the other hand, will seek solace elsewhere. What exactly does that mean to the landscape of Linux? Let’s don our speculation caps and take a look.

  • GNOME-KDE wars are back again

    There have been two recent instances where Canonical has acted in a way that has displeased GNOME – one was when it decided to use its own interface, Unity, for the next version of Ubuntu, instead of the forthcoming GNOME 3 shell.

  • Faenza 0.9 Released – Brings More Polish, New “Darkest” Theme & Lots More

    Faenza icon theme is arguably *the* most beautiful icon theme for GNOME and also has support for the widest range of applications in Ubuntu GNOME. Faenza 0.9 was released a day ago and it brings in a number of major upgrades including a new “darkest” theme and many other openly visible as well as subtle changes.

  • GNOME marketing contract: week 2

  • In response to “the libappindicator story”

    It’s fine for you to state Canonical did not follow the process, but to not link to a doc or provide a post showing the process as approved by either GNOME or the team within GNOME responsible for this particular area, it’s quite frankly irresponsible.

  • Use Getting Things GNOME to get things done

    One of the most fundamentally life-altering books that I have ever read was Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book is inspiring, eye-opening, and has allowed me to work more efficiently than I ever had before reading it. The GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology has quite literally changed the way that I work and approach tasks.

    I’ve played with a number of GTD-inspired applications on the Mac with varying degrees of success. Currently my app of choice on the Mac is OmniFocus, which is a great application. Unfortunately, it does not run on Linux and I do like to keep work and home-related tasks separate, so while I use a Mac for the home stuff, I use Linux for work. That meant I needed a good GTD app for Linux.

Distributions

• Exotic Linux distros: A walk on the wild side

  Linux seems to offer a distribution for every occasion. Among these obscurer flavours are a few that you may not have encountered, but could be just what you need, says Jack Wallen.

• Continued Adventures in Distro Remixing

  I’ve been making a personal Fedora remix for a while now… since Fedora 10. While that might sound hard, thanks to Fedora’s livecd-tools package and their livecd-creator script, it is really quite easy. I even made a screencast about it. I recently started making a remix of Scientific Linux 6.0 and wanted to share.

  As you may recall, I prefer Fedora on my personal desktops but on servers I prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux or a RHEL clone. There are actually a few clones to pick from and I’ve been using CentOS for a number of years. One thing I like about CentOS is that one of its goals is to stay as true to RHEL as possible by attempting to be 100% binary compatible with it, bugs and all. Unfortunately the CentOS developers have gotten somewhat backlogged with the onslaught of RHEL releases over the last few months (6.0, 5.6, and 4.9) and have taken a lot of criticism for release delays as well as falling behind on security updates in the process.

• Had A Gnuff?

  Yesterday a reader dropped me a link to Gnuffy, which is an offshoot of Arch Linux started about three years ago. Looking over what has been accomplished with it thus far, I was very impressed with their ideas on expanding Arch (many already implemented), and given a few new ideas of my own.

  At this point Gnuffy appears to consist of a package manager called Spaceman and some user repositories. Gnuffy can use any of Arch Linux’s repos in addition to its own, and can use the standard PKGBUILDs in addition to its own improved version of PKGBUILD, which includes some Gentoo-style USE flags and other enhancements. Packages on Gnuffy’s repos are GPG signed with the key of the packager, and Spaceman checks signatures. Nice work! It was a bit like suddenly being transported into the future of Arch.

• Linux From Scratch 6.8 is released! Step-by-step instructions on how to build your own Linux-based OS from scratch

  It also includes editorial work on the explanatory material throughout the book, improving both the clarity and accuracy of the text.

• Puppy Linux — could it replace Debian on my oldest hardware?

  I’ve run Puppy Linux before. Many times. I started with Puppy 2.13 and still remember that release very, very fondly.

  I have half an entry (not yet published) on the Lenny to Squeeze upgrade for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop — a 1999 throwback with Pentium II MMX at 233 MHz, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. I’ve written dozens of articles about this laptop, and I’ve run everything from OpenBSD and TinyCore to Slackware and Debian Lenny and now Squeeze on it.

• Puppy in 2011 on a laptop in 1999 — I’m sticking with Debian

• Gentoo 11.0 Screenshots

• Top Linux Distros For Every Level User

  In this article, I’ll highlight some of the top Linux distributions for advanced users as well as some great ones for those who are intermediate and newer users. In each case, I’ll include distributions for those wanting to learn more about using Linux effectively.

• Reviews

  • Tiny Core 3.5 review – a blend of the brilliant and the infuriating

    Tiny Core is a light and modular Linux distribution. Its main purpose is to allow the easy construction of simple but powerful appliance-like desktops. Michael Reed tests the latest release…

  • Pardus 2011 – Best KDE4 around, but could be better

    Pardus is easily one of the lesser known bigger surprise Linux distributions. Developed in Turkey, it does not strike you as a top choice for your desktop, does it? But it is a top-notch distribution with a handful of clever tricks that make it a great candidate for daily use. I was mightily impressed with the 2009 version, which is why I’m testing this year’s release.

  • A peek at Bodhi Linux 0.1.6

    I can’t deny Bodhi brings something new to the table; the desktop it provides is certainly different. Judging from the number of downloads the project has experienced thus far it must be appealing to quite a lot of people. However, I didn’t find anything to recommend the distro. It is, in my opinion, mostly glitter and little substance.

• New Releases

  • Trisquel 4.5 Slaine Release Candidate is ready

    The release candidate images for the 4.5 release of Trisquel, “Slaine”
    are ready for testing. Note that this images will become the final
    release if no bugs are found. Minor bugs would be fixed via updates.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat teams with RIT to help deaf children

    Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is sponsoring open source workshops at the Rochester Institute of Technology this summer that have the potential of improving technology for deaf and hard of hearing children.

    Three RIT students who are alumni of the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience workshops have developed an open source prototype video chat package to produce smooth sign language video for One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptops.

  • Fedora

    • Playing With Fire, Fedora 15 and Gnome 3

      There are concern among users that Gnome 3 or Unity is a wrong decision; that it needs a learning curve and not many users are ready or willing to do so. I disagree. The fact is people like status-quo; they don’t like changes. But that’s not how world works. Not changing for sake of user’s reluctance also keeps technologies from evolving.

    • My Wife Loves Gnome 3

      I downloaded and installed Fedora 15 alpha (Gnome 3) after reading this review. I was looking forward to this opportunity as I knew that sooner or later it will be ‘between the Devil and the deep blue sea’. I will have to choose from between Unity and Gnome Shell 3. Or, I will resist the change and migrate to a distro which will continue to invest on Gnome 2? I believe I will go with Unity or Gnome 3. It’s not fair to not embrace newer technologies. The incident that I am going to share with you strengthened my trust in Gnome 3.

• Debian Family

  • Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.1 released

    The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

  • Ubuntu Linux aims to give back with Debian Dex

    About five years ago, the Debian Common Core Alliance (DCCA) got started as an effort to help encourage collaboration among Debian derivatives. The DCCA failed.

  • Debian Project News – March 14th, 2011

  • Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”: What’s New?

    Debian 6 was in many ways an important and path-breaking release of Debian, but is it really relevant today? Debian as a desktop system isn’t really something you’d like to use—it’s too old. Debian for servers? Well, it does the job extremely well, but Ubuntu Server, while providing LTS releases every 2 years (which coincides with Debian’s new release cycle), has better support from applications, built-in support for EC2 clouds, and commercial support from Canonical (with stuff like Landscape, which even Red Hat cannot boast of).

