• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Applications

• Best Download manager for Linux

• Marave – Distraction free writing in Linux

  Marave aims to combat this by shoving everything but the task in hand out of the way. No toolbars, menus or web-browser peeking from underneath the window; As my mother likes to say, ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

• Remember those birthdays with GBirthday

  Since today is the birthday of both myself and the US President I thought it apropos to cover a birthday reminder tool for the Linux operating system. There are a few of these tools but only one of them really is worth discussing at any length. That tool? GBirthday. GBirthday is a tool that lives in your notification area and keeps track of the bithdays in your Evolution contacts or your Thunderbird/Icebird, Lightning, Sunbird/Iceowl events, even CVS files or MySQL databases!

• Instructionals

  • Lookup Words from the Command Line Using a Simple Bash Script

  • Fedora GIT package update (fedpkg) step by step.

  • Get the OS X ‘Genie Effect’ in Compiz easily

  • small screen Ubuntu windows customizations

  • Recover wasted disk space in Ubuntu

  • alias

  • Introducing CsoundAC: Algorithmic Composition With Csound And Python

  • Disk Information Utility – di

  • 15 Useful Bash Shell Built-in Commands (With Examples)

  • Using the Opera browser as a widget engine in Linux

  • Fedora 13 btrfs installation guide

  • Unix How-To: Give Me That Old-Time Security!

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Preview of KDE 4.5

    Plasma, KDE’s desktop shell, has a few new features added in SC 4.5. Among them are the preview button in Folderview. Instead of hovering over a folder and automatically giving you a popup access window, hovering your mouse will show an “up arrow” button that gives the same functionality, making it less intrusive.

    KDE has also added many new features and fixes to KDE games, admin tools, and other included software. KDE 4.5 is available for many operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix variants, Windows, and Mac OS X. Most Linux distributions provide updated binaries through their software repositories. You can also download KDE from the project’s website and build it from source. KDE is free and open source software, and the new version 4.5 is expected to be released today, August 4.

  • KDE release day for 4.5.0 delayed

    Today an email from the release team was sent out notifying KDE developers and packagers that the release of the next KDE software compilation, containing versions 4.5.0 of the Dev Platform, Workspaces and application modules, will be delayed by a week.

Distributions

• Weaknet Linux – Penetration Testing & Forensic Analysis Linux Distribution

  WeakNet Linux is designed primarily for penetration testing, forensic analysis and other security tasks. WeakNet Linux IV was built from Ubuntu 9.10 which is a Debian based distro. All references to Ubuntu have been removed as the author completely re-compiled the kernel, removed all Ubuntu specific software which would cause the ISO to bloat, and used a non-Ubuntu-traditional Window Manager, with no DM. To start X11 (Fluxbox) simply type “startx” at the command line as root.

• Hacking is easy…

  Now, Gentoo has currently a number of hacks over Rubygems (the library, and the package manager) for two main reason: supporting the Portage-based install of gems in the old manner (as in calling gem from within the eclass), and supporting multiple Ruby implementations to be installed at the same time.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • KDE 4.5 RC3 available for Mandriva 2010 Spring !!

    The third release candidate release of KDE 4.5 was released last week and again thanks to neoclust and mikala who did all the rebuild work this time, we have packages for Mandriva 2010 Spring since a couple of days now. Packages for both i586 and x86_64 are available. Here are the upgrade instructions:

  • Mandriva2010 Spring..

    1.faster boot
    2.quick response.
    3.better fonts.
    4.default wide range software
    5. large repository media(Free DVD version)..

  • August 2010 Issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine

    In the August 2010 issue:

    Xfce 4.6.2: Xfce Settings Manager, Part 3
    Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Your Xfwm Theme
    Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Thunar’s Context Menus
    Video Encoding: Step-By-Step
    Linux IS Ready For The Desktop
    OpenOffice 3.2: Calc
    Clipping Objects Together To Create Cool Graphics With Inkscape
    Ms_meme’s Nook: Linux Time
    Forum Foible: Fun With PCLinuxOS
    Computer Languages A to Z: Modula2
    Command Line Interface Intro: Part 11
    Screenshot Showcase
    Alternate OS: Haiku, Part 2
    Game Zone: World Of Goo
    Firefox Add-ons: Xmarks Marks The Spot
    and much, much more!

