07.27.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure group of malcontented purveyors of “standards.”
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You might also ask, “With how much certainty can you guarantee that my applications will make that same transition?” Red Hat, Novell and Canonical can give the best answers, but their consultants will tell you that only in rare cases will your applications have trouble making the trip from your Unix environment to a Linux-hosted one. Rest assured that your issues aren’t so unique that their highly skilled Linux engineers can’t tackle them.
Unix has different “flavors” that generally refer to differences injected by their development teams to take advantage of proprietary hardware features or to capitalize on special software innovations, such as volume management or virtualization. Such flavors are Sun’s Solaris, IBM’s AIX, HP’s HP-UX, AT&T’s System Vr4, BSD Unix, DEC Unix, Mac OS X, and the beloved SCO Unix.
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Meanwhile Zaphod has finished his work for now and decides to play a game to relax. He opens up his software manager (similar to Apple’s app store) and finds a game he likes. After selecting it and clicking on install he goes away for a drink of something that is almost but not quite like tea. When he comes back with the steaming mug in his hands, Zaphod is pleased to find that his new game has been installed and is ready to play. Putting the mug next to the keyboard Zaphod immerses himself into the game.
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So anyone who states that installing programs under windows is easier than under Linux is obviously showing their lack of knowledge and inability to look at the true state of affairs.
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Let’s first consider Ubuntu as a replacement for your Windows desktop or laptop operating system. Computer owners generally use an Internet browser, a word processing program, the occasional spreadsheet, an email application and almost nothing else. These computer owners may not realize that they’re paying $150 to $300 for the OS and another $300 or more for the office suite–most of which they’ll never use. Why add hundreds of dollars to a computer system that has a life expectancy of three to four years?
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Still, I thought that Mark Shuttleworth, the software entrepreneur who founded the Ubuntu project, was onto a good thing. In a world of cloud-based apps, there are fewer and fewer substantive differences between Windows and the Mac OS—since I can easily shuttle my data and programs between different computers, I rarely find myself wishing for one OS when I’m on another. If Ubuntu’s designers could iron out some of its kinks, I thought, a free operating system could fit perfectly in this new, OS-agnostic world.
Well, I think they’ve done it. I made a second foray onto Ubuntu’s shores a week ago, and so far, I like it quite a bit. The OS has progressed a great deal since I last checked in (in 2008 I installed version 8.04; now I’m running version 10.04). I found Ubuntu quick to install, speedy to do pretty much everything, and, thankfully, very easy to figure out. There were some rough edges; for instance, Ubuntu’s designers ought to make some of its error messages more comprehensible to newbies. While installing Skype, I was informed that a “later version is available in a software channel. You are strongly advised to install the version from the software channel, since it is usually better supported.” I’m pretty sure that could have been translated to, “Click ‘Next’ to install a newer version of Skype.” For the most part, though, Ubuntu has broken free of technical mumbo jumbo, and if you’ve got a little bit of tech savvy, you’ll have no problem dealing with it.
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Desktop
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There was a time when Linux was notorious for having what was called “fugly” fonts. Things improved a bit over the years, but thanks to expiring patents things are about to get even better.
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Jeeze, people, one guy has trouble ordering Ubuntu Linux on a Dell laptop over the weekend and it’s Ubuntugeddon. Chill. Ubuntu is still going to be offered by Dell.
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Plenty of folks are confused about Dell’s commitment to Ubuntu, the Linux distribution promoted by Canonical. In recent days, old rumors about Dell abandoning Ubuntu have returned. But in reality, Dell indicates it is preparing to ship systems with Ubuntu 10.04 — the most recent Ubuntu release — within the next few weeks. Here’s the reality check.
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The latest panic in desktop-Linux-land was that Dell would no longer be selling Ubuntu pre-installed on laptops and netbooks. Alas, for those who love drama, it wasn’t true. In fact, Dell is expanding its Ubuntu desktop offerings.
Gerry Carr the marketing manager for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, told me that the stories that Dell will no longer be offering Ubuntu pre-installed on its hardware were “NOT true.” Now, Anne Camden, a Dell PR manager, tells me that far from moving away from Ubuntu Linux, Dell is offering more Ubuntu choices than ever.
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Kernel Space
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A change recently implemented in kernel 2.6.35 shows how developers from different companies collaborate on the kernel, what good support contracts with Linux distributors are, and how commercial interests influence the development of Linux and troubleshooting. The change was made by Red Hat’s DRM subsystem maintainer Dave Arlie to solve some stability problems and prevent crashes that reportedly occurred on a lot of systems with Intel’s 945GM, which was launched in 2006 and is mainly used in notebooks.
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Applications
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Games
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In your quest to find a good, native and free game for Linux you might have seen long lists of games mentioned on various sites and forums. These mentioned games range anywhere from simple 2D side-scrollers to impressive 3D shooters. The amount of Linux games is surprising and can be a tid bit overwhelming. So, how do you pick out the games that are actually worth your time? Well, I’ve compiled a small list of some of the most talked about games for Linux on the internet. Have a read and see if any of these catch your eye.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A long time developer with Kubuntu, Ubuntu’s KDE variant, Pearson describes himself as “an electrical engineer specializing in embedded systems and RF [Radio Frequency] by day, and an open source programmer by night.”
Pearson first discovered free and open source software in 2001 as an alternative to Windows, but at first used it only for servers, judging the desktop as not ready for general use. Later, though, he discovered Kubuntu and KDE 3.5, “and was blown away by the powerful but user friendly interface, as well as the fast Debian packaging system. Shortly thereafter I replaced all my Red hat and Windows XP installations with Kubuntu, never looking back.”
With such an attitude, Pearson was blindsided by the release of KDE 4.0 in January 2008.
“KDE 4 kind of snuck up on me,” he writes. “I had assumed that the new software coming from KDE was going to be along the same lines as KDE 3.5. I tried using KDE 4 for a few days and just could not stand the interface; my productivity plummeted and I seriously considered going back to Windows. The only thing that kept me from doing that was the sheer expense of deploying Windows Server across multiple environments.”
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New Releases
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eBox Platform development team is glad to announce that the first installer CD for eBox Platform 1.5 is now available for download. Please note that eBox Platform 1.5 is a development version based on Ubuntu 10.04 and it will become eBox Platform 2.0 (next stable release of the Linux small business server) after a stabilization period. The development of eBox Platform 2.0 is now finished and from now on all the attention will be focused on testing, bugfixing and optimizing the software.
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Red Hat Family
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BeyondTrust Software Inc., the global leader in privilege delegation and authorization management for virtualization and cloud computing environments, today announced a formal partnership with Red Hat. BeyondTrust will join Red Hat’s ISV Partner Program and create joint solutions aimed at offering Red Hat users a tightly aligned package of the Privileged Identity Management (PIM) tools needed for mission-critical servers.
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Sub-notebooks
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Back in March, we broke the news that Jolicloud had released their Pre-Final build. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Jolicloud is a customized version of Linux Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE). It’s designed to be an easy and trouble-free operating system for almost all netbooks. It’s taken me awhile, but I’ve finally had time to install Jolicloud and try it out on my HP Mini netbook. I’ll give you some details and screenshots from my brief time exploring Jolicloud.
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If you need a simple, fast, secure and visually pleasing OS on your netbook, this one will be hard to beat. The express install option is a big winner, making it one of the easiest Linux OS’s to install. For those with more Linux experience, you might want to stick with Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It’s much more flexible but definitely more difficult for newbies. I believe that Jolicloud will continue to bring good news to netbook users who may not want to be chained to Microsoft Windows.
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Jolicloud 1.0 is a new edition of Linux aimed at nontechnical netbook users that’s described this way by its makers: “[It] is not a traditional OS. It was built for netbook users to leverage the cloud and make their life easier.” Think of it as a variant on the Google Chrome OS approach: This Internet operating system, as the company calls it, is little more than a Web browser plus a few other supporting technologies.
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It’s summer. And frankly, that means no one’s all that excited about working. Oh goodness no.
In honor of the season of laziness, we’ve put together a list of some of the most fun open source downloads you can find. No, none of those office productivity tools here – just lots of games, hobbyists’ tools and other time wasters. Is it quitting time yet?
In case you’re feeling too lazy to read all the way through the article, the very “funnest” apps – the games – are at the beginning. The rest are categorized and in alphabetical order.
I should probably write some more about the list here, but – you know – it’s summer.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The popular Web browser has had a longstanding CPU (central processing unit) utilization issue that–in some cases–overtaxed the CPU, causing noticeable heat issues in small laptops.
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Oracle
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It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox.
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Education
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Today I’d like to spotlight TurnKey’s unlikely relationship with Chelsea School, a high school in suburban Maryland. I’m going to try to tell this story on two levels…
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GnuTLS is a modern C library that implements the standard network security protocol Transport Layer Security (TLS), for use by network applications. GnuTLS is developed for GNU/Linux, but works on many Unix-like systems and comes with a binary installer for Windows.
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Project Releases
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Standards/Consortia
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If it goes through, the standard will then be presented to the interdisciplinary ISO (International Standardisation Organisation) to be ratified as the current version of the ISO 26300 standard. OASIS is in charge of maintaining this standard, and its stated aim is to promote the interoperability, that is the ability to exchange documents, between different office suites.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Britons are not getting the broadband services they are being sold, research by the regulator Ofcom suggests.
Its analysis of broadband speeds in the UK shows that, for some services, 97% of consumers do not get the advertised speed.
Sen. Franken: Stop the Corporate Takeover of the Media
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This shows that GNU/Linux is not only for geeks. If you have some grown-ups in your organization who are reluctant to change, perhaps this example would inspire sufficient effort. The benefits outweigh the costs:
* relative freedom from malware
* relative freedom from anti-malware
* freedom from monopoly, and
* superior performance at lower cost.
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Desktop
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A preview version of Userful’s Linux MultiSeat 2010 has been made available to potential users.
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Based on Userful Multiplier and Edubuntu, Linux MultiSeat 2010 also includes a wide range of open source applications that are relevant to schools.
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“Dell has a problem,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “They want to be seen to be friendly to GNU/Linux so they have a few products, but they do not have a real campaign to sell GNU/Linux for fear it would offend M$ or their fans. I do not know at what point Dell will feel comfortable pushing GNU/Linux, but if they do not hurry others will pass them by.”
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Server
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The servers come with Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise 11.
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Applications
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GNU libextractor is a library used to extract meta data from files of arbitrary type. It is designed to use helper-libraries to perform the actual extraction, and to be trivially extendable by linking against external extractors for additional file types. libextractor is a GNU package. Our official GNU website can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor/. libextractor can be downloaded from this site or the GNU mirrors.
