08.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As a private school, GHCA would not have been able to afford a typical Microsoft or Apple lab. However, with Linux we were able to get the most modern hardware at the time. Even better yet, that hardware is still more than fast enough even though it is 5 years old, thanks to Linux!
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Riak, a highly scalable, fault tolerant, no SQL database.
Guests: Mark Philips, Community Manager, and Andy Gross, VP of Engineering of Basho
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Now that the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released a few days ago, Linus Torvalds has begun pulling in new code for the Linux 2.6.36 kernel as the various developers begin submitting pull requests of their new work. Dave Airlie, the maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code in the Linux kernel, overnight sent in his first Git pull request of his DRM tree. This pull request brings many new features for Intel, ATI, and NVIDIA/Nouveau graphics hardware.
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Applications
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Overall, Xiphos has a very user-friendly and simple interface. I found it to be very intuitive and very easy to learn. I was able to completely navigate around the program after only 2 minutes of playing with it. Xiphos has my highest recommendation. I would give it a 9/10 rating:
* very easy to install.
* very easy to use.
* simple user interface.
* great modular installation system.
Xiphos was written using the GTK toolkit, and has versions for GNU/Linux, Unix, and Windows. You can download the latest version here: http://xiphos.org/
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The team behind open-source Flash alternative LightSpark pushed out a new bug-fix release a few days ago.
Seeing as we’re a few releases in, I felt now was a prime time to see just how well LightSpark performs against its proprietary counterpart – particularly so I have a benchmark which to compare future releases against.
Now, you don’t need to be remotely “on-the-ball” to predict that LightSpark won’t out-whoop the real Flash plug-in, but if users are considering taking a performance hit by switching they might want to know exactly how big a hit it will actually be…
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Scores:
Counter Strike: Source
* 1680×1050, Wine – 44.16fps
* 800×600, Wine – 48.59fps
* 1680×1050, Native – 54.02fps
* 800×600, Native – 56.22fps
Team Fortress 2
* 1680×1050, Wine – 43.88fps
* 800×600, Wine – 49.58fps
* 1680×1050, Native – 50.56fps
* 800×600, Native – 58.47fps
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Games
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Until August 12th, Machinarium (and its soundtrack) will cost only $5. It usually goes for $20. The game is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. In Machinarium you play as an unassuming robot traveling through a beautifully detailed world mechanical malcontents. We grabbed this game from Steam a while back, and can testify to its quality and challenging puzzle-based gameplay.
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The award-winning puzzle platformer, And Yet It
Moves, was released for the Linux platform today. Indie studio Broken Rules brings the
award-winning downloadable PC and Mac game that will have players physically
rotating environments to overcome various obstacles and challenges to the Free
Operating System. The game won the 2007 Independent Games Festival Student
Showcase, was nominated for the 2007 EUROPRIX Top Talent Award and qualified as a
finalist during IndieCade 2008. Download the DRM-free game as RPM or Debian
package, or as a Tarball. The game will be on sale for $9.99.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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So that was my first contribution to KDE: a changeable number of pieces, a randomizer, and a color chooser.
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KDE 4.5 will be released in the next days with the most polished Kate/KWrite and KatePart during the KDE 4.x series.
A lot of work went into fixing bugs and cleaning up old code for this release. Many important aspects where redone, just to enumerate a few:
* encoding detection & handling
* the text buffer
* the undo/redo system (thanks Bernhard)
* search/replace (thanks again Bernhard)
* handling cursors and ranges
* improved spell checking (thanks Michel)
* improved indentation (thanks Milian)
* speed improvements (Milian too)
* better JS scripting (Dominik)
* porting of KDevelop to new interfaces (David Nolden)
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The upstream bugs are mostly driver related bugs. The number does not reflect reality perfectly as some driver crashes are set to duplicate. So we see that we have more crashes in drivers than crashes we fixed!
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GNOME Desktop
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This is a GNOME Shell theme based on the Ubuntu Lucid theme called Ambiance.
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Tomato Linux
Kickstart your old router with a little tomato juice. Tomato Linux is a small distro customised to be installed on Broadcom-based routers such as the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS routers. Once installed Tomato can be administered through a web interface, Telnet or SSH. But more importantly it adds a bunch of new features to your router, including bandwidth monitor, QoS controls, DynamicDNS support, multiple wireless modes as well as the ability to manage the signal strength of the router. And, because it’s essentially an embedded Linux version, there are all manner of extra things you could configure your router to do. It also works like a bomb. I ‘ve been using it on my home router for the past year.
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $33.99 with the current price action closing at just $33.25 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.
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Fedora
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Here is an outline of the topics covered:
* MeeGo Spin status
* Upcoming FUDcons – Zurich and Tempe
* Deadline for dealing with open Board tickets
* fedoracommunity.org domains – how are they going & shall we approve the open requests
* Community Working Group idea from Rex
* start.fedoraproject.org
* Vision for Fedora
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Debian Family
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Computing-wise, I’ve taken a break from the JamVM/OpenJDK port for a couple of days while I play with my latest toy : a cheap mini-netbook based on a Chinese MIPS clone. It’s branded CnMbook, but it’s available (or was) under dozens of names.
[...]
The cost? 65 quid off ebay for an ex-display model as you can’t buy them anymore, the ARM9 WinCE machines having completely replaced them.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It can be a big question for some, “to Wubi or not to Wubi” 
? So what is Wubi? It is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Do you really want to install Ubuntu inside Windows? Let me list out the pros and cons of using Wubi as well dual booting. and to make things more interesting let us throw in the Virtualization option (Sun VirtualBox or Vmware Player) in the mix. You can then decide whats the best option for you.
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The point is that Canonical has established itself as a big player in the F/OSS world, and to make the F/OSS world better for everyone in it – including Canonical – it’s important that everyone contributes; not just to marketing or UX design or whatever, but to the fundamental engineering. The argument isn’t ‘Canonical doesn’t contribute to $FOO so they’re a bunch of losers, nee ner nee ner!’, it’s ‘Canonical doesn’t contribute to $FOO and it would really be better for everyone if they did’.
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Today, one day after reaching the third Maverick milestone, Alpha 3, I am happy to announce the birth of a new testing project and team in Ubuntu: the Desktop Testing Team.
Every time we release a new Ubuntu milestone, testers are encouraged to install the new milestone and play around with it, filing bugs as they go. We want to go a bit further and use a more methodological approach for those people that love testing and want to help improving Ubuntu that way.
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Ubuntu’s ambitions don’t stop with moving some window buttons and making everything purple – the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium saw the announcement of Unity, a completely new desktop interface aimed at instant-on computing.
What’s got us really excited is that fact that the creator of the fantastic Gnome Do, David Siegel, is working with the design team. Naturally, we wanted to find out some more…
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Flavours and Variants
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Although this release is filled great stuff, the one single thing that caught my eye more than anything is the way cutting edge features have been used to improve the users experience. One I’m concerned about is that it’s built on the older Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope which Canonical will no longer support in October because of its age. Definitely worth trying if you have a Netbook-like device.
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Okay, if you skipped down from the top or you need a refresher about the points I made, here is the Cliff’s Notes version:
* Several experienced people within the project have left recently and not enough new people have replaced them
* Many things are not accomplished because of limited resources (i.e. people)
* Even without prior developer experience you too can contribute to Ubuntu Studio
* Long term commitment is unnecessary, just fix one thing or a couple
* If you are not helping then it probably is not getting done
I believe that about sums it up.
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I recently stumbled across this interesting device from Entourage Systems. At first glance when closed, the enTourage eDGe may appear to be a typical netbook, but it is actually a combination of an e-reader and a Tablet computer running Android.
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Phones
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Analyst group ABI Research has predicted that Linux will account for over 62 per cent of the market for non-smartphone mobile devices by 2015. “The number of Linux-oriented initiatives recently seen in the mobile industry indicates that Linux will be a key technology in the next generation of netbooks, media tablets, and other mobile devices,” commented the report’s author Victoria Fodale.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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All in all FAM is an excellent application and it is much faster the default application manager. In fact the only real draw back to FAM currently is that it does not support installing applications from the Ovi Store as of yet. Also worth mentioning is that unlike the default application manager FAM supports portrait mode when you tip your device into a vertical position.
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Android
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Most smartphone users I know will never turn back to a conventional mobile phone again. They just derive too much productivity from it. It’s hands down the most efficient way to maintain a communications line to your contacts in the smallest form factor possible. Voice calls, texting, emails, instant messaging; they’re all available at your fingers with the right smartphone.
[...]
This is a significant step. While previously, cheap mobile devices often meant crappy software loaded inside, with Android, what you’re getting is probably just as good as you can get with any other manufacturer. Sure, you’ll probably be limited by crappy hardware, but the basic features of what I expect of a smartphone will be there. I do not need a top-of-the-line AMOLED or SLCD screen to view my calendar. I do not need a Snapdragon or Hummingbird CPU to check my email. All I need for it is to be decently made and cheap.
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Sub-notebooks
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As expected, the folks at OLPC are starting to offer XO Laptop models with more traditional looking keyboards. The new model is called the XO-1.5 HS and it’s aimed at high school students, while the original XO models were designed for younger children.
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Computers without programs are like boat anchors. They are cold, heavy and just sit there like a lump of steel, which of course they are. It is the software which controls the movement of electrons through the computers memory. It is the software which transforms the computer from a cold silent box to a whirring, warm window into a greater world.
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Events
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That engagement may be one reason that people were positive and participatory at the recent Apache Lucene EuroCon-our Lucene and Solr user conference in Prague-compared to some of the commercial vendor user conferences we’ve heard about where frustrated users end up yelling at the vendors.
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Growth
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Open source software may be looking at a bumper year in 2010, as a new survey showed companies are looking to invest.
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This conclusion backs the findings in this week’s poll of eWEEK Europe UK readers, a clear majority of whom (40 percent) stated that their organisation’s backed, whenever possible, an open source strategy.
The Accenture survey was of 300 large organisations with annual revenue in excess of $500 million (£315 million) in both the private and public sector.
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SaaS
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I spent sixteen years of my life working for Digital Equipment Corporation. While that company is now gone, some of its innovations and technologies live on in Intel and ARM processors, and in various parts of different operating systems. If this was not true, I would be very depressed. However, even more technologies (both hardware and software) could have survived if those technologies had been “Open”, and that is what Google is doing.
So I, for one, encourage Google to keep innovating, and putting those innovations out as FOSS. While some may not become products immediately, many more will be available for discussion and use in other ways that even the Google engineers may not have envisioned.
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Databases
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When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems — and by association, MySQL — plenty of open source pundits expressed concern. After much silence there are at least two signs Oracle plans to show MySQL customers and partners some love. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
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Oracle
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On August 3 Nexenta hosted a conference call to announce a new open source project called “Illumos.” Illumos is an open source alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution free from the binds of Oracle. Still several days short of the deadline set by the OpenSolaris governing board to Oracle, perhaps this announcement makes it all moot.
The effort is headed up by former Sun and Oracle Solaris developer Garrett D’Amore. He said that Illumos is not a fork of OpenSolaris, but more of a code base that perhaps Nexenta, Belenix, and SchilliX can be built on one day. Most important to D’Amore and Illumos supporters is that the code base will live on and be free from the control of any corporate entity.
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With the days counting down to the probable disbanding of the board and the constant threat of losing access to the source, Illumos might be all that remains of OpenSolaris sooner or later. Several distributions are based on OpenSolaris now, and its loss could have spelled disaster for those systems. That’s why most of them as well as several current and former OpenSolaris developers have committed to Illumos. Other community partners include Joyent, berliOS, Greenviolet, and Everycity.
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CMS
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The most notable improvement to Drupal’s user interface are overlays. Usability lab tests observed that many users coming from other CMS systems were accustomed to a dedicated back end for administration and content creation, and found it difficult to distinguish the administration layer from the rest of the website.
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The final line-up has been announced for DrupalCon Copenhagen, this year’s annual European gathering for fans and developers of the popular open source content management system. Running from 23-27 August, alongside the usual ‘State of Drupal’ address from project founder Dries Buytaert, keynote speakers include Rasmus Lerdorf, author of the original PHP scripting language, and HTML5 expert Jeremy Keith.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Eben Mogen of the Software Freedom Law Center recently gave the keynote address at the LibrePlanet conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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With the growing popularity of Open Source Hardware, Liquidware announces the first 100% Open Source Hardware and Open Source Software Scientific Calculator. Based on Linux, Arduino, and the BeagleBoard design specifications, the Open SciCal X101 brings modularity and customization handheld scientific calculators and research aids.
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Programming
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I hate git. I really do. The people who designed the plumbing never stopped to think how any of it would be used, and the user interface is a bunch of ad-hoc bolted on independent bits that have nothing to do with each other.
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Security/Aggression
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Today I am happy to report that this action had a bigger impact that we hoped for!
* Delo — probably the most serious Slovenian daily newspaper was very keen on publishing our open letter in the readers’ letters section in the printed edition.
* Dnevnik — the other major daily newspaper has also published the open letter under readers’ letters in both the printed form and online.
[...]
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. And they were only looking at a 720 ppm case! The Dust Bowl was a sustained decrease in soil moisture of about 15% (”which is calculated by subtracting evaporation from precipitation”).