    Moreover, day by day, Debian is getting more purist in its approach. For a server OS, it beats me why SELinux or AppArmor wasn’t included, and the fact remains that even if I use it as a desktop, it still needs a bit of tinkering around with configuration files in /etc to fully realise the potential of the system. Although yes, porting in Software Center from Ubuntu was a very nice touch, and it does make managing repositories and installing software a lot easier.

    There’s only one thing I can say about Debian 6: it may have released just yesterday, but it was outdated 6 months ago. So unless you have a reason for using Debian, both on the server front and desktop front, I’d recommend Ubuntu. On the other hand, if you do have that reason for using Debian, go ahead and upgrade, because you will be blown away by the amount of polish that has gone into this release. Debian 6 is indeed a worthy upgrade to Debian 5, but not really from other distros.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Gallery: Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3

      Ubuntu Linux 11.04 now uses the “Unity” user interface, which features a prominent “Task Bar” on the left hand side that acts as both a task manager in addition to a common application launcher. Shown on the desktop is LibreOffice Writer, the word processing program that comes with the new LibreOffice productivity suite which replaces OpenOffice 3 in previous versions of Ubuntu.

    • Ubuntu Will Run On Tablets With Better Multi-touch Support

      So, what is going on at Canonical when it comes to the multi-touch devices? It appears a lot is going on behind the scene. Future versions of Ubuntu will have better support for mult-touch devices and if vendors like it they might start putting Ubuntu on tablets.

      Chase Douglas of Canonical has written in his blog post, “One of my key goals for Ubuntu 11.04 has been to introduce full multitouch support through X.org. In technical terms, this means adding touch support to the XInput protocol. You may see others refer to multitouch in X.org as simply XInput 2.1. We hatched our plan back at UDS-N to push hard on developing the XInput 2.1 protocol and implementing it as best as possible in 11.04. The idea was that Ubuntu would be a test bed for the protocol before it is adopted by X.org upstream.”

    • Canonical pares Ubuntu down to 2 editions

      Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of Debian Linux, is going to make it easier for people to consume its operating system.

      Gerry Carr, director of platform marketing at Canonical, says in a blog post that beginning with the “Natty Narwhal” release in April, the company is going back to the way it did things ahead of its server launch, with a single release for any kind of PC. That new release will be called simply Ubuntu 11.04, and the server edition will be called Ubuntu Server 11.04.

    • Ubuntu: Really a Cloud Operating System?

      It’s no secret that Canonical’s been pushing Ubuntu’s cloud-centric features hard in recent months. We’ve written frequently here about new tools, like cloud-init, that give Ubuntu a leg up vis-à-vis other distributions in the cloud niche, as well as development trends that place the cloud at the center of the longterm vision for Ubuntu Server Edition.

    • Beyond Natty: The next version of Ubuntu Linux

      Well, we dodged a bullet. Instead of Octopoid Octopus, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its parent company Canonical, has chosen Oneiric Ocelot for Ubuntu’s November 2011 version name.

      Unless you’re a film maven, your first question is probably: “What’s Oneiric!?” I know it as a film criticism term for dream sequences in a movie. Or as Shuttleworth explained, “Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.” I’ll buy that. But, let’s get down to brass tacks: What does this mean? What can we expect from this version?

    • Canonical intelligently reinvents the scrollbar for Ubuntu

      Such a lack of scrollbars gave the design team at Canonical an idea. Could they remove the permanent scrollbars at the edge of windows in Ubuntu to free up more space for content while still allowing them to work with a cursor? The answer was a definite yes, and the re-design is now being experimented with.

      The two videos included here give you a good idea of how the experimental scrollbars, called overlay scrollbars, work. They are effectively the same as before functionality wise, but invisible until your cursor enters the area of the screen you would normally expect to find them. At that point a scrollbar appears as an overlay and you can click and drag to scroll around.

    • Ubuntu Linux 11.04: A whale of changes for Canonical’s user base

      I recently had a chance to take a look at the Alpha 3 release of Ubuntu 11.04, the latest version of Canonical’s Linux desktop OS that is due in April. 11.04 is considered to be a major release for Ubuntu because it represents a significant departure from the default GNOME UI to the new Unity UI.

    • 15 Very New and Unique Ubuntu Wallpapers

      It has been really long since we featured any new collection of wallpapers for Ubuntu or Linux. Article featuring Ubuntu/Linux wallpaper packs was the last in this particular category and even that was several months ago. So here is it once again, a nice and simple collection of 15 Ubuntu branded wallpapers from across the web. Enjoy!

    • Ubuntu Netbook Remix is dead. Long Live Ubuntu

      The Netbook Remix was a personal favorite of mine, as it made it easy for me to point my netbook friends at it, as an easy replacement for whatever OS was installed by default on their device.

    • Ubuntu using Windows key(Super key) to Launch Gnome Main Menu

      If you’d like Super key as keyboard shortcut to launch Gnome Main menu in Ubuntu, follow this simple tutorial.

    • Six Conceptual Unity behaviour mock-ups

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Ultimate Edition 2.9 has been released!

        Ultimate Edition 2.9 has been released! according to the announcement, this release was built off Ultimate Edition 2.8 which is built off Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’. All updates fully updated / upgraded, old kernels purged, new initrd and vmlinuz rebuilt. Ultimate Edition 2.9, as with all odd release numbers, was built with KDE users in mind. Ultimate Edition 2.9 has KDE, GNOME, Openbox and Xfce environments, user selectable at login. A crisp new theme (121 to choose from) and tons of new software. LXDE was broken at time of build on the 32-bit side, so it did not make the cut.

      • 10 Ubuntu re-spins I’d like to see

        In the Linux-verse, a re-spin is basically a new distribution that has been “spun off” from another distribution. We’ve already seen the likes of this with just about every major distribution. Ubuntu is one of the distributions that has enjoyed a number of good re-spins. Based on what is going down with the current releases of Ubuntu, this favorite distribution of new users will be in need of a few newer re-spins.

        With that in mind, I thought it would be a fun exercise to come up with a few re-spins of my own that would combine various bits and pieces (and a few philosophies) from other operating systems or developers. Some of these distributions would be quite possible, whereas some may not. I’ll leave it up to you which of them should actually happen.

Devices/Embedded

• Saab IQon and Linux: when Open Source isn’t Open, and your car isn’t really yours

  Car maker Saab recently announced that it will use Android, a version for mobile devices of the “Free as in Freedom” Linux operating system, for its in-car entertainment and information system, the IQon.

• Linux-based VPN router offers wide temperature range

  Korenix is readying the JetBox 9435-w, a Linux-based industrial embedded Layer 3 VPN routing computer with an Intel Xscale IXP435 667MHz RISC processor, eight 10/100 Ethernet ports, and extended temperature support. The company also has begun touting its JetBox 9400- and 9500-series as suitable platforms for network video recording (NVR) applications.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Nokia Sells Qt Licensing and Services to Digia

      Nokia is shedding the commercial licensing and professional services business for its Qt cross-platform app development framework, selling it off to Digia.

  • Android

    • Asus Making a $200 Android or Chrome Netbook

      Now Google has something that could be a very good alternative to Linux in the form of Chrome OS. We put Google’s own Cr-48 through its paces and we came away impressed with computing from the cloud.