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat gets bump as markets rise

    After a 200-plus point increase on Monday, the Dow was set to give up some of those gains. U.S. futures pointed to a weak opening, CNBC reports.

  • Red Hat vs. Ubuntu: Why upstream commits matter

    There has been some ‘debate’ that has bubbled to the surface again recently about Ubuntu vs. Red Hat on the issue of who contributes what to Linux.

    Red Hat leads the Linux world with its contributions to the core Linux kernel and it also leads with its contributions to the GNOME desktop project as well. Ubuntu on the hand does contribute (not as much), and is focused on ‘fit and finish’ for the most part.

    I personally don’t have much issue with the fact that Ubuntu doesn’t contribute as much upstream as Red Hat — though it is something that matters. Let me explain.

• Debian Family

  • On extending Debian membership to non-programming contributors

    Stefano raised again the issue of providing some kind of Debian membership to people that contribute to Debian in unusual ways (not involving deep purely technical skills), like doing translation, documentation, marketing, design, etc.

    [...]

    It’s true that the name “Debian Developer” is suboptimal for non-programmers. But it’s also suboptimal for most DDs, since most of us don’t strictly develop software: we “just” maintain packages, mainly developing meta-data around the upstream source code. “Debian Developer” is how we call our full-fledged project members. Do we want to classify those non-programming contributors as second-class citizens? If not, we need to make them “Debian Developers”, not some strange other name.

  • DebConf 10: Day 2

    Stefano delivered an excellent address to the Debian project. As Project Leader, he offered a perspective on how far Debian has come, raised some of the key questions facing Debian today, and challenged the project to move forward and improve in several important ways.

    He asked the audience: Is Debian better than other distributions? Is Debian still relevant? Why/how?

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Canonical Adjusts Ubuntu Linux Partner Strategy

      Canonical has made a subtle but important shift in its channel partner strategy. Sure, the Ubuntu Linux promoter continues to engage with solutions providers. But increasingly, Canonical wants to recruit hosting partners and cloud partners onto the Ubuntu bandwagon.

      [...]

      The VAR Guy is intrigued but key questions remain. For starters how does Canonical intend to compete with Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management (designed for on-premises and cloud environments) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which Red Hat is promoting to cloud partners?

    • Main frozen for Alpha-3

    • Making room in the sound indicator

      In Maverick we’re adding the new Ayatana indicator for sound, Conor Curran’s very classy implementation of MPT’s very classy spec. It’s a Category Indicator, like the messaging menu, so it allows apps to embed themselves into it in a standard and appropriate way. You can have multiple players represented there, and control them directly from the menu, without needing a custom AppIndicator or windows open for the player(s). The integration with Rhythmbox and, via the MPRIS dbus API, several other players is coming along steadily.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo for IVI 1.0 Screenshots

      If you’re wondering exactly what MeeGo is, it’s a combination of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo project. This lightweight combination targets smartphones, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. This specific release is for Atom-based IVI systems. These systems are designed to deliver things like navigation, entertainment, and networked computing services inside of cars, trucks, buses, planes and more. On their website MeeGo states “As vehicles become connected to the internet, the demand for internet-based entertainment applications and services increases and MeeGo strives to accelerate the pace of innovation in IVI.” I couldn’t help downloading MeeGo for IVI V1.0, taking some screenshots, and writing some of my thoughts on the new features. Be sure to visit the cart where you can buy MeeGo on USB.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • JoliCloud Finally Launches

      JoliCloud is based on Linux, and is looking to go after cloud clients such as netbooks and tablets. However, the Paris-based company started by former Netvibes founder Tariq Krim is also exploring ways to recycle old computers and make them cloud compatible — targeting an economically sensitive demographic. Krim thinks web OS-based machines are going to find favor in the educational realm as well.

Six open source projects you should be using

Nagios: Open source network and system monitoring and notification
I’ve been a fan of Nagios for a long time. Nagios is a soup-to-nuts network and system monitoring and notification tool that has an extensive list of plug-ins and a vibrant community. There is a steep learning curve to set it up, but once that’s done, you’ll have your finger on the pulse of the entire IT plant.

