01.22.10

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Will Clinton Free The World From Software Dictatorship?

  Recently many Software Freedom activists have started to question bundled operating systems. If one goes to buy a PC, you will have to pay for the pre-installed Microsoft Window. Today there are many alternatives to Microsoft Windows — GNU/Linux based Ubuntu is one of the most popular Operating Systems. It is not only free in terms of cost, but also free in terms of control that the user has over his or her computing. GNU/Linux operating systems are very much more secure than Microsoft technologies.

  If you want buy a branded PC from HP or any other major player and you want to run GNU/Linux on it then what are your choices? Irrespective of what software you want to run on your machine, you will have to pay the cost of pre-installed Windows, even if you are going to remove it and replace it with GNU/Linux. Will Mrs. Clinton take measures to save citizens from paying forced Microsoft Taxes?

  The ideal situation would be that one should be able to buy hardware with or without Windows pre-installed. There should also be policies to ensure that Microsoft doesn’t kill Linux offers by ‘subsidizing’ Windows PCs.

  Thank you Mrs. Clinton for giving hope to citizens of the free world. Let’s see how much goes into practice.

• LCA (Linux.conf.au)

  • Brisbane to host LCA 2011

    Nine years after it first played host, Brisbane has been awarded the rights to host the Australian national Linux conference again.

    The winner of the bid for the 2011 conference was announced at the formal closing ceremony of the 11th Australian national Linux conference, held at the Conference Centre in Wellington this evening.

    [...]

    Linux Australia derives its yearly budget from the conference and thus things have to be on the plus side for the organisation to be able to plan any activities, apart from the purely ceremonial.

  • Smarter Linux file structure aims to ease software management

    The Unix file system hierarchy has been used for decades and remains the model for most of today’s modern Linux systems, but one distribution, GoboLinux, is making software management easier with an innovative directory structure.

    Speaking at this year’s Linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Wellington, New Zealand, GoboLinux developer Michael Homer said the standard Unix directory structure has survived for many years, but sometimes it is not optimal for contemporary computing.

  • Labour plans Web 2.0 push for open government

    A key question that emerged in government use of open source and open ICT standards is whether failures to date lies in a lack of policy or a lack of will to put the policy into effect.

    “The policy is clear,” insisted former government CIO Laurence Millar, displaying policy statements from the e.govt.nz website “encouraging” agencies to look at open source software. “This is not about policy; it’s about changing attitudes.”

  • Open source conference opens its doors

    In a push to bring the open source software message to the non-hacker public, the Wellington open-source conference, linux.conf.au, is holding an Open Day at the Wellington Town Hall tomorrow.

    More than 30 exhibitors from business, education and community groups will be demonstrating some of the software they have developed, organisers say.

• Server

  • London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform

    The London Stock Exchange has begun a twelve-month migration to its new trading platform, based on Linux, as trading fell sharply.

    In a busy three months for the exchange, it also agreed a framework plan for its newly-acquired controlling stake in Turquoise, a large volume ‘dark pool’ trading platform.

    The LSE suffered a heavy fall in sales of real-time trading data. While the group’s IT revenues, from selling information and server hosting, grew three percent to £55 million in the three months to 31 December, real-time data sales fell nine percent, nearly three million pounds.

  • Millennium Global Investments (MGI) Standardizes on Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware

    Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Millennium Global Investments (MGI), a specialist in developing and managing alternative investment products for institutional investors, has selected JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System) for its mission-critical business rules repository.

  • 10 Years of IBM Linux: Embracing Customer Choice

    Prial: The most important thing to do was to bring a complete IBM Linux solution-hardware, software, and services-to market. We had what was then the IBM PC Company supporting Linux machines, Linux on z, services around Linux, and a very varied portfolio of software running on Linux. We had IBM’s first major presence at LinuxWorld in 1999 and a consistent IBM story.