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Mark Shuttleworth said, “Moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely, and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options there.” So if you guys are wondering what did he even meant by that, you have take a look at this.
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Instructionals
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All you have to do now is find the bits that sound good and use Audacity’s editing features (cut, paste, fade in, fade out, amplify) to separate them out from the bits that might not sound quite so good. I did mention that it was an open mic evening, didn’t I? Not everything done during an open mic evening is going to sound, well, wonderful. On the bright side, however, Santa Fe has an overflow supply of musicians, and many of them drop by Second Street on Wednesday to join the house band. It’s kind of relaxing for them to have a place where they can play in a non-gig venue and just have a bit of fun.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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July 26th, 2010. Today, KDE delivers the third release candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.5. The KDE Software Compilation consists of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, a large number of applications for all purposes and the KDE development platform the applications and workspaces are built upon. The final version will be available next week This last RC is intended for verifying no showstoppers will creep into the final release of 4.5.0. It will also interest those who want an early look at what is coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer.
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So TechBase is a source of mostly technical information. This includes step-by-step howtos for all sorts of KDE development as well as the feature plans and schedules for KDE releases and so forth. It’s mainly static content. Think of a howto for a Plasma Widget or a howto for building KDE. The content usually is valid for a long time, mostly even for years. For those of you longer in the KDE project, TechBase is the same as our good old developer.kde.org page (and we’ve never put arbitrary content there). The only difference is, that it’s now maintained as wiki.
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Well it’s taken me a little time to commit this work, but here it is. This is the fruits of my labour from the KDE Multimedia Sprint earlier this year.
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This code is now in trunk (r1154776) so feel free to try it out and report other bugs etc. This GUI is also included in Mandriva Cooker (I did want to include it prior to 2010.1 release, but the timing didn’t work out – tho’ it probably would have been OK considering the delays that cropped up in the release process). I expect this functionality to be included in any updated/backported versions of KDE for 2010.1.
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After many years being a Windows user, I took my first steps as a Linux user under Ubuntu. As I started to learn more about the GNOME desktop manager, one of the pleasing and welcome surprises was to find out how incredibly easy it was to transfer files from and to my mobile phone using Bluetooth. From that point on, I tend to use this feature more often, uploading MP3 files or wallpapers to my mobile, or downloading pictures I took from its on board camera. In Windows XP I had always avoided the matter, not willing to download a few hundred MB just to get Bluetooth file transfer to work, or simply too lazy to install Nokia’s own software and have to use their specific cable.
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This solution is very simple, so much so that I was ashamed I had not found it earlier. The downside is that it always requires a new device scan before sending files, which can be a bit annoying, but at least I can send and download files to and from my mobile using KDE’s own KBluetooth. Hope this helps in case you were having similar problems.
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Peter: It doesn’t make it easier, it makes it easy. It wasn’t easy before. As I said in the presentation, we developed the first run wizard with the KDE Usability team. We managed to come up with a nice wizard that gets people started right away.
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For Amarok 1.4 lovers, there is more good news. Gereqi is yet another Amarok 1.4 fork, which is still in its early stages of development. And it is already looking good.
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PlainSight is a versatile computer forensics environment that allows inexperienced forensic practitioners perform common tasks using powerful open source tools such as RegRipper, Pasco, Mork, Foremost and many more.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Earlier this laptop has been filled with PCLinuxOS 2007, PCLinuxOS 2008, PCLinuxOS 2009.1, and the last was 2010.07. From the series 2007-2009.1 my bluetooth still does not work. My Bluetooth works in PCLinuxOS 2010.1 with kernel update to 2.6.33, and version 2010.07 PCLinuxOS has worked perfectly on my laptop.
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Red Hat Family
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Even a Linux fan might not have heard of CentOS Linux but, if you’re a Web or other edge-server administrator, I can guarantee you know about CentOS. That’s because, according to Web Technology Surveys, in July 2010, “For the first time, CentOS is now leading the Linux distribution statistics on web servers with almost 30% of all Linux servers.”
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked five topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:
* Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
* Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
* Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience.
* Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
* Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
* Packaging – packaging software for Ubuntu users to install with a clock.
* Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu Studio 2.0 (Puppy Edition) is based on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and provides a lightweight interface where you can run popular Ubuntu Studio applications like Jack, Ardour2, Hydrogen and many more. This audio production software is available along side all the tools of a normal Puppy Linux desktop. Make sure you check out the Multimedia — Multimedia section of the menu as it contains a very impressive collection of tools and useful apps and I missed it the first time through. I found more applications are available in the Ubuntu repositories which are accessible using the Quickpet package manager, icon on the desktop. You’ll find Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Cinerella, Dia, Inkscape, and many other applications plus Quickpet provides a drivers section where you can add Nvidia or ATI Radeon drivers. Overall, this looks like an excellent idea and I’ll definitely watch as it is developed.
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Phones
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Android
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Motorola’s co-CEO Sanjay Jha spoke out about the company’s relationship with Google and its Android OS at Fortune Brainstorm Tech over the weekend. Notably, he asserted his belief that Android would become the dominant mobile operating system seen on a vast majority of devices over the next five years. He likened the current battle between Android and the iPhone to the early years of personal computing, when Apple’s early lead was eventually overcome by a standard OS that was not linked to a specific manufacturer or device.
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A photo of a T-Mobile-destined, Android-based HTC “G1 Blaze” phone has popped up on Engadget, and Droid Life has unveiled Motorola’s Droid 2, due for a Verizon launch next month. Meanwhile, Verizon’s Droid X delay has been extended, some minor screen and security problems have emerged, and the phone has been rooted but not fully conquered, according to reports.
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Tablets
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Indian minister for HR Development HRD, Kapil Sibal announces $35 tablet project. It seems to be based on the Freescale i.MX233 system on chip, with a 7″ resistive 800×480 touch screen. Here’s my video with AllGo Embedded Systems, a R&D company based in Bangalore India, where they are showcasing their $35 tablet reference design at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando last month. This is likely to be the tablet that India’s HRD Minister is talking about:
The Bill Of Material is as following:
* ARM9 Processor: $5 (Freescale i.MX233)
* Memory: $3
* WiFi B/G: $4
* Other discret components: $3
* Battery: $5
* 7″ 800×480 resistive touch screen: $15
* Total bill of material: $35
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Depending on which particular business school text you pick up, you might have seen the organizational lifecycle stages described as some approximation of the following:
1. Startup
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline
We must of course acknowledge the glaring impedance mismatch between mixed motive movements such as open source and profit-centric enterprises. Undoubtedly, open source will occasionally, even frequently, follow a different trajectory than will closed source alternatives.
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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software — programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved.
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Need to connect to a remote client securely and simply? One way to do that is to employ Hamachi, a zero-configuration VPN service. While zero configuration sounds pretty easy, you can make things easier still by using Quamachi, a Hamachi GUI for Linux.
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Monopoly is not good for us. Monopoly is good for those who have the monopoly, in this case, two powerful corporations with fewer than a million people. We are thousands of millions. We can do more and better whatever the monopolists can do. Monopoly is not good for us because we pay too much for IT and are limited in what we can do with IT because we depend on what the two monopolists do. Then there are their partners. Need application X in 64bit? Nope. Need application Y to run on ARM? Nope. Need application Z to run on another OS? Nope. Need your network to be secure from intruders? Nope. Need an upgrade? Nope. Pay full price and you have to buy version 12.34 first, etc.
Hardware. We can buy ARM, AMD, even Apple. If you are locked into Intel because the stuff you run only runs on that other OS and it only runs on x86 you can change.
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Invest in FLOSS. Free yourself from monopoly. You can start right away by migrating parts of your operation to GNU/Linux and identifying the parts that do not migrate readily and fix the causes of that non-portability. Fix it by finding a FLOSS project that does what you need done or creating one. There are lots of resources on the web. FLOSS is reusable so you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Just use the wheels others have developed and contribute to the world under a Free Software licence.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Originally scheduled for release late last week, Mozilla has confirmed that the second beta for version 4.0 of its open source Firefox web browser has been delayed by one week. Firefox 4 Beta 2 is now expected to arrive on Thursday, July 29th. The third beta is still on schedule for an August 6th release.
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Oracle
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The company, ForgeRock, has released a new version of Sun’s Open Single Sign On (OpenSSO) Enterprise software, called OpenAM, that adheres to the OpenSSO roadmap established by Sun.
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CMS
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The Drupal trademark policy was launched officially about 11 months ago. As explained in my blog post on the Drupal trademark policy, the purpose of the policy is to create a level playing field for all. It allows everyone to use the trademark without administrative hassle, while at the same time keeping some control and oversight to avoid dilution and misuse. For example, we all know the scarcity of cool domain names, and how frustrating it can be for a local Drupal user group to find that their domain name has already been taken by a commercial entity. The trademark policy seeks to resolve this problem.
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I hope everyone can see that the trademark policy is not a money printing machine for me. In fact, it’s the opposite. I have paid personally for the creation of the policy and the cost of responding to trademark usage requests. The balance between costs and income is quite skewed out of my favor, although the amount of payments seems to be increasing.
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Open Data
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I’ll spare you their 57-page argument that corporations are Americans too (apparently) and spending is speech. But the result left President Obama, congressional leaders, and states a little shaken, grasping for any fix shy of amending the First Amendment (and Sen. Kerry signaled that option is on the table). Out of that scramble has come Sen. Schumer’s DISCLOSE Act.
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Open Access/Content
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The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, recently at the centre of the hacked emails controversy, is launching a pilot study into how best to make public three major temperature data sets and detailed records of how they are processed. They will include data repeatedly requested by climate sceptics under freedom of information legislation.
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It’s always kind of amusing when you see a business owner make obviously false statements as they try to justify why everyone should be worse off, just so they don’t have to adapt their business model. It’s especially amusing in the movie theater business, where we keep seeing theater owners complain about shortening windows between theatrical release, and when a movie can be viewed at home. As we’ve noted over and over again, every time a movie theater executive makes such a complaint, they are effectively admitting that they’re too clueless on how to compete. Even though they have huge theaters with great sound systems and seating, they’re admitting that they either don’t want to or simply cannot compete. If that’s really the case, they don’t deserve to be in business.
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We’ve already covered the bizarre story of Homeland Security effectively working for Disney in seizing some domains of sites that were used to file share movies (way, way, way outside of Homeland Security’s mandate), and covered the sneaky attempt to defend those moves by conflating copyright infringement online with counterfeit drugs being sold online. It’s also still not clear that Homeland Security even has the legal right to seize those domains as it did.
