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02.20.11

Links 20/2/2011: Fluxbox 1.3 is Out, FSF Calls for Boycott of MPEG-LA Signers

Posted in News Roundup at 7:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Cognitive Style of Unix

    Some software tries to be “easy-to-use” by externalizing rules and knowledge into the interface, so that the user does not have to think and can merely follow the cues. An example is inactivating parts of the interface that are not relevant or allowed in a particular context. Software that does not externalize such rules and knowledge relies instead on the user internalizing those, and mindfully coming up with plans to solve the problem at hand.

  • Looking at a few Operating Systems

    The last few weeks have seen me poking around with a few different operating systems to see how they perform. None of these were particularly in-depth in their nature but brushes with alternatives to what I currently use for much of the time. While I am too sure what exactly has kicked off all of this curiosity, all of the OS’s that I have examined have been of the UNIX/Linux variety. With the inclusion of Unity in the forthcoming Ubuntu “Natty Narwhal” 11.04, I am mindful of the need to be keeping an eye on alternative options should there ever be a need to jump ship. However, a recent brush with an alpha version has reassured me a little. Then there are interesting OS releases too and I recently forgot the Ubuntu password (a silly thing to do, I know) for my Toshiba laptop too so I suppose that a few things are coming together.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • KDEMU Markey’s Movin’

      On this release of KDEMU! I talk with Markey over his move to Germany and his new job at Nokia. Oh look an elephant in the room.

  • Ballnux

    • Toronto Night School Plugged into IBM i LUG

      The TUG Night School is set up with the York University campus of Seneca College located in Toronto. A typical classroom is equipped with 22 workstations running the latest versions of both Microsoft Windows and Novell SUSE Linux.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Fluxbox 1.3 Released | What’s new | Compile Fluxbox

      Fluxbox is a great lightweight X window manager based on Blackbox 0.61.1 built using C++. Fluxbox has a simple friendly user-interface quite easy to use for any user, and does not require a high machine performance to use it. Been a long time since last Fluxbox stable release from two years, finally Fluxbox 1.3 has been released today with quite a few new features we will take a look at along with installation methods for Fluxbox 1.3.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Pardus Kurumsal 2

        Yesterday, I did something that I always do. I checked DistroWatch for the latest news. Something interesting was listed there. Apparently, Pardus has a “Corporate” edition. This isn’t a paid release or anything. It’s another version of Pardus that uses only trusted components. I was rather interested. I have long been a Slackware fan due to the amount of control I have over my system, but also due to a want for trusted, stable packages. While this release of Pardus isn’t as stable as say Debian-stable, it is interesting in the fact that it includes the best desktop environment of all time: KDE3.

      • Debian Squeeze: about relevance and visibility

        The new awaited Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” has been recently released. I only got it a quick look on my blog. What more surprised me has been all the discussion about Debian “relevance” that appeared on the Internet just after Debian release (for example here and there). I’m not going to defend Debian here, there is no need, many people has already done it and I couldn’t add more of information to the whole discussion.

        [...]

        Coming back to Debian, our famous distribution seems to be slowly drifting toward invisibility.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Top 8 Newest GNOME GTK Themes Worth Trying Out

        If you are a regular here, you must already know that posts relating to Linux desktop eyecandy corners a huge chunk of our daily dose of Ubuntu/Linux articles. On top of the classic and most popular GTK themes for Ubuntu/GNOME we have featured here before, here are a bunch of very new and very awesome GNOME GTK themes worth taking a look at.

  • Distributions

    • [Sabayon] Sneak Peek and Feedback
    • Arch Linux

      I had to drop FreeBSD for now on my Acer TravelMate 2300. I’m still using it on my desktop machine.

      The reason for dropping it on the laptop is that the intel drivers freezes up the system under Xorg 7.5 , as discussed here. Now, I’m not going to use VESA. Newer drivers are available, but are waiting for KMS support. The only way to live with the problem is to keep Xorg at version 7.4, but this is a hassle given that I like to track the current version of FreeBSD. Sure one can keep Xorg at the old version even with the new FreeBSD, but it is a headache.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Community Support Expands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

        The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is pleased to announce the release of EPEL 6. A community project, EPEL 6 is a collection of open source projects packaged specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which was released in November 2010, and other compatible systems. These supplementary applications, tools and libraries are maintained and supported by volunteers for the convenience and advancement of the community. Though EPEL is under the umbrella of the Fedora Project, it is not commercially supported by Red Hat.

    • Debian Family

      • Space without the Fun

        This is Debian booting with Plymouth using the Debian Sunrise theme, by gajm, which is a modification of the Space Sunrise theme by Andre “Osku” Schmidt.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Desktop for the enterprise
        • ‘Ubuntu Linux’, ‘Ubuntu GNU/Linux’? No, use ‘Ubuntu’!

          The first, and the most important argument considering we’re trying to market a product here, is that using simply ‘Ubuntu’ makes the brand name a lot more attractive and easier on the mind. Because of the Linux in ‘Ubuntu Linux’, people will associate it with the legacy of past Linux distributions, and I think that ‘Ubuntu’ is a more attractive name on its own.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Bodhi Linux RC2 & Updates

            After three weeks of user input and a few bugs reports the Bodhi team and I are happy to present our second release candidate (version number 0.1.6). This version features package updates such as Firefox beta 11 and a number of small changes that make the system feel a bit more seamless. For a full change log see here.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • MontaVista’s Bare Metal EngineTM Pushes Linux Performance to New Frontiers — Wireless Applications Gain 600% Increase in Linux Data Plane Performance

      MontaVista® Software, LLC, a leader in embedded Linux® commercialization, today announced that the MontaVista Bare Metal Engine™ pushes their Carrier Grade Edition 6.0 Linux performance to new frontiers. MontaVista Bare Metal Engine delivers the technologies required for next generation multi-core SoC’s to achieve extremely high performance, leverage new multi-core resource management capabilities to fully maximize multi-core designs, and delivers new high availability features incorporating the latest open source technologies. According to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index, mobile data traffic is expected to grow by 39 fold between 2009 and 2014, so wireless systems will be required to operate as efficiently as possible to keep up with the astronomical growth. Now wireless equipment providers building 3G, WiMAX and LTE infrastructure equipment such as LTE Base Stations (eNodeBs) and Evolved Packet Core (EPC) devices, 3G Base stations, Cell Site Aggregators, Radio Network Controllers (RNC), Packet Data Serving Node (PDSN), xGSNs, Femtocells, Femto Gateways, WiMax base stations and ASN Gateways will be able to achieve even higher performance from their deployed applications.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Splashtop Releases MeeGo™-Based Splashtop OS for OEMs
        • The future for Qt, MeeGo and Symbian – CTO Rich Green explains

          Nokia CTO Rich Green talks to Conversations readers about the futures of Qt, MeeGo and Symbian. With 150 million more Symbian devices planned for the next year, there’s still lots of work to be done in providing a great user experience for current Symbian users and for new owners. Plus ongoing suport for developers.

        • Intel Demonstrates MeeGo OS On A Tablet: Video

          Despite Nokia’s decision to focus on Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Intel showed MeeGo – the two companies’ joint open source operating system – running on a tablet, at Mobile World Congress (MWC).

          Formed last year by the merger of Nokia and Intel’s Linux-based platforms Maemo and Moblin, MeeGo was going to be Nokia’s future platform, until CEO Stephen Elop realised its arrival at the end of 2011 would be too late given the company’s operating system crisis. The company is slashing development, turning MeeGo into an R-and-D sandpit, with one MeeGo phone still scheduled for delivery later this year.

        • Intel to Forge Ahead With MeeGo

          The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said that since MeeGo is an industry effort, and not an Intel-Nokia effort, it plans to look for new partners will continue its development. Hardware companies Advanced Micro Devices, Texas Instruments and Sony Ericsson are still signed up to the project, as are operators like Orange, Telefonica and Sprint, and developers such Novell and Wind River.

        • Nokia Admits to not Focusing on Desktop Qt

      • Android

        • MWC 2011: Google Android takes centre stage at Mobile World Congress

          No wonder, then, that new software from companies such as Myriad offers the chance to run Android apps on other devices, with a programme that it hopes to sell to handset manufacturers called Alien Dalvik. So Android is now so big, there’s even a nascent ecosystem to sell the ecosystem to other people.

        • Check Out Google’s AMAZING Android Booth At Mobile World Congress
        • What Honeycomb Means for Apple and Microsoft

          Overall tablet sales for 2011 are estimated in the tens of millions, and many of those new units will run Google’s tablet-specific mobile platform, Honeycomb. Though a number of the OS’s new features and functions — from a new graphics engine to support for a variety of device sizes — appear specific to slates now, some are sure to filter down to smartphones, bringing greater Android unification across device types. And while Apple’s iPad may have the current lead in the tablet market, Honeycomb puts Google in an excellent position to catch up, much as Android has done in competing with iOS. But Apple isn’t the only competitor Google’s got in its crosshairs: Microsoft is also likely to be affected, from both a mobile and a desktop computing perspective.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Distributed WAF Project Launched by art of defence at RSA

    Cluster Awareness, Distributed Architecture and Central Administration Ideal for Cloud and Enterprise WAF Projects

  • Appcelerator and Engine Yard Partner to Deliver Integrated Cloud Connected Mobility Solution

    Appcelerator®, the leading platform for rapidly developing native mobile, desktop and tablet applications using web technologies, and Engine Yard, the leading Ruby on Rails development and deployment platform for the cloud, today announced an agreement to provide an end-to-end solution for the rapid development and deployment of highly scalable mobile applications. The partnership provides developers with the integrated platform needed to take advantage of the explosive growth in cloud-connected mobility.

  • DataDirect Networks (DDN) Funds Open Source HPC Initiative and Offers Free Year of Lustre Support to Sun and Oracle Customers

    DataDirect Networks (DDN), the world’s largest privately held information storage company, today announced a series of HPC funding initiatives around the Lustre open source file system, aimed at providing scientists and researchers better and more cost-effective tools in order to accelerate the rate of invention and scientific innovation.

  • 6 Open Source CMDB

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • New Chrome extension: block sites from Google’s web search results

        We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we’re exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla delays final Firefox beta

        It’s looking increasingly unlikely that Mozilla will ship Firefox 4 this month.

        On Thursday, Christian Legnitto, who oversees Firefox releases, said that Beta 12 would probably not ship for several days.

        “The bugs blocking beta 12 are expected to be fixed in the next day or so,” Legnitto said yesterday in a message to a Firefox development mailing list. “At that point, we will freeze nightlies and then create the beta build when we are confident of quality.”

      • The Version Number Game

        Some developers realize that this is very much a game and they choose not to play it. The Debian team does not plan on artificially inflating their number of versions any time soon (at least as far as we know). Mozilla on the other hand seems to be caving to the pressure, they recently announced that they plan to release Firefox versions 4, 5, 6, and 7 by the end of 2011. Thats right, in the next ten months Mozilla plans to release more versions of Firefox than they have in the last six years. Personally I feel this is very unnecessary, Mozilla’s past release cycle has been plenty fine and meaningful – it has accurately represented the progress of the browser.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • ForgeRock Shines on Sun’s Legacy Identity

      Are one company’s castoffs another company’s treasure?

      Open source startup ForgeRock this week is celebrating its first year in business, thanks in part to technology giant Oracle.

      The core of ForgeRock identity offerings were born at Sun Microsystems, which has since been acquired by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). ForgeRock has managed to take a number of open source technologies started at Sun, including the OpenSSO single sign on and identity platform, and position them as the foundation of a growing business. According to ForgeRock, the technologies that it is now building and evolving might not have had a future with Oracle, which has created an opportunity for the startup.

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Talend Integration Factory is Major Step Forward in Democratizing ESB Market

      Talend Integration Factory, based on Apache Camel, uses well known Enterprise Integration Patterns to make message-based system integration easier to implement, yet more powerful and scalable.

    • Actuate and Talend Collaborate to Deliver Open Source BI Solution

      Talend, a global open source software leader, today announced an alliance with Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), the people behind BIRT® and the leading open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor. Under this technology alliance, Talend is the preferred provider of data integration and data quality solutions for migrating data on the recently launched BIRT onDemand. Talend’s solutions are also referenced under Actuate’s BIRT Exchange Marketplace.

    • Semi-Open Source/Eclipse

      • Nuxeo Initiates Contribution of CMIS-Enabled Content Repository to Eclipse Foundation Provides Proven Core Services for Content Management Application Development

        Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management company, has proposed to contribute its proven Content Repository technology (Nuxeo Core) to the Eclipse Foundation. The “Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository” project, if approved, will build on the initial contribution to deliver a modular, versatile and full-featured Content Repository technology, leveraging CMIS as main access protocol and API.

      • Eclipse Foundation Elections
      • Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT 2.2 now available

        Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT 2.2 are now available with several new features that we’re excited to share with you. First, Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.2 directly integrates GWT Designer, a powerful WYSIWYG Ajax user interface (UI) designer that makes it much easier to quickly build UIs. Second, developers can take advantage of the modern web with the first round of HTML5 support within the GWT SDK. Additionally, GWT’s CellTable widget now offers new functionality, such as default column sorting and the ability to set column widths. These new features make it even easier to build best in breed web apps using Java-based tools and Eclipse. And while these apps can be run on any platform, Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it very easy to deploy, and run, on Google App Engine.

  • Funding/Deals

  • BSD

    • ZFS and FreeBSD
    • FreeBSD installers. BSDInstall and pc-sysinstall to merge

      Most readers here will agree that FreeBSD would benefit from an updated installer with more functionalities. One of many reasons e.g. is support for the Zetabyte File System (ZFS). A number of FreeBSD users even think that FreeBSD can do with a more attractive installer (me included).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • OpenSFS Announces Collaborative Effort to Support Lustre 2.1 Community Distribution

      Open Scalable File Systems, Inc. (OpenSFS), a technical organization focused on high-end, open-source file system technologies, today announced plans to collaborate with Whamcloud and the broader Lustre community on version 2.1 of the Lustre file system. In a strong demonstration of unity and resolve, major proponents of the Lustre user community have joined in this effort to ensure the availability and open-source status of the software.

    • Qualcomm Innovation Center Launches AllJoyn Open Source Project
    • Qualys Unveils IronBee Open Source Web Application Firewall

      Qualys®, Inc., the leading provider of on demand IT security risk and compliance management solutions, today at RSA Conference USA 2011, announced IronBee, a new open source project to provide the next-generation of web application firewall (WAF) technology. Led by the team who designed and built ModSecurity, the new project aims to produce a web application firewall sensor that is secure, high-performing, portable, and freely available – even for commercial use. Hosted at the web site www.ironbee.com, the project is open to all parties interested in joining the development effort.

    • Icinga 1.3.0 released!

      We are proud to announce the new Icinga version 1.3. The new version includes nearly 200 solved bugs and issues and marks another outstanding milestone in Icinga’s release history. One major change is the introduction into dualstack host monitoring with IPv6 support – check the wiki for a startup guide.

  • Licensing

    • Huh. Font licensing.

      So this afternoon I was making business cards for Teaching Open Source community members to hand out at the big SIGCSE conference that’s coming up.

  • Openness/Sharing/Transparency

    • Senators Introduce Sunshine in the Courtroom Act

      Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) have introduced legislation to permit federal and appellate judges to allow the use of cameras in the courtroom.

      “The judicial branch of our federal government is a mystery to many Americans. Cameras in courtrooms would help lift the veil of secrecy and contribute to greater public understanding of the judicial system,” Grassley said in a written statement.

    • Open Access/Content

      • APS to Adopt Creative Commons Licensing and Publish Open Access Articles and Journals (February 15, 2011)

        As of 15 February 2011, authors in most Physical Review journals have a new alternative: to pay an article-processing charge whereby their accepted manuscripts will be available barrier-free and open access on publication. These manuscripts will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), the most permissive of the CC licenses, granting authors and others the right to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided that proper credit is given. This new alternative is in addition to traditional subscription-funded publication; authors may choose one or the other for their accepted papers.

    • Open Hardware

      • Marvell Introduces Kinoma – Revolutionary Open Software Platform to Unify Applications

        The newest version of Kinoma Play is the first product built on Kinoma. Featuring an elegant, touch-friendly design coupled with lightning fast speed, Kinoma Play shows how Kinoma delivers a seamlessly integrated user experience. Combining 40 applications, ranging from social networking to digital media to location to search, Kinoma Play offers consumers a simple, consistent user experience for work and play.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The four pillars of modern IT openness

      *The second pillar is represented by open standards, which have transformed from somewhat of a joke in open source circles to a more true representation of the term and the words. Rather than a single vendor’s effort to get a technology standard viewed as open, today’s open standards have to really be open. Why? The market no longer accepts open standards that are open in name only. True, there are still plenty of aspects to standards, even open standards, that makes them more closed than open, but the situation has generally improved, and with continuing customer empowerment, vendor collaboration and the influence of open source software driving standards that are truly more open for participation and community. We do wonder what types of standards will be open enough as we push further into cloud computing, devops and other driving trends, but the overall industry movement now seems to be toward openness in standards. It’s not just analysts saying so, either. The market dictates standards arguably more than anything esle, and the market now demands (almost all of the time) they are open.

    • Boycott companies who sign onto the MPEG LA’s patent pool

      In response, we’re asking everyone who values a web free of restrictions and threats like this — and especially everyone who values the publication of audio and video files on the web — to sign a pledge that they will boycott any and all companies who sign onto this patent pool.

      Together, we can name, shame and penalize any corporation threatening a free web.

Leftovers

  • Silvio Berlusconi sent for trial accused of paying for sex with teenager

    Italy’s tumultuous 17-year relationship with its maverick prime minister entered a dangerous phase as Silvio Berlusconi was sent for trial on vice charges and his supporters declared the indictment an onslaught on the will of the people.

    The trial, to start in April and be presided over by three women judges, is unparalleled in the modern history of Italy, and may make an early general election unavoidable.

  • The NFL Or SkyNET: There Can Be Only One

    So says Rick Telander in a piece for the Chicago Sun Times, in which he declares that traumatic head injuries in those sports are stealing away our ability to fight the machines. Seriously. I couldn’t make this stuff up. To preface, it should be noted that Telander isn’t some crackpot pseudo-journalist. He is the senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, hired away from Sports Illustrated, where he was also a Senior Writer. He attended Northwestern University on a football scholarship and then went to training camp with the Kansas City Chiefs. Personally, I think he might have taken a few blows to the head himself.

  • Walmart Employees Fired For Stopping Armed Robber

    When a suspected shoplifter pulled a gun on employees at a Walmart in Utah last month, the staffers say they were left with no choice but to disarm the man, which they managed to do without anyone getting shot. Unfortunately for them, Walmart says it had no choice but to let these employees go.

    It began when Walmart workers noticed the suspect stick a netbook under his clothes. He was met at the exit by a loss-prevention coordinator who escorted him back to the loss-prevention room at the store where three more employees joined him.

  • Science

    • Being bilingual may delay Alzheimer’s and boost brain power

      Learning a second language and speaking it regularly can improve your cognitive skills and delay the onset of dementia, according to researchers who compared bilingual individuals with people who spoke only one language.

      Their study suggests that bilingual speakers hold Alzheimer’s disease at bay for an extra four years on average compared with monoglots. School-level language skills that you use on holiday may even improve brain function to some extent.

      In addition, bilingual children who use their second language regularly are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking compared with monolingual children, said Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist at York University in Toronto.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

      A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

    • The Global Crop Diversity Trust -Food fight

      One group of researchers examined the historic links between climate change and incidents of war in Europe and Asia. Going back a millennium, they uncovered a “strikingly high” correlation between temperature variation and the number of wars. Their explanation? Climate change has “significant direct effects on land-carrying capacity” which in turn “affects the food supply per capita.” In their words, “the paths to those disasters operated through a reduction in agricultural production.” As one might guess, these researchers, working from institutions in China, the US, and UK, found that the highest correlation between climate change and war occurred in arid regions, precisely the areas where food supplies were must vulnerable to climatic perturbations.

    • Whose Aid Is It Anyway?

      Skewed aid policies and practices threaten to undermine a decade of government donors’ international commitments to effective, needs-focussed international aid. This paper sets out how these commitments are being disregarded, and how this trend can be reversed.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Mubarak resignation throws into question U.S.-Egyptian counterterrorism work
    • Egyptian army hijacking revolution, activists fear

      Egypt’s revolution is in danger of being hijacked by the army, key political activists have warned, as concrete details of the country’s democratic transition period were revealed for the first time.

      Judge Tarek al-Beshry, a moderate Islamic thinker, announced that he had been selected by the military to head a constitutional reform panel. Its proposals will be put to a national referendum in two months’ time. The formation of the panel comes after high-ranking army officers met with selected youth activists on Sunday and promised them that the process of transferring power to a civilian government is now under way.

      But the Guardian has learned that despite public pronouncements of faith in the military’s intentions, elements of Egypt’s fractured political opposition are deeply concerned about the army’s unilateral declarations of reform and the apparent unwillingness of senior officers to open up sustained and transparent negotiations with those who helped organise the revolution.

    • The Middle East’s Pox Americana

      As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them. Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people. When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the US should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a “tightrope” the Obama administration was walking. While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should “take sides” (as though we hadn’t done so decisively over the last decades).

    • Israeli lecturers urge state to probe university’s alleged anti-leftist policies

      Bar-Ilan University faculty members urge Council For Higher Education to examine claims by lecturers that they were denied promotion because of leftist political activities and opinions.

    • Obama ‘warned of repercussions’ if Abbas takes settlements to UN

      President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday defied US attempts to get him to abandon a UN Security Council vote against Israeli settlements after being threatened with repercussions if he did not, his aides said.

    • Wikileaks: Economic Reasons Behind the Siege on Gaza

      As opposed to the way the Palestinian Authority (PA) was portrayed in leaked cables, leading to scandalous revelations, for a while Israel suffered no such scandal from the documents pertaining to its conduct. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even came out in support of the leak of the papers, suggesting that the documents can do no harm to Israel’s foreign policy.

    • Armed Israeli settlers storm Palestinian village near Hebron

      A group of heavily-armed Israeli settlers stormed the village of Beit Ummar, in the southern part of the West Bank, on Sunday night, harassing and threatening villagers but causing no injuries, according to local eyewitnesses.

    • The Afghanistan War: Tactical Victories, Strategic Stalemate?

      The top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, likes to describe the tactical gains his troops are making against insurgents. But a stream of independent data and analysis suggests a wide gap between those battlefield gains and the strategic progress needed to convince a skeptical President Obama, Congress and the public to stay with the war effort for at least three more years.

    • Vast uprisings in Tehran
    • Blood on the Streets of Bahrain

      Last summer, the government rounded up dozens of human rights workers, religious leaders and opposition figures who demanded an end to the regime’s habitual use of torture. Twenty-five were charged with “contacting foreign organizations and providing them with false and misleading information about the kingdom.” Half were charged with attempting to stage a coup. . In total, 450 have been arrested, including the well-known pro-democracy blogger Ali Abdulemam.

    • Yemen violence mounts in bid to remove President Saleh

      Anti-government protests flared in Yemen for the sixth consecutive day, turning violent as protests sprang up across the country, spurred on by the resignation last week of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

      In Yemen’s main southern city of Aden, security forces chased hundreds of people who took to the streets of Al-Mansura neighbourhood demanding the resignation of President Ali Abdallah Saleh. At least one protestor was shot dead by police as demonstrators hurled stones at police, set tyres and vehicles on fire and stormed a municipal building.

    • RFK Center Report: Western Sahara: Accounts Of Human Rights Abuses Persist In Wake Of November Unrest
    • Curveball doubts were shared with CIA, says ex-German foreign minister

      Germany’s former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has accused the former head of the CIA George Tenet of making implausible claims about the handling of the Curveball case by the US.

      On Wednesday Tenet, the director of central intelligence between 1997 and 2004, issued a statement on his website saying he discovered “too damn late” that Curveball – the Iraqi defector who became a key source for the CIA and the German secret service (BND) – might be a fabricator.

    • They pissed on him and he got eight months.

      Humiliation is a subjective matter, depending on people’s personal symbols. For me, for example, what feels most humiliating is not the fact that they urinated on him, but that they stripped him naked. At first Mohammad’s father was ashamed to tell about the pissing. To even say these words out loud. I think that for him, that was the most humiliating thing they did to his son, more than all the other things.
      What kind of person, I wonder, takes a 13-year old boy no matter why, and tortures him like this. And then I answer myself, almost any Israeli. Any soldier in the army when it comes to Palestinians. Any person, in fact, if only the local codes designate that it’s permissible.

    • The Indictment for Torture Filed Against George W. Bush (Part One: The Facts)

      In my article, I stated that “the fact that the torturer-in-chief has been made unwelcome in Europe — and, in theory, anywhere outside the US – is heartening news indeed,” and this remains the case. In the hope of keeping the story alive — and providing the Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment in an accessible form, I’ve divided the original PDF into two HTML documents, and am cross-posting the first part below. The second part will follow soon. Please not that CCR will amend the indictment as new information comes to light (as it undoubtedly will, given how much of the US torture story is still hidden), and please also note that the original contains detailed footnotes, which I have not attempted to replicate here, where I have, instead, inserted a number of important hyperlinks.

    • Lawmakers Flee Wisconsin Capitol, State Police Pursue; Protests Swell to 30,000

      UPDATE: According to Newsradio 620 WTMJ, “Democratic Senator Jon Erpenbach confirmed that he and all of his Democratic colleagues boarded a bus and left the state.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Green groups targeted polluters as corporate agents hid in their ranks

      At 8.04pm, an agent using the conspicuous alias Vandango007 received an email setting out the details of his deployment. The message had come from Rebecca Todd, chief executive of Vericola, a company spying on environmental campaigners on behalf of some of Europe’s largest power companies.

      It was September 2009, and green activists involved in the Climate Camp network were planning a major demonstration against Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire, owned by one of Todd’s clients, the energy company E.ON. A meeting to plan the protest was being held at London’s SOAS university, and Todd wanted someone on the inside.

    • What’s behind the Belo Monte dam

      I recently witnessed a conversation between someone working for the Brazilian federal government and an environmentalist; both were Workers’ party (PT) supporters (the ruling party of President Dilma Rousseff).

      “I’m in favour of the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant,” the former said, “but I concede it’s not a ‘left versus right’ issue.”

    • How much oil does Saudi Arabia actually have?

      Does anyone know how much oil Saudi Arabia has left? Last week a series of US diplomatic cables from 2007-2009 and released by WikiLeaks suggested that senior US embassy staff were warning Washington that reserves could be 40% less than stated and that “peak oil” might be imminent.

    • The dirty history of corporate spying

      Greenpeace is claiming these two multinational chemical outfits between 1998 and 2000 set up a clandestine operation to break into Greenpeace Washington offices to steal “confidential information and trade secrets”, go through its trash cans, conducted surveillance of its employees and ran an undercover operation to penetrate and disrupt the organisation’s campaigns involving climate change, genetic foods and chemical pollution. According to the suit, the chemical companies and their PR firms employed a now-defunct private detective firm called Beckett Brown International (BBI) to do the dirty work. The companies have denied the allegations; detailed responses to the Greenpeace complaint are due soon.

    • The gas industry attacks an Oscar nominee

      “Gasland” is a highly compelling grass-roots-level exposé of the explosion of natural gas drilling across the United States since 2005, when a little-noticed clause in Dick Cheney’s energy bill exempted the aggressive and invasive extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “hydrofracking,” from any federal regulation or oversight. Fracking, at least in its recent, higher-tech reinvention, involves the explosive injection of millions of gallons of water, laced with tons of toxic chemicals, in an effort to free natural gas trapped deep in the shale. It appears anecdotally connected to hundreds if not thousands of cases of groundwater contamination and a wide range of health problems.

    • GOP “Carpet Bombing” of Environmental Protection Continues

      To the dismay of environmentalists, religious groups, and citizens nationwide, this week House Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) have been piling on amendments to the temporary government-spending proposal, or Continuing Resolution (CR)—moves that would further undercut regulatory powers for federal agencies with environmental protection duties. (MoJo’s Kate Sheppard has more on the CR from last week.)

    • Common Cause Seeks Details of Justice Thomas’ Reported ‘Drop-by’ at Koch Industries Political Meeting

      Common Cause raised a new ethical question Monday about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asking the Court for a thorough accounting of a January 2008 trip in which the justice spent four days in California for what the court has said was a single speech and a “drop-by” at a gathering of business executives and veteran political operatives.

      A court spokesperson’s description last month of the trip is “problematic” compared with financial disclosure reports filed by Thomas, the government watchdog group asserted.

      “Justice Thomas has acknowledged spending four days in a popular resort area, with his tab covered by Federalist Society. It’s difficult to square such a prolonged stay with what the court now describes as one speech to the Federalists and a ‘drop-by’ at a nearby Koch Industries event,” said Bob Edgar, Common Cause’s president and CEO.

    • Billionaire tea party tycoons financed Wisconsin’s anti-union governor, records show

      Who was the principle financiers of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor, now embroiled in a controversial attempt to destroy public sector unions?

      None other than reviled tea party financiers Charles and David Koch, is who.

      Turns out, the billionaire oil tycoons’ political action committee gave Gov. Scott Walker (R) roughly $100,000 in campaign contributions during the 2010 election, according to campaign finance records highlighted by Mother Jones.

    • Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, dead

      Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist’s video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn’t degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

      That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

      At a science conference in Washington, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn’t.

    • Japan recalls whaling fleet from Antarctic

      Japan has recalled its whaling fleet from the Antarctic following confrontations with activists from the Sea Shepherd marine conservation group, the government has said, in a move that has raised hopes that the hunts will be halted altogether.

  • Finance

    • Astroturf for Hire

      NPR’s Planet Money recently reported on astroturf activities in the financial sector. “Forgery: The Latest Tactic To Sway Finance Rules” focuses on the behind the scenes fight over the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. The Dodd-Frank bill is now in the agency rulemaking stage and financial sector lobbyists have descended en masse on the pertinent federal agencies, lobbying in person and via comment letters to the Federal Register.

    • Have You Heard? Bharara Wants to Stiffen Insider-Trading Penalties

      When the book gets written on Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, we’re not sure exactly what it will say.

      But you can bet that not too far into the introduction the writer will mention the words “insider trading.” While under Bharara’s watch, his office has launched the largest assault on insider-trading in decades. Convictions have come, and bigger ones may follow.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Consumers sue retailers over ZIP Code queries

      Last week’s state Supreme Court ruling barring merchants from asking customers for their ZIP Codes sparks a flurry of litigation against such chains as Wal-Mart, Bed Bath & Beyond and Crate & Barrel.

    • NYC Hospital Data Theft Affects 1.7 Million Patients

      The confidential personal health data of about 1.7 million New York City patients, staff members and others affiliated with four Bronx hospitals were stolen in December, according to the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp.

    • Court stays order to turn over juror’s Facebook postings

      They issued subpoenas to Facebook and Ramirez for the records of the post. The social networking website refused and Ramirez challenged the subpoena. The trial court ordered Ramirez to sign an order giving him until Feb. 14 to sign a consent form that would allow Facebook to hand over the postings.

    • Durbin urges Facebook to allow protesters anonymity

      Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Facebook Thursday to offer better protections for protesters in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, where the social networking site has been used by organizers.

      The problem, Durbin wrote in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is that the company doesn’t allow anyone to use fake names – exposing activists to the governments who monitor the website.

  • Civil Rights

    • FBI to announce new Net-wiretapping push

      Any solution, according to a copy of Caproni’s prepared comments obtained by CNET, should include a way for police armed with wiretap orders to conduct surveillance of “Web-based e-mail, social networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications technology.”

    • Hillary’s Hypocrisy

      During that speech Ray McGovern, a veteran who also served for 27 years as a CIA analyst, exercised his freedom of speech by standing and silently turning his back on Secretary Clinton. He was protesting the ongoing wars, the treatment of Bradley Manning and the militarism of U.S. foreign policy. He did not shout at the Secretary of State or interrupt her speech. He merely stood in silence. See the video here of the incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Vy8fFnz18

      McGovern’s action was a powerful one and it threatened the Secretary of State. Two police officers roughed him up, pulled him from the audience and arrested him. As you can see from the pictures, the 71 year old McGovern, was battered and bruised, indeed his attorney reports he was left in jail bleeding.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Bell class action suit approved by Que. court

      A Quebec Superior Court judge has authorized a class action lawsuit to go ahead against Bell Mobility.

      The case was launched by Denis Gagnon, a former Bell customer, who said the cellphone provider illegally charged him hefty early contract termination fees.

    • Senators Dump Internet ‘Kill Switch’ for Cyber-Attack Response

      The president can’t use emergency measures to order an Internet shutdown to combat cyber attacks, according to revised legislation introduced yesterday by three senators.

      The 2011 Cybersecurity Freedom Act — proposed by senators Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent; Susan Collins of Maine; and Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat — is almost identical to the legislation the senators introduced in June with two exceptions.

      The bill adds language that forbids the president from shutting down the Internet during a national crisis. It also permits owners of major computer systems deemed as critical infrastructure, and therefore subject to Homeland Security Department regulations, to appeal their status in federal court.

  • DRM/DMCA

    • Sony Threatens to Terminate Service of PS3 Jailbreakers
    • Death Of Nokia’s ‘Comes With Music’ Shows That ‘Free’ With DRM Is A Losing Proposition

      This is from a little while ago, but I’m just catching up on some older stories. Reader Rabbit80 points us to the news that Nokia has finally put its “Comes with Music” program out of its misery and shut it down. Comes with Music was actually an interesting idea: you buy a phone and for 12 months you get free music downloads. At a conceptual level, this sounds great: you’re using the abundant (free music!) to make the scarce (mobile phone!) more valuable. But, like everything, a good idea can be marred by the execution. And, in this case, the execution involved the major record labels demanding that “Comes with Music” really mean “Comes with DRM’d Music.” A year and a half ago we pointed out that Comes With Music was really getting very little uptake, and the decision to kill it off just confirms how weak the pickup was.

    • Sony: PlayStation 3 Pirates Will Be Banned for Life

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • CETA and Copyright: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on International Trade

      This week I was invited to appear before the Standing Committee on International Trade to discuss the ongoing negotiations of the Canada – European Union Comprehensive Trade Agreement (CETA). I’ve written about some concerns associated with CETA in the past (here, here, here, and here). The appearance comes just as speculation mounts that CETA is running into significant barriers with opposition from many groups and a lack of strong support at the provincial level. While a trade deal that focuses on traditional trade barriers may make sense, the EU’s effort to re-write Canadian regulatory policy on issues such as intellectual property is why the deal should be scrapped or slimmed down.

    • Trademarks

      • [UPDATED] Pasadena’s Dervaes Family Trademarks the Terms ‘Urban Homestead’ and ‘Urban Homesteading,’ Now Cracking Down on Bloggers

        They’ve gone as far as to sanctimoniously lecture the world on their website (you’ll have to look it up, because no way in hell I’m linking to them) since the controversy broke about the intricacies of trademark law to, as they put it, “cut through the mob of misinformation…of course, urban homesteading is ‘old’ but we used it in a new and unique way and that is what is registered.”

        Actually, no. The Dervaeses aren’t just going after people who have ripped off their writings (a perfectly legitimate legal move, mind you) but ANYONE using the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading.”

    • Copyrights

      • Tucson photographer Jon Wolf seeks fees for image of Christina Taylor Green

        A Tucson portrait photographer whose image of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green was shared with media outlets by her family after she was killed is seeking compensation from numerous media companies, including The Arizona Republic and TucsonCitizen.com, and has threatened to sue if he is not paid.

      • Update copyright law for pre-industrial era, says law professor

        UK copyright law needs an overhaul to bring it into line with pre-industrial cultures, says a top legal academic. It may strike you as the Most Imaginative Use of Politically-Correct Rhetoric you’ve ever heard, but the joke is ultimately on you: the project has won funding from the Department of Business.

      • Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hearing on “Targeting Websites Dedicated to Stealing American IP”
      • Mardi Gras Indians Still Trying To Copyright Costumes

        Of course, they claim they’re really only concerned with people who try to make money off the photographs by selling them, so not just your everyday tourist snapping a shot. However, as we noted, this whole thing goes against the very purpose of copyright law, which was to provide an incentive to create. But these guys have plenty of incentives to create that have nothing to do with copyright. Basically, they’re just upset that someone, somewhere might make money selling a calendar of Mardi Gras photos without paying them first. Of course, the simple response to this is that they should just create their own damn calendar and sell it themselves. Competition for the win.

      • Millennium Park Garden Deemed Not Copyrightable, Because Gardens Are Not Authored

        Eric Goldman points us to a fascinating ruling concerning whether or not an artistic garden can be covered by copyright (pdf). The ruling itself (embedded below) is interesting for a variety of reasons. It goes over the basics of “moral rights” in US copyright in great detail. As most people know, for the most part, the US does not recognize moral rights — even though the Berne Convention (which the US has tragically signed on to) requires it. Partly to get around this, the US did put in extremely limited moral rights for a very small subset of works, and part of this case revolves around that.

      • Rhapsody bites back at Apple

        With Apple officially sharing the details of its new App Store subscription plan, which lays the groundwork for Apple to take a 30-percent cut from publishers who sell content within their apps, we were waiting for some reaction from content providers. Well, one, Rhapsody, has finally braved Apple’s wrath and issued a statement saying Apple’s new arrangement was “economically untenable.” And while it didn’t threaten legal action, it certainly hinted at it.

      • Movie Studios, Publishers Seek Limits On Celebrities’ ‘Rights Of Publicity’

        What kind of control should celebrities have over creative works that involve their images? In a high-stakes case just argued in a California appeals court, media companies are asking for courts to place clearer limits on celebrities’ intellectual property rights in their own images, known as “rights of publicity.” The case is about whether Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) has to pay college athletes when it uses their image in video games, but it could have wide-ranging ramifications in other digital arts as well. That’s why the major movie studios and several newspaper companies are backing EA in this battle.

        EA and its supporters argue that if rights of publicity aren’t properly balanced against the First Amendment, it would make it impossible to create artworks about famous persons like The King’s Speech or The Social Network.

      • Texas chainsaw massacre: senior judge “severs” most P2P lawsuits

        Last month, we profiled Evan Stone, the Denton, Texas attorney who has brought nearly every Internet file-sharing lawsuit in the state since getting into the business in mid-2010. Stone sues a few hundred to a few thousand anonymous defendants on behalf of his client, has Internet providers look up their real names and addresses, then asks them to settle for a couple thousand bucks before he files a federal lawsuit against them personally. Most cases have involved pornography distributed by BitTorrent, but Stone recently convinced the anime distributor FUNimation to adopt the technique after much hesitation on the part of the FUNimation.

