Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Lin-dependence day!

  On Friday I was honored to sit in front of a group from the Techrepublic community and talk open source. The driving force of the debate was open source vs. proprietary software. The ever-present subtext of that debate is Linux vs. Windows. The audience was pleasantly surprised when the debate never turned sour. Why is that? So many asked. The answer, although one-sided, is simple.

• The Advantages of Using Linux

  Every now and then, I receive emails from people who are asking me to explain the benefits or advantages of using Linux. I just answered them with a link or two to articles that could give a good explanation regarding the subject matter. But since I realized that it would be better if my response were based on my own experience, I finally decided to write a simple list that I could use to answer those who want to know the benefits of using Linux.

• 10 Misconceptions about Linux

  Linux is not an OS, it is actually a kernel which is the middleware between your Apps and Hardware! The Better the Kernel, the better the system responds! and better error handling!

• The Real reason Why Ubuntu Linux Doesn’t Have Malware – Part 1

  I created this video to give a few extra reasons why Linux doesn’t have viruses besides the common ones that get thrown around, like “linux is not popular enough” or “linux distributions each use a different kernel that is recompiled with every release”.

• Five tips for a more efficient Linux desktop

  For me, the Linux desktop is all about being efficient. Yes, I do enjoy the eye candy as well. But having an incredibly efficient desktop just makes for much faster, more reliable work. And much to the surprise of most users, Linux should be hailed as the king of desktop efficiency. There are many ways to have an efficient desktop in Linux, but I have narrowed the list down to these five tips. Even if you employ only a couple of these techniques, your desktop experience will become far more efficient.

• My experience with GNU/Linux professionally and personally

  I am writing this out of my close association with GNU/Linux for quite sometime.I have had been using it everywhere to do my day to day work.

  First I have started or introduced to the UNIX system way back in 1996 during my Diploma classes.One day I was sitting in front of a blank and black terminal in the classroom ;so my instructor came to me and said ” why are you sitting idle”…I replied back with a pretty confusing face that ” I am not able to understand what to do with this(the black and blank terminal)..with small cursor blinking on it”. My teacher/instructor smile at me(rightfully) and said ” Bhaskar it is challenging you to play with it and waiting for your intervention”..that spark me!! From that day onward I fall in love with that fellow called “UNIX”.Yes,it was SCO UNIX ..those days it was used in almost all the academia.Oh yes before that incident happen I was given a book or two about UNIX operating system and I went through them ..but little infer.

  [...]

  Basically corporate houses buy or run something which is quite stable and proven track record and should have paid support.The reason behind this is that business data are absolutely crucial to the business and which will fetch revenue with that.

  I had have the exposure of handling production box running RHEL(Enterprise version of REDHAT), SLES(SUSE Enterprise version),CentOS(derived from RHEL source) and to my surprise! Gentoo for one of my job assignment.And in the very same place Debian for hosting server.

• Desktop

  • 3G woes: maybe NetworkManager isn’t that bad?

    I won’t talk here about the awful user interfaces (supplied by the carriers and you must use them) which make your eyes hurt, brain explode and usability die (compared with them NetworkManager is a breeze). My problem here is with making them both work together on the same computer, which on Linux is natural: you add the connections in NM (with a wizard) and just select whatever you want from a menu.

• Ballnux

  • LG to Launch Android-Powered Tablet

    Yet another electronics manufacturer has announced plans to launch a tablet computer powered by Google’s Android operating system: LG. According to The Wall Street Journal, the device will launch in the fourth quarter of this year, though no other details were immediately available.

• Applications

  • [compiz] Compiz 0.9.0 is Released!

    This is the first unstable release of the Compiz 0.9 series. This release represents a complete rewrite of the 0.8 series from C to C++, brings a whole new developer API, splits rendering into plugins, switches the buildsystem from automake to cmake and brings minor functionality improvements. This release represents the first developer and tester preview of what will eventually make the 0.10.x stable series. Please note that as such, it is not yet ready for general use as there are a number of known issues, regressions and incomplete functionality.

  • Compiz in your browser – unlock Firefox 3.6 hidden features

    If you’re running lucid, you should have the latest version 3.6 of Firefox from Mozilla.

    Here are some hidden features disabled by default, similar to Compiz expo and shift-switcher.

  • Ailurus – A Useful Ubuntu Tweak Alternative For Beginners

    Ailurus is cross-Linux-distribution GPL software, which aims at making Linux easier to use for beginners. Rather than a Ubuntu Tweak alternative, Ailurus is the kind of app you can use along Ubuntu Tweak. Ailurus is available for Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint while Ubuntu Tweak is a dedicated Ubuntu only application.