    • Debugging AndroidX86 with Adb

Puppet, DevOps key to data center surge, says Constant Contact

Email marketing firm Constant Contact said it selected Puppet Labs’ Puppet configuration management and automation framework to help scale its environment from a couple hundred servers to several thousand in under two years time.

If all goes as planned, that trend will continue unabated, as the company grows and adds new applications like a Cassandra distributed database cluster.

Open source systems management: Hits and misses

With open source technology now in the mainstream, IT shops now have plenty of options for systems management. But IT administrators — even those with open source skills — agree that these tools have some significant drawbacks.

The Quality of FOSS Blogs

6 More of the Best Free Linux Blog Software

Weblog software (also known as blog software) is a type of application which is designed to help users effortlessly create and maintain weblogs.

Events

• Texas Linux Fest – It’s on Bay-bee….

  This year, TXLF will be held at the spacious and opulent Downtown Hilton hotel. I’ve been in aircraft hangers that were not as big as the speaking halls and let’s face it…it’s the Hilton. I believe current numbers are already surpassing last year’s attendance.

Web Browsers

• Next-Gen Browser Battle: IE 9 vs Chrome 10 vs Firefox 4

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Is Better Than Microsoft Internet Explorer: 10 Reasons Why

    Google’s Chrome platform is coming on strong in the browser market. It’s becoming clear that more and more people are realizing it might just be better than Internet Explorer.

• Mozilla

  • Crunching the Numbers: Firefox 4.0 Pulls Ahead

    After last week’s benchmarking project, I combed through the comments and ran the numbers myself using the latest Firefox 4.0 beta, Chrome 10, and Opera 11. The results? It looks like Firefox 4.0 has the speed crown on Linux, for now.

  • IE9 and Firefox 4 ready to battle

    Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 is coming next week. How do the two shape up?

    Showing impeccable timing the developers of both Firefox and Internet Explorer have decided to release new versions of their browsers within days of one another. Microsoft’s IE9 browser was released on Tuesday (15 March 2011), just a couple of days after Firefox released its final release candidate and days before its final release on March 22.

  • More Ubuntu Unity Integration for Thunderbird…

  • Firefox 4 RC Review–Clean UI, Improved and Faster Browser

    Mozilla has released the Release Candidate of latest Firefox 4 i.e. Firefox 4 RC and is available to download and try. I installed this RC 3 days ago and since then spent hours on this new version and here is my review and experience.

SaaS

• Rackspace, Dell push OpenStack cloud OS

  Rackspace will help enterprises build private clouds using the OpenStack cloud operating system, the company announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, Dell is seeking enterprises and service providers for proof-of-concept OpenStack trials with its Dell PowerEdge C family of servers.

• S3TC For Mesa Is Talked About Some More

  Discussions surrounding S3TC Texture Compression support for mainline Mesa (right now it’s an external library) is becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Newer games and OpenGL applications depend upon S3TC support and open-source developers are unable to provide “out of the box” support due to patent concerns.

  There was a hopeful discussion about S3TC and floating point support for Mesa a little more than a week ago, but that discussion died before anything materialized in Mesa Git. The push there was for mainlining the S3TC and OpenGL floating point support but to not build it by default if not using the hidden –enable-patented option.

Databases

• Couchbase Unleashes Open Source NoSQL Database

  What happens when you bring together two open source database technologies? In the case of vendors Membase and CouchOne, you end up with a new company called Couchbase and a new product called the Couchbase Server.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Beautiful Looking LibreOffice Splash Screen, A Must Try!

  As you all should know by now, LibreOffice is already the new default office suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. You can even install latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid easily via LibreOffice PPA by following the instructions here. Now, here is a very good looking and very creative LibreOffice splash screen that demands your attention.

• 6 of the Best Free Linux Office Software

  The risk was deemed so serious that many developers decided to form the Document Foundation in September 2010 to manage and develop a fork called LibreOffice. There have already been a number of significant features added to the OpenOffice.org codebase in recent months. However, it is likely that there will be a significant delay before the corporate world readily embraces LibreOffice, in part because of concerns about the Document Foundation itself. Nevertheless, their fork is a comprehensive desktop productivity suite with a number of significant features not found in OpenOffice.org.

• Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet

• Gosling: Oracle’s self-interest requires good Java stewardship

  Although Java founder James Gosling left Oracle last year after a short, dissatisfying experience with the company following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, he nonetheless sees Oracle as having no choice but to do a good job in its stewardship of Java.

  In discussions Wednesday morning at the TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas, Gosling stressed that a large faction of Oracle’s business is based on Java. For example, Oracle Fusion Middleware, including the WebLogic application server, is based on enterprise Java. “It’s in their own self interest to not be aggressively stupid,” said Gosling, who was a prominent Sun engineer and has been called the father of Java.

Business

• Is it really a business vs. open source world?

  It seems like there’s no such thing as a non-controversial Linux distribution anymore.

  Look at the news and the blogosphere, and lately it seems like every major distro company’s in some kind of hot water with various elements of the community.

• Semi-Open Source

  • The Slur “Open Core”: Toward More Diligent Analysis

    Later — shortly after I pointed out Mark Shuttleworth’s fascination with and leanings towards this practice — I realized that it was better to use the preexisting, tried-and-true term for the practice: “proprietary relicensing”. I’ve been pretty consistent in avoiding the term “Open Core” since then. I called on Shuttleworth to adopt the FSF’s recommendations to show Canonical, Ltd. isn’t seeking proprietary relicensing and left the whole thing at that. (Shuttleworth, of course, has refused to even respond, BTW.)

Funding

• Packt Publishing Believes in Open Source, Donates Over $300K to Projects

  Packt today announced that its donations to open source projects have surpassed the $300,000 mark. Following its first donation to the phpMyAdmin project in April 2004, the company has gone on to provide sustained support for over 70 different open source projects.

• Open source news publishing platform gets $975,000 grant

  The Knight Foundation has given a $975,000 grant to The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen, both non-profit news organisations, to develop a free and open source publishing platform for other online news organisations. Online local news is a growing sector in the United States and the Foundation wants to enable local news organisations to engage with readers more and manage content easily while being able to raise revenue. The Knight Foundation is dedicated to funding local news and journalism in the digital age.

BSD

• FreeBSD Events update (NYCBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, BSDCan)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• When Freedom Rings

  I was both surprised and pleased with the community response to the announcement for GNU Free Call. Rather unfortunately our hosting for the wiki, Ibiblio, was down, as they were doing a large move on Tuesday. Even more amusing, Haakon’s email provider also decided to do some relocation this week.

• Volunteer to help the new Savannah maintainer

  Sylvain Beucler, who was instrumental in modernizing and maintaining Savannah for the last seven years, has decided to step down and look for new challenges. Many, many, thanks to Sylvain and best wishes.

Project Releases

• A Group Of FFmpeg Developers Just Forked As Libav

  Following a number of internal disputes among FFmpeg developers in recent weeks, a group of these developers have stepped away from the project and have forked off of the FFmpeg code-base to create a new project called the “libav” project.

Openness/Sharing

• How-To for Sustainable Creativity

• Open Access/Content

  • It’s Sunshine Week, But Obama’s Transparency Record Is Cloudy

    The federal bureaucracy is failing to abide by President Barack Obama’s inaugural decree that agencies “usher in a new era of open government,” according to a Monday survey by the National Security Archive.