• Kernel Space

  • Btrfs Battles EXT4 With The Linux 2.6.33 Kernel

    Our 2.6.32 file-system benchmarks compared the performance directly of EXT3, EXT4, XFS, ReiserFS, and Btrfs. These results remain relevant so check them out if you are interested in the performance of these other Linux file-systems. For this article we are simply comparing the performance of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems using the Linux 2.6.33-rc4 kernel.

• Instructionals

  • Repair Damaged Drives With Linux

  • Auto shutdown your computer in Linux

  • Speculating on page faults

  • 7 KOffice Tips and Tricks

  • GNU/Linux: rdesktop – Working on a Windows Based PC Remotely

  • Get to know Linux: File permissions

  • Installation of OpenSIPS 1.6

  • Create an Ubuntu Repository

  • Create a KVM-based virtual server

  • Some thoughts on best practices for SMTP blocking of e-mail spam

• Devices/Embedded

  • BAE Systems uses MontaVista Linux in gun systems

    BAE Systems Bofors (Karlskoga, Sweden) has selected MontaVista Linux to power its latest naval and artillery gun systems.

    The use of a commercial quality embedded Linux is intended to provide for rapid development, combined with the long-term support required for military applications.

  • High-end NAS device runs Linux on dual-core Pineview Atom

    Synology announced it is shipping a Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device called the DiskStation DS1010+, offering a dual-core Intel Atom D510 and up to 10 drive bays. Earlier this month, the company also shipped a single-bay (2TB) DS110j NAS aimed at SOHO customers.

  • Android

    • Amazon brings Android MP3 store to UK

      UK MUSIC LOVERS who own an Android based smartphone are getting another online music service, this time from Amazon.

    • Sony Ericsson’s first Android smartphone to launch in April

      The phone is Sony Ericsson’s first to be based on Google’s Android operating system and is part of an effort to carve out a name for itself with phones that include social networking as well as entertainment functions such as music and movies.

    • Android 2.1 Source Code pushed to AOSP

      Looks like Google is starting to push Android 2.1 source code to the Android Open Source Project. The files are marked Android 2.1_R1 Snapshot.

    • Hacker brings multitouch to Google’s Nexus One

      Operating under the moniker Cyanogen, the hacker released the updates on Wednesday. The hack came as Google formally made the Nexus One operating system, Android version 2.1, open source, paving the way for much more advanced modifications of the phone.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Android tablet runs on Cortex-A9 SoC

      ViewSonic demonstrated an Android-powered 8.9-inch, 1024 × 800 tablet device at a trade show in Beijing, China, yesterday, reports Mobile.163. The VTablet 101 incorporates an ARM Cortex-A9 based Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip (SoC), plus WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4GB of flash storage, says the story.

    • Asus: What will be the next netbook?

      Smartbook manufacturers will seek to minimise the cost of the devices by using a lightweight OS, such as Android or Google’s forthcoming netbook OS Chrome, that require a modest amount of processing power and memory to run, she said.

Free Software/Open Source

• Why Free Software matters for Society (draft)

  Free Software is defined by four freedoms, and intends to create ethical relationships in the digital age of society, based on trust, responsibility and freedom.

  In a world where we rely increasingly upon Information Technologies such as software and networks, it is important to realize software is more than code. The effects of programs go beyond the limited scope of developers, and contribute to shape our future.

  The Free Software movement aims at making this future possible for everyone by ensuring fundamental principles of freedom for all, equally.

• Challenges for open source software in Nigeria

  Collaboration has not started working properly in our software development society. The main idea behind OSS is to create a platform where ideas and knowledge are shared productively, hence creating a broader base for development and innovations. It is still rooted in our attitude to maintain total ownership and control over whatever is ours. Sharing our original ideas such that others can contribute to it and thus be a part of its improved version is a thinking that is naturally alien to us.

  We need a system that would facilitate open sharing of ideas and collaboration where innovations are supported, nurtured and protected. The only way we can come about this is if we believed that we should be proud of advances made in our local software terrain, whether little or massive. We need a true beginning.