  • Wuala – Linux friendly secure DropBox alternative

    Linux users are already spoilt for choice when it comes to free online cloud storage. UbuntuOne and Dropbox both offer 2GB for nothing whilst newly announced project SparkleShare aims to better both of these.

  • Control Applications With Simon Speech Recognitions

    Awesome way to control applications, installed operating system, sound recognition text typing without using mouse or keyboard. working on multi platforms, user interface KDE, Qt.

    Also including Simon add ons download center support many applications Media centers, Web browser, text editor, Multimedia applications, and utilities application such as Gnome Screenshot tool.

  • Terminator 0.94 released!

  • Lightspark Flash Player Continues To Advance

    Back in May we reported on the Lightspark Flash Player that was developed by a free software developer using Adobe’s released SWF/Flash documentation and has hit a point where its ActionScript 3.0 support is nearly complete, has a JIT engine that leverages LLVM, supports OpenGL rendering, and boasts various other features as an open-source Flash Player alternative to Adobe’s binary plug-in. Today a new release candidate of Lightspark 0.4.2 is available.

  • Instructionals

    • Hacking wireless presenters with an Arduino and Metasploit

      I gave a presentation this week at Hack in the Box in Amsterdam about hacking wireless presenters (slides here. My demo showed how I could abuse vulnerabilities in the product to get a Metasploit payload on to the PC of someone using a wireless presenter, by just sending keystrokes to it. This article describes how I did it and why you may be at risk if you use any wireless input device (such as a wireless mouse).

    • How to install an application in Ubuntu?

      Ubuntu does not ship with in-built support for various media formats such s .mp3, .mp4, flash and Java files. Ubuntu restricted extras will add codec and file to support them and enable you to enjoy your music collection without any hassle.

    • Changing file associations and default applications in openSUSE / Gnome

    • Ailurus – A Useful Ubuntu Tweak Alternative For Beginners

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 13 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

    • Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop Customization Guide

      At the request of our readers and because today is Independence Day in the United States, we have decided to revive our old desktop customization tutorial for the Ubuntu OS and other major Linux distributions powered by the GNOME desktop environment.

    • How to dual-boot Linux and Windows

    • Easter Eggs in Ubuntu

    • LightDM

    • Setting up a RocketRaid 2320 controller on Linux Mint 9

  • Games

    • LettersFall 2.0

      A new game has been brought to our attention called LettersFall which is a cross between between Scabble(R) and Tetris(R). This game offers the following items to the Linux community.

    • MegaGlest 3.3.5 Pre-release special!

      A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.

      MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 5.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Impression of First Day at Akademy 2010

      After many years of successful meetings in great locations, Tampere has a lot to live up to as this year’s Akademy host city. On the basis of the first day at least, it has not disappointed. After the opening keynote by Valtteri Halla a series of other talks followed and we have had plenty of discussions in the open spaces between the conference rooms. Read on for an impression of the first day of the biggest and coolest Akademy ever!

    • start your Akademy engines!

    • Akademy Ready for Take-off!

      In Tampere, Finland, the pre-Akademy party kicked off the conference last night. Hundreds of KDE contributors were there, meeting old and new friends and enjoying the party. Rowdy Brazilians and Dutch cheered on their teams as their countries battled each other in the World Cup on the big screen. Others spent time reliving their childhood on the classic arcade machine.

    • akademy videos

      Not only does he help Akademy organizing teams year after year on the march towards success (and this year’s Akademy has been a roaring success this far!), but he’s worked to get videos up for the keynote presentations in a timely fashion. His poor little netbook churned all night long to encode four videos: the opening, the first keynote, my keynote and the Telepathy presentation. More videos are coming as they get encoded and you can find them on the conference program page, starting right now with the four aforementioned videos.

    • My secret about the KDE multimedia meeting 2010

      As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing ;-). Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).

      1. Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
      2. Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
      3. Location (house) in general: 2.6
      4. Location (area, geographically): 2.8
      5. Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
      6. Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
      7. Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
      8. Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
      9. Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
      10. Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
      11. Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
      12. Organization staff competence: 3

    • Akademy 2010 Slides on the Plasma Netbook project [PDF]

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Support GNOME by shopping at Amazon

      The GNOME foundation provide Amazon referral links for your browser. That is, every time you search for a product using the referral link and end up buying something GNOME get a paid a referral fee based on the amount you spend. The best bit is that it costs you absolutely nothing extra but helps keep GNOME in servers, ballpoint pens and developers.