Programming

• GCC 4.6 Release Candidate Comes w/o P1 Regressions

  The GNU developers responsible for GCC have eliminated all of the P1 regressions (their most serious class of regressions in this open-source compiler) in the GNU Compiler Collection 4.6.0 code-base, so they have went ahead and tagged the first release candidate.

  Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek issued a new status report on the progress of GCC 4.6. The P1 regression count is now at zero, after the last four bugs were corrected in the past week. There have also been seven P2 regressions fixed, but three new regressions of P3 status discovered.

Standards/Consortia

• Has the Battle for the Digital Car Been Won?

  This week a new consortium was launched that may signal who will finally own the last great, unclaimed consumer computing platform – the automobile. The new organization is the Car Connectivity Consortium, and the winner is . . . well, we’ll come back to that a little later. Suffice it to say for now that the fifteen year battle to control the digital future of the automobile could be at an end, and that its resolution may tell us something about the future of the digital desktop as well.

Crowd-Sourcing System Requirements For Free Software

Over the weekend into OpenBenchmarking.org I pushed the OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index (OPCI) feature. Read that blog post for all of the features, but it comes down to now indexing the most commonly tested hardware and classifying the performance of all test results into low, mid, and high-end segments. So you can easily see a list of overall — for all tests hosted by OpenBenchmarking.org — a list of the rated processors, graphics cards, motherboards, and disks that are self-hosting. The OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index was then resolved down to the test profile level to be able to answer questions like what is the best graphics card for this game?

Oracle accused of stifling HP TPC benchmark

Oracle has been accused of stifling the publication of an HP/Oracle DBMS benchmark that indicates its own SPARC SuperCluster world-record benchmark system cost almost 60 per cent more per transaction than a similar test on an HP Proliant system.

The record TPC-C benchmark result is held by a $30.53m, 108 processor, SPARC Supercluster, which achieved 30,249,688 transactions per minute (TPM) at a cost of $1.01/TPM.

Jury: Blogger Johnny Northside must pay $60,000 to fired community leader

Though blogger John (Johnny Northside) Hoff told the truth when he linked ex-community leader Jerry Moore to a high-profile mortgage fraud, the scathing blog post that got Moore fired justifies $60,000 in damages, a Hennepin County jury decided Friday.

Hardware

• Replacing DVD, a Hollywood cliffhanger

  UltraViolet (UV) is the name of new technology standards expected to debut this summer that Hollywood hopes will help reignite the public’s interest in collecting movies and cauterize the bleeding in their home-video divisions. UV was created by a consortium that includes all the big film studios–with the exception of Disney–and numerous movie-sector allies, such as Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Comcast and Netflix. UV managers said in January that the technology will ensure consumers will be able to play their movies and TV shows on a wide range of devices and services.

Security

• Arbor Networks Researchers Find U.S.-Based DDoS Botnet

• Why Pwn2Own doesn’t target Linux

  “Linux is not an operating system that has widespread use with any one particular distribution, flavor or configuration,” Portnoy said.

• Is Linux Antivirus Software Worth It?

  Some friends who are in the computer business took exception to my position on anti-virus (AV) software, saying “for Linux, we don’t clog up our computers with anti-virus software.” And that remark deserves some elaboration.

  Windows is such a booby-trap for malware of all kinds, that Windows AV software works in the “always-active” mode. Emails are scanned the moment they arrive. If you insert a storage device or download a file, that gets scanned. This requires a big chunk of the AV software to be permanently loaded in memory, and continuously running, so yes, it does “clog up” your computer to some extent, making it run slower. But you need this continuous vigilance to keep your Windows PC safe.

• Social media passwords off limits, Simons says

  A politician running to lead the B.C. New Democrats says he is refusing to comply with a requirement of leadership hopefuls to hand over the passwords to their social media accounts.

  Nicholas Simons, an NDP MLA who’s hoping to run in the leadership race, says he’s left that information off his nomination package.

• Google to enforce SSL encryption on developer APIs

  Google will soon require the use of SSL encryption with three of its developer-facing APIs.

  Beginning September 15, Google will require all developers to use SSL connections for all requests through its Google Documents List, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Sites APIs. In other words, these APIs will only accept requests via HTTPS. If you make a request to an old HTTP address, such as http://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full, it will no longer work. You must use https://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• US military brig officials order whistle-blowing suspect to sleep naked

  United States soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking US state secrets to WikiLeaks and detained under restrictive conditions at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia since July 2010, was ordered Wednesday to sleep stripped of all clothing. According to his attorney, this condition was imposed because Manning made a “sarcastic quip” about the harsh conditions of his confinement.

• Administration Forces PJ Crowley Out Of The State Dept. After He Admits That Manning Is Being Mistreated

  When President Obama was campaigning and elected, one of the things he frequently talked about was how he was influenced by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, and how President Lincoln brought together may dissenting voices into his cabinet. There were, clearly, political reasons for doing so, but part of the benefit was that it allowed voices of dissent to be heard. However, in practice, it’s appearing that President Obama has no real interest in allowing the same thing to occur in his administration, and that’s really unfortunate.

• Suspect in MLK bomb tied to racist movement

  Federal agents today arrested an ex-soldier with ties to the white supremacist movement and charged him with planting the backpack bomb along the planned route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day march in downtown Spokane.

• Defamation Lawsuit Against NYT by Informant in Plot to Bomb 2008 RNC May Have a Chance

  A former FBI informant who helped foil a bomb plot at the 2008 Republican National Convention has sued the New York Times for libel and defamation.

  A Times story from February 22 claimed that Brandon Darby had “encouraged” others to bomb the RNC, when in fact he had been essential to law enforcement efforts that disrupted the plot.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Japan Radiation Levels (In English)

  While media around the world continue to present the Fukushima nuclear crisis as an Armageddon moment for Japan and the world, Japanese media is going out and taking measurements of radiation levels all around the Kanto region. Because I have not been able to find this type of information easily in English I have translated a radiation map of Japan into English and created a clear overview for you here.

• Let There Be Light

  The response from an Energy Department official nicely illustrated the paternalistic, know-it-all attitude Paul was criticizing. “I’m pro-choice on bulbs,” insisted Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency. “My view is, what you want is lighting.” And the government, in its infinite wisdom, will tell you what kind of lighting is best for you.

Finance

• Wisconsin protests—now with farmers (and tractors)

  Tens of thousands of people were in Madison, Wisconsin, again this weekend, continuing to protest Governor Scott Walkers attempt to do away with collective bargaining for some state employees. We’re at Day 18 now, if you’re keeping track.

• Wis. defeat could help launch counterattack on GOP

  With the labor movement suffering an epic defeat in Wisconsin and perhaps other states, union leaders plan to use the setback to fire up working people nationwide and mount a major counterattack against Republicans at the ballot box in 2012.Wis. defeat could help launch counterattack on GOP

• Tiny Cuts, Big Complaints

  Republicans and Democrats squabble over crumbs as the layer cake of debt keeps rising.

• Oil Price Shocks and the Recession of 2011?