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The “journalist” who made-up the story about Grand Theft Auto Rothbury in yesterday’s Daily Star says he’s “baffled” by the uproar and has responded to complaints by ridiculing adult gamers.
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We’ve written a few times in the past about the attempt by Vision Media TV to use legal tricks to force down critiques of its business practice. The company, as has been covered in detail by the press, tends to focus on charities, suggesting that it will create a news report that may air on “public television” with “Hugh Downs.” But the reality is that they’re expecting the organization to pay, and there’s no evidence that the content ever gets on TV anywhere. And Hugh Downs only participates in very, very limited cases. The company — or one very much like it, based from the same basic place — has gotten into legal troubles in the past. Even though the NY Times and NPR have covered Vision Media’s method of doing business, Vision Media has not sued them, even though it has claimed such articles are defamatory.
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Security/Aggression
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The family of Ian Tomlinson today branded as a “cover-up” the decision not to bring a single criminal charge against a police officer who attacked the newspaper seller before he died.
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Sören Preibusch and I have finalised our in-depth report on password practices in the wild, The password thicket: technical and market failures in human authentication on the web, presented in Boston last month for WEIS 2010. The motivation for our report was a lack of technical research into real password deployments. Passwords have been studied as an authentication mechanism quite intensively for the last 30 years, but we believe ours was the first large study into how Internet sites actually implement them. We studied 150 sites, including the most visited overall sites plus a random sample of mid-level sites. We signed up for free accounts with each site, and using a mixture of scripting and patience, captured all visible aspects of password deployment, from enrolment and login to reset and attacks.
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Amazon, for example, didn’t block our brute force attempts, but there’s ample reason to believe they detect account takeover by other means. On the whole though, the level of security implemented is dramatically lower than security researchers might expect. There’s an interesting parallel here. At first the insecurity of passwords was blamed on users not behaving the way security engineers wanted them to: choosing weak passwords, forgetting them, writing them down, sharing them, and typing them in to the wrong domains. It’s now generally accepted that we should design password security around users, and that users may even be wise to ignore security advice.
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Fast forward four years however and the formerly close and protective relationship between the US federal government and Sourcefire/Snort has soured to the point that the Department of Homeland Security is funding an alternative through the OISF foundation. The Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and commercial partners are also contributing to the development of Suricata, OISF’s open source IPS.
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Environment/Wildlife
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As the Gulf of Mexico continues to battle the oil from the BP Deepwater drilling disaster, President Obama’s establishment of a national ocean policy is a significant step forward in the management of our oceans, our coasts, coastal economies and ocean health. This first ever national ocean policy is not a new idea – in fact, two blue ribbon commissions recommended establishing a national ocean policy more than five years ago. For the most part, those reports have sat on bookshelves in Washington DC, while legislative efforts to implement their recommendations were defeated by ocean industries.
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The scientific community has always had difficulty policing conflicts of interest, since financial interests and other exterior motivations have a very real potential to influence if and how scientific data gets reported. This issue has historically reared its ugly head in the biomedical community, where many researchers also consult for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. But it appears that a number of different scientific fields are about to see these conflicts played out in a very public manner, as a report indicates that BP is now locking scientists into contracts that will prevent them from publishing their results at all.
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Hundreds of penguins that have apparently starved to death are washing up on the beaches of Brazil, worrying scientists who are investigating what exactly killed them.
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One downside is that “shouting,” as for humans and other animals, requires more energy expenditure and probable strain, so we are making life more difficult for these already at risk marine mammals. Since communication is tied to mating, feeding and more, these critical aspects of whale life may also be impacted.
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Globally NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace. This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent NASA paper noted.
Globally nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records, “making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records,” as meteorologist Jeff Masters has reported.
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Plan to charge large polluters abandoned in favour of narrower legislation focusing on increasing firms’ liability for oil spills
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Increased use of satellite data and new tactics to deter loggers have led to drop, says Brazilian environment agency
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Finance
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A telephone call between a financial adviser in Beverly Hills and a trader in New York was all it took to fleece taxpayers on a water-and-sewer financing deal in West Virginia. The secret conversation was part of a conspiracy stretching across the U.S. by Wall Street banks in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market.
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Central bankers and regulators have reached an almost unanimous preliminary agreement on new standards to reinforce the stability of the global financial system, adding to investors’ confidence in the outlook for many banks.
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Britain’s financial regulator has banned the former finance director of mortgage lender Northern Rock – the country’s first major casualty of the global credit crunch – and fined him 320,000 pounds ($500,000) for misreporting figures on loan arrears.
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Americans might be counting on the day when home and retirement-fund values start to rise again, but anyone expecting to benefit from a future boom in prices should take note: Economic policymakers around the world are looking for ways to make sure that doesn’t happen, or at least not with such intensity that it risks the kind of bust that usually follows.
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With powerful senators watching closely, federal investigators search high and low for evidence of insider trading in shares of Microsoft. One of Wall Street’s best-known hedge fund managers is targeted, but the feds can’t find proof. Years pass, and they close the case without filing charges.
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The rules, developed after lengthy negotiations among regulators on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, would not take effect for at least seven years.
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You remember the big to-do about Goldman Sachs and how the United States Securities and Exchange Commission brought a so-called landmark fraud case against the mighty Wall Street firm? If you followed the legal soap opera, you were entertained with congressional hearings, thrilled by the lurid stories and dazzled by all the posturing and pandering. Then, at the eleventh hour, as the Gulf leak was capped, as FinReg was about to be signed, the Hollywood ending came into play as the case miraculously settled for something like half a billion dollars.
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The S.E.C. wasn’t forced to grapple with the issue until 1990, when Congress greatly expanded its power to seek financial penalties from corporate violators. (Before then, companies could shrug off civil orders as a passing embarrassment.)
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Goldman’s executives claim they do not track all information pertaining to derivatives, a position towards which the F.C.I.C. are clearly dubious.
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Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, has argued that it didn’t depend on the U.S. government’s $182.3 billion rescue of AIG because the investment bank had collateral and credit-default swaps to protect itself. Joshua Rosner, an analyst at research firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York, said the list of counterparties indicates that Goldman Sachs may have had difficulty collecting on those swaps.
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Goldman Sachs is facing a threat by the US financial crisis inquiry commission to hire outside accountants to comb through the bank’s systems for data on its derivatives business.
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According to the report, “Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations,” released Monday, the reward programs create “an implicit money transfer” to credit card users from noncard users (i.e. cash payers) because of the across-the-board price increases merchants put in place to cover the costs of accepting the cards.
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Parts of the bond market are shutting down this week as ratings agencies try to figure out how they’ll be affected by a last-minute provision in the finance bill, the WSJ reports.
President Obama will sign bill into law this morning, and this may be the first unintended consequence.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Iraq’s proposed new journalism court is a further blow to the country’s already oppressed media
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Prankster activists The Yes Men are sick of having the videos depicting their shenanigans taken down through copyright complaints, so they’ve put the latest video, a full-length doc called The Yes Men Fix the World up as a torrent file through VODO, resistant to censorship and easy to get.
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The review’s publisher apparently used a DMCA takedown notice of copyright infringement to get the critical blog post deleted. I wonder if it will work out for them.
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He outlined the FTC’s law enforcement actions against companies accountable for protecting consumer privacy. He said that the FTC has brought 28 actions charging businesses with failing to protect consumers’ personal information and 15 actions charging website operators with collecting information from children without parents’ consent.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The iPhone ecosystem, which Apple protects with the ferocity of a Smoke Monster, is about to get wilder.
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We mentioned, when the recent FCC report on broadband came out, that it seemed notable that the first politician out of the gate complaining about it, Rep. Cliff Stearns just happened to have had massive financial support from the biggest broadband players around when it came to raising money for his political campaigns. Given that, it seemed worth looking into the sponsors of a new bill designed to prevent the FCC from implementing net neutrality rules. Now I’m still not convinced the FCC really has the authority to do what it’s trying to do, but I find it even more troubling when a group of Senators get together and call a new bill the “Freedom for Consumer Choice Act (FCC Act),” and it seems like they’re all funded by AT&T. Somehow, I don’t think that AT&T is supporting “freedom for consumer choice” when it comes to broadband. Over the years, they’ve done exactly the opposite, and worked hard to limit competition.
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As various broadband providers drool over the idea of implementing broadband caps, they’ve mainly focused on the claim that they’re doing so to make “bandwidth hogs” pay “their fair share.” Sometimes they sprinkle this with claims of poverty over having to provide unlimited access to people who actually use it a lot. Of course, none of this is true. The various metered broadband plans almost always end up increasing everyone’s bills, and there’s little to no evidence that bandwidth hogs are a problem, either technologically or economically speaking.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Last year the Industry Ministry held a public Copyright Consultation, soliciting Canadian input on copyright reform. More than 8,000 Canadians made submissions in last year’s Copyright Consultation, and these submissions overwhelmingly said
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A copyright infringement lawsuit filed by SAS Institute against a small British software company is being passed from a British court to a higher European judicial body following a Friday ruling that has both companies claiming victory.
[...]
British court precedent holds that it is not copyright infringement to study how a program functions and write a program to emulate the functionality.
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That sounded wrong to our reader, who questioned how that could make sense, seeing as Mucha has been dead for over 71 years. Now, I’m certainly no expert on Czech copyright law, so anyone out there who is an expert, feel free to chime in. But I’m assuming that the situation is similar to one that we discussed a year ago. In the US, thanks to Bridgeman vs. Corel, it is mostly believed that a photograph of a copyrighted work does not receive a new copyright (technically, it only applies in the court where the ruling was made, but the ruling has been followed by other US courts as well). However, in Europe, I believe the question is more or less unsettled — so many claim that a photograph of a work can itself get a new copyright.
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It claimed websites such as Ars Technica and ZDNet were ‘taken in’ by a report put out by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) and pushed by the ‘anti-piracy’ outfit AFACT, which said that only 0.3 per cent of files available on Bittorrent were legal.
In a blog post, Torrentfreak said that the report tried to answer four questions and got them all entirely wrong due to inaccurate data and a flawed methodology.
For instance, ICSL said that there were slightly more than a million torrent files from 17 Bittorrent trackers last Spring, but this was only a small sample of what they could have looked at. Also it was biased towards the most-seeded torrents such as TV and film, leaving others badly unrepresented.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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Before the Digital Economy Act, it was possible for a copyright owner to gain an injunction against a service provider from the High Court. Under Sections 97A and 191JA of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003), the Court can grant an injunction if it is proved they have “actual knowledge” that someone is “using their service to infringe copyright” – s97A(1). In practice, this means the copyright owner must notify the service provider and then take them to court (where they would need to prove the infringement) before anything would have to be done. The powers potentially available under the Digital Economy Act take this much further.