• Distributions

  • 100 % free Linux distributions

    On this, July 4, 2010, the day the United States celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate that same day with a toast to those Linux distributions that shirk all non-free software. This means EVERYTHING on these distributions is protected under, at least, the GPL.

    There aren’t tons of these distributions and some of them are threatened, daily, to disappear from lack of support. So it is my honor to hopefully introduce the Ghacks audience to these distributions.

  • Liquorix Squeezes the Most Out of Your Linux Desktop

    Switching to Linux has many reasons – Security, Stability, Performance, and of course, Cost. Be whatever the reasons, performance becomes the eventual priority for desktop as the viruses, malwares and breakdowns don’t come in the linux-users way.

    How to get the most out of a Linux desktop? Well, there are so many tricks, tweaks and hacks such as using a just right, well customized kernel, removing unnecessary services, apps, packages, paralleling boot process, using a lightweight window manager and desktop environment….and a dozen others. A long time user often dabbles to do these things of which the first, and perhaps the most important is hacking the kernel fitting impeccably to his/her hardware and working requirements.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine July 2010: Issue 42

      All Magazine Issues

      * Welcome From The Chief Editor

      1. KDE 4: The KDE Netbook Interface
      2. World Population Day: July 11, 2010
      3. Reclaim Your Background: The Widget Dashboard
      4. Xfce 4.6.2: Xfce Settings Manager, Part 2
      5. Screenshot Showcase
      6. Double Take
      7. Mark’s Gimp Tip
      8. ms_meme’s Nook: Deep In The Heart Of Linux
      9. OpenOffice: Writer
      10. Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Your Xfce Panels
      11. How Teenagers View PCLinuxOS
      12. Xfce 4.6.2: Panel Plug-ins
      13. Alternate OS: Haiku, Part 1
      14. Game Zone: Osmos
      15. Create A Basic RPM Package For PCLinuxOS
      16. Create A PCLinuxOS Packaging Environment In Phoenix
      17. ms_meme’s Nook: That Ol’ Linux Call
      18. Forum Foibles: ByteS From The Bunkhouse
      19. Command Line Interface Intro: Part 10
      20. Getting Started With folding@home
      21. Computer Languages A to Z: Netlogo
      22. Configuring and Using Epson Stylus NX415
      23. KarlM: The Loss Of A Friend, Supporter

    • Debranding Firefox in PCLinuxOS

      I’m not a huge fan of third-party branding. One of my (minor, when put into perspective) gripes about PCLinuxOS is that they sorta go nuts with it. One of the apps that’s the target of their branding is Firefox. If you are equally bugged by this, debranding the default profile used as the template for new profiles isn’t that hard.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Jim Whitehurst is CEO and Chief Plumber at Red Hat

      That’s certainly borne out by the recent top500 supercomputer listings, where 91 per cent of the world’s fastest supercomputers run some form of GNU/Linux (Windows runs on 1%), the fact that the open source Apache Web server well over half of the Web – as it has for the last 10 years – and the near-parity in Europe of Firefox’s market share with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora Board Meeting, 2 Jul 2010

        Our new Fedora Project Leader has been named: Jared Smith. The announcement stated that he is gone but not when he’d return: Right now, Jared has limited email access until next week. He’ll be around next week and a lot more when he returns from his LATAM travels (more on them below).

        Jared will be making a blog post when he returns and it will be listed on Fedora Planet. He will be traveling together with Paul Frields to the Red Hat Raleigh, NC office for orientation, and they will be meeting up with Max Spevack while there. Jared will also be introduced to various folks around the Red Hat Raleigh office.

      • Announcing a new Fedora for the XO-1 release

        This build brings us more inline with the work being done for the XO-1.5, as well it includes several changes incorporated from the Paraguay builds.

  • Debian Family

    • Lenny-)Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop

      Here is a short update on my my Debian Lenny-)Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I’m not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when aptitude try because of missing conflicts (#584861 and #585716).

• Devices/Embedded

  • Five of 2010’s Linux-Powered e-Book Readers

    Spring Design Alex

    Although powered by Google’s Android OS, I’m still including this dual-screen e-book reader in this list. After all, the original Android was based on Linux. So what do I mean by “dual-screen”? Well, some e-book reader manufacturers like Spring Design have recognized the advantages of a brightly-colored touch screen and the superior reading qualities of a gray-scale e-ink screen.