• California CIO: Open source officially welcome here

  The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the state of California has issued an IT policy letter to formally affirm that open source software is acceptable for use by government agencies in California.

• A Look Behind the Scenes at Social Networking Sites

  Twitter has been open about its use of Ruby on Rails as its foundation and Jabber/XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) instant messaging. These are both open source technologies. This means that open source products keep the social networks up and running.

• SourceMap Provides An Open-Source Tool For Tracking Manufacturing Impact

  A project of the MIT Media Lab, SourceMap aims to provide insight on the origins of the products we consume, tracking their every component. The open-source tool gives registered users a platform for building a database composed of the origin, carbon footprint, and other impact-relevant characteristics of manufactured items. The project provides analysis tools such that producers, businesses owners and consumers can gather information concerning the impact of various supply chains to guide sustainable decision-making.

• ‘Inbound Marketing’ and ideas for fostering the open source community

  You could even argue the point that the community of users around many open source technologies like MySQL, JBoss, or Apache are more significant than the technology itself. After all, there are plenty of open source databases, app servers, and Web servers to chose from. What made these particular products stand out in the marketplace? If you’re using open source or trying to build an open source business, how do you tap into that community?

• Benjamin Mako Hill

  At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate.

• Ifbyphone buys Cloudvox, lets clients build their own open-source telephony apps

  Ifbyphone, a company offering a suite of its own web-based voice and phone applications, announced today that it has acquired Cloudvox to give its customers the tools they need to build their own open-source, customized phone applications to fit their business needs. No financial deals were disclosed.

• Open source platform assisting in Haiti

  Federal News Radio is continuing to cover the government’s efforts to help in Haiti more than a week after that devastating earthquake.

• The decade of development

  2. The rise of open source software (OSS)

  Open Source Software reached critical mass in the decade of the noughties. The open source model caught on like wild fire among developers and quickly became adopted by entrepreneurs looking to build companies by providing services for these OSS technologies. And it worked. Marc Fleury founded JBoss around the JBoss application server and later sold the company to Red Hat for more than $350 million. Rod Johnson founded SpringSource around the open source Spring Framework, and last year sold it to VMware for $420 million. VCs saw an opportunity and began to get behind the best and the brightest. And organisations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation sprang up to, among other things, foster community involvement in various open source projects. Although the ASF was founded in 1999, it saw some of its best days in the noughties.

• Code Is the New Resume: How to Get an IT Job in Today’s Economy

  Dmitri, on the other hand, is a Linux developer. His power management code has been mainlined into the Linux kernel steadily over the last few years. He’s even been invited to Kernel Summit. Behemoth Consumer Products (BCP) employed Dmitri for the last three years, for work on their version of Linux that they embed in their devices. They, too, hit a rough patch, and Dmitri is out looking for work.

  Luckily for Dmitri, his colleagues in the Linux community all work for companies who use embedded Linux. It’s easier for him to network, and employers don’t have to count on Dmitri for a description of his work. It lives in the open, in the kernel tree, for anyone to inspect. (He can even make it in the “Who Writes Linux” report that the Linux Foundation publishes every year.)

• Events

  • OpenGeo Announces Open Source Geospatial Training Series

    OpenGeo engineers will provide training on popular open source geospatial components including GeoServer, OpenLayers and PostGIS, as well as review courses on the new, integrated OpenGeo Suite. Training is available at OpenGeo’s new training facility in downtown Manhattan.

  • Pentaho Expands International Training Program to Meet Rising User Demand

  • Open Source & Software SIG

    ‘Open Source Software vs Commercial Hardware: When the unstoppable force hits the immovable object’

• UK

  • Open source software ‘can alleviate security risks’

    Open source software could help to alleviate the increasing risks posed by hackers, according to an IT researcher.

  • Bett 2010 roundup

    Sadly we met few children at this year’s show but any that ventured near met a sticky end in that the price for a lollypop was a free copy of Ubuntu and a ‘talk’ :). Also young teachers were thin on the ground. Maybe ICT is uncool?