      • Copyrights and Copywrongs

        Why not give in and give up all rights in your work? Surrendering a copyright is like surrendering a child to adoption: You surrender all rights of custody and control over your work. In fact, it’s no longer your work; it’s the property of the publication. You may not recycle, reprint it, or quote extensively from it in violation of fair use without the publication’s permission. The publication’s employees (editors) may rewrite what was once your work without your permission, altering your perspective as well as your language, including or omitting your byline at their discretion. Usually they disavow any intent to substantively alter your work, but I am always wary of people who make non-negotiable demands for rights they claim to have no intention of exercising. (When confronted with these contracts, I almost always offer publishers a perpetual license to reprint my work for free, but they almost always demand all rights, including the unilateral right to alter it, as well.)

Clip of the Day

Free Software !!!


Credit: TinyOgg

02.19.11

Links 19/2/2011: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9, ODF Plugfest UK Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Not All is Fair in Linux

    There are a couple experiences I had yesterday computer-wise that I’d like to share.

  • Desktop

    • Web Development, Better Done On GNU/Linux

      I often tell people that setup, configuration, writing, scripting, and other general development of any website is better done on the same web server, or at least the same operating system, that is installed on the web server that the site is going to be hosted and ran on, rather than developed elsewhere and simply dropped in place later. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using Apache or Windows Server, GNU/Linux or Windows.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KWin Embraces New Platforms with OpenGL ES 2.0 Support

        Over the last few months the KWin development team worked on bringing the Window Manager for KDE’s Plasma workspaces to mobile devices. This has required porting the compositing code to OpenGL ES 2.0, the open graphics API for programmable embedded graphics hardware. With the migration of KWin’s codebase to git, the code was imported into the master development tree to be part of the next release of the KDE Platform.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 marks the end of 4.x

        After 6 plus years of service, Red Hat is moving its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4) into a bug and security fix maintenance phase. The move follows the release of RHEL 4.9 which is the last update of RHEL 4.x that will include new features and hardware support.

        According to Red Hat, RHEL 4.9 included 200 updates including an update version of SystemTap.

      • Close to the 50 Day – Red Hat

        New York, February 18th (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading day at $45.58 close to its 50 day moving average currently set at $45.32. Red Hat’s price action is just above this important support level translating into a trading opportunity.

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.

      • Axial preaches open source with capital

        Axial Exchange, an early-stage company launched by a former Red Hat executive, has closed on an initial fundraiser that will allow it to expand deployment of its open source-based, health care communication product.

        The Raleigh company raised $1.5 million in recent weeks from two investors and will close on an additional $350,000 in the coming weeks, says founder Joanne Rohde. The funding will be used for development, sales and marketing expansions this year. The company has seven employees and may hire a couple more this year.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 14 screen capture

          Fedora 14 was released last Nov 2, 2010, awfully long time ago in the Linux world. Anyway, I am just documenting here how it looks like installing Fedora 14 in VirtualBox. I have done this for the top 5 distributions and I am gonna do this for Fedora again.

        • Romanian Fedora community at crossroads

          By the official numbers there are 9 Fedora Ambassadors for Romania, this sounds like a healthy number but: some of them I know nothing about, from some didn’t hear in more than a year, some are busy with life, some working exclusively on derivative distros, some left the country and some left the country with a paid job on a competing distro… Also, I am not an Ambassador, so not included in the list above. Yet.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 5 Amazing Wallpapers From The Ubuntu 11.04 Submissions

          As you may be aware, many of the wallpapers that ship with Ubuntu are user submitted. Till Ubuntu 10.10, only photographs are accepted. However in Ubuntu 11.04, the Canonical design team will also include three artworks submitted by users. There are plenty of very good submissions – and this is our selection of five of them which we like.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Quick Look: PureOS 3.0

            Every once in a while I run into a distro that has me scratching my head and wondering what the developers were thinking. PureOS is just such a distribution. Version 3.0 was just released and announced on DistroWatch, so I thought I’d give it a download and see what it was like.

            I had initially planned to do a full review of it on Desktop Linux Reviews, but I ran into a snag with the install (which I’ll talk more about in that section of this quick look) so I decided to do a quick look instead. This quick look is based on the live desktop environment.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Open source Snowball board taps dual-core Cortex-A9 SoC

      Both the Snowball and PandaBoard are supported with low-level Linux code supporting Ubuntu, MeeGo, and Android from the ARM-backed, not-for-profit, Linaro development firm. In November, Linaro demonstrated its Linaro 10.11 tools running on a variety of Cortex-A8 platforms, such as the BeagleBoard, plus Cortex-A9 systems, such as the PandaBoard.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google tips future unity between Gingerbread and Honeycomb forks

          An upcoming “I” Android release will provide Honeycomb-like tablet features for phones, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during a Mobile World Congress (MWC) keynote. He added that Google would still welcome Nokia in the Android camp, demonstrated a video editor for Honeycomb named Movie Studio, and waxed eloquent on mobile technology’s positive effect on society.

        • Google music app to ship on Motorola Xoom tablet

          Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha said a Google music application will be available with the Motorola Xoom tablet later this year. Also this week, Motorola confirmed the $799 (unsubsidized) pricing for the Android 3.0 tablet and announced the retailers that will participate in the tablet’s second-quarter release in the U.K.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Editor’s Note: Hackers Defend Liberty

    It amazes me that this is a concept that we actually have to defend. If it weren’t for hackers jailbreaking PS3s and Apple devices, breaking laughably weak copy protection schemes, and exposing the many weaknesses of proprietary products we would have no way out. It is amazing and amusing, in the most bitterly cynical way, that instead of improving their shoddy products the goons I mean fine upstanding titans of industry instead resort to jackbootery, to pushing through terrible legislation like the DMCA, terrible international treaties like ACTA, wholesale abuse of the civil courts, and unrestrained invasions into our personal business. It’s a sickness.

  • ForgeRock Shines on Sun’s Legacy Identity

    Are one company’s castoffs another company’s treasure?

    Open source startup ForgeRock this week is celebrating its first year in business, thanks in part to technology giant Oracle.

    The core of ForgeRock identity offerings were born at Sun Microsystems, which has since been acquired by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). ForgeRock has managed to take a number of open source technologies started at Sun, including the OpenSSO single sign on and identity platform, and position them as the foundation of a growing business. According to ForgeRock, the technologies that it is now building and evolving might not have had a future with Oracle, which has created an opportunity for the startup.

  • Long-Term Open Source Solutions on Cities’ Radar

    In cities across the country, government officials are searching for ways to make meaningful data available and use the intelligence to solve social problems. Agencies are leveraging contests like NYC BigApps 2.0, which is scheduled to announce its winners in March. Though contests are an effective tool, experts warn that governments should focus on long-term solutions.

    One of the leading apps contest creators, ChallengePost, has proved that apps contests can be a good investment. Brandon Kessler, founder and CEO of ChallengePost points to New York as a shining example.

  • Why I lose interest in some projects.

    Some projects have historically sucked; they’ve been incomplete, they’ve been hard to use, they’ve had poor documentation, or they’ve had regular security issues.

    Over time projects that started off a little poorly can, and often do, improve. But their reputation is usually a long time in improving.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google gives Chrome 10 beta a turbo boost

        Google has released a new beta version of Chrome 10, giving it a notable speed boost.

        The firm announced “a dramatic improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings,” via the Chrome blog.

        Google said the JavaScript speed in this beta release is 66 per cent faster on the V8 benchmark suite over the current stable release.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Fate of Java

      On the one hand, Java is looking like a security sieve/trojan these days and on the other Google has asked USPTO to shoot down several patents on Java which are held by Oracle.

      Until software patents in general are discarded IT will be burdened by illegitimate patents that take many years to sort out in the courts. Patents are silly when applied to software. They are tantamount to patenting ideas and the last thing IT needs is restraint on ingenuity.

  • CMS

    • XOOPS, There It Is! A CMS for the Masses

      The great thing about open source software is the ability for developers to fork their own project, if they want to see it take a different direction.

      In 2001, a Content Management System called MyPHPNuke forked from another project, PHP-Nuke, for this very reason. Shortly thereafter, when core developers decided that add-on modules were integrated too tightly with the core, another fork was spawned named XOOPS (eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System).

    • Bitrix Releases List of Top Ten Open Source CMS Pitfalls

      Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, has compiled a list of the ten major pitfalls of free open source (FOSS) content management systems (CMS) from a customer’s and web developer’s perspective (download whitepaper). The weaknesses listed are natural, if unfortunate, outcomes caused directly or indirectly by this licensing model that diminish its viability in meeting real-life business requirements.

  • Business

    • Open for Business – SMEs take place at Public Sector table

      Today at the Treasury, Mark Taylor attended Franice Maude’s SME strategic supplier summit. If even half of the promised reforms materialise it will transform the Public Sector landscape, clearing the way for young and dynamic businesses to bring innovative solutions and play their part in cutting the gaping deficit.

      The event began with a surprise visit from David Cameron, who gave the opening talk. The day was lead from the front by Francis Maude throughout. Their enthusiasm for the new measures plainly evident.

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Openness is Virtue. Ask Sony.

        Sony has tried and failed to failed to lock down PlayStation. Their latest move was to threaten to ban those who modified their PlayStations… They were going to do that by recognizing a unique ID.

  • Programming

    • Software is too important to leave it to programmers

      After reading Software piracy is also the Government’s fault a website developer wrote to me (synthesizing):

      1. trying to write programs or websites “for everybody” is something that requires a lot of development time; therefore, unless the customer paid to have something viewable with any browser/operating system, you do it. Otherwise, you DON’T. You try to make happy the makority of users and who gives a f**k if not all versions of Linux support Vmw (a video format) out of the box. Sure, that’s ugly to say, but that’s the way it goes
      2. I don’t even care much for people who use Open Source Software that they didn’t pay and then demand to be treated as those who paid something
      3. Here’s a (deliberately) stupid example: if I build my own car myself with my friends, in our spare time, I certainly don’t expect the same performances as an Audi

  • Standards/Consortia

    • About Global Public Inclusive Infrastructures (GPIIs) | gpii.org

      The ODF, as the chief open standard for documents, is leading the front here, and OOo, as the leading open source office suite, is profoundly important to the point.

    • ODF Plugfest UK a week away

      The ODF 5th Plugfest is shaping up well with leading speakers and presentations including Bill McCluggage, Deputy CIO, UK Cabinet Office; Rob Weir, ODF Architect, IBM, Co-chair, OASIS ODF TC; Rufus Pollock, Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, Director, Open Knowledge Foundation; Chris Puttick, Consultant CIO, Oxford Archaeology, Council Member, IMIS; Mark Taylor, CEO Sirius, a leading integrator of Open Source Applications, as well as world experts in the development and implementation of Open Document Formats.

Leftovers

  • Mikhail Khodorkovsky verdict ordered from above, claims judge’s assistant

    The guilty verdict against the oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky was ordered from above and written by a judge who did not try the case, a Russian court official who worked on the recent trial has said.

    Natalya Vasilyeva, in an interview she claimed was certain to spell the end of her career, said: “I can say that all of legal society understands perfectly well that this is a made-to-order case, a made-to-order trial.”

  • Erase and rewind

    In the 1960s and ’70s, it was common practice at the BBC to reuse video tapes. Old recordings were taped over with new shows. Some Doctor Who episodes have been lost forever. Jimi Hendrix’s unruly performance on Happening for Lulu would have also been lost if a music-loving engineer hadn’t sequestered the tapes away, preventing them from being over-written.

  • How big business subverts democracy

    Just a couple of years ago, most people had no idea what the Chamber of Commerce did. Aren’t they mom and pop’s small-business lobby in Washington? Now, thanks in large part to the work of Chamber opponents, we’ve come to learn that the biggest business lobby in the world is also one of the biggest impediments to real democracy in the US, and that they’re a huge force in opposing healthcare reform, employee free choice and other labour legislation, veterans’ rights, banking regulations and, of course, transparency.

  • The Secret Weapon of the Rich: Money

    I’ve written before about Larry Bartels’ research showing that politicians basically don’t care about the views of low and medium-income individuals. The non-rich simply have no impact on their voting behavior at all. But I know you want more evidence. So here it is.

    The charts below come from a 2005 paper by Martin Gilens (a revised 2007 version is here). His study is based on a dataset of polling questions about public policy issues between 1981 and 2002 (raising the minimum wage, sending U.S. troops to Haiti, requiring employers to provide health insurance, allowing gays to serve in the military, etc.) in which the responses differed significantly between the rich and the poor. On the left, you can see the impact that support from low-income voters had: when 10% of them supported a position, there was about a 32% probability of that change becoming law. When 90% supported a position, there was a….33% probability. The chart on the right shows the same for median income voters. They did slightly better, but not much.

  • I eat out of bins too. So what?

    Sasha Hall must have thought she was in luck when she found a bin outside Tesco overflowing with food. She helped herself to packets of potato waffles, pies and ham – a small fraction of the goods that had been abandoned after the store’s freezers broke down. But when police arrived at the 21-year-old’s home in Essex to arrest her for “theft by finding”, those waffles must have looked less lucky.

    Hall now faces court. But if she committed a crime, it’s one that I, like thousands of other freegans across the UK, commit daily. I have lived healthily for several years on discarded food. I take my pick from sacks full of heavily packaged sushi, bread, ready meals and fruit, all perfectly edible but dumped as they go out of date.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Unconstitutionality of Obamacare

      Why does an outback writer in Boonville, Mondocino county, California, have to write on a left-wing website about how a right-wing judge did the left — and the American public — a favor?

      Why do I have to explain to local liberals that Obamacare, especially its “mandatory health insurance” provision, is unsupportable — even if the wonderful Barack Obama proposed it?

    • An Illuminating Expedition to the World of the Uninsured

      A few years after “Wild Kingdom” went off the air, Brock founded Remote Area Medical to deliver basic health care to people living in some of the planet’s most remote locales. A pilot, Brock himself began flying doctors and medical supplies to villages in South America, Africa and Asia.

      It never occurred to Brock when he started RAM in 1985 that most of his expeditions would eventually take him to communities in the States. But it soon became apparent to him that millions of Americans don’t have much better access to affordable care than residents of the third world. Today, more than 60 percent of RAM’s expeditions are in the United States, and not just to rural areas. In fact, the biggest annual RAM expedition is now held in Los Angeles, where thousands of people line up for care that is provided free over the course of eight days.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • 1,500 detainees transferred to Evin prison

      Following the large uprising against the regime in various cities in Iran on Monday, the regime’s officials at the notorious Evin prison released the names of 1,500 people arrested and transferred to the prison on Monday night.

      According to Harana news agency on Tuesday, students and protestors have also been arrested by the regime’s suppressive forces in the northeastern city of Mashhad.

    • U.S. pushing Palestinians to drop UN resolution on settlement construction

      The United States is putting heavy pressure on the Palestinian Authority and Arab states to withdraw a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution is due to come up for a vote at the United Nations Security Council on Friday.

      Washington has made it clear that it will veto the resolution should it come to a vote, and has implored the Palestinian Authority and other Arab nations to withdraw the proposal, but to no avail.

    • Haaretz probe: IDF base to be built in East Jerusalem

      The Jerusalem municipality plans to construct an Israel Defense Forces army base that will house military colleges on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, reportedly beyond the pre-1967 war green line.

      Both the municipality as well as the Ministry of Defense dispute this claim, stating that the base will be built within the green line, however, Haaretz has revealed otherwise and according to the plans created by the architectural firm hired by the municipality, the base will encroach upon disputed territory.

    • From An Israeli Prison to Tahrir Square
    • Bahrain protests: Four killed as riot police storm Pearl Square

      At least four people have been killed in an early-morning raid by security forces on Pearl Square, the focal point of anti-government demonstrations in Bahrain, sparking street battles with riot police.

      Armoured trucks have been seen in central Manama and key roads are blocked by security forces. The crackdown follows a dramatic and violent turn in three days of protests calling for widespread reform within Bahrain’s ruling minority. Dozens of wounded protesters were being taken to hospitals across the city on Thursday morning.

    • Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin

      In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

      The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt’s military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

    • The Koch Connection in Scott Walker’s War on Working People

      Wisconsin’s embattled Governor Scott Walker took large donations from Koch Industries in the run-up to the 2010 election that swept him into office. OpenSecrets.org reports that Koch Industries donated a total of $43,000 in two separate contributions — $15,000 on July 8, 2010 and another $28,000 on September 27, 2010 — to the Friends of Scott Walker Political Action Committee (PAC), to help get Walker elected governor.

    • Firefighter Support
    • A CMD Special Report: Scott Walker Runs on Koch Money

      The RGA in turn spent $5 million in the race, mostly on TV ads attacking Walker’s political opponent, Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett. As this photo shows, the RGA described itself as a “key investor” in Walker’s victory. In its congratulations, the RGA notes that it “ran a comprehensive campaign including TV and internet ads and direct mail. The series of ads were devastating to Tom Barrett . . . . All told, RGA ran 8 TV ads and sent 8 pieces of mail for absentee, early voting, and GOTV, totaling 2.9 million pieces.”

      The Center for Media and Democracy reported on some of the RGA’s spin-filled ads last November, including the ads against Barrett, and filed a snapshot report this week. As the RGA takes credit, its multi-million dollar negative ad campaign probably did help make the difference between the 1.1 million votes cast for Walker against Barrett’s 1 million votes. According to Open Secrets, Koch Industries was one of the top ten donors to the RGA in 2010, giving $1,050,450 to help with governors’ races, like Walker’s.

    • Wisconsin Governor Walks on Workers

      Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is trying to end collective bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin, and thousands have converged on the state capitol in protest of what many consider a radical and blatantly political move. Walker’s plan threatens the rights of all Wisconsin workers, and if it prevails in this state, could threaten the rights of working people across the nation. It would also reverse the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and all those who have fought for economic justice through the power of organizing.

    • Military moves quickly to bring elections to Egypt

      Egypt geared up Tuesday for a breakneck rush to democracy as its military rulers vowed to hand authority to an elected civilian government in six months and ordered legal experts to draft a revised constitution in 10 days.

    • Anti-government protests, clashes spread to Libya

      Egypt-inspired unrest spread against Libya’s longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi on Wednesday, with riot police clashing with protesters in the second-largest city of Benghazi and marchers setting fire to security headquarters and police stations in two other cities, witnesses said.

    • Palestinian Revolution by Default

      The Egyptian revolution, and the threat to autocratic Arab regimes all over the region, have forced rapid changes on the Palestinian political scene – with major players Hamas and Fatah scrambling to catch up.

    • Curveball could face jail for warmongering, says German MP

      A German politician has warned that the CIA informant Curveball could go to jail after telling the Guardian that he lied about Saddam Hussein’s bioweapons capability in order to “liberate” Iraq.

    • Curveball: How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam

      In a small flat in the German town of Erlangen in February 2003, an out-of-work Iraqi sat down with his wife to watch one of the world’s most powerful men deliver the speech of his career on live TV.

    • Will Any Landlord Rent to This Abortion Provider?

      Mila Means, the Wichita doctor who wants to fill the void left by the 2009 murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, has been forced to search for a new place to work. Last month, Means’ landlord requested and received a restraining order forbidding the doctor from providing abortion services in the building where her office is currently located. On Friday, Means told the state judge handling the case that she is hoping to secure a new location for her practice, and reached an agreement with her landlord not to provide the service at the current location.

    • In Iraq, Torture and Secret Prisons Continue

      As the world’s eyes were fixed on the drama in Egypt last week, Human Rights Watch investigators in Iraq filed a depressingly familiar chapter in the country’s recent history, making new allegations of torture and of a secret prison that they say is run by special counterterrorism forces who answer directly to the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

      The watchdog group reported that, in November, more than 280 prisoners were transferred from their prison in the Green Zone to the secret prison, known as Camp Justice, just days before a team of rights observers were planning to visit and monitor conditions. Two separate security forces, the 56th Brigade and the Counter-Terrorism Service, both of which take orders from Maliki, are tasked with running the secret prison — and have proven adept at keeping its detainees beyond the reach of international aid groups, relatives, or the state’s own Ministry of Human Rights.

    • Bahrain: 2011-2-18
    • Protests death toll rises in Libya

      Security forces in Libya have killed scores of pro-democracy protesters in demonstrations demanding the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s long time ruler.

      A doctor in Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city, told Al Jazeera that he had seen 70 bodies at the main hospital on Friday in one of the harshest crackdowns against peaceful protesters thus far.

    • Libya protests: 84 killed in growing unrest, says HRW

      The number of people killed in three days of protests in Libya has risen to 84, according to the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.

    • Libyan Disconnect

      Renesys confirms that the 13 globally routed Libyan network prefixes were withdrawn at 23:18 GMT (Friday night, 1:18am Saturday local time), and Libya is off the Internet. One Libyan route originated by Telecom Italia directly is still BGP-reachable, but inbound traceroutes appear to die in Palermo. A minority of our peers report some surviving paths through the peering connection between Level3 and Telecom Italia, but traceroutes into those prefixes fail, suggesting that the Libyan cutoff is complete.

    • The Day Egypt Disappeared

      Wael Ghonim, a young Google product manager who was secretly arrested and held for 12 days during uprising, claims that “this revolution started on Facebook.”

      For years now, democracy activists across the Arab world have been meeting and collaborating on-line. Six months ago, Ghonim started the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page honoring the Egyptian blogger who was beaten to death by police after he released material exposing police corruption. What started as a campaign against police brutality and government propaganda grew into an enormous chat room for a generation disgusted with the Mubarak regime.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Barack Obama 2012 budget provides $8bn for clean energy

      President Barack Obama proposed on Monday to boost funds for clean energy research and deployment in his 2012 budget by slashing subsidies for fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

      The budget provides the Department of Energy with $29.5bn (£18.4bn) for the fiscal year 2012, up 4.2% from the proposed 2011 budget, and up 12% from the enacted 2010 budget. Some $8bn would support research in clean energy like wind, solar and advanced batteries.

    • Warming Arctic brings invasion of southern species
    • Study finds massive flux of gas, in addition to liquid oil, at BP well blowout in Gulf

      A new University of Georgia study that is the first to examine comprehensively the magnitude of hydrocarbon gases released during the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil discharge has found that up to 500,000 tons of gaseous hydrocarbons were emitted into the deep ocean. The authors conclude that such a large gas discharge—which generated concentrations 75,000 times the norm—could result in small-scale zones of “extensive and persistent depletion of oxygen” as microbial processes degrade the gaseous hydrocarbons.

    • Chevron Runs from Judgment
      in Ecuador

      Chevron petroleum Corporation is attempting to slither out of an $8 billion judgment rendered yesterday by a trial court in Ecuador for cancer deaths, illnesses and destruction caused by its Texaco unit.

    • Climate change doubled likelihood of devastating UK floods of 2000

      Global warming made the floods that devastated England and Wales in the autumn of 2000, costing £3.5bn, between two and three times more likely to happen, new research has found. This is the first time scientists have quantified the role of human-induced climate change in increasing the risk of a serious flood and represents a major development in climate science.

      “It shows climate change is acting here and now to load the dice towards more extreme weather,” said Myles Allen of Oxford University, who led the work, which he started after his own home was nearly flooded in 2000. It will also have wider consequences, say experts, by making lawsuits for compensation against energy companies more likely to succeed.

    • Chevron’s dirty fight in Ecuador

      No regrets, no apologies and not a penny in damages. The US energy giant Chevron came out fighting last night after a court in Ecuador ordered it to pay $8.6bn (£5.3bn) in fines and clean-up costs, plus $900m reparations, to the victims of oil pollution that fouled a swathe of Amazon rainforest along the country’s remote north-eastern border.

      The sum was the largest ever levied in an environmental lawsuit anywhere in the world.

      Supporters of the indigenous villagers who brought the case said they were celebrating a landmark victory in the wider battle to hold multinational corporations to account for their conduct overseas.

    • Juror in activists’ trial hits out at absence of police tapes

      A juror in a controversial trial of environmental activists has castigated police for withholding covert recordings that he said could have led to them being declared not guilty.

      Jezz Davis, 39, a construction worker, took the rare step of speaking out after hearing revelations that Nottinghamshire police allegedly suppressed surveillance tapes of activists convicted of conspiring to shut down one of Britain’s biggest power stations for a week.

  • Finance

    • Nine Pictures Of The Extreme Income/Wealth Gap

      Many people don’t understand our country’s problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don’t see it. People just don’t understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people’s ability to comprehend.

    • Consumer 10.0: Phila. homeowner wins judgment against Wells Fargo over mortgage fees

      Frustrated by a dispute with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage and by his inability to get answers to questions, the West Philadelphia homeowner took the mortgage company to court last fall.

      When Wells Fargo still didn’t respond, Rodgers got a $1,000 default judgment against it for failing to answer his formal questions, as required by a federal law called the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act.

    • Where is the Budget Crisis?

      Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker alleges that dismantling public sector collective bargaining rights is made necessary by a $3.6 billion deficit in the next budget, and a $137 million shortfall this year. Setting aside the fact that the ability to negotiate shifts, seniority, benefits and conditions of employment would have a negligible impact on the deficit, and looking beyond Walker’s deceptive claim that the alternative to union-busting is to kick 200,000 children off Medicaid (called “false” by Politifact), how deep is the state’s economic crisis?

    • An Injury to One is an Injury to All

      Cue mayhem across the state, with teachers, nurses, steelworkers and even cops and firefighters — who would be exempt from the curtailing of their collective bargaining rights under Walker’s bill — descending upon Madison to storm the Capitol.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The GOP Plot to Destroy Legal Aid

      Last month, when the House conservative caucus proposed scrapping a program that has provided the poor with free legal assistance for nearly four decades, it felt like déjà-vu. Indeed, this provision of the GOP’s Spending Reduction Act of 2011 was simply the latest salvo against an entity that’s been under siege by conservatives since the day it was conceived.

      Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is a federally funded nonprofit that doles out money ($420 million this year) to 136 independent groups providing legal services in hundreds of communities around the nation. Debt collectors knocking down your door? Foreclosure mill trying to take your house? If you can’t afford a lawyer and your family is hovering near the federal poverty line, then the LSC is your ticket to legal representation.

    • Bloomberg Behind the Coalition for Competition in Media

      An article in the February 28 issue of The Nation has revealed that Bloomberg was behind the Coalition for Competition in Media (CCM), an apparent public interest group aiming to stop the then-pending $30 billion megamerger of Comcast and NBC Universal. While CCM advanced a legitimate argument that the merger would negatively impact independent media outlets and internet freedom, and while other pro-media democracy groups joined the coalition, Bloomberg LP’s true motivation behind forming and funding the group may have been to advance the narrow interests of Bloomberg Television.

    • Astroturf for Hire

      NPR’s Planet Money recently reported on astroturf activities in the financial sector. “Forgery: The Latest Tactic To Sway Finance Rules” focuses on the behind the scenes fight over the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. The Dodd-Frank bill is now in the agency rulemaking stage and financial sector lobbyists have descended en masse on the pertinent federal agencies, lobbying in person and via comment letters to the Federal Register.

  • Civil Rights

    • EU Accused of Backing Child Labour

      The EU is facing accusations of tacitly supporting child labour after its main decision-making body approved a trade agreement with Uzbekistan on textiles – an industry known to involve at least one million child labourers a year.

      It has emerged that just days after Uzbek president Islam Karimov’s controversial visit to Brussels last month, the European Council approved a protocol granting various tariff and customs privileges and free access to European markets for Uzbek textiles.

    • Soviet Shadow Over Russia

      With less than a year remaining for parliamentary and presidential elections in Russia, human rights activists and opposition forces have become targets of political intimidation and frequent harassment by law enforcement agencies. They see an effort to exclude them from the country’s democratic process.

      “Many opposition groups suffer from widespread official suppression,” Yelena Ryabinina, chairperson of the Moscow-based Memorial and the Civic Assistance Committee and a member of the Presidential Committee on Human Rights told IPS.

    • TSA Behavioral Screening: Yet Another Untested Program that Compromises Civil Liberties

      The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) use of privacy-violating full-body imaging scanners in U.S. airports has provoked a public outcry and garnered extensive media attention, but dozens of other questionable TSA initiatives have gone largely unnoticed, including the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program launched in 2006.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • U.S. House Votes to Allow Cable Providers to Throttle Internet

      It has seen the end of the net neutrality legislation, it will soon see the end of the Rebellion…

      House Republicans have managed to pull off a high profile rejection of a key tech-related component of the Obama administration’s initiatives. In control of the House for the first time in four years, Republicans have voted to overturn so-called “net neutrality” rules proposed earlier this year by the Obama administration.

Clip of the Day

City Lights From Space


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 19/2/2011: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS is Out, Android/Linux is Beating Apple

Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • IBM’s Watson Should Rejuvenate Open Source AI

    Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past week, you had to have caught the remarkable performance of IBM’s Watson intelligent computer, which has beaten the two best players in the history of the show Jeapordy, and caused people to herald “our new computer overlords.”

  • Fans

    What bothers me most is not that such attacks are personal so much as the lack of tolerance behind them. To my way of thinking, the refusal to tolerate criticism is crippling in any discussion. The right to question is basic, not just to civilized discourse, but to any improvement — as well, as Robin Miller impressed on me, to journalism, which can be an essential part of that process of improvement if it tries to describe fairly and raises inconvenient truths.

    In fact, you could say that questioning is central to FOSS. After all, what is the patch system of software development, except a series of criticisms and counter-criticisms? Sometimes, the criticism are wrong, or create more problems than they solve, but FOSS could not evolve without a constant critique of what is. In other words, I would argue that, by finding enemies in anyone who doesn’t show unwavering support, FOSS fans are acting against the basic tenets of the cause they claim to support.

  • Terracotta adds search to cached databases

    The latest company to merge analytics and transactions into a single operation, Terracotta has added search functionality into the latest version of its Ehcache Java cache software.

    The search feature, available in the newly released version 2.4 of the software, will allow organizations to perform analysis directly against their online data stores, which could simplify their architecture and cut the time it takes for analyzing data, when compared to performing analysis against disk-based databases or data warehouses, the company claims.

  • Web Browsers

    • Qualys Releases Report on Faulty Browser Plugins

      Qualys’s BrowserCheck tool, released last summer, reports on any security problems with your browser. A new report, released Wednesday, shows the most vulnerable plugins.

      BrowserCheck focuses on plugins that are out of date and hence vulnerable to attack. You can click a button for more details about each found problem; in most cases clicking another button will launch the needed update. The tool works with Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome running under Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

    • Chrome

      • Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings

        In the spirit of the lunar new year, we’re excited to kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a slew of enhancements in the Chrome beta channel. Today’s new beta includes a dramatic improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings.

      • Find out who has the most Klout on Twitter with this Chrome extension

        Klout (beta) is a Chrome Extension that was born in a recent Hackathon between bit.ly and Klout. It’s a Twitter rating system that once installed tells you what Klout scores Twitters users have in your Twitter stream. The higher their Klout score the greater their power influence in the Twitterverse.

      • Tech Support Folks Rejoice: All Chrome Settings Now Have a URL

        Google released the latest beta version of its browser, Google Chrome, today and at least one of the changes is likely to make a lot of phone tech support folks very happy.

        In addition to the standard fare updates of making things generally faster and better, the browser now opens all of its settings in a new browser tab, making them entirely searchable and reachable by URL.

      • Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff

        Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we’ve reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client SDK.

    • Mozilla

      • Moving forward with F1

        We’re releasing a new update to F1 with support for more services, more service specific features, and a brand new UI. Here’s a run down of what’s new.

      • Firefox 4 RC coming next Friday

        One year on since the first Alpha of Firefox 4 was made available for testing the worlds second most popular browser may finally have the finish line in sight.

      • Sandboxed add-ons to be disabled next week

        The new Developer Tools and review process were implemented on AMO and announced a little over a month ago. I also expanded the explanation about the new review process, so you should have a look if you haven’t already.

      • Announcing Search in Thunderbird

  • SaaS

    • Yahoo to open-source cloud-serving engine

      Yahoo is developing an internal cloud-serving engine to boost its own productivity, and intends to release the code as an open source this year.

      “We’re committed to open-sourcing all of our cloud infrastructure, for the simple reason that we don’t believe the cloud infrastructure is a competitive differentiator for us,” says Todd Papaioannou, Yahoo’s vice president of cloud architecture. “I have this question pop up from time to time, ‘Is Yahoo ever going to move into the cloud?’ And the answer is, ‘No. We are the cloud.’”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation
    • LibreOffice Raises 10000 Euros for Foundation in One Day

      The Document Foundation announced their intention of becoming a legal non-profit foundation to allow it to accept donations and financial assistance as well as pay employees and rent without having to suffer the tax liabilities levied upon businesses. Since startup capital is required, they began asking for donations to reach their goal. And so far, so good.

      The plan to form a legal foundation was mentioned a while back but not widely announced until February 16. By that time a donation mechanism was instituted and outlined on The Document Foundation Blog. Florian Effenberger, founding member of The Document Foundation, said they’ve decide to apply in Germany where €50,000 in startup funds are considered necessary. That’s where the community comes in. They need help raising that sum.

  • Funding

    • Slashdot owner reports loss again

      Geeknet, the owner of the American technology news accumulation site, Slashdot, has reported a net loss of $US4.4 million for the year 2010.

      In 2009, the company recorded a net loss of $US14 million.

  • Project Releases

    • Python for Qt version 1.0.0 release candidate 1 “The name doesn’t matter” released

      The PySide team is proud to announce the first release candidate of PySide: Python for Qt version 1.0.0. We consider PySide quality already high enough for the 1.0 release, and to ensure a high-quality 1.0 release, we are providing a release candidate to catch any last-minute regressions. Please pound this release hard to help us verify there are no serious outstanding issues!

    • Muon Suite 1.1.1 Released

      This is a few days late in coming (I have been busy with school), but I am glad to announce the release of the first bugfix update for Muon Suite 1.1. This release fixes several bugs that the public has found with the newer tools in the suite such as the Muon Software Center, Muon Update Manager, and Muon Update Notifier. All known bugs are now fixed with this release, and the Muon/QApt buglist is sitting right at zero, and it is recommended that anybody using Muon Suite 1.1.0 upgrade to Muon 1.1.1. Thanks to all the testers who filed bug reports, and thanks to Colin Watson for providing several bugfix patches. In addition, one month’s worth of translation updates from the rocking KDE l10n team are included.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Creative Commons 2010 Figures

      Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization and we happily provide all of our tools for free. As a result, we rely on our international community of users and advocates to give back to this vital public resource and support our work. With so many worthy causes in the world vying for peoples’, foundations’, and companies’ support, we are grateful so many have given whatever they are able to help keep CC afloat and going strong for the past 8 years. In the spirit of transparency and openness, below are some numbers to give you an idea of where our money comes from (You can also see real-time figures as they come in). We’d like to see these numbers continue to grow, just as CC license adoption and use of our tools has grown so steadily since 2002. Please donate today and join our international ranks of supporters to make 2011 our best year yet.

    • Open Data

      • The open-data battle continues with OC Transpo

        When OC Transpo started giving out live GPS data on its buses to app-developers who wanted to let people know when their next buses were likely to make it to particular stops, it was a breath of fresh air — very un-OC Transpo-like, to just give out info like that.

        So much so that when the transit company yanked the data, saying it was necessarily current or accurate enough to be used for REAL real-time predictions of bus arrivals, it seemed plausible. These people really wanted to get the thing right, it seemed. They did mention putting out an official OC Transpo-branded app with the data later, but that’s as far as they went.

      • City mulls making money off bus-tracking data

        The City of Ottawa’s decision to pull access to global positioning system data for OC Transpo buses appears to have been in part to capitalize on potential advertising revenue.

        OC Transpo had made the GPS data available as part of a pilot project, but suspended the project in January shortly after a developer had created a mobile application which gave real-time updates for people waiting at bus stops.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open Standards What A Corrupted Term

      When Steve Jobs stands up and says h264 is an Open Standard are we bucking up against sociological, political and generational corruption of what he truly means? Is he saying that and Open Standard refers to the availability of the standard itself and has nothing to do with the implementation, restrictions or privileges defined by the standard and licenses applied to the standard? Is there a purposeful play on words here to describe a technology like h264 as an Open Standard thus playing to the popular “buzzword” term of the day ascribing Open Standard to be akin to Peren’s definition when in truth it is merely the publication of the h264 standard itself and nothing more?

    • W3C Confirms May 2011 for HTML5 Last Call, Targets 2014 for HTML5 Standard

      Today there are more than 50 organizations participating in the HTML Working Group, all committed to Royalty-Free licensing under the W3C Patent Policy. There are more than 400 individuals from all over the world in the group, including designers, content authors, accessibility experts, and representatives from browser vendors, authoring tool vendors, telecoms, equipment manufacturers, and other IT companies.

    • 15-day Public Review for OpenDocument Version 1.2

Leftovers

  • GM to offer Pandora Internet radio on Chevy cars

    General Motors Co will launch a new system to stream online radio from Pandora in upcoming Chevrolets starting with the Volt and Equinox.

  • Jon Stewart gawks at Silvio Berlusconi’s nerve

    Silvio Berlusconi will face a judge for allegedly paying for sex with a teenager. For a leader who has long avoided legal consequences of his sometimes salacious activities, this could go very poorly.

  • Review: Recompute Cardboard PC

    Shawn shows us the Recompute PC from Sustainable Computers. It’s a full blown workstation that you could use to start a camp fire. We don’t recommend the camp fire part though.

  • 2011: Year of the SSD?

    Disk manufacturers are putting a new spin on an old product: Solid State Drives. New technology, increased power costs, space limitation, and new business requirements are driving advances in storage. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are part of that new technological push toward more efficiency, increased agility, and higher demand.

  • Berlusconi has made Italy a laughingstock

    L’Espresso start publishing the secret Wikileaks cables

  • Twenty questions I ask myself every day
  • ‘Some EU governments’ consent helps rise of Islamophobia’

    Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg has said that as some EU governments take a tolerant stance regarding the arguments of the extremist right in Europe, xenophobia and Islamophobia gain strength, resulting in more border controls and restrictions on immigration.

  • 10 Historical ‘Facts’ Only a Right-Winger Could Believe

    10. The Robber Barons weren’t robbers — they were capitalist heroes.

  • Ask Ars: How should my organization approach the IPv6 transition?

    Whenever Ars runs an article about the increasing global scarcity of IPv4 addresses or an IPv6-related topic, we inevitably hear from some readers that they would like to see Ars available over IPv6. We thought we’d explain why we haven’t made that move yet.