    Hence, Spring Design decided to put together these two screens into one device. The 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD screen is for browsing, while the 6-inch e-ink display is for reading.

  • Android

    • Everything You Need To Know About The Fragmented Mobile Developer Ecosystem

      - Android stands out as the platform most popular among mobile developers. Survey results suggest nearly 60 percent of all mobile developers recently developed on Android, assuming an equal number of respondents with experience across each of eight major platforms. Second in terms of developer mindshare is iOS (iPhone), outranking Symbian and Java ME, which were in pole position in 2008.

    • HTC Finally Releases Kernel Source for the EVO 4G

      Just before a small community of distraught developers gear up to sue HTC in an effort to get that kernel source they’re required to release for the HTC EVO 4G, they’ve done it. It’s been a month since the device has launched, and – compared to how long it took HTC to offer up the goods for the HTC Hero – I’d say that EVO owners and developers are lucky to be getting the source so soon.

Free Software/Open Source

• Ben Franklin Day at The Saratogian: A ‘Declaration of Independence’ from newsroom software (with video)

  Most of the news and photographs on the pages, and the layout of those pages themselves, were prepared for publication without using the usual newsroom software for writing, editing, toning, cropping and paginating.

  Instead, all this work was done using free software available to anyone on the Internet. And yes, it was hard work. The proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relative fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.

  [...]

  But between us, producing today’s paper wasn’t easy for the newsroom. News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus.

• Newspaper tries free software for a day

  The Saratogian tried an experiment for Independence Day – run free software for a day, to produce the July 4 2010 issue of their (web and print) newspaper. They called it the Ben Franklin Edition *. The free software experiment is part of the Ben Franklin Project of the Journal Register Company, which owns The Saratogian.

• The Charge for Freedom

  In the open source republic, the hacker is your representative. He codes on your behalf, and should his idea find favor, the project leader approves the idea, and the idea becomes part of the code base. Should your ideas and the hacker’s ideas differ, you are free to contact someone else on the dev team. If nothing is done to your liking, your are free to secede from the union and fork the code. In the real world, information is free for the taking, and where law forbids the exchange of ideas we see rather inventive means of circumvention come to fruition. In most free nations around the world, people were supposed to be at the forefront of government. In the USA, politicians were once called public servants. The open source community is much the same. While many do make money off of open source software, the motivation to create open source software and to open source already existing projects was initially the want to help others, make a better product, and lower development costs by allowing anyone to contribute. Only one of those three motivations has anything to do with monetary cost.

• Open source developer sees 100 percent growth

  Open source software developer Exist Global foresees a 100 percent revenue growth this year to $4 million on back of a vibrant US market and local companies’ willingness to pay for high-valued software.

  The company believes this year is the start of sustained profitable operations from a slowdown in the US market after it was adversely affected by the global financial crisis.

  “As far as Exist is concerned, I think the worst is behind us. We’re receiving a lot of requests, indicating that the second half is going to be healthy. We’re beginning to focus on hiring again,” said Winston Damarillo, Exist Global founder, in an interview at a company celebration for its first half performance.

• Meet the staff: Community editor Lee Schlesinger

  Today’s a legal holiday in the US, but we like to post an entry in the blog every weekday to keep you from getting bored. I can’t promise to relieve the boredom today, because today’s entry is about me.

• Events

  • Linux.conf.au requests 2012 bid proposals

    The organisation behind Australia’s flagship annual Linux conference has requested formal proposals from parties interested in hosting the event in their city in 2012.

• Mozilla

  • Field Guide to Firefox 1.1 for Maemo

    Over the last several weeks of the beta, members of the mobile team have written blog posts about most of the new features and improvements you’ll find in the browser. Here, with quick summaries, are links to all of them – enjoy!

  • Firefox Mobile – The fox in your pocket! – Windows Mobile shunned?

    With the popularity of Android phones, it seems strange that it was not released there first. There is a massive Android user base already, who are apparently hungry for a well known browser that is familiar to the one they use on the desktop. This is shown in the success Opera Mobile has enjoyed and one look at the comments in the marketplace suggest that it is widely favored over the default browser that is packaged with the users phone. Speaking as an HTC Desire user, I certainly prefer Opera to the native browser and even though I cannot set it as default, I would much rather use that than the default offering.

• Oracle

  • OpenOffice.org to use GStreamer for Multimedia

    GSteamer and its libraries are installed by default on many distributions, like Ubuntu and its derivatives, and is contained in the repository of many others. It has become very stable in recent versions and supports most multimedia codecs. If already installed, users need not take any further action to enjoy the benefits of GStreamer in OpenOffice.org, one of which is much better performance. Distribution developers can disable this support by choice if desired and cause OpenOffice.org to revert to using Java.