  • Tim Berners-Lee launches UK public data website

    Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched Data.gov.uk, giving access to a wealth of public data, and the Guardian launched a website to make finding that data easier

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Says New Firefox 20% Faster Than Last Version

    For developers, Firefox 3.6 supports the latest HTML5 specification, including the file API for local file handling, font support (in addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, it supports the new Web Open Font Format), CSS gradients (linear and radical), and device orientation – it exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to web pages.

  • Firefox 3.6 Boosts Speed, Tabs, HTML 5 and CSS

    Customizing how Firefox looks has now also become easier, thanks to the integration of the Personas add-on directly into Firefox 3.6. With Personas, users can change the way Firefox looks without restarting the browser.

  • Mozilla’s Bespin rebooted, to be GPL compatible

    The Mozilla Labs Bespin project, to create a web based integrated development environment which makes use of cloud functionality, is undergoing a reboot aimed at making Bespin easier to work with and extend. Bespin was introduced in February 2009 by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almear. In September 2009, Galbraith and Almear moved to Palm, which in turn led to an opportunity to remodel the project. The reboot’s progress has been detailed in a posting by Kevin Dangoor on the Mozilla Lab’s Bespin Blog.

• Databases

  • Oracle Sun Merger Wins EU Approval

    Oracle moved closer to sealing its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Thursday, as the European Union’s antitrust body formally signed off on the deal following a three-month investigation into its impact on competition in the IT sector.

    “I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned,” said EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes, in a statement. “Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Kroes.

  • Oracle to provide Sun road map next week

    Oracle will provide more details about its plans for Sun Microsystems at an event next Wednesday, the same day European regulators are expected to sign off on the deal.

    CEO Larry Ellison will host the event at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, where executives will outline Oracle’s strategy for absorbing Sun, including details about product road maps, Oracle said in a statement.

  • UPDATED: Sun CEO Issues Memo in Wake of Oracle Acquisition Greenlight

    During his tenure as CEO of Sun, Schwartz was best known as the pony-tailed lover of all things open source, quixotically dressed on stage in pinstripe suits. I’m betting he has serious doubts about Oracle’s intent to advance Sun’s open source efforts.

  • EnterpriseDB Selected by Genscape for Energy Industry Inventory Analysis Solution

• Business

  • Nexenta Systems Announces Record Growth in 2009

    NexentaStor is the leading hardware independent storage solution built upon the breakthrough open source ZFS file system.

  • Selling to CIOs – Helping Them Get in the Game

    I had a really good lunch the other day with Bob Suh, ex-CTO of Accenture, at the Four Seasons in Boston discussing his new venture OnCorps. (As an aside, the Four Seasons clearly believes we are out of the recession because with one hour of parking my burger cost $42.)

  • Liferay Reports Strong Company Growth and Leadership in 2009

    Liferay, Inc., the leading visionary for open source portal and collaboration technologies, today announced that it experienced tremendous growth in 2009, underscoring its impact and influence in a fast-growing and dynamic open source software industry. The company’s successful penetration into the enterprise market with Liferay Portal, its leading web platform for the enterprise, provides a strong basis for leadership in portal and collaboration technologies in 2010.

• VoIP

  • Sangoma Extends Commitment to FreeSWITCH Open Source Telephony Project

  • Fonality Names Dean Mansfield as CEO

  • Telephony Industry Marks Decade Full of Change: Digium

    With the New Year underway, it’s common for many businesses executives to take time to reflect on the evolution of their industry and where their company stands today. And Digium, Inc. the Asterisk (News – Alert) Company, is no exception.

    Danny Windham, president and CEO, Digium, Inc., discussed how the ever-changing telephony market reached its current model and how open source technology has played a role to help reduce margins and costs in the communications space at a keynote session at ITEXPO today.