Java is Everywhere
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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TIN BOX FLOGGER Dell has quashed reports that it stopped selling machines preloaded with the Linux distribution Ubuntu.
It was reported that Dell had given up on its Linux experiment by going back to being a Microsoft only shop, however the firm responded to those stories by telling The INQUIRER that it will continue to sell selected machines with Ubuntu installed. However, punters looking for the capable alternative to Microsoft Windows will have to order by phone.
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Kernel Space
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While ZFS was not faster than EXT4/Btrfs overall, these results certainly show that this file-system is a superior choice to the UFS file-system options on FreeBSD. The performance of ZFS is certainly better than UFS and it has the much greater set of features. It would actually be nice to see ZFS enabled by default in FreeBSD in a forthcoming release or at least for it to be properly integrated with the FreeBSD installer like what has been done with PC-BSD.
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“The figures suggest an increasing number of consumers are now asking for Android handsets by name,” said GfK analyst Megan Baldock. “Operating systems are no longer simply a by-product but a key selling point in their own right.”
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We can’t say we’ve heard of Augen before, but the company certainly sparked our interest (and that of Kmart circular readers) this weekend with its $149.99 7-inch Android tablet. Oh yes, you heard right shoppers — the small Florida-based shop is bringing an Android 2.1 tablet with WiFi, 2GB of storage and 256MB of RAM to a store near you for just 150 buckaroos.
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OpenNMS was registered on SourceForge in March of 2000 as project 4141, about two months after NetSaint which later became Nagios. So it has been around for while, almost longer than any other open source management tool.
It was designed from “day one” to be enterprise-grade, that is to manage tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of devices from a single instance. Ultimately it will be able to mange unlimited devices with a heavily distributed architecture.
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Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but it got me wondering: supposing Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? And it occurred to me that one rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies – all of them.
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Matt Aslett continued his series on Open Core yesterday, and pointed to my post on the subject. He says, and I agree, that we can’t expect companies to call themselves Open Core as a means of differentiating from Open Source if we use pejorative phrases like “crippleware” to refer to Open Core projects.
But that ship has long since sailed. No company has every described themselves as “an Open Core company” to anyone except VCs, as shorthand for their business model. In the software business, Open Core has no-one defending it, and it has no brand value. In fact, in free software circles, Open Core has been a pejorative phrase almost since it was coined – fauxpen source, popularised by Tarus Balog, cites Open Core as a synonym, and pretty much every mention of it which I have found has not been by a vendor referring to themselves, but by an analyst or commentator referring to a class of business models.
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Openness/Sharing
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Years ago, as young student serfs toiling on the law school legal plantation, several of my peers and I “had a vision.” It was not as big as some, but hopeful and liberating nonetheless, of legal information being freely accessible to all Americans.
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Peer review serves as a critical sanity check for the scientific literature. It is by no means a perfect system—flaws ranging from outright fraud to subtle errors can easily slip past reviewers—but peer review can generally identify cases where a paper’s conclusions aren’t supported by the underlying data, or the authors are unaware of other relevant papers, etc. As a result, peer review acts as a key barrier to prevent scientifically unsound ideas from attracting undeserved attention from the scientific community.
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Standards/Non Standards
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The Khronos Group announced today the release of the OpenGL 4.1 specification, which has been defined by Khronos’ OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB). The previous version of the specification, OpenGL 4.0, was unveiled in March.
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A Google staff member posted a video on YouTube demonstrating a particular Google Spreadsheet function today, but when she selected a file format to launch – there was a new option on the drop down menu. Called Punch, the video made no mention of the file type and we’ve been unable to find any mention of it elsewhere. Internally, at least, it appears that something very new is in the works at Google Docs.
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But I fear that when analysts slaver over “curated” computing, it’s because they mean “monopoly” computing – computing environments like the iPad where all your apps have to be pre-approved by a single curating entity, one who uses the excuse of safety and consistency to justify this outrageous power grab. Of course, these curators are neither a guarantee of safety, nor of quality: continuous revelations about malicious software and capricious, inconsistent criteria for evaluating software put the lie to this. Even without them, it’s pretty implausible to think that an app store with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of programs could be blindly trusted to be free from bugs, malware, and poor aesthetic choices.
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HP has asked the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to have a look at some of the inkjet ink supplies and components that are being shipped to the Land of the Free.
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Science
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More important than just fitting in, though, caffeine actually binds to those receptors in efficient fashion, but doesn’t activate them—they’re plugged up by caffeine’s unique shape and chemical makeup. With those receptors blocked, the brain’s own stimulants, dopamine and glutamate, can do their work more freely—”Like taking the chaperones out of a high school dance,” Braun writes in an email. In the book, he ultimately likens caffeine’s powers to “putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals.”
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BEFORE my interview with Murray Gell-Mann officially begins, we have lunch. We are at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in the foothills of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, and here, lunch is a communal affair.
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Security/Aggression
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Is your company’s data under surveillance by foreign spybots looking for any competitive advantages or weaknesses they can exploit? This might sound farfetched, but such electronic espionage is real. It’s an insidious security threat that’s a lot more common than you probably realize.
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The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who potentially faces sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop. In a trend that we’ve seen across the country, police have become increasingly hostile to bystanders recording their actions. You can read some examples here, here and here.
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The Metropolitan Police Force cannot be guaranteed to abide by the law when it comes to allowing the public their right to take photographs.
That was the startling admission made last week by Met Police Commissioner John Stephenson under sharp questioning from Liberal Democrat London Assembly Member Dee Doocey during a Police Authority Meeting on 22 July in City Hall. Video footage of the exchange is available on the Metropolitan Police Authority site, with relevant footage from around the 68 minute mark.
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We have a new paper on the strategic vulnerability created by the plan to replace Britain’s 47 million meters with smart meters that can be turned off remotely. The energy companies are demanding this facility so that customers who don’t pay their bills can be switched to prepayment tariffs without the hassle of getting court orders against them.
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Finance
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SpongeTech Delivery Systems, which makes soap-filled sponges in such shapes as (appropriately) SpongeBob SquarePants and whose advertising has dazzled fans at sporting events, has filed for bankruptcy protection
According to Crain’s New York Business, the Manhattan sponge maker’s demise began after the company’s chief executive was charged with fraud in May. Prosecutors said CEO Michael Metter helped to fake 99% of the company’s supposed sales, and he was charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
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Fort Lauderdale, Fla., millionaire George Levin, whose Banyon Investors Fund was the primary feeder fund that funneled about $830 million into Scott Rothstein’s Ponzi scheme, has agreed to surrender the bulk of his assets under a bankruptcy settlement.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Newspapers have come up with various methods to monetise online content; for example, New Zealand’s The National Business Review has introduced a paywall for some of its online material.
However, The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts may be taking the search for new revenue streams just a little too far. It has announced that it will start charging its readers to comment on stories on the paper’s website. Before posting their thoughts on any story, readers must register their name, address, phone number, and a credit card number with the paper. Registered readers are charged a one-time fee of 99 cents for their commenting privileges.
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“The advent of something like WikiLeaks kind of makes the traditional concept of prior restraint obsolete,” says Lee Levine, a name partner at Levine Sullivan (Levine is not advising The Times or any parties on the WikiLeaks matter).
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Broadband ISP TalkTalk UK could be about to incur the wrath of privacy campaigners after some of its customers spotted that their online website browsing activity was being monitored and recorded without consent. The situation has caused a significant amount of concern with many end-users worried about the impact upon their personal privacy.
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Guilia Bongiorno, president of the parliamentary judiciary committee, decided on 21 July that amendments to paragraph 29 of article 1 of the so-called Wiretapping Bill were “unacceptable”. The amendments targeted the article’s extension of the print press rectification obligation to the web. By eliminating even the possibility that this complex topic will be debated in parliament, the deicison threatens to make freedom of information on the web its first victim.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed light on this question, I analyze the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, and estimate the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes. Celera’s IP applied to genes sequenced first by Celera, and was removed when the public effort re-sequenced those genes.
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Copyrights
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I signed on to the website that is most offensive to me, got an account, and typed my name into the Search box. I got 4,000 hits. Four thousand copies of my music were being offered for “trade.” (I put “trade” in quotes because of course it’s not really a trade, since nobody’s giving anything up in exchange for what they get. It’s just making illegal unauthorized copies, and calling it “trade” legitimizes it in an utterly fraudulent way.) I clicked on the most recent addition, and I sent the user who was offering that music an email. This is what I wrote:
Hey there! Can I get you to stop trading my stuff? It’s totally not cool with me. Write me if you have any questions, I’m happy to talk to you about this. jason@jasonrobertbrown.com
Thanks,
J.
Nothing too formal or threatening, just a casual sort of suggestion.
But I wasn’t content to do it with just one user. I started systematically going through the pages, and eventually I wrote to about four hundred users.
The broad majority of people I wrote to actually wrote back fairly quickly, apologized sincerely, and then marked their music “Not for trade.” I figured that was a pretty good result, but I did find it odd – why list the material at all if you’re not going to trade it?
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When Woot announced last week that it was going to be acquired by Amazon.com, just about everyone wrote about it. However, of the many media organizations that covered the deal, only one has floated a policy that would charge bloggers for the kind of excerpting that’s historically been considered fair use. So, when the Associated Press, in writing about the Woot-Amazon deal, borrowed some of Woot’s own verbiage, the deal-a-day site struck back and told the wire service it expected $17.50 for the words. Or the AP could just buy two pairs of Sennheiser in-ear headphones and call it even.
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The music industry suffered another high-profile legal setback on Friday when a federal judge reduced a damages award against a file sharer found liable for copyright violations.
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Disagrees with Judge Nancy Gertner’s ruling that the $675,000 fine is “unconstitutionally excessive” and formally appeals the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
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Indian Ocean, a favorite of PI team (and our readers) has poked at Recording companies and decided to give away their latest album, 16/330 Khajoor Road for free. The album has seven songs and Indian Ocean is giving away free song from the album starting July 25th, 2010.
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Online movie piracy has largely enjoyed a fairly predictable structure during the last decade. New releases have generally hit the Internet on high-security ‘topsites’ first and then trickled down to become widely available on peer-to-peer networks. TorrentFreak now takes a look at a new wave of release groups who operate with a fresh and BitTorrent-powered philosophy.
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Earlier this year The Pirate Bay’s co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij were banned from operating the site by a Swedish court. Today, The Pirate Bay’s former spokesperson Peter Sunde was added to this list, and now faces a fine of nearly $70,000 if he does not comply with the decision.