• Education

  • ICT to face crisis in UK Schools

    We are going to have to face a very uncomfortable fact in the coming weeks and months. This new Coalition Government is out of love with ICT in schools.

    I am certainly not the only pundit who has noticed the resounding silence surrounding matters ICT amongst the noisy plethora of other announcements concerning educational reform.

    All we know so far is that virtually the very first act of this government was to abolish Becta, an act they had uniquely signalled months in advance of coming to power and carried out with a ferocity resembling a pogrom.

    Something about it, taken in combination with stories from ex-Becta employees who (subsequently) complained about apparatchik style cronyism within the organisation makes me think that ICT has been linked deeply with the previous administration..and not in a good way.

• Business

  • Open Core and OSI

    Is Mark suggesting that OSI intended to facilitate less freedom for the code and end users than the GPL offers, that this was an OSI goal, that “software freedom for the software user” isn’t and never was an OSI goal? Does freedom mean only the right to fork the code? If so, I’d like OSI to say so clearly and on the record. If so, it might provide insight into why OSI is struggling and provide indisputable proof that they were foundationally wrong. I hope they’ll weigh in on this debate and plant their flag, because if that is what OSI stands for, maybe it’s time to let them float out into outer space without the community, thus making it clear there really is no connection between the real FOSS community and OSI any more.

    If that is not what OSI stands for, I’d like to hear them say so. I hope it isn’t. But the community wants to know where they stand, and for what.

    For myself, I believe that OSI, in order to be relevant, needs to reinvent itself and restructure to represent the entire community with its license list and its definition. Enough with the old divisions and the debates. The community needs to face the world more unitedly now, as a broad spectrum, including those who had the foresight to realize that VC guys and proprietary types would be coming along someday and would try to close down the freedom of the code and the freedoms of those using it just to make a buck.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Welcome to Open Source Law

    Since, as Larry Lessig famously pointed out, “code is law” (and vice versa), it’s natural to try to apply open source methodologies in the legal world. Indeed, a site called Openlaw existed ten years ago:

    Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum. With your assistance, we will develop arguments, draft pleadings, and edit briefs in public, online. Non-lawyers and lawyers alike are invited to join the process by adding thoughts to the “brainstorm” outlines, drafting and commenting on drafts in progress, and suggesting reference sources.

    Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations. Openlaw is therefore a large project built through the coordinated effort of many small (and not so small) contributions.

    Despite this long pedigree, open source law never really took off – until now.

• Open Access/Content

  • WWW: World Wide Wikipedia

    The good news is that she is starting from a solid base: Wikipedia runs on GNU/Linux, Apache, Squid and MySQL. The bad news is that – unbelievably – Wikipedia is essentially run out of Florida (plus that troublesome caching site in Amsterdam). For such a globalised project – just think of all the languages supported – to be running like this is, frankly, bonkers – and makes outages like today’s almost inevitable.

Leftovers

• Science

  • ‘Never-before-seen material’ can store vast amounts of energy

    Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as “the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,” the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors.

  • Planck telescope reveals ancient cosmic light

    The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.

  • Perennial grains could be biggest agricultural innovation in eons

    The paper, “Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains,” points out that perennials have longer growing seasons and longer, denser roots than annuals. Those longer roots, which can reach down 10 to 12 feet, allow the crops to reach and hold more water and nutrients, reduce erosion, and condition the soil. Because the plants grow for a greater length of time, they also sequester more carbon from the atmosphere.

  • ‘Digital Embryo’ Gains Wings: Now Possible to Film Development of Fruit Fly and of Zebrafish’s Eyes and Brain

    In a study published in Nature Methods, they describe how they were able to capture fruit fly development on film, and were the first to clearly record how a zebrafish’s eyes and midbrain are formed. The improved technique will also help to shed light on processes and organisms, which have so far been under-studied because they could not be followed under a microscope.

• Security/Aggression

  • Hidden cameras in parts of Birmingham ‘will be removed’

    Hidden cameras in areas of Birmingham with large Muslim populations will be removed and any counter terrorism involvement stopped, police say.

  • New ID badge is really personal CCTV camera

    A SCOTTISH company has created a new personal CCTV system which could offer safety protection for frontline public service workers.

  • In the UK, Big Brother is listening

    The USSR, as Russia once was, used to epitomise the police state.