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The EFF has put up a new page for a project which it calls the SSL observatory. They have spent months collecting information about SSL certificates across the net; as one might expect, they have found some interesting things.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Regulators halted closed-door negotiations about net neutrality rules with phone, cable and Internet companies on Thursday after reports of a side deal between two participants, Verizon Communications Inc and Google Inc, surfaced.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The ACA2K project has been examining the relationship between copyright and access to learning materials in Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, Egypt and South Africa. The project, which began in 2008, is supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and South Africa’s Shuttleworth Foundation, and managed by the Wits University LINK Centre in Johannesburg.
Richard M. Stallman Speech Girona Apr 2004
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Windows may still be the dominant operating system but in South Africa Linux has a good showing
We all know that Windows is the dominant operating system, around the world. But how popular is Linux?
According to analysts StatCounter, Linux is still minuscule in comparison with the Windows family of operating systems but there are some numbers worth looking at.
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He sent me back the Windows executable. And here is the directory listing of the Linux and Windows executables:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 brad brad 7514 2010-07-27 10:07 fixfile
-rw-r–r– 1 brad brad 163954 2010-08-04 07:17 fixfile.exe
It’s a 45-line C program with only two functions. It compiles to about 7 1/2 kbytes on Linux. And it compiles to almost 164 kbytes on Windows!
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Recently a friend of mine needed to convert a lot of videos from AVI format to Windows Media for a client. My friend is also of the Microsoft persuasion, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money acquiring batch conversion software.
I recommended that he get a copy of Ubuntu, load it up with some video codecs and editing software, then use ffmpeg (with the handy WinFF GUI) to batch convert the files. This is how I usually do the job, and I have had great success with Ubuntu and openSUSE in finding and installing the right software and having this particular task Just Work.
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Kernel Space
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The 20th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS2010) was held in Brussels, Belgium from July 6-9, along with a series of satellite workshops which took place on July 6. One of those satellite workshops was OSPERT 2010 – the Sixth International Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time Applications, which was co-chaired by kernel developer Peter Zijlstra and Stefan M. Petters from the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. Peter and Stefan invited researchers and practitioners from both industry and the Linux kernel developer community. I participated for the second year and tried, with Peter, to nurse the discussion between the academic and real worlds which started last year at OSPERT in Dublin.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Even so, choosing Linux offers a number of advantages. In this article, we’re going to show you how to build a Linux-based media center that acts as a music, video, and photo server for your entire house. It will display video on a large-screen TV without a hitch. Most importantly, coupled with MythTV, the system will record TV shows and act as a genuine DVR. This last point is key, because many so-called “media center” setups don’t actually do this, and just exist to play standalone media files or stream video from the Web.
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Red Hat Family
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“Red Hat is doing very well and is taking advantage of open systems business demand,” said Foote in an interview with eWEEK. “Two Red Hat certs are in the top 10 on our IT Certifications Hotlist: Red Hat Certified Technician and Red Hat Certified Security Specialist. It appears that companies still want a support base, even in open systems where you don’t have to choose a vendor. But they are, and those investing in the cloud are looking at employee skill sets in Linux and open source.”
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Debian Family
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During DebConf10, currently being held in New York, the Debian developers announced that Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” has been frozen. This means that the ongoing development of the next version of Debian has moved into a new phase where the focus will be on bug-fixing and polishing the distribution ready for release at some point in the future.
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The Debian GNU/Linux Project has announced that its next release, Squeeze, has been frozen.
This means that no new features will be added and that work will now commence on ironing out all release-critical bugs so that Squeeze can be officially released.
The release will be based on the 2.6.32 kernel and will have version 4.4.5 of the KDE Desktop and 2.30 of GNOME. Other desktop environments like XFCE (version 4.6.2) and LXDE (0.5.0) are also included.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Despite being treated like a stepchild due to the presence of heavyweights like RHEL, CentOS, SLES and the BSD Brothers, Ubuntu Server has consistently improved over the years.
As of version 10.04, Ubuntu Server 10.04 makes the perfect choice for running your servers in a corporate environment with low to medium loads.
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When Ubuntu’s software designers sit down to design software, they prefer to do so with a total picture of the end-user in mind. Their method involves creating “personas,” a compilation of characteristics that represents various types of people who use the software. For instance, Mary might be a first time Linux user who loves working with media files and images, while Chuck may be a FOSS hobbyist who enjoys working at the command line.
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The new tooling technology simplifies the way Web applications are tested for compliance with current accessibility standards and guidelines, helping to speed up delivery of new accessible Internet applications.
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Flavours and Variants
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There are a lot of good ideas on display in Jolicloud 1.0, but the nascent product still feels incomplete. If the company behind Jolicloud can expand on the current implementation and fill in some of the gaps, it has the potential to be a real winner. I like where they are taking the user experience and I think that there are a lot of great things that they can do to make the launcher richer if they take full advantage of HTML’s inherent strengths.
The real challenge will be continuing to expand the scope of Jolicloud’s differentiating features while keeping pace with Ubuntu and ensuring that Jolicloud users will benefit from Ubuntu’s steady stream of new features.
Some of the technologies that Canonical is developing for Ubuntu’s own Unity environment (particularly the D-Bus-powered messaging indicators and application indicators) could potentially make it much easier for third parties like Jolicloud to ditch the conventional GNOME panel and integrate the underlying functionality into their own custom user experience in a more seamless way. It would be great to see the functionality of Ubuntu’s messaging indicators, for example, woven seamlessly into the Jolicloud launcher.
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Mindspeed announced a new member of its Comcerto family of VoIP system-on-chips (SoCs), targeting media, signaling and control processing on low-to-medium density optical networking environments. The Comcerto 300xv offers dual ARM11 processors, a 64-bit DSP, dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and a PCI Host controller, and is available with an OpenWRT Linux-based evaluation board.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Several people who are clearly fond of their N900 phones expressed their dismay at feeling abandoned. The N900 runs Maemo, an operating system Nokia developed based on Debian Linux. Earlier this year Nokia said it would merge Maemo with Moblin, an open-source operating system that Intel developed.
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Android
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A lot of Mobile devices come with attractive features and fabulous designs, but when Android based phones get released in the market, everything looks pale and goes down. As if users are waiting for the glimpse of the model that is implemented by Google’s Android software.
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We knew Netflix had plans to bring an app to our beloved platform since the start of the summer (after a job posting uncovered their plans to do just that), but we didn’t get a concrete window. We still don’t have a concrete window, but at least Netflix isn’t keeping quiet. One of the company’s employees stated on Reddit that they would be stupid to ignore the Android userbase considering how much it’s blown up in the first half of the year (More on that here, here, here, here, and here.)
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On the Linux-based Android platform, each application runs in a separate “silo,” unable by default to read or write data or code to other applications. Associated with each isolated application is a unique identifier and a corresponding set of permissions explicitly governing what that particular application is allowed to access and to do.
As a result, much the way Linux users typically don’t have “root” privileges with the associated power to do systemwide harm, so Android apps by default are limited in a similar way. Just as Linux minimizes the damage that could be done on the desktop by a virus affecting an individual user, in other words, so Android restricts the potential damage that could be done by a rogue application.
In order for any data to be shared across Android applications, it must be done explicitly and in a way that informs the user. Specifically, before installation can even happen, the app must declare which of the phone’s capabilities or data it will want to use–the GPS, for example–and the user must explicitly grant permission to do so. Those wallpaper apps, it should be noted, were no exception. So, if a user sees upon installation that a simple wallpaper app is requesting access to her list of contacts, say, there’s probably reason to think twice before proceeding.
On the iPhone, on the other hand, it’s a different story. All apps are considered equal and can access many resources by default, and without having to tell the user. So, while on Android you’ll be able to see that a malicious app is suspicious the moment you try to install it, on the iPhone iOS, you’ll have no idea–potentially until the harm is done.
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Vodafone has angered customers with HTC Desire mobile phones after delivering an update that added new applications which can’t be deleted.
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Sub-notebooks
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Acer today revealed a dual-boot netbook that offers users the benefits of both Windows XP and Android.
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According to survey results released by Accenture, two thirds (69%) of organisations anticipate increased investment in open source, with over a third (28%) saying they expect to migrate mission critical applications to open source within the next twelve months. The survey of three hundred large public and private sector organisations in the US, UK and Ireland, found that half of them said they were fully committed to open source and almost a third said they were still experimenting with open source.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla developers have released version 3.1.2 of their open source Thunderbird email and news client, code named “Lanikai”. According to the developers, the latest maintenance update addresses several user experience concerns and improves the applications overall stability.
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Databases
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NoSQL document store MongoDB’s new release from 10gen and the MongoDB community now offers automated horizontal scaling, high availability, automatic failover, replica sets and auto-sharding. MongoDB 1.6 is the fourth stable release of the NoSQL database.
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Oracle
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According to the release notes for the update a number of usability issues in the JavaFX Composer and Editor have been fixed. A full listing of the patches incorporated is available. NetBeans 6.9.1 is available to download and is dual licensed under the Common Development and Distribution Licence (CDDL) v1.0 and the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).
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Government
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Suggestions include getting cheaper mobile phone contracts across government, and switching government and public service computers to run on free Linux and open source software.
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Licensing
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A court in the US has ordered a company not complying with the terms of the GNU General Public Licence ver 2.0 to stop distributing the software which was putting it in non-compliance and awarded damages to the plaintiffs.
The Software Freedom Conservancy and Erik Anderson, the developer of Busybox, filed the suit against Westinghouse Digital Electronics and 13 others over the distribution of the Busybox utility in HDTV products.
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In December 2009, the Software Freedom Conservancy filed lawsuits against 14 consumer electronics vendors alleging that they were not in compliance with the GPL license. Of those 14 vendors, 13 have now either settled amicably or are in productive discussions toward a settlement.
In one case, consumer electronics vendor Westinghouse failed to comply, and a U.S. District Court has now ruled in a default judgment against it.
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Basically, Westinghouse gets off easy in comparison with those who have shared music on P2P sites ($675,000 and $1.92 million, in the first two cases to go to trial) because it only shipped a single software package, even though it was done for commercial gain.
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Two cases in which DAG has played a prominent advisory role were those of Paul Clarke, who was found guilty of possessing a shotgun which he had handed in to the police (at one point he was facing an automatic five year prison sentence, though thankfully the judge was able to find “exceptional circumstances”) and the ongoing case of Paul Chambers, whose Twitter joke about Nottingham airport led to his conviction for communicating a “bomb hoax”.
In both cases, the letter of the law was used as a pretext for bringing charges despite the lack of any real public interest in doing so. Part of the problem may lie in the narrow way in which “public interest” is defined by the Crown Prosecution Service. CPS guidelines assume that once the evidence is strong enough to suggest a likelihood of conviction, a prosecution will always be in the public interest unless there are “clear” reasons suggesting otherwise. “A prosecution will usually take place unless the prosecutor is sure that there are public interest factors tending against prosecution which outweigh those tending in favour” says the latest edition of the CPS code (pdf). I guess that because they are dealing with criminal cases day in, day out, CPS lawyers easily overlook the devastating effect that prosecution often has on an individual’s life.
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As a result, Baidu — the world’s number-three search engine and the biggest in China — lost control of the baidu.com domain name for more than five hours. Register.com employees refused assistance when legitimate Baidu representatives appealed for help by phone and online chat, and didn’t begin to address the problem until two hours after first being told of the snafu.
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Science
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The U.S. government should lead development of a nuclear thermal propulsion system for a future Mars mission and leave new heavy-lift launchers to commercial entities, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) says.
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Security/Aggression
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All this may appear stupid or even funny (“returning electronic documents”) but the communication is a very professional way to deal with classic news agencies, given how they operate. Also the concept of “stolen property” looks pretty compelling from a media communication perspective, though US government documents are generally in the public domain (irrespective of disclosure).
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Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has, for the most part, been out of the spotlight for the past year since he wrote his book titled The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…And How We Can Be Safe Again, which came out in September of 2009. In that book, Ridge confessed that, although unsurprising to anyone who understood the rampant fear-mongering and propaganda that took place in the post-9/11 Bush era, he was pressured by others in the Bush Administration to purposely manipulate the infamous color-coded National Security Alerts for political reasons, and in particular, during the run-up to former President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Andreas Muenchow, an oceanographic researcher from the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, reports that an “ice island” four times larger than Manhattan has separated from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland (shown in the photo above from 2009).
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The US government said today that most of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico has been cleaned up as BP reported that a “static kill” blocking procedure was stopping more crude pouring into the gulf.
The White House energy adviser, Carol Browner, said a new assessment had found that about 75% of the oil had been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf.
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Despite repeated pledges to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and criticism from some quarters that government support for renewable energy technologies is too generous, global subsidies provided to renewable energy and biofuels are dwarfed by those enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry.
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How much would you pay for the most biologically rich patch of land on Earth – some 675 sq miles of pristine Amazon, home to several barely contacted indigenous tribes, thousands of species of trees and nearly 1bn barrels of crude oil?
Ecuador, home of the Galapagos Islands, the Andes mountain range and vast tracts of oil-rich rainforest, yesterday asked the world for $3.6bn not to exploit the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha oil block in the Yasuni national park. A knockdown price, it said, considering the oil alone is worth more than $7bn at today’s prices. The 407m tonnes of CO2 that would be generated by burning it could sell for over $5bn in the global carbon markets.
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A North American bat regarded as one of the most voracious insect-eaters in the world faces extinction in parts of the continent within the next 16 years, scientists say.
The little brown myotis bat is one of the most abundant in the US and Canada, but the population is threatened by a fungus that causes a lethal disease known as white-nose syndrome.