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I’m reminded of this bit of history thanks to this story, brought to my attention by Glyn Moody, about how Jon “Maddog” Hall wanted to try to preserve some deteriorating piano rolls, but discovered (much to his annoyance) that copyright may be getting in the way. He points out that many old player piano rolls are deteriorating, and the small group of remaining collectors are hoping to preserve the music by digitizing them.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 SNES – [Linux-based] Pandora emulation
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07.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences?
Is it market share, perceived ease of use, slick marketing overtures, users wanting to use what they already know? This list might explain why people might choose OS X or Windows.
But what approach to computing (and life) prompts a person to use a Linux box on a daily basis? I’ll share my insights based on personal experiences and other observations accumulated over years of living the Linux lifestyle full time.
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Server
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You get to spend countless hours dealing with “me myself and I” users who always seem to have issues that can escalate to bringing the world as we know it to an end if not promptly attended to. The pay is bad and the work hours are long. Simply put system administration is a job for those who love and have a passion for administering computers and their users.
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Graphics Stack
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Measures to optimise the power management code and fully support the Turbo Core function of recent AMD six-core processors increase the data throughput and processing speed of Linux 2.6.35. Further kernel additions include tracing interfaces for KVM, another kernel configuration program, and functions for de-fragmenting the working memory.
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Applications
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You can find CDargs on most Debian-based distros, so if you’re using Debian, Linux Mint, or Ubuntu you should be able to just grab it with sudo apt-get install cdargs. It’s also available on Fedora, and you should be able to find it through the openSUSE Build Service as well.
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Proprietary
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Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary programs such as Adobe Flash or Skype or the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats such as MP3 or commercial DVDs to your Linux desktop. Here’s how to do it.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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If you’ve read me long enough, you know I am a desktop junkie. Much to Jaqui’s chagrin, I do love my desktops. So much so I could have a different desktop every day and still not be completely happy. During my trials and tribulations with the Linux desktop I have, surprisingly, missed the whole Xfce train. Why? I have no idea. I’ve known of it, I’ve used it briefly, and never really thought much more about it. That is, until recently.
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Reviews
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The main purpose of the reviews published on this site is to give readers a good idea of what they would experience if they actually downloaded and installed the distribution on their computer. It is, therefore, necessary to highlight good features, or features I think will lead to a positive user experience. It is also necessary to highlight badly implemented features, or features that could give a negative user experience. For this review, let’s begin by looking at the features I think you’ll like on Sabayon (5.3).
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Debian Family
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The organisers of the DebConf10, the upcoming annual Debian Developer conference, announced that there will again be a Debian Day for everybody interested in free software. It will be on the 1st of August at the Columbia University in New York City. During this event, there will be a full day of talks on several subjects such as free software in government, design and free software, free software advocacy as well as string of talks about the Debian project and operating system. Debian Day is free of charge, but a registration via e-mail is required to ease the organisation of that event. More information is available on http://debianday.org/.
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Imagine the following situation: you find yourself with ten to twenty brand new Notebooks and the opportunity to install them with Debian and customise to your own taste. In any case it would be great fun to manually perform the Debian installation and configuration on each Notebook. This is where Debian Preseed comes into play.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Android
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Hidden away in a bland update about terms & conditions, Google’s Android Developer Blog has revealed the next phase in Google’s plans to make Android a little more pleasing to the mass market—direct carrier billing for app purchases made via the Android Market.
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Although Android itself is under an Apache licence, within Android are GPL licensed components such as the Linux kernel. This means that although vendors can freely use Google created layers such as the Dalvik VM, user interface layer and other services, the operating system’s kernel needs to be made available as source code to anyone who receives the code under the GPL licence.
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Mozilla
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Though still in its initial stages of development, Tab Candy is an interesting new Firefox 4.0 feature, which has every potential to get adopted by every single browser out there. Like for example, the tabs itself were invented by Opera, and now it’s a default and a must have feature in web browsers.
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was released on June 4 and a new master workspace was branched off for the upcoming 3.3 on June 5. The code in this branch will be stabilized and later become the product release that will find its way onto your desktops.
With the feature and UI freeze of June 24, only fixes will go into this new OOO330 release code branch. New features will be merged into the DEV300 development code line as 3.3 is readied for release.
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Have you looked at the new Microsoft Office 2010 yet? How many of its few, new features does your company really need? And are these features worth the investment? Here are five reasons your company doesn’t need to purchase Office 2010.
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On the surface, it would seem Oracle, as the new proprietor of all things Sun, is now the master of Java’s fate. Besides inventing Java, Sun had steered important Java technologies such as the GlassFish application server, which has served as the open source reference implementation of enterprise Java. Sun also held power in the Java Community Process (JCP), the official scheme for amending Java.
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Simon Phipps/Semi-Open Source
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Simon Phipps is one of those technology purists that makes you wish you were even half as enthusiastic as he is about your favourite subject. As Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer/evangelist he was a welcome addition to JavaOne events, where he would typically install himself in the press room alongside the technical journalists and file Flip-video reports on his own company’s event with tremendous gusto.
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Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants.
Open source is what happens when several different people choose to work together on the same code base rather than working separately. They use an OSI-approved licence and gather as an open source community around the resulting free-software commons. Each of them is there for their own reasons; each covers their own costs and contributes the code they choose to. There is no pooling of funds to pay for work to be done because everyone is solely responsible for their own costs.
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Programming
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Once one of the pillars of the Internet, is Perl now fading away — or will Perl 6 will spark a renaissance for the programming language?
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Environment
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SynapSense is one of a handful of companies designing data center energy management systems, which use sensors to collect environmental data from inside data centers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos — people who, until now, could have been sued for their non-infringing or fair use activities.
[...]
The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone “jailbreaking” — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes “App Store,” and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.
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Xmonad + Compiz 0.9
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So. They tell us to buy another operating system. Thou shalt use proprietary software. Is that the government’s role? If we want to use Netflix, we have to have two operating systems, one just for that? I wonder if a different legal argument were made if it might be successful, namely that the government should not be in the position of forcing citizens to spend money to have two operating systems just to be legal. Nor should a government aid certain vendors to make money by such compelling of citizens to buy their products. Nor should the government endorse products or enable certain companies to make competing products less desirable in the market.
I mean, to think about how silly this is, turn it around. Let’s say the US Copyright Office said you could only view movies and DVDs on Linux. Imagine if they told protesters using Microsoft and Apple that Linux is free, so they can just download it and dual boot, so there’s no problem? Can you imagine the uproar? From Microsoft, for starters. They fight like pit bulls when any government suggests using Linux too, and when they say they will only use Linux, what does Microsoft do? Well, legally they argue it’s prejudicial. Why isn’t this similarly prejudicial?
Of course, Netflix and Hollywood could do the right thing and solve this in the marketplace by making their works available to Linux users. Hollywood seriously needs to think about its use of Linux while making it impossible for Linux users to enjoy the resulting works. They use Linux because it’s the best tool they can find. So do we.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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At Akademy, we ran in to many interesting people, including “random motorcycle adventurer” Henri Bergius, who is also a board member for Akademy co-organizers COSS among his many other free software related activities. Read on for the full conversation.
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Journalist Gaia Vince recalls how Seed magazine, owner of ScienceBlogs, spiked one of her articles because it was critical of a potential advertiser
While the science community reacted with indignation and shock this week over ScienceBlogs’ decision to publish a blog on nutrition written by food giant PepsiCo, I was unsurprised. I’ve been here before with Seed magazine, owners of the ScienceBlogs network.
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A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a little-known law making it a crime to falsely claim to have been awarded a military medal.
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Science
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Sikorsky Aircraft says it will build a full-size, piloted electric helicopter this year to explore the benefits of an electrically powered helicopter. The company announced Project Firefly at the Farnborough Airshow outside London and says the electric helicopter will be unveiled at EAA Airventure in Oshkosh next week.
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Environment
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More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.
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A photographer taking pictures of a BP refinery in Texas was detained by a BP security official, local police and a man who said he was from the Department of Homeland Security, according to ProPublica, a non-profit news organization in the U.S.
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Former BP contractor Adam Dillon went public last Friday, telling a local news station in New Orleans that he was fed up with BP’s handling of the spill response, not least of all its information clampdown. In an interview with Mother Jones this week, Dillon, who claims he was fired for raising concerns about the cleanup with his bosses, elaborated on his experiences in the Gulf and vented his frustrations with BP.
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We’re helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years.
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The average British carnivore eats more than 11,000 animals in their lifetime, each requiring vast amounts of land, fuel and water to reach the plate. It’s time to think of waste as well as taste
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Finance
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If you’ve been paying attention this past decade, it won’t surprise you to learn that the country’s policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking.
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International Monetary Fund says only western countries in the most severe difficulty should try to reduce their deficits, appearing to back former Labour government’s policy
[...]
By contrast, the IMF reckoned the world economy was recovering faster than expected, although it warned that Europe’s debt troubles posed a big risk.
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I have often maintained that any action by any company, individual or group of individuals, that has a mass negative affect on the people should be considered an enemy of the state. In fact, some actions taken by these individuals may even be considered treasonous. I believe that some high ranking government officials have commited treason but their actions, by virtue of who they are, are not dealt with as they would if it were you or I doing the same things.
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Through May, the treasury department reported that 340,000 of the 1.5 million homeowners who been offered trial modifications had received permanent modifications. Almost as many, 300,000 homeowners, never even started on the trial after it was offered. Roughly the same number of homeowners had their trial modifications cancelled before being offered a permanent modification.
[...]
Unfortunately, almost no one in Washington talks about this route either. They are concerned about interfering with the Fed’s independence. After all, Greenspan and Bernanke have done such great things for the economy how can anyone suggest changes?
For now at least, we can only talk about helping homeowners if most of the money goes to the banks. Since we aren’t actually helping homeowners with current policy, maybe we should just end the discussion and make the banks work for their money instead of relying on taxpayer handouts.
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Health
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A recent, dramatic warning about synthetic chemicals causing cancer came from an unlikely source — the normally staid President’s Cancer Panel. In the past, the federal panel’s annual reports have explored maximizing the nation’s investment in cancer research or promoting healthful living, or they simply assessed the nation’s progress in fighting cancer.
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China’s ban on GM rice questioned as environmental activists discover unapproved transgenic products at two grain sources
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Dozens of blogs by some of China’s most outspoken users have been abruptly shut down in an apparent crackdown.
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Country will need to regulate and supervise foreign media who take advantage of its legal protection
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A veteran British journalist and author promoting his book on the death penalty in Singapore was arrested in the country today for alleged criminal defamation and other offences.