    After the G20 civil rights violations, Canada could almost make the claim.

    But in fact Britain is the country which has undeniably become the poster child for Big Brother among allegedly democratic countries.

  • Cyberwar

    The cyber-attacks on Estonia in 2007 and on Georgia in 2008 (the latter strangely happened to coincide with the advance of Russian troops across the Caucasus) are widely assumed to have been directed by the Kremlin, but they could be traced only to Russian cyber-criminals. Many of the computers used in the attack belonged to innocent Americans whose PCs had been hijacked. Companies suspect China of organising mini-raids to ransack Western know-how: but it could just have easily been Western criminals, computer-hackers showing off or disillusioned former employees. One reason why Western governments have until recently been reticent about cyber-espionage is surely because they are dab hands at it, too.

  • We were permanently banned from the Miami-Dade Metrorail for taking photos

    The truth is, we could have left whenever we wanted but the goal was to make some sense of the contradictory policies in place regarding photography at the Metrorail stations.

    But instead of getting answers, we were told we would never be allowed on the train again. For the rest of our lives. We were told we would be arrested for trespassing If we dared set foot on any Metrorail property for as long as we live.

• Environment

  • Study: Oil Means More Arsenic In Seawater

    Besides the oil already spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of up to 60,000 barrels daily, a group of British scientists says one can expect to see elevated levels of arsenic as well.

    The research, published in the journal Water Research, showed that oil prevents naturally-occurring arsenic from being filtered out of the water by the sediment on the ocean floor. Oil coats the individual sediment particles and blocks the arsenic making contact with the minerals that would ordinarily bind to it.

• Copyrights

  • RIAA Warns 1 Million Copyright Infringers a Year

    In less than two years the RIAA has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable.

  • The Pirate Ship Sets Sail

    Today the Pirate Party can announce the launch of our new community blog, PirateShip.org.uk.

    The Pirate Ship is what is known as a “blog aggregator”, which takes posts from the blogs of party members and presents them all together in one website, allowing you to keep up to date on the latest political issues and debates without ever having to leave the page.

  • New copyright lawsuit involves Creative Commons

    GateHouse sued a company that sells reprints of articles — including articles from the Register Star — on fancy plaques to the people who are featured in those articles. Since GateHouse has its own reprint business, it views the defendant’s work as a competitive threat.

  • File-Sharing Sites Unfazed By Takedowns, Bounce Right Back

    During the last few weeks many file-sharing sites have been taken down by threats, legal action and police raids. From the mighty Pirate Bay to lesser known torrent sites across Europe and streaming giants around the world, the theme isn’t capitulation after a setback, but getting back online as quickly as possible.

  • The Public Domain and the WIPO Development Agenda

    The following guest post is from Séverine Dusollier, who is a Professor in Law at the University of Namur and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. She recently completed a Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain commissioned as part of the WIPO Development Agenda (particularly its recommendations 16 and 20). We asked her to write about her findings…

  • An (Analogue) Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism

    There’s a new meme in town these days: “rights of the artists”. The copyright industries have worked out that cries for more copyright and more money don’t go down too well when they come from fat-cat monopolists sitting in their plush offices, and so have now redefined their fight in terms of struggling artists (who rarely get to see much benefit from constantly extended copyright).

    Here’s a nice example courtesy of the Copyright Alliance – an organisation that very much pushes that line:

    Songwriter, Jason Robert Brown, recently posted on his blog a story about his experience dealing with copyright infringement. Knowing for a long time that many websites exist for the sole purpose of “trading” sheet music, Jason decided to log on himself and politely ask many of the users to stop “trading” his work. While many quickly wrote back apologizing and then removing his work, one girl in particular gave Jason a hard time.

  • ACTA

    • ACTA Consensus on Transparency Breaks Down

      The 9th round of ACTA talks concluded last week in Lucerne, Switzerland. I briefly noted the official statement last week, but a subsequent news report makes it clear that the most important development to come out of the meeting is the breakdown of a consensus on transparency. Following the New Zealand meeting in April, there was consensus achieved on the need to release a draft version of the text. It is now clear that the overwhelming majority of countries favoured continuing this approach by releasing updated versions at the conclusion of subsequent meetings. That did not happen after the Lucerne meeting, however, with both the Swiss and European Commission delegations indicating that they favoured releasing the text but that one delegation did not. It is a safe bet that the U.S. is once again the key holdout on the transparency issue.

    • INTA, ICC Oppose De Minimis Provision in ACTA