The fungus, Geomyces destructans, causes a loss of body fat and disrupts the usual hibernation behaviour of the bats, causing them to wake early and leave their roosts during the daytime. In affected areas up to 99% of bats will die out.
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Space junk continues to clutter the friendly cosmic skies, posing threats to satellites and spacecraft, with scientists working to identify which bits of orbital rubbish to pluck from the heavens first. But a new study suggests they’re fighting an uphill battle.
New research on changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere suggests space debris could remain in orbit for longer than expected.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A little over 3 weeks ago, an observant UK TalkTalk customer discovered their ISP was stalking their web surfing. (Read more on the Phoenix Broadband forum).
For a period of approximately two months, TalkTalk have been covertly monitoring the web pages requested by their customers. Then, moments later, replaying exactly the same requests, to obtain the same page content that their customers had been reading for analysis. Even TalkTalk staffers seem surprised that consent was not sought for this process.
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Features in the four major browsers designed to cloak users’ browser history often don’t work as billed, according to a research paper that warns that users may get a false sense of security when using the built-in privacy settings.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A genetically modified (GM) crop has been found thriving in the wild for the first time in the United States. Transgenic canola is growing freely in parts of North Dakota, researchers told the Ecological Society of America conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today.
The scientists behind the discovery say this highlights a lack of proper monitoring and control of GM crops in the United States.
US farmers have dramatically increased their use of GM crops since the plants were introduced in the early 1990s. Last year, nearly half the world’s transgenic crops were grown in US soil — Brazil, the world’s second heaviest user, grew just 16%. GM crops have broken free from cultivated land in several countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan, but they have not previously been found in uncultivated land in the United States.
“The extent of the escape is unprecedented,” says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola (Brassica napus, also known as rapeseed).
Sagers and her team found two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild — one modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (glyphosate), and one resistant to Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty herbicide (gluphosinate). They also found some plants that were resistant to both herbicides, showing that the different GM plants had bred to produce a plant with a new trait that did not exist anywhere else.
[...]
Sagers agrees that feral populations could have become established after trucks carrying cultivated GM seeds spilled some of their load during transportation. She notes that the frequency and population density of GM canola that they found may be biased as they only sampled along roadsides.
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Taco John’s — a chain that has seen at least three efforts to expand into Oklahoma fail over the past 25 years — is ordering owners of downtown’s Iguana Mexican Grill to quit using the phrase “Taco Tuesday” to promote its weekly $1 dollar taco nights.
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Copyrights
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A few years back at a Cato Institute conference on copyright, a guy from NBC Universal challenged me with the question of “how will we make $200 million movies?” if content is freely shared. As I noted at the time, that’s really the wrong question. No one watching a movie cares about how much the movie costs. They just want to see a good movie. The question for a good filmmaker or producer or a studio should be “how do I make the best movie I can that will still be profitable?” Starting out with a “cost” means that you don’t focus on ways to save money or contain costs. You focus on ways to spend up to those costs. That’s backwards, and it’s how you fail as a business.
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Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on privacy
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08.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Fortunately, from our testing and the reports of other Linux users looking to see this problem corrected, the relatively small vmscan patches that were published do seem to better address the issue. The user-interface (GNOME in our case) still isn’t 100% fluid if the system is sustaining an overwhelming amount of disk activity, but it’s certainly much better than before and what’s even found right now with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that the Linux 2.6.36 kernel is set to ATI R600/700 tiling support within the Radeon DRM code, patches for hooking into this tiling support have been committed to the xf86-video-ati DDX and the classic Mesa DRI R600 drivers.
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Applications
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Take Thunderbird, mix liberally with calendaring, instant messaging, and release it on Linux and Windows. What do you get? Spicebird, a collaboration client that remixes Thunderbird to bring the creaking mail client up to date for today’s users.
Spicebird has been in the works for some time, but the 0.8 release is finally ready for a wider audience. To see if it’s ready for everyday use, I downloaded Spicebird 0.8 a week ago and started testing.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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One of the free software projects we have been talking to as of late about better enhancing their benchmarking capabilities for likely integration into the Phoronix Test Suite is Rigs of Rods. While the graphics within this driving simulator may not be the best (at least when compared to Unigine, or within the open-source world, Nexuiz) it’s not the graphics that the developers pride themselves on but rather the physics capabilities. Rigs of Rods began as a truck driving simulator game, but since then has turned into a rather interesting physics sandbox of goodies. A new release of their code-base was just made.
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For those trying to find a new Linux game that offers good graphics while not being a first person shooter with little to no plot — as is the case for a majority of the commercial and open-source games available for Linux — the Amnesia: The Dark Descent game is expected to be released next month. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a graphic adventure horror game that will have a Linux-native client and has been in development by Frictional Games, the same studio that developed the Penumbra series.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks
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In the recession and as a means to kill netbooks, M$ and its partners decided to “up-sell” notebooks. There were those in the market who believed paying more got more but they have now bought and the rest of us, looking for bargains, are holding back. The result is a glut of notebooks on the market. The stockpiles are almost double their normal levels. Expect a resurgence of netbooks as the best way to buy a lower-priced PC. This comes just in time for the ARMed smart-thingies, too. The monopoly can delay the effects of market forces by concerted action but they cannot stop them.
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Open source may have some answers there. Every day, programmers around the world generate high quality code for open source projects—often for free.
Yet the Heaths’ article mentions a production-increasing initiative by AT&T executives where programmers were paid for each line of (proprietary) code they produced. They weren’t more productive; they simply generated a whole lot of extraneous code.
Open source coders and other highly motivated workers share three characteristics, according to Pink: purpose, autonomy, and mastery. The coders contributing to an open source project—some of whom may well be working for AT&T—are intrinsically motivated to do quality work. It seems that offering external motivation (in the form of money) should further increase their interest in a project. But in fact, the opposite occurs.
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Healthcare
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In the FOSS world there is choice. There are desktop oriented applications and web based applications. There is however no EMR application which offers both – at the same time. This is because the desktop and the web a fundamentally different – only the user stays the same.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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In the ongoing debate between open source purists and people who appreciate and defend proprietary software, extremists will always have their voices, but many people in the open source community are waking up to the fact that proprietary platforms and applications can co-exist peacefully with open source ones. There are several trends boosting this fair dinkum version of the software landscape, including the growing ease with which open source and proprietary titles can work together in heterogenous network environments, and platforms aimed at consumers that embrace the sharing of proprietary and open source applications.
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Licensing
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Copyright denotes ownership of code, it is regarded as property and as such it can be bought, sold or assigned. This applies to all copyrighted material, and is a weakness in all free software licensing, which is why the FSF has always recommended that the ownership of GPL code be assigned to the FSF, which itself has caused ructions among some developers in the past, notably between the developers of Xemacs and GNU Emacs.
The GPL, or any other software licence, depends upon the framework of copyright law. Copyleft is a hack on copyright law that puts the rights and responsibilities back into the hands of the user.
The logic of Richard Stallman and the FSF is that “a copyright holder in a jointly-authored work is in a weak position to enforce its copyright unless all co-authors participate in the legal action”. If all the authors participating in an open source project assign their copyrights to the FSF this puts the FSF in a strong legal position to act as an umbrella in defence of the GPL and any code licensed under it.
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Openness/Sharing
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This week, those smart folks over at IDEO launched a new project they are calling OpenIDEO. If you aren’t familiar with IDEO yet, you should be—they are the poster children for design thinking specifically and 21st century innovation more generally.
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Cameras/Open Hardware
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Photography buffs revere the Holga camera as something of a cult classic. Originally created as an inexpensive mass-market camera in China, professional photographers fell in love with the way its limitations created unique images that fancy high-end cameras could not.
[...]
“This kind of open-source product license would open up a lot of new possibilities,” writes Biswas. “For example, manufacturers would be able to produce lightweight and cheap plastic camera as well as more expensive and rugged metal body based on the same design. The manufacturers would also be able to develop simple or complex accessories like lens adapters for current or old lenses from other brands, lenses, viewfinders etc. Likewise, on the software/firmware side, the open source code would also open up new possibilities.”
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Stanford’s open-source digital photography software platform, “Frankencamera,” which allows users to create novel camera capabilities, is available as a free download for Nokia N900 “mobile computers” starting today. Next week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, the Frankencamera engineering team will describe the platform and several sample apps created with it.
“We’re going public with Frankencamera,” said Stanford computer science and electrical engineering professor Marc Levoy, who leads the project. “We are releasing code so that people can create new imaging applications on their Nokia N900s.”
In addition, the researchers have been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, shared with colleagues at MIT, to begin making professional-style, single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras, equipped with the software platform, for free distribution to computational photography professors around the country. Non-academics could buy the camera at cost. Levoy said he expects those cameras will be available within a year.
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Want to get rid of your boss and move up to his position? Put kiddie porn on his computer then call the cops! This was the cunning plan envisaged by handyman Neil Weiner of east London after falling out with school caretaker Edward Thompson too many times. Thankfully, Weiner didn’t cover his tracks quite well enough to avoid being found out — earlier boasts about his plan to friends at a BBQ provided the police with enough evidence to arrest him for trying to pervert the course of justice.
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THE Irish Red Cross is taking Google – one of its biggest donors – to court today in an attempt to silence an anonymous critic who has posted comments on the internet which have criticised the organisation.
The charity has claimed that a blog, which has been running since late last year, contains false and defamatory remarks about the Irish Red Cross and has become a major concern.
The blog, entitled Governance Reform at The Irish Red Cross, is hosted by the Googleowned site Blogspot. The Irish Red Cross have filed a plenary summons with the High Court due to be heard today in an attempt to silence the blogger.
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That last point is a really interesting one. One of the “features” of the “always on” society is the fact that we’re actually ending up with better tools for managing our time — and the “old” telephone system really doesn’t fit into that setup. Thompson notes in the piece that he simply won’t answer calls that aren’t scheduled — and I’ve been reaching the same stance lately myself. I actually find it odd when people call me without contacting me first to set up a time to call. If anything, it almost feels “rude.”
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However, placing the blame on Craigslist is entirely misguided. Yes, it was the tool that was used, but the anger should be directed at those who turned them into prostitutes, and at law enforcement for not using these publicly available tools to do their job. Some law enforcement agencies have learned that Craigslist is a great tool for finding and catching those responsible. If these sorts of ads get forced off Craigslist, it won’t stop the prostitution. It’ll just go further underground and make it that much more difficult for law enforcement to do anything. As it stands now, Craigslist works closely with law enforcement to catch those actually responsible. Blaming the company (or Craig himself) is misguided and likely to do more harm than good.
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Security/Aggression
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In the meantime, US military are banned from looking at Wikileaks. I’m sure that’ll seal all leaks just fine. The Taliban can still read it, of course.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The ground-up genitals of TCM pharmacists. Shocking, I know, but it’s a fact. TCM pharmacists never have sexual problems because they are constantly doping themselves up with their panaceas, and their tissues are saturated with the most effective reagents in their pharmacopias.
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With BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone’s lips is: where is all the oil?”
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The Obama administration is facing internal dissent from its scientists for approving the use of huge quantities of chemical dispersants to tackle the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Guardian has learned.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has come under attack in Congress and from independent scientists for allowing BP to spray almost 2m gallons of the dispersant Corexit on to the slick and, even more controversially, into the leak site 5,000ft below the sea. Now it emerges that EPA’s own experts have been raising similar concerns within the agency.
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Developing countries have argued strongly for minimum 40% emission cuts from industrialised nations by 2020. But new analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Third World Network (TWN), released at the latest UN climate talks in Bonn, showed that current pledges amounted to only 12-18% reductions below 1990 levels without loopholes. When all loopholes were taken into account, emissions could be allowed to rise by 9%.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today firmly rejected government claims that federal agents have an unfettered right to install Global Positioning System (GPS) location-tracking devices on anyone’s car without a search warrant.
In United States v. Maynard, FBI agents planted a GPS device on a car while it was on private property and then used it to track the position of the automobile every ten seconds for a full month, all without securing a search warrant. In an amicus brief filed in the case, EFF and the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital argued that unsupervised use of such tactics would open the door for police to abuse their power and continuously track anyone’s physical location for any reason, without ever having to go to a judge to prove the surveillance is justified.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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By now, most readers have probably heard about the six newly minted exemptions to the anti-circumvention measures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), announced last week by the Librarian of Congress. For the uninitiated, Ars Technica has an excellent overview of the exemptions, which provide much-needed legal cover for a variety of activities including jailbreaking and unlocking cell phones, decrypting DVDs for non-commercial remixes, and several others.
Of particular interest to folks in the security community is the exemption granted for security research on video game digital rights management (DRM) systems, stemming from both realized and potential security holes in systems like Safedisc and SecuROM.
Christopher Clay on YGAW
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced a number of initiatives for its community members: these include LPIMall.com (http://www.lpimall.com) — a webstore for LPI affinity products for Linux professionals, a survey of LPI alumni, and prizes for volunteer contributors from around the world who assist with LPI’s exam development program.
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Events
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Even though I won’t be able to attend, I’m pretty excited about next week’s LinuxCon–excuse me, LinuxCon North America 2010.
Last year’s inaugural event in Portland (disclaimer: which I assisted with in my former tenure with the Linux Foundation) was a great success, in no small part to the organizers, with whom I was fortunate to assist. With one such show under their belts, I expect this year’s offering to surpass the last one.