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Doctors Embrace Facebook, Twitter

      Hospitals and healthcare facilities all over the U.S. are integrating Facebook, Twitter and even mobile apps into their work, in an effort to improve patient-doctor communication.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Friday
    • Pirates are not hackers and software piracy is also the Government’s fault

      In January 2011 Italian newspaper Repubblica published an article that is a nice example of how much confusion there still is, in mainstream press, about the nature of software and copyright, their relevance for all citizens and the responsibilities of Public Administrations in these fields. That article may have been written everywhere, there’s nothing specifically Italian in it, so I translated my objections to it because they too may be useful outside Italy (to stimulate discussion if nothing else).

    • Government and Security

      There’s a story running on CBC that several Canadian Government departments were penetrated from China over the network. It seems the intruders got control of some executive PCs and sent memos to underlings to reveal passwords etc… I guess it helped that the PCs were running that other OS but once the keys to the kingdom are turned over it matters little what OS was running where.

    • Why the Cabinet Office’s £27bn cyber crime cost estimate is meaningless

      Today the UK Cabinet Office released a report written by Detica. The report concluded that the annual cost of cyber crime in UK is £27bn. That’s less than $1 trillion, as AT&T’s Ed Amoroso testified before the US Congress in 2009. But it’s still a very large number, approximately 2% of UK GDP. If the total is accurate, then cyber crime is a very serious problem of utmost national importance.

      Unfortunately, much of the total cost is based on questionable calculations that are impossible for outsiders to verify. 60% of the total cost is ascribed to intellectual property theft (i.e., business secrets not copied music and films) and espionage. The report does describe a methodology for how it arrived at the figures. However, several key details are lacking. To calculate the IP and espionage losses, the authors first calculated measures of each sector’s value to the economy. Then they qualitatively assessed how lucrative and feasible these attacks would be in each sector.

    • NSA reveals its secret: No backdoor in encryption standard

      The National Security Agency made changes in the proposed design of the Data Encryption Standard before its adoption in 1976, but it did not add any backdoors or other surprises that have been speculated about for 35 years, the technical director of NSA’s information assurance directorate said Wednesday.

      “We’re actually pretty good guys,” said Dickie George. “We wanted to make sure we were as squeaky clean as possible.”

    • Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

      The attached document, which is in English, begins: “LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION).”

      It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one’s enemies with knives (try “the area directly above the genitals”), with ropes (“Choking… there is no other area besides the neck”), with blunt objects (“Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick.”), and with hands (“Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them.”).

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Feb18 Bahrain Army Attack on peaceful protests
    • The Tweet and Revolution

      President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton rushed to contrast the repressive brutality of the Iranian authorities with what they now seek to present as the bloodless, US-managed triumph of pro-democracy forces in Egypt.

      By any measure this was brazen impudence, starting with the fact that across the past few weeks the 300 dead, slaughtered by security forces and government-hired thugs fell in Tahrir Square and the streets of Cairo, not in Teheran, with more dead piling up in Bahrein, home of the US Fifth Fleet.

      Good or bad, everything has to be made in America. The 9/11 conspiracists decry the notion that “men in caves” –could plan the destruction of the Twin Towers. They say it had to be non-cavemen Bush and Cheney, plus the commanders of NORAD and several thousand red-blooded American accomplices.

      Today, there’s a flourishing little internet industry claiming that the overthrow of Mubarak came courtesy of US Twitter-Facebook Command, overseen by Head of the Joint Chiefs of Twitter, in the unappetizing, self-promoting form of Jared Cohen, with flanking support by the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House.

    • Bahrain’s army deliberately kills peaceful protesters with live rounds ( automatic weapon )
    • Bahrain: anti-government protests continue despite brutal crackdown (big photo gallery)
    • Bahrain royal family orders army to turn on the people

      As protesters attempted to converge on Pearl Roundabout, a landmark in the capital Manama that has become the principal rallying point of the uprising, soldiers stationed in a nearby skyscraper opened fire.

      Since they took to the streets, Bahrain’s protesters have come to expect violence and even death at the hands of the kingdom’s security forces. At least five people were killed before yesterday’s protests.

    • Libyan protesters assert control

      Libyan officials said that the security forces had been withdrawn from al-Bayda city centre to avoid further loss of life, but were now laying siege to the town as an uprising turned into outright conflict.

      Demonstrators in contact through social media with Libyan exiles claimed they also controlled parts of Libya’s second city, Benghazi, and, in one unconfirmed report, had managed to prevent government planes bringing reinforcements landing at the airport.

      Other social media from the country, which is largely closed to western journalists, showed bodies lying in hospitals as security forces fought back.

    • WikiLeaks: US wanted ‘derogatory’ information on Bahrain king’s sons

      The office of Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, wanted to know if Prince Nasir bin Hamad al Khalifa or Prince Khalid bin Hamad al Khalifa took drugs, drank alcohol or “caused problems” within the monarchy.

      Embassy staff in the Bahraini capital of Manama were also asked whether the princes had any friends among the country’s Shia Muslim majority, which is behind this week’s protests against the minority rule of the Sunni regime.

      Prince Nasir, 23, who is serving in the Bahrain Defence Force, and Prince Khalid, 21, are King Hamad’s sons by his second wife and there have been fears in the region that hardliners from neighbouring countries might try to influence them.

    • 08MANAMA194, NEW HEAD OF BAHRAIN NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

      1.(SBU) King Hamad on March 23 appointed Khalifa bin Abdullah bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa as the new Head of the Bahrain National Security Agency, replacing Khalifa bin Ali Al-Khalifa. Khalifa bin Abdullah is currently Bahrain’s ambassador in London, and has been there only about a year. Prior to that, he served in a variety of positions at the Ministry of Information: Acting Director of Press and Foreign Media Relations (1997-1998), Director of Press and Foreign Media Relations (1998-2002), Assistant Undersecretary (2002-2007), and Acting CEO of Bahrain Television (BTV) and Radio Corporation (2006-2007).

      2.(C) During his time at the Ministry of Information, Khalifa bin Abdullah was a valued contact of the Embassy’s Public Affairs section. He worked closely with the PAS on a judicial forum in 2004 and the Forum for the Future in 2005. During his stint as acting CEO of BTV, he presided over a successful collaboration with the State Department’s Office of Broadcast Services in producing a documentary program about the U.S.-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement.

    • 05PRAGUE337, C) RUSSIAN MISSILES FOR US NAVY COMING FROM

      1. (C) THIS IS AN ACTION REQUEST. SEE PARAGRAPH 4. The US Navy has for some time been planning an open commercial purchase of 23 KH-31 (or MA-31) Russian sea-skimming missiles from a Czech arms dealer. It has come to our attention that the missiles are coming from Belarus, via a series of complicated transactions. This arrangement is reportedly necessary because the Russians themselves refused to sell the missiles to the Czech arms dealer.

    • 04HELSINKI1603, FINNS FIND PUTIN “FRUSTRATED, ANXIOUS”

      1. (C) Finnish President Tarja Halonen’s most recent meeting with Vladimir Putin left the Finns with the clear impression that the Russian president is feeling frustrated and anxious. He complained at length to Halonen that Russia has been misunderstood and mistreated by the West, with an implicit accusation that the U.S. is fostering regime change in the near abroad with political cover from the EU. Former PM Paavo Lipponen, after discussing the meeting with Halonen, described to the Ambassador his own sense that the Russians feel under pressure on their perimeter, at least in the Baltic and Caucasus; Lipponen advises that the U.S. and EU stand firm on principle, as always, but “bear in mind that Putin feels very uncomfortable right now.”

    • Bahrain’s death toll grows and its Internet slows

      Bahrain’s dictatorship looked at what has happened in Tunis and Egypt and decided that bullets would serve its cause better than relenting to its people’s call for ballots and reform. This morning, mercenaries of Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf country, overran a camp of sleeping protesters killing at least four of them. At the same time, it appears that Bahrain has started strangling the country’s Internet connection to keep news from coming in or out of the country.

      Sources at Arbor Networks, a network security company, told me that “Bahrain has significantly increased its filtering of Internet traffic in response to growing political unrest.” While the Bahrain Internet has remained up, unlike Egypt’s Internet, it’s averaging a pronounced 10-20% reduction in traffic volumes.

    • Algeria Tries To Placate Unrest By Ending 19 Years Of Emergency Law

      Algeria is making a dangerous gambit in attempts to placate thousands of protesters.

      The petro-state will lift emergency laws that have been in place since 1992, according to Al Jazeera.

    • Algerian minister: Protests just a minority stunt
    • Adding insult to Lara Logan’s injury

      …used the attack to reinforce their anti-Muslim, anti-revolution arguments.

    • Egypt’s military rejects swift transfer of power and suspends constitution

      The Egyptian military has rejected the demands of pro-democracy protesters for a swift transfer of power to a civilian administration, saying it intends to rule by martial law until elections are held.

      The army’s announcement, which included the suspending of the constitution, was a further rebuff to some pro-democracy activists after troops were sent to clear demonstrators from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the centre of the protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak. “We do not want any protesters to sit in the square after today,” said the head of the military police, Mohamed Ibrahim Moustafa Ali. Many agreed to leave but a hardcore refused, saying they would remain until the army took a series of steps toward democratic reform including installing a civilian-led government and abolishing the repressive state of emergency.

    • Albanians hold new anti-government protest

      Tens of thousands of Albanian opposition supporters marched peacefully through the capital Friday to demand that the government resigns over corruption allegations, almost a month after four people died when a similar demonstration turned violent.

      Hundreds of police guarded the main government building in Tirana, where dozens of protesters and police were injured in the Jan 21 riot. But the protest ended peacefully.

      The opposition Socialists are demanding that conservative Prime Minister Sali Berisha hold early elections over allegations of corruption and vote rigging in the 2009 general election.

    • Egypt: prison guards killed scores in run-up to fall of Hosni Mubarak

      The full extent of the carnage at Al-Qata Prison outside Cairo as guards fought back is only now becoming clear.

      One prisoner, speaking from inside his cell, told The Daily Telegraph that inmates had drawn up a list of 153 men killed during a siege lasting a full two weeks. He described how as the men celebrated the fall of Mr Mubarak, a man standing next to him was hit by gunfire, an explosive bullet ripping into his head through the cell window.

      “We started to cheer and shout,” said the prisoner, whose name The Telegraph is witholding for his protection. “This man was standing here and was just shot through the eye. He died immediately.

    • U.S. veto thwarts UN resolution condemning settlements

      The other 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the draft resolution. But the U.S., as one of five permanent council members with the power to block any action by the Security Council, struck it down.

    • In dramatic turnaround, US to censure Israel in Security Council

      In a dramatic departure from longstanding policy, the United States intends to support a United Nations Security Council resolutions censuring Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory.

      The Obama administration told Arab governments Tuesday it will back a draft resolution saying the Security Council “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” according to Foreign Policy magazine.

    • Is the Apocalypse upon us? In dramatic turnaround, US to censure Israel in Security Council

      In a dramatic departure from longstanding policy, the United States intends to support a United Nations Security Council resolutions censuring Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory.

      The Obama administration told Arab governments Tuesday it will back a draft resolution saying[1] the Security Council “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” according to Foreign Policy[2] magazine.

    • Adventure playground

      What happier roost could there be for Mark and his mother? Margaret Thatcher found that permitting British companies to break the sanctions against the apartheid regime turned South Africa’s problems into our opportunities. When Mark was asked what he thought of his mother’s position, he replied: “My sympathy is with the struggling white community.”

    • Cop apologizes for ‘sluts’ remark at law school

      A police officer who suggested women can avoid sexual assault by not dressing like “sluts” has apologized, saying he is “embarrassed” by the remark and that assaulted women are “not victims by choice.”

      “I made a comment which was poorly thought out and did not reflect the commitment of the Toronto Police Service to the victims of sexual assaults,” Const. Michael Sanguinetti wrote on Thursday to Osgoode Hall Law School where he made the comment.

    • Don’t dress like a slut: Toronto cop

      Students and staff at Osgoode Hall Law School are demanding an apology and explanation from the Toronto Police Service after one of their officers suggested women can avoid sexual assault by not dressing like a “slut.”

      On Jan. 24, a campus safety information session was held at Osgoode Hall, where members from York security and two male officers from Toronto police 31 Division handed out safety tips to community
      members.

    • Wisconsin Dem Senator Posts ‘brb’ Message On Facebook

      The Democratic walkout was designed to deny Republicans the necessary number of lawmakers needed for a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial proposals that would strip most state government workers of their collective bargaining rights.

    • Wisconsin Democrats could stay away for weeks

      Democrats on the run in Wisconsin avoided state troopers Friday and threatened to stay in hiding for weeks, potentially paralyzing the state government in a standoff with majority Republicans over union rights for public employees.

      The dramatic flight from the state stalled a proposal that seeks to ease Wisconsin’s budget woes by cutting the pay, benefits and collective bargaining rights of many government workers. Democrats who stayed in Madison scored their own victory, forcing the state Assembly to adjourn until at least Tuesday without taking a vote.

    • Texas man wrongly put away for 18 years denied compensation after legal glitch

      A courtroom technicality has cost a wrongly convicted Texas man the compensation that would otherwise be due him for the 18 years he’d served in Texas prison–14 of which he spent on Death Row.

      Anthony Graves would have received $1.4 million in compensation if only the words “actual innocence” had been included in the judge’s order that secured Graves’s release from prison. The Comptroller’s office decided the omission means Graves gets zero dollars, writes Harvey Rice at the Houston Chronicle, even though the prosecutor, judge, and defense all agreed at trial he is innocent.

    • Fear of Teratocracy

      I’ve been thinking about the nature of democracy over the past few weeks, for both obvious (Egypt) and less-obvious (potential for social change under conditions of disruption) reasons. The definition of democracy that most people are familiar is something along the lines of “rule by the people through voting, where the recipient of a majority of the vote wins.” That’s a decent description of the mechanism of democracy, I suppose, but I don’t think it captures the important part.

      Democracy is defined by how you lose, not (just) how you win.

      The real test of whether a society that uses a plebiscite to determine leadership is really a democracy is whether the losing party accepts the loss and the legitimacy of their opponent’s victory. This is especially true for when the losing party previously held power. Do they give up power willingly, confident that they’ll have a chance to regain power again in the next election? Or do they take up arms against the winners, refuse to relinquish power, and/or do everything they can to undermine the legitimacy of the opposition’s rule?

    • Flamboyant Gaddafi feels ripples of change

      For most that time he also held a prominent position in the West’s international rogues’ gallery.

      He has maintained tight control by clamping down on dissidents but his oil-producing nation is now beginning to feel the wind of change that is blowing across the Arab world.

      Anti-Gaddafi protesters clashed with police and government supporters in the eastern city of Benghazi, and Human Rights Watch reported that at least 24 people had died in two days of unrest this week.

    • Gaddafi’s forces accused of using gunships against citizens

      Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime turned its helicopter gunships and snipers on protesters as rare anti-government protests were reported to have reached Tripoli, the capital.

      The dictator was the focus of a ”day of rage” in at least five cities, an unprecedented challenge to his ”Green Revolution”.

      Human Rights Solidarity, a campaign group, said snipers on the rooftops in al-Baida had killed 13 protesters and wounded dozens of others after police stations were set on fire and posters of Colonel Gaddafi burnt.

    • US targets Afghan laundering network

      The US government on Friday slapped sanctions on a high-profile Afghan money exchange house and its executives, accusing them of laundering cash for drug traffickers.

      The Kabul-based New Ansari Money Exchange as well as 15 related people and firms were accused of hiding “illicit narcotics proceeds” in billions of dollars they transferred in and out of Afghanistan between 2007 and 2010.

      The New Ansari Exchange was thought to be the biggest of Afghanistan’s “hawala” money-transfer firms, which play an even larger role in the war-torn nation’s economy than commercial banks.

    • The Arab Revolution Saudi Update

      Remember, in a former post, when I said that Saudis were captivated and shocked by what happened in Tunis and Egypt but hadn’t collectively made up their mind about it? Well it appears that they have. Everywhere I go and everything I read points to a revolution in our own country in the foreseeable future. However we are still on the ledge and haven’t jumped yet.

      I know that some analysts are worried particularly of Saudi Arabia being taken over by Al Qaeda or a Sunni version of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Calm down. Besides my gut feeling (which is rarely wrong), the overwhelming majority of people speaking out and calling out for a revolution are people who want democracy and civil rights and not more of our current Arab tradition based adaptation of Sharia. My theory of why that is, is that Al Qaeda has already exhausted its human resources here. The available muttawas, are career muttawas (fatwa sheikhs) and minor muttawas (PVPV) of convenience both paid by the government and do not want the current win-win deal between them and the government to sour. So it’s unlikely that they would actively seek change. Actually quite the opposite, they will resist and delay as much as they can. Fortunately the winds of change can’t be deterred by a PVPV cruiser.

    • protest in #Djibouti

      Dijibouti had protested earlier, on January 28, leading Ismaël Guedi Hared, President of Djibouti’s UAD opposition alliance, to call for a massive protest today. “According to UDDESC activists, this evening even international calls have been blocked in Djibouti in an attempt to restrict reporting from the events.”

    • Wisconsin Is a Battleground Against the Billionaire Kochs’ Plan to Break Labor’s Back

      As some 30,000 protesters overwhelmed the state capitol building in Wisconsin today, Democratic state senators hit the road, reportedly with State Police officers in pursuit. The Dems left the state in order to deprive Republicans the necessary quorum for taking a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to strip benefits and collective bargaining rights from state workers. Newsradio 620 WTMJ reported that the Democratic senators were holed up in a Rockford, Illinois, hotel, out of reach of Wisconsin state troopers. Now, it seems, Republican lawmakers are beginning to waver on their support for the union-busting bill.

    • Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people

      These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your “friends” are.

      But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my “friends” even real people?

      In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online “personas,” allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they’d like.

  • Cablegate

    • What caught the attention of US diplomats?
    • ‘So This is America’: Veteran Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested At Clinton Speech

      As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.

    • [Old] Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern
    • WikiLeaks Precedes Ugandan Election to Reveal Meteroic Rise of Homophobia

      Wiki Leaks reveals U.S. embassy cable reports on ’s meteoric rise of homophobia in Uganda, reflecting on a UN-backed human rights meeting attended by now murdered Ugandan Gay activist David Kato, and author of the “Kill the Gays” Bill, David Bahati. The International community could not have better real time reports and so action and outcry must occur in as rampant a fashion.

    • Gay hate exposed in Uganda poll countdown

      The murdered gay rights activist David Kato had been mocked at a United Nations-backed debate on proposed Ugandan legislation on homosexuality, a US diplomat in Kampala said.

      The diplomat said in a leaked embassy cable that in the debate Mr Kato, who was bludgeoned to death near his home in the capital last month, had delivered a well-written speech against a bill that would impose the death penalty for the offence of ”aggravated homosexuality” and life imprisonment for consenting adults who have gay sex.

    • Five Reasons Why Georgia Lost The August War

      But a recently-released cables via Wikileaks has brought the issue back into focus again. The cables in question cite sources that cast serious doubt on the ability of the sprawling, but famously creaky, Russian conventional military as being of little threat to NATO.

    • WikiLeaks brings to light suspected baby trafficking from Egypt to Canada

      The RCMP and Canadian consular officials in Cairo have been investigating up to a dozen cases where couples are suspected of having trafficked babies from Egypt into Canada, according to leaked diplomatic cables.

    • US extradition claims revealed by Wikileaks site

      THE extradition of a former university academic accused of plotting to smuggle military equipment to Iran was delayed for political reasons, a leaked secret cable claims.

      A US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks suggests the UK Government put the extradition of Nosratollah Tajik on hold to protect sensitive nuclear talks with Iran.

      The claim appears at odds with ministerial statements given to the House of Commons four months after the cable was sent, saying the extradition was a judicial process and that the sole issue to be considered was whether it would breach Mr Tajik’s human rights.

    • A Wikileaks Primer on the Cozy US-Bahrain Relationship

      In December 2009, the then-US Ambassador to Bahrain, Adam Ereli, cabled to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton his great regard for the rulers of that country. The US-Bahrain relationship as seen through Wikileaks cables is quite cozy, and focused quite a bit on areas of mutual security.

      King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Ereli wrote, “is personable and engaging” and “rules as something of a ‘corporate king,’ giving direction and letting his top people manage the government.”

      King Hamad was given high marks for ushering in governmental reforms. Ereli sad King Hamad had “overseen the development of strong institutions with the restoration of parliament, the formation of a legal political opposition, and a dynamic press.” King Hamad, Ereli said, “is committed to fighting corruption and prefers doing business with American firms because they are transparent.” Ereli noted that King Hamad had awarded U.S. companies major contracts, including Gulf Air buying 24 Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

    • WikiLeaks panellists censure ‘virus’ of government secrecy

      GOVERNMENTS have become too secretive and politicians should be disqualified from Parliament if they lie, says Julian Burnside, QC.

      Advertisement: Story continues below

      Mr Burnside, who spoke in a panel discussion about WikiLeaks at the Capitol Theatre last night, said the number of classified documents in the US had grown by almost 10 times between 1996 and 2010. Secrecy hid incompetence and corruption and was only warranted when lives were at risk, he said. ”Of course governments have got to have secrets. But they have too many at the moment.”

    • Senate Bill Would Make Leaks a Felony

      Legislation introduced in the Senate this week would broadly criminalize leaks of classified information. The bill (S. 355) sponsored by Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) would make it a felony for a government employee or contractor who has authorized access to classified information to disclose such information to an unauthorized person in violation of his or her nondisclosure agreement.

      Under existing law, criminal penalties apply only to the unauthorized disclosure of a handful of specified categories of classified information (in non-espionage cases). These categories include codes, cryptography, communications intelligence, identities of covert agents, and nuclear weapons design information. The new bill would amend the espionage statutes to extend such penalties to the unauthorized disclosure of any classified information.

    • What WikiLeaks has told us

      Since 2006, the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks has published a mass of information we would otherwise not have known. The leaks have exposed dubious procedures at Guantanamo Bay and detailed meticulously the Iraq War’s unprecedented civilian death-toll. They have highlighted the dumping of toxic waste in Africa as well as revealed America’s clandestine military actions in Yemen and Pakistan.

      The sheer scope and significance of the revelations is shocking. Among them are great abuses of power, corruption, lies and war crimes. Yet there are still some who insist WikiLeaks has “told us nothing new”. This collection, sourced from a range of publications across the web, illustrates nothing could be further from the truth. Here, if there is still a grain of doubt in your mind, is just some of what WikiLeaks has told us:

    • Wikileaks Scandal Hits paraguayan president Fernando Lugo

      Paraguay president Fernando Lugo, a center-left politician who was elected to office in April 2008, was seen as a potential ally to the U.S. by the U.S. embassy in Asuncion, so long as he had “more than just a little help from ’upstairs’ to govern as president” which Lugo was apparently willing to accept.

    • A Librarian reacts to “A Librarian Reacts to WikiLeaks”

      Thanks to Bill Sleeman for his Jan. 24 article on WikiLeaks. His parsing is thought-provoking, but incomplete.

      I’d like to add some context to Sleeman’s op-ed because I think he conflates and ignores several issues surrounding Wikileaks the organization and the leaked US State Department cables themselves.

      Sleeman ignores the information and focuses instead on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the actions of members of the American Library Association — Al Kagan’s American Libraries Magazine article as well as Larry Roman’s comment/response offer a good review of the ALA Midwinter conference WikiLeaks dustup. Sleeman repeatedly suggests that we have only one choice: “embrace” WikiLeaks or reject it. This is a false choice and misdirection. In doing this, Sleeman has adopted the strategy being used by those who wish to suppress the information by distracting us from it and focusing instead on the messenger.

    • Swedish justice questioned as Julian Assange awaits extradition ruling

      The Australian ambassador to Sweden has written to the country’s justice minister seeking assurances that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, would be treated justly under Swedish and international law, should he be extradited there.

      Assange, an Australian citizen, is currently fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden over allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual molestation made by two women in August last year, which he denies. He will learn within days whether his attempt to resist the European arrest warrant has been successful.

    • 06YEREVAN1019, A PROSTITUTE’S STORY: SEX AND TRAFFICKING IN

      Poverty and desperation are the largest factors contributing to trafficking in persons in Armenia, according to prostitutes, police and NGOs in Vanadzor, Armenia’s third-largest city. We met them during a July 14 trip to the city, where prostitutes gather after dusk in the traffic circle outside a central church to begin the day’s work. To each we posed the question, “What can be done to eradicate trafficking in persons in Armenia?” No one had an answer, but all agreed that lack of jobs drove women to sell themselves both in Armenia and overseas, where the money was better, but where they often didn’t actually get paid. They told us that girls as young as 11 and 12 have started walking the streets. A police officer told us that parents send their daughters to Turkey fully understanding the cost at which remittances will be sent home. We visited a decrepit shanty town, where prostitutes work for bread and rice, to see first-hand the conditions in which many of them live. We left Vanadzor convinced that, while stricter laws and harsher sentencing are needed in Armenia, prostitutes work in large part because they have to put food on the table, and they go to Turkey and the UAE because they believe the money is better there.

    • 08MOSCOW1124, MOSCOW TABLOID SHUT DOWN BY OWNER AFTER BREAKING

      The Moscow-based tabloid Moskovskiy Korrespondent suspended its operations on April 18 at the request of its owner after being the first Russian newspaper to report the rumor on April 11 that Putin had divorced in February and planned to marry 24-year old rhythmic gymnast and Duma member Alina Kabayeva. Korrespondent owner, Aleksandr Lebedev, told the Ambassador that no one had called him and he had not been forced to suspend the publication, as reported in the media. Korrespondent had ceased publication because kiosk owners had refused to carry it in the wake of the scandal. Putin denied there was any truth to the rumors during an April 18 joint press conference in Sardinia with Silvio Berlusconi, and the reporting which followed in the mainstream Russian press focused exclusively on his denial, pointedly failing to address the veracity of the rumors. Media sources we have spoken with indicate that it is not worth the risk of attracting Kremlin scorn to print any stories having a First Family angle.

    • Viewing cable 08MANAMA89, BAHRAIN’S CROWN PRINCE CONSOLIDATING HIS AUTHORITY

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Melting Arctic soil spewing carbon: study
    • GOP Lawmaker Mike Beard Claims God Will Provide Unlimited Natural Resources

      Mike Beard, a Republican state representative from Minnesota, recently argued that coal mining should resume in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, in part because he believes God has created an earth that will provide unlimited natural resources.

      “God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable,” Beard told MinnPost. “We are not going to run out of anything.”

    • Why Chevron’s lawyers must be among the busiest in the world

      Oil is the dirtiest industry in the world and Chevron, one the world’s largest companies, must be the oiliest. That’s saying something when you consider it has rivals including BP, Shell, Exxon and Oxy. Never mind the gross violations of the Ecuadoran environment for which it was punished this week with a $8bn (£5bn) fine. When it comes to aggressive legal tactics, vindictiveness, threats, pollution, intimidation, tax evasion and links with venal and repressive regimes, it is in a league of its own as its corporate lawyers bludgeon, bully and try to beat with the law any opposition it meets around the world.

  • Finance

    • Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – Closed Session – Ben Bernanke
    • How Goldman Killed A.I.G.

      The conventional wisdom has it that the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was a low-budget flop, hopelessly riven by internal political disputes and dissension among the commission’s 10 members. As usual, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Actually, the report — and the online archive of testimony, interviews and documents that are now available — is a treasure trove of invaluable information about the causes and consequences of the Great Recession.

    • Did Goldman Sachs Kill AIG ?

      The “dispute” between GS and AIG was over the timing and amount of the collateral call. I must emphasize that this was part of the contract between two very sophisticated financial firms — AIG was the world’s biggest insurer, and GS was one of the world’s biggest bankers.

      As Cohan states “On July 27, 2007, Goldman sent a $1.81 billion collateral call to A.I.G. Financial Products.” But Cohan’s mention that: “Goldman — pretty much alone at that point — thought represented the decline in the value of the securities.”

      But so what? That AIG gave GS the ability to demand increased collateral based on their own valuations is pretty astonishing — and dumb as hell. AIG ultimately negotiated down the $1.8B collateral call to “only” $450m; eventually, they ponied up an additional $1.55 billion in collateral. AIG also had to pay collateral to Merrill and Soc Gen.

    • A Few Words From Bernie

      No senator in Washington talks straighter about the truth than Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He is a staunch defender of ordinary Americans, and strongly opposes the Republican effort to balance the budget on the backs of these people while giving huge tax breaks to the rich. The following statements from Senator Sanders are from an interview with Judy Woodruff, where he discusses the budget plans of President Obama and the Republican Party. As usual, he’s right on target.

    • 05MINSK851, THE BANKING SECTOR, BELARUSIAN STYLE

      1. Summary: The banking system in Belarus is characterized by its underdevelopment, lack of foreign competition, and constant government interference. The Belarusian economy still relies primarily on cash as a settlement instrument. Cash outside the banking sector is the preferred method of payment because, what the GOB doesn’t see, it can’t confiscate or control. GOB intervention in the operational activities of both private enterprises and government- controlled banks is the cause of most of the problems in the banking sector. However, despite these systemic problems, public trust in the banking sector is growing.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Sign the petition: Bev Oda must resign

      Falsifying documents? Misleading Parliament? Enough is enough.

    • Koch Industries Slashed WI Jobs, Helped Elect Scott Walker, Now Orchestrating Pro-Walker Protest

      Wisconsin’s newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker is facing a growing backlash over his attempt to cut pay and eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in his state. Although Walker is claiming his power grab is an attempt to close a budget gap, the budget “crisis” was engineered by Walker as soon as he got into office. As Brian Beutler reported, half of the budget shortfall comes from Walker’s own tax cuts for businesses and other business giveaways enacted in January.

    • Sarah Palin Answers Questions From Business Group In Front Of Mainstream Media
    • Targets of Chamber of Commerce fight back

      Three attorneys at Hunton & Williams, the international law firm that is implicated in a scheme to attack WikiLeaks and critics of the Chamber of Commerce, will be hit with bar complaints next week by anti-Chamber activists who were targeted in the scheme.

      “It’s a powerhouse law firm and if they’re allowed to deal in this kind of illegal activity, what do ethics in the law mean?” asks Kevin Zeese, attorney for the group StopTheChamber.com. “These guys are openly talking about potentially criminal activities — invading privacy, moving toward libel and slander and defamation of character — by creating forged documents, tricking us to putting them out, and accusing us of putting out disinformation.”

    • Why Ballmer wasn’t at the Obama tech dinner

  • Censorship

  • Civil Rights

    • TSA screeners stole over $200K from fliers’ baggage

      Two TSA screeners from New York’s Kennedy airport were busted for stealing over $200,000 in cash from fliers. They targetted people they thought were drug dealers, since they didn’t think their victims would complain.

    • Comment: Civil liberties campaigners dig their own grave

      The reason leftists always sense a rightward drift in British politics is simply because the pressure is there. The tabloid press seize on any instance of crime being dealt with leniently, or an MP who proposes liberalising drugs laws, or a theatre production in a prison. People are on their toes about getting done from the right, so they cater to its concerns. The most you get from the left is a concerned column in the Independent. There’s just not enough pressure.

      Which is why civil liberties activists’ current strategy – namely complacency – is so ruinous to the cause.

      It was evident when the coalition took power that civil liberties was a crucial middle ground for the two parties. The Tories were always dodgy on civil liberties but it fitted a freedom agenda which could be combined with their deregulation plans to imitate an ideologically coherent policy portfolio.

    • Defend Free Speech on the Internet

      Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would give phone and cable companies absolute power over the Internet.

    • FBI pushes for surveillance backdoors in Web 2.0 tools

      The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.

      FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told Congress that new ways of communicating online could cause problems for law enforcement officials, but categorically stated that the bureau is no longer pushing to force companies like RIM, which offers encrypted e-mail for business and government customers, to engineer holes in their systems so the FBI can see the plaintext of a communication upon court order.

    • Data retention should last one year: AG

      The talks, set for July this year, will lay the foundations to unify current data retention plans between the US, Europe and Australia.

      Governments have proposed that internet providers retain information on customers including websites visited, online searches and key data required to tie verified account identities to IP addresses. The ideas are being pushed as a means to assist law enforcement within and across national borders.

    • The Fourth Amendment is Going Dark

      In 1994 the FBI decided it needed a surveillance system built into the telephone network to enable it to listen to any conversation with the flip of a switch. Congress obliged by passing the Communication Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), forcing the telecoms to rebuild their networks to be “wiretap ready.” Seventeen years later, law enforcement is asking to expand CALEA to include the Internet, claiming that its investigative abilities are “going dark” because people are increasingly communicating online.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • EU to consider new plans to reduce roaming phone charges

      The European Commission will have to consider radical new measures to reduce the cost of mobile roaming charges after almost all respondents to its consultation said prices were unfair.

    • Rogers Responds To CRTC Net Neutrality Concerns: No Need for Disclosure Changes
    • Regulations committee drops advice to CRTC on false and misleading news

      Facing mounting public pressure, the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations, a committee of the House and Senate, agreed Thursday to withdraw advice to the CRTC to water down a regulation prohibiting the broadcast of false and misleading news.

      Some observers now expect the CRTC, which is against the proposal, to withdraw or abandon the regulatory change it put forward in a consultation on Jan. 10.

    • Who owns the tangible Internet?

      What is the Internet? It is not analogous to a house. But you folks want tangibles, so lets talk tangibles.

      A house occupies a finite amount of space. A house anywhere in our world is most likely to fall under the specific jurisdiction and laws of the nation in which it stands. Under the laws of the land, it is usually straightforward to determine who holds title to the house. In most cases only the owner has the rights to alter or amend the structure of the house.

      The Internet, on the other hand, spans the globe. This means that there are bits of infrastructure residing in many nations and under many different legal systems. And if Fred in Topeka sends an email to Mary in London, the email it is broken down into multiple packets which are sent independently — part of Fred’s email might go in a relatively straight line from sender to destination but part of it may be rerouted via Sri Lanka and another through Iceland.

  • DRM

    • Copyright Lobby Group Makes the Case for Flexible Digital Lock Rules

      This report is what Canadian officials have in mind when they talk about it being driven entirely by U.S. industry. There are many aspects worth noting in this year’s report – the criticism of countries like Vietnam and the Philippines for encouraging the use of open source software (the Vietnamese program was established to help reduce software piracy), the criticism of Bill C-32′s digital lock provision that allows cabinet to establish new exceptions (the IIPA would like any new exceptions to be both limited and for a limited time), and the near universal demand that countries spend millions of public dollars on increased policing, IP courts, and public education campaigns.

      Of particular note, however, is the fact that the IIPA report provides a fairly convincing case that there is considerable flexibility in implementing the WIPO Internet treaty anti-circumvention rules.

      The IIPA hopes to make the opposite case by claiming that country-after-country should amend their digital lock rules to make them more like the U.S. DMCA. Yet the picture that emerges is that dozens of countries around the world have rejected that DMCA approach in their effort to comply with digital lock requirements found in the WIPO Internet treaties.

    • Stipulation: Hotz to Turn Over Computers to Neutral Third Party – Updated

      This will make a lot of you feel better. The parties have come up with a stipulation in Sony Computer Entertainment American v. Hotz regarding what Hotz must do about handing over his computers. The new Preliminary Injunction [PDF] now says that he is to turn his materials over to a “neutral” third party, not to SCEA’s lawyers, and after the neutral party combs through them, it all is returned to Hotz. All but whatever they “segregate” out of them. He won’t get that back until the end of the litigation, should he prevail, which this court at least currently thinks is less likely than that Sony will. There will be a hearing on Hotz’s motion to dismiss on April 8, 2011.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Did Watson Succeed On Jeopardy By Infringing Copyrights?

      This is a really good point and (once again) highlights the ridiculousness of copyright in certain circumstances. Of course, your viewpoint on this may depend heavily on whether or not you believe Google’s book scanning infringed on copyright (I don’t). But, for those who do, do you believe that IBM’s scanning of books does infringe? Technically, it’s the same basic process. In fact, you could argue that with Watson it’s much more involved, because Watson then actually made use of the actual data to a much greater extent than Google did with Google books.

    • Photographer Who Took Family Portrait Of Girl Shot In Tucson Suing Media For Using The Photo

      What you might not know is that the professional photographer, who took this photo, apparently seems to think this is an “opportunity.” After Christina’s unfortunate murder, photographer Jon Wolf of Tucson decided to register the photo at the Copyright Office and then threaten and/or sue a bunch of media properties for showing the photo without licensing it (thanks to Eric Goldman for sending this over). It’s hard not to be sickened by someone who would so brazenly try to capitalize on such a tragedy.

    • Trademarks

      • Google Pushes To Keep Reams Of Documents Secret In Major Trademark Case

        Rosetta Stone v. Google, one of the most important trademark cases of the digital age, is pending in a Virginia federal appeals court, and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is fighting a remarkable battle to keep thousands of pages of documents secret. The documents could contain information that’s potentially damaging to Google about how frequently customers are confused by trademarked searches, which is a central question in the case.

        The company is trying to block an effort by the non-profit Public Citizen to unseal heaps of documents in the case. The battle over these sealed documents won’t affect what Rosetta Stone has access to, so it shouldn’t really affect the outcome of the case. But Google is fighting to keep sealed at least 800 pages of documents that could damage it from a PR perspective.

    • Copyrights

      • Creating creativity

        To give creative endeavor more shelter I proposed making fair dealing illustrative. But if we must remain locked into enumerated categories of fair dealing Professor Graham Reynolds convincingly argues that a further category be added: a protection for those who engage in transformative work. In his chapter, “Towards a Right to Engage in the Fair Transformative Use of Copyright-Protected Expression,” in From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright…” (free download available here) he indicates that Canada would not be the first country to take such a step, and, he stresses the importance of ensuring that the anti-circumvention provisions of Bill C-32 do not render such a right null and void.

      • Leaving Millions on the Table: Pandora and Canadian Music

        Pandora, the popular U.S. online music service filed for an initial public offering last week, provided new insight into hugely popular company that spends millions of dollars in copyright royalties. Pandora users listened to a billion hours of music in the last three months of 2010. Given U.S. laws, the Pandora prospectus notes that it paid for the privilege of having its users do so, with the company spending just over half of its revenue on copyright fees – $45 million in the first nine months of 2010.