  Oil prices surged to near $107 per barrel yesterday and regular gasoline is going for $3.51 per gallon. Last March oil sold for around $80 per barrel and gas cost about $2.79 per gallon. The uprisings throughout the Middle East are in part responsible for the recent uptick in prices. For example, the fighting in Libya has reduced global oil production by about one million barrels per day. On the other hand, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are boosting their output by a similar amount to make up for the shortfall. Democrats in Congress are calling upon President Barack Obama to damp down prices by selling off oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

• Michigan Republicans create “financial martial law”; appointees to replace elected local officials

  Republican Michigan governor Rick Snyder, along with the state’s Republican house and senate, have passed a controversial bill that allows the governor to dissolve the elected governments of Michigan’s towns and cities, replacing them with unaccountable “emergency financial managers” who can eliminate services, merge or eliminate school boards, and lay off or renegotiate unionized public employees without recourse. Republican senator Jack Brandenburg — who supported the measure — calls it “financial martial law.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Glenn Beck’s syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs

  Premiere On Call, a division of the Clear Channel subsidiary that distributes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, is a service that hires actors to call into radio shows and read a script that purports to be a true story presented by the public.

• Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

  Sending DMCA takedown notices in bulk has become increasingly fashionable during recent years but thanks to the database at Chilling Effects, we are able to see who is sending what to whom. As concerns mount over the amount of checking carried out before items are taken down, it appears that Fox has managed to get Google to delist DMCA complaints on Chilling Effects, which were originally sent by Fox themselves and submitted to Chilling Effects by Google.

  The Chilling Effects web archive was founded in 2001 as a response to the usually secretive practice of sending so-called ‘takedown notices’ to have content removed from the web. This, according to the activists involved, was having a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech.

• Hatchet Job: The Video Hit Piece that Made Both NPR and Its Critics Look Bad

  In the video, NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller and a colleague met with two members of a fictional Muslim group dangling a $5 million donation. Prodded by the “donors,” Schiller said liberals “might be more educated” than conservatives, described Republicans as “anti-intellectual” and said the GOP had been “hijacked” by the “racist” Tea Party.

Censorship

• French Court Tosses Ridiculous Criminal Complaint By Israeli Against An American Over Book Review By A German

  Last year, we wrote about a horrendous lawsuit brought by an Israeli author/law professor, Karin Calvo-Goller, who had written a book on The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. Another law professor, Thomas Weigand, in Germany, reviewed the book for Global Law Books, and didn’t think the book lived up to its potential. I’ve read plenty of book reviews, and while this one is negative, it’s hardly a scathing book review. Weigand just didn’t think the book was all that good. It happens. Move on.

  But Calvo-Goller did not move on. She claimed that the review was libelous, and contacted the editor of the journal — an American named Joseph Weiler — who responded quite reasonably to Calvo-Goller, pointing out that the review wasn’t that bad and that he did not believe the review was libelous (and explained in detail why not), and then offered Calvo-Goller the right to write a response that he would publish as well. He also pointed out that her reputation would likely take a much larger hit from trying to suppress a negative book review, than from the review itself.

• SF Plastic Surgeon Files Defamation Claim Against Negative Reviewers Across The Country To Avoid SLAPP

  Paul Alan Levy points us to the news of how a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon, Usha Rajagopal, has sued some people who wrote negative reviews of her work for defamation. However, he notes, despite the fact that she’s in California and the reviews she’s upset about appeared on Google — a California-based company, she filed her suit in Virginia. Levy suggests that this was done to avoid California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which would have allowed for immediate dismissal and the possibility of attorney’s fees being awarded for the filing.

• Photographers Respond to Lady Gaga’s New Copyright Demands

  Lady Gaga is now demanding that photographers surrender the copyright of photos taken at her concerts – and photographers are incensed.

  Washington, D.C. website TBD.com made this practice public on Friday when they published the release form given to their photographer Jay Westcott. In addition to standard release restrictions regarding the use of images shot at her concerts, the document states that any photos taken at the show become the property of Lady Gaga. This an especially bold demand as the government has established that copyright exists the moment when a work is created, which in this case is the moment when a photographer clicks their shutter button.

• Bill Spooner sues AP writer over tweet

  An NBA referee has sued The Associated Press and one of its sports writers over a Twitter message suggesting he intentionally made a bad call to make up for a previous bad call that went against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

  In a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Minneapolis, veteran NBA referee William Spooner claimed AP sports writer Jon Krawczynski defamed him in the Twitter message, sent while he was covering the Jan. 24 Rockets-Timberwolves game.

• French Constitutional Council Validates Internet Censorship

  Judges held that article 4 of the bill, which allows the executive branch to censor the Net under the pretext of fighting child pornography, is not contrary to the Constitution. In doing so, the constitutional court has failed to protect fundamental freedoms on the Internet, and in particular freedom of expression. Hopes lie now in European institutions, which are the only ones with the power to prohibit or at least supervise administrative website blocking and its inherent risks of abuse.

• Bev Stayart Loses Yet Again In Her Quixotic Quest To Blame Search Engines For Search Results She Doesn’t Like

  We’ve covered Beverly “Bev” Stayart a few times — and even been legally threatened by Stayart and her lawyer (also named Stayart). As you may recall, Stayart sued Yahoo/Overture after doing a search on her name, and seeing a suggestion that included “levitra” and “cialis.” Stayart took offense to such terms being associated with her name. She tried a few different questionable legal theories including “privacy rights” and that because the search engine made the suggestions, the search engines have liability for impermissably selling her name. It had also kicked off with a trademark claim over her name, despite the lack of any trademark in her name. The threat against us was because she didn’t like some of our comments, which necessitated us having our lawyer explain Section 230 to her as well, after which we never heard from Stayart again. However, after losing in her lawsuit against Yahoo, she sued Google over the same “levitra” connection. Oh, and she appealed and lost her original loss against Yahoo.

Privacy

• Noprivacyville

  I heard a report on NPR about an auto insurance company giving drivers the options of putting GPS tracking devices on their vehicles to lower insurance rates by as much as 30%. The idea is that, for example, the device could confirm to the insurance company that the car wasn’t being used in high risk situations, such as commute traffic. Safe driving situations would be rewarded with lower rates.

• Judge Won’t Stop WikiLeaks Twitter-Records Request

  The U.S. government is getting closer to getting data from Twitter about various associates of WikiLeaks.

  The people whose Twitter records were being requested had moved to throw out the government’s request for data, but a judge denied that motion Friday, ruling that the associates don’t have standing to challenge it.

  The judge also denied a request to unseal the government’s application for the Twitter order.

• US government wants a privacy bill of rights

  Sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal said that the US assistant secretary of commerce, Lawrence Strickling, is going to bring up the Obama administration’s legislative initiative at the Senate Commerce Committee.

  The US administration is expected to push for a privacy bill of rights as it wants to give the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more powers. Back in December, The INQUIRER reported that the FTC called for a “Do Not Track” mechanism to be installed in consumers’ web browsers.

• Court Refuses to Set Aside Order Requiring Disclosure of Twitter Users’ IP Addresses

  A federal magistrate judge refused to vacate a previously issued order granting the government’s request to reveal information regarding various Twitter accounts for people allegedly associated with Wikileaks.

Civil Rights

• Man With 4th Amendment Written on Chest Sues Over Airport Arrest

  A 21-year-old Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area is demanding $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

  Aaron Tobey claims in a civil rights lawsuit (.pdf) that in December he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.

  “Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated,” his chest and gut read.

• Judges focus on technicality, not constitutionality of TSA scanners

  A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared unlikely to block the use and ongoing deployment of the so-called “nude” airport body scanners, which the government maintains are necessary to protect the airways from terrorists.

  Still, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which hears challenges to Department of Homeland Security policies, did not indicate during an hour-long oral argument here whether it agreed with allegations that the machines are an unconstitutional privacy invasion, ineffective, and unhealthy. Instead, the three-judge panel, which did not indicate when it would rule, appeared stuck in the procedural muck, and spent little time on those bread-and-butter issues.