CMS

• Drupal has a two-prong enterprise strategy

  The news peg here is an agreement with Cap Gemini to promote Drupal as part of its Immediate platform. On his blog Buytaert compared it to the decision by Dell and IBM to ship Linux on their machines in 2007.

Business

• Australia to Host Global Open Source Leaders

  Leaders of Ingres, Jaspersoft, Liferay, Sugar CRM, Pentaho and Red Hat are converging for the inaugural SPLASH Conference in Sydney on August 10, 2010. The main reason of the meeting is to share ideas with local firms in Australia.

BSD

• 10 differences between Linux and BSD

  How often do you hear people lumping together Linux and any of the BSDs? I’ve done it on occasion, and I hear it all the time. Of course, there are plenty of similarities between Linux and BSD: They are both based on UNIX. For the most part, both systems are developed by noncommercial organizations. And I must say that both the Linux and BSD variants have one common goal — to create the most useful, reliable operating system available.

Government

• CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead

  For three years, Matthew Burton has been trying to get a simple, useful software tool into the hands of analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency. For three years, haggling over the code’s intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley. So now, Burton’s releasing it — free to the public, and under an open source license.

  Burton, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and software developer, speaks today at the Military Open Source Software Working Group in Virginia. It’s a gathering of 80 or so national security tech-types who’ve heard a thousand stories about good ideas and good code getting sunk, because of squabbles over who owns the software.

Licensing

• More GPL Enforcement Progress

  LWN is reporting a GPL enforcement story that I learned about during last week while at GUADEC (excellent conference, BTW, blog post on that later this week). I wasn’t sure if it was really of interest to everyone, but since it’s hit the press, I figured I’d write a brief post to mention it.

  As many probably know, I’m president of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the non-profit organizational home of the BusyBox project. As part of my role at Conservancy, I help BusyBox in its GPL enforcement efforts. Specifically and currently, the SFLC is representing Conservancy in litigation against a number of defendants who have violated the GPL and were initially unresponsive to Conservancy’s attempts to bring them into compliance with the terms of the license.

Openness/Sharing

• Update on Open Source Initiative’s adoption of the Open Knowledge Definition

  A few weeks back we blogged about Russ Nelson’s proposals for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to adopt the Open Knowledge Definition, our standard for openness in relation to content and data.

  [...]

  Here are the questions we arrived at (thanks to Skud aka Kirrily Robert for taking notes):

  1. What happens with data that’s not copyrightable? 1a. What about data that consists of facts about the world and thus even a collection of it cannot be copyrighted, but the exact file format can be copyrighted? Many sub-federal-level governments in the US have to publish facts on demand but claim a copyright on the formatting.
  2. What about data that’s not accessible as a whole, but only through an API?
  3. We’re thinking that OKD #9 should read “execution of an additional agreement” rather than “additional license”.
  4. Does OKD #4 apply to works distributed in a particular file format? Is a movie not open data if it’s encoded in a patent-encumbered codec? Does it become open data if it’s re-encoded?
  5. What constitutes onerous attribution in OKD #5? If you get open data from somebody, and they have an attribution page, is it sufficient for you to comply with the attribution requirement if you point to the attribution page?

Can open business practices survive an acquisition?

In a recent case study about the company, the New York Times details how, almost immediately following the deal, friction emerged between the two companies. In an effort to stay the course of their mission statement, Honest Tea added a “no high-fructose corn syrup” label to the packaging of its Honest Kids line of children’s drinks. Coke saw this label as disparaging and potentially damaging to its other product lines and asked Honest Tea to change or remove the claim from its labels.

Wave Goodbye To Google Wave

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• How WikiLeaks Is Changing the World

  After dumping 90,000 documents from the war in Afghanistan, and with a treasure trove of millions of files on other topics from around the world waiting to be released, everywhere-and-nowhere Internet leak hub WikiLeaks is once again the center of a discussion about the changing landscape of investigative journalism and the relationship between the media and the state secrets it reports. Nobody questions the importance of WikiLeaks, but not everyone is pleased.

• Surprise! Feds stored thousands of checkpoint body scan images after all

  US agencies have long defended the use of body scanning devices at airports with the promise that all images will be discarded as soon as security staff have viewed them.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Hadopi’s Secret Internet Spying Spec Leaked

    As a part of France’s three strikes law, the organization in charge of implementing the program, Hadopi (which, we should remind you, was caught infringing itself in using a font it did not license for its logo), has been tasked with figuring out a way to actually block people from the internet, or to stop them from using certain file sharing programs. While there were public consultations on how to do this, the actual technical spec was supposed to have been kept secret.