      • RIAA Labels Spain and Canada As Piracy Havens

        Together with their partners at the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the RIAA has submitted their ‘piracy watchlist’ recommendations to the Office of the US Trade Representative. Canada and Spain are listed as two piracy havens that require urgent attention from the US Government, even though the latter just adopted a US inspired anti-piracy law.

      • The RIAA attacks Canada

        The IIPA (International Intellectual Property Alliance) is touting another of its spurious ‘reports’ and, says the RIAA, quoting from the document, “the Canadian Government has inexplicably consumed yet another year without modernizing its copyright regime, leaving a legal structure in place that is not adequate to respond to present challenges.”

        Posted Michael Geist, “This [IIPA] report is what Canadian officials have in mind when they talk about it being driven entirely by U.S. industry.

        “There are many aspects worth noting in this year’s report — the criticism of countries like Vietnam and the Philippines for encouraging the use of open source software (the Vietnamese program was established to help reduce software piracy), the criticism of Bill C-32’s digital lock provision that allows cabinet to establish new exceptions (the IIPA would like any new exceptions to be both limited and for a limited time), and the near universal demand that countries spend millions of public dollars on increased policing, IP courts, and public education campaigns.”

      • Nothing New Under The Copyright-Eclipsed Sun

        The copyright industry has tried the same tricks and rhetoric for well over 500 years, and they are also keen on trying to rewrite history. But the tale of the history books differs sharply from what the copyright industry is trying to paint.

        When the printing press arrived in 1453, scribe-craft was a profession in high demand. The Black Death had taken a large toll from the monasteries, who were not yet repopulated, so copying books was expensive.

      • President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil

        This is an open letter to President Dilma Rousseff signed by international organizations, academics and activists in support of the work of the Brazilian society and government for the cultural commons

      • Optical illusion inventor goes on to invent copyright threats against 3D printing company

        Yesterday, I blogged about Artur Tchoukanov, who figured out how to make a 3D printed “impossible” Penrose triangle. Turned out I didn’t have the details quite right. The guy who came up with the 3D design in Thingiverse had made it after seeing someone else’s model for the same thing on Shapeways, and he’d made the triangle design to show that he’d figured out how the trick was done.

      • ACTA

        • Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: European Commission welcomes release of negotiation documents

          The negotiation parties of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) today published the documents of the 8th round of negotiations held in Wellington on 12-16 April. The European Commission welcomes the decision to make the draft available to the public. This text shows that the overall objective of ACTA is to address large-scale infringements of intellectual property rights which have a significant economic impact. ACTA will by no means lead to a limitation of civil liberties or to “harassment” of consumers.

        • Comments to USTR Submitted for ACTA: Thirty Professors Say It Requires Congressional Approval

          We write to call on the Obama administration to comply with the Constitution by submitting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to Congress for approval.

          The executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter international agreements on intellectual property without congressional consent. The regulation of intellectual property and of foreign commerce, which are at the heart of ACTA’s terms, are Article I Section 8 powers of Congress; the President lacks constitutional authority to enter international agreements in this area as sole executive agreements lacking congressional authorization or approval.

Clip of the Day

Using HLML5 as a wrapper around Flash, Is it a Possibility?


Credit: TinyOgg

02.18.11

Links 18/2/2011: LSE’s GNU/Linux Doing Fine; Dell’s New Android Tablets Revealed

Posted in News Roundup at 2:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Stock Exchange denies Linux system glitch

      The London Stock Exchange has played down reports that its new Linux-based Millennium Exchange is failing to cope since it went live earlier this week.

      According to the Financial Times, a technical glitch disrupted some trading displays and caused confusion over prices.

      DIY-style execution-only brokers, such as Selftrade, warned that their websites were not showing correct prices. It is the latest glitch to affect the system, following problems during a partial roll-out last year.

      However, the LSE told PC Pro that the problems were down to individual trading companies, not the system itself.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Plumbers Conference looking for more track proposals

      We still need several more though to fill out the schedule. So if you have additional ideas for tracks, please don’t hesitate to submit them! Likewise if you know someone who ought to run a track this year, badger them and get them to submit a proposal.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland Is Now Playing Well With NVIDIA, ATI Drivers

        For those of you interested in running the Wayland Display Server on your NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards, without running it nestled inside an X Server, it should work if you use the newest Linux kernel code.

        There’s reports on the Wayland mailing list that for ATI users you can use the Linux 2.6.38 kernel (for the Radeon DRM page-flipping support) and for NVIDIA users if using the Nouveau kernel (the page-flipping isn’t yet merged into the mainline kernel, possibly for Linux 2.6.39) and use one external patch, Wayland should now work directly with both of these DRM drivers. This is coming after it’s long been a pleasant Wayland experience when using the Intel DRM.

  • Applications

    • Exaile 0.3.2.1 Released, Install Exaile in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid via PPA

      Exaile is a very good music player alternative for Linux. Exaile is nimble and can handle large music collections without any problems. Exaile 0.3.2.1 was released a day ago. Exaile 0.3.2.1 is a bugfix release for version 0.3.2.

    • Guayadeque 0.2.9 Supports iPod, USB Mass Storage Devices, Wavpack, Trueaudio, Integrates With The Ubuntu Sound Menu

      Guayadeque is starting to become a mature, reliable music player – the latest version 0.2.9, released today brings some very important features to Guayadeque like Ubuntu sound menu support, iPod support with covers and playlist, usb mass storage devices support, support for trueaudio files and wavpack, option to embed album cover to all album tracks, output audio device configuration option in preferences, Magnature and Jamendo support.

    • Chromify-OSD: NotifyOSD Notifications For Chrome

      Jorge Castro announced the release of a Chrome extension called Chromify-OSD that makes the build-in Chrome notifications use NotifyOSD. I’ll make this post short because for some reason the extension doesn’t work for me in either Google Chrome or Chromium.

    • Proprietary

      • First Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” Dev Snapshot Available For Download

        Earlier this week, the Opera Desktop Team announced Opera 11 “Barracuda” which they say it will bring “another popular Opera feature will be taken to the next level”.

        Well, the first Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” development snapshot was made available for download on the Opera Desktop Team blog today. For now, the mysterious new feature is not available but considering the fast development Opera has been undergoing lately, I’m sure we’ll see it soon enough.

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • webOS up and running on PC hardware

        PreCentral user cdowers looks to have successfully booted up webOS on a Dell C600 laptop. The trick, apparently, is to take the webOS image from the emulator (which is compatible with x86 processors) and put it on an IDE hard drive (not the more modern SATA standard). Essentially what’s happening here is that instead the webOS emulator running in a ‘virtual’ machine, it’s running on the real machine.

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Qt at MWC11 – Digia NFC ShopWizer demo
        • Intel says will find new MeeGo partners

          Intel Corp (INTC.O) said its partner Nokia dropped the MeeGo operating system after Microsoft offered “incredible” amounts of money for the phonemaker to switch to Windows but it would find new partners for MeeGo.

          Intel’s Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a meeting with analysts in London, accessed by Reuters via conference call, that Nokia’s (NOK1V.HE) choice of Microsoft (MSFT.O) over Google’s (GOOG.O) Android platform was a financial decision. [ID:nLDE71A0DG]

        • First MeeGo based netbook coming from Fujitsu

          Bangalore: Japanese computer hardware and IT services company Fujitsu has unveiled world’s first MeeGo-based netbook called the LifeBook MH330. The netbook is available in Asian markets for a price of $380.

        • Google CEO feels sorry for Nokia’s Microsoft alliance

          Nokia should have chosen the Android operating system for its upcoming handsets instead of going with Microsoft, Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday.

          “We would have loved if they had chosen Android. They chose the other guys, that other competitor, Microsoft. I think we are pretty straightforward,” Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, adding that Google was open to Nokia switching to Android in the future.

        • Google Sky Map Turns Your Android Phone into a Digital Telescope

          Whether you’re an astronomy buff or just somebody looking for a perfect “look how sweet my smartphone is!’ application, Google’s Sky Map application for Android phones is a must have app.

          If all the application did was show you detailed views of the night sky it would be pretty awesome based on that alone. Where Sky Map dazzles, however, is in linking together the GPS and tilt-sensors on your phone to turn your phone into a sky-watching window. Whatever you point the phone at, the screen displays.

      • Android

        • Setting up the standard Andriod marketplace on the Archos 10.1

          I was not a very pleased user of the Archos 10.1 ever since I got it last December. The issue centered on the Archos supplied “AppsLib” which was not all that efficient nor useful. It would startup slowly sometimes, crash at other times, and a lot of apps that I’ve got in my Nexus One was not even available (like ConnectBot for example). Apart from these inconveniences, the tablet is really a nice device, quite responsive and despite it’s plasticky feel, it is robust and quite well built.

        • Secret codes for your Android phone

          Kind of like the hidden menu at In-N-Out (if you don’t know what that is, I’m sorry you’re so deprived), there are some nifty hidden codes that can be used to accomplish certain tasks on your Android phone. Some of them do fairly basic, practical things, while others can be used to perform complete alterations, such as factory resets. You should be careful when using some of these codes, because once you do (again, factory reset), they can not be undone.

        • Official Google Reader app gets updated, now comes with widgets
        • Honeycomb features such as action bar, app switcher and hologram design will come to our phones in Ice Cream

          Like Andrew mentioned in his report about Eric Schmidt’s MWC keynote, Google’s next version of Android will combine Gingerbread and Honeycomb, so there will not be separate versions for phones and tablets. I think that’s good news, and now a few more details have emerged about which Honeycomb features we’re going to see on our phones.

        • Entrance of Android tablet PCs will weaken dominance of iPad, says Acer chairman

          In addition to the four ARM-based tablet PCs that Acer introduced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2011, Acer is also set to launch a MeeGo-based tablet PC in 2011.

        • QuickOffice will edit Office docs, sync with Dropbox & more on Honeycomb tablets
        • Mobile World Congress 2011 Wrap-Up: Android Takeover

          Today was the last day of Mobile World Congress 2011 and the majority of exhibitors and press folks are on their way home. In fact, organizers are gently nudging us out of the press room right now. I just completed one final sweep of the conference and wanted to do a quick recap of what were my favorite things about Mobile World Congress. Below is my list of the best things that I spotted at MWC 2011.

        • Midmarket: Acer Tablets, Smartphones Run Android, Play HD Video

          Not to be left out of the burgeoning tablet market, computer maker Acer showcased a number of portable computing devices at this year’s Mobile World Congress, including three tablets—two running the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, “Honeycomb,” which was designed specifically to run on tablet devices. Debuting under the company’s Iconia nameplate, the A100 and its larger cousin, the A500, boast front- and rear-facing cameras and sport Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core processor.

        • Dell roadmaps show 4 Honeycomb tablets and 2 Ice Cream phones

          A leaked Dell device roadmap is showing that a Honeycomb future isn’t too far off.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Choosing Java sides

      With all the drama going on with Nokia this month, it was easy to miss other goings on. But one thing of note to the open source community was the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM), where FOSS developers from around the planet congregated in Belgium Feb. 5-6 to groove on all things FOSS.

      One of the FOSDEM sessions that caught my eye was “IcedRobot: The GNUlization of Android,” which announced a new project that hopes to take Android and change it so it has a clean-room OpenJDK-based Java VM and will be based on what they refer to as a more standard Linux kernel.

      The idea here is to get this Android fork to run on something like a Linux desktop, hence the need to have IcedRobot on a more vanilla Linux kernel. The swapping out of the Dalvik VM for something from OpenJDK is a clear move to get this project out from the litigious crosshairs of Oracle, which is currently suing Google for trademark infringement over Oracle code that’s allegedly in Dalvik and shouldn’t be.

  • ECM/CMS

    • Alfresco 3 Business Solutions: Types of E-mail Integration

      In this article by Martin Bergljung, author of Alfresco 3 Business Solutions, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages between three different e-mail integration solutions and also learn how to use Alfresco’s built in IMAP solution to:

      * Enable dragging-and-dropping of e-mails into the Alfresco repository
      * Enable e-mail attachment extraction
      * Enable viewing of document metadata from the e-mail client
      * Set up different folder mount points
      * Enable e-mail management in an Alfresco Share site

    • What Makes Diaspora Special?[Video]

      You all must be already aware of open source Facebook alternative called Diaspora. I have been using it for a month now and I am really starting to like it. Now a lot of people ask me what’s so special about Diaspora, what makes it different. For that, you need to watch this “introduction to Diaspora” video by the inventors of the idea themselves.

    • Open Source Obama

      Every day, tens of thousands of developers from businesses, colleges, and homes contribute patches or new code to open-source programs. It’s not every day though that the White House does it. That’s exactly what happened last week when the White House’s New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS).

  • Funding

    • Open business funding: New ideas for a new economy

      Starting a business is always a bit of a gamble. But investing in a start-up is practically a guessing game.

      “A lot of venture capitalists will tell you that for early stage investment they don’t have any real way of knowing which businesses will succeed,” said Marc Dangeard, head of Entrepreneur Commons. “They might invest in thirty businesses of the same type for the one that will thrive.”

      Faced with the difficulties of venture capitalism and start-up funding, Dangeard decided it was time to “take the ego out” of venture capital. “With traditional venture capital you have a lot of egos involved: the venture capitalist who decides if a business plan is good or bad, the entrepreneur who thinks his idea is great,” he explained.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview: Eben Moglen – Freedom vs. The Cloud Log

      Glyn Moody: So what’s the threat you are trying to deal with?

      Eben Moglen: We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage – machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody’s equal.

      In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web – that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.

      The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.

    • FOSS maven says $29 ‘Freedom Box’ will kill Facebook

      Concerned about Facebook, Google, and other companies that make billions brokering sensitive information, free-software champion Eben Moglen has unveiled a plan to populate the internet with tiny, low-cost boxes that are designed to preserve individuals’ personal privacy.

  • Government

    • Open Source at the State Department: Loud, timely, not your parents’ State Department

      Last Friday, I was in Washington, D.C., for Tech@State’s Open Source Conference . Tech@State is an inspiring step by the State Department, connecting technologists to targeted goals of the U.S. diplomacy and development agenda via networking events as part of Secretary Clinton’s 21 st Century Statecraft initiative . Tech@State connects leaders, innovators, government personnel, and others to work together on technology solutions to improve the education, health, and welfare of the world’s population. To date they have held events on Haiti, Mobile Money, and Civil Society 2.0.

  • Licensing

    • Free Speech Online UnderAttack

      Yesterday, Republicans in Congress introduced a “resolution” in both chambers that would give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over Internet speech.

      Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and John Ensign (R-Nevada) introduced the “resolution of disapproval” on Wednesday. It already has 39 Republican cosponsors. On the House side, Reps. Fred Upton (R-Michigan) and Greg Walden (R-Oregon) are pushing similar measure.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Court Says Metadata Should Be Released Under Freedom Of Information Act Request

        Copycense points us to the fascinating news that a federal judge has ordered Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reveal the metadata on a document as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. ICE had responded to the FOIA request (apparently “after significant delay,”) but provided the content requested in an unsearchable PDF. The original requestor for the content, the National Day Laborer Organization, complained that this was unfair, and the information had to be supplied with metadata — and the court agreed.

      • National Audit Office: Open data the key to ‘big society’

        In a report titled “Information and Communications Technology in Government, Landscape Review”, the watchdog says that a duty will be placed on all levels of government to publish data.

        As a result, new demands will be placed on existing ICT systems across government. These systems will be required to provide access to data at low cost using common data standards; a system of identity assurance that can be used by government’s partners; information security where necessary; assurance about data quality; and the timely release of data.

    • Open Hardware

Leftovers

  • On rape culture & the importance of staying angry
  • Wisconsin Crowds Swell to 30,000; Key GOP Legislators Waver

    “I have never been prouder of our movement than I am at this moment,” shouted Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt, as he surveyed the crowds of union members and their supporters that surged around the state Capitol and into the streets of Madison Wednesday, literally closing the downtown as tens of thousands of Wisconsinites protested their Republican governor’s attempt to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights.

  • Live Reporting from the Massive Protests in Wisconsin — Over 30,000 Assemble at the Capitol

    Tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents are flooding the State Capitol in Madison in protest of Governor Walker’s proposed budget “repair” bill that would end 50 years of collective bargaining for Wisconsin workers. CMD reporters will be out providing live coverage of these historic events.

  • Long Time Academic, Regular Op-Ed Writer, Claims He Had No Idea He Was Supposed To Attribute Text He Plagiarized

    This one is just bizarre. Romenesko points us to the news that the director of the University of Utah’s Middle East Center, Dr. Bahman Baktiari, who regularly writes op-ed pieces for various newspapers, has been accused of plagiarism. His defense? He claims he had no idea he was supposed to attribute the content he copied.

  • U. probes claim of possible plagiarism by scholar

    Several political commentaries published by the director of the University of Utah’s Middle East Center (MEC) appear to borrow heavily from unattributed sources, prompting an inquiry by university officials.

    One of the pieces is an op-ed about the Egypt turmoil by Bahman Baktiari that was published in The Salt Lake Tribune on Feb. 5. According to an analysis by MEC faculty and students, given to top U. administrators and The Tribune on Tuesday, the piece replicates material from at least four sources, including The New York Times and The Economist.

    In an interview Thursday, Baktiari said he was unaware that he needed to attribute material written by others in opinion pieces he wrote for newspapers.

  • Influence vs Obeisance at the Independent

    There was an educational article in the Undiependent yersterday, in a sort of “OmiGod” way. It was about the UK “Top 100 Twitterers”, and was ostensibly based on the PeerIndex algorithm. Now those of you who know about measuring influence on Twitter will know we are in Iteration 4 of Influence Monitoring.

  • As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret

    As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have been grappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of a human life?

    The answer determines how much spending the government should require to prevent a single death.

  • The trick to defeating tamper-indicating seals
  • Full apology and fluffed Labour response saves Caroline Spelman

    Caroline Spelman walked into the Commons chamber at lunchtime today with a shaky grip on her cabinet post. The environment secretary left the chamber an hour later with far greater prospects for the future.

    How did the mild-mannered Spelman, who had been the butt of jokes among senior members of the cabinet over her forest sell off plan, change her fortunes? Here are three reasons.

  • Science

    • Radio jammed by massive solar flare

      The cloud of supercharged particles emitted by a series of three solar flares is, as feared, disturbing radio communications.

      The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) reports that shortwave communications have been disrupted by the flares, of which the third, on Tuesday, was the biggest in over four years. With flares categorised as C Class, M Class and X Class, it’s well into the X Class range.

      And while there’s some debate about how much disruption the flare will cause, a similar coronal mass ejection (CME) cut the power to millions of people in Canada in 1973.

    • Print the Impossible

      This is an awesome print of an awesome object that does the very awesome trick of looking like it can’t possibly be real, even though it totally is. I think in person you might have to close one eye or be far away for it to work.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Firefighter refused call to Tucson shooting spree scene

      A veteran city firefighter’s refusal to respond to the Jan. 8 shooting spree, citing “political bantering,” may have slowed his Tucson Fire Department unit’s response to the incident that left six dead and 13 wounded, city memos show.

    • Judge Throws Out Ex-Detainee’s Suit Alleging Torture

      A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit by Jose Padilla, who alleged that he was tortured at a Navy brig while being held on terrorism charges.

      U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled Thursday that Padilla has no right to sue for constitutional violations and that the defendants, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, enjoy qualified immunity.

    • Bahrain joins the freedom campaign

      Now the former rulers of Bahrain are experiencing what can happen when ordinary people decide they’re in charge of their own destinies.

    • Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law

      This week has seen massive, broad based protests in Wisconsin over Tea Party governor Scott Walker’s new labor bill, which outlaws collective bargaining, slashes real wages in the public sector (by increasing workers’ share of pension contributions and other payments), and allows the executive to fire state employees without substantial due process. Walker brought down his bill with enormous bluster, promising to mobilize the national guard against the state’s workers if they had the temerity to demonstrate against this gutting of their hard-fought rights. Thousands and thousands of protestors have surrounded the state capital, and Walker has had to retreat to a nearby corporate boardroom in order to give his budget address. Protestors are camping out around the clock, braving the Wisconsin February to stand up for their rights — a little bit of Midwestern Tahrir Square right there in America.

    • Overview of Middle East crackdowns and the (varying) U.S. responses

      As protests — and crackdowns — have been rippling through the Middle East, the U.S. response has varied by country.

      For instance, while the Obama administration has been vocal about events in Iran, it has been relatively quiet about violence by pro-government forces in Yemen. Here’s a brief look at what’s happening in some key countries — and the U.S.’s response in each.

    • Bahrain protests: live

      Troops and tanks lock down the capital of Manama after uprooting a protest camp in a central square, beating demonstrators and blasting them with sprays of birdshot and tear gas. Medical officials say four people are killed. The military bans all gatherings.

      The protesters want the ruling Sunni Muslim monarchy, a key U.S. ally in the Gulf, to give up its control over top government posts and all critical decisions. Shiite Muslims make up 70 percent of Bahrain’s 500,000 citizens but say they face systematic discrimination and poverty and are effectively blocked from key roles in public service and the military.

  • Cablegate

    • Secretary Clinton Unveils New Funding for Activism Technology, Rhetorical Refresh in Internet Freedom Speech

      Earlier today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a speech about Internet freedom titled, “Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices and Challenges In A Networked World.” In her remarks, Clinton built on prior statements about the U.S. Government’s commitment to a free and open Internet, responding in part to the uprisings in the Middle East and Cablegate — major, ongoing international developments adding to the swell of debate about the parameters of Internet freedom.

      Notably, Secretary Clinton announced that the State Department plans to award $25 million in grants to technology, tools, and training projects that support Internet freedom. Moreover, the State Department appears to be committed to diversity in the projects it awards, with Secretary Clinton stating, “We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are at the ready.” We hope to see that commitment to diversity translate into real improvement for the best tools for online anonymity, circumvention of censorship, and the technologies that help protect lives and move ideas throughout the world.

    • Why Our Government Would Fear Wikiarguments More than WikiLeaks

      Wikiarguments is an Internet-based (wiki) system that would force congressional accountability and make government deception much more difficult.

    • Will the Rise of Wikileaks Competitors Make Whistleblowing Resistant to Censorship?

      As these sites multiply, they will still need to deal with the challenges that Wikileaks and Cryptome have faced. They will need to find ways to effectively protect the identities of their sources, provide an adequate media platform, earn the trust of whistleblowers, weed out fabricated leaks, and avoid the wrath of corporations and governments. However, one thing is clear: the strong demand by readers and the media will make anonymous whistleblowing websites a permanent fixture in the future of investigative journalism. Cutting off services to one popular whistleblowing website will never be enough to keep truthful political information off the Internet.

    • Arabs believe world is better off, thanks to Wikileaks

      Most Arabs support Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website, and demand greater transparency, a survey conducted in 17 Arab countries indicates.

      According to the Doha Debate poll that surveyed the views of more than 1,000 Arabs in the first week of February, six out of ten Arabs believe that the world has become a better place with Wikileaks.

    • Jemima Khan on Wikileaks

      Jemima Goldsmith explains why she is supporting Wikileaks & Julian Assange’s fight against extradition to Sweden.

    • Jemima Khan – Defending Wikileaks Stop The War Coalition 7.02.11
    • Anonymous Surpasses Wikileaks

      The exploits of Anonymous to hack the systems of firms providing spying services to governments and corporations suggest that the WikiLeaks mini-era has been surpassed.

      Much of WikiLeaks promise to protect sources is useless if the sources are not whistleblowers needing a forum for publication. Instead publishers of secret information grab it directly for posting to Torrent for anybody to access without mediation and mark-up by self-esteemed peddlers of protection, interpretation and authentication, including media cum scholars.

      The wit and brevity of Anonymous taunts are exemplary — min-talk max-action — compared to the overblown gravitas of WL aping MSM in valuing its mission over short-shrifted “sources.”

    • Special report: China flexed its muscles using U.S. Treasuries

      Confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassies in Beijing and Hong Kong lay bare China’s growing influence as America’s largest creditor.

      As the U.S. Federal Reserve grappled with the aftershocks of financial crisis, the Chinese, like many others, suffered huge losses from their investments in American financial firms — from Lehman Brothers to the Primary Reserve Fund, the money market fund that broke the buck.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • State: Reality TV miners didn’t have to shoot bear to protect themselves

      In one of the first episodes of “Gold Rush: Alaska,” the new Discovery Channel series about six men transplanted from Oregon to Southeast Alaska in hopes of striking gold, a brown bear wanders into camp.

    • Tell Chevron’s CEO: Clean Up Ecuador Now!
    • Japan suspends whale hunt after chase by protesters

      Japan has suspended its annual whale hunt in the Antarctic for now after a hardline anti-whaling group gave chase to its mother ship and it may call the fleet back home, a government official said.

      Regular attempts by Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to interrupt hunts have caused irritation in Japan, one of only three countries that now hunt whales and where the government says it is an important cultural tradition.

    • Forests sell-off abandoned as Cameron orders U-turn

      David Cameron has ordered ministers to carry out the government’s biggest U-turn since the general election by abandoning plans to change the ownership of 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland.

      Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, will announce on Friday that a consultation on the sale of forests will be ended after a furious backlash that united Tory supporters with environmentalists and the Socialist Workers party.

    • Armenia: Animal Rights Activists Plan Suit Againist New Yerevan Dolphinarium

      A group of Armenian non-governmental organizations is planning to file a lawsuit against a recently opened Yerevan dolphinarium, asserting that the center’s seven marine mammals are subject to abuse. The dolphinarium’s management, which promotes the facility as a “world of water miracles,” denies abuse accusations.

      “This is a prison for animals, an exploitative circus, and we will not give up our fight,” asserted Silva Adamian, the chairperson of the Ecological Alliance, a group comprising 50 environmental, human rights non-governmental organizations, and the opposition Heritage Party. The alliance opposes the Nemo dolphinarium’s operations. Efforts to review the Ukrainian-built center’s license to import dolphins into Armenia, or the license to construct the building, have so far been unsuccessful, she said. “We are going to bring a lawsuit soon and we will go to international courts,” she said.

    • Ebay Classifieds: Stop Selling Live Animals

      EBay claims that they have safeguards in place to protect the animals. But unless eBay is inspecting all of the operations listing pets for sale (because the USDA is not), and unless they’re doing home visits on all of the people buying, how could they possibly protect the animals?

      The answer: They can’t. Because of a loophole in the laws, as long as animals are being sold online, the breeders don’t even fall under USDA regulation. Ebay has given puppy mills a huge, unregulated platform to peddle cruelty. And it seems that they’re hoping animal advocates won’t notice.

    • Interview with legislator who introduced bill to declare global warming “natural” and “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”

      Climate policy, he believes, is essentially an attempt to steer money and control into the federal government, which has been dictating the direction of climate science research for decades. He rejects the counsel of scientists like the University of Montana’s Dr. Steve Running, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists whose research on global warming finds that the “only solution that adds up on a global scale is reduced emissions.”

      “The purpose of this whole issue of carbon credits and pushing the agenda of global warming,” Read told the Wonk Room, “is about directing levies and fees for carbon credits so the federal government gets an income source.”

      Faced with the prospect of regulation, the fossil fuel industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last thirty years to cast doubt on long-established scientific conclusions.

  • Finance

    • Obama, GOP freshmen win in jet engine budget fight

      Determined to reduce deficits, impatient House Republican freshmen made common cause with President Barack Obama on Wednesday, scoring their biggest victory to date in a vote to cancel $450 million for an alternative engine for the Pentagon’s next-generation warplane.

    • Trust Over Pension Pots Prompts Hungarians to Send Money Abroad

      Hungary’s fiscal policies are encouraging Peter Barta to hoard his money abroad.

      The 35-year-old businessman started sending cash out of the country after Premier Viktor Orban diverted 3 trillion forint ($15 billion) of private pension assets to plug the budget.

    • Borders Is Bankrupt. Use Your Gift Cards Now!

      As expected, second-tier book chain Borders filed for bankruptcy today, after a last-ditch effort at a lifesaving loan failed. The company now says it will be closing 30% of its stores—nearly 200 locations—over the next several weeks. But…but what about my gift card?

    • Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

      “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

    • In an Amish village, the SEC alleges a Madoff-like fraud

      The personal assets of Monroe L. Beachy, a 77-year-old Amish man, included a horse, buggy and harness. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, his skills included financial fraud.

      Beachy spent a quarter-century raising $33 million from more than 2,600 investors, the overwhelming majority of them fellow members of the Amish community, which often shuns modern conveniences such as automobiles.

      But Beachy’s investment approach allegedly had more in common with the timeless methods of Charles Ponzi and Bernard Madoff than with the sheltered village of Sugarcreek, Ohio, where he lived. When the SEC charged him with fraud on Tuesday, it said he had lost nearly half of his investors’ money.

    • Comparing the GDP of China’s Provinces to Countries

      I happened to come across a Chinese report that compiled 2010 growth rates and GDP figures for individual Chinese provinces. (This exercise may also be a partial and limited answer to my fellow guest blogger Edward Goldstick’s dispatch on China’s 12th five-year plan, a topic on which I’ve written extensively in my day job.) So using World Bank GDP numbers for various countries, which were only up to 2009 unfortunately, I did a quick comparison (confession: I did not tally up the GDPs to see if they totaled $5.8 trillion).

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Week 81 – No freedom of speech for Cardiff University

      Several weeks ago, I was emailed an invitation to speak alongside Noam Chomsky in Cardiff, in March. The organisers also asked if I would give a talk at Cardiff University the following day; I happily agreed to both proposals.

      Yesterday, I got call from Ghaith Jayousi, who had invited me to Cardiff, to inform me that his University had refused to host the event, due to “security concerns coming from higher channels”.

  • Civil Rights

    • About That Constitution

      The GOP shows that for all their recent rhetoric about the sacredness of the Constitution, the document is really little more than a political prop.

    • Ron Wyden Speaks Out Against COICA: We Shouldn’t Toss Out The First Amendment Just To Go After A Few Bad Actors

      Senator Ron Wyden (who just joined Twitter) was kind enough to send over the remarks he made to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning COICA. It’s an excellent read that highlights many of the points we’ve been making.

    • The COICA Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill
    • ICE Seizures Raising New Speech Concerns

      We’re still getting a handle on the details, but it appears that the government took down all sites associated with a dynamic DNS service called afraid.org, in particular subdomains beneath mooo.com. One or more of the subdomains may have been hosting child porn, but instead of seizing that subdomain alone, the takedown targeted mooo.com. What is worse, it also appears that the perfectly legal sites were temporarily plastered with a notice suggesting they trafficked in child porn.

    • US Senate votes to extend Patriot Act measures

      The US Senate has voted to extend controversial surveillance powers granted by the Patriot Act law, put in place after the 9/11 attacks.

      By a vote of 86-12, the Senate approved a 90-day extension of wiretaps, access to business records and surveillance of terror suspects.

      The move came one day after the House of Representatives voted to extend the provisions until 8 December.

    • MPs call for EVERYONE to be added to the national DNA database

      Erm, perhaps Mr Horwood would like to explain how the creation of a vast, central database of the intricate biological data of every British citizen can be squared with any conception of civil liberties?

    • ‘Internet Freedom’ in the Age of Assange

      Describing the Internet as the “public space of the 21st century,” she called the debate about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or oppression “beside the point.” Whether this digital public space is used well or used badly, she noted, is the responsibility of each and every one of the world’s 2 billion-plus Internet users — alongside all governments who seek to regulate it and companies that build Internet technologies and platforms.

    • China warns US over Clinton’s web freedom call

      China has warned the US not to use calls for internet freedom as an excuse to meddle in other countries’ affairs.

      The foreign ministry comments came after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced an initiative to help dissidents around the world get past government internet controls.

      Since Mrs Clinton’s speech, comments about it have been removed from China’s popular Twitter-like microblog sites.

    • European Commission and Europol refuse to supply data on the implementation of the EU-US TFPT (SWIFT) agreement as it is “Top Secret”

      The German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, and member of the Joint Supervisory Body of Europol, asked the German Interior Ministry numerous questions about the EU-US TFTP Agreement as they are empowered to do. The TFTP (“SWIFT”) Agreement covers the transfer of personal records on financial transactions in the EU concerning terrorism and terrorist financing.

      The questions could only be answered by the European Commission or by Europol. The Europol Management Board decided that questions regarding the implementation of the Agreement should be answered by the Commission (13-14 October 2010). Under Article 4 of the Agreement Europol has to clear all US requests for detailed personal financial data.

    • FBI To Announce Significant New Wiretap Push Backdoors Galore In Everything From Skype To BitTorrent

      Despite the fact the phone companies now act as part time FBI surveillance analysts with a fleeting regard to law, and dump U.S. citizen data and voice traffic wholesale through NSA listening posts, Uncle Sam still apparently isn’t happy with its wiretap authority. The FBI has been making their intentions clear in recent months that they not only want to start pushing hard again for ISP retention data, but the DOJ and FBI are also launching a new push for laws that would allow the easier access to a wider variety of information transmitted via new Internet communications platforms.

    • Newly Released Documents Detail FBI’s Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws

      EFF just received documents in response to a 2-year old FOIA request for information on the FBI’s “Going Dark” program, an initiative to increase the FBI’s authority in response to problems the FBI says it’s having implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders on new communications technologies. The documents detail a fully-formed and well-coordinated plan to expand existing surveillance laws and develop new ones. And although they represent only a small fraction of the documents we expect to receive in response to this and a more recent FOIA request, they were released just in time to provide important background information for the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing tomorrow on the Going Dark program.

    • Debate Over Internet Backdoors Heats Up in Congress and in Court

      Two hearings tomorrow—one in court and one in Congress—will highlight the brewing debate over whether Congress should expand federal surveillance laws to force Internet communications service providers like Facebook, Google and Skype to build technical backdoors into their systems to enable government wiretapping.

    • FBI: We’re not demanding encryption back doors

      The FBI said today that it’s not calling for restrictions on encryption without back doors for law enforcement.

      FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told a congressional committee that the bureau’s push for expanded Internet wiretapping authority doesn’t mean giving law enforcement a master key to encrypted communications, an apparent retreat from her position last fall.

    • Hillary Clinton Talks Freedom as Protester Ray McGovern Is Bloodied

      But that’s what our current Secretary of State did when peace activist, veteran Army officer and onetime C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern protested silently while she lectured the rest of the world about freedom this week at George Washington University.

      [...]

      McGovern had been standing silently facing the back of the auditorium where all the news cameras were. His supposed crime? “Disorderly conduct” – i.e. wearing a shirt that blocked the view of guests and the media, and therefore “disrupted” the speech by the Secretary of State.

      McGovern discussed his protest and subsequent arrest at Secretary Clinton’s “Freedom Speech” in an interview with blogger Rob Kall.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Students: Show Your Support for Net Neutrality!

      Thank you for participating in the Internet Strikes Back! Please read the letter below and fill out the fields at the bottom of the page in order to add your signature. We’ll deliver this letter to Congress with all of the student signatures attached at the end of February. Want to do more to show your support for net neutrality? Click here to visit the Internet Strikes Back homepage. Want to learn more about net neutrality? Click here for more information.

    • The Internet Is Mine

      The Internet does belong to *me* — and all the other self styled Citizens of the Net.

      Corporations may own bits of wire and pieces of equipment, but that isn’t The Internet.
      Any more than a handful of soil scooped up from the nearest garden is your country.

      That pile of dirt may be a fractional portion of your country, and those bits of technology may be segments of Internet infrastructure, but they are neither the sum of your country nor the entity we call The Internet.

      Please note: there is but one Internet, which is the sum of a whole mess of interconnection.
      Networks. Computers. Cell phones.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • New leaks of TPPA text show U.S. is playing hardball

      The text confirms that the Americans are taking an extremely aggressive position on intellectual property that contrasts starkly with the New Zealand proposal, said Professor Jane Kelsey, who is in Santiago as a registered “stakeholder” at the negotiations.

    • Copyrights

      • Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web
      • History of Copyright, part 6: Hijacked By Record Industry

        Copyright in the 20th century was not characterized by books, but by music. The 1930s saw two major developments that affected musicians: the Great Depression, which caused many musicians to lose their jobs, and movies with sound, which caused most of the rest of musicians to lose their jobs.

        In this environment, two initatives were taken in parallel. Musician’s unions tried to guarantee income and sustenance to the people who were now jobless, made redundant as we say today in executivespeak. Unions all over the West were concerned about the spread of “mechanized music”: any music that isn’t performed live and therefore didn’t need performing musicians. They wanted some power over the speaker technology, and the question was raised through the International Labour Organization (a predecessor to the UN agency with the same name).

      • History of Copyright, part 7: Hijacked by Pfizer

        The president of Pfizer, Edmund Pratt, had a furious op-ed piece in a New York Times on July 9, 1982 titled “Stealing from the Mind”. It fumed about how third world countries were stealing from them. (By this, he referred to making medicine from their own raw materials with their own factories using their own knowledge in their own time for their own people, who were frequently dying from horrible but curable third-world conditions.) Major policymakers saw a glimpse of an answer in Pfizer’s and Pratt’s thinking, and turned to Pratt’s involvement in another committee directly under the President. This committee was the magic ACTN: Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations.

        What the ACTN recommended, following Pfizer’s lead, was so daring and provocative that nobody was really sure whether to try it out: the US would try linking its trade negotiations and foreign policy. Any country who didn’t sign lopsided “free trade” deals that heavily redefined value would be branded in a myriad of bad ways, the most notable being the “Special 301 watchlist”. This list is supposed to be a list of nations not respecting copyright enough. A majority of the world’s population is on it, among them Canada.

        So the solution to not producing anything of value in international trade was to redefine “producing”, “anything”, and “value” in an international political context, and to do so by bullying. It worked. The ACTN blueprints were set in motion by US Trade Representatives, using unilateral bullying to push foreign governments into enacting legislation that favored American industry interestes, bilateral “free trade” agreements that did the same, and multilateral agreements that raised the bar worldwide in protection of American interests.

      • BitTorrent is to stealing movies what “bolt-cutters are to stealing bicycles”

        Today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was all about COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The bill would give the government legal tools to blacklist a “rogue” website from the Internet’s Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid US-based online ad networks from working with the site. It even directs the government to keep a list of suspect sites, even though no evidence has been presented against them in court.

        Everyone loves the idea. Democrats love the idea (well, except for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who said it was “like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile”). Republicans love the idea. And rightsholders really love the idea.

      • The Economic Consequences of Piracy

        But this laudable attempt at rigour is completely undermined by the fact that nowhere in the report is there any recognition that all this “lost” money does *not* disappear, but is simply channelled elsewhere in the Australian economy, where it might actually create more jobs than it would if spent on films (because of revenue outflows to the US, and the fact that local money would be spent on more labour-intensive industries like retailing or catering.) Similarly, it *does* produce tax revenue for the Australian government, just from different sources.