• TSA to retest airport body scanners for radiation

  The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

• Court Unlikely to Halt ‘Nude’ Airport Body Scanners

  A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared unlikely it would block the use and ongoing deployment of the so-called “nude” airport body scanners, which the government maintains are necessary to protect the airways from terrorists.

• Manning’s Father Condemns Treatment of Imprisoned Son

  The father of suspected WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning says the military has crossed a line in its treatment of his son and called the conditions under which he was being imprisoned “shocking.”

  Brian Manning broke his silence to a PBS Frontline correspondent this week after the U.S. Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, where his 23-year-old son is being held, stripped the soldier of his clothing and forced him to stand at attention in the nude and sleep naked. Manning’s defense attorney has called the brig’s move “inexcusable” and “degrading treatment.”

• ACLU Protests Manning’s Treatment in Letter to Pentagon

  The American Civil Liberties Union calls the treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning unconstitutional and “gratuitously harsh.” The remarks came in a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

  “The Supreme Court has long held that the government violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment whenever it ‘unnecessarily and wantonly inflicts pain,’ the ACLU’s letter read. “No legitimate purpose is served by keeping Private Manning stripped naked; in prolonged isolated confinement and utter idleness; subjected to sleep deprivation through repeated physical inspections throughout the night; deprived of any meaningful opportunity to exercise, even in his cell; and stripped of his reading glasses so that he cannot read. Absent any evident justification, such treatment is clearly forbidden by our Constitution.”

• Police just rubber-stamping US data slurp

  Members of the European Parliament have condemned the first six months of data sharing with US terror spooks as an abject failure of data protection.

  The SWIFT agreement gives US authorities access to Europeans’ banking information, but MEPs were told that in the first six months of operation data requests were so abstract it was impossible to tell if they complied with data protection rules or not.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• House subcommittee votes to kill net neutrality

  A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has voted in favor of a resolution to throw out the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s recently adopted net neutrality rules.

  The communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 15-8 along party lines for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC’s rules. Those rules would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.

• Obama admin calls for more ICANN accountability

  The Obama administration today called for improvements in the mechanisms used to oversee Internet domain names, saying changes are needed to make the process more “accountable” and “transparent.”

  Larry Strickling, a Commerce Department assistant secretary, said that the California nonprofit group created in 1998 to oversee these functions–the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN–”needs” to do more to explain the reasoning for its decisions and to heed the advice of national governments.

DRM/SCOny

• Sony wins subpoena for PS3 hacker’s PayPal records

  Tuesday’s order by US Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero said the information subject to Sony’s subpoena “shall be provided on an Attorneys’ Eyes Only basis” and is limited to information relating to whether Hotz has enough ties to Northern California to be sued in federal court in that district. Hotz, who goes by the hacking moniker GeoHot, is a resident of New Jersey, and has argued that the court lacks the authority to try him.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Massive Research Report On ‘Piracy’ In Emerging Economies Released; Debunks Entire Foundation Of US Foreign IP Policy

  Joe Karaganis, from the Social Science Research Council was kind enough to reach out to me last week and send me an advance copy of the (somewhat epic) report that SSRC just released this week, exploring “Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.” It’s a rather massive 440 pages of research into a variety of issues having to do with infringement, specifically focused on emerging markets. While it was nice of Karaganis to send it to me, I was a bit disappointed to find out that they’re not releasing the report for free (for most). Instead, it’s released under a “Consumer’s Dilemma” license, where they want people in developed countries to pay $8 for the report, but will offer it for free to those in less developed countries (though, it looks like Canadians can get it for free).

• George Lucas’ Lawsuit Over Stormtrooper Costumes Goes to U.K. Supreme Court

  The ‘Star Wars’ creator argues prop designer Andrew Ainsworth doesn’t have the rights to sell the replica suits.

• Lawmakers tell Biden to push Russia on antipiracy

  If Russia wants to prove the country is a good trade partner, then the country must be more aggressive in fighting online piracy. That’s the message a group of U.S. congressmen wants Vice President Joe Biden to send during his visit to Moscow this week.

• And I Thought Rupert Murdoch Thought Copying Stories From Other Publications Was ‘Stealing’

  Of course, around that time, we highlighted the fact that Murdoch, himself, owned a whole bunch of aggregators, many of which acted much worse than the sites — such as Google — that Murdoch was complaining about.

  However, over the weekend there was a nice example of how one of Murdoch’s publications clearly copied a story from another publication and did not give any credit for it whatsoever. We noted earlier how Broadband Reports broke the story of AT&T deciding to put in place metered billing. Broadband Reports got a tip with a leaked email showing the new rules, and got confirmation from AT&T. Nearly every other report on the story credited Broadband Reports with breaking the story. However, when the WSJ (via Dow Jones Newswire) wrote the story, by reporter Roger Cheng, there is no mention whatsoever of Broadband Reports breaking the story.

• Administration’s New IP Enforcement Recommendations Will Only Serve To Make IP Less Respected

  But, really, the bigger question is what does this have to do with enforcement? I’m fine with Espinel going beyond just focusing on enforcement, if she’s going to look for ways to actually help IP live up to its Constitutional mandate of promoting the progress. But this recommendation seems completely out of place in a document focused entirely on enforcement with this one non-enforcement issue tossed in at the end.

  The thing is, every time the government ratchets up IP laws in ways that don’t match with the way most people view the world, the less respected those laws become. Rather than actually increasing enforcement, these moves decrease respect for those laws.

• Questionable ‘Piracy’ Study Found; Details Show It’s Even More Ridiculous Than Expected

  Thanks to G Thompson for pointing us to where the BSA has stashed a copy of that mysterious “piracy” research report we were just talking about, which was apparently written by someone named Emilio Ferrer. It’s embedded below, and it’s even more ridiculous than we had initially expected. First, the entire thing is based on the massively and completely debunked TERA report from last year, that used such outrageous assumptions as to not even pass the most basic sniff test. The researchers here appear to have made no attempt to determine the accuracy of the TERA report, nor to respond to any of the debunked points.

• Trademarks

  • Which Does More Damage To Your Reputation: A Non-Competitor Using A Similar Name, Or Filing A Lawsuit That Pisses Off Many Potential Clients?

    Judith Lindenau points us to the news that a guy named Daniel Rothamel, who is apparently a well-known, well-respected blogger in the real estate world, is facing a questionable trademark infringement lawsuit because he blogs under the name the Real Estate Zebra. The company suing him, the Lones Group, claims to publish a blog and newsletter under the names The Zebra Blog and The Zebra Report. So, they’re claiming infringement, because there can apparently be only one zebra in the real estate world. It’s worth pointing out here that the Lones Group apparently is not actually in the real estate business itself, but provides marketing services to real estate agents.

  • Lady Gaga takes on Baby Gaga in breast milk ice-cream battle

    The planet’s most flamboyantly dressed pop star is threatening legal action against British manufacturers of the world’s most bizarrely flavoured ice-cream.

    Lady Gaga has told a store in Covent Garden, central London, to stop selling its latest brand, Baby Gaga – ice-cream made from human breast milk, blended with vanilla pods and lemon.

    The US singer, whose last entanglement with foodstuffs involved wearing a dress stitched together from raw meat to an awards ceremony, appears unaware that the product she complained about disappeared off the company’s shelves last week.