  • Flattr: A Social Micropayment Platform for Financing Free Works

    The idea is pretty simple. Flattr functions very nearly like a social networking or social bookmarking site — but with money. Sites that support Flattr provide a button that members of Flattr can push to signal their appreciation. When they do, the Flattr site gets a notification.

    At the end of each month, each member’s clicks are added up. Their monthly balance is then divided up equally among all of the clicked “things”. These are paid out, micro-payment style, to the recipients. The total amount spent by the donor, though, is constant — they set this choice from their Flattr account. So the amount they spend is totally predictable, no matter how many times they click.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Unruly Customers

M$, too, had a lot of willing and unwilling customers who have now seen the light and broken out of their jail. Fortunately there is no doubt in most people’s minds that it is legal to migrate to GNU/Linux. They know PCs are somewhat more open than an embedded thingie. That wasn’t always so. I have met people who thought it was against the law to replace the OS, but lately, folks have been installing GNU/Linux on their own or with some help and a few are buying PCs installed with GNU/Linux.

Instructionals

• Open Source Software Shortcuts for Doing More with ‘Less’

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • how to get more people wikiing?

    Today’s blog entry is a simple question:

    What would motivate you to contribute to KDE wikis such as Techbase or Userbase?

    Within the Plasma team, developers put a fair amount of time and effort into writing tutorials, with some more taking shape on our Community wiki pages. We’re about to start on content on Userbase, starting with documenting how Actitivies work from a user’s point of view in the 4.5 release. Other teams within KDE are doing similarly.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Red Hat Is The Top GNOME Contributor

  • Ubuntu To Get Ayatana Sound Indicator

    Ubuntu’s next version, code-named Maverick Meerkat, is slated for the November release. Mark Shuttleworth once again emphasized the ongoing work on improving the art-work of Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu is planning to add a new sound indicator to enhance the ‘music’ experience under Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth is toying with the artwork of the indicator.

  • GNOME Commit-Digest Issue 95

    This week… 1817 commits, in 202 projects, by 221 happy hackers (and 396 were translation commits).

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat appointments to boost APAC growth

    Red Hat, provider of open source solutions, today announced six senior management appointments to boost its Asia-Pacific management team and position the company for growth in the region.

• Debian Family

  • Debian developer conference under way in New York City

    The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which is popular among embedded Linux developers, and also offers the foundation for Linux distros including Ubuntu Linux, Xandros, and Google’s Chrome OS.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Introducing Lubuntu

        A light-weight version of Ubuntu Linux has hit download mirrors everywhere. While it is not yet officially supported by Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular Linux distribution, this version of Ubuntu has in the last three months wormed its way up the Linux charts to become the twelfth most popular version of Linux. The name of this light-weight version of Ubuntu is Lubuntu,

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola Open Sources Droid X

      It appears Motorola may have finally given us what we wanted: the open source software for the Droid X. That’s right, now developers can mess around with the 4.3-inch beast even more! This isn’t quite as exciting as the 1-Click Root that came to the Droid X just a few days ago, but it’s still news. And I’m sure some crazy dev will have Froyo up and running on the Droid X in no time.

    • Droid X: More Athlete Than Aesthete

      With the Droid X, Motorola’s slapped a huge hunk of screen onto a stone-cold slab of a phone that still manages to sit comfortably in the hand and in the pocket. It’s got processor muscle, sharp screen resolution, and an interface that looks kinda ugly even after you customize it. Those widgets and controls might be worth a little homeliness, though.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Negroponte’s OLPC Offer Shows Staying Power of Open Projects

    Now that is a friendly, charitable letter, and it illustrates something that the many nay-sayers didn’t realize when criticizing the OLPC effort: It’s extremely common in the open source world for an initial idea to find itself without wings, and then flourish and fly in a metamorphosized new version. It’s entirely likely that the OLPC assets are exactly what Indian developers need to deliver a good device at a low price point.