        It would be far more conducive to producing an honest debate about the *real* effects of unauthorised copies on national economies if these key facts were included for a change; by continuing to ignore them, these misleading and one-sided reports amount to little more than industry propaganda.

      • File-Sharers Start Handing Over $1,000 Each in Bizarre Amnesty Program

        Ten individuals have freely and bizarrely handed over $1,000 each to movie studio Liberty Media in piracy settlements, despite the company having absolutely no idea who they are or if they did anything wrong. Now Liberty have a new amnesty and are offering BitTorrent users the chance to hand themselves in or risk being involved in 36,000 upcoming lawsuits.

        After running rampant in Germany and the UK, the United States is now suffering under an onslaught of Speculative Invoicing – mass file-sharing lawsuits designed to scare people into paying cash settlements on the basis that by doing so they avoid a much more costly trial later.

      • CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry [Ed: just recording industry, not music]
      • Can Senator Patrick Leahy Actually Provide The Proof That The COICA Censorship Law Is Needed?

        “Are reported?” By whom? Not the US government, who a year ago noted that all of the studies making those sorts of claims were bogus, and the various studies discussing these claims of “losses” to both jobs and the American economy have been thoroughly debunked. The only people still claiming that such things are factual are lobbyists and legacy industry insiders, who clearly stand to benefit from such laws that can be used to stifle innovation.

        If Leahy is going to insist that these numbers are factual, shouldn’t he at least have to say where he got those numbers from — and also avoid relying on numbers from the very industries this law is designed to help?

      • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

Clip of the Day

WikiRebels: The Documentary on Wikileaks (Part 2 of 6) HD


Credit: TinyOgg

02.17.11

Links 17/2/2011: Linux 2.6.38 RC5, SplashTop Makes MeeGo-based Platform

Posted in News Roundup at 5:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Nigeria Uses GNU/Linux to Manage Elections

    120K PCs in a huge network manage the database.

  • Linux Based Cameleon XR1.5 For Indian Telecom Industry

    Donjin Communication Technology, a player in global multimedia communication platform technology and Contarra Systems, a worldwide telecommunica­tions software company specialized in multi-purpose communications solutions, have introduced Cameleon XR 1.5 a service delivery platform based on Linux Operating System for the Indian telecommunications industry.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung aims for iPod touch with WiFi-only Galaxy S variants

      At Mobile World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona, Samsung was showing off two new WiFi-only Android devices based on the popular Galaxy S smartphone. Coming in both 4″ and 5″ display sizes, the models would serve as non-phone companions to Samsung’s Galaxy S line, similar in many respects to the iPod touch.

      Both new devices feature 1GHz Hummingbird processors, front-facing VGA video cameras, microSD slots, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and they run Android 2.2 (Froyo). A smaller device which looks almost identical to current Galaxy S smartphones features a 4″ LCD touchscreen, a 3.2MP rear camera, and a 1200mAh battery. The larger version has an 800×480 pixel 5″ touchscreen, a 5MP rear camera with flash, and a 2500mAh battery. Both devices are compatible with 32GB microSD cards, but it’s not clear how much, if any, flash storage is built in.

    • LG Optimus 3D video hands-on

      The recently announced LG Optimus 3D (read specs) provides glasses-free 3D vision by sending separate signals to the right and left eyes. The technique creates an image that tricks the eyes into seeing the foreground of videos, games, and the user interface at a closer angle. My only problem with this that angles must be tight. When moving the phone a small degree to the left or right, the desired effect is gone and a distorted image appears in its place. While it’s a neat trick to be able to view 3D video without having to wear glasses, the experience is rather limited.

    • LG Optimus 3D is the new king of the hill when it comes to hardware performance thanks to its TI OMAP 4 chip

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Organizing conf.kde.in Conference In India

        The Indian KDE team is organising conf.kde.in, a conference for the KDE community and users. The conference is creating a platform for Qt and KDE contributors and enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn and play.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3: Getting better by the day

        It’s easy to focus on the big new features, but there has been a huge amount of polishing work going on also. Marina has been refining the behaviour of the messaging tray, Owen has been making sure that icons are clearly rendered, and lots of bug fixing has been happening.

        This isn’t everything that’s been happening to GNOME 3 in recent weeks (system settings have been getting a lot of attention, as have many of our applications) but I hope the update’s useful.

      • Gnome Shell is Almost Ready to Rock Your Desktop

        When Gnome Shell was first becoming available over a year ago, we took a look at it to see what the foundation was like, and to see what direction the Gnome desktop was likely to go. At the time, we liked it, though it was clearly a “rough draft” of what it could eventually become. Since then, time has gone by, and while Ubuntu may have decided to go with Unity instead, others have taken Gnome Shell up to the next level. Fedora, among others, will be putting it front and center in future releases. Today we’re going to take a look at one of the most recent builds available to see what this slick desktop environment has got to offer.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Blog Now Included on the Censored Planet

          My blog is now included on Fedora’s “Planet Edited” – mind you various people won’t like me for calling it censored. Originally, I thought the censored version of planet was going to filter out the ‘I had this-and-that for breakfast’ type of blog posts, which, usually anyway, have nothing to do with Fedora at all. However, after some clarification from Andrea Veri, it seems a relation between the posts content and Fedora isn’t sufficient – the blog post must be specifically about Fedora.

        • Stop blaming Italians for Berlusconi

          The Italian media do not allow public opinion to be formed in an objective and impartial way. We could blame Italians for their leader only if the delicate mechanisms that govern Italian democracy were not distorted by a biased, irresponsible media. Rather, we should blame its “mediocracy”; that is, the dangerous entanglement of power and media that has been afflicting the country for decades.

          The mammoth media power that Berlusconi has built his empire on is unimaginable in any other western democracy. If we overlook his immense and unchallenged power over public opinion, his articulate propaganda machine, we won’t be able to explain why Italians have fallen asleep instead of reacting to the regime.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6 Linux finally released

        In a recent article Brockmeier argued that Debian was still crucially important to the Linux world for two key reasons.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The top 5 desktops from our Facebook competition

          We got over 500 submissions throughout the week, and it was certainly a tough decision to pick only 5 winners out of so many.

        • A Long Overdue Introduction: ecryptfs-migrate-home

          One of my most popular (by number hits) posts on eCryptfs is the one on Migrating to An Encrypted Home Directory. This post contains a lengthy set of instructions when, if followed correctly, allows you to migrate to an encrypted home directory.

        • Live Ubuntu Video Q+A: Every Wednesday
        • Bug search no longer does substring matching of source package names
        • Canonical Re-licenses Ubuntu Wiki to CC BY-SA

          Elizabeth Krumbach on behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council announced in an email to various mailing lists, and posted on the Ubuntu Fridge that the licensing for the Ubuntu wiki will be CC-BY-SA and barring a “substantial number of objections” this change should take place in approximately one month.

        • Thunderbird in the Usability Lab!

          This time, I had the pleasure of working with Andreas Nilsson, who came to London to observe the sessions. It was very useful to get his feedback and to work collaboratively with him on the analysis and implications of the findings. In addition to these benefits of our work together, there is an added one: since he observed participants struggling with certain aspects of the interface, he will no doubt be a very effective user experience advocate with his team.

        • Ubuntu Unity 2D

          Some random musing about Ubuntu ARM Netbook Edition.

          Last month Canonical held its Ubuntu Platform Team rally in Dallas TX. During this rally the Unity 2D launcher was added to the public archive for use with the Ubuntu ARM Netbook edition. We had hoped it would be fairly simply to replace the existing EFL (Enlightenment Foundations Library) launcher with the QT based Unity launcher.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Noki-Soft Windfall – who wins most when Micro-Kia hand away lucrative smartphone empire bigger than Blackberry, bigger than iPhone

          Even more than being an 11x bestselling author of mobile telecoms and a consultant and ex-Nokia executive, I am more than anything else, an industry analyst for the mobile industry and one of its leading statisticians and forecasters. I am known for deep and insightful statistical analysis articles of the industry and its market such as this final review of all the stats and major players in the year 2010 in smartphones. So I have done a thorough analysis of all rivals who stand to gain from the loss of market share, that Nokia’s sudden Microsoft partnership announcement will create.

        • Analyst: Nokia-MS alliance bodes ill for phone giant

          “With the Microsoft deal unlikely to yield any products for nearly one year, Nokia will have no choice except to remain awkwardly reliant on the Symbian and MeeGo platforms in 2011. This will have a further negative impact on the Nokia’s already eroding position in smart phones,” it said.

        • SplashTop Releases Its MeeGo-based OS

          While Nokia has effectively abandoned the MeeGo Linux operating system, Intel is still supporting MeeGo along with AMD and other vendors, including SplashTop. SplashTop has today announced the release of their MeeGo-based operating system.

        • Fujitsu starts selling the first MeeGo netbook

          Fujitsu has just put MeeGo on their existing LifeBook MH330 netbook (originally launched with Windows onboard) making it the first MeeGo netbook shipping commercially. The MH330 (launched in mid 2010) has an Intel Atom N455 @ 1.66 GHz, 1 GB RAM, a 250 GB hard disk and 10.1″ 1024×600 display. The netbook is available now on Asian markets for about € 300.

        • Meego and Qt after Microsoft & Nokia: a summary of “facts”

          # MEEGO@NOKIA: #info Elop: Nokia would continue to develop the MeeGo operating system in collaboration with Intel
          So, definetly this work will continue.

          [...]

          So Meego will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Qt will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Symbian will die. Qt will not be ported to QP7. KDE will survive.

        • Collabortage

          I coined the term during an IRC conversation after a friend expressed dark suspicions that the MeeGo alliance between Intel and Nokia might have been a ploy by Intel to screw up Nokia’s ARM-centered product strategy in order to favor Intel’s Atom processors. I do not endorse this theory, but it started me thinking of various historical examples, such as Microsoft’s browser-technology collaboration with Spyglass, for which there is in fact strong reason to suspect deliberate collabortage.

        • Doomed By The Desire For Control?

          By attempting to seize control, Nokia and Microsoft are actually likely to lose influence.

        • Nokia shareholders and unions fight back against Microkia

          First, will be a battle with the Finnish trade union Pro which is demanding €100,000 (in addition to severance payments) for every Nokia employee that loses their job under Elop’s new strategy — money the unions says will be used for reeducation.

        • Otellini: Nokia News Made Me Swear Like Yahoo’s CEO

          When Intel CEO Paul Otellini received a call from Nokia chief Stephen Elop about Nokia’s move to Microsoft, he used a word that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz “has often used.”

        • Nokiasoft: Who are the Open Source Winners and Losers?

          The clearest loser in the deal is Symbian: it is as dead as the proverbial Monty Python parrot.

          [...]

          Surprisingly, perhaps, I don’t think Qt will be joining Symbian and MeeGo as a Dead Parrot; indeed, continuing the Monty Python theme, I’d say it’s more a question of “I’m not dead yet.” For Qt is, of course, a key element of KDE, which is doing very nicely thank you, and certainly doesn’t depend on the commitment or otherwise of Nokia (luckily). People will continue to hack on Qt because by doing so they can make KDE better – which is what they are passionate about.

          Indeed, you could argue that Qt might benefit from Nokia leaving it alone: it will allow Qt development to concentrate on improving those things that matter to KDE, rather than Nokia’s corporate priorities. And if the eventual owner of Qt (whoever that might be, assuming Nokia eventually sells it, as I think likely) starts messing about – hello Oracle – then there’s always the option of a fork, which in the wake of LibreOffice has become a much more respectable option.

        • Hands on with Intel’s MeeGo tablet UI: good ideas, rough edges

          Although Nokia is gutting its commitment to MeeGo, the platform still has support from a number of other prominent hardware vendors. Intel, which originally cofounded MeeGo with Nokia last year, has released an experimental “pre-alpha” build of its MeeGo tablet environment.

          The software was unveiled at Mobile World Congress this week and is being demonstrated on the Atom-based ExpoPC tablet. It is built with Nokia’s Qt development toolkit and uses the powerful Qt Quick framework for much of the user interface. It appears to be at a relatively early stage of development and is still lacking a lot of basic capabilities, but many of the underlying concepts are promising.

        • Intel Shows Off MeeGo Tablet UI Experience[Screenshots and Video]

          MeeGo is in the news again, this time for all the right reasons. Few days ago, Nokia announced that they are going to partner with Microsoft and use Windows Phone 7 as its primary OS instead of MeeGo. Intel on the other hand is all set to go ahead with MeeGo platform without Nokia. Intel has reiterated its commitment towards MeeGo open source mobile OS project by showing off MeeGo’s latest UI experience at Mobile World Congress currently being held at Barcelona, Spain.

        • Community SSU features to look forward to

          Most of these patches try to improve the user experience and look and feel of the Maemo 5 UI, but tastes differ, so you can choose which one to enable:

          * Blurless desaturation: With this feature enabled, the background of dialogs, menus, the launcher and the switcher won’t get all blurry – instead, they keep their sharpness, but are darkened and desaturated. (thread with screenshots)
          * Bigger task switcher: I think this is one of my earliest patches, now cleaned up to be configurable with different settings. You can choose between the Maemo 5 default layout, the single-column “big” task switcher and the two-column task switcher. I’ve left the horizontal task switcher out of this, as it wasn’t working that well in some situations. (thread with screenshots)
          * Rotation around the Z axis: This one makes the screen rotation look much more natural, just like on the MeeGo Handset UX. Instead of rotating around the X and Y axis, this makes the transitions from/to portrait mode rotate around the Z axis. (demo video)
          * Forced auto-rotation for all apps: By default, hildon-desktop obeys the preferences of application windows and whether or not they support portrait mode. With this option enabled, hildon-desktop ignores those preferences and instead assumes every application can be auto-rotated. There’s no support for the home screen, launcher or switcher, as these things are more complicated to support in portrait mode. (demo video)

        • Intel Giving Away Lots of Cash, Trip to Antarctica, Jet Flight & More for MeeGo Developers

          Intel is currently offering several incentives for developers to create MeeGo apps. The prizes look very interesting. How does a trip to South Pole sound? How about flying former military jets at supersonic speeds? If you’re not into that, you can opt for cash. The first 100 submitted quality apps also get $500 and the best 10 of those apps get $1000.

      • Android

        • Google: Android activations up to 350,000 a day
        • VMware put an Android in your Android, so you can VM while you VM

          So apparently VMware heard you like virtualization (or at least, that corporations do), so it made an Android virtual machine that can run inside Android’s own Dalvik VM.

        • ZTE taking the high road with new Android devices

          One of the more interesting announcements at this year’s MWC has come from ZTE, a Chinese telcom which has held a solid portion of the Chinese market by offering a number of low-end Android phones. Last year, ZTE shipped 2 million Android phones, and this year is looking to increase that number to 10 million, but also aim a little higher with these. ZTE has announced a number of devices ranging from 1 GHz smartphones to 1.2 GHz dual-core devices. The standouts from ZTE’s announcement were the ZTE Skate, the Light 2, the Light 10, and a mysterious “Internet box”.

        • Social discovery app “Tagged” comes to Android this week

          Just about every one loves a little social networking in their lives, right? Well, if you are tired of Facebook and Twitter and hopefully have also moved on from MySpace, then maybe the network Tagged is what you are looking for. Tagged is self-dubbed “the world’s leader in social discovery” and because of that are brought their popular iPhone app to Android this week.

        • Android increases lead over iOS in ad impressions. Let’s break down the numbers.

          As of October and November of last year, Millennial Media reported that Android and iOS were tied in ad impression share at about 38% each. By December, Android had pulled ahead with 46% to iOS’s 32%. Now, Millennial Media is reporting that in Januray iOS had an ad impression share of 28%, compared to Android’s 54%.

        • Huawei announces low-end IDEOS X3 smartphone and X7 tablet

          Huawei is certainly not going for the big money crowd like many of the other Android manufacturers seem to be doing. Huawei has just announced an entry-level phone, the IDEOS X3, and what looks to be an entry level tablet as well, the IDEOS X7.

        • CyanogenMod 7 release candidates now available for a number of devices

          Version 7 of the Android world’s most popular custom ROM, CyanogenMod, has now received its first proper release candidates. This means that a final release of CM7 should be pretty close now. The new builds are feature-complete and have been pretty thoroughly tested, although they might have to do some further tweaking. Nonetheless, these release candidates of CyanogenMod 7 should definitely be stable enough for everyday use.

        • The System & The System: Overlaying GNU on Android on the Beagle Board

          And so it is with Contraption, my project to overlay a GNU environment on top of the otherwise very un-GNU-like Android on the Beagle Board. Like the citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma, the GNU and Android environments co-exist in close proximity, within the same geographic file system and random access memory, yet kept separate through the auspices of the Breach-like Linux kernel. You can interact with Android from one one screen while running GNU-based software from a bash shell inside an ssh session from another. For the most part the two systems simply unsee one another by virtue of using different PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variables and by being dynamically linked to different shared objects. The Linux kernel and the dynamic loader keep it all separate.

        • MapQuest Launches Android App with OpenStreetMap and Turn-By-Turn Navigation

          One of the superior apps on the Android phone has long been Google Maps, with its turn-by-turn and voice-guided navigation missing from the iPhone version. So on the surface, MapQuest has a difficult sell to Android users with the launch of its free app today.

          The MapQuest app also offers the turn-by-turn capabilities and takes advantage of Android’s speech capabilities to offer a voice guide as well. The benefits of MapQuest over Google Maps comes from the former’s use of OpenStreetMap (OSM), making the mapping app usable outside the U.S. and adding to it some user-submitted data.

        • Android pwns Mobile World Congress with unique display [Video]

          Android is taking over according to all the stat reports and user surveys released these days. But what happens when the green robot commands a large space of one of the major mobile phone events in the world?

          In Hall 8 of Mobile World Congress, Google has an Android zone that takes up a big chunk of space. There are product demos of Google and third-party apps, massive statues, giveaways, and even a smoothie bar serving up treats with an Android theme (Cupcake, Donut, Gingerbread, and Honeycomb). It’s one of the most popular and crowded destinations at MWC.

        • Google Unveils Android Subscriptions

          Google on Wednesday debuted an Android subscription model, which lets publishers “set their own prices and terms for their digital content.” As Fast Company notes, “It’s a fast counter blow aimed squarely at Apple’s new subscription system.” Indeed, “Google’s been careful to frame its system as a direct competitor to Apple’s App Store subscription service–one that’s far friendlier to publishers–without really mentioning Apple at all.”

        • Android Market on pace to outgrow iTunes 3-1

          According to a recent report by Lookout’s App Genome Project, the number of Android Marketplace apps increased by over 125% since August, putting it on pace to outgrow iTunes apps three to one. Apple still commands a sizeable lead in the total number of apps it offers through iTunes versus AM, the gap is narrowing quickly.

        • Android Ice Cream 2.4 = Gingerbread + Honeycomb

          Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed to an audience at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the upcoming version 2.4 of its Android operating system will combine both Gingerbread 2.3 and the tablet-centric Honeycomb 3.0.

        • TeamViewer6 Stable For Android, Released [Remote Desktop Application]
        • IcedRobot Will Take Android Beyond Smartphones: Exclusive Interview

          A group of developers has announced a project called IcedRobot which will make it possible to run Android apps on non-Android platforms. Something similar to what Alien Dalvik is trying to do. However, there is a significant difference between the two projects, what is it? How is IcedRobot going to affect the Oracle-Google court battle? How is it going to make life easier for developers? How is it going to make life easier for users? We got in touch with one of the founders of the IcedRobot to understand more about the project. Here is an exclusive interview with one of the founding members of the IcedRobot project, Mario Torre.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4, Socorro at AOL, PyCon 2011, Join Mozilla and more…

        * Firefox 4 playing well on major websites
        * Laura Thomson talks Socorro at AOL
        * Mozillians Take PyCon 2011
        * Now serving weekly updates on Join Mozilla
        * Meet the Developer Engagement Team
        * Thoughts on community from metrics guru
        * Mozilla and IPv6 day
        * Can IE9 be considered a modern browser?
        * Improvements to Firefox 4′s spell checker
        * More on MozMill at FOSDEM
        * What will Add-on updates look like in the future?
        * Software updates
        * Upcoming events
        * Developer calendar
        * About about:mozilla

      • Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/02/15

  • SaaS

    • Is the open source cloud computing dream evaporating?

      It’s hard to avoid cloud computing these days, with vendors lining up to support this latest incarnation of an idea that goes all the way back to terminals hanging off a mainframe. In many ways, that’s unfortunate, since the idea of computing ‘in the cloud’ poses particular problems for free software.

  • Databases

    • Database Technology for Large Scale Data

      It is similar to the MapReduce programming model, which has been frequently used as of late. Both Greenplum and Aster Data provide a feature of combining SQL and MapReduce. The following is a description of the SQL used by Greenplum and the manner in which it is processed.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Linux 6 available

      With a simple email to an in-house mailing list, last Friday Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 6. There is, as yet, no press release on the release, which is unusual as the company and its CEO usually tend to aim for maximum publicity.

      The new generation Oracle Linux is largely a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL), which was released last November. New features listed in the release email and release notes are, therefore, already familiar from the original, for instance the use of Ext4 as the default file system, the support of XFS and the ftrace and perf tracing tools. One section in the release notes lists all the packages Oracle has modified to adjust the distribution’s “look and feel” and remove Red Hat trademarks.

    • [tdf-announce] LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation

      LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation

    • Webcast recap: General Hugh Shelton
    • Now Hudson moves to GitHub

      The dispute between Oracle and the Hudson community over the continuous integration software Hudson, which led to the creation of Jenkins, a renamed version, has taken an ironic turn.The arguments started over where Hudson’s code and other developer resources would be hosted.

      Oracle had insisted, having ownership of the Hudson trademark, on the code being on its project Kenai-based Java.net service. But after problems with a mishandled migration of the project, much of the community backed a plan that would have moved it to the GitHub repository. Oracle objected to this and the community’s response to Oracle was a vote to rename Hudson as Jenkins to avoid the trademark issue and taking control of Jenkins hosting.

    • Google Files Motion for Leave to File Motion for Summary Judgment on Oracle’s Copyright Claim

      Google has sent a letter [PDF] to Judge William Alsup, asking leave to file a motion for summary judgment on Count VIII of Oracle’s Amended Complaint in Oracle v. Google.

      Count VIII is the one about copyright infringement. So regardless of how the judge rules, we get to see Google’s position, which if I translate into non-legalese would be: “What we did isn’t actionable, being covered by fair use or the files are so few their use is de minimis or they are not copyrightable.” I have done the letter as text for you.

    • New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m100) available

      Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m100 is available for download.

      DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.

    • LibreOffice Starts 50,000 Euro Challenge Foundation Set-Up

      Oracle’s Sun buyout has taught a very important lesson to the Free and Open Source Community: its better and safer to be independent than be controlled by a corporate entity. There are many projects driven by corporates with good intentions, but the risk of buyout remains.

      OpenOffice fork, LibreOffice is one of the role models of community-governed project. To meet the financial requirements without compromising on what the community or users want, the LibreOffice community is calling for monetary contributions.

    • LibreOffice Colorful Icons Land In The US @ SCALE

      LibreOffice is the free office productivity suite developed by the TDF developer community, and is going to be included as the default choice in all Linux desktop distributions announced from March 2011 onwards. The software features a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation manager (Impress), a charting and graphics program (Draw), and a database front end (Base). The suite supports the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) for personal documents, and is compatible with most of the legacy proprietary formats – including several flavors of Microsoft Office, WordPerfect and Microsoft Works – and with the OOXML ISO standard (in the current non-standard Microsoft implementation).

  • Healthcare

    • Parliament Approves European Directive Against Falsified Medicines

      The European Parliament today approved a new law aimed at preventing falsified medicines from entering the legal supply chain, according to a Parliament press release. The law needs to be formally approved by the Council of Ministers.

      The new law will cover internet sales and introduces new safety and traceability measures. According to the release, a “huge growth” in falsified medicines has been witnessed since 2005, with an estimated one percent of products sold in to the European public through the legal supply chain being falsified, according to the release. The law is expected to be posted soon to a link provided in the press release.

  • Funding

    • AdBlock Plus: Open source for fun (not funds)

      It is this last thing that strikes me as offering the most vital reason for the significant contributions to VLC, and it also comes through in Palant’s decision to invest so much time in Adblock Plus. He told me: “I have the feeling that this work is important. I can help many people and in the long term the web might actually become a better place.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Stress test FSFE’s new donation options!

      FSFE’s work depends on your donations. Without we would not be able to work on software freedom, follow the policy process in European countries, the European Union, and the United Nations, nor would we be able to run campaigns like pdfreaders.org or Document Freedom Day.

    • Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

      On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

    • The FreedomBox Foundation
    • Debian and the FreedomBox

  • Project Releases

    • GNU Guile 2.0.0 released

      We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.0.0, the first of a new stable series and the result of almost 3 years of work. It provides many new noteworthy features, most notably the addition of a compiler and virtual machine.

  • Government

    • EE: Ministry saves millions by using open source office

      Using the open source costed the ministry no more than 64.000 Euro over the past ten years, being simply the annual budget for training users. Had it continued to use a proprietary office suite, the costs for purchasing or renting proprietary software licences and user training would have ranged between 1.4 and 2.8 million Euro, Merilo showed in a presentation at the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA), a trade organisation, on 18 January in Latvia’s capital Riga.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • User-led innovation can’t create breakthroughs. Really?

      2) Getting user feedback ≠ taking user feedback.

      Jens and Rasmus jump to a conclusion that I probably wouldn’t reach myself. They argue that it is actually harmful to listen to users and that innovative brands don’t care about what their users want. They make four key points 1) Users insights can’t predict future demand 2) User-centered processes stifle creativity 3) User focus makes companies miss out on disruptive innovations 4) User-led design leads to sameness.

    • The Lebanese Creative Commons community gains momentum

      In the past three years, the Lebanese CC Community has started to structurally gain momentum and actively co-create together on local, regional and multi-national levels. The community that we have is vibrant and diverse consisting of visual artists, photographers, musicians, NGOs, and publishers—each with his own story and journey with CC.

    • Open Data

      • The State of Open Data in Canada: The Year of the License

        Open Data now an established fact in a growing list of Canadian cities. Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa have established portals, Montreal, Calgary, Hamilton and some other cities are looking into launching their own and a few provinces are rumored to be exploring open data portals as well.

        This is great news and a significant accomplishment. While at the national level Canadian is falling further behind leaders such as England, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, at the local and potentially provincial/state level, Canada could position itself as an international leader.

      • How Open Data Initiatives Can Improve City Life

        Major city governments across North America are looking for ways to share civic data — which normally resides behind secure firewalls — with private developers who can leverage it to serve city residents via web and mobile apps. Cities can spend on average between $20,000 and $50,000 — even as much as $100,000 — to cover the costs of opening data, but that’s a small price to pay when you consider how much is needed to develop a custom application that might not be nearly as useful.

    • Open Hardware

      • Texas Instruments OMAP 5 may offer the best quad-core chip [Processor fights]

        All cores are not created equal. That was the key message that I took away from a recent meeting with the folks from Texas Instruments. While the trend among mobile phones and tablets is to trumpet how many cores one chipset has, and how many gigahertz can be crammed into a tiny piece of hardware, that doesn’t tell the whole story of how a device will perform.

        Texas Instruments recently announced that its TI OMAP 5 would be a quad-core processor that greatly advances the computing power of smartphones, tablets, and other devices. OMAP 5 features twin ARM Cortex-A15 cores that can each reach 2 GHz of power, and two ARM Cortex-M4 cores that are used to deliver optimal battery with less power requirements. So while NVIDIA trumpets its four Cortex A9 cores, TI plans to counter with what it claims will be a stronger and smarter quartet.

  • Programming

    • Is Eclipse Open-By-Rule?
    • Open Source COBOL-IT Tools to be Distributed by Speedware

      IBM i shops that develop in COBOL may be interested in learning about COBOL-IT, a compiler and collection of modernization tools that is developed in France under an open source license. Last week, the Canadian application modernization company Speedware announced that it’s now distributing COBOL-IT to North American customers.

      According to the Paris-based company, the COBOL-IT Compiler Suite is an ANS85-compliant version of the popular procedural language. The compiler installs on Windows, Unix, and Linux machines, including Linux for z/OS, thereby providing organizations with hosting options besides the IBM mainframe, where a lot of legacy COBOL resides.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C: HTML5 will be finished in 2014

      Those curious about the final release date for the hotly debated HTML5 need wonder no more: The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) plans to finalize the standard by July 2014, the organization announced Monday.

      “This is the first time we’ve been able to answer people’s questions of when it will be done,” said Ian Jacobs, head of W3C marketing and communications. “More and more people from more and more industries are asking when it will be done. They require stability in the standard and very high levels of interoperability.”

    • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) Authorized Translations Now in Six Languages
    • ODF Mime Type Icons Redesign

      Overall, this design decision enables us to make ODF file distinction to be supported via luminance and form/contour contrasts. Which is a significant improvement compared to the current ODF icons, without violating any ODF marketing constraints.

    • ODFDOM 0.8.7 – The new Release of the OpenDocument Java Library

      The new version of ODFDOM – our Apache 2 licensed ODF library in Java has been released!

    • Scramble to set mobile pay standard

      In the business world, the pursuit of profits sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. And in the race to be first in the local mobile payment market, credit card firms, telecommunications companies and mobile phone makers are forging unlikely alliances.

      With the country’s “cashless” payment culture and the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones creating a whole new way to pay for goods and services – via mobile devices – companies in some industries are looking to set the standards for the new business and get in on the first train.

    • Drumming Up More Addresses on the Internet

      They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment would ever require, far more, in fact, than he could ever imagine needing. And so he was comfortable rejecting the even larger number of addresses that some on his team had argued for.

Leftovers

  • [Old] Hunton & Williams Sued for $150 Million in Contract-Interference Case

    Hunton & Williams has been hit with a $150 million lawsuit in Wisconsin claiming that the law firm maliciously squeezed a broker out of a contract and should pay up for the company’s losses.

    The lawsuit alleges that Hunton & Williams and client Insight Equity Holdings LLC ousted plaintiff Minerals Development & Supply Co. from a supply chain agreement in which Minerals Development was the middleman. Filed in Monroe County, Wis., Circuit Court, on July 30, the lawsuit seeks punitive damages for what Minerals Development asserts was the law firm’s intentional and malicious conduct.

  • Why You Should Use Emoticons In Your Emails

    Language is a means of communication, buts its only as effective as the person using it. Without inflection and emotion, language loses a lot, making text communication one of the poorest forms. While emoticons can be informal, they may actually be the best way of bringing additional meaning to your emails.

  • Guilting parents out of child care

    In the crass world of Canadian right-wing politics, there is a surefire way to diffuse voters’ earnest desire for affordable, high quality child care and early learning options: play the guilt card.

    Human Resources Minister Diane Finley did it just last week in response to a federal Liberal promise to revive the national child-care program Paul Martin said he would implement before losing grip of his fledgling minority government five years ago.

  • No courting in public, Hindu group warns Delhi

    “We won’t allow our culture to be hijacked by foreign multinationals who have introduced concepts like Valentine’s Day just to sell cards,” said its spokesman, Sunil Tyagi. The group plans to equip its members with cameras to film couples in action. “When we upload such footage on YouTube, the couples will learn their mistake.”

  • Police issue arrest warrant for rabbi that supported book which justifies killing non-Jews
  • Stop the global land grab

    “NGOs don’t mobilise people, desperation mobilises people,” said a Cambodian land activist as he related the experience of Boeung Kak villagers who were driven off their land by their own government to make way for corporate profiteering.

  • Science

  • Hardware

    • ARM Marches Onward

      Obviously ARM is doing very well in embedded stuff and smart thingies but nVidia’s newest Tegra chip is mind-blowing. They tout it for mobile but demonstrate it doing video and games on huge monitors. Does that not spell desktop/notebook/gaming console? Yep! There’s a rumour that this will power the next iPad.

    • 3TB Drives are Here

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Aims to Own Our Food, While Profiteering Off of Toxins and Pesticides

      In its latest of many articles on the increasing threat of Monsanto to world agricultural production, Truthout once again points out that the multinational corporation is in the process of privatizing much of our food supply through the patenting and aggressive marketing of genetically engineered (GE) seeds and crops.

    • Doctors Sue Federal Government for Deceptive Language on Meat, Dairy in New Dietary Guidelines

      A nonprofit physicians organization is suing the federal government over the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, accusing officials of using deliberately obscure language regarding foods consumers should avoid. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) cites the government’s conflicts of interest and arbitrary and capricious behavior in developing nutrition advice that was supposed to help Americans fight record obesity levels.

      In a lawsuit filed this week against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, PCRM says the Dietary Guidelines are clear about what to eat more of—vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, for example—but deliberately hide the foods Americans should eat less of. The Guidelines use biochemical terms, such as “saturated fat” and “cholesterol” instead of specific food terms “meat” and “cheese.” This deliberate omission can be traced to the USDA’s close ties to the meat and dairy industries, including fast-food companies such as McDonald’s.

  • Security

    • Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
    • Wednesday’s security updates
    • Legal Defenses For Anonymous In The Excited States – IANAL

      This is actually a multi-layered defense. The FBI appears (from some statements) to be trying to claim that having a copy of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon is illegal. The Low Orbit Ion Cannon is a network testing application. Network testing applications aren’t illegal, however they possibly could be used for illegal uses. I can see a defense lawyer claiming that the LOIC application is the cyber equivalent of a rifle, and possession is covered under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

      The use of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks against Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, etc. is being regarded by the FBI as illegal. However the use of a gun in self defense isn’t illegal in many places. Expect to see arguments that use of the LOIC software is equivalent to using a gun for self defense.

      Also expect to see arguments that the social engineering attack on Rootkit.com was also self defense, assuming that the FBI can locate whoever actually did it. This would also cover any of the actions by anyone against HBGary Federal.

    • Anonymous victim HBGary goes to ground

      The computer security company hacked by members of activist group Anonymous has gone to ground as further revelations about its activites leak online.

      HBGary has cancelled its appearances at public events, saying that members of staff had been threatened.

      It follows the release of internal documents which appear to show the firm offered to smear Wikileaks’ supporters.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • [Old] Police arrest four at Toronto homes

      Toronto police are arresting many of the key organizers behind anti-G20 protests, several of them during pre-dawn raids on houses across Toronto that resulted in four people being charged with conspiracy to commit mischief.

    • CBS News’ Logan recovering after ‘brutal’ attack
    • Yemen protests turn violent

      Yemen protests started in mid January with a self immolation and the arrest and release of Yemeni activist Tawakel Karman, and they have not really stopped since. A Day of Rage was organized for February 3 but tens of thousands were in the streets on January 27 as well as many smaller protests, throughout the time period. The last five days have seen a huge increase in the numbers in the streets, as well as the violence directed at them. According to Human Rights Watch, president Ali Abdallah Saleh’s security forces have attacked demonstrators, activists, lawyers, and journalists in Yemen capital city Sanaa without justification. An estimated 3000 people protested from Sana’a University, clashing with police and pro-Saleh demonstators using batons, rocks, and occasionally knives. Today in Taiz, over 2500 people are refusing to leave and are forming committees and buying tents to continue occupying their protests grounds.

    • ‘Best lead’ before 7/7 not followed

      Police failed to chase up their “best lead” after a suspected armed robbery, which may have led them to one of the July 7 bombers weeks before the atrocity, an inquest has heard.

      Inquiries were “left outstanding” after Jermaine Lindsay was linked to an alleged gun crime in May 2005. Though police were able to identify the 19-year-old as the owner of a red Fiat Brava spotted leaving the scene, this information was never fully followed up.

      Officers launched an investigation named Operation Bugle after a man dialled 999 to say there was a gunman in his flat on May 27, 2005 – five weeks before the terror attacks on London.

      Three women and a child were later seen fleeing from the property “in fear” while three men – wearing balaclavas and gloves – were spotted getting into the Fiat Brava.

      When armed officers arrived later that evening, neither the owner of the Luton flat nor the gunman were there. Attempts to identify the gang of men – two black and one Asian – or the group of women seen leaving the area in a taxi were unsuccessful.

    • Somali pirate gets more than 33 years in prison

      A Somali pirate who kidnapped and brutalized the captain of a U.S.-flagged merchant ship off the coast of Africa in 2009 was sentenced to more than 33 years in prison Wednesday by an emotional judge who told him he deserved a stiff punishment for leading a crew of armed bandits bent on committing “depraved acts.”

      U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska choked up as she read at length from letters written by Capt. Richard Phillips and traumatized sailors who were aboard the cargo vessel commandeered by Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse.

    • Vaughan Smith’s new film ‘Blood and Dust’ broadcasting on Al Jazeera

      Above is a preview of Vaughan Smith’s dramatic new film BLOOD AND DUST recording life and death with an American helicopter medevac unit in Southern Afghanistan.

      ‘These Medivac teams, US military air ambulances, are amoungst the only soldiers that go to war to save lives and they are very good at it.’

    • Two TSA agents arrested at JFK Airport for stealing $39K from passenger’s bag

      Under questioning, the pair also admitted swiping up to $160,000 from other unsuspecting passengers.

      Rogue agents Davon Webb, 30, and Persad Coumar, 36, were busted after a sharp-eyed colleague blew the whistle.

    • Libya cracks down on protesters after violent clashes in Benghazi

      Hundreds of anti-government protesters clashed with police and government supporters in Libya’s second city yesterday as unrest spread across the Arab world.

    • Mubarak ordered Tiananmen-style massacre of demonstrators, Army refused

      Buried in this Robert Fisk report for The Independent is a startling account of the Egyptian army refusing to move with tanks against the Tahrir Square protesters on January 30. If this is true, it must be the defining moment in the history of the movement that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign.

      [...]

      Last night [Feb 10], a military officer guarding the tens of thousands celebrating in Cairo threw down his rifle and joined the demonstrators, yet another sign of the ordinary Egyptian soldier’s growing sympathy for the democracy demonstrators. We had witnessed many similar sentiments from the army over the past two weeks. But the critical moment came on the evening of 30 January when, it is now clear, Mubarak ordered the Egyptian Third Army to crush the demonstrators in Tahrir Square with their tanks after flying F-16 fighter bombers at low level over the protesters.

      Many of the senior tank commanders could be seen tearing off their headsets – over which they had received the fatal orders – to use their mobile phones. They were, it now transpires, calling their own military families for advice. Fathers who had spent their lives serving the Egyptian army told their sons to disobey, that they must never kill their own people.