The keynotes include some of the usual suspects: Stormy Peters, Marcus Rex, Eben Moglen, and Wim Coekaerts, just to name a few. But there’s some new blood in the speaker lineup that I will be very interested to hear from, such as Ravi Simhambhatla, VP and CIO of Virgin America. Virgin America is known for innovative business practices, so I will be interested in learning about how they integrate Linux and open source into their operations.
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If you can’t join us in person this year, you might miss out on the social scene but you can still catch a select number of sessions via webcast.
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Do you want to speak at the first MeeGo Conference in Dublin, Ireland on November 15 – 17? Now is your chance! The call for session proposals has started, and anyone who wants to speak at the conference must submit a proposal. Proposals from community members, Intel, Nokia, the Linux Foundation and others will all be given equal consideration.
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Desktop
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This is your brain. This is your brain on Linux Desktop. It is a good thing.
To borrow and twist the old “brain on drugs” PSA, your brain on Linux Desktop could be one of the best things that could happen to you for your computer fix.
Linux Desktop continues its ascent into users’ collective consciousness with great graphics, powerful applications, and seamless interfaces. Linux Desktop frees your brain to think about the work (or the fun) at hand. Imagine — transparent computing, and it’s free!
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Peter Hutterer, one of the few X.Org input developers and the developer behind Multi-Pointer X when he was a student in Australia, has now published the first public draft of the multi-touch protocol specification. The multi-touch protocol specification is a low-level spec to be integrated with the X Input Extension for further enriching the multi-touch capabilities on Linux and other operating systems using the X.Org Server.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Contacts is Mozilla’s nifty Labs project that compiles and manages all your web address books in Firefox, and now it’s made the logical leap into Mozilla’s email client, Thunderbird. It’s a really convenient syncing tool for your desktop email.
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Instructionals/Technical
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BeagleBoard is a low-power, low-cost single-board computer (SBC) that integrates SoC, storage and GPU on one board of size 3” x 3”. It was designed with open source and hobbyists in mind. And there are numerous open source projects around. But before we jump into the software side, let’s dig deeper into the hardware. BeagleBoard-xM is a revision of the original BeagleBoard and has only just been launched (with pre-orders being taken on the website from 7 June 2010). The xM makes use of an OMAP35x SoC which is based around the ARM Cortex A8 CPU.
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Wine
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Wisotool currently supports about 145 games and/or benchmarks (see below). Please consider contributing support for your favorite game, its not (too) hard. Thanks to everyone who contributed changes for this release.
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Games
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While we are discussing open source contributions to gaming projects (and just one gaming project, in this case), the buck need not stop there. This is all applicable to any open source project out there. So I encourage you to go out, find a project you are passionate about and find some way to contribute. It does not have to be a technical contribution. You can contribute documentation, translation, bug reporting or even marketing & advertising. Figure out what you’re good at and contact the project lead(s) and ask how you can help out and share with them what areas your skills lie in. While my own open source contributions are super duper minor in the grand scheme of things, I really liked the way OpenOffice.org broke down the areas where you can contribute. More open source projects need to embrace solutions for allowing potential contributors easy access to the “low hanging fruit,” if you will. To that end, there’s a project called OpenHatch which is providing these very types of resources and one which I will be spotlighting in the very near future.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The ideas that go around different OS’s and the way the represent highlighted and selected items differs greatly. Not to say that this is a problem. I believe it is rather a strength. OS’s dare to be different and they seem to be more interesting to work with. Simplicity is something that I value, I believe that openSUSE does not have this simplicity yet. The KDE desktop features a few ideas that can be used across the whole platform. I am not saying either that OSX and Windows treat this better.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Release Team have issued GNOME 2.31.6, the first development snapshot of what will eventually become version 2.32 of the GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix. According to the GNOME Project developers, the development preview is “looking great”. It is of course aimed at early adopters and developers.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Prentice Hall are happy to send each and every approved LoCo team one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Book and one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Server book. To be entirely clear: this is one copy of each book per team. This will be a great addition to each team’s library of Ubuntu books!
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Well, it looks like Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat is getting better and better everyday. According to Jasev from UbuntuForums, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat supports Apple’s Magic Mouse out-of-the-box.
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Phones
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Android
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It will be built with two cameras, one for taking photos and the other facing the user for video conferencing.
Motorola, Google and Verizon declined to comment.
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According to a report from AndroLib, Google’s Android Market for mobile applications has surpassed 100,000 applications. The AndroLib team say they’re confident that “at least 100,000 applications have been submitted to the Android market since its creation”, but also point out that not all of them are active apps. They estimate the active number to be closer to 83,000.
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Yeah, it may look like the Dell Aero when peeking it head-on, but Motorola’s Glam is apt to be far more sophisticated that the self-proclaimed “world’s lightest Android phone.”
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Google has published an updated breakdown of the number of active devices running a given version of its Android mobile operating system platform. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, nearly 60% of all Android devices in circulation are now running version 2.1 of the OS – up almost 10% compared to mid-June (50%). Android 1.5 and 1.6 devices now make up 15.3% and 20.3% of devices respectively, while only 0.2% of devices are running obsolete versions, including version 1.1, 2.0 and 2.0.1.
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For one thing, there’s a new Metasploit version on the way that sports new features, including improved social engineering testing tools. But there’s also the transition from a purely open source project to an effort that must balance the needs of its open source community with the commercial requirements of its new Metasploit Express proprietary product.
At the center of these transitions is HD Moore, the researcher who founded the Metasploit project.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Between 10 percent and 15 percent of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge, according to Mozilla. “A lot of people would say, ‘Don’t worry about it. Donate it to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] or just send me a T-shirt,’” said Johnathan Nightingale, the director of Firefox development, in a recent interview.
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Firefox, a free Web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is used by an estimated 270 million people worldwide. To maintain and improve the Firefox browser, Mozilla depends not only on its team of professional programmers and managers but also on a network of volunteer technologists and enthusiasts—free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) developers—who contribute their expertise. This kind of peer production is unique, not only for its vast scale but also for its combination of structured, hierarchical management and open, collaborative volunteer participation. In this MacArthur Foundation Report, David Booth examines the Mozilla Foundation’s success at organizing large-scale participation in the development of its software and considers whether Mozilla’s approach can be transferred to government and civil society.
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Oracle
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Analyst Charles King said reassuring Sun customers should be Oracle’s first goal.
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As for OpenSolaris and the whole idea of having an open source, cutting-edge version of an enterprise OS — like Red Hat has with Fedora and Novell has with OpenSUSE — well, that might be the way Red Hat and Novell like to develop their enterprise Linux OSes, but it’s not the way Oracle is used to developing its proprietary and highly profitable software offerings. Never has been, and probably never will be.
So it’s hardly surprising Oracle is not a happy place for Solaris engineers to be right now. Although the company appears to be studiously ignoring the OpenSolaris community in the apparent hope it will eventually go away, it may well get its wish — some OpenSolaris community developers have started a new project, and a fork in the code looks imminent.
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Education
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When we discuss terms like open textbook, open courseware, and open source, a common theme emerges: sharing content that might otherwise be protected under intellectual property laws. The use of open materials by faculty is something of a continuum, with those who closely guard their intellectual property and privacy on one end, with faculty who seek out and use open content and technologies in the middle, and with those who actively contribute to open content on the other end. However, to say that concerns over intellectual property or privacy are the defining characteristics of open faculty would be a mistake.
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The future of the “open student” is directly related to the willingness of those of us in both secondary and higher education to openly discuss these questions. Finding the answers will allow us to jump these hurdles to the future of learning. These are a few of the questions. Which people and organizations will answer them?
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Business
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VMware’s SpringSource division this week is launching a new version of its Hyperic system management and monitoring technology. The new Hyperic 4.4 release provides improvements to users of VMware virtualized environments enabling more granular monitoring control.
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Semi-Open Source
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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So what is the state of the Hurd? Is it vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever? Fortunately not: the code exists, there is still work going on (for instance as part of Google Summer of Code), and there are even some relatively functional Hurd distributions. Let’s look first at the code and the current architecture, and then at the Hurd distributions.
The current architecture of the Hurd is a set of “servers” running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel. These servers implement file systems, network protocols, authentication, processes, terminals, and other features that traditional monolithic kernels implement in the kernel itself. The Hurd servers implement clear protocols that formalize how the different components of the Hurd kernel interact, which is designed to reduce mutual trust between components. To transfer information to each other, the servers use Mach’s interprocess communication (IPC) system. Collectively, these loosely coupled servers implement the POSIX API, with each individual server implementing its part of the specification.
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Project Releases
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The framework has primarily been developed by employees from 1&1 web hosting company in Germany. qooxdoo is available under a dual licence, allowing users to choose either the LGPL (Lesser General Public License) or the EPL (Eclipse Public License) depending on project requirements.
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Licensing
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When a contribution is made to an open source project, there is an implicit assumption (and sometimes explicit consent) that the contribution (code, translation, artwork, etc) may be incorporated into the project and distributed under the license the project is using. However, many conditions of the contribution are not explicitly called out. The purpose of Contributor Agreements is to make the terms under which contributions are made explicit, thereby protecting the project, the users of the software and often also the contributors.
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Openness/Sharing
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Fog Computing (SaaS)
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I am coming up on 20 years in Information Technology, and closer to 30 years of being exposed to it (my dad was big in IT as well), and over those years, with a few exceptions, the business of IT like all aspects of business, has gone around in a circle. Here in 2010 we are talking about the current big deal thing: cloud computing. To make cloud computing a reality, you need things like virtualization, and software as a service and …insert sound of needle being scrapped across a record
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While the cloud is taking the data center by storm few are noticing the thunderhead rolling in over mobile management. Perhaps since IT has successfully mastered mobile evolution to this point, it presumes “mobile-in-the-cloud” is just more of the same. To a degree, that presumption is understandable as the cloud does move smartphones closer to functioning like laptops — a device IT has years of experience in managing. This creates a false sense of security, however, as the cloud will change far more than that in mobile.
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Health
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The annual report by the trustees who oversee Medicare and Social Security, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, gives backers of the new health care law evidence of a positive impact on government entitlement programs, but it also undercuts the findings with a host of caveats.
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Security/Aggression
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The Pentagon has demanded that WikiLeaks immediately erase the huge cache of secret US military files about the Afghan war it has posted online and hand over another 15,000 classified records in its possession.
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There’s a reason Wikileaks exists, and it’s not because it’s a criminal syndicate, but because the folks behind it believe that there are serious problems in the way certain types of secrets are used to abuse power. So it represents a more efficient (if blunt) way of solving that. The same is true of the RIAA and Napster (and its descendants). The folks behind file sharing programs felt there were serious problems and inefficiencies with how industry gatekeepers used their gatekeeper role for abuse, rather than in the best interests of the market.
It won’t happen (it never does), but Khatchadourian is spot on in noting that the Pentagon really should be recognizing that it’s traveling down the same mistaken path as the RIAA, rather than just copying the same types of moves.
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Finance
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The private sector created 71,000 jobs, the government said. However, both figures were worse than expected.
Despite the overall fall in job numbers, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.5%.
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Companies showed a lack of confidence about hiring for a third straight month in July, making it likely the economy will grow more slowly the rest of the year. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.5 percent.
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In seven simple lines buried in this year’s financial overhaul bill, lawmakers swept away one of the last vestiges of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that held sway over markets for decades.
The Depression-era bill is best known for separating commercial and investment banking — a wall that was effectively repealed in the late 1990s. Liberal Democrats, consumer advocates and a few Republicans pushed unsuccessfully this year to draw that line once more as part of the Wall Street bill.
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The second half of the year is off to a slow start for retailers, who reported Thursday that sales at stores open at least a year were weaker than expected in July, increasing 2.9 percent from July of last year, according to a tally by Thomson Reuters.
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A few years ago, the securities markets financed hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages without any government guarantee. Now, those markets are virtually closed to such financing.
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Though it feels like a cultural violation to talk about any television shown in contest with “Mad Men,” our national homage to past depravities, it is merely one of two series about a good-looking divorced white man in conflict with his virility that is offered on Sunday nights at 10. The other series is “Hung,” a comedy that, although it has not given birth to a single trend, expression or style of tie, has distinguished itself as the most topical fictional programming on television. As it’s moved into its second season on HBO, “Hung” has become an even more finely drawn satire of the Great Recession.
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Fannie Mae reported Thursday that its loss in the second quarter shrank dramatically and that the company had put away enough money to cover most of the losses it expects in the future, likely reducing — but not eliminating — the need for additional taxpayer aid.
In a sign of the topsy-turvy world Fannie Mae now lives in, the company also said it would ask the government for another $1.5 billion to cover losses even as it was paying the government $1.9 billion in dividends on rescue funds it provided earlier.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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“True transparency and no anonymity”, he says, is the way forward – and there’s nothing we can do to prevent it.
According to a report on tech blog ReadWriteWeb, Eric Schmidt revealed the size of the Internet information boom yesterday at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe.
“There was five exabytes [five billion gigabytes] of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” he said. “But that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing… People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.