    The day after it went on sale inspectors from Westminster council’s food standards department confiscated the remaining scoops of Baby Gaga to check whether it met hygiene requirements.

  • Breaking: Zynga files for trademark on the word “Ville” in Europe

    On March 1, 2011, Zynga filed for a trademark on the word: ville. The trademark was filed with the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the official trade marks and designs office of the European Union.

    Zynga’s trademark representative is Rouse, a specialist in international IP business whose client list ranges from Honeywell and BP to Christian Dior and Starbucks Coffee.

  • Finally: Clear Ruling That Realizes That Just Buying Ads On Trademarked Keywords Is Not Infringing

    For the better part of a decade, there have been a ton of lawsuits about keyword advertising, and whether or not it’s a trademark violation to buy an advertisement on a competitor’s trademark. All along, we’ve argued that this is not, at all, a trademark violation. The main purpose of trademark law, of course, is to prevent consumer confusion — and advertising a competing product when people are looking for one brand is not a trademark violation. Just think of supermarkets where they have those little coupon dispensing machines that pop out competitor’s coupons all the time. Keyword advertising is basically the same thing. Tragically, despite a large number of these cases, the courts have really skirted the issue. Some of the cases have blamed Google, but thankfully there have been a growing number of cases that have ruled Google clearly has no liability here as a third party. But the company buying the ads? Well, we’ve been waiting for a clear ruling… and we’re getting closer.

  • Bath & Body Works Sues Summit Over Twilight Toiletries

    Bath & Body Works is suing Twilight distributor Summit Entertainment, hoping to get a declaratory judgment that its “Twilight Woods” line of lotions, shower gels and other products doesn’t infringe the trademark on the hit vampire film franchise.

  • Utahn in dispute with Pac-10 over Pac12 website

    There’s an unexpected Utah connection in the online battle for the website Pac12.com.

  • Why Redskins Insider lost its name

    Maybe you’ve wondered why the Redskins Insider Live videocast became the Football Insider Live videocast. Or why the Redskins Insider blog became The Insider blog. Or why the Redskins Insider twitter feed became the Insider twitter feed.

• Copyrights

  • Liberal MP Dan McTeague: Repeat Copyright Infringer?

    Liberal MP Dan McTeague has responded to my recent post on his linkages with CRIA in a 2,200 word “rebuttal.” The McTeague post confirms that his earlier letter to the editor came directly from content supplied by CRIA and adopts the contradictory position that when CRIA launches a lawsuit, it is only an unproven claim that should not have an impact on copyright reform, but when isoHunt files a lawsuit it demonstrates that there is a “legislative holiday” in Canada that demands immediate action.

    The McTeague post provided the opportunity to take a closer look at his website, which reveals what may be widespread copyright infringement. Since the introduction of Bill C-32, McTeague has posted dozens of full-text articles from mainstream media organizations on his website, at times without attribution. In addition to the articles, McTeague has also reposted many photographs associated with the articles. While it is possible that McTeague has fully licensed the reproduction and posting of each article and photograph, this seems unlikely since the licences offered by many organizations do not even permit this form of reproduction. No other Liberal MP appears to have established a similar practice.

  • Girl Talk As Fair Use Martyr

    We saw today on the Creative Generalist blog a post about a film entitled Rip! A Remix Manifesto. The film, according to the Open Source Cinema Web site, is “an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.”

  • Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Important Copyright Case: Will Review First Amendment vs. Copyright Issue

    Eldred and Kahle, both ended up in losses, but they did get the court to establish some boundaries for when and how the US could retroactively change copyright law. As a very quick review, Eldred argued that the ongoing extension of copyright violated the “limited” part of the copyright clause in the Constitution.

  • 111-111-1111

    The blog garnered a small audience on Tumblr and a following in the newsroom of The Times. When it came to the attention of the company’s Senior Counsel, he asked that I remove all copyrighted New York Times content. This request effectively ended Ten Ones.

  • Congresswoman: Websites Mistakenly Seized By ICE Should Sue Government

    Speaking at a Silicon Valley legal conference this morning, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said that the recent website shutdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement COICA are way out of line, and an abuse of due process. In particular, she pointed out a recent episode during which, while pursuing a handful of websites allegedly connected to child pornography, ICE agents accidentally shut down more than 80,000 unrelated websites and tarnished them with child porn-related accusations.

  • RIAA Not Happy With Rep. Lofgren Calling Out ICE For Web Censorship

    We’ve covered how Rep. Zoe Lofgren is one of the only Representatives in Congress (along with Senator Wyden on the other side of the Capitol building), who appears to actually be concerned that Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group is seizing web domains on questionable authority, without due process, and likely in violation of basic First Amendment rights against prior restraint. Of course, even with just one Congressional Rep. speaking out about this, apparently the RIAA wishes to stomp out any dissent. Yesterday, they sent Rep. Lofgren an unsolicited letter in response to her comments. You can see the full letter embedded below, but let’s go through a few of the “highlights.”

  • Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process (and break the law)

    At 9:30pm PST on February 11, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain mooo.com. They ordered the domain name’s registrar to redirect all traffic headed for mooo.com to a government IP address, one which displayed a single stark warning that the domain name had been seized for involvement with child pornography.

    But the mooo.com domain name was shared between 84,000 sites; every one suddenly displayed the child pornography warning. The mistake was soon corrected, but the free domain name provider running mooo.com warned users that removal of the banner from their sites might “take as long as 3 days.”

    One outraged user took to his blog to tell ICE to “get out of my Internet. You’d get no argument from me that there are truly distasteful and illegal things on the Internet. That’s true of any society. But there are also proper ways to deal with these problems. Pulling a total domain, sweeping up innocent people along the way, feeling that you don’t have to comply with due process of law and indicating that you don’t give a damn is wrong. It’s not as wrong as child pornography or counterfeiting, but it’s still wrong… That’s to say nothing of any damage done to my name or reputation.”

  • More Reasons Why Homeland Security Seizing Domain Names Is Unconstitutional

    We’ve raised a number of reasons as to why the federal government’s domain name seizures (via Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement group) are almost certainly not Constitutional. And while we’ve run these arguments by a number of well respected Constitutional lawyers who are extremely interested in these issues (and may be getting involved in various ways), some in our comments have insisted that our points could be ignored because we are not lawyers. And while I’ve asked some of the lawyers I regularly speak to if they would write blog posts commenting on these issues, many are quite busy trying to actually do something about these issues, and that seems a bit more important.

  • CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood’s “PATRIOT Act”

    CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood’s “PATRIOT Act”
    Yesterday’s White House wish list of new intellectual property laws focused on things like counterfeit medicines, but it also included proposals to extend wiretaps into copyright cases and to ensure that illegal streaming video is a felony. A DC trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft today objected loudly to the plan, saying that legitimate concerns about counterfeiting have been “hijacked to create draconian proposals to alleviate the content industry of the burden of protecting its own interest using its own extensive resources.”

  • Coming soon: Pirated movies in 3D

    IN AN effort to keep audiences flocking to the cinemas to see the latest movies, studios and theatres are gambling on the 3D movie experience.

  • Music Publishers Settle With Limewire; Afraid To Have To Prove They Actually Owned Copyrights In Question

    We were a bit surprised last summer when the major music publishers piled on to the bandwagon and sued Limewire. After all, the major record labels (who own most of the major publishers anyway) were already involved in a lawsuit with Limewire and had won a pretty complete victory over the file sharing system.