  • Digium Launches Asterisk ‘Marketplace,’ Upgrades Switchvox UC Solution

    With the launch of a new marketplace where vendors can reach out to integrators and solution providers, Asterisk sponsor Digium is says it will make available a range of products and services based on the open-source platform.

• Sauce Labs

  • Sauce Labs, the Selenium Company, Announces $3.1 Million Series A Financing Led by Contrarian Group

    Sauce Labs, the Selenium Company, today announced that it has closed a $3.1 million round of Series A financing led by the Contrarian Group, Peter Ueberroth’s investment management firm. Founded in July 2008, Sauce Labs makes open source Selenium-based cross-browser software testing easy for businesses developing and testing web applications. Sauce Labs offers a cloud testing service called Sauce OnDemand, commercial support for Selenium, as well as commercial-grade versions with premium features. Selenium’s creator, Jason Huggins, is a co-founder of Sauce Labs.

  • Cloud and open source meet to test Web apps

    Sauce Labs also uses cloud services to make testing with Selenium testing easier than running on your own server infrastructure. Sauce On-Demand, is a hosted offering that allows you to remotely test web applications across various browsers in the cloud.

    Huggins said this is an intersection between open source and the cloud that makes sense. By offering a cloud-based version of Selenium, users have the ability to parallelize their test and use cloud resources on demand in order to take advantage of a large number of instances in the cloud and get test results and bug reports must faster.

  • Selenium Gets Some Sauce for Open Source Testing

    As increasing numbers of applications move online, the need for functional cross-browser testing continues to grow, which is good news for the open source Selenium project—a popular automated application testing tool with nearly 3 million downloads to date.

• Releases

  • MuleSoft releases proprietary JMS server

    The company chose to license a JMS server from an unnamed OEM because its customers were encountering reliability problems with Apache ActiveMQ, said CTO Ross Mason. MuleSoft customers had previously used ActiveMQ.

  • Chamilo.org – An Open Source Tool For Educating People

    A South American startup, Chamilo is a collaboration platform and an open source e-learning solution. As they put it on the site, their objective is to bring people “the best e-learning and collaboration platform in the open source world”. As it stands today Chamilo can be installed anywhere, and educative contents can be easily created and implemented through it.

  • GroundWork Open Source releases Monitor Enterprise 6.1

    GroundWork Open Source, a provider of open source system and network management software, has released Monitor Enterprise 6.1. that includes enhancements to the GWOS platform for customers with heterogeneous IT environments.

• Licensing

  • Open Source Licensing and Community

    I agree, license and copyright are factors in creating and fostering communities but I don’t think it’s the most important set of factors. License and community, while related are very much separate issues. Open source tends to fetish license and thus it’s over-emphasized in conversations where it at best a contributing factor.

• Openness

  • Mik Kersten on transparency

    Mik, pictured here, is CEO at Tasktop Technologies. He attributes much of the success at Mylyn to the project’s transparency.

  • Some professors using alternatives to expensive textbooks

    Independent book publishers are also a part of a unique initiative: attempting to implement open-source textbooks in classrooms across the country.

  • Nina Paley vs. Jaron Lanier

    The one point that really does need to be refuted is that he seems to believe that artificial scarcity somehow makes people pay. He talks about the importance of a “social contract” to have people “pay for others’ brains.” He says “people need to be secure that they’re earning their dignity and don’t need to sing for their supper every night.”

  • NSF grant to launch world’s first open-source genetic parts production facility

    With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these “DNA parts” in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.

  • GlaxoSmithKline Using Open Source Principles To Further Drug Research

    The first way GSK plans to encourage drug research is by setting up an “Open Lab” in Tres Cantos, Spain, where as many as 60 independent researchers will be able to access the the lab’s data and scientific equipment. GSK is also seeding the lab with $8 million to help fund research projects.

  • The open-source hydrogen car set to change the industry

    The first departure from the conventional business plan is that the designs of the car will be released under an open source licence. This allows people to freely build on ideas and designs, speeding up innovation and enabling technologies to be quickly improved, meeting the needs of people rather than markets.