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EFF International Rights Director, Katitza Rodriguez will be moderating the open dialogue on privacy at the Third Latin American Preparatory Meeting for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will take place on 3-5 August 2010 in the city of Quito, Ecuador.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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In the meantime, someone forwarded me a report from a DC think tank complaining that my last post on this subject represented a “new low” for Techdirt, because everyone knows the FCC has really been taken over by “leftist” consumer advocates. I find it ridiculous when anyone take an issue and pins “left wing” or “right wing” to the sides when the real issue is about neither. That’s a weak attempt at dismissing important arguments by focusing on the politicization of it, rather than the substance. But, part of that complaint was that having the companies involved work out a deal is much better than having “a small handful of elite, ‘consumer advocates,’ impervious to reason, debate or the sunlight of opposing viewpoints” make the decisions.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The emergence of the Internet and the digital world has changed the way people access, produce and share information and knowledge. Yet people in Africa face challenges in accessing scholarly publications, journals and learning materials in general. At the heart of these challenges, and solutions to them, is copyright, the branch of intellectual property rights that covers written and related works.
This book gives the reader an understanding of the legal and practical constraints posed by copyright for access to learning materials in Africa, and identifies the relevant lessons, best policies and best practices that would broaden and deepen this access.
The book reflects and showcases the outputs and findings of the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) research project, LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, launched in late 2007 as a network of researchers committed to probing the relationship between copyright and learning materials access in eight African countries: Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda.
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Of course, we’ve seen some examples of this already. Earlier this year, we talked about a Swedish band that was releasing its latest album as a magazine. Last year, Mos Def tried releasing his latest album as a t-shirt with a download code. And, we just wrote about Kristin Hersh’s latest album being released as a book. The idea, of course, is to give fans a real reason to buy beyond just the music — which is effectively free for many people. But providing scarce value can really do amazing things.
Of course, considering it sounds like the Sub Pop folks are still thinking about this, they might want to consider that selling scarcities can also expand a bit beyond just selling tangible goods. There are intangible scarcities that go well with music as well — including things like access and attention. Either way, it’s great to see such an iconic label realizing that there could be serious value in embracing (rather than complaining) about “free” within a business model, and looking at opportunities to use it to their own advantage.
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Copyrights
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THREsq has an interesting story about how the guy, Louie Psihoyos, who won an Oscar for best documentary this year for The Cove, apparently has a pretty quick legal trigger finger against anyone using a photograph he took 15 years ago. He’s sued a bunch of companies over the years, and the latest is the BBC and CBS.
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The introduction of long-awaited copyright reform legislation has generated considerable discussion among Canadians about whether the latest bill strikes the right balance. While concern over Bill C-32′s digital lock rules has garnered the lion share of attention with expressions of concern from all opposition parties and a wide range of stakeholders, the other major issue in the bill is the extension of fair dealing – Canada’s version of fair use – to cover education, parody, and satire.
[...]
The case highlights that Canadian fair dealing analysis involves a two-part test. First, does the use (or dealing) qualify for one of the fair dealing exceptions. Second, if it does qualify, is the use itself fair. In this particular case, the court affirmed that the copying in question qualified under the first part of the test (ie. for research or private study), but that it did not meet the six-part test for fairness and thus was not fair dealing.
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We’ve covered the ongoing debates in New Zealand over the proposed three strikes law in the latest copyright reform bill. There are many, many people who are quite concerned about any sort of three strikes law — which is why the earlier version was scrapped and the process was restarted. However, there are still some who think that it doesn’t even go far enough.
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The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which allows for large fines and six month Internet suspensions, has already passed its first reading in the New Zealand Parliament. However, according to copyright advocates, it doesn’t go far enough. Instead of simply disconnecting repeat infringers, they are calling for a heavier punishment that would take people’s right to Internet access away.
Judge Napolitano: The Plain Truth – The Government Lies to You!! Freedom Watch 7/31/2010
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I encountered a case of IT staff not knowing about GNU/Linux last year. I received a CD that would have been useful on our local web server. However, the file-names all over the CD were in random case. In some places file-names were all lower case, or all upper case or even mixed for the same file. I ended up editing dozens of index-files to use the identical name in all instances. This took hours of work. I e-mailed the distributor my changes. They had no clue that these things matter. Since they wanted their stuff to work in all schools, they thanked me for my input. Similarly, Manitoba Education uses a database that runs MySQL and Java but will not work on GNU/Linux. Can we say “hard-coded C:\paths”, boys and girls? How much pain does using open standards and rendering them non-open cause? Lots.
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Desktop
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There must be something about the US$200 price point — for the second time this summer, Linux bloggers have been pondering the notion of a $200 computer.
Back in June, it was Phil Shapiro who kicked off the conversation by demonstrating how to configure an Ubuntu machine for less than $200.
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When I clicked on “Help me decide” next to choice of OS, “Linux” appeared as a tab. I could see the merits of the versions of that other OS but was overjoyed with this information when I clicked on “Linux”:
“While all ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops will ship with an operating system, ThinkStation workstations may be ordered without a preloaded operating system for users preferring an open-source solution.”
OK! I took a look at ThinkStations… and there is a similar model for $60 more with a more powerful processor and a second drive bay. They also have thin clients as a choice under workstations but they are about the same price as these low-end desktops.
How different is that experience compared to Dell because Dell isolate everything. Of course, Lenovo could do better. They could offer no OS etc. for all their PCs…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week, we discuss the big Gnome Census debate, other news from GUADEC 2010, Lockheed Martin’s first open source project and what it does, Chrome Canary, DMCA exemptions and much more…
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This week on a very localized episode of KDEMU we have Jure Repinc, KDE Localizations outlaw. The sound quality suffered this time, please bear with us.
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In this episode: Gnome 3.0 has been delayed while the Gnome team releases its first census results. KDE 4.5 should be here, and Mark Shuttleworth dislikes tribalism. Discover our new ‘You Dare Us’ challenge, and we reveal our discoveries from the last two weeks. Finally, hear us discuss one of the most compelling Open Ballots in living memory.
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Applications
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There’s nothing new about f.lux, a piece of software designed to make nighttime computer usage easier on your eyes. There isn’t even, in theory, anything new about flux in the Linux world: it’s been (sort of) available in the form of the command-line app xflux.
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8 Best Linux Terminal Emulators You May Have Never Heard Of: For some Linux users, the terminal or command line shell is a useful and powerful tool that can help accomplish tasks (from simple to complex) in a more efficient and often quicker way. Although it is not a necessity anymore, I think it would still be handy to have some basic command line skills. To those of you who are afraid to use the Linux terminal, perhaps you should get or download some Linux/UNIX command cheat sheets.
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Distractions. They’re everywhere. Believe it or not, one of the biggest sources of distractions is your computer desktop. Email notifications. IM windows. Your Web browser. Even that nifty rotating wallpaper you have.
For a writer, distractions are not only annoying they also put a huge dent in your productivity. More distractions mean less time writing which equals less written and (for the pro) less money earned. Neither is a good situation to be in.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Vincent Untz has just announced the release of GNOME 2.31.6, which is the first development snapshot of GNOME 2.32 following the announcement last week that GNOME 3.0 is delayed until March 2011. With the 2.32 release not being the 3.0 milestone, the 2.32 release will continue to use GTK+2 rather than the still-in-development GTK+3.
Most of the GNOME packages have retained GTK+2 API support while adding in the GTK+3 capabilities and can be configured to use either tool-kit version at build-time. However, a few GNOME packages didn’t keep the GTK+2 support around, so for this GNOME 2.31.6 release some packages needed to be reverted to their 2.30 state so that this would be a GTK+3-free release. By the GNOME 2.32 beta, however, these packages should be fixed to work with either GTK+ version.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Here are my rough notes from DebConf 10. Nothing should be taken as a direct quote of the speaker who is supposedly associated with the talk as my own thoughts are interwoven with their points, the person switches around between they and I and we all the time… I made them for my own reference and publish them in the hope you might find them interesting but they must not be relied on. Happy hacking
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Summary: Linux Mint 9 KDE is Kubuntu as it should have been. This release adds new applications, a new software manager and so much more. It’s well worth a download for anybody interested in using KDE as his or her desktop environment.
Rating: 4.5/5
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Sub-notebooks
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Jolicloud 1.0 is now available for all so I decided to install it on my netbook (Asus EeePC 1005 HA) and write a review for the WebUpd8 readers while waiting for the best netbook Linux distribution to be out – no, not Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 but Aurora.
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So, what could improve on this situation? I think you know where I’m going with this … yep, good ol’ free and open source Linux, and specifically Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook Edition.
Ubuntu Netbook Edition uses the GNOME window manager with the most excellent custom Ubuntu Netbook Edition interface and includes pretty much every application you might want on a general purpose, portable system.
But here’s what makes Ubuntu Netbook Edition so great: It is ridiculously easy to install and knows about a huge range of peripherals; it’s easy to configure; it isn’t a resource hog; and it runs really, really fast even on the 1.66GHz Atom N450.
I downloaded UNE, installed it onto a 4GB USB drive ($10 from Fry’s!) using the Universal USB Installer, stuck the USB drive in the NB30, restarted the NB30, went into the BIOS set up and moved the USB drive above the HDD, told the BIOS utility to save the configuration, and, voila! The whole process (other than the download) took minutes and, on reboot, Ubuntu Netbook Edition was up and running in seconds.
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Mainstream netbook makers like Acer are down to $199. If they want to keep up volume and increase margins they will have to skip that other OS soon.
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I put together a bootable flash drive with Ubuntu 10.04 on it and a 1 GB persistence file, and booted to it. I installed the Broadcom STA Wireless driver and rebooted. Thanks to the persistence file, the driver remained intact upon second boot, and I immediately had access to four wireless networks. For those not counting, that’s two more than every other PC in the room saw. And for those wondering, both boots and the driver install took less time than it took to boot the native Windows image once.
Thanks to Ubuntu, my netbook runs faster and more stably than anybody else’s in the office, and the hacker in me is satisfied without my ever having to hack anything. I realize, too, that Ubuntu isn’t exactly a lightweight distro, and that Puppy (yes, I know it’s really Ubuntu) or Knoppix or even a custom-built Slackware would almost certainly run faster and more stably. But considering the convenience factor of getting Ubuntu installed (20-30 minutes), its built-in support for encrypted file systems (a mandate for these netbooks), and its overall great appearance and performance, it’s probably the best distro for this netbook at the moment.
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The Aspire One AOD255, first shown at this year’s Computex, will feature Google’s Chrome operating system along with Microsoft’s Windows XP.
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Wave
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There may be enough code out there already for ambitious developers to pick up where Google left off. While it’s easy to think Google’s failure indicates that it’s unlikely anyone else will succeed, Trapani notes that many successful open source projects are based on abandoned projects and forks.
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I am frequently overly enamoured of the idea of where we might get to, forgetting that there are a lot of people still getting used to where we’ve been. I was forcibly reminded of this by Carole Goble on the weekend when I expressed a dislike of the Utopia PDF viewer that enables active figures and semantic markup of the PDFs of scientific papers.
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Oracle
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FULL SERVICE IT VENDOR Oracle has released a set of free plug-ins to help developers use Eclipse to code for Java Enterprise Edition 6.
The Oracle Enterprise Pack supports the popular Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). The company is also promoting several new features, including improved debugging for Weblogic Script Tool scripts, visualisation of MBeans and syntax highlighting for Python.
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Education
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If you live in a world of daily technology use, rapidly changing online services, social networking, instant messaging and an explosion of new devices, new form factors and new platforms the ‘essential skill’ of creating a Microsoft Access database or writing an essay in Microsoft Word will seem as interesting and relevant to you as learing to drive a horse and cart to the owner of a Ferrari… that is, not much.
The schoolchildren’s response is not only understandable, it shows intelligence and realism way beyond those who have chosen this set of historical anachronisms to teach them.
Everything interesting happening in Information technology is driven by Open Source, enabled by Open Source, or contains a big chunk of Open Source.
You think I exaggerate? not at all… Open Source is the technology of choice behind everything of interest in the online world, and social networking sites are jam-packed with OSS old favourites (and not just LAMP stacks) and sparkling new ones. Cloud and SaaS? even conservative firms like Gartner will tell you these are up to 90% composed of Open
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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A new economic analysis finds that making taxpayer-funded scientific papers freely available would yield more than $1 billion in benefits to the U.S. economy over 30 years—five times the costs of archiving the papers.
A team led by John Houghton, an economist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, examined the potential payoff of expanding a National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy requiring grantees to post their peer-reviewed manuscripts in a free database after a delay. A proposal in Congress would extend the policy to 11 more research agencies and shorten NIH’s 12-month delay to 6 months. Supporters say taxpayers should have free access to the results of research they paid for; publishers worry that they will be put out of business.
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Whether you are a fan of NoSQL, cynical of its merits, or just curious about its development goodies, there’s no escaping the presence and growth of NoSQL. In the next 18 months, at least half of all new websites will use NoSQL databases, reports GigaOM Pro Research.
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A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.
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One of the UK’s tech leaders believes students are staying away from computing classes because they teach nothing but the boring basics.
Professor Steve Furber – the legendary Acorn and ARM processor designer – is working with the Royal Society to figure out why the number of students taking A-Level computing classes has halved in the past eight years, and why students who love technology aren’t signing up to study the subject.
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The claims are contained in thousands of pages of declassified files on UFOs, released on Thursday online by the National Archives.
The 18 files, which cover from 1995 to 2003, are made up of more than 5,000 pages of reports, letters, and drawings drawn from correspondence with the public and questions raised in parliament.
[...]
Dr David Clarke, author of The UFO files and Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, said the “fascinating” files showed the level of concern about such “bizarre incidents” during the war.