    • Baghdad wants U.S. to pay $1 billion for damage to city

      Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

    • Iraqi lied about weapons of mass destruction

      An Iraqi defector has admitted for the first time he fabricated claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday.

      In an interview with the newspaper, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi said he made up a story told to German intelligence officials throughout 2000 about mobile biological weapons and clandestine factories. His motive was to overthrow the Iraqi government, he said.

    • Bahrain: 2011-2-16

      In the last hour police raided the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. The protestors were camped when teargas, buckshot and rubber bullets were fired into the square from the bridge overlooking the circle. When the crowd stampeded away from the bridge another barrage from the opposite direction scattered them. The circle has been locked down with no one allowed in or out. Many were wounded and some deaths have occurred. Men, women and children were injured. This attack came after the king promised to investigate the previous deaths from buckshot.

    • Bahrain: 2011-2-17

      It looks like the regime will not roll over as in Tunisia and Egypt. I expect tomorrow will be a very interesting day in Bahrain. Friday is the holy day when many passionate speeches will be made in the mosques.

    • Bahrain Police Refuse Ambulances Access To Wounded Protesters
    • Domino Theory 50 Years Later
    • Tsunami in Egypt

      UNTIL THE very last moment, the Israeli leadership tried to keep Hosni Mubarak in power.

    • Tea Party declares war on military spending

      In his speech to the conference on Friday, Paul the elder was the only speaker to address the current crisis in Egypt and criticised successive US administrations for “propping up a puppet dictator”, citing 30 years of uncritical support for Hosni Mubarak. Traditionally, Ron Paul’s supporters (and the libertarian philosophy they espouse) have been dismissed as merely boisterous gadflies fluttering around the real heavyweight horsetrading for political power within the Republican party. The issues they champion range from the practical (passing a balanced budget amendment), to the fanciful (abolishing the Federal Reserve and reintroducing the gold standard); thus they have never been taken seriously by the Republican establishment.

  • Cablegate

    • The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG For Tuesday, Day 80

      Six in 10 say WikiLeaks played role in Tunisia revolt, which sparked so much else, and other demos. “More than 60 percent believe that Wikileaks will change the way governments behave. 55 percent of Arabs revealed in the poll that they believe little to nothing of what their governments tell them.”

    • WikiLeaks, free speech and Twitter come together in Va. court case

      In the courtroom, John Keker, a lawyer representing one of the Twitter clients, said the users’ data would give the government a map of people tied to WikiLeaks and essentially halt free speech online.

    • Notes From a Father of the Open Internet, 15 Years On

      As a revolution that was in many ways organized on Facebook continued in Egypt, John Perry Barlow said Wednesday that the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace that he wrote 15 years ago Tuesday is still as relevant now as it was when he penned it.

    • The Australian’s double standard on Julian Assange

      The Australian’s love-hate relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks — possibly a little more co-dependent on The Oz’s side — continues apace. Like much of News Limited, its right-wing columnists turned their guns on him early, before The Oz began a desperate attempt to acquire some of the “cablegate” cables after Philip Dorling began publishing reports of them in Fairfax (which disgraced itself as the only news partner unwilling to actually publish the cables in question).

      [...]

      The implicit accusation is absurd and simply wrong.

    • EFF Argues for Privacy in Hearing Over Twitter Records

      These secret government requests for information only came to light because Twitter took steps to ensure their customers were notified and had the opportunity to respond. In fact, EFF was only able to speak publicly about the hearing and the motions we filed on behalf of our client, Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, after petitioning the court to lift the seal on the legal proceedings. We also asked the court Tuesday to go further with its unsealing, and make more documents public. The issues at hand — WikiLeaks, privacy, free speech, and social networking — are all important matters of public interest, and the orders and motions before the judge should be available to inform public debate.

    • Obama Admin Touts Internet Freedom While Targeting Twitter, WikiLeaks

      The Obama administration has unveiled a new policy it says will help protesters worldwide evade curbs to internet freedom. Drawing on the key role of online organizing in the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. will help bloggers and activists evade state censorship.

    • Hillary Clinton Talks The Talk On Internet Freedom; Will The Administration Walk The Walk?

      A year ago, Hillary Clinton gave a speech about the importance of “internet freedom” that many of us later pointed out appeared to be in stark contrast with the federal government’s (including Secretary of State Clinton’s) reaction to the publishing of various State Department cables. So a lot of folks were interested in what Clinton had planned for her followup speech on internet freedoms, which she gave yesterday. I’ve embedded the full speech below, but you can also read a summary of the speech at Wired.

    • Friend of Suspected WikiLeaks Source Alleges Torture

      A friend of the alleged whistleblower, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, says the U.S. government’s treatment of Manning amounts to torture.

    • WikiLeaks: Egypt’s new man at the top ‘was against reform’

      The military leader charged with transforming Egypt opposed political reform because he believed that it “eroded central government power”, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.

    • Hillary Clinton champions Internet freedom, but cautions on WikiLeaks

      The 50-minute speech was also an opportunity for the US to weigh in on a event that has been a thorn in the discussion over freedom of speech since it began, namely the WikiLeaks document release, says Depauw University communications professor Kevin Howley.

      He noted the “surprisingly small” amount of mainstream attention given to the fact that WikiLeaks was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize two weeks ago.

    • Clinton: We Love Net Freedom, Unless It Involves WikiLeaks
    • Government challenged on Twitter records access

      Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament, is the most high-profile of the three defendants.

    • Interview of Daniel Ellsberg on Bradley Manning [MP3]
    • 06YEREVAN1019, A PROSTITUTE’S STORY: SEX AND TRAFFICKING IN

      Poverty and desperation are the largest factors contributing to trafficking in persons in Armenia, according to prostitutes, police and NGOs in Vanadzor, Armenia’s third-largest city. We met them during a July 14 trip to the city, where prostitutes gather after dusk in the traffic circle outside a central church to begin the day’s work. To each we posed the question, “What can be done to eradicate trafficking in persons in Armenia?” No one had an answer, but all agreed that lack of jobs drove women to sell themselves both in Armenia and overseas, where the money was better, but where they often didn’t actually get paid. They told us that girls as young as 11 and 12 have started walking the streets. A police officer told us that parents send their daughters to Turkey fully understanding the cost at which remittances will be sent home. We visited a decrepit shanty town, where prostitutes work for bread and rice, to see first-hand the conditions in which many of them live. We left Vanadzor convinced that, while stricter laws and harsher sentencing are needed in Armenia, prostitutes work in large part because they have to put food on the table, and they go to Turkey and the UAE because they believe the money is better there.

    • Lawmaker reintroduces WikiLeaks prosecution bill

      New legislation in the U.S. Congress targets WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage prosecution.

      Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, introduced the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination, or SHIELD, Act on Tuesday. The bill would clarify U.S. law by saying that it is an act of espionage to publish the protected names of American intelligence sources who collaborate with the U.S military or intelligence community.

      King introduced similar legislation in 2010. Senators John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, introduced similar legislation in the Senate last week.

    • Julian Assange Has NEVER Done ANYTHING That Would Give The U.S. Jurisdiction! Alan Dershowitz
    • Cables illuminate U.S. relations with Bahrain, potential for unrest

      The United States and Bahrain are close allies. In fact, according to an April 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable, one of several released by WikiLeaks this week, the two countries have “about as good a bilateral relationship as anywhere.” The cables recount a number of interesting details, particularly in light of ongoing unrest there this week, about the government’s leadership, U.S. interests in Bahrain and the region, and about the backstory of sectarian tensions between a ruling Sunni government and a large underclass Shiite majority.

      U.S. interests in Bahrain, according to the cables, center around two issue: Iran and Iraq. And the two are related. The April 2008 cables notes that Bahrain’s “number-one security concern is Iran. They support [the U.S.] tough stand toward Tehran.” The cables claim that Bahrain worked with the U.S. government to monitor financial transactions from Iran. And perhaps even more importantly, Manama expressed interest in creating a broader alliance of countries in the Gulf and the region to resist Iran, the cables claim. And here’s where Iraq comes in, according to a 2008 cable: “Our point that reintegrating Iraq into the Arab fold is critical to limiting Iranian influence has had real resonance with the Bahraini leadership.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Sterility in frogs caused by environmental pharmaceutical progestogens

      Frogs appear to be very sensitive to progestogens, a kind of pharmaceutical that is released into the environment. Female tadpoles that swim in water containing a specific progestogen, levonorgestrel, are subject to abnormal ovarian and oviduct development, resulting in adult sterility. This is shown by a new study conducted at Uppsala University and published today in the scientific journal Aquatic Toxicology.

    • The True Cost Of Coal – Up To A Half Trillion Dollars Per Year

      Dr. Paul Epstein from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard’s Medical School has written an article set for publication this month in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences quantifying the true costs of coal in terms of economic, health and environmental impacts.

      Dr. Epstein’s study details how each stage of coal’s life cycle (extraction, transportation, processing, and combustion) has enormous costs, all of which are directly borne by the public. Notably, the report estimates some $74.6 billion a year in public health costs for Appalachian communities, mainly from increasing healthcare burdens, injury and death.

    • Video: Carnivorous Bladderworts Catch Meals With Vacuum Power
    • Amazon pollution: Chevron hits back in row with Ecuador

      US oil giant Chevron says it will appeal against an $8.6bn (£5.3bn) fine imposed by Ecuador judges, carrying on a long-running row over pollution.

      Chevron’s Kent Robertson told the BBC the case was an “extortion scheme”, and accused Ecuador’s state-run firm of polluting the country’s Amazon region.

    • Mining giants bury Canadian critics with lawsuits

      Canadian academics and free speech advocates are up in arms over two mining multinationals’ use of libel law to bury their critics in lawsuits. Alain Deneault, Delphine Abadie, and William Sacher published a book called Noir Canada. Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique that detailed well-sourced human rights abuses by the multinational resource companies Barrick Gold and Banro Corporation.

  • Finance

    • NYSE traders say yes to Germany, no to lederhosen

      A German takeover of the New York Stock Exchange, the citadel of American capitalism, would have shocked its floor traders in years gone by. But not now.

    • Is the Great Stagnation a great opportunity?

      As Tyler points out in this book, and catalogued at length in his other excellent book, Create Your Own Economy, recent increases in happiness come from growth in internal economies. That is, internal to humans. In the past, increased well-being came from not having a toilet and then having one, or the invention of cheap air travel. Today they come from blogging, watching Lost on Netflix, listening to a symphony from iTunes, tweeting with your friends, seeing their pictures on Facebook or Path, and learning and collaborating on Wikipedia. As a result, once one secures a certain income to cover basic needs, greater happiness and well-being can be had for virtually nothing.

    • We All Work at Enron Now

      Remember Enron? That paragon of turn-of-the-century new-economy triumphalism, gushed over by pundits, lauded by investors, celebrated by the cognoscenti — until it turned out to be a roadside bomb in disguise? The cause of its demise, ultimately: overstating benefits and understating costs. The result, of course, was a spectacular flameout, today the stuff of legend.

      So here’s a question. Is the global economy going Enron? Just like Enron, does it systematically and chronically overstate real benefits (consider just how vanishingly little “profit” reflects trust, happiness, joy, delight, inspiration, passion, wisdom, or a sense of meaning) and understate real costs (like damage to nature, the future, communities, society, or human achievement itself)? And is that, perhaps, the prime mover of what both Tyler Cowen and I have termed a Great Stagnation?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Egypt’s Lobbyists Worked To Block Pro-Human Rights, Democracy Resolution

      New disclosures filed in the past few weeks by Egypt’s lobbying team in Washington shine a light on the activity the country took last summer and fall to block the discussion and passage of a resolution calling on the United States to support human rights in Egypt and demand an end to the emergency law, two key demands of the protesters who, last week, toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

    • Beck warns against searching his conspiracy theories on Google

      Okay, Glenn Beck has completely lost it. Now he’s warning his audience against looking up his conspiracy theories on Google…

    • UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All

      According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

  • Censorship

    • Algeria tried to block internet and Facebook as protest mounted

      The Algerian government was blamed by protesters for preventing access to internet providers across much of the capital, Algiers, and other cities including Annaba for much of Saturday morning and afternoon in an attempt to prevent planned demonstrations gathering pace.

      Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone.

    • Salinger’s Ghost Censors From The Grave

      Jay McInerney in the NY Times reminds us why there will never be a biographical account of J.D. Salinger that is as accurate and insightful as it could be, all thanks to a bit of stifling censorship from the current copyright regime…

  • Privacy

    • Using Real Names has Real Consequences

      I post under my own name, but I do it with a consciousness of the risk.

      I’ve been on the net (it was the ARPANET then) since 1977. At that time, we actually had user profiles with a place to supply your social security number, and people often complied because there was no reason to suppose it was dangerous. Those were certainly different times. People today are often horrified as they look back at the practices of those days, but everyone’s sensibilities were different then. At some point we noticed that there was danger in having such information out in the open, so the data was erased and the ability to attach it was removed. But initially we were more trusting.

    • Council survey causes privacy concern

      A survey issued by Wiltshire Council has stirred up a privacy debate in the local community, as it asks questions about resident’s sexuality, debt levels and qualifications.

      According to the Salisbury Journal, the document has been sent out to 26,500 households across the county “to help the council develop its housing and planning policy” to provide affordable housing in the area.

    • Obama assertion: FBI can get phone records without oversight

      The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.

      That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

      Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.

    • Congressmen Urge State Department to Investigate Internet Spying Company

      To recap, Narus is a Sunnyvale, California, Internet surveillance and filtering company begun by Israeli security experts, and subsequently bought by Boeing. The company has nefarious links to the NSA, and to AT&T efforts to monitor phone communications domestically.

      Among Narus’ many cyber-sleuthing products is one called “Hone,” which can filter through billions of packets of online data to target individuals on social networks and then link that information to their “VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.” Those using cell phones or Wi-Fi connections can then be located geographically.

  • Civil Rights

    • WATCH: Our new ad opposing the PATRIOT Act
    • Free Press Congratulates Electronic Frontier Foundation on 21 Years of Service

      Free Press wishes to offer our congratulations and thanks to EFF for their work on behalf of the American public.

      Long before most people had heard of the Internet, EFF was on the job to ensure that it remained an open space for the free exchange of ideas. Little could anyone have imagined then the global impact it would have 21 years later, and in many ways, we have EFF to thank.

    • Happy 21st Birthday EFF
    • EFF Appoints Jonathan Zittrain to the Board of Directors

      EFF is extremely pleased to announce a new addition to our Board of Directors: Harvard Law and Computer Science Professor Jonathan Zittrain.

      For many of you, Jonathan does not need an introduction, as he is one of the true luminaries of Internet scholarship. His work encompasses the critical issues at the heart of EFF’s work, including privacy, speech, digital property, and the role played by private intermediaries in Internet architecture.

    • Thousands protest anti-union bill in Wisconsin

      Thousands of teachers, prison guards and students descended on the Wisconsin Capitol for a second day Wednesday to fight a move to take union rights away from government workers in the state that first granted them more than a half-century ago.

      The Statehouse filled with as many as 10,000 demonstrators who chanted, sang the national anthem and beat drums for hours. The noise level in the Rotunda rose to the level of a chainsaw, and many Madison teachers joined the protest by calling in sick in such numbers that the district had to cancel classes.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Does Secretary Clinton Have a Double Standard on Internet Freedom?

      Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday highlighted new U.S. Internet freedom policy that is designed to help democracy movements gain access to open networks and speak out against authoritarian regimes.

      According to Clinton, the program will provide $25 million in new grants to support “technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against Internet repression.”

    • French Parliament to Consider Net Neutrality Law

      Net Neutrality in France is the subject simultaneously of government attacks and parliamentary efforts to protect it. After French Minister for Digital Economy Éric Besson’s direct attack, the French Parliament will on Thursday discuss a bill which strongly supports the principles of Net Neutrality. La Quadrature du Net calls on its supporters to contact French MPs and ask them to support this proposal in order to protect a free Internet.

    • We’re helping to make a safer internet – but it’s a shared responsibility!

      Anyone can be affected by security issues on the internet. It sounds like a boring cliché, but it is true. I recently I found out about someone attempting to impersonate me and my work at the Commission – using fake webmail and other tactics. My advice is to check how your name is being used online! Not only that – be sure you know who you are communicating with. Most of us like to share personal information online, but we rarely think about how embarrassing – or worse! – it could be if that information was forwarded or simply available to the wrong people. That is the thinking behind the theme of this year’s Safer Internet Day: “it’s more than a game – it’s your life.” (see the video above from the recent Data Protection Day which highlights this exact point)

    • The Internet Strikes Back: Tell Congress to Stand Up for Net Neutrality

      Make no mistake: this will be a decisive vote. This is the only time that Congress will vote “yes or no” on Net Neutrality, so it’s crucial that they vote the right way. Help us send a clear message to Congress: a vote for the repeal act is a vote against internet users.

  • DRM

    • PS3 Sparks Debate

      This device has caused a great deal of controversy Ranging a possible band in Norway due to unfair ToS’s that protect the consumer to Hackers entering into the system and breaching it Which has lead to a Lawsuit with an infamous hacker “gehot”
      to a Lawsuit that is pending Known as the “Other OS” Lawsuit that states SCEA wrongfully had removed the “Other OS” function in which was deemed as a security threat , The lawsuit also states that the “Other OS” was taken from a group of consoles that a Consumer had purchased.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Flip side of IPR protection

      Champions of intellectual property rights (IPR) say it is the driving force of economic growth and technological innovation. China has made its legislators perfect IPR laws ever since it decided to embrace market economy, and asked its law-enforcement agencies to ensure that they are properly implemented and protected. The country’s increasing foreign trade has further strengthened this demand, and the government and judicial authorities have made great efforts to perfect the IPR system.

      China has enacted and implemented a series of laws and regulations on IPR protection and issued the Outline of the National Intellectual Property Strategy in 2008. Its judicial authorities at various levels continue to crack down on people and companies violating IPR. On the whole, the country has made considerable progress both in legislation and enforcement of IPR laws.

      But the purpose of an IPR system is not only to protect intellectual property, but also to encourage innovation, maintain social justice and thus promote comprehensive economic and social progress.

      The present tendency to lay undue emphasis on intellectual property both at home and abroad may go against the original intention of an IPR system. Some practices and disputes in the United States and other Western countries have taught a lesson to China, rather than being experiences worthy of emulation.

      The fundamental driving force of innovation is competition, while IPR protection in substance is a kind of monopoly. Monopoly can provide incentives for innovation, but it can also prompt former innovators to gain high return by relying on the products they have already innovated, rather than pushing them toward further innovation. Such a situation will ultimately weaken the power of technological innovation.

    • International Civil Society Demands End To Secrecy In TPPA talks

      Negotiators in Santiago, Chile for the fifth round of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks were delivered a forceful message today by prominent civil society groups, demanding an end to the secrecy that shields their negotiations from the scrutiny of national lawmakers and the general public.

      Jane Kelsey, who is at the meeting, said that open letters addressed to government leaders in Australia, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand and the United States of America, signed by trade unions, environmentalists, faith and social justice organisations that speak for hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens, were handed to each delegation.

      The letters object that the proposed agreement is deeply undemocratic in its process and its effect.

    • Copyrights

      • KEI comments on USTR 2011 Special 301 Review

        KEI’s comments on the USTR 2011 Special 301 Review are available here.

      • Movie theatres generating record results in Canada

        Cineplex Inc, (CGX) the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada has recently released its 2010 year end totals, and its net revenue is up 17.8 percent from 2009.

        The entertainment company has interest in over 132 theatres across Canada with 1,366 screens, and it’s currently serving approximately 70 million guests annually. The latest financial report shows that they’re making record gains aside from attendance which is down .09% from last year.

      • Premium VOD Is Doomed If This Piracy Study Is Correct

        A new PricewaterhouseCoopers study casts serious doubt on consumer willingness to pay for movies on digital platforms. Warning: Film-industy executives interested in reading further may want to first increase dosage of any anti-depressants they might be taking.

        If, as recent comments made on media-conglomerate earnings calls would suggest, studios are gearing up to charge consumers $20-25 to watch movies in their homes two months or so after theatrical release, the new revenue stream known as premium VOD is headed for quite a bumpy ride.

      • Would Shakespeare Have Survived Today’s Copyright Laws?
      • UK Law Enforcement Also Looking To Be Able To Seize Domains

        And with both the US and the UK looking for such rights, won’t more and more countries now start to follow? It certainly makes you wonder about the impact of the overall internet, when various countries can just seek to shut down various domains without any trial determination.

      • An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee

        Today, 87 prominent Internet engineers sent a joint letter the US Senate Judiciary Committee, declaring their opposition to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA). The text of the letter is below.

      • Don’t Mess With Texas: Another Texas Judge Scrutinizes Mass Copyright Litigation

        Looks like the Texas courts are no place to file suit if you want to bypass due process. A few weeks ago, we reported that Mick Haig Productions had dismissed its copyright infringement lawsuit against 670 “John Does,” complaining that the court’s appointment of attorneys from EFF and Public Citizen had impeded its ability to prosecute its case. In a brief filed on behalf of the Does, EFF and Public Citizen had argued that Mick Haig should not be allowed to send subpoenas for the Does’ identifying information, because it had sued hundreds of people in one case, in the wrong jurisdiction and without meeting the constitutional standard for obtaining identifying information. We have also raised questions about the plaintiff’s conduct, as it appears it sent out subpoenas without the court’s permission.

      • 6,374 DISMISSED John Doe Defendants cheer as the LFP Internet Group lawsuits go down in flames.

        I would like to personally congratulate the 6,374+ John Doe Defendants (3,120 + 635 + 2,619) who have been dismissed from the LFP Internet Group, LLC (Larry Flynt Productions) cases. This is a huge victory for our clients and internet users in general. What makes this case significant is not the daunting number of defendants, but that this case provides great case law for future cases.

      • the “specter of e-book piracy” is a crock

        Used to be copyright was justified as an encouragement to creators to create more. The thing is the terms have become downright silly… extending copyright terms from fifty to seventy years after the death of the author is not going to encourage the author to create more. Once you’re dead that’s it. The current trend in ridiculous copyright laws don’t benefit the creators, but rather the corporations, who have never been particularly beneficial to creators. Corporations do NOT have the same objectives as creators.

      • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

        • Concerns over the DEA Costs Sharing Order

          First is an acknowledgement that the Act will have implications on affordability of broadband. The Government “has acknowledged that there may be an effect on broadband take-up should ISPs pass on the full cost of the process. This is regrettable, but needs to be balanced against the wider benefit to the UK’s digital economy.”

Clip of the Day

Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 17/2/2011: London Stock Exchange Reports, Mageia and Firefox 5 Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • We want more Linux presentations inside shopping centers!

    Last october I wrote about the first Italian presentation of Free Software inside a supermarket chain because it looked to me, and still looks, a wonderful idea that should find many followers worldwide, since it proves that Free Software isn’t a boring topic best left to software professionals.

    When I published the Italian version of that article I got some congratulation and this critique from Italy, born out of the fact that the article explains how and why Coop (the supermarket chain) promoted Gnu/Linux even if (as of october 2010) they didn’t use it internally or sell computers with Gnu/Linux preinstalled…

  • Read Kindle books on your Linux PC

    Andrei Pushkin at blogkindle.com has put together a short tutorial on how to get the Kindle for PC app running on his Ubuntu operating system. The solution, which you can probably guess if you’ve spent any time with Ubuntu or other Linux OSes, is to use Wine 1.3 or higher, which is a new enough version that you have to install it through a terminal window and not the software repository.

  • Linux for Mobile Users

    The smart mobile user shouldn’t overlook Linux. The question is, which distro should you pick? You’ll get a different answer depending who you ask.

    You’ll probably be pointed in the direction of Arch for performance, Debian for stability and Ubuntu if you want easy access to the biggest collection of apps. If that’s not enough choice to make your head spin, Slackware has its fans too – particularly among people who use older laptops.

  • 5 Reasons why kids should use Linux

  • Desktop

    • 7 Reasons to Use the Ubuntu Linux Operating System

      Everyone has heard of Windows and OSX. But what about the safe, secure, and open source operating system called Ubuntu Linux?

      People may have heard of this one, but they may have also heard that no programs run on it, it’s old or outdated (which is not true), and it’s hard to
      use.

      Well these five reasons should put your worries at ease, and maybe even convert you.

      [...]

      I highly recommend it.

  • Server

    • Watson vs Carbon Life Forms (Day 1)

      While I am amazed at how well he can assimilate knowledge, I am also amazed at how much knowledge he holds. There is no Internet connection. The range of topics was quite vast from Beatles songs, to cough, cough, a reference to Grendel and Beowulf (the literary version).

    • London Stock Exchange: The road to Linux

      The London Stock Exchange’s move to Novell SUSE Linux based systems and a new matching engine written in C++ – set live on its main market on 14 February 2011 – was a major decision taken shortly after the appointment of a new chief executive two years ago. The systems replace a Microsoft .Net setup, with programs written in C# and running on Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server.

    • London Stock Exchange tackles closing auction system problem

      The London Stock Exchange has taken steps to resolve a system problem that occurred at 4.30pm yesterday (Tuesday), which saw a delay to the start of the closing auction and knocked out automatic trades during a 42 second period.

    • Freedom Box: Freeing the Internet one Server at a time

      Free software isn’t about free services or beer, it’s about intellectual freedom. As recent episodes such as censorship in China, the Egyptian government turning off the Internet, and Facebook’s constant spying, have shown, freedom and privacy on the Internet are under constant assault. Now Eben Moglen, law professor at Columbia University and renowned free software legal expert, has proposed a way to combine free software with the original peer-to-peer (P2P) design of the Internet to liberate users from the control of governments and big brother-like companies: Freedom Box.

  • Kernel Space

    • Atheros wifi free software laptops

      I looked for an Atheros wifi free software laptop for a long time without finding anything that was still in production.

    • Graphics Stack

      • What NVIDIA’s Linux Customers Want

        Last week when talking about NVIDIA looking to expand its Linux team (hire more engineers), I asked what else NVIDIA Linux customers wanted that already wasn’t offered by the proprietary driver for Linux / BSD / Solaris operating systems. Aside from the obvious one, of many desktop users wanting NVIDIA to support some sort of an open-source strategy, other expressed views are listed below.

      • Intel Graphics On Linux Still Behind Windows, With Sandy Bridge

  • Applications

    • LCA: Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail

      The Sendmail mail transfer agent tends to be one of those programs that one either loves or hates. Both its supporters and its detractors will agree, though, that Sendmail played a crucial role in the development of electronic mail before, during, and after the explosion of the Internet. Sendmail creator Eric Allman took a trip to Brisbane to talk to the LCA 2011 about the history of this project. Sendmail is, he said, 30 years old now; in those three decades it has thrived without corporate support, changed the world, and thrived in a world which was changing rapidly around it.

    • BookmarkBridge Looking Kind of Rickety

      Installing beta versions of software is usually less of a risk with open source apps than with commercial third-party apps. BookmarkBridge has stagnated with version 0.76 beta. It also is not uncommon to find plenty of beta applications distributed through Linux distro repositories. I found that if an app is available through a repository, it will work as described.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Purity

        A long time ago, on the old FreeGameDev forum, I heard of Purity; an original game based on the idTech3 engine.
        Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago.
        But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting:
        In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you have to get you to the end.

  • Desktop Environments

    • WTF Desktop Environments: GNOME, KDE And More Explained

      You can customise nearly every last inch of your Linux installation to fit your liking, and it starts with choosing the right desktop environment. Whether you’re a Linux beginner or you’re just looking for a new interface, here’s an overview of how desktop environments work and how to pick the right one for you.

      Windows and Mac OS X come with pretty specific graphical interfaces (you know, the windows, the skin, the system toolbars, etc.) that aren’t really built for customisation. With Linux, you can fully customise not only how your desktop looks, but even its functionality, and the settings available in its preferences. If you’re a beginning Linux user, you may have heard of popular desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, or others — but what do they all mean? Here, we’ll discuss what desktop environments are, and how to try new ones out on your existing Linux installation.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Geotag Photos with Open GPS Tracker and digiKam

        You don’t need a fancy camera with a built-in GPS receiver to geotag your photos. An Android device with the Open GPS Tracker app and digiKam can do the job just fine. The app lets you track your route and save it as a GPX file which you can then use to geocorrelate your photos in digiKam.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • FOSDEM 2011: building distro bridges

      FOSDEM. I finally got to the “blog about it” todo I took from there. I have to talk about the distribution collaboration panel discussion Jared Smith (Fedora Project Lead), Stefano Zacchirol (Debian Project Lead) and myself led on Sunday (video here). We discussed what barriers there are to cross-distro collaboration and what to do against them.

    • Reviews

      • Comparing CTK Arch Live and ArchBang

        Verdict
        1. ArchBang
        It’s more mature and gave me less trouble, from the boot process to recognizing the network to letting me do things like take screenshots and gauge RAM usage for this review. That said, the disabling of repositories by default is a little annoying.
        2. CTKArchLive
        It’s a younger project, to be sure, and it does things its own way rather than trying to emulate a particular project, but the fairly serious boot and network problems relegate it to runner-up.

    • New Releases

      • Berry 1.07
      • SystemRescueCd 2.0.1
      • 2/15/2011: Parted Magic 5.10

        It seems like it’s been longer than a month, but it’s time for a new release. The most notable changes are the Linux 2.6.37 Kernel, GParted 0.8.0, and the move back to Firefox as the default web browser.

      • GhostBSD 2.0 Beta Release

        We the developing team of GhostBSD would like to announce the release of GhostBSD 2.0 x64 beta. This Flavor is only a live cd as of the moment. There are great improvements on the look, feel and the speed of this release. Some of the things that were done to the new release was our new logo, bug fixes, New live cd file system, and improvements to GDM where there is no more white screens during booting. GhostBSD 2.0 is base on freebsd 8.2.On GhostBSD 2.0 you will see Gnome 2.32, Rhythmbox 0.12.8_3, Pidgin 2.7.7, Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird 3.0.11.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2011 KDE: A Review and Retrospective

        PCLinuxOS is a great distro for individuals who favor rolling updates, performance, and a dedicated community. If you’re a first-time Linux user or if you favor aesthetics over technological prowess, better choices are available.

      • Mageia Alpha 1 Released: Visual Preview

        Mandriva fans and users have a reason to cheer and keep trust in the system they love, as an Avatar of Mandriva is taking shape. Mageia, the fork of Mandriva, has hit the alpha 1 version. The version is only meant for developers and not for ordinary users as it is “alpha” and not ready for use. However, the version does promise that we will be seeing a final stable release in June as Romain stated in an exclusive interview with Muktware.

      • This is MAGEIA!

        That’s the installation: a real piece of cake.

      • Mandriva Linux 2011 Alpha 1: A Quick Peek

        Hey! Did you notice the penguins? I like them! The black and blue pattern is reminiscent of my Mepis 8.0 wallpaper (my favorite).

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6 Offers Updated Applications, Few Rough Spots

        Debian 6 is also available in a LiveCD version, similar to what other Linux distributions offer, which enables users first to try out the operating system before installing it on their hard drives.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Increasing Its Diversity

          In a blog post, Bacon highlights some key points that show the dedication of Canonical and the Ubuntu Project about combating the issue of so few women participating in Open Source events and communities. Those highlights include: adoption of an anti-harassment policy, a page on the Ubuntu Women site for UDS, UDS stories page, as well as the UW teams discussing how to provide support for this diversity effort.

        • A Kernel By Any Other Name
        • Canonical Re-licenses Ubuntu Wiki to CC BY-SA

          Elizabeth Krumbach on behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council announced in an email to various mailing lists, and posted on the Ubuntu Fridge that the licensing for the Ubuntu wiki will be CC-BY-SA and barring a “substantial number of objections” this change should take place in approximately one month.

        • DanRabbit on the Ubuntu One Desktop

          Hey Ubuntu One and Design fans! This is my first post here, and I have to say I feel priveledged to be able to write to you all. Recently I’ve been working with the Ubuntu One team on the desktop syncing apps, and trying to give them some special attention. I feel like these apps have the potential to be such an important part of not only the Ubuntu experience, but also the experience of users who may not have converted over to Ubuntu yet.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Dear Nokia We Know You are Confused- Just Don’t Try Confusing Us

          The argument put forward by Steven Elop, the Microsoft shareholder turned Nokia CEO, is that going with Android would have made them just one more OEM with little chance of differentiation…fragmentation anyone? But by choosing Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 he argued, would help create a third force in a two horse race, referring to Apples iOS and Google’s Android. I’m assuming all that Elop sees is what he’s telling us.

        • The Nokia N900- Long Live the Device

          Then there is the Voip integration on the device. At the time of the release, it really was ahead of the it’s time. Simply enter your Skype and Google Talk credentials and you have the two Voip networks integrated into your phone calling function.

      • Android

        • Google to merge smartphone and tablet versions of Android

          Google has promised Android updates will arrive every six months, with the next full version bringing together the best of the smartphone and tablet editions.

          The Android roadmap was laid out by Google’s executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, who was delivering a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

          Regarding the follow up to Gingerbread (version 2.3 of Android) and the tablet-focused Honeycomb (version 3), Schmidt said: “you can imagine the follow up will start with an I, be named after dessert, and will combine these two.” That version is expected to be called “ice-cream sandwich”.

        • Motorola’s 3LM Acquisition is Focused on Android in the Enterprise

          However, a startup company run by a group of ex-Google employees, dubbed Three Laws Mobility (3LM), has its eyes squarely fixed on the market for security software on Android smartphones, which could boost Android’s presence in the enterprise market.

        • GetJar Snags $25 Million As It Looks to Ride Android Growth

          Independent mobile app store GetJar announced it has grabbed $25 million in Series C funding as it looks to become the premier open Android market. The San Mateo, Calif.-based start-up’s latest round was led by Tiger Global Management, and Accel Partners, which participated in earlier rounds, will also contribute. The latest investment brings GetJar’s total funding to $42 million.

        • Mozilla: Firefox 4 for Android to Ship in a Few Weeks

          The Mozilla Foundation expects to release the final code for the Firefox 4 browser for Android mobile devices in a few weeks, with one more beta version to be released in the next week or so.

          The latest version of the mobile browser has a sync feature that allows users to replicate information contained in the desktop version of the browser on their Android device, including bookmarks, saved passwords, open tabs and browsing history, said Jay Sullivan, vice president of products for Mozilla, during an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday.

        • The dual-core ‘phone’ that runs Android and Ubuntu

          There’s more than enough glitz and smartphone glamour at Mobile World Congress to keep me writing previews well into next week, but when I dropped in at the ARM stand, it was something a little unusual that drew my attention.

          On the edge of a narrow bench sat a rattly-looking development unit – the kind of device phone and chip makers use to test hardware before squeezing it into the shiny, sleek chassis I’ve seen so many times over the past three days. But that’s not the interesting part: ARM was using it to demonstrate the benefits of multicore mobile processors, the sort so many of the new devices this year are set to employ.

        • Acer shows laptop lid look tablet

          Wireless connectivity? 2.4GHz 802.11n W-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 – it’s “upgradeable” to 3.0, Acer said. And some models will incorporate quad-band HSPA 3G.

          There’s a gigabyte of Ram on board, plus a choice of 16GB or 32GB storage, to which you can add Micro SD cards of up to 64GB capacity.

    • Tablets

      • Tablet wars: Those with the most and best apps win

        Personally, I think the market will end up supporting two top contenders: the iPad and the best tablet that runs Android 3+. Then there will be a strong #3, but with far less marketshare than the top two. Though it is really too early to make a fact-based prediction, I would not be surprised if that #3 eventually was a WebOS tablet from HP.

        Samsung may be #4, but after that all other contenders will have share lost in the error term. That is, something, but so small that the top contenders’ share and revenue will dwarf it. Put yet another way, share so small that executives at the companies will ask themselves why exactly they are in the market at all. I think Microsoft will not be a significant player here.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Dress Up Your Documents with Free Graphics Tools and Resources

    If you think back to what you were doing with documents 10 years ago, and then think about what you’re doing today, odds are that you work with graphics and multimedia much more than you ever did before. Within the world of open source, there are not only outstanding free applications that can improve your experience in these areas, but there are many free guides and tutorials to get you going with them. In this post, you’ll find collected resources for sprucing up your documents. Spend some time with these, and you’ll collect some rich dividends.

  • Events

    • Linux Foundation announces the Android Builders Summit

      Everyone and their brother seems to be coming out with some kind of Android powered doohickey. This is generating a fair amount of fatigue in consumers, as well as developers, as they grapple with the differing features in each vendor’s Android product. The Linux Foundation hopes to help remedy some of this with their upcoming Android Builders Summit, April 13-14 in San Francisco. This isn’t some Android Users Group potluck, but rather “an intimate forum for collaboration at the systems level and discussion of core issues and opportunities when designing Android devices.”

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 in March, A First Look At Firefox 5

        The elimination of the remaining bugs in Firefox 4 isn’t proceeding as fast as Mozilla would like and it appears that the release of the browser has shifter one more time. The RC is now targeted for a finalization on February 25, while the final version of the browser is now targeted for sometime in March. First mockups hint to dramatic UI changes with a site-specific browser that integrates Apps within tabs.

      • Mozilla Infographic Compares Firefox And Internet Explorer

        Is Internet Explorer 9 a modern web browser, and how does it compare to Firefox 4. Those are the two questions that Mozilla’s Paul Rouget tries to answer with an infographic and a blog post. The infographic looks at the technical side of things, web compatibility, platform support and hardware acceleration to name a few. All show that Firefox 4, and sometimes even Firefox 3.5 or 3.6, do better than Internet Explorer 9.

      • First look at Firefox 5

        Firefox 4 isn’t even out of beta yet, but that doesn’t stop the UI team from thinking about Firefox 5.

        ConcievablyTech uncovered mock-ups posted by the Mozilla UI team that show the possible UI for Firefox 5.

  • Mono

    • Nine Current Flame Wars in Open Source

      Mono is a FOSS implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Although MONO is FOSS in itself, Mono is dependent on resources that Microsoft has not released for general use, and many worry that it might become the basis for a patent infringement case. Supporters counter that Mono is a first rate development platform, and suggest that the current licenses on .NET resources are adequate guarantees for their safe use.

      Ordinarily, such a geeky flame war would never attract popular interest. But the debate is especially bitter because of the widespread distrust of Microsoft in the FOSS community. To further complicate matters, Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Mono and its chief public representative, is outspoken even by FOSS standards, and many of the criticisms of Mono become personal attacks on him.

      Currently, the debate is relatively quiet. However, the issue never quite goes away if you search the blogs, and is certain to flare up again. It always does.

    • Canonical bid to profit from Mono app fails

      Burt wrote on his blog that Canonical approached the Rhythmbox developers as it was concerned that the Amazon MP3 link would affect its earnings from its own Ubuntu One music store.

      Canonical proposed that when it used Rhythmbox it would disable the Amazon store code by default – it could be re-enabled with a few easy steps – and leave the affiliate code unchanged.

      A second option offered, according to Burt, was to leave things as they are but change the affiliate code so that 75 percent of the affiliate’s fee would go to Canonical and 25 percent to GNOME.

      The Banshee developers accepted the first option, which means that Canonical will make no money out of using Banshee.

      “As maintainers of the Banshee project, we have opted unanimously to decline Canonical’s revenue sharing proposal, so that our users who choose the Amazon store will continue supporting GNOME to the fullest extent,” Burt wrote. “The GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors supports this decision.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Money gone, people gone: Oracle’s open-source blowback

      Now, Oracle has a growing reason to dislike the projects themselves and it’s got everything to do with the two things Oracle values most: money and control.

    • Open office dilemma: OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice

      OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice each consists of six applications, called Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, and Math in both suites. The modules provide word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, business graphics, database management, and formula editing, respectively.

      Both suites are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC). You can also get OpenOffice.org for Solaris (Sparc and Intel).

    • Novell’s Michael Meeks talks LibreOffice 3.3, The Document Foundation & Oracle

      Enter the Document Foundation. As an aspiring non-profit organisation, the Document Foundation has already spent six months helping to bring new contributors and new code to OpenOffice, which the Foundation has essentially forked and renamed LibreOffice. From making word count actually work, to repairing bugs that caused the number 1,000,000 to be ignored entirely in certain situations, those six months have already made a huge difference to the project.

  • CMS

    • Joomla vs. Drupal: An open source CMS shootout

      Before we begin, it should be noted that both Joomla and Drupal keep getting updated — e.g., Joomla 1.6 was released January 10, 2011, and Drupal 7 on January 5, 2011 — and get more add-on modules. This is a good thing, obviously. But it also means that the opinions expressed in this article may become outdated or invalidated. As always.

  • Business

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The open source revolution

      Open source is basically a model for innovation driven not by intellectual protectionism but by cooperative competition toward a common, continuously expanding goal. On the battlefield of software technology, the big open source names are familiar even to non-tech savvy users: Mozilla (makers of Firefox and Thunderbird), Wikipedia, WordPress, and Linux are all titans on par with their proprietary counterparts. Most people are probably not aware that social media services like Facebook have been built from open source building blocks such as PHP and MySQL. Programmers and developers have produced the technologies that power our modern lives because those building blocks are readily available through distributed code, APIs, and open languages. At its core, open source means we do not have to reinvent the wheel in order to build a better car.

      The philosophy behind open source extends beyond arguments for efficiency and quality. There is a shared understanding among open source converts and evangelists that it ultimately improves the world. Sharing code and data is only the grease that makes the machine work. The fuel is the collective understanding among the open source community that the combined effort of individual contributors is far greater that the sum of its parts.

Leftovers

  • TOM THE DANCING BUG: Judge Scalia Spans the Time/Space Continuum!
  • Case Study: Leah Day Brings Free To The Quilting World

    It’s Connect With Fans + Reason To Buy in action.

  • Innovation Far Removed From the Lab

    Since the Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published “The Theory of Economic Development” in 1934, economists and governments have assumed that the industrial and business sectors are where ideas for products originate. A complex net of laws and policies, from intellectual property rights to producer subsidies and tax benefits, have flowed from this basic assumption.

  • CPAC hears plan to deny citizenship to Americans born to foreigners

    Presenting at the right-wing love-in CPAC, cuddly Kris Kobach (architect of Arizona’s racist “papers, please” law) revealed his plan for getting around the pesky Constitutional guarantee of citizenship for people born in the USA — he’s going to get state legislatures to deny “state citizenship” to kids born to foreigners. Presumably this means that they wouldn’t be issued birth certificates and wouldn’t be entitled to attend school, etc. Kobach was joined by numerous birther loonies who, um, think that states should provide special super-birth-certificates attesting to the citizenship of one particular American.

  • Customer Bites Retailer? That’s the Argument

    THE idea for this week’s episode comes from Scott Wainner, the founder and chief executive of ResellerRatings, a Web site that allows consumers to rate products and retailers. Mr. Wainner wrote to the Haggler to recount the tale of a shopper who posted a negative review of a company called Full House Appliances, an online appliance seller in Washington State.

  • Parents sue Disney, say son suffered ‘severe burns’ from nacho cheese

    os-disney-lawsuit-child-burned-cheese20110210
    San Diego parents who say their young son suffered “severe burns” at the hands of scalding hot nacho cheese served to them during a family vacation have filed suit against Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, records show.

    In their suit, filed in California district court on Wednesday, parents Michael and Maria Harris said they were eating dinner at Disney World while on vacation in March when the cheese was spilled on their son’s face.

  • Science

    • Awesome DIY Electric Bikes Defy Laws, Good Sense

      Building your own electric bike has many advantages over buying one. It’s cheaper: you can pick up parts from scrapyards or buy cheap off-the-shelf motors, and even a purpose-made conversion kit can be had for $400, a lot less than buying a new electric bike.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • What we still don’t know about Lasik

      That’s all anyone ever wants to know these days: How my eyes are doing after my collision with Lasik almost three years ago. Are they still dry? Do they still hurt when exposed to sunlight? Is my vision still blurred? And what about glasses — am I still wearing them?

      The answer: Yes, yes, yes and yes. Emphatically, resoundingly, blindingly yes. My eyes sting. They burn. I look at neon signs and the colors bleed into a fluorescent Rorschach test. I have difficulty deciphering black lettering on white boards; I have personally helped elevate the stock of Allergan, which manufactures Refresh Plus, the drops that allegedly help dry eye.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Hillary Clinton’s speech: Shades of hypocrisy on internet freedom

      Hillary Clinton is back, lecturing the world on internet freedom, but thirteen months after her original speech on the topic, the dimension of the debate has changed. Back then she targeted the Chinese, whom she could confidently and credibly criticise in the wake of attacks on Google.

      Last year, the secretary of state made her position clear, warning that “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century” – a pointed criticism of China’s ‘great firewall’ approach to a technology that many previously thought inherently democratising.

      Yet after the WikiLeaks affair it is harder for the United States to so readily moralise. It is only two months ago that WikiLeaks saw its US domain name briefly taken away. Julian Assange’s site was also stripped of its ability to raise money via PayPal, MasterCard and Visa.

    • Two TSA Agents Stole Over $160,000 From Checked Luggage

      n yet another bad look for the TSA, two agents at New York’s JFK Airport ‘fessed up to pilfering $160,000 from passenger bags.

    • Bahrain: Police Attack Sleeping Protesters
    • Authorities Search and Copy U.S. Journalist’s Notes, Computer and Cameras After Returning from Haiti

      Independent journalist Brandon Jourdan recently returned from Haiti after being on assignment documenting the rebuilding of schools in the earthquake-devastated country. However, when he returned to the United States, he was immediately detained after deboarding the plane by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. He was questioned about his travels and had all of his documents, computer, phone and camera flash drives searched and copied. This is the seventh time Jourdan says he has been subjected to lengthy searches in five years, and has been told by officials that he is “on a list.”

    • Why can felons buy guns at a gunshow without a background check?

      I like our former great U.S. Senator in Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, am a supporter of the 2nd Amendment giving an individual right to bear arms. This is one of the few issues that I disagree with the majority of those on the left. The Bill of Rights was written for a broad view of individual liberty, not a narrow one. I would be remised if I ignored its’ protections when it came to the 2nd Amendment, because the left when it comes to the Constitution are for a broad view of liberty and rights, while conservatives are usually for a narrow view. But, like libel/slander laws when it comes to freedom of speech, it isn’t of course absolute. Violent felons should not have guns. Not much argument from many Americans on that one. The problem is when it comes to ensuring that they don’t have the ability to acquire firearms. We can’t stop all of them from getting guns, but we sure can make it darn hard that they do so with ease.

    • St. Louis police detail January’s ABB plant shooting spree

      St. Louis police made the fullest accounting yet this morning of a shooting rampage in which an employee of ABB, Inc., killed three co-workers and wounded five at the north side electric transformer plant last Jan. 7.

      Among the details explained by Capt. Michael Sack of the homicide unit:

      • The attacker, Timothy Hendron, 51, bought two of the four weapons he used – an AK-47 rifle and 12-gauge shotgun – the day before the spree.

    • Sticklers for Procedure

      It would be difficult to cite a more shameful episode in the history of America’s criminal justice system than the pedophilia panic of the 1980s and ’90s. Police, prosecutors, and social workers all over the country were overcome by hysteria about the supposed proliferation of ritual sex abuse, a fear fed by a new movement of quack, Christian fundamentalist psychologists. Although dozens of convictions have been overturned, we are nowhere near uncovering all the damage wrought by this panic. The case of Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen shows how the same criminal justice system that rushed to convict innocent people can take decades to recognize and correct its mistakes.

    • What Islamist Terrorist Threat?

      Know thy enemy is an ancient principle of warfare. And if America had heeded it, it might have refrained from a full-scale “war” on terrorism whose price tag is touching $2 trillion. That’s because the Islamist enemy it is confronting is not some hyper-power capable of inflicting existential—or even grave—harm. It is, rather, a rag-tag band of peasants whose malevolent ambitions are far beyond the capacity of their shallow talent pool to deliver.

      The shock and awe of 9-11 was so great that Americans came to think of Islamist jihadists as a low-tech version of Dr. Strangelove, an evil genius constantly looking for ingenious ways of spreading death and destruction. America is so open and vulnerable and the Islamists so crafty and motivated that it was just a matter of time, everyone thought, before they got us again.

  • Cablegate

    • Leaked HBGary Documents Show Plan To Spread Wikileaks Propaganda For BofA… And ‘Attack’ Glenn Greenwald

      Once again, as I’ve said before, I really don’t think this is a good idea. The potential backlash can be severe and these kinds of attacks can create the opposite long-term incentives that the folks involved think they’re creating. It also gets people a lot more focused on the method rather than the message and that seems unfortunate.

      Still, the leaked emails are turning up some gems, with a key one being that Bank of America (widely discussed as Wikileaks’ next target) had apparently been talking to HBGary Federal about how to disrupt Wikileaks. That link, from The Tech Herald, includes tons of details. The full proposal (embedded below) feels like something straight out of a (really, really bad) Hollywood script.

      It appears that the law firm BofA was using as a part of its Wikileaks crisis response task force, Hunton and Williams, had reached out to firms asking for research and a plan against Wikileaks. HBGary Federal, along with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies put together their pitch. According to the emails discussing this, the firms tried to come up with a plan as to how they could somehow disrupt Wikileaks , see if there was a way to sue Wikileaks and get an injunction against releasing the data.

    • Assange Probe Hits Snag

      U.S. investigators have been unable to uncover evidence that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange induced an Army private to leak government documents to his website, according to officials familiar with the matter.

      New findings suggest Pfc. Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst accused of handing over the data to the WikiLeaks website, initiated the theft himself, officials said. That contrasts with the initial portrait provided by Defense Department officials of a young man taken advantage of by Mr. Assange.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Vexed By Natural Gas

      The problem is that the United States doesn’t know, just yet, what to do with its natural gas. In addition, the US economy doesn’t have enough growth in its power and manufacturing sectors to demand more natural gas, that would spur a faster transition away from oil. The result is a kind of stasis, in which a consumption-led economy is still trying to operate with oil. Previous energy transitions, on a historical basis, are instructive here. For example, it took Britain decades to transition from Wood to Coal–even though coal was cheaper on a btu basis. Sound familiar?

    • Rare Amazon Tribe Nearly Extinct from Deforestation

      It was the ‘civilizing’ spirit of colonialism which first drove the Awa-Guajá from their settlements along the eastern shore of Brazil and into the Amazon rainforest. There, under self-imposed isolation from a world that’s changing so rapidly around them, they live in remarkable harmony with nature — going as far breastfeeding animals alongside their own children. Nowadays, colonialism has given way to developmentalism, and the bearers of ‘civility’ to loggers and businessmen. But for the Awa-Guajá, perhaps there is little difference; both signal the destruction of their land and their very way of life.

    • Obama’s $36 Billion Nuke Giveaway

      Barack Obama’s 2012 budget marks a major escalation in the nuclear war against a green-powered future, whose advocates are already fighting back.

      Amidst massive budget cuts for social and environmental programs, Obama wants $36 billion in loan guarantees for a reactor industry that cannot secure sufficient private “marketplace” financing for new construction.

    • Rare metals found in Cornish tin mine

      A Cornish tin mine hopes to be producing hundreds of kilos of valuable indium – used in iPads and other devices and costing up to £500 a kilo.

  • Finance

    • When Recovery’s Just a Word

      I was disappointed last week when two of my favorite publications, The Economist and the Financial Times (both British) capitulated to the new recovery myth in the US Labor Market. I generally depend on London, not New York, to give me a better read on the US economy. This has been true for over two years now as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have either leaned in an overly optimistic direction, or, missed whole portions of the story entirely. For example, let’s look at the big picture. Here is a chart of the total number of employed Americans over the past ten years.

      [...]

      Now you know why annual government budgets have blown out into the trillions: the economic flows normally provided by a functioning economy are now provided through unemployment checks, food stamps, FDR style spending and other distributions. In short, the “economy” cannot be experiencing a recovery when, after 10 years of population growth and growth in future liabilities, the number of people employed is hovering around levels last seen in 2002-2004. Whether you chose to look at just Non-Farm Employment, or Total Employment, the US Labor Market is essentially flat-lining since a deep trough was reached in late 2009, early 2010.

    • TSX closes above 14,000

      The Toronto Stock Exchange closed above the 14,000 level Wednesday for the first time since July 2008.

    • Swiss ex-banker custody appeal turned down-lawyer

      Swiss ex-banker turned whistleblower Rudolph Elmer has lost his appeal against a court ruling remanding him in prison over possible breaches of Swiss banking secrecy, a lawyer representing Elmer said on Wednesday.

      Elmer was taken into custody by police on Jan. 19 after handing over computer discs to WikiLeaks two days earlier. The former Julius Baer (BAER.VX) banker indicated the CDs contained details of as many as 2,000 offshore bank accounts.

    • Amazon.com shutting Irving office over tax dispute

      As a result of an ongoing tax dispute with Texas, Amazon.com has decided to take its ball and go home.

      The online retailer said Thursday that it would shutter its Irving distribution facility April 12 and cancel plans to hire as many as 1,000 additional workers rather than pay Texas what the state says is owed in uncollected sales tax.

    • Actually, Texans Save $600 Million a Year

      A Texas tax official estimates in this story that Texas loses an estimated $600 million in Internet sales taxes every year. Its part of a long-running debate about whether state governments should be able to collect taxes from out-of-state retailers who send goods into their jurisdictions.

      What happens with the $600 million depends on what you mean by “Texas.” If you mean the government of the state of Texas in Austin, why, yes, the government appears not to collect that amount, which it wants to. If by “Texas” you mean the people who live, work, and raise their families throughout the state—Texans—they actually save $600 million a year. They get to do what they want with it. After all, it’s their money.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Walkom: Oda’s attempt to mislead is part of Tory strategy
    • Mallick: Canadian democracy, Soviet-style

      Denunciation was the weapon of choice in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Anyone could denounce anyone else, which they did, writing letters to the authorities with venom and energy, ending careers, destroying families and worse. Anyone anywhere — at a university, in Stalin’s inner circle, on the factory floor — looked left and looked right, and wondered which friend would stand up and denounce them as kulaks (educated types, i.e., peasants with more than two cows).

      “Some denunciations were the Stalinist equivalent of awkward parliamentary questions and investigative reporters,” the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote in his 2003 book on office politics in the Stalin era, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. They were as effective “as kerosene on a fire.”

      Stalin loved it. “You probably find it unpleasant,” he wrote, “but I’m glad. It would be a bad thing if no one complained.”

    • HBGary Federal Spied On Families And Children Of US Chamber Of Commerce Opponents

      The story of HBGary Federal keeps getting worse and worse. After threatening to reveal the “leaders” of the leaderless group Anonymous, the company’s servers were hacked and emails released, exposing a bizarre plan to intimidate Wikileaks critics to get them to stop supporting the site, and to plant false information. A few days later, it came out that HBGary Federal (along with partners Palantir and Berico) also had proposed a similar campaign to help the US Chamber of Commerce silence critics. New reports show that HBGary Federal boss Aaron Barr apparently went so far as to “demonstrate” his ability to intimidate people by using social networking info to dig up information and photos on people’s families.

    • How To Debunk A Fact-Free Fox News Fearmongering Piece About New Video Game

      So there you go. When someone like Fox News publishes a ridiculously wrong and misleading attack on video games, three perfect templates for debunking.

  • Privacy

    • California high court: Retailers can’t request cardholders’ ZIP code

      California’s high court ruled Thursday that retailers don’t have the right to ask customers for their ZIP code while completing credit card transactions, saying that doing so violates a cardholders’ right to protect his or her personal information.

      Many retailers in California and nationwide now ask people to give their ZIP code, punching in that information and recording it. Yet California Supreme Court’s seven justices unanimously determined that this practice goes too far.

    • We know where you’ve been: privacy, congestion tracking, and the future

      Highway congestion is a serious problem that will only get worse as the US population grows. And our traditional solution to congestion—building more lanes—seems to be running out of steam. With governments facing record deficits, elected officials are having enough trouble finding the money to maintain existing infrastructure, to say nothing of adding new capacity. And in many places, proposals to expand highways encounter fierce resistance from nearby residents.

      So public officials are searching for strategies to use existing highway capacity more efficiently. Recently they’ve begun experimenting with a new strategy for controlling congestion: demand-based pricing of scarce road capacity. Congestion pricing promises to kill two pigs with one bird, keeping traffic flowing smoothly while simultaneously generating new revenue that can be used for public investments. New technologies—notably RFID transponders and license-plate-reading cameras—are allowing the replacement of traditional tollbooths with cashless tolling at freeway speeds.

    • Justice Department assertion: FBI can get phone records without oversight

      The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy Newspapers.

      That assertion was revealed – perhaps inadvertently – by the department in its response to a McClatchy Newspapers request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Trouble With “Balance” Metaphors

      Reading Orin Kerr’s new paper outlining an “equilibrium-adjustment theory” of the Fourth Amendment, I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly the language of “balancing” pervades our thinking about legal and political judgment. The very words “reasonable” and “rational” are tightly linked to “ratio”—which is to say, to relative magnitude or balance. We hope to make decisions on the basis of the weightiest considerations, to make arguments that meet their burden of proof. We’re apt to frame almost any controversy involving heterogenous goods or values as a problem of “striking the right balance” between them, and many of those value dichotomies have become well worn cliches: We’ve all seen the scales loaded with competing state interests and individual rights; with innovation and stability; with freedom and equality; with privacy and security. There’s obviously something we find natural and useful about this frame, but precisely because it’s so ubiquitous as to fade into the background, maybe it’s worth stopping to unpack it a bit, and to consider how the analogy between sound judgment and balancing weights may constrain our thinking in unhealthy ways.

    • As Expected, House Agrees To Extend Patriot Act With No Discussion, No Oversight

      We all knew last week, when the House failed to renew three controversial clauses in the Patriot Act that allow the government to spy on people with little oversight, that it was a temporary reprieve. Indeed, just a week later, with a slight procedural change, the same provision has been approved, and now it moves to the Senate, where there are three separate bills for extending these clauses (and none about getting rid of them, as was supposed to have happened by now). Only one of the three bills, put forth by Senator Patrick Leahy, includes additional oversight. The two others — from Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Dianne Feinstein — do not include any oversight.

    • EPIC Opposes TSA’s Secret Evidence in Body Scanner Case

      EPIC has opposed an effort by the Transportation Security Administration to provide secret evidence to the court in EPIC’s challenge to the the airport body scanner program. The TSA claimed that it can withhold documents that it has designated “Sensitive Security Information” and scientific studies because they are “copyrighted materials.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Bell Class Action lawsuit seeks payback of Early Termination Fees
    • Regulators of Our Digital Future Have Lost Public’s Trust

      The government has told the CRTC to go back to the drawing board on its Internet metering decision. The Liberals and NDP have blasted the regulators, too.

      And yet remaining defenders of the decision cling to the argument that someone has to pay for Internet infrastructure, so why not let it be the so-called bandwidth hogs among us?

      To still make that the basic issue is to have missed the citizens’ revolt of the past week, a backlash far beyond the wonky specifics of how many gigabytes are too many or too pricey.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

        The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

      • Feds Seize 18 More Domains in Piracy Crackdown

        The U.S. government seized 18 more internet domains Monday, bringing to at least 119 the number of seizures following the June commencement of the so-called “Operation in Our Sites” anti-piracy program.

        The Immigration and Customs Enforcement seizure, in honor of Valentine’s Day, targeted sites hawking big-name brands like Prada and Tiffany & Co.

      • Debate opens on domain closures

        Police plans to shut down web domains believed to be used by criminals are to be debated in public.

        In November, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) tabled a plan to give such powers to Nominet, which oversees the .uk domain.

      • Can A Contract Remove Fair Use Rights?

        Last year, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which the Association for Information Media and Equipment (AIME) threatened UCLA, after discovering that the school had set up an online video service, that let UCLA professors put up legally licensed video clips so that students could watch them from their computers. AIME claimed that UCLA’s license did not allow for such uses. UCLA claimed this was fair use. After initially taking down the videos, UCLA decided this was worth fighting over and put the videos back up last March. At the time, we thought a lawsuit from AIME would come quickly, but apparently it took until December. UCLA recently filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, setting up a few reasons why — including the claim that, as a state university, it has sovereign immunity from copyright lawsuits and, also, that AIME is not the copyright holder in question, and thus has no standing.

      • Did The Record Labels Kill The Golden Goose In Music Video Games?

        And now it looks like the labels may have succeeded in bleeding those types of games dry. With Activision announcing that it was dumping Guitar Hero, one of the major reasons given is the high cost of licensing music. Yup, the labels priced things so high that they made it impractical to actually offer any more. Yet another case of the labels overvaluing their own content. Now, it’s also true that these games haven’t evolved that much, and people haven’t seen the point of buying new versions, but part of that lack of evolving is because so much of the budget had to go towards overpaying for music, rather than innovating.

      • Once Again, If You Don’t Offer Authorized Versions Of Released Content, Don’t Be Surprised If People Get Unauthorized Copies

        We just had a post about a guy in the UK who could not buy the version of RosettaStone’s language training software that he wanted because the company would not sell it to him. In response, he felt compelled to pirate it, rather than pay lots of money for a lesser version with no promised upgrade. And here’s another, similar case, involving venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who could not find a legitimate way to buy The Streets’ new album after hearing that it was being released. After searching all over for it, the best he could do was order a CD. Instead, he ended up getting an unauthorized copy.

      • UK Gov’t Admits That Protecting Big Record Labels More Important Than Getting Poor Online

        Via Glyn Moody, we learn that the UK government has responded to a question about how the Digital Economy Act might increase the price of internet access. The government’s response? Yes, the Digital Economy Act might price poor people out of the internet, and that’s “regrettable,” but somehow necessary. Huh? So it’s more important to protect the profits of a few obsolete record labels, than to help get more people connected to the internet?

      • Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Coach Over Bogus Takedowns, Trademark Bullying

        We’ve seen so many cases of trademark bullying, and it’s so rare to see people fight back, that it’s interesting to see it happening — and even more surprising to see it done as a class action suit. Eric Goldman points us to the news that this class action lawsuit has been filed against luxury goods maker, Coach, for apparently issuing takedowns to eBay for perfectly legitimate second-hand sales, while also threatening those who put up those items.

      • Judge in Jimi Hendrix Case Declares Washington Publicity Rights Law Unconstitutional

        In a surprise decision, a federal judge in Washington has ruled that the state’s publicity rights law violates the U.S. Constitution. The case involved the estate of Jimi Hendrix battling against a vendor, HendrixLicensing.com, which sold t-shirts, posters, lights, dartbords, key chains and other items designed to capitalize on the fame of the rock legend. On Tuesday, Judge Thomas S. Zilly ruled for the defendant.

        The lawsuit against HendrixLicensing.com begin as a trademark dispute, but after Washington amended its law in 2008 so that dead celebrities could enjoy more generous publicity rights in the state, the defendant asked for a court order that declared that Hendrix’ publicity rights weren’t applicable to the dispute.

      • How Come No One Calls Out Pandora For False Promise Of Profitability?

        Yet, on Friday, Pandora filed for a $100 million IPO, and the filings show that the company is still a long way from profitability. And, now, the company that talked up how profitable it was going to be in 2010 is claiming it might not really be profitable until the end of 2012 or later.

      • Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?

        Copyright, now powerfully linking authors, the printing press (and later technologies) and the market, would prove to be one of history’s great public policy successes. Books would attract investment of authors’ labor and publishers’ capital on a colossal scale, and our libraries and bookstores would fill with works that educated and entertained a thriving nation. Our poets, playwrights, novelists, historians, biographers and musicians were all underwritten by copyright’s markets.

Clip of the Day

Multibooting With LMDE


Credit: TinyOgg

02.16.11

Links 16/2/2011: Distributions Abolish Canonical’s ‘Unity’, Chevron’s $9.5 Billion Fine

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • So The Cynical Old Bastard Was Right

    And there are a lot of trolls out there. Trolls in internet parlance are people who pop up, and do nothing but attempt to destroy a message board. They are often rude, crude, bombastic, and rude. I’ve run into them several times (which is why I have comments tightened down). So has just about anyone else who’s ever written anything which isn’t complimentary to Microsoft. Seriously.

    I can write uncomplimentary articles about Google, Adobe, Oracle, IBM, etc. No Trolls. Write something uncomplimentary about Microsoft and it attracts trolls, just like a picnic attracts ants.

    The thing is that we know that Microsoft was working to torpedo anyone who didn’t like them. It’s in the documents released in discovery in the Comes anti-trust case. A copy of the Comes Documents can be found here.

  • Server

    • Open Source COBOL-IT Tools to be Distributed by Speedware

      IBM i shops that develop in COBOL may be interested in learning about COBOL-IT, a compiler and collection of modernization tools that is developed in France under an open source license. Last week, the Canadian application modernization company Speedware announced that it’s now distributing COBOL-IT to North American customers.

    • No Millennium bug (yet) for love-struck LSE

      This will no doubt come as a relief to the London exchange and market-participants alike, following November’s outage of Turquoise — under what at the time were billed by the exchange as “suspicious circumstances” — just a couple of weeks after its migration to MillenniumIT.

      With no signs of would-be saboteurs, the LSE’s main market has been trading on the platform without any major hiccups since 8.00 GMT. No St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in sight just yet then — although, as one broker noted, “I would give it a day or so. In the past, issues occurred after the initial launch.”

    • London Stock Exchange tackles closing auction system problem

      The London Stock Exchange has taken steps to resolve a system problem that occurred at 4.30pm yesterday (Tuesday), which saw a delay to the start of the closing auction and knocked out automatic trades during a 42 second period.

      The problem occurred a day after the high profile launch of its new matching engine on the main equities market, based on the SUSE Linux system from Novell.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung officially announces the Galaxy S II

      As expected, Samsung kicked off Mobile World Congress by announcing the new Samsung Galaxy S II. Like any true successor, the Galaxy S II delivers on all the expectations set by the original and raises the bar to a whole new level. The Samsung Galaxy S II comes equipped with a 4.27-inch 800 x 480 Super AMOLED Plus display, a 1GHz Dual Core application processor (most likely the Samsung made Exynos processor), 8 megapixel camera with LED flash and capable of 1080p video recording, 2 megapixel front-facing-camera, and NFC capabilities all bundled into a package that’s only 8.49mm thick. Last we checked, that makes the Samsung Galaxy S II the thinnest smartphone on the planet.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • R600 Gallium3D Driver Now Supports S3TC Library

        While there is not integrated support for S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) support fully integrated into the Mesa / Gallium3D code-base over patents covering the algorithm, there are Mesa drivers that support hooking into an external S3TC library. This external S3TC support requires setting a special variable in the build process and building the S3TC library (named libtxc_dxtn.so) after obtaining the code from an independent source. This move shifts the legal burden from the Mesa developers and onto the user.

        Support for using this external S3TC library on the ATI R600 Gallium3D “R600g” driver has been sought after by users for months as there are a number of games on Linux (and under Wine) that require this texture compression extension. The hooks have been in place for the classic Mesa R600 driver (and the ATI R300 drivers), but it wasn’t until yesterday that the hooks were in place for the R600g driver.

      • AMD Catalyst 11.2 Linux Driver Released

        AMD has just issued their Catalyst 11.2 Linux driver update. It’s now available from AMD.com but their release notes as usual are of little use, so here’s the Phoronix scoop on this month’s update.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Green Linux

      I have recently been talking (at least tangentially) about intuition and computers, most notably in “Isolation Experimentation” and “Spaced Out”. As computer professionals we often base our thinking on how computers are and how they should work off an unconscious synthesis of the facts, and unfortunately, the opinions that we have. Often we even base prejudgment about the computer systems we work with on things that used to be true, but are not anymore. Sometimes it is guilt by association even: See ReiserFS for details.

    • 100% Free with Trisquel

      This is not the first time I have tried to become 100% Stallman-approved Free. I have tried running both Gobuntu and gNewsense, but none of those have been a succes. Gobuntu only made one release, and gNewsense is always very much behind with the packages, which is a no go for me because I need new toys all the time.

      Enter Trisquel. Trisquel is based on Ubuntu, like Gobuntu and gNewsense (before gNewsens changed to being based directly on Debian). And it just works! … Except for the wireless. But I knew this, as even though the driver itself is free, the firmware-blob required to make it work is not. A positive surprise was that 3d-acceleration worked, although I thought that the driver for my Intel GMA 950 had the same problem with firmware-blobbiness as the wireless. But hooray for Free Drivers!

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Starting with Mageia: download it!

        As explained in a previous blog post, this development release should not be used in production.

      • Mandriva & Mageia Release Their Alphas

        The Magiea team hopes to put out a stable release on the 1st of June while there will be another alpha release in mid-March before the betas commence in April and a release candidate in May. Find more in the Mageia release announcement.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Global Jam: Call For Events!

          Never before has the Ubuntu Global Jam been so important! In this cycle we are shipping Unity as the new desktop interface, and we are going to be working hard together to ensure that as many Unity bugs are squeezed out as possible. This is a great chance to come along and help test Unity, report bugs, fix bugs, triage problems, write documentation, help advocate Ubuntu in your area, and otherwise make a real difference that will benefit others. Together we can make Ubuntu 11.04 the best Ubuntu release yet!

        • Ubuntu Developer Week

          On the 1st of March at 16:00 UTC, I will be giving a session at Ubuntu Developer Week on how to write a Compiz Plugin and get started with Compiz development in general. I am just finishing my draft of the lesson I will be giving, but we will be covering topics such as:

          * Setting up the development environment to write, build and test Compiz plugins
          * Basic plugin set-up and tear down – getting your plugin to build and load
          * Handling events
          * Drawing to the screen and Drawing to windows
          * Reading and using options

        • Fedora, openSUSE Give up on Unity

          Some bad news came across the wire today. In a bit of a coincidence, the contributors from both openSUSE and Fedora who were working on Unity announced on the same day they were giving it up. So, those wishing to test this new interface will have to fire up Ubuntu after all.

        • Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical

          Faced with sharing 75% of revenues from Amazon with Canonical, the Banshee maintainers have opted to disable the Amazon store by default when Banshee ships in Ubuntu 11.04. Instead, the media player will ship with support for purchasing music through Ubuntu One’s service, and users will have to change the defaults to be able to support GNOME.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Android

        • Unigine Engine For Android Makes Its Debut

          Unigine Corp developers aren’t starting and ending with Android on the mobile front, but they are also going to be working on bringing their powerful and scalable engine to other mobile platforms too. Below is the Unigine mobile interactive game demo.

        • OpenSignalMaps crowd-sources mobile signals with Android app – 80,000 downloads and counting

          I’ve been wandering around Mobile World Congress and I managed to bump into a startup which – although unable to can’t afford the expensive stands here – actually has an app that stands out from the crowd by quite some way. You see, it’s obvious to people that getting a decent signal on your mobile is crucial. You’ll no doubt recall how the launch of the iPhone suddenly created a massive interest in the quality and reach of mobile phone networks across the planet. Imagine being able to work out which mobile carrier was best for you based on where you are, in real time? OpenSignalMaps does just that.

        • HTC ChaCha and Salsa outed as the fabled Facebook phones

          We’ve heard rumors and seen mockups, but it seems like the HTC Facebook phones are real, and do fall more in line with Facebook’s comment that the phones are simply “integrating [the Facebook APIs] in an interesting way”. PocketNow has pics of the phones, while the Seattle Times has more in-depth (though harder to believe) info on the phones.

          [...]

          The second model is the Salsa, which is a more standard Android slate with a 3.4″ touchscreen.

        • Nokia’s Elop fears mobile duopoly, but it is already here

          Given the absence of Apple, this Mobile World Congress could almost be called the Android World Congress, such is the dominance of Google’s mobile OS.

        • Android To Make More Sense For Enterprises

          RIM’s Blackberry platform has traditionally been a favourite when it comes to mobile enterprise security and its management. Its Blackberry Enterprise Server offers encryption that is virtually impregnable–a fact repeatedly confirmed by Indian security agencies. However, in recent times the stronghold of Blackberry as the preferred business tool has been diminishing constantly. Firstly, because Cupertino-based Apple has through regular software updates, made iOS devices into a potent personal as well as a business communication tool.

        • Sony Ericsson LiveView Puts Android on Your Wrist, Is Awesome – Coming Soon to US and Canada [MWC] [Video]

          The Sony Ericsson LiveView is already available in several regions, but without a US release I had not seen the nifty little accessory in the flesh…or plastic, rather. When I stumbled upon it at Sony Ericsson’s booth at MWC I couldn’t pass up the chance to check it out. Good news was learned, too. The LiveView is a mere few weeks away from a US and Canadian release.

        • Nvidia Tegra Stark 100x faster than Tegra 2

          Just before Google CEO Erick Schmidt announced it, we learned from industry sources that the next phone OS update for…

    • Tablets

      • Meego For Netbooks

        On the bright side Meego does boot and run very fast, but the downside is that I’m faced with having to try to fix what should never have broke. In the end I decided to wipe the netbook and rebuild each partition. I now have Windows 7, Linux Mint Debian Edition (instead of Debian Squeeze) and Linux Mint 10 (for screencasting). I also have Meego for now.

      • An Update from Intel

        What an interesting weekend. I am sure you can imagine what my inbox has looked the last few days. I appreciate your patience as the team works very hard on the MeeGo Software Platform to move things forward.

        As you know, MeeGo has always been an open source platform with many supporters, Intel foremost among them. This support is consistent with our long track record in open source projects and platforms including MeeGo, Yocto embedded Linux, LessWatts, the Linux kernel, Linux graphics, Google Android, ChromeOS, KVM, and many others. At Intel, we work very hard to make sure the software our customers use and want to use, runs best on our hardware platforms.

      • HTC Flyer Is Official: 7-inch Aluminium Android Tablet With A Media Focus

        HTC will today unveil its new 7-inch tablet device, the HTC Flyer, the first tablet from HTC that will feature the company’s HTC Sense UI, a sleek alumninium body and pen interaction, encouraging users to write down notes instead of jabbing away at a screen.

        There had been rumours that the HTC Flyer wouldn’t ship with Google’s new Honeycomb operating system; that rumour has been substantiated, to a point, as it looks like HTC will be running a customised flavour of the Android 2.4 operating system that will allow them to integrate its HTC Sense, HTC Scribe and HTC Watch technologies.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The four capital mistakes of open source

    How do you develop a successful open source business that lasts? Of the more than 250,000 open source projects on SourceForge, few will be successful at that goal. But one way they might think about how to do it is by doing it in reverse: What should an open source project or business not do?

    The negative advice has existed since ancient times, from one religion to another. The Ten Commandments are for the most part written as what not to do. We can go for a short walk or drive around our neighborhood: road signs give us, in very short messages we can read while driving, negative advice. Ask Warren Buffett about finance. He’ll tell you “Rule #1 is ‘Don’t lose money,’ and Rule #2 is… ‘Don’t lose money’”.

    Open source can also be better understood through negative advice. The latter can be back-tested and endure the test of time. By following a positive framework (but without falling into platonicity), one can slightly increase the chances of success. But by ignoring a negative one, you will most certainly fail.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • What’s up with SUMO – Feb. 14

        SUMO 2.5 going out tomorrow. It includes a new look for the support forum which you can see right now on support.allizom.org. Also if you go there with a mobile browser you can see some of the in-progress work on mobile layouts.

      • Z-Type
      • Multimedia on the web and using HTML5 sensibly

        Last week I went to the London Ajax User Meetup in London, England to deliver two talks about HTML5. One was a re-run of a talk I gave at MIT about Multimedia on the web and the second was a call to arms to use HTML5 sensibly. You can go over to Skillsmatter web site to see both talks back to back – but be sure to catch the notes to the second talk in this post, too.

      • SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 2 Introduces New Features
      • Mozilla: ‘Internet Explorer 9 is not a modern browser’

        Free whitepaper – Distributed Workforce Management in the Cloud

        Mozilla has taken a right swipe at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, telling the world that the latest incarnation of IE is not a “modern browser.”

        On Tuesday, with both Firefox 4 and IE9 on the verge of official release, Mozilla technical evangelist Paul Rouget hit back at apparent Microsoft suggestions that the new IE offers more extensive HTML5 support than competing browsers. “Is IE9 a modern browser?” Rouget writes on his personal blog. “NO.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Project Releases

  • Government

    • Economics of Participatory Government: The Coming (temporary) Scarcity

      I’ll admit, it’s a bit of a sensational headline. But if I put the word “equilibrium” in there, you might not have reached this point.

      Last year while presenting at a technology and disabilities conference, I answered a question about participatory government, gov 2.0, so on, in a way that reverberated in tones of heresy on the faces of some people.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Public Data Corporation

        On 12 January the Government confirmed it was looking to “open up opportunities for innovative developers, businesses and members of the public to generate social and economic growth through the use of data.” The new concept – which for the moment we’re describing as the Public Data Corporation – will be a global first and will help make government-held data much easier to access and use.

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • Atom is dead, strangled slowly by Intel

        THE BIGGEST LOSER in the tie up between Microsoft and Nokia is none other than Intel. While they may try to put a brave face on the matter, the simple fact remains that their Atom line is now without a future.

        As you may recall, Nokia was going to hold up the flag for Intel and their Atom chips in phones, starting with Moorestown, the 45nm Atom SoC variant, and moving on to custom silicon at 32nm. That variant, as we exclusively reported, was called Penwell. Nokia’s deal with Microsoft just killed that chip dead, and any hopes Atom had in phones went with it. Meego was hit in the head with an errant bag of cash during the drive-by, and has family gathering in the emergency room to pay their last regards.

        Technically, the Atom core is doing everything right, each variant hitting internal targets and improving at a very quick pace. Moorestown was a hugely impressive chip, able to kick the highest end ARM variants to the curb with it’s raw CPU performance. When it came out, nothing was in it’s league, and while ARM variants came close months later, the next iteration, 32nm Medfield, is due out in the near future.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Last Call for HTML5

      After three years of development and debate, there is light at the end of the tunnel for HTML5. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Monday announced that the “last call” date for HTML5 would occur in May of this year. The W3C also announced that testing will extend until 2014, at which point HTML5 will be declared an official W3C specification.

      With the move for a last call, the W3C is formalizing the process by which HTML5 will be completed and eventually widely adopted by Web developers and users.

    • W3C Invites Implementations of CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3; Updates Text Level 3

Leftovers

  • Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law

    I have posted a draft of my newest paper, Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law. I revisit the strange story of HavenCo, an early-2000s attempt to set up an Internet hosting site where no country on Earth could get at it, leading to complete freedom from censorship. The place they chose was a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, which had been occupied since the 1960s by a former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, who declared it the independent Principality of Sealand.

  • HuffPo economics shows that Digital Newspapers are still unsustainable

    Interesting article on the economics of the Huffington Post in the NYT – apart from (as you’d expect) having a strong power law relationship between post and popularity – see diagram above – a few nuggets emerge…

  • With A Little Help: The Early Returns

    At the time of my last column, I was in a three-quarters panic about the book: negotiations with Lulu and my agent had bogged down in miscommunication; Christmas was fast approaching; and I was about to go in for hip surgery. So, what happened? Literally a day after writing that column, I simply launched the book. I made the site live, uploaded the book to Lulu’s servers, and set up the sell pages. The good news: I’ve made some money, and I didn’t turn into a ravening monster on a blind quest for fortune and sales. But I’ve also discovered a lot of tiny errors—and two gigantic ones.

    First, the good news: I’ve made a ton of money on the $275 limited edition. I’ve already sold more than 50, and I get a new order every day or two, without news or advertising. The recipients have been universally delighted with their purchases and the packaging. The combination of a cardboard book mailer, a section of burlap coffee sack, and acid-free tissue paper is a huge hit, with some customers even producing lavish “unboxing” YouTube videos and Flickr sets.

  • Success and challenges for China’s leading paid content website for periodicals

    Since its establishment ten years ago, Qikan.Com.Cn (Longyuan) has stuck to the paid content business model, becoming a website with 2,700 cooperating periodicals and 50 million new users each year. The average subscription is renewed five times.

  • Berlusconi indicted in prostitution probe

    An Italian judge on Tuesday ordered Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to stand trial on charges he paid for sex with a 17-year-old Moroccan girl, then tried to cover it up.

    Berlusconi has stood trial on a number of business-related charges, but this is the first time the 74-year-old billionaire businessman is being tried for personal conduct.

  • Rat runs past No 10 Downing Street
  • The full list: The Twitter 100

    Its 200 million users share 110 million messages a day – and if you don’t know who rules the twittersphere, you don’t understand the 21st-century world. This guide is a definitive who’s who of the UK’s tweet elite.

  • Flowchart: Why Hasn’t the Person You Texted Responded Yet?
  • Virginia House Makes Rolling Right Turn Reckless Driving

    The Virginia House of Delegates on February 4 approved legislation that would make a rolling right-hand turn on a red light a reckless driving offense. The bill introduced by Delegate Bill Janis (R-Glen Allen) was approved with a 67 to 31 vote and is now pending before the Senate Courts of Justice Committee.

  • Truffaut’s Big Interview with Hitchcock (MP3s)

  • Science

    • Making sense of science: introducing the Google Science Communication Fellows

      In an effort to foster a more open, transparent and accessible scientific dialogue, we’ve started a new effort aimed at inspiring pioneering use of technology, new media and computational thinking in the communication of science to diverse audiences. Initially, we’ll focus on communicating the science on climate change.

    • Is Relativity Hard?

      Brad DeLong, in the course of something completely different, suggests that the theory of relativity really isn’t all that hard. At least, if your standard of comparison is quantum mechanics.

      He’s completely right, of course. While relativity has a reputation for being intimidatingly difficult, it’s a peculiar kind of difficulty. Coming at the subject without any preparation, you hear all kinds of crazy things about time dilating and space stretching, and it seems all very recondite and baffling. But anyone who studies the subject appreciates that it’s a series of epiphanies: once you get it, you can’t help but wonder what was supposed to be so all-fired difficult about this stuff. Applications can still be very complicated, of course (just as they are in classical mechanics or electrodynamics or whatever), but the basic pillars of the theory are models of clarity.

    • Quiz-playing computer system could revolutionize research [running GNU/Linux]

      IBM’s supercomputer Watson is going up against top players of the US television quiz programme Jeopardy! this week, stirring up excitement in the artificial-intelligence community and prompting computer science departments across the country to gather and watch.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • South Dakota GOP pushes bill to legalize ‘homicide’ in defense of the unborn

      “Justifiable” homicide is usually claimed in self defense cases, and in particular home invasions that end up with a dead burglar. You could say it’s one of the many things that’s big in Texas.

      But in South Dakota, a group of Republican state legislators have crafted a bill that would expand the legal definition of “justifiable homicide” in a way that’s plain and unambiguous: they’re trying to legalize the murder of abortion doctors.

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Self-encrypting discs will lock down your data

      IN JUNE 2009, 45,000 people linked to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, suddenly had their privacy compromised. Personal data including social security numbers of students, former students, staff and faculty were exposed. But this was no high-tech hack – all of the information was contained in a single stolen computer. Had the data been safely encrypted there would have been virtually no risk, but typical encryption methods require specialised software that few are willing to invest in.

    • Image site hits back at spammers

      Spammers are being thwarted by finding that their junk messages unexpectedly contain warnings urging recipients to delete the e-mail.

      The alerts are issued by ImageShack, in an effort to stop spammers using its services.

      It is replacing pictures, known to have appeared in spam, with warnings such as “Do not buy”.

    • Ashkenazi Video Admits IDF Bombed Syrian Nuclear Reactor and Created Stuxnet

      Haaretz has just published a story that will certainly disappear due to gag order. In it, Anshel Pfeffer writes that Gabi Ashkenazi prepared a video celebrating his achievements as chief of staff, which was screened at a party marking his final day on the job. What is extraordinary about the video is that among the successes of his time in office it credits the bombing of the Syrian nuclear reactor and the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel has never publicly acknowledged responsibility for either.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • From #Jan25 to Tahrir: What Comes Next for the Internet Revolution?

      Guest author Ahmed Zidan lives in Egypt and is the editor of Mideast Youth. The Egyptian protesters have overthrown Mubarak after nearly 30 years. Egypt has come second in row after Tunisia. The two revolutions, the Tunisian and the Egyptian, have succeeded. Egypt has seen its first people’s revolution, and over 18 days many things changed until the regime was totally uninstalled.

      Let’s trace the protests back across the Mediterranean. The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid was the spark for the massive Tunisian protests that overthrew then-president Ben Ali. The Tunisian protests, in turn, were the spark for Egypt’s #Jan25. And it’s very relevant to name it #Jan25, because it was totally Internet driven. (Other names include the Jan. 25 Revolution, Revolution of Anger, and lately Tahrir Revolution, an Arabic equivalent for Revolution of Liberation.) It’s not an overstatement to say that #SidiBouzid is the sole parent of #Jan25, and created a domino effect that will not stop in Egypt.

    • Hillary Clinton: Tehran violence ‘an indictment of Iranian regime’s hypocrisy’ – video
    • Iran unrest: What next for the opposition movement?

      Extra security forces are on the streets of Tehran today after anti-government protests on Monday.

      Video posted on the internet clearly show demonstrators clashing violently with uniformed and plain-clothed police; some were chanting for the removal of Ayatollah Khamanei.

    • Iran lawmakers call for execution of opposition leaders

      Iranian lawmakers urged the judiciary on Tuesday to hand out death penalties to opposition leaders for fomenting unrest in the Islamic state after a rally in which one person was killed and dozens were wounded, state media said.

    • Hillary Clinton Is Well Acquainted With Hypocrisy

      Hilary Clinton is one of many politicians around the world from all parties and ideologies who are part of the problem, not the solution. The other day she called the Iranian government hypocrites for supporting the Egyptian people in their protests under the excuse “it’s an Islamic revolution” then clamping down on Iranian protests in their usual fascist state tried and trusted ways. It turns out that Hillary Clinton does know the word hypocrite after all.

    • The toxic residue of colonialism

      And yet, by means seen and unseen, external actors, especially the United States, with a distinct American blend of presumed imperial and paternal prerogatives are seeking to shape and limit the outcome of this extraordinary uprising of the Egyptian people, long held in subsidised bondage by the cruel and corrupt Mubarak dictatorship. What is the most defining feature of this American-led diplomacy-from-without is the seeming propriety of managing the turmoil, so that the regime survives and the demonstrators return to what is perversely being called “normalcy”.

    • [Humour] Comparison of the Republican Party with the Muslim Brotherhood
    • Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood To Form Political Party

      The panel is to draw up changes at a breakneck pace — within 10 days — to end the monopoly that ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party once held, which it ensured through widespread election rigging. The initial changes may not be enough for many in Egypt calling for the current constitution, now suspended by the military, to be thrown out completely and rewritten to ensure no one can once again establish autocratic rule. Two members on the panel said the next elected government could further change the document if it choses.

    • Libya: Violent protests rock city of Benghazi

      BBC’s Jon Leyne in Cairo talks about the protests in Libya as amateur video is released of clashes in Benghazi

      Hundreds of people have clashed with police and government supporters in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

    • TSA comes under fire again as employees admit to repeatedly stealing money from passengers

      In return the colleague would give some of the money to Arato, who also admitted to stealing some himself at his security checkpoint in Terminal B.

      The colleague, who was not named, cooperated with investigators leading them to the arrest of Arato.

      Arato faces a maximum potential sentence of 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, though the actual penalty may be less under sentencing guidelines. He will be sentenced on May 24.

    • Bahrain police open fire on funeral procession leaving one dead

      Bahrain has moved to defuse unrest by promising to investigate the killings of opposition protesters who had been inspired by the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

      The latest violence in the Gulf state saw the shooting of a young man at the heavily attended funeral of another who was killed by security forces on Monday.

    • The empire strikes again

      Anyone who still wonders why the Bush administration invaded Iraq would do well to become familiar with an institution whose existence few Americans are aware of: the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya.

      Located in Kurdistan, at the nexus of northern Iraq’s border with Iran and Turkey, AUI-S opened its doors in 2007. At the time, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote about it with the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm that had generally accompanied the invasion itself four years before. “Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq … Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq … Well, stop imagining.”

    • Donald Rumsfeld was right about everything, book by Rumsfeld claims

      Reviled two-time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has finally written his memoir. It is titled “Known and Unknown,” after a typically obtuse quote he gave to the press while mismanaging the “global war on terrorism.” In his memoir, Rumsfeld is settling various old scores, and, obviously, trying to convince everyone that he is not responsible for the various awful failures and fiascoes that occurred at the Pentagon during his tenure in the Bush administration. Like, for example, the whole “Iraq invasion and occupation” thing.

  • Cablegate

    • Biting the source that feeds you

      It’s the climax of the 1975 hit Three Days of the Condor. On a Manhattan sidewalk fugitive CIA analyst Robert Redford, having outgunned his assassins, confronts his double-dealing boss, who demands he join the sinister plot to control the world’s oil. No way, Redford says, he’s already blown the whistle. And the camera pans across the street where a truckload of newsprint is being delivered – to The New York Times. Game over.

      Ahh, Hollywood. But what really happens when you’re a major league whistleblower? Say you’ve acquired sensitive documents of huge public importance, very hush-hush. Although it’s bound to annoy powerful people and may expose you to reprisal, you deliver them to the world’s mightiest news media, including The New York Times, which use them in sensational articles that have worldwide impact.

      The Condor’s triumphant fourth day? Well, no. Sure you’ve handed over official secrets of global significance at considerable personal risk. That’s not enough. You’ve also got to be charming. Make sure your clothes are laundered and wrinkle-free. You may be living out of a backpack and pulling impossible hours culling data, but don’t forget to bathe regularly. And even if one of the organizations you’ve given this material to violates the conditions you set, don’t you dare get angry.

      And know this: That every conversation you have with the reporters you’re working with, every snarky comment they make about you, every detail of your collaboration, may be used in a high-profile account of the whole affair that will portray you as a peevish, contemptuous, slouching, disheveled, foul-smelling, paranoid, self-serving, manipulative, volatile ideologue.

      Those descriptors come more or less verbatim from the remarkable cover story by The New York Times’ top editor, Bill Keller, in the newspaper’s Jan. 30 Sunday magazine, titled “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s [sic] Nest.” It is Keller’s 8,000-word version of his newspaper’s dealings with Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian-born founder of Wikileaks, the worldwide online anti-secrecy network that last year provided The Times and other leading newspapers with a vast and extraordinarily rich trove of classified U.S. government documents.

    • Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks

      When Aaron Barr was finalizing a recent computer security presentation for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, a colleague had a bit of good-natured advice for him: “Scare the shit out of them!”

      In retrospect, this may not have been the advice Barr needed. As CEO of the government-focused infosec company HBGary Federal, Barr had to bring in big clients — and quickly — as the startup business hemorrhaged cash. To do so, he had no problem with trying to “scare the sh*t out of them.” When working with a major DC law firm in late 2010 on a potential deal involving social media, for instance, Barr decided that scraping Facebook to stalk a key partner and his family might be a good idea. When he sent his law firm contact a note filled with personal information about the partner, his wife, her family and her photography business, the result was immediate.

    • US request for Twitter account details ‘outrageous’: Assange

      Washington’s efforts to get Twitter to hand over information on the accounts of people connected to WikiLeaks is “outrageous,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Monday.

      “This is an outrageous attack by the Obama administration on the privacy and free speech rights of Twitter’s customers — many of them American citizens,” Assange said in a statement, a day before a US hearing in the case.

      The US government’s attempts to get Twitter to hand over information about the Twitter accounts of three WikiLeaks supporters, is “more shocking, at this time, (as) it amounts to an attack on the right to freedom of association, a freedom that the people of Tunisia and Egypt, for example, spurred on by the information released by WikiLeaks, have found so valuable,” he added.

    • WikiLeaks and the Archives and Records Profession

      Do WikiLeaks and its complex, attendant issues shift our conceptualization of our roles as information professionals? How might WikiLeaks change the public’s views on usage of and access to archives and records? To what extent is the most recent release of diplomatic cables a product of information mismanagement?

      Addressing these and many more questions, the speakers include Trudy Peterson, former Acting Archivist of the United States (1993-1995) and current representative for the Society of American Archivists on the Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee; Fred Pulzello, Solutions Architect in the Information Governance practice at MicroLink LLC; James Fortmuller, Manager of Systems Security at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP in Washington, DC; Mark Matienzo, Digital Archivist in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library; and Derek Bambauer, Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. The panel was moderated by Peter Wosh, Director of the Archives/Public History Program and Clinical Associate Professor of History at New York University.

    • [Dershowitz Joins Legal Team for Wikileaks]
    • The powerful law firm at the center of the WikiLeaks plot

      One of the big outstanding questions in the story of the plot to undermine WikiLeaks and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, as well as a separate plan to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, is the nature of the role played by the large international law firm Hunton & Williams.

      Hunton, which brags it employs 1,000 lawyers in 18 offices on three continents, has worked for both the Chamber and Bank of America. The company is nervous because WikiLeaks is reportedly planning to release internal bank documents, and Bank of America apparently connected with Hunton to help respond to the crisis.

      Hunton attorneys in turn had a series of e-mail communications — since hacked by WikiLeaks supporters and published online — with a trio of technology firms that proposed various schemes to attack WikiLeaks, Greenwald and critics of the Chamber. (One typical idea was to provide labor activists with false documents in order to discredit them.)

    • More facts emerge about the leaked smear campaigns

      As I noted on Friday, the parties implicated in the smear campaigns aimed at WikiLeaks supporters and Chamber of Commerce critics have attempted to heap all the blame on HBGary Federal (“HBGary”) and its CEO, Aaron Barr. Both Bank of America and the Chamber — the intended clients — vehemently deny any involvement in these schemes and have harshly denounced them. The other two Internet security firms whose logos appeared on the proposals — Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies — both issued statements terminating their relationship with HBGary and insisting that they had nothing to do with these plots. Only Hunton & Williams and its partner, John Woods — the central cogs soliciting these proposals — have steadfastly refused to comment.

      Palantir, in particular, has been quite aggressive about trying to distance itself. They initially issued a strong statement denouncing the plots, then had their CEO call me vowing to investigate and terminate any employees who were involved, then issued another statement over the weekend claiming that “Palantir never has and never will condone the sort of activities that HBGary recommended” and “Palantir did not participate in the development of the recommendations that Palantir and others find offensive.” Such vehemence is unsurprising: the Palo-Alto-based firm relies for its recruitment efforts on maintaining a carefully cultivated image as a progressive company devoted to civil liberties, privacy and Internet freedom — all of which would be obviously sullied by involvement in such a scheme.

    • Early Morning Swim: Glenn Greenwald Discusses Wikileaks Smear Campaign with Matt Miller
    • The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG For Tuesday, Day 80

      2:10 Largely overlooked in Clinton speech was this small bit near end: “There were reports in the days following theleak that the U.S. government intervened to coerce private companies to denyservice to Wikileaks. This is not the case. Some politicians and pundits publiclycalled for companies to dissociate from Wikileaks, while others criticized them fordoing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a linebetween expressing views and coercing conduct. But any business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own policies regarding Wikileaks was not at the direction or the suggestion of the Obama Administration.”

    • Dershowitz: Assange has a new legal adviser

      ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s five OFF-SET questions is Alan M. Dershowitz, who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights.”

    • ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE WANE IN RUSSIA REF: MOSCOW 2586

      Russia has recently shown clear signs of throwing off its long and tragic history of anti-Semitism. In the past several years, official GOR policy has involved an aggressive campaign against anti-Semitism, coupled with positive official statements towards the Jewish community. Societal attitudes have also improved, with a resulting decrease in the number of anti-Semitic attacks or incidents. Increasing ties between Russia and Israel, including the new visa-free regime between the two countries, have also added to the improved atmosphere. While some ingrained suspicions of Jews remain among Russians, Jewish contacts with whom we spoke painted an optimistic picture of the current situation for Russian Jews, though they warned that the situation could easily change back again quickly.

    • Corporate America vs. Wikileaks

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Philly homeowner forecloses on Wells Fargo

      Patrick Rodgers, an independent music promoter in Philadelphia, has won a judgment against his mortgage lender, Wells Fargo, which Wells hasn’t paid, and so he’s foreclosed on them and arranged for a sheriff’s sale of the contents of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, 1341 N. Delaware Ave to pay the legal bill.

  • TPPA

    • Critical Paper Links TPPA to Financial Instability, Challenges Negotiators to Release Draft Text for Further Analysis

      Negotiators on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) meeting for a fifth round of talks in Santiago this week will be presented with a mock draft text and expert analysis that links the proposed agreement to continued financial instability.

      The paper authored by Professor Jane Kelsey from the University of Auckland and Sanya Reid Smith from Malaysia-based Third World Network, with assistance from other investment experts, will form the basis of a stakeholder presentation on Tuesday.

      “The post-2007 global financial crisis exposed the chronic instability of a highly liberalised, deregulated and globally integrated financial system. No one knows how or where the next crisis will unfold”, said Professor Kelsey.

      “It is time to rethink the failed model of financial deregulation that has been repeatedly locked in and ratcheted up through previous free trade agreements.”

      “Far from recognising that need, the TPPA negotiations appear to be bolting the door closed on the options for governments to re-regulate the financial sector and impose controls on speculative capital flows in ways that meet the needs of their people”.

    • Leaks and lockouts as TPPA negotiations begin in Santiago

      As New Zealand’s December paper foreshadowed, the US text is reportedly more aggressive than its previous free trade agreements (FTAs), building on the IP chapter in the Australia US FTA. A local IT expert predicted the US would use the TPPA to achieve what it failed to secure in the recently concluded Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • EU web blocking plans curtailed

      The EU Commission’s stupid plans to mandate EU-wide web blocking as a central element of the proposed directive on the sexual abuse and exploitation of children suffered a setback in the Libe committee (civil liberties committee of the Parliament) yesterday, thanks primarily to the efforts of a small number of digital rights groups, prominent amongst which was EDRI.

    • Senate extends the Patriot Act for three months in 86-12 vote

      The Senate on Tuesday voted 86-12 Tuesday to extend the Patriot Act for three months.

      The vote came one day after the House passed legislation extending the Patriot Act until Dec. 2011.

      Due to an amendment tacked on to the House bill by Senate leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) earlier Tuesday the Senate version of the bill only extends the Patriot Act until May 27, 2011.

    • Just How Open Is Your Internet? [INFOGRAPHICS]

      America, the champion of democracy and freedom, actually has more Internet censorship than some countries in Africa and South America according to an infographic based on Internet censorship research conducted by the OpenNet Initiative.

  • Civil Rights

    • Free Cheng Jianping – sentenced to labour camp in China for a tweet!

      On the 28th October, she was set to marry her fiance, Hua Chunhui, also a human rights defender.

      On the same day, Cheng was arrested and sentenced to a year of Laojiao – education through labour – for ‘disturbing social order’. Her crime was to send out one tweet which mocked a protest orchestrated by the Chinese government.

      Cheng is totally devoted to social activism and was working without income, reportedly lived on instant noodles as her main food.

    • Over 1 lakh phones are tapped every year

      Some startling figures tumbled out on rampant phone tapping in the country when telecom service provider Reliance Communications told the Supreme Court on Monday that the authorities had asked it to tap 1.51 lakh phone numbers in a five-year span between 2006 and 2010.

      This works out to an average of over 30,000 telephone interceptions every year by a single service provider on the orders of various law enforcing agencies. Or, over 82 telephones were intercepted every day by a single service provider.

    • Corporate spying ‘scandals’ – where is the ethical edge?

      Where should a company draw the marker between information gathering for risk management and outright spying and subterfuge?

      It’s clearly a fine line.

      As Eric Dezenhall has argued, companies need defending just like anyone else, and are often targeted by those seeking personal advantage from alleged corporate malfeasance. He cites Toyota as an example.

      Equally, companies have been accused, by authorised or unauthorised proxy, of crossing the ethical line in information gathering in recent lines. Dow Chemical and Sasol are in a spotlight they would rather was shone elsewhere as a result.

      In messy and long-running cases, it becomes hard to work out who has behaved badly – or worst – in emotionally-charged campaigns and legal cases that can take on a life of their own. Take Chevron, campaigners and Ecuador as an example.

      The WikiLeaks saga, and threat of its expansion further into the corporate world, have given many a corporate executive pause for thought. The article linked above this line has been the most popular on Ethicalcorp.com this year.

      Just yesterday, to sit alongside the ongoing News of the World phone tapping scandal and police undercover operations against activists the Guardian has reported that UK energy companies E.ON, Scottish Resources Group and Scottish Power have been ‘spying’ on activists via a private security firm.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • European Union plans new measures to reduce data roaming charges

      The European Commission will have to consider radical new measures to reduce the cost of mobile roaming charges after almost all respondents to its consultation said prices were unfair.

      European roaming prices are currently more than three times that of domestic charges. Even Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes on Monday described the current charges as “rip offs.” And the prices for data roaming are even higher.

    • Brazilian telcoms regulator raids, confiscates and fines over open WiFi

      The latest in a series of reversals from Brazil’s new government is an attack on open WiFi. The Brazilian telcoms regulator claims that it is empowered to raid the homes of people with open WiFi networks and seize their routers and then issue hefty fines. This is part of a general series of attacks on sharing and openness in Brazil, including attacks on free content and open culture — a heartbreaking turn from a nation that has led the world in respect for the open Internet, shared culture, and freedom for most of the century.

    • Three Kingdoms of China’s Internet

      While China’s Internet is already dominated by power players in a way that the US Internet is not, investment bank CLSA sees further consolidation through lose alliances.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Should There Be Trade Barriers For Chinese Companies Buying Core Global Patent Portfolios in New Technology?

      Secondly the party that is willing to sell the core patent portfolio is not getting the real market value if the government is raising barriers, so as a retaliatory measure against China’s discriminatory indigenous innovation policies it might hurt the one retaliating, and it might lock up resources that could be brought to better use.

      I know that after the financial crisis the following words may sound harsh to your ears but this author believes it is best to eliminate the barriers and let the market do its work to avoid misallocation of resources.

    • Copyrights

      • Learning from my children… and Radiohead

        My daughter, the eldest, told me all about Facebook in 2004, and even became my first friend there after I received an invite from Dave Morin, now at Path. Before that I’d done things like watch her converse across multiple MSN Messenger channels in parallel (forcing me to have Microsoft in an Apple-only house!), seemingly while doing her homework and while watching television. It reminded me of the time she was just a few years old, watching TV while reading while eating while playing with toys. I would gently walk over to the TV with the intention of switching it off, only to be stopped by a plaintive “Dad, I’m still watching it”. She was three when the web was written about, five when it became real. And it was a joy to learn about the web through her eyes, the sites she visited, the sites she knew about, the tools she used and why.

      • Spanish Academy Awards Tainted By Anti-Piracy Law Controversy

        The Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent to the Academy Awards, have been tainted by controversy stemming from the country’s so-called Sinde anti-piracy law. Alongside egg-throwing and public boos for the eventual Best Actor winner for his support of the legislation, as a protest today, Spanish Film Academy president Alex de la Iglesia will step down.

        In recent months a controversial piece of legislation aimed at shutting down file-sharing sites has resulted in massive opposition from all corners of the Spanish nation. Protests last year appeared to have been successful when the House of Representatives rejected the proposal, but the good news was short-lived.

      • ACS: Law Targeted People Who Were “Clearly Not Guilty”

        Former employee says she quit her job there because she felt the law firm was targeting people like “old ladies who never downloaded files” who likely didn’t “have security on their wireless connection.”

        The row over ACS: Law and its controversial mass file-sharing lawsuit campaign continues with news that a former employee quit the job over moral concerns.

      • 5 live Investigates: The XXX Files 13 FEB 2011

        Thousands of people across the UK received letters accusing them of illegally downloading internet porn, demanding £495 for the privilege. But the firm behind the letters, ACS Law, didn’t know for sure if they were guilty or innocent. Campaigners are warning that a new law designed to clamp down on online crime will encourage more bullying and intimidation of web users by unscrupulous legal firms. Also: we reveal the latest FIFA investigation into football match-fixing, following suspicious betting on a Turkish tournament last week. Plus, the latest twist on direct debit fraud which affects nearly 100,000 people a year.

      • Evidence Suggests Major Film Studios Uploading Movie Clips To YouTube… Pretending To Be Pirated

        One of the tidbits that came out of the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit was the fact that Viacom quite frequently would upload its own clips to YouTube, but did so trying to pretend they were pirated clips. In fact, they would send employees out of Viacom’s offices to local printshops to upload the videos under childish sounding names, like “MMysticalGirl8, Demansr, tesderiw, GossipGirl40, Snackboard and Keithhn,” to make people think they were pirated copies.

      • Notes on Lady Gaga, Madonna, George Harrison and originality in music.

        After hearing the comparison myself, I can draw a personal conclusion that Lady Gaga was heavily influenced by Madonna and is far less talented and original than people give her credit for.

        But could she be liable for copyright infringement? In a sane world, the answer should be “no”, since the works can still be distinguished. Gaga clearly took the broad structure of Madonna’s song (the “spine” of the melody, if you will), but then put a personal gloss over it to make it her own, new work. The fact that it clearly grew out of Madonna’s previous creation should not make it an actual “copy” in the eyes of the law.

      • Axis of Awesome – 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)
      • CBS sends a YouTube takedown to itself

        Here’s yet another example of the TV industry’s love-hate relationship with YouTube: a CBS website hosting a YouTube clip that has been removed due to a copyright claim from CBS.

      • Have Media Companies Destroyed Their Copyrights With The ‘Share’ Button?

        Righthaven has become controversial by taking a sue-first-ask-questions-later approach to copyright enforcement on behalf of its newspaper clients, which include MediaNews Group as well as the smaller chain that owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Most content companies, by contrast, are content with more low-key methods of making sure their copyright is respected. But if the Righthaven experiment ends badly, it could be a big setback for other media companies trying to make sure their content isn’t copied—even for companies that wouldn’t ever consider an aggressive strategy like Righthaven’s. There are at least two ways that could happen.

      • Record Label Teaches Music Fans BitTorrent

        Record labels are generally not too fond of BitTorrent. Just a few months ago the RIAA reported several BitTorrent sites as “rogue sites” to the US Government. It therefore comes as quite a surprise that the independent record label Adamant Records is featuring a BitTorrent tutorial on its homepage, right next to the ‘download on iTunes’ links. Why would they do that? Have they gone mad?

      • What Congress Can Learn from the Recent ICE Seizures

        COICA”, Senator Leahy’s Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, is back. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the legislation tomorrow morning.

        As a reminder, COICA would give the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, most notably the ability to meddle with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) and make entire websites effectively disappear, along with noninfringing content and lawful speech.

      • ACTA

Clip of the Day

The Sagan Series (Pt 2) – Life Looks for Life


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 16/2/2011: Google Claims 350,000 Daily Activations of Android/Linux, Firefox 4 Release Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 2:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 10 ways to e-publish with Linux

    As a writer, I always am looking at new and better ways to get my words to the public. And since I write fiction as well as technology pieces, it’s in my best interest to know how to get my books into the hands of readers. In today’s market, the publishing industry is in a serious swing away from the traditional routes. With the major improvements in e-readers, more and more users are migrating away from the old standard hardcover/paperback books to digital formats. This has been a boon for new writers. With the ability to easily self-publish for various e-readers, it no longer requires an agent or a publisher to see your brilliance.

    But does that mean everyone should be submitting their books? Well, if everyone can properly format, design, and create -yes. If not, no. For those with the necessary skills, it is important to have the right tools and/or procedures for getting your books into the Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s, and Apple systems. Linux can help you do that. Let’s take a look at 10 Linux tools that can help your get your book into the market.

  • As Linux becomes easier it can be more dangerous.

    Over the last several years I have seen great leaps and bounds in terms of ease of use for Linux based operating systems (have to keep the purists happy :) which I will refer to as simply Linux. Because I am lazy and don’t want to write Linux based operating system all the time.

  • Ballnux

  • Applications

    • Evernote For Linux: Nevernote

      Evernote is an service/application you can use to store notes, images and all kind of information (like audio, handwritten or video notes) for retrieving later. It supports search and tagging and most importantly: you can sync everything between computers – further more, Evernote supports mobile devices too like iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry or Android and there’s a web interface too and a clipping bookmarklet to pull anything into your netbook. But unfortunately there’s no official Evernote application for Linux.

    • Minus Desktop App for Linux Lets You Drag-N-Drop Photos Into Taskbar for Instant Upload

      Minus desktop application was something which I had never heard about before and it even had a Linux version. Minus desktop application lets you drag-n-drop photos and files into the Minus taskbar and instantly upload onto Minus. Those of you who use free image/file hosting websites other than min.us extensively might want to consider using min.us instead solely because of this very interesting desktop application.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • The Perfect Desktop – Debian Squeeze
      • Advanced IP subnet calculator sipcalc
      • The 10 Days of awk
      • Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin

        Veteran Unix admin trait No. 1: We don’t use sudo
        Much like caps lock is cruise control for cool, sudo is a crutch for the timid. If we need to do something as root, we su to root, none of this sudo nonsense. In fact, for Unix-like operating systems that force sudo upon all users, the first thing we do is sudo su – and change the root password so that we can comfortably su – forever more. Using sudo exclusively is like bowling with only the inflatable bumpers in the gutters — it’s safer, but also causes you to not think through your actions fully.

      • How to organize your stuff

        What I say here applies to those using a GNU/Linux like operating system, but these suggestion will work in Windows or on a Mac. If you use Windows, however, some of the tools that make my approach work will not be available to you by default but can be easily installed.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • conf.kde.in Announces Talks, Keynotes and Registration

        There is only a month to go before the first KDE and Qt conference in India opens. The event will be headlined by three keynotes speakers talking on the effects of technology on culture, the law and what makes our community tick. Talks and workshops have been announced and registration is open for anyone planning to attend. Read on for details.

  • Distributions

    • Why I Use Gentoo: Conclusion

      The distribution that, in my mind, shows the most promise, however, is Exherbo.

    • New Releases

      • Canaima 3.0-vc1
      • Openwall Current-20110212
      • 8.1 Untangle Community Webinar
      • Pinguy 10.04.2
      • IPFire 2.9 – Core 46

        This is the 46th update of the IPFire distribution.

        IPFire 2.9 Core 46 is a bugfix release and fixes a security issue in the openssl package (more details below). This is why we strongly recommend you to do the update as soon as possible.

      • Frugalware 1.4 (Nexon) released

        The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.4, our fourteenth stable release.

      • Welcome to Tiny Core Linux

        Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux GUI Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly. Also offered is Micro Core a 6 MB image that is the console based engine of Tiny Core. CLI versions of Tiny Core’s program allows the same functionality of Tiny Core’s extensions only starting with a console based system.

        [...]

        v3.5

        Improved system boot times with optimization of startup code. Administration improved with deletes of uninstalled ondemand without reboot. Many user interface improvements and additional supported options in: appsaduit, wbar, services, tce-audit, and fluff, the integrated file manager. Key system programs updated to latest release: busybox and zsync

      • 2011-02-15: CRUX PPC 2.7 released!

        CRUX PPC 2.7 is now available. It works on Apple 32bit “NewWorld” G3/G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER and IBM Power Systems servers.
        CRUX PPC 2.7 is, as usual, released via two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree.
        See the download page!

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian volatile replaced by new updates suite

        The Debian Volatile archive is discontinued starting from the upcoming Debian release 6.0 (“Squeeze”). It is replaced by the suite squeeze-updates on the official mirrors. Its management will move to the Debian Release Team, who already manage regular updates to Debian stable and oldstable.

        [...]

        These updates will also be included in the next stable point release after the announcement. Regular updates not fitting the criteria above will be pushed through point releases according to the rules of the Stable Release Management.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Netbook Edition review

          For many users looking beyond the worlds of Windows and Macintosh, Ubuntu Linux is the go-to choice. It’s not hard to see why: Ubuntu’s commercial parent Canonical has arguably done more than any other Linux distributor to popularise open-source operating systems to the public, with its free Ubuntu Desktop Edition OS. It’s arguably the most accessible, easiest-to-install and easiest-to-operate operating system you’ll find at the price.

        • Man seeks used laptops to refurbish, give to students

          But the students who benefit form his just launched project will have to add a new word to their vocabulary, Ubuntu,’ and learn to get along without some of the familiar computer programs they may already know.

          Cloyd’s project, which is just getting underway, aims to take unused, donated laptop computers, refurbish them with the Ubuntu free, open source operating system and other free programs and give them to students who aren’t able to afford their own computer.

        • Ubuntu Developer Week 2011: February 28th – March 4th

          Canonical, through Daniel Holbach, announced the schedule of this year’s first Ubuntu Developer Week.

        • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind River Android tools add Honeycomb, tablet support

      Wind River has updated its Wind River Platform for Android and Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android, and will demonstrate a new tablet user experience for MeeGo. Wind River Platform for Android adds upgrade paths for Gingerbread and Honeycomb, multi-windowing features, plus support for Ethernet, USB On-the-Go, the Nvidia Tegra 2, and DLNA Digital Media Server (DMS).

    • Marvell tips UMTS/TD-SCDMA combo chip, new open source dev platform

      Marvell announced a 1.2GHz processor for mobile devices claimed to be the first to combine 3G UMTS and TD-SCDMA cellular technology. In addition to unveiling the PXA978 processor, which is also touted for its advanced 3D graphics and 1080p multimedia playback, Marvell announced an open source mobile development platform called Kinoma.

    • Phones

      • HP’s WebOS takes on Android and iOS

        It’s taken a while but now HP has joined the mobile fray with its WebOS devices.

        While everyone at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is watching the Nokia-Microsoft partnership kick off there is other news worth watching: HP’s WebOS strategy.

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Nokia shareholders start rebellion and plan a company coup

          In the wake of last week’s news that Nokia has entered a partnership with Microsoft, a group of nine Nokia Shareholders has published “Nokia Plan B”, a manifesto “to challenge the company’s strategy and partnership with Microsoft”.

          On their website, the currently anonymous nine shareholders outline an agenda and a series of actions, which include ousting current CEO and President of Nokia Stephen Elop.

        • MeeGo After Nokia: ‘I Will Survive’ or ‘Where Did Our Love Go’?

          Intel has reaffirmed its commitment to the MeeGo platform following Nokia’s announcement that it will partner with Microsoft and its Windows Phone platform for future handsets. Can MeeGo survive without one of its biggest corporate backers? As a phone and tablet OS, MeeGo’s certainly lost some momentum, but those aren’t the only kinds of devices the platform is targeting.

      • Android

        • Android has 150k apps, 350k daily activations, and more notes from Eric Schmidt’s MWC keynote

          Android is the biggest thing on the planet, the fastest thing smoking, the hottest thing burning, and whatever other cliche you can think to affix to it. Google CEO-turned-other-executive-guy Eric Schmidt confirmed as much when he updated the Android stats in his keynote address at Mobile World Congress.

          Schmidt confirmed that the Android Market app total has reached 150,000 apps, which is three times what it was less than a year ago. No one was surprised to hear that these apps helped push the Android device total to 350,000 per day. Or is this an egg before the chicken situation and the app totals grew because developers saw the increasing number of devices being activated and realized that they had to invest more in supporting