Datamatics Migrates Core Solutions To Ingres

Within the framework of this partnership, Datamatics has expanded its BSS portfolio and migrated its core solutions to Ingres Database, including its main applications in the ‘Order to Cash’ sector and ‘DSS Document System Solution’ for template-based mass document generation.

OpenChrom: a cross-platform open source software for the mass spectrometric analysis of chromatographic data

The software is independent of the operating system, due to the fact that the Rich Client Platform is written in Java. OpenChrom is released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL).

Facebook Meets Open Source Diaspora

Since Diaspora is based on Open Source, it will be easier to be scrutinized by authorities and by you to see if it is compromising your data. Another major fact is open source technologies are much more secure than proprietary technology. The simply rule was given by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, “Given enough eyeballs, every bug is shallow.” In common man’s language. ‘If every one in your neighborhood is aware and cautious, criminals can never succeed there. ‘

Pacific Fibre man, open source champ elected to InternetNZ

Lance Wiggs, Don Christie, and Dave Moskovitz were elected councillors.

Corporates have an appetite for open source software, says Deloitte

Large companies are increasingly using open source software to conduct pilots, according to Deloitte consultant Mark Lillie.

I met up with Mark today, who is a consultant in Deloitte’s technology group. We were talking about the IT market in general and some trends.

Metasploit To Get More Powerful Web Attack Features

Events

• SPLASH To Unite Open Source Leaders

  The inaugural SPLASH Conference, to be held in Sydney on Tuesday, August 10, 2010, will unite leaders from Ingres, Jaspersoft, Liferay, Sugar CRM, Pentaho and Red Hat to share insights with Australian technology companies.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Brief Update — CEO Search

    A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.

SaaS

• DuraSpace Introduces DuraCloud Open Source

Oracle

• Oracle Demostrates Great Community Support and Fixes Eclipse

  Every once in a while I am reminded of the lunacy of the Internet, especially headline writers. On Monday of this week, Oracle released an update to the Java 1.6 update 21 that fixes a problem in a previous version that broke Eclipse. All the details can be found in the bug or Neil’s good summary. The good news is that Eclipse is no longer broken!!

  The irony however is that the issue just yesterday shows up on Ed Burnette’s ZDNet blog ‘Oracle Rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse‘ and the pillar of all Internet lunacy, slashdot Oracle Java Company Change Beaks Eclipse . Credit to Ed for actually reporting and testing the fix.

CMS

• Building a Website – Smart and Easy

  Joomla! – One of the pioneers of the open source CMS software programs, constantly up dating their options, and thousands of programmers world wide offer all sorts of special apps.

  Drupal – Drupal is an amazing piece of technical engineering, simple to use and lots of options to make wonderful websites.

  WordPress – WordPress is not so much a website application but more in the form of a blog, many different options are offered and all the templates look really beautiful.

Business

• Nagios Enterprises Gains Over 200 Nagios XI Customers In First Half Of 2010

  Nagios Enterprises gained more than 200 Nagios XI customers in the first half of 2010, setting the stage to become one of the fastest-growing Open Source technology companies in the market. Interest in Nagios continues to gain strength as more companies around the world look to deploy effective IT infrastructure monitoring to ensure operational continuity and minimize the business impact of IT outages.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Open Core is Dead

    I was wanting to take a break from Dev-Jam to put down some thoughts I’ve been having during this recent renaissance of the “open core” debate when I realized something:

    Open core is dead.

    At least as a business model. While I don’t expect it to go away overnight, I do expect to see very few new companies using the model and those commercial software companies that tout themselves as open source reframing their marketing to de-emphasize it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague 2010

  This GNU Hackers Meeting took place on Saturday 24 July and Sunday 25 July. We organised a hacking space on Monday 26 July and Tuesday 27 July and encouraged people to stay for the extra days. The main GUADEC conference was on Wednesday 28 – Friday 30. This meeting featured a workshop on GNUnet, free secure networking and decentralised applications.

Openness/Sharing

• Open science is, to some, humanity’s best hope

  Jackson says open science will speed innovation in the same way the open source code movement revolutionized Internet applications. He also wants transhumanists to support the thousands of backyard tinkerers, known as citizen scientists, who are already studying microbes, mapping genomes, and seeking cures for diseases. He calls himself a citizen scientist. At Humanity+, he described the LavaAmp — a pocket-size device for amateur DNA researchers — he is helping to develop.