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Ignorance of the law is no excuse. That’s the standard line motorists hear when they say they weren’t aware of the speed limit, or gun owners hear when they say didn’t know about the gun laws in the jurisdiction they happened to get arrested in. Yet that ignorance is pretty understandable in an America where just about everything is being criminalized. At the federal level alone there are now more than 4,500 separate crimes, and that’s not counting the massive regulatory code, violations of which also can sometimes be punished with criminal charges.
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A $100 million war has erupted over the unauthorized Michael Jackson online casino — and now GoDaddy.com could be on the hook for allowing the casino owner to register the site with them.
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Security/Aggression
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With public opposition to the Afghan war growing, the US needs to rethink policy over politically schizophrenic ally Pakistan.
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The U.S. Defense Department demanded WikiLeaks return secret military reports from Afghanistan leaked to the website and purge all copies from their records, including tens of thousands of reports already publicly posted.
“We want whatever they have returned to us and we want whatever copies they have expunged,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters today at a news briefing.
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Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
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Marc Thiessen draws upon my article in The New Yorker to make his case against Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, and to argue that American “military assets” could be used “to bring Assange to justice.” Using the military for this purpose would be a terrible idea. WikiLeaks may not be a conventional news organization, but it is not “a criminal syndicate,” as Thiessen asserts, and the notion that the Defense Department should go about destroying privately run Web sites (with infrastructure in friendly countries), because of what those sites publish, suggests a gross misuse of military force. Rather than treating WikiLeaks like a terrorist cell, the military is better off accepting that the Web site is a product of the modern information age, and that it is here to stay, in some form or another, no matter who is running it.
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Many are saying that the Wikileaks documents tell us nothing new. In some ways this is true. Most Americans knew that we have been fighting losing battles. These documents show just how bad it really is. The revelation that Pakistani intelligence is assisting the people we are bombing in Afghanistan shows the quality of friends we are making with our foreign policy. This kind of thing supports points that Rep. Dennis Kucinich and I tried to make on the House floor last week with a privileged resolution that would have directed the administration to remove troops from Pakistan pursuant to the War Powers Resolution.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The White House was accused today of spinning a government scientific report into the amount of oil left in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill which had officials declaring that the vast majority of the oil had been removed.
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Finance
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In our original Flash Crash Analysis report, we dedicated a section to an observed phenomena we termed “Quote Stuffing”, in which bursts of quotes (at very high rates) with extremely unusual characteristics were observed.
As we continue to monitor the markets for evidence of Quote Stuffing and Strange Sequences (Crop Circles), we find that there are dozens if not hundreds of examples to choose from on any given day. As such, this page will be updated often with charts demonstrating this activity.
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No. The disadvantage was not speed. The disadvantage was that the “algos” had engaged in something other than what their claimed purpose is in the marketplace – that is, instead of providing liquidity, they intentionally probed the market with tiny orders that were immediately canceled in a scheme to gain an illegal view into the other side’s willingness to pay.
Let me explain.
Let’s say that there is a buyer willing to buy 100,000 shares of BRCM with a limit price of $26.40. That is, the buyer will accept any price up to $26.40.
But the market at this particular moment in time is at $26.10, or thirty cents lower.
So the computers, having detected via their “flash orders” (which ought to be illegal) that there is a desire for Broadcom shares, start to issue tiny (typically 100 share lots) “immediate or cancel” orders – IOCs – to sell at $26.20. If that order is “eaten” the computer then issues an order at $26.25, then $26.30, then $26.35, then $26.40. When it tries $26.45 it gets no bite and the order is immediately canceled.
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But just because the markets are electronic doesn’t mean you can’t take a picture of them. Market analysis firm Nanex has produced some very compelling visualizations of the type of sub-second trading that goes on in our electronic exchanges. A number of the pictures are from BATS—a fully electronic exchange that consists of a bank of computers in Jersey City—but others cross multiple exchanges.
Nanex’s visualizations page contains an ongoing catalog of the traces that stock-trading bots leave in the market, as they move individual symbols up and down in price thousands of times per second. The obvious, repetitive, algorithmically generated patterns produced will be familiar to any physicist or electrical engineer—the stock market is a now a networked collection of high-frequency oscillators and feedback loops of varying sizes, where computers cycle stock prices by the millisecond.
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US small business sentiment is down. Consumer income is down. Consumer spending is down. Pending home sales are down. Worldwide, crops are threatened by drought and floods. And while some claim that a US bumper crop will ease the problems, American corn is not exactly a perfect substitute for Russian and Ukrainian wheat, which go a long way towards feeding extensive segments of Middle East and Northern African populations.
[...]
Needless to say, if you’re speculating on food commodities like wheat, whether it be through Commodity ETF’s or elsewhere, and you fancy yourself to be a Capitalist of Chaos, what’s not to like about failed crops and rising price uncertainties? You can corner markets, the way cocoa honcho Anthony Ward has, you can sell derivative instruments to pension- and market fund managers chasing yield without sufficient savvy, and at the end of the day, you can be filthy rich. Just don’t feel too bad about the hungry, starving and dying, or about those who see their pensions and other savings vanish. Hey, if you didn’t do it, someone else would, right?
The biggest irony in all of it, of course, remains that the biggest players in these ultimate dog eat dog Darwinian capitalist schemes use US and EU taxpayer money to play the games. They wouldn’t be here anymore, sitting at their crap tables, if you wouldn’t have handed them the money to play their ultimate to-the-death fighting games with. If nothing else, it seems to be a fitting end to yet another economic system doomed by a lack of morals.
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Former Secretary of State George Shultz famously quipped about Washington: “Nothing ever gets settled in this town. You have to keep fighting, every inch of the way.” This is proving just as true for banking reform as for other aspects of American government policy.
For example, Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, after considerable effort, were able to place strong language in the Dodd-Frank financial-sector legislation — enacting a version of the “Volcker Rule” that would require big banks to become significantly less risky. While this idea originated with Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman and senior adviser to President Obama, and was announced with great fanfare by the president himself in January, it was clear – from the beginning and throughout the detailed negotiations this spring – that the Treasury Department was less than fully enthusiastic about this approach.
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Amazingly, Mr. Geithner made no reference to the Volcker Rule, either explicitly or even implicitly – despite the centrality of this idea to the recent debate. It appears to be nowhere at all in his list of priorities (or on the “to do” list of Michael Barr, the responsible Assistant Secretary, who gave a follow-up speech on Wednesday). He is apparently signaling to all the regulators involved that this is not a top priority for the administration and – presumably – they should toe this line if they would like to be reappointed. Treasury carries great weight on these issues, even with nominally independent regulators, and in the Treasury interpretation big banks would be allowed to rearrange their activities so they can still effectively take big risks – earning big returns in good times and creating major problems for the rest of us when the cycle next turns down.
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The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The police chief for Industry filed a lawsuit against AT&T Mobility recently, claiming the company improperly released his cell phone records to his wife.
Garold Ray Miller filed the claim for invasion of privacy in Beaver County last month, but it was moved to federal court on Tuesday.
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A few years back, I did a long newspaper story about the FBI snooping on the private records of ordinary citizens. As my old editor Michael Kinsley likes to say, the scandal is what’s legal. The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI was doing it, in secret, tens of thousands of times a year.
As I dug into the story, government officials kept telling me that law-abiding Americans have nothing to fear. Why object to surveillance if you have nothing to hide? Joseph Billy Jr., a top FBI supervisor for whom I had great respect, told me, “I’ve had people say, you know, ‘Hey, I don’t care, I’ve done nothing to be concerned about. You can have me in your files and that’s that.’ Some people take that approach.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Google-Verizon net neutrality saga has taken yet another strange turn as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ended closed-door talks with several companies over the future of net neutrality and has lashed out against the practice of paying for faster transmission of data over the Internet.
[...]
The entire affair has blown up into a PR nightmare. Google and Verizon have both denied they are attempting to end net neutrality, but they have confirmed that they are talking to one another. It seems as if the two are trying to define net neutrality through an agreement and model their definition as a standard for the industry.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Culture Ministry will add 25 traditional arts, wisdom and folklore as well as muay thai to its national intellectual copyright protection list.
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My Dough Girl’s menu features perky and pretty cartoon women in the style of 1950s pin-up girls. Each, like yellow-bikini-clad Betty—who has an oatmeal cookie with apricots and cherries named after her—are namesakes and mascots of various cookies. The menu doesn’t feature mascots actually made of dough such as the pudgy Pillsbury Dough Boy, but nevertheless, Dough Boy-trademark owner General Mills is demanding the locally owned cookie shop come up with a new name.
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Copyrights
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You may recall that Eckhard Höffner has been examining the history of copyright in Germany – finding that in its absence there was an explosion of knowledge – that due to the late enforcement of copyright in Germany, Germany emerged from a poor agricultural country in 1800 to the leading science nation in 1900. The German media being more advanced than the U.S. media Der Spiegel,the preeminant German weekly news magazine with a print run of about 1 million, and one of the most widely circulated magazines in Europe has picked up the story.
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That seems like an important paragraph to show to folks who insist that copyright on sound recordings must obviously be covered by copyright and/or that it’s a “natural right” to include sound recordings under copyright. Clearly, even Congress felt it was likely to be unconstitutional for quite some time.
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While ASCAP is apparently too busy to debate Larry Lessig, they aren’t too busy to produce silly and ridiculous propaganda. ASCAP member Damian Sol notes that he recently received an email from ASCAP asking him to “spread the word” about ASCAP’s new propaganda video that compares getting songwriters paid for music to getting chickens and cows paid for their eggs and milk. Seriously. I’d embed it here, but the technologically savvy folks at ASCAP are apparently too clueless to figure out how to include an embed on a video they claim they want people to “share.”
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A D.C. Superior Court judge abruptly lifted a temporary restraining order on Friday that had barred a legal journal from printing information it obtained from a court file, ending a dispute that legal observers said was destined to become one of the biggest First Amendment cases in years.
The battle began when a reporter from the National Law Journal was investigating a story about money owed to a District law firm by POM Wonderful, a health juice manufacturer.
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The report does spend some time noting that there are some significant differences in the US and UK markets, so it probably doesn’t make sense to directly extrapolate out the results. However, this certainly does call into serious question the reasoning of BPI and others for the Digital Economy Act. What it shows, quite clearly, is that the industry was doing a very good job adapting on its own. It even makes you wonder if the BPI/IFPI/RIAA lobbyists are actually upset about this report, which sort of takes away the entire crux of their “help us politicians, you’re our only hope” claim.
Richard M. Stallman Speech for Curitiba Event 2003
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08.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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While Linux runs great on most any hardware, it runs even better on a machine with ample memory and a recent CPU. Upgrade options abound for even the most hardware hacking averse. In this monthly roundup we’ll take a look at options to get your Linux system running even better without breaking your budget.
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Desktop
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Fix #2: The Open-Source Desktop PC
Linux on desktop PCs offers the same cost savings potential as it does on server platforms: no upfront licensing costs. Novell’s SUSE Linux, Red Hat and, most recently, Canonical’s Ubuntu all have operating system distributions available via GSA Advantage.
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Linux: First, Linux is scalable to a point that is kind of stupid. Linux can run mainframes and super computers, as well cell phones, and even less powerful embedded devices. Clearly, that gives it a wide range of application that neither Macintosh nor Windows can really deal with. Secondly, Linux has proven itself far more stable than its commercial competitors. Still, Linux lacks good CAD software, and good arguments have been made against Linux for tax, accounting, and other business related software not being up to par with commercial applications available for Windows and MacOS X. The general security, scalability, stability, and responsiveness of Linux make it perhaps the most capable general purpose operating system. So long as you are not using it for CAD, gaming, or certain very specific business tasks.
Verdict: Each OS has its purpose. Each OS is easy to use.
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Kernel Space
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I gave the keynote speech at this year’s Linux Symposium. The talk was entitled the ‘State of the Kernel’, and summarised the past year of kernel development. Attempting to summarise an entire year in the space of an hour is a daunting challenge and required over 70 hours of preparation in order to review each of the many proposals and discussions that have taken place. With that work done, however, I’d like to share a few of the things I have learned with readers.
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While we benchmark the latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com using our automated testing platform built on the Phoronix Test Suite, now that the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released, we have run a formalized set of kernel benchmarks on a ThinkPad W510 notebook with an Intel Core i7 CPU to see how the Linux 64-bit kernel is running with this high-end notebook under the Linux 2.6.32, 2.6.33, 2.6.34, and 2.6.35 releases.
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Reviews
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Good installer, easy to use and full of choices without overwhelming the new user
Virtualbox and mouse integration working from the start
A very standard Xfce
Good looking fonts
Effortless localization
Helpful links and pointers how to use the system everywhere
Great package manager works well and fast, updates without hiccups, good package search
Friendly update-notifier with links to package search and website
Xfce and Lxde versions fit on a CD rather than the DVD-size download of bigger environments
Gnome network manager applet used
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Earlier this year, former Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields announced he’d be stepping down from the post and that Fedora and Red Hat were searching for a new project leader. At the end of June, Frields announced that Jared Smith would be taking up the position. Since this is a pretty important job in our community, we thought it’d be a good idea to talk with Smith and learn more about him and his plans for Fedora.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 3 uses the Linux Kernel 2.6.35. This kernel includes a lot of security enhancements over the previous kernels. It also has some interesting new features like support for Apple’s Magic Mouse and faster packet transmission.
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A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the third and last Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.