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A U.S. Congressman has introduced a resolution that would protect citizens who videotape cops in public from getting arrested on state wiretapping charges.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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INTERNET DEMOCRACY is set to be crushed and hopes for an Internet that is fair and open to all look doomed as Republican senators push legislation that will force antitrust like laws on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Facebook will try to get a New York man’s claim for majority ownership of the website thrown out of court, attorneys for the social networking site said Tuesday.
A complaint by Paul Ceglia of Wellsville claims that a 7-year-old contract he signed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for software development entitles him to 84 percent of the company.
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Copyrights
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Silence isn’t always golden after all — at least not for Bethany Hare.
The 10-year-old budding actress’ effort to raise money for a U.K. children’s hospice through a homemade video has been dealt a setback by a copyright dispute with a New York-based publishing company that owns the rights to a song from a Charlie Chaplin movie.
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While we’re on the subject of rants (a real rarity here at the Underground), we’d like to point out it’s not exactly been a great decade for the PR departments of most corporations (the financial industry recently brought the world economy to its knees, and if you haven’t looked to the Southeast USA lately, you’ve missed the specter of BP work crews burning oil-covered sea turtles alive).
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Over the years, we’ve written many, many, many times about Perfect 10, the former publisher of a porn magazine who has spent the last decade making ridiculously laughable arguments about how every search engine on the planet is infringing on its copyrights for pointing people to images that people had scanned from Perfect 10′s magazines and put online. For the most part, these lawsuits have gone nowhere, but Perfect 10 is incredibly persistent. Last month, we wrote about a countersuit by Rapidshare, which detailed how Perfect 10 is now a “copyright troll,” that (according to Rapidshare’s claims) purposely tries to spread its works online in order to have more companies to sue. Obviously, a key target of Perfect 10 has been Google, though Perfect 10 keeps losing (and then continues to come up with ridiculous reasons to keep the lawsuit alive).
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The complaint reads like most of the other, similar complaints we’ve seen, explaining the basics of BitTorrent to establish the claim that these “Does” infringed on the copyright. Once again, it seems like an open question as to whether or not it’s actually legal to include all of these defendants in a single lawsuit. It’s also not clear if the goal here is to send similar pre-settlement letters, but that sure seems likely.
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U.S. President Barack Obama isn’t the only government official who wants to smack down copyright infringement and counterfeiting.
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WEB HOST Rapidshare has won an appeal against film distributor Capelight Pictures that absolves it of blame for the dissemination of a film through its network.
Capelight Pictures, known for peddling such motion picture marvels as Cherrybomb, Dood Eind and Fanboy, had accused Rapidshare of not undertaking “all reasonable measures” to stop the spread of a title through its network. Capelight had initially won an injunction against Rapidshare, however the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has reversed that decision.
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On that first one. Just saying it’s a “review” doesn’t automatically give you fair use rights. And there’s no fair use for “satire,” only parody — and it’s not clear that the review is actually a parody (or, for that matter, satire). Going through the four factors for fair use… you could make an argument either way as to whether or not it currently is fair use. It would really depend on the judge, and I’d actually guess that the sheer amount of the movie that is used would probably tilt the scales against fair use.
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News of an act being given a £1m record contract by a major label conjures up images of a big cheque and instant riches. But what does a £1m record contract actually mean?
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Digital Economy (UK)
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When the last UK Parliament rushed the Digital Economy Act into law without debate, hours before it dissolved for the election, it appointed Ofcom, the telcoms regulator, to work out the details. Specifically, it charged Ofcom with sorting out some high standards for what evidence a rightsholder would have to produce in order to finger an online infringer (the DEA gives these rightsholders the power to eventually disconnect entire families from the internet on the strength of these accusations).
Now Ofcom has abrogated its duty to the public and announced that the record and film industry can “self-regulate” their evidence-gathering procedures; in other words, anything that the MPA or BPI say counts as proof that you’ve violated copyright goes. Since these are the same companies that have mistakenly accused dead people, inanimate objects (laser printers), and people who don’t own computers of file-sharing, this doesn’t bode well.
While we get 0.9 compiz
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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1) What one big opportunity, outside of technology, has the best chance of being solved the open source way? (i.e., collaboration, transparency, meritocracy, rapid prototyping, community)
Better government. I think most people would find the attributes of open source–collaboration, transparency, meritocracy, etc.–would be a breath of fresh air in government. The Sunlight Foundation is working on this. I am on the board of Open Source for America, and there are many other organizations working on this.
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GNOME Desktop
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Under the terms of the partnership, the LiMo Foundation will join the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and the GNOME Foundation will become an Industry Liaison Partner for the LiMo Foundation. Morgan Gillis, Executive Director of the LiMo Foundation, said, “This close alignment between LiMo and GNOME provides important support for this commitment and will take in an expanding ecosystem of products and services developed by GNOME developers in conjunction with the members of LiMo Foundation.”
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This is a huge head start toward a free web. I think what’s missing is a client platform which catalyzes the development and use of FLOSS web applications.
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CMS
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There are many trends driving its momentum, including adoption by publishers seeking more cost-effective content platforms, and the fast-growing sophistication of the platform.
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Open Data
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I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode.
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Open Access/Content
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The first, found via Karl Bode, is a story about how Mark Rein, a VP from Epic Games, the large video game developer behind Gears of War among other games, audibly scoffs at Cliff Harris of the one-man shop Positech Games (whom we’ve written about before, concerning his plans to “compete with pirates.”) Harris was on stage discussing how indie developers, like himself, had an easier time “forming personal relationships with gamers.” Apparently, Rein loudly announced that forming a personal relationship with “a small number of gamers” was a “waste of time.” Harris shot back on his blog, pointing out that (a) whatever he’s doing is working for him, because he’s been happily making games (and a living) for 13 years and seems to have a devoted fanbase and (b) Mark Rein is a jerk for acting the way he did.
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New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs. The finding raises questions about a key principle of a strong democracy: that a well-informed electorate is best.
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Science
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SpaceShipTwo staged a dress rehearsal for its glide flight and flew with a crew for the first time.
Anticipation mounted yesterday as word spread that SpaceShipTwo, attached to its mother ship Eve, departed the Mojave Air and Space Port. Many, including us, were anxious to hear whether the first glide flight of the spacecraft also known as VSS Enterprise would happen, especially since we knew a chase plane followed SpaceShipTwo into the sky.
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Security/Aggression
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Lots of folks are submitting the big interactive investigative report put out by the Washington Post, detailing the massive bureaucratic mess that has become the US’s anti-terrorism operations. Basically, since September 11, 2001, when the government (reasonably) agreed to devote more resources to the counter-terrorism, it’s been an opportunity for both government employees and the private sector to build up giant, well-funded bureaucratic entities that have little to no oversight, and quite frequently seem to overlap with what others are doing…
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Britons face being spied on and pursued by foreign police officers even for the most minor offences in an European agreement the Home Office will sign up to tomorrow.
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Fox News’ senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.
In a interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN’s Book TV to promote his book Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been indicted for “torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant.”
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A presentation on the “Chinese Cyber-army” that delved into China’s cyberspace activities between 2001 and 2010 has been yanked off the agenda of the upcoming Black Hat security conference. The talk was canceled by Armorize Technologies after concerns were raised by the Taiwanese government over its content.
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But there is a better option that would eliminate this problem, as well as others: Get rid of the no-fly list entirely. For that matter, get rid of the requirement that passengers provide government-approved identification just to go from one place to another.
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Environment
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Our natural environment underpins our economic prosperity, our health and our wellbeing. As a result, protecting the environment and enhancing biodiversity is one of Defra’s top 3 priorities, as outlined in the Department’s Structural Reform Plan.
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For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation.
BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company’s lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research.
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Finance
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This recession has caused a generational restructuring of America’s labor market.
Many job skills in high demand 20 years ago just aren’t today, and some of the fastest-growing careers now weren’t even conceivable then. That’s why this administration is refocusing job-training efforts to give workers the skills they’ll need to compete successfully in a 21st century labor market.
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But despite that drought, Harley’s profits are rising — soaring, in fact. Last week, Harley reported a $71 million profit in the second quarter, more than triple what it earned a year ago.
This seeming contradiction — falling sales and rising profits — is one reason the mood on Wall Street is so much more buoyant than in households, where pessimism runs deep and joblessness shows few signs of easing.
Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy, as management conserves cash rather than bolstering hiring and production. Harley, for example, has announced plans to cut 1,400 to 1,600 more jobs by the end of next year. That is on top of 2,000 job cuts last year — more than a fifth of its work force.
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The other day, a mortgage broker named Deb Killian called me, more or less out of the blue. Ms. Killian has been in the business since 1994. She and her husband run Charter Oak Lending Group, a small firm based in Danbury, Conn., that they founded in 1996. She is a member of the board of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. By her estimate, she has closed more than 3,500 loans during her career.
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I am winging my way home from Canada, flying over Minnesota into Wisconsin. I am catching up with some reading, but I had to comment on all the Sturm und Drang about the expiration of the Bush Tax “cuts.”
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Instead, Ms. Warren’s supporters want President Obama to nominate her as the first head of a new consumer financial protection bureau created by the legislation he signed into law last week. They say that Ms. Warren, who conceived the idea and helped shepherd its passage into law, is the only acceptable choice to finish the project.
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When times are hard financially, families frequently let their credit card balance expand. But they also slash expenses to meet their new financial situation. They stop going out for dinner, for instance, or take their vacation locally instead of abroad. They might even downsize their house.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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American businesses weren’t very happy about a privacy bill that Rep. Rick Boucher announced in May. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, for instance, said the Virginia Democrat’s draft legislation would have “major” effects on legitimate business practices.
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What is most interesting is why Wikileaks – a Web 2.0 User Generated Content site if there ever was one – chose Mainstream media as its organ of publication and dissemination rather than just getting it out there on the Web. If there is one thing this proves, it is that the role of the Olde Media is far from redundant. The deep throating may now be very 2.0, but the reporting is an interesting combination of Old Hacks drinking from New bottles.
[...]
As to the actual incidents themselves, there will no doubt be a lot of hand wringing from the self-declared sensitive types, but the more prosaic truth about these facts is that this sort of thing was ever thus (Allied exploits in WW2 do not make them out as angels at all, and just ask the average British tankie about US “friendly fire” in the Gulf Wars), its just its all come out in the open this time (A process that started in the Crimea, by the way).
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Is no secret safe?
That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.