  Jackson recently hosted the Open Science Summit in Berkeley, Calif., which again highlighted the importance of sharing data. One of the speakers was Alexander Wait Zaranek, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School who is working to build bridges between open-science organizations, citizen scientists, and industry.

• CacheFlowe releases open-source robot vocal software to welcome our digital overlords

• Open Access/Content

  • Open source book publishing gets a boost

    One that I found rather amusing was via FLOSS Manuals (a project I’ve written about before – a group effort to get good manuals written for all the amazing FLOSS out there). The Amsterdam-based foundation has been working on another project: Booki.cc. Booki’s a new book production platform, which takes the same concept as FLOSS Manuals – collaborative online book writing – and expands it beyond the realm of just manuals.

Programming

• Global Tech Company Contegix to Sponsor Open Source Language Project Clojure

  Contegix, a privately held technology firm specializing in Internet infrastructure and hosting services, announced their agreement to provide sponsorship to Clojure development language project.

• Open-source ‘R’ gets Hadoop integration

  Lately, you can’t talk about business without talking about “big data,” which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.

Consumers v Intel

What bugs me about government regulation of monopolists is that while after a decade or so of investigation, complaints and courts, the consumer is usually left out of the picture and the monopoly gets to keep its ill-gotten gains by paying off the government and other businesses. Previously Intel paid AMD to go away instead of compensating them for the many years when major portions of the market were closed for no other reason than that Intel bribed OEMs to avoid AMD. Who knows how much AMD’s business could have grown in those years?

New wave of evictions threatens Gypsies

Human rights campaigners have condemned a wave of evictions and court actions against Gypsies and Irish Travellers which they say are threatening to extinguish a whole way of life.

Dozens of families face the prospect of being pushed off plots of land they own and forced to move back into illegal “side-of-the road” and wasteland camping. Children will be unable to go to school and the elderly and infirm unable to access health services, say the campaigners.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change

  Life can be hard in Moscow. The Russian capital is sweltering in temperatures that reached a record 37.7C last week. Vast stretches of peat bog surrounding the city have dried out and caught fire covering Moscow with choking smog. The changing of the horse guard in Cathedral Square was cancelled as sentries wilted in traditional woollen uniforms. Elsewhere, more than 2,000 Russians – many drunk – drowned trying to cool off in lakes and rivers and at least 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined. States of emergency have been declared in 23 regions.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Facial recognition technology and CCTV – a potent mix

  You may have noticed recent television advertisements plugging holiday cameras with facial recognition technology good enough to pick out your loved ones in crowds and keep them in focus in holiday snaps.

• More spys in the skies

• Surveillance Commissioner issues whitewash report

  I’ve written elsewhere about the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, who issued his Annual Report into surveillance in the United Kingdom this week. It shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking – these operations are now part of our nation’s everyday life.

• UAE to block BlackBerry web features

  The United Arab Emirates is to block key features on BlackBerry smartphones because of national security concerns.

  The move could prevent thousands of users from accessing email and the internet on the handsets starting in October, putting the federation’s reputation as a business-friendly commercial and tourism hub at risk.

• Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant

  A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Game copiers for Nintendo DS ruled illegal in UK

  A High Court has ruled that devices that allow gamers to play pirated video games are illegal in the UK.

  The ruling specifically targets a range of popular devices which can be used to store and play copied games on the Nintedo DS handheld console.

• Copyrights

  • UK music industry revenues up 4.7% to £3.9bn in 2009

    This morning, PRS for Music is launching its annual Adding Up The Music Industry report, which puts numbers to recorded music, live music and B2B music revenues in the UK.

  • Dear Jeff Zucker, Whether You Like It Or Not, Content Will Stay Free

    Sorry, Jeff, but you don’t get to decide that. The technology and the market have already decided that the content is or will be free online. It might not be authorized. It might not be legal. But the content is free. “Should” has nothing to do with it, because the technology and the market don’t care about “should.” Yes, this sucks for those who only understand how to run a business when they’re a gatekeeper who controls things, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t really good businesses built on free content. NBC should know this, since an awful lot of its history was built on exactly that… And I don’t recall Zucker’s predecessors whining about that darn “free” broadcast TV.