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Now for the big question: Why is the Linux community ‘reasonably’ happy with Ubuntu while Linspire was almost immediately painted as a mockery within Linux universe?
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2. Deleting useful programs to make way for more Mono.
Am I the only one who was mildly annoyed when they deleted The Gimp (and now, Aptitude) so they could use the precious few MB on their LiveCD to haul around 80 megs of Mono runtime to support Tomboy, F-Spot, and gbrainy? Three programs that are not particularly useful and easily replaceable by real Linux apps and not imitation Microsoft C#. Native programs such as Gnote and Shotwell.
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Phones
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Android
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Google Wave may be gone, but there are still reasons to rejoice in Googleville. One of them is the continuing good news about sales of smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. While the shock of Searchzilla’s announcement that it was driving a stake into the heart of its experiment in collaboration, its boss revealed to a gathering of reporters at Techonomy in Lake Tahoe, California that Android smartphone activations have reached 200,000 a day.
That’s an increase of more than 200 percent since over this year’s first quarter, when activations were around 65,000 a day. At 200,000 activations a day, one million Android phones would be sold every five days, six million every 30 days and from August 1 to the end of the year, 30 million new handsets would be in consumers’ hands.
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Unleash the iPhones of war! The Army’s announced the winners of its first-ever mobile phone app development contest. And the general behind the program says some apps will be in the field “within a year.”
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Anyway, as part of my news-catch up today I read this announcement from the U.S. Army about Apps for the Army, an “application-development challenge… used to help the service more quickly acquire software applications.” Soldiers and Army civilians were eligible to team up and develop software applications based on the iPhone OS or Android. They had 90 days, and 140 people competed. Today the 5 winners and ten runners-up in all five categories were announced.
The winners included a program that breaks down a new physical fitness manual of 400 pages into an multimedia presentation, one that helps potential recruits size themselves up, and the Telehealth Mood Tracker app, which “allows users to track their psychological health over a period of days, weeks and months using a visual analogue rating scale.” An honorable mention went to an App that would turn an iPhone essentially into a black box in case of “extreme shock events” — so, for instance, if an IED exploded nearby. It would take a series of pictures and report its location, the time, etc. to help with compiling a report later on.
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Oracle
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The release of odt2braille by the Belgian university Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, has brought the ability to work with Braille to OpenOffice.org. The extension adds a “Braille” menu to OpenOffice.org’s Writer which allows users to translate documents into Braille formats such as .brf or .pef or send the content to Braille printers for embossing. The development was supported by the EU funded AEGIS project. Previously AEGIS helped deliver odt2daisy which allows for the creation of DAISY3 format digital audiobooks from OpenOffice.
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BSD
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Highlights:
Introduction to MidnightBSD
The FreeBSD Ubuntu challenge
Network monitoring with Nagios and OpenBSD PART 1
Replacing Microsoft Exchange Server
Maintenance Systems over BSD
Low Resource PCs with FreeBSD
Making the Unknown Giant Visible and Known
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Openness/Sharing
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While the world of Big Brands was initially too caught up in its sermons and fine words to notice the dwindling congregations, it has now woken up and joined the burgeoning world Bazaar. In fact, I suspect, many people, wish they had stayed in their pulpits where they were easy to avoid. But some brands are becoming very savvy and offering goodies including new soapboxes for people to use. Like the ‘Best Job In The World’ campaign run by the Queensland Tourist Board, that invited people to share their wares and talents in exchange for the type of adventure that sets the Bazaar buzzing.
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It’s easy to overlook open-source projects when exploring project management tools. But an open-source tool like web2Project can be the easiest way to choose a tool that will continue to grow with your needs.web2Project allows you to look to the future of what your organization needs, while still being able to get to work today.
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The set of proposed priorities specifically mentions OER. Essentially, if the priorities are adopted, it could mean that grant seekers who include open educational resources as a component of an application for funding from the Department of Education could receive priority. OER is included in Proposed Priority 13–Improving Productivity:
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Open Data
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Data Blog editor Simon Rogers gave me an action-packed interview in The Guardian’s London newsroom, starting with story walkthroughs and ending with a philosophical discussion about the changing role of data in journalism. It’s a must-watch if you’re wondering what the digitization of the world’s facts means for a newsroom.
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Open Access/Content
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I’ve started using Mendeley. I like it a lot, so far. Papers, but with a networking aspect. CiteULike, but with a quick PDF full-text search aspect. Free. Cross platform. Good stuff.
But.
The But isn’t Mendeley’s fault. It is a result of the evolution of our methods of scientific communication. I’m usually a fan of iteration, evolution. Not this time. I want instant, sweeping change.
I want to share all the PDFs in my Mendeley library with everyone. Right now.
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Standards/Consortia
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The W3C management Team will also keep you informed as plans for the second Workshop, in Europe, likely during the first quarter of 2011.
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It’s often tempting to think that Gov 2.0 is common ground between those who always want smaller government and those who want government to help its citizens. To an extent, this is true: opening up services lets citizens and businesses do more for themselves, and means government doesn’t have to grow for more things to happen. In some cases, government can even get smaller.
But government-as-platform doesn’t absolve us from asking what fundamental services should be provided by a government, as opposed to private industry. This is a big question. We didn’t come up with a single universally-agreed answer before Gov 2.0, and Gov 2.0 will neither answer it for us nor let us evade the question.
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Much of the press coverage around Flattr, the “social payments” startup, focuses on the fact that it was founded by Peter Sunde, who is perhaps better known for being the (former) spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. I have no doubt that this is a big reason why the company got a lot of its initial attention, but I think what’s a lot more interesting is that this is one of the first “micropayment” platforms that actually tries to get around the historical problems of micropayments for content. There have been lots of micropayment companies out there, and almost all of them failed — and it wasn’t difficult to see why. First, they underestimated the “mental transaction costs” that micropayments entail. Just making the decision if something is worth paying for is a huge “cost” for users. Second, they heavily underestimated the “penny gap,” which is the effort that it takes to get someone to go from “free” to paying even a penny. Next, it’s an attempt to fight the basic economics of what supply and demand is pushing for the content be priced at. And, finally, required micropayments make it very hard to promote that content via word of mouth or sharing.
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Like many websites, Last.fm’s web server contains a file called robots.txt, whose job it is to instruct the robotic web spiders employed by search engines like Google to ignore certain directories on the site.
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According to one of the parties in the case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has asked both sides for supplemental briefs in the NYPD Blue indecency case, wanting to know what effect a recent ruling by a three-judge panel of that same court has on the FCC’s fleeting nudity enforcement policy under challenge in the NYPD Blue case.
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A blogger for liberal sites such as AlterNet and News Junkie Post has reported discovering a conservative group of online users who systematically work together to bury, or vote down, stories on liberal subjects and by posters they believe to be liberal, in order to keep those stories from becoming more widely known.
“A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites,” reported the blogger, known as oleoleolson, who is the Senior News Editor and Chief New Media Strategist for News Junkie Post. “DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark.”
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Health
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According to statistics published by Forbes Magazine [i] based on Tate & Lyle estimates, aspartame had conquered 55 percent of the artificial sweetener market in 2003. One of the driving factors behind aspartame’s market success is the fact that since it is now off patent protection, it’s far less expensive than other artificial sweeteners like sucralose (Splenda).
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Security/Aggression
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The government has assured us that the images made from “Digital Strip Search”” imaging technologies like millimeter wave and backscatter imaging wouldn’t be saved. They lied. It turns out the U.S. Marshals Service saved more than 35,000 “whole body” images of people who entered a U.S. courthouse in Orlando, Fla.
And, if the U.S. Marshals Service can do this, why should we trust the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to keep their word about deleting these images? I can’t think of any good reason, can you?
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The rumors are true: Saudi Arabia has become the second country inside of a week to block access to Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices on grounds of national security.
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Kevin Mitnick was eager to participate in a social-engineering contest at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas last weekend and was told he would target Microsoft in the event.
He figured it would be fun to show off his schmoozing skills, which he so easily used to trick employees at tech companies in the 1990s into handing over passwords and other sensitive information, ultimately landing him in jail.
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Finance
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So, the degradation of the world’ GPS system is not something unexpected, nor it is unrelated to such problems as peak oil or the depletion of mineral resources. It is just another kind of peak: “peak capital.” Maybe GAO has been too pessimistic; maybe we’ll decide that the GPS system is so important that we can’t let it decay. But, in any case, it is a sign of the times: the fifth problem.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The truth, or at least more of its constituent parts, will out. In the big picture, that’s a good thing. Those who have the most to fear from an open environment are ones with closed agendas, for whom public debate is a threat rather than an opportunity. Long-term strength lies in persuasion grounded in fact, rather than on carefully constructed artifice.
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Apparently Senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein are quickly drafting a special amendment that says the law wouldn’t apply to “websites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents.” That’s obviously targeted directly at Wikileaks, but it certainly could impact other sites that store documents as well, and that could create problems.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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A Google spokeswoman declined to comment while a Verizon spokesman said in a statement that the companies have worked on an agreement for 10 months. “We are currently engaged in and committed to the negotiation process led by the FCC” that will allow both sides to “reach a consensus that can maintain an open Internet and the investment and innovation required to sustain it,” he said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Last week, of course, we paid a fair bit of attention to the latest round of DMCA exemptions, which come along every three years. It was surprising that the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress seem to keep moving the bar (slowly, slowly) towards a more consumer friendly approach, as compared to the early exemptions which never helped consumers at all. Still, the exemption requests that got rejected show how arbitrary the process appears at times.
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Did you know that the definition of ‘public domain’ as ‘the few published works not protected by copyright’ is very recent?
All published works are supposed to be in the public domain. This was the original pretext behind copyright – to incentivise the delivery of novel and educational works into the public domain – for the public’s benefit (albeit at the cost of cultural liberty).
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The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which allows for large fines and six month Internet suspensions, has already passed its first reading in the New Zealand Parliament. However, according to copyright advocates, it doesn’t go far enough. Instead of simply disconnecting repeat infringers, they are calling for a heavier punishment that would take people’s right to Internet access away.
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Once-abundant privacy is now scarce. Once-scarce publicness is now abundant.
It’s the second half of that that interests me most since I’m writing a book about that.
So if we’ve seen Lessin’s Law on Privacy, then Jarvis’ Corollary on Publicness (which is my synonym for publicity because publicity as a word is so freighted with marketing meaning now) is this:
Now publicness is free.
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It’s a shame that the recording industry and its lawyers want to turn this into an us vs. them situation. It’s not. Plenty of people want to create a situation where there are wider opportunities for everyone acting as both creators and consumers, to really allow creativity to flourish. But you don’t do that by locking up creativity and pretending that many of those creators don’t appreciate art.
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Google Book Search (GBS) has captured the attention of many commentators and government officials, but even as they vigorously debate its legality, few of them have marshaled new facts to estimate its likely effects on publishing and other information markets. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom propounded by the U.S. and German governments, as well as Microsoft and other competitors of Google, concerning the likely economic impact of mass book-digitization projects. Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the prevailing account of mass book-digitization projects is that they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels. Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most-affected by it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the mechanisms of digitization’s economic impact.
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Remember, this is the guy who was just saying that if a publications primary duty was to advertisers rather than readers, it was morally abhorrent. But, even here he admits that the subscriptions are driven by… advertisers. If this was really about getting the influence of advertisers away from newspapers, why is he playing up the increased ad revenue due to the paywall?
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Reps for the Beach Boys are threatening to sue Katy Perry after she included their classic line “I wish they all could be California Girls,” in her song “California Gurls.”
Rondor Music has fired off a letter to Perry’s label, Capitol Records, demanding Mike Love and Brian Wilson — who penned the 1965 classic “California Girls” — be given a writing credit on Perry’s hit summer song, as well as royalties.
FSCONS 2008 video cast.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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One of the problems commonly talked about in our forums and elsewhere is the poor responsiveness of the Linux desktop when dealing with significant disk activity on systems where there is insufficient RAM or the disks are slow. The GUI basically drops to its knees when there is too much disk activity, which is far from being ideal. For many the problem has just been present for a year or two, but those experiencing these horrible responsiveness problems where it may take many seconds for a menu to appear when clicking on it or a half-minute to do a VT switch, there soon may be a fix.
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Applications
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GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you’ve lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Regnum Online is a free MMORPG that concentrates on PvP (Players vs Player) and has a great graphics.
This game was first started several years ago (the graphics has improved a lot since then) and at the time there was only the Spanish/English Ra server.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In many ways, the Ubuntu community has evolved far differently than WorksWithU initially expected. Back in 2008, WorksWithU likely spent too much time wondering how Canonical would promote Ubuntu in traditional PC and server markets vs. Windows. Fast forward to 2010, and new opportunities (the cloud, hosting centers) and new challenges (Google Android, Applie iPad) have forced WorksWithU to rethink our Ubuntu coverage multiple times.
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Alongside the desktop and server editions of Ubuntu, Canonical has put considerable effort into Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud recently. This investment is poised to pay off with Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), which will introduce several enhancements to the cloud-init package when it debuts next October 2010. Here’s a preview of some of the changes that Ubuntu cloud users have to look forward to.
cloud-init, the successor to ec2-init that expands the latter’s functionality beyond Amazon’s EC2, is a tool that makes it easy to customize generic Ubuntu cloud images. Rather than having to tweak a cloud-based system manually after it first boots, users can deploy cloud-init to automate tasks like adding repositories and importing ssh keys when an image is initalized.