  • Design your Own Electric Vehicle With the Trexa EV Platform!

    The design of everything else is up to you, and its modular nature means that it can be tailored to virtually any application – from futuristic connected tram systems for commercial fleets, to high-performance hot rods, to neighborhood-friendly EV’s perfect for a jaunt around town.

  • HP announces 3D printer range

    The 3D printers from HP are designed to be cheap, but will struggle to compete with open-source designs like the MakerBot.

    [...]

    Thankfully, other innovators are stepping up to fill the gap: from the completely DIY RepRap, which is built on the von Nuemann-esque concept of a 3D printer capable of printing other 3D printers, to the kit-form MakerBot which offers an open-source alternative to HP’s new range with kits starting at just $750 (£460).

  • Company Plans to Give Away Open-Source Robots

    Willow Garage group hopes to push forward the field of open-source robotics generally. It could allow researchers to draw on common hardware and software programs for robots instead of needing to start from scratch, hopefully advancing the field of robotics.

  • Company Offers Free Robots for Open Source Developers

• Standards/Consortia

  • Introducing YouTube HTML5 Supported Videos

    A while ago, YouTube launched a simple demo of an HTML5-based video player. Recently, we published a blog post on our pre-spring cleaning effort and your number one request was that YouTube do more with HTML5. Today, we’re introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player.

    HTML5 is a new web standard that is gaining popularity rapidly and adds many new features to your web experience. Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback. This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin.

  • YouTube Offers HTML5 Video Player as Flash Alternative

    YouTube on Wednesday announced that the popular video-sharing Website will now support HTML5 for video playback. HTML5, for the uninitiated, is an in-development Web standard that aims to add various niceties and enhancements to the modern Web-browsing experience.

  • Google, Apple, the MAFIAA, and the racketeering scheme afoot in Youtube.

    Unfortunately…The World Wide Web Consortium, the people who draft and implement web standards, were coerced by a cartel of corporate bad guys like Apple, the RIAA/MPAA (the MAFIAA), and Google, to drop an unpatented, fully documented, public domain, royalty free set of codecs that *any* browser or user can use (Ogg Theora and Vorbis) in favor of the heavily patented, restricted license, royalty-encumbered h.264 and AAC, which only the aforementioned cartel can afford to implement or use.

    Yes, I know that these codecs are widespread, and it’s mainly because Apple sells them on iTunes, but using AAC (or any other patented codec) in and of itself is nearly as bad as using a DRM-encumbered AAC that had everyone up in arms. (Yeah, I would say that MP3 is the least bad of your proprietary options, if you have to use proprietary. That doesn’t make it peachy.) Patent-encumbered codecs are the next best thing to DRM.

  • Google betas Flash-free YouTube sans open codec

    A Google spokesman indicated that the choice of H.264 over Ogg does not mean the company has picked H.264 for an eventual Flash-free version of YouTube. “Support for HTML5 is just a TestTube experiment at this time and a starting point,” he said. “We can’t comment specifically on what codecs we intend to support, but we’re open to supporting more of them over time. At the very least we hope to help further this active and ongoing discussion.”

Leftovers

• The NYT’s paywall

  I suspect that what’s going to happen now is that as the moment of truth approaches, bloggers will increasingly search around for the NYT’s replacement as online paper of record: the way that blogs work is that they’re backed up by links to reliable sources, and a link is worthless if the person clicking on it risks running straight into a paywall, unable to read the information in question. The NYT’s journalism might well continue to be reliable, but its website won’t be, any more. (For the record: I feel very comfortable in saying that Reuters stories are just as reliable as those of the NYT, if not more so, and that if a link to a story works for you, it will work identically for anybody else in the world.)

• Environment

  • UVa engineers find significant environmental impacts with algae-based biofuel

    With many companies investing heavily in algae-based biofuels, researchers from the University of Virginia’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have found there are significant environmental hurdles to overcome before fuel production ramps up. They propose using wastewater as a solution to some of these challenges.

  • IPCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers

    The admission today followed a New Scientist article last week that revealed the source of the claim made in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not peer-reviewed scientific literature – but a media interview with a scientist conducted in 1999. Several senior scientists have now said the claim was unrealistic and that the large Himalayan glaciers could not melt in a few decades.

• Finance

  • Can AIG Be Saved?

    Goldman Sachs has a new enemy—as if it needed another one.

    Hank Greenberg, as we sit in his Park Avenue office, is telling me how to do my job, saying reporters need to get to the bottom of the events that preceded and followed the government bailout of AIG, the insurance company he built into a global giant.

    In particular, they need to get to the bottom of the part played by the investment bank of Goldman Sachs. He waves a sheaf of press reports from the New York Times, Washington Post and McClatchy papers about the firm’s doings before and during the subprime meltdown. “We’re dealing with a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are not in the box. Bit by bit, we’re getting the pieces. The pieces are failing into place and the picture on the face of the puzzle is not a pretty picture.”

    Let me get this straight. Is Mr. Greenberg saying the machinations of Goldman Sachs were responsible for the disastrous failure of AIG amid the recent financial crisis? “Well, it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to come to that conclusion.”

  • Exclusive: U.S. Attorney General’s 5,000 DOJ Pending Indictments Targeting Financial Fraud, And National Security

    The enormous size of the thefts here (in the trillions of dollars) threatens U.S. national security, and global stability. We have seen the dollar implode, retirement accounts savaged, and major institutions brought to their knees and worse, much worse in many cases. These thefts have been implicated in the destruction of investor confidence, and there is no form of security that has not been impacted, from stocks and bonds, currencies, physical and forward commodities, agencies, to commodities, and more. These same thefts could never have been executed except with the wholesale cooperation of not just hedge funds, and investment banks, but only with the implicit cooperation, support and protection of every form of financial service monopoly involved in trading, clearance and settlement of securities globally in all forms of assets along with the major international money center banks, a pliant press, and a corrupt research industry perforated by criminal interests who pay top price for the purchase or sale of research for securities they specialize in. Oversight provided by our U.S. government branches and agencies hasn’t been deficient, it has been non-existent, a canard by every perspective.

• PR/AstroTurf

  • Pelosi: House won’t pass Senate bill to save health-care reform

    As Democrats continued to grapple with the consequences of their loss in Massachusetts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday eliminated the most obvious avenue for completing health-care reform, saying the House will not embrace the version of the legislation already approved by the Senate.

  • Exclusive: Kucinich shreds Democrats for betraying the promise of change

    Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday said the Massachusetts election was a “wake up call” for Democrats and that his party had better change course or it could suffer devastating losses come November.

    “People elected Democrats in 2008 to change the country’s direction,” he told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview.

• Censorship/Civil Rights

  • Clinton praised for Internet freedom speech

    Clinton’s announcement that fighting Internet censorship would be a top priority for the Department of State is welcome news for dissidents in Iran, said Ashraf, co-founder of AccessNow.org, a group focused on providing Internet tools allowing freedom of expression.

  • 1984 film classification law gets reboot

    Anyone hoping that 2010 was the year when they could produce smut or violence for direct release to DVD, without undergoing the tiresome process of having their work checked and classified by the British Board of Film Classification, can hit pause now.

  • Polish Internet Users Against the Censorship of the Net

    Polish government wants to enforce Internet filtering to eliminate online gambling and child pornography. Everything for the benefit of our children, as this is the argument which is hard to stay against.

    However, a notable group of Polish lawyers, journalists, academics, enterpreneurs, politicians and bloggers think otherwise and signed a letter (written by myself, btw) to President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, asking him to turn the law down (in Polish legal system, president has the right to do this, but the parliament can then overcome president’s opposition if 2/3 of the delegates vote for it).