So what’s new now? There are more means to get information since it is pooled and digital. There are more means to share information; Daniel Ellsberg had to go through media to spread his Pentagon Papers while Wikileak chose to go through media so they could add value (perspective and attention) but didn’t have to. And there are new means to stay anonymous in the process.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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A new court ruling on Friday could set a legal precedent that allows bypassing digital rights management (DRM) for fair use purposes. New Orleans circuit Judge Emilio Garza found that GE hadn’t violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by using hacked security dongles to repair uninterruptible power supplies from MGE UPS Systems as the goal itself was legal. While a jury fined GE $4.6 million for breaking copyright and misusing trade secrets, Judge Garza determined the DMCA hadn’t been broken, as using hacked items by itself didn’t constitute violating protection at the same time.
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The FCC, which proudly and repeatedly proclaims they embrace “transparency,” is taking considerable heat this week for meeting behind closed doors with the largest carriers to hash out a deal on network neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A group of experts mandated by the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) met from 19-23 July to discuss possible text for an eventual international legal instrument on the protection of traditional cultural expressions and expressions of folklore.
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On Tuesday July 20, a group of public interest organizations, represented by Sean Flynn, Associate Director of PIJIP, will file a complaint alleging that U.S. trade policy in the Obama Administration reduces access to medicines in low and middle income nations, and therefore violates international human rights obligations. The complaint will be filed with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Anand Grover. A press conference announcing the complaint will be held at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.
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Copyrights
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Following the country’s first ever raid on a BitTorrent site in 2009, Russian authorities have now begun a criminal investigation into the operators of Interfilm.ru. Run by a married couple, the site is now at the center of copyright infringement claim which runs to a staggering $1.25 billion. Reports suggest that the investigation has also traced some of the site’s top users.
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In the end, the former Rolling Stone senior editor chose Bronfman over Jobs for Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music and an Industry in Crisis, in no small part due to the intense motivation exhibited by the heir to the multibillion dollar Seagram throne to transform his family’s liquor-derived empire into an entertainment company.
Why, when he could have spent his life playing tennis, did Bronfman persevere? And why does he continue to believe in the value of recorded music, despite having shown the poor timing to invest in the major-label system not long before Napster introduced the world to file sharing, causing the financial worth of recorded music to decline?
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The convicted Guns N’ Roses uploader, Kevin Cogill, isn’t the anti-piracy pitchman the Recording Industry Association of America was hoping for.
A year ago Wednesday, the 29-year-old Los Angeles man was sentenced to two months’ home confinement and a year of probation for uploading nine unreleased tracks of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy to his music site. Federal prosecutors initially sought six months of prison, but Cogill got no time after agreeing to do an RIAA public service announcement that would scare future file sharers straight.
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A leading music industry figure has labelled attempts to thwart internet file-sharing as a “waste of time”.
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Copyright enforcement outfit Righthaven has filed some questionable lawsuits in the past, but really outdid itself in a case against Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor.
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Next up at the Westminster eForum is Peter Jenner, emeritus president of the IMMF – a manager and “recovering economist”. He says he’s going to look at copyright more from an economist’s point of view, too, getting away from the law.
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UN1TE Dance Company‘s choreographers feel free to use whatever music they like in their classes. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy when you put videos from those classes online.
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The estate filed a similar lawsuit last year in England against Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, the UK publisher of the Harry Potter franchise. Now in a statement, Jacobs estate trustee Paul Allen says the estate is contemplating legal action in key territories worldwide and the “USA being the world’s largest market for Potter books means that our first overseas action is brought here in America.”
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ACTA
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The level of secrecy shrouding the EU’s ACTA negotiations reached new heights earlier this week, with the news that Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom felt compelled to abandon a meeting with ACTA negotiators in the European Parliament after he was forbidden from sharing information with the public.
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So, we now know for certain that the ACTA negotiators’ promise of “transparency” over negotiations was an outright lie. They fought it every step of the way, falsely claiming that if the draft were public, some members would leave the table. It was only after a pretty massive smack down from the EU Parliament and the fact that the draft was already leaked that negotiators finally agreed to release a draft that left out lots of pertinent information.
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They don’t allow countries to experiment with different types of copyright law to see if they work better. That, of course, is one reason why ACTA is so troubling. However, before ACTA there were other such international agreements, such as WIPO and, most famously, the Berne Convention.
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With yesterday’s leak of the full ACTA text (updated to include the recent round of talks in Lucerne) the simmering fight between the U.S. and the E.U. on ACTA is now being played out in the open. During the first two years of negotations, both sides were at pains to indicate that there was no consensus on transparency and the treaty would not change their domestic rules. Over the past four months, the dynamic on both transparency and substance has changed.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Most of our work…work done by The HeliOS Project involves working with kids one-on-one. We find children that do not have computers due to financial disadvantage and do our best to give them one. It is indeed gratifying work. I have not had many chances to work with kids in large groups before…I mean working with them in a technical environment.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa
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Mesa 7.9 is shaping up to be one hell of a release. Mesa 7.9 is already set to carry many ATI Gallium3D driver improvements along with enhancements to the LLVMpipe driver that uses the CPU for rendering, the early R600g driver, various Gallium3D architectural and state tracker improvements (MSAA, Stream Out, etc), more OpenGL 3.x functionality, and tons of other changes. But there’s still more coming! Intel’s Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa development list that they would like to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa in August.
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Applications
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Being able to touch type is the ability of typing without looking at the keyboard. When touch-typing, the individual uses all fingers instead of just a few fingers. Consequently, typing speed increases dramatically.
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Open Source and Linux provide rewarding surprises. And one of these surprises is the software Synfig.
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Neil Patel is the Technical lead for Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Unity at Canonical Ltd. With the current drawbacks with Gwibber’s UI in mind, Neil have created some really good looking Gwibber UI mockups.
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Instructionals
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In this article series by John Ward,author of BIRT 2.6 Data Analysis and Reporting we will be looking at a practical example of building a reporting site. In this part of the article, we will be looking at a scenario where we have a Bugzilla instance setup with a series of bugs related to BIRT. We will look at a series of requirements and build the reports necessary to fulfil those requirements.
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We just wrapped up the Ohio LinuxFest call for presentations, so pitching presentations is on my mind. Regional, volunteer-run conferences are not only a good way for people without a travel budget to see some big names in open source, they’re also a way for first-time or inexperienced speakers to hone their presentation skills. Regional conferences also provide an excellent forum to educate users about your favorite project or topic.
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Games
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25th July 2010 – v0.65 is now available.
* Added the next part of the story
* Dying and then being stunned by a Centurion no longer leaves you immortal
* Fixed a crash when creating the Fire Shield
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Desktop Environments
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I compared a couple of ideas on the desktop to a piece of art by Cezanne. In it, I explained that this expressionist painting was able to make people who looked at it, understand that although it is expressionism, you still understand the shapes and forms in it and relate them to elements in real life. Later, I received this comment “A desktop is a tool, not a piece of art.” Is this true? I want to put this question to you all.
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New Releases
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PelicanHPC is a live CD for high performance computing cluster and is based on Debian. The latest version of the distro is PelicanHPC 2.2 RC and runs only on amd64.
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Fedora
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Whenever I make a major jump to a new computer and/or operating system, there’s usually quite a bit of distro-hopping instability as I try to figure out what works best for my hardware, my work and my moods.
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Debian Family
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For the past four or five days I have been running the Mebius laptop as my home file server, torrent slave and music player. I jumped to put a larger hard drive into the machine when I realized Debian could configure the network, the sound card and the hard drive (at its full 120Gb size!) without any extra effort from me.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I ended up having to obliterate Quickweb off the drive in favor of the much more feature-rich but still very fast booting Ubuntu. Now i’m not going to sit here and preach how good Ubuntu is–just go out and try it. Download the Live CD, you don’t even have to install it to try it (although it wont be fast unless you physically install it). But Ubuntu, thus far anyway, runs like butter with the Core i5 and 8gigs of ram. Much faster than any other OS i’ve had experience with (Yes, even you, OS X).
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 10, based on the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”, will be released in November this year under the codename “Julia”.
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The PobBox reportedly runs a customized version of Linux 2.6 as its internal operating system, on a RISC-based Sigma Designs SMP8643 system-on-chip (SoC) processor. For more specs and features, including details on the device’s hardware and its supported multimedia formats, read our earlier PopBox coverage.
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Pros: This tiny home theatre box is the perfect partner for streaming HD content to your TV, or as a mini Linux entertainment system
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Phones
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Linux will dominate mobile devices by 2015. That’s according to a new report from technology analyst ABI Research.
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Tablets
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Olive Telecom has announced the launch of OlivePad – VT100, India’s first 3.5G Pad.
Designed as a multi functional device, Olive Pad operates on an Android Operating System and supports 3.5G HSUPA, Wi-fi, and Bluetooth.
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The situation is pretty simple to explain: As Microsoft scrambles to position Windows Phone 7 against Apple’s iPhone, and Windows 7 for tablets against the iPad, Google keeps lining up more and more hardware partners to build tablets running Google Android.
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Events
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It’s my favorite conference, I think. I love the smaller, more focused events too, but OSCON is a gathering of the tribes and we need one of those.
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BSD
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In these benchmarks we compared the performance of the traditional ATA infrastructure in FreeBSD/PC-BSD 8.1 to that of the new CAM-based ATA infrastructure when using ZFS. The tests included LZMA compression, Gzip compression, Compile Bench, PostMark, and the Threaded I/O Tester.
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Openness/Sharing
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Joi Ito wants to revolutionise the internet. His vision is of a world unperturbed by a complicated, costly and outdated copyright system, where everybody can collaborate and share content on the web as they wish.
He doesn’t want to get rid of copyright, he just wants you to be able to adapt it to your needs. He wants to build a sharing economy.
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Open Data
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Standards/Consortia
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For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs.
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I first blogged about webm the day Google released it. It has taken some time but now I have full support for webm in my preferred Linux desktop distro (Fedora 13). I’ve been doing some testing and I have to say I’m impressed.
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Three people working with the Scott McInnis for Colorado governor campaign have resigned their positions. This comes as McInnis, a Republican, has been battling plagiarism allegations.
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Science
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A new kind of time travel based on quantum teleportation gets around the paradoxes that have plagued other time machines, say physicists.
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Security/Aggression
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Researchers found the widespread use of CCTV, ID cards, electronic registration systems, fob-controlled gates and fingerprint technology as schools attempt to crackdown on troublemakers.
Staff at one comprehensive patrolled corridors and playgrounds with radios to make sure children behaved at lunchtimes, while teachers at a private school used technology to spy on children’s computer and internet use.
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THE owners of a new bar have defended their decision to install a CCTV camera in the men’s toilets.
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More than 21,000 fines of between £60 and £120 were issued for motoring offences such as stopping to drop off family and friends.
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Lorretta Cole says she was trying to teach her neighbour’s children a lesson after she claims the ball repeatedly landed on her property and even damaged her car.