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Sub-notebooks
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I know a handful of people who suffer from netbook-buyer’s remorse: they bought one of the inexpensive little machines, then stuck it in a closet when they discovered how sluggishly it ran Windows.
If you’re in the same boat, you might be able to give that system a new lease on life. Jolicloud is a free, Linux-powered operating system designed specifically for netbooks. It’s fast (way faster than Windows), easy to use, and better optimized for cloud computing.
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Aiming to greatly ease the barriers that the aging or people with disabilities experience in participating in Internet activities, the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) announced it has created new open source tooling technology to help software developers make it dramatically easier for them to access and use Web 2.0-enabled business, government and consumer web sites. The new tooling technology simplifies the way Web applications are tested for compliance with current accessibility standards and guidelines, helping to speed up delivery of new accessible Internet applications.
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CMS
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“Our company, Global Nomad, was started originally in 2005 as a non-profit with the aim of providing free web development training for unemployed locals here on the Tibetan Plateau in western China where we are located, and then hiring them to do the back-end development work for clients’ websites.
In 2008 we made the switch from non-profit status to that of a wholly foreign-owned enterprise, and since then are steadily growing as a web development company as our name spreads and our local employees’ skills expand. Because of the free (sometimes even paid) training that we have provided for our local employees, they now are implementing Joomla onto client websites, thereby earning an income and becoming financially independent… which is significant in light of the current situation in western China of high unemployment rates and “brain drain” to the bigger cities in the eastern half of the country.
Most of our clients come from the West including the US, Europe, and Australia, and thanks to the high-speed internet available even way out here in remote western China and open-source software such as Joomla, locals who used to be jobless can now earn a decent living implementing Joomla and doing back-end coding work for our clients.
When I saw your invitation to interview web development companies who are using Joomla to make a living and become independent, I thought “perfect”! That is precisely what is happening here within our company. Please visit our website for more information about us (www.itsglobalnomad.com) and I do look forward to hearing from you.”
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BSD
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FreeBSD may not receive the attention that Linux does, but its latest upgrade could provide some instruction to the makers of Ubuntu about how to do open source releases. The makers of Ubuntu and the popular Linux Mint usually add new features to every release of these Linux distributions, whether or not these are features that the average users will ever need.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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The default judgement was made on the basis that the company had ceased to respond to discovery requests from the court or the SFC. The SFC was awarded $90,000 damages and $47,685 legal costs. Westinghouse Digital Electronics was also ordered to hand over equipment in its possession that contained GPL code and forbidden to distribute devices which contained the BusyBox software.
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Security/Aggression
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Dear Sir/Madam,
in the past weeks, especially in connection with the story about FBI’s action against a cybercrime which lead to the arrest of a suspect in Slovenia, the word “hacker” has been used several times in the media in the wrong context and the wrong way. Since this term is differently understood by the experts then by the lay public, we feel it appropriate to warn about it in this open letter[1].
“Hacker” comes from the verb “to hack”, which is an expression that originated in the 50′s of the previous century on the MIT[2] and means solving a technical problem in an unique way. In the computer jargon it is still used to label inventive and original modifications of a programme or system, based on a deep understanding and in a way that was originally not intended.
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Finance
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The Chinese government fund represented by Kenny Huang has spent the past fortnight raising precisely the amount of cash required to finance a bid for Liverpool. Sources have confirmed to Digger that the China Investment Corporation, the sovereign wealth fund to the world’s most populous nation, is the organisation being fronted by Huang, who yesterday admitted interest in bidding for Liverpool.
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Both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then New York Fed President Tim Geithner assured senators in April 2008 banking committee testimony that the assets assumed by the Fed in its bail-out of Bear Stearns were “investment grade.” In loading its own balance sheet with unprecedented credit risk, the Fed not only made the American people guarantors of toxic paper – and placed the value of the US dollar at greater risk – it materially misrepresented the quality of the securities involved. While credit quality and credit risk were at the heart of the unfolding banking crisis, the Fed itself was claiming that $30 billion in collateral it assumed consisted of only currently performing and investment grades assets. But the collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed bonds involved had already been downgraded at the time of the testimony.
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UBS AG announced on Sunday that it will hire executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) and Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC) to build out its mortgage and lending business in the United States.
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Former top traders with Goldman Sachs will be working together again as two hedge fund firms merge.
London-based Montrica Investment Management, with $1.1 billion in assets under management, is merging with TPG-Axon, an $8 billion New York-based firm, according to an investor letter.
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If you were running for office this year, would you want Goldman Sachs stumping for your election?
Talk about radioactive. The firm epitomizes everything that Main Street hates about Wall Street these days — rescued by the feds from billions of dollars in losses in the collapse of 2008, it quickly rebounded to post billions of dollars in profits. In the meantime, a federal lawsuit showed how Goldman created at least one exotic mortgage-backed product that was designed to fail, soaking one set of clients for the benefit of another. Nice!
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The move was an unexpected sign of restraint after a major Supreme Court ruling this year that gave corporations the power to devote unlimited amounts to electing or defeating candidates for federal office.
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The Wall Street investment bank was hardly alone in creating CDOs designed to fall in value and was hardly alone in betting against the housing market. Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal article on Deutsche Bank makes that clear. The German bank wasn’t just creating and selling mortgage securities to some of its clients, it also was advising other clients to bet the other way, and sometimes doing so itself.
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The media is certainly hot and heavy for Goldman Sachs (GS) scoops. We noted recently the New York Times reported Goldman had Battery Park residents angry over the loud ferries it had been using. Now comes news from the Daily Telegraph that the gilded bank has also offended some people living near its fancy 200 West Street global HQ.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Joe Hockey, shadow treasurer, has told Australian radio that the Liberal Party will oppose the Australian government’s planned compulsory net filter.
Communications minister Stephen Conroy has staked his reputation on blocking content from the internet which would be censored if it were a film for cinema release. The government announced a review of the contentious plan last month.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Indeed, this last factor is a crucial element of Net neutrality – not some minor, optional element that can be discarded. Consider a hypothetical situation when the Web was invented. Suppose we had the kind of pseudo-Net neutrality Schmidt seems to be advocating. According to this, it would have been perfectly permissible to allow the then-leading services like Gopher or WAIS traffic (anyone remember them?), say, to be delivered more quickly than Web traffic. So existing Gopher and WAIS incumbents (such as they were) could have conspired to throttle the Web. That is, if Schmidt’s proposed “bridge”had been around then, there probably wouldn’t be the Web as we know it – and certainly no companies based on searching it…
The situation is exactly the same today, with the difference that we don’t know what new services will be developed and run across the Internet. But we do know that we need an absolutely level playing field if they are to stand a chance of challenging current leaders and maybe replace them. Sadly, if Google’s “compromise” goes through, we may see the situation where large companies with vested interests can discriminate against new entrants, with the result that online innovation is crimped.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Its unlikely to be the impact which the IP Enforcement Agenda is having on the poorest people in the world. Its unlikely because its apparent from both the latest leaked text of ACTA and the preceding leaked text that no consideration is being given to threat posed to the poorest people in the world by ACTA. The likely impact of the threat on the poorest people in the world is already indicated by the instantiation of an expansive “enforcement” agenda. I’ve pointed to some of the obvious consequences in a working paper hosted by the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at Washington College of Law.
windows 95 on android
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is famous, but the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field is much, much bigger and more pervasive. How else to explain so much devotion to a malware-ridden, inefficient, overpriced under-performing computing platform? Oh I know, those license fees don’t really matter, and Windows 7 is really good and really secure any day now! World wide botnet? Don’t be silly, when Linux gets popular it too will be riddled with malware.
Yes, many people really do believe that stuff, even in the face of years of overwhelming data to the contrary.
Should Linux admins also know Apple and Windows? Yes. Because, again, the real world is mixed environments. Running mixed networks, making a good business case for Linux adoption, making a migration plan, and performing migrations requires knowledge. It also makes you appreciate Linux more.
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Airline IT systems and transactions business company Amadeus yesterday announced it will completely migrate its commercial airline transaction processing systems onto Linux by 2012, saying proprietary platforms were “very limiting” and criticised the lack of open standards in the industry.
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Desktop
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Driven by an urge to move out of my old, stale (to me, anyhow: I’ve been using KDE for years) KDE desktop environment, I went on an install binge, successively slapping Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 (UNE), plain ol’ Ubuntu 10.04, and Linux Mint 9 onto unsuspecting hardware that I had laying around. Yes, I know these are all Debian-based distros. I’ve served my RPM time with Mandrake/Mandriva, RHEL, CENTOS, and Fedora. It’s Debian-based distros for me from now on, if I have a choice.
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Applications
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The good news is that there are free and open-source alternatives for virtually every package a small business might need, and most of them are excellent. Whether or not you’ve already made the switch to Linux — there are, after all, myriad security and other reasons for doing so — these free apps can be just what any small business needs to succeed.
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Instructionals
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Red Hat Family
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DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of information technology to the public sector, today announced that Red Hat, Inc. has recognized the company as its 2009 Public Sector Partner of the Year at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World held in Boston earlier this year.
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Sub-notebooks
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An initiative within the Laboratory for Technological Literacy caught our eye since it focuses on free and open source issues–FOSS@RIT. The FOSS@RIT group officially began in January 2009, as an offshoot of RIT’s Department of Interactive Games and Media. A course in Interactive Games and Media generated interest in open game development for the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), and led to the creation of FOSS@RIT. Though the group still does lots of work with OLPC development and education projects, it also has a broader purpose that includes general educational efforts around open source tools and processes, particularly in education.
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Jolicloud is available as a free download. Founder Tariq Krim says premium features will be available later this year.
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Setup for Jolicloud is simple: Simply download and run the tiny installer, and follow the on-screen instructions to create a dual-boot installation of Jolicloud and Windows. Alternatively, you can download an image file to create an installation CD, or create a bootable USB flash drive.
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THE OPEN AJAX ALLIANCE (OAA) is using open source web 2.0 initiatives to improve Internet access for the elderly and disabled.
The OAA announced the open source tooling technology to help developers create accessible web 2.0 enabled sites that meet online accessibility standards. The guidelines followed are the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), considered as the industry-wide global standard for accessibility.
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Intel Corp., the world’s largest computer chipmaker, can’t use threats, retaliation or exclusive deals to block customers from buying competitors’ products under a settlement of antitrust charges, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said.
The settlement covers graphics chips, central processors and chipsets, the FTC said.
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Science
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The cooling system is essential for maintaining the temperature inside the station. There are two “loops” in the system, one that uses water and draws heat from the inside of the station and one that dumps the heat into space, which uses ammonia as the fluid. Ammonia is used because it freezes at a much lower temperature than water.
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The Nature article makes it clear that researchers in other fields, including astronomy, are starting to try similar approaches to getting the public to contribute something other than spare processor time to scientific research. As long as the human brain continues to outperform computers on some tasks, researchers who can harness these differences should get a big jump in performance.
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Security/Aggression
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Finance
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Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.
And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural,” a permanent part of the economic landscape — and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.
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U.S. consumer spending and incomes were unexpectedly flat in June while personal savings were the highest in a year, implying an anemic economic recovery for the remainder of this year.
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Households across a majority of large U.S. cities received more foreclosure warnings in the first six months of this year than in the first half of 2009, new data shows.
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Despite months-long speculation that the nation is primed for a housing recovery, homeownership — a tenet of the quintessential American life — is far from making a comeback.
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While many businesses have been hurt by the recession, the comic book collection industry has received a boost. It all started in the spring of 2009, in the bleakest days of current downturn, when ComicConnect sold a copy of Action Comics No. 1 for $317,200 – a record at the time.
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The warning screams at you: “Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs!” Yes, this Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover reads like National Enquirer or a flashing neon sign on the Vegas Strip.
And just in case you didn’t get the warning, B/W repeats it twice more, on the cover: “Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs … Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs.” Then, as if afraid you still won’t get it, they scream even louder: Commodity ETFs are “America’s worst investment.”
Worst? Add toxic, deadly, evil. Commodity ETFs are rapidly becoming a malicious virus breeding chaos in the global markets pricing all commodities: food, farm lands, metals, oil, natural gas, livestock, water and other natural resources are the assets under commodity derivatives and their ETFs, pricing that’s now controlled more by Wall Street speculators than the weather, adding wild swings in volatility and trillions in global derivative risks.
And once again the usual suspects, the Goldman Conspiracy of Wall Street Banksters, are in the lead.
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he basic idea behind Brown’s bill is that state aid should be funded using preexisting stimulus dollars. That’s what he talks about in the video. He doesn’t say anything about conditions. And to double-check, I read the bill. Still nothing.
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A new report on Tuesday showed a slight dip in overall wages and salaries in June, caused partly by employees working fewer hours.
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The Obama administration plans to send $600 million to help unemployed homeowners avoid foreclosure in five states.
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The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
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Sixty-three percent of people believe that it is acceptable for their government to spy on another country’s computer systems
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has asked the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), host of Wikinews and its sister projects, to take down its image of the FBI seal from its websites. However, the WMF declined, saying that FBI lawyers had misinterpreted the relevant federal law.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Nokia’s global director of brand protection has published a critical column on ACTA in the World Trademark Review (sub required). The column says that ACTA is unnecessarily broad and that by excluding key countries from the negotiations, those countries “are practically forced into a position of opposition.”
Stallman in the program Dissertation of Channel Andalusia
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