  • Four More Inducted Into The Streisand Effect Hall Of Shame

    For the record, here are the EFF’s four latest inductees:

    * Peabody Energy, for issuing outstandingly spurious trademark claims against a spoof site criticizing their “clean coal” group;
    * Yahoo, for an impressive attempt to return a cat to the bag after a leak of its guide to snooping services for law enforcement was posted to a whistleblower site;
    * Perez Hilton and the Miss Universe Organization for endeavoring to stop a non-profit from airing an ad commenting on a public same-sex marriage controversy initiated by their videos; and
    * Universal Music Group, for attempting to muzzle online criticism of the rapper Akon.

• Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

  • Amazon ‘makes it easier’ for authors to DRM Kindle ebooks

    Amazon has added a new tool to its Kindle self-publishing service that lets authors and small publishers easily choose between DRM and no DRM when uploading texts to its online book store.

    Amazon tells The Reg that no-DRM was always the default with its Digital Text Platform – used by small publishers and authors as opposed to large publishing houses. In the past, the company says, if authors wanted to add DRM, they had to download separate software. Now, they can add DRM simply by checking a radio button.

• Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

  • IFPI: Piracy Bad!!! Government Must Fix Because We Don’t Want To Adapt!

    It’s that time of the year when the IFPI comes out with its annual fear-mongering report, and this year’s has really gone overboard into the ridiculous. The basics are pretty much what you’d expect (“piracy bad! industry dying! governments must break everything to protect us!”). However, the details are just downright laughable. The entire report seems premised on the idea that direct music sales is the only thing that really matters (a blatant confusion about the difference between the recording industry (which the IFPI represents) and the music industry (which the IFPI pretends to represent).

  • Malaysia’s New Copyright Act To Make Owning A Single Counterfeit DVD Illegal

    Imagine buying what you thought was a legitimate DVD and then being dragged to court for it.

  • Wiggling Their Way To Musical Success Without A Label

    Tim Lash points us to a CNN interview with The Wiggles, the massively popular pop band for toddlers. The whole interview is interesting, but the most interesting part is the explanation of how the band went it alone.

  • Pigopolists wants another stab at OiNK

    John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), said the industry is considering civil proceedings against Ellis in a second bid to collect the £180,000 it claims he made from running the invite-only file sharing website.

  • Music Industry Set For Civil Action Against OiNK

    Alan Ellis, the ex-admin of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, was cleared of Conspiracy to Defraud by jury of his peers last week. But now it seems that as one battle ends, another begins. IFPI says it is considering civil action, and is committed to reclaiming the money donated to the site in order to give it back to the artists.

  • No, David Bowie Is Not Responsible For The Financial Crisis

    We’ve talked in the past about some of the many rather innovative efforts by David Bowie to come up with new business models. He’s been a huge pioneer in embracing what new technologies allow — and also new markets and financial opportunities.

  • MPs frozen out of super-secret copyright talks

    The government has refused to give MPs access to papers on international negotiations about copyright enforcement on the internet and at national borders.

    Junior business minister David Lammy said he could not put documents about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in the House of Commons Library, because other countries wanted to maintain secrecy.

    Lammy said he was “sympathetic” to calls for more transparency and had told his officials to press the point at the talks, but added: “Disclosure of any documents without the agreement of all our ACTA negotiating partners would damage the United Kingdom’s international relations.

  • BPI Insists UK ISPs Overstating The Cost Of Three Strikes; So Will BPI Pay The Difference If Wrong?

    Of course, BPI can’t accept those numbers, so its commissioned its own study which (of course!) claims that the cost to ISPs would be tiny. Hell, they’d barely be noticeable at all.

  • Prisons And Hair Dressers Latest To Push Back On Ridiculous Collection Society Demands

    The first involves prisons in the UK who are refusing to pay the licensing fees, and thus are telling prisoners (hey look, real thieves!) that they can’t listen to music any more in any area where multiple people might be (the kitchen, workshops, restrooms, etc.) since others might overhear it. Yes, listening to music in a prison apparently requires a separate performance license.