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The Government has until the end of the month to decide whether to opt out of the scheme – which would give authorities in any country in the whole of the EU the power to order our police to produce evidence, or even interrogate or launch surveillance of suspects without their knowledge.
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West Sussex County Council has been described as showing ‘poor regard’ to the importance of protecting children’s personal information after an unencrypted laptop containing information about children was stolen from the home of one of its employees.
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Environment
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In May, PRWatch reported on a controverisal new group, “Balanced Education for Everyone” (BEE), that is trying to stop public schools from teaching kids about climate change science. BEE argues that teaching climate change is too scary for kids and “unnecessary.” But BEE’s efforts also raised other questions, like what are kids learning about climate change in school, anyway, and who is influencing it?
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Connecting the Dots: Hushed Relationships Between ACE and BP
ACE was founded with an initial donation of $2.675 million in “private funding,” the source of which is undisclosed on ACE’s Web site. However, a September 30, 2009 article about an ACE school presentation says all of money to start ACE came from one person: Michael Haas, the group’s founder. A second article posted on Grist.com in July 2009 confirms this. So why is ACE so cagey about reporting this on its website?
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The Los Angeles Times reported last week that, “worst-case estimates place the total oil spilled in the gulf at about 126 million gallons over two months. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates the country disgorges that much hydrocarbon pollution to the air in 10 days.”
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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson questions BP’s widespread application of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, as does everyone else. According to Jackson, the government is “uncharted waters” with the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. “The amount of dispersant being used at the surface is unprecedented,” Jackson says. BP is also applying the chemicals in the sub-sea environment. In addition, dispersant is stopping oil from collecting on water surface, where it can be more easily controlled.
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Leaders of the Gulf Coast states have designated Sunday a day of prayer for the regions affected by the oil spill that has sent millions of gallons of crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for the last 66 days.
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There’s something missing in the Coast Guard’s latest PR photos of oil spill cleanup workers: protective gear.
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NOAA, the FDA and the Gulf states have been rigorously testing Gulf seafood for oil—doing smell tests with teams of human sniffers, and performing chemical tests for the harmful polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, found naturally in crude oil.
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The oil is too dispersed to take advantage of the converted Taiwanese supertanker’s enormous capacity, said Bob Grantham, a spokesman for shipowner TMT.
He said BP’s use of chemical dispersants prevented A Whale, billed as the world’s largest skimmer, from collecting a “significant amount” of oil during a week of testing that ended Friday.
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Rachel Carson ignited the debate over pesticide safety a generation ago. Its latest phase began today (July 15).
Chemical farming interests have taken aim at Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) influential “Shopper’s Guide To Pesticides In Produce,” a popular consumer tool introduced more than a decade ago that has helped drive expansion of organic produce sales at the expense conventionally grown, pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables.
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Finance
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As members of opposing political parties, we disagree on a number of important issues. But we must not allow honest disagreement over some issues interfere with our ability to work together when we do agree.
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AFR’s 250 consumer, labor, business, housing and grassroots groups, along with dozens of academics and think tanks, came together in an unprecedented effort to pool their expertise on complex financial matters to provide a counterweight to the big money lobbying onslaught and technical expertise of Wall Street.
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These numbers are much higher than what is reported in the media because CMD’s Wall Street Bailout Cost Table takes into account all 35 government programs, not just the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) managed by the U.S. Treasury Department. Still unpaid: $568 billion in TARP money and $1.4 trillion in Federal Reserve loans and investments.
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What is a corporation? In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the nature of the corporation has been the subject of considerable debate. While this is a very complex topic, two major points of view seem to be emerging, which we can use to book-end the different ends of a spectrum, with many hybrid positions in-between.
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At the other of the spectrum, is the view of the corporation as an organization that will use all lawful means for its single-minded objective of generating profit and wealth. As we have seen with the financial crisis, that single-minded focus on wealth can degenerate into a behavior dominated by greed, where a relatively small number of people will do whatever they can to earn large sums of money without worrying about the impact of their actions on the larger society.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The “Chez Sludge” scandal in San Francisco, involving the city giving away free toxic sewage sludge as “organic Biosolids compost” for gardeners, took another turn on July 13, 2010. The Food Rights Network filed a formal letter of complaint with the California Bar Association, asking the professional society for California lawyers to investigate Chris Desser, attorney for Francesca Vietor, in Vietor’s threat of libel against the UK Guardian newspaper.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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I’ve been disagreeing with a lot of people about transparency recently, and even though it’s kind of going out of fashion on the edge of my community, I’m still going to stand up for the principle. Transparency, real and true, is a good thing for many reasons. It’s not magic fairy pixie dust that makes the world a wonderful place, and anyone who sold it as such needs to do their historical homework. What is does it complex, important, but not sexy enough for many activists.
What a lot of people commenting on the debate about government transparency don’t get is that it’s not just about the information. Action always has an inherent politics to it; publishing data about itself is as much about telling government how it’s supposed to behave as it is about the data. Even if you’re wildly juking the stats, you’re at least communicating to yourself how different things should be. The action involved in transparency is the action of telling on yourself. No matter how subverted, two things remain true: you know that you should be doing better, and you’re going to accidentally expose incidental truths.
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It recently came to light (thanks to some good reporting) that the Government has been fishing around with ISPs for their support on a new and radical data retention policy. This would legally oblige telcos to retain large amounts of data about their customers’ communications activities in case law enforcement needed them at some point in the future.
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Members of the European Parliament are being asked to sign a written declaration that will, ostensibly, “set up a European early warning system for paedophiles and sex offenders”. In reality, it will extend the Data Retention Directive to search engines.
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Copyrights
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A claim arguing both copyright infringement and moral rights infringement looked for $27 million in damages. (Plus, amongst other things, the goods and services tax on the monetary awards.) By the end, the Honourable Mr. Justice Russell of the Federal Court of Canada determined that the defendants’ copyright misdemeanor was confined to posting the plaintiff’s work on their website, without his consent. Justice Russell did not conceal his opinion of the plaintiff’s conduct; “The evidence adduced concerning infringement of copyright suggests that the Plaintiff’s claims are disproportionate and opportunistic.”
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A new study has been making the rounds, concluding that only 0.3% of all files available on BitTorrent are confirmed to be ‘legal’. The results of the study were promoted by anti-piracy outfit AFACT and have been picked up by several news outlets, including Ars Technica and ZDNet, who all failed to see that the report is bogus.
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Unfortunately, the results of these type of studies are pushed by anti-piracy outfits and taken for granted by outsiders, even by respected news outlets on the Internet such as Ars Technica and ZDNet. In this case their reporters were completely taken in by the report.
Just a few minutes into reading the study we were shaking our heads here at the TorrentFreak headquarters. Mistake after mistake is made in the report and conclusions are drawn based on painfully inaccurate data and methodologies. We’ll lay out the most critical errors below, which represent just the tip of the iceberg.
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ACTA
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Just who is the bad apple at the ACTA negotiations, excluding the public and forcing discussions between the parties to be held in secret?
Not us, says the EU, which has come in for some stick of late – not least from Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstroem – for its refusal to allow MEPs to disseminate anything from the talks back to their voters. Rather, the blame should be laid at the door of just one of the parties to the talks, but the official line is that they are staying schtum on just which.
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Digital Economy
XBMC Mythbox Demo
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Security/Aggression
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Many encryption utilities–such as the BitLocker feature in Windows 7 Ultimate, or the Rohos Mini Drive utility for protecting info on a thumb drive–are available. But my favorite tool covers all the bases: It’s free, it’s easy, it’s effective, and it works on all major operating systems. TrueCrypt lets you create virtual encrypted drives. Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; if you install it on several machines running different OSs, you can open your encrypted files from a network share, thumb drive, or other shared storage device.
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A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
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Environment
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BP has said that it is not the only oil Company responsible for oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Company is firm on the view that the claims of its negligence in the oil spill are baseless.
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Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, is to leave the company, bowing to pressure over his handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, the aftermath of which has become America’s worst environmental disaster.
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Finance
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Wall Street took the latest government report on its pay practices in stride Friday, saying it would review U.S. pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg’s suggestions about compensation while privately expressing relief that the report wasn’t tougher on them.
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Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among the banks that sold Goldman Sachs Group Inc. protection against a failure of insurer American International Group Inc., said two people with knowledge of the transactions.
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Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master on executive compensation, called on 17 bailed-out financial firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to adopt compensation policies that allow directors to lower top executives’ pay when a firm’s survival is under threat.
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Goldman Sachs told United States investigators which counterparties it used to hedge the risk that American International Group would fail, three people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News.
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The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether political or other factors influenced the timing of the filing and subsequent settlement of the commission’s securities fraud case against Goldman Sachs, according to letters between his office and a Republican congressman.
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H. David Kotz, the S.E.C. inspector general, who is an independent watchdog for the agency, began the inquiry in response to an April 23 letter from Mr. Issa, a California Republican who is the ranking minority member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The S.E.C. has denied that its timing was influenced by politics.
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A nonprofit accuses the bank’s traders of starving people by dramatically bidding up prices for wheat, corn and rice. Is that fair?
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International banks and financial companies were indirect beneficiaries of the government’s 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc., according to newly released documents.
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The government’s pay czar announced Friday that 17 companies benefiting from federal bailout money handed out $1.6 billion in excess executive pay at the height of the financial crisis. The firms include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed as the Obama administration’s special master for compensation, examined executives earning more than $500,000 at the 419 companies that received taxpayer assistance. Of the 17 companies that he found were egregious in their compensation, 11 have paid back the assistance received from taxpayers.
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Goldman Sachs (GS) has contracted documentary film maker Ric Burns, co-producer of the Emmy-award winning 1990 documentary, The Civil War, to make an “industrial,” a movie about Goldman for internal consumption only, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Susanne Craig, citing a Goldman rep.
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That isn’t a real movie title. But filmmaker Ric Burns, who created the PBS series “The Civil War” with his brother Ken, is shooting a documentary about the Wall Street firm. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is paying for the film, has editorial control and is overseeing the project through its marketing department, a Goldman spokesman said.
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The creditors claimed the unit facilitated the fraud committed at Stamford, Connecticut-based Bayou, which filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2006. Bayou co-founder Samuel Israel pleaded guilty to directing a $400 million fraud and is serving 22 years in prison.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In an unprecedented development, close to 92,000 classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan have been leaked. SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have analyzed the raft of mostly classified documents. The war logs expose the true scale of the Western military deployment — and the problems beleaguering Germany’s Bundeswehr in the Hindu Kush.
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The closing date for comments is 30 July, so you have a few days to mull things over before submitting.
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