  • Judge eviscerates P2P lawyer: “I accepted you at your word”

    As a lawyer, you know it’s going to be bad when a federal judge summons you to his courtroom at nine in the morning to talk about your “ill-considered lawsuit” that has “abused the litigation system in more than one way.”

    Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a “Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!” sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. At issue was Steele’s representation of CP Productions, an Arizona porn producer suing 300 anonymous individuals for illegally sharing a film called (ahem) Cowgirl Creampie.

  • Feds Really Do Seem To Think That Linking To Infringing Content Can Be A Jailable Offense

    Last week we covered the somewhat surprising arrest of Brian McCarthy, the operator of Channelsurfing.net, on charges of criminal copyright infringement. As we noted at the time, this seemed like a pretty questionable charge. I could potentially see a civil charge against him using the court-created concept of “inducing” infringement (a concept that Congress rejected…), but there is no inducement standard in criminal infringement. It’s possible that the feds could go with an aiding and abetting charge, but that requires a much higher standard, and it’s not clear that the feds have enough to make such a claim really stick. At the time, we didn’t have the complaint, but the folks at DemandProgress have obtained a copy of the complaint, which we’ve also embedded below.

  • US Congress will decide if video streaming is a felony

    According to Espinel, the current law makes it unclear whether streaming copyrighted works is subject to felony penalties, meaning prison time, because the penalty is “predicated on the defendant either illegally reproducing or distributing the copyrighted work”. The question lies in the legal definition of “distribution”, as streaming isn’t the transfer of complete files.

  • Google Found Guilty Of Copyright Infringement In France For Not Magically Blocking Infringing Movie

    The latest in confused secondary liability rulings comes from France, where Google has lost a lawsuit and been fined for copyright infringement, because of links and an uploaded video of a movie from producers Mondovino.

  • Righthaven Really Pushing Its Luck: Sues Canadian Newspaper For Misattributing Photo

    For a while Righthaven and its corporate owners/partners at the Las Vegas Review Journal positioned Righthaven as being about big newspapers standing up to the grubby internet folks posting copies of newspaper articles on blogs and forums. In fact, it kept trying to get other big media operations to sign up — with the only other paper to sign on so far being the Denver Post. Since then, Righthaven has gone a bit ballistic in suing all sorts of websites for posting a particular photo from the Denver Post (of a TSA patdown) that had gone viral. Rather than recognizing the positive benefits of the image going viral, Righthaven and the Denver Post has just seen it as a way to do a short-term money grab by suing everyone they can — of course, without any notice or takedown requests.

  • 99 Cent Books

    I am having trouble convincing myself why digital books will not cost 99 cents within 5 years. All books, on average. Just as the price of music does not in general change on the length or quality.

  • Netflix spooks Hollywood more than ever

    Hollywood film executives want you to know that they are not at war with Netflix or the Internet.

  • Even WIPO Realizing That Copyright Law May Have Gone Too Far

    Of course, WIPO certainly hasn’t gone too far away from its traditional position, but it has been showing more and more signs of moving away from copyright maximalism. TechnoLlama points us to a recent keynote speech given by Dr. Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, on the issue of “future directions in copyright law.”

  • An Internet Levy is a Terrible Idea

    The notion that all Internet users should somehow pay the old copyright monopoly structures a monthly fee, to compensate them for file sharing, has popped up again. It does from time to time. It’s a terrible idea, and for several good reasons. It fails to meet basic quality standards for lawmaking. But the most elusive and strongest reason is that it’s a last-ditch attempt to maintain the old power structures where a small pseudonobility were the only ones allowed to create culture.

  • NYTimes: When We Do It, It’s Journalism, When HuffPo Does It, It’s ‘Piracy’

    The latest sad example of this overvaluing of one’s own work and talking down about someone else’s work comes from the NY Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller (also a driving force behind the NYT’s plan for a paywall). In a weird and somewhat rambling discussion, which eventually gets around to the future of news, Keller decides to attack the Huffington Post as a bunch of sniveling copyists, compared to his high minded version of journalism…

  • Sean Parker, Music Mogul? Facebook Billionaire Mulling Warner Music Bid

    Sean Parker helped create Napster, which kicked off the long and steep decline of the big music labels. Soon he might own part of one.

    The digital entrepreneur is considering putting his money into a consortium bidding on Warner Music Group, which put itself on the block earlier this year. Sources tell me that Parker isn’t part of the formal bid, but is aligned with a group led by investors Ron Burkle and Doug Teitelbaum.

  • Report: Piracy a “global pricing problem” with only one solution

    A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can’t be stopped through “three strikes” Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That’s because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is “better described as a global pricing problem.” And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.

  • Cutting prices is the only way to stop piracy

    The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That’s the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won’t be halted by ‘three strikes’ broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.

    The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is “better described as a global pricing problem” – and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.

  • White House wants new copyright law crackdown

    The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making “illegal streaming” of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.

    In a 20-page white paper (PDF), the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix “deficiencies that could hinder enforcement” of intellectual property laws.

  • New Music Locker Startup Looks More Like Sucker’s Bet To Transfer Cash From Investors To Music Labels

    A few weeks ago, at the Digital Music Forum East event, right before I went on stage to interview Gary Shapiro from CEA, there was a presentation from a new music startup I’d never heard of, called Beyond Oblivion. The presentation (which is embedded below) was interesting, if incredibly vague. It looks like they’re trying to create a music locker of sorts, but to avoid the various legal woes of other such music lockers by throwing a ton of cash at the labels. It’s basically “don’t sue us” money. Literally, the company has promised to pay $500 million to labels.

  • Starve Copyright ‘Parasites,’ Official Urges

    The most effective way to target foreign Websites that illegally stream copyrighted material may be to cut off their funding, Maria Pallante, acting register of copyrights, told a House subcommittee Monday.

    “The parasites who operate so-called rogue websites build businesses on piracy, counterfeiting and other unlawful activity, in part based on the expectation of weak enforcement,” Pallante told the House Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet Subcommittee.

  • Jon Bon Jovi slams Steve Jobs for ‘killing’ music

    Jon Bon Jovi has taken aim at Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, accusing him of “killing” the music industry with iTunes.

    The rocker is saddened that the “magical” experience of buying records in a store is disappearing, brick-and-mortars stores being eroded in part due to iTunes’ success.

  • Inauspicious Start For Chris Dodd At MPAA; Starts Off With ‘Infringement No Different Than Theft’ Claim

    No surprise, really, but former Senator Chris “I won’t become a lobbyist” Dodd has begun his new tenure as a lobbyist for the MPAA on an inauspicious note — by falsely claiming that infringement is no different than “looting.”

  • Associated Press sues retailers over iconic Obama image

    The Associated Press has sued several retailers including Urban Outfitters for the unauthorised use of the Hope image created by artist Shepard Fairey.

    Artist Fairey used an AP photo without permission to create the image, and was sued by the news agency for violating copyright. That case was settled.

  • 8-Track Piracy Is Killing The Music Business…. In 1976

    It really is amusing at times to go back and look at the historical moral panics by the recording industry over the “threats” of piracy. It’s the same story every year, from the player piano (killing live music!) to the tape recorder (home taping is killing music!) to the MP3 player (illegal!). Sometimes such stories get lost to history, but Boing Boing has an amusing image from a 1976 record album sleeve, where the cover is devoted to telling people to fight the scourge of 8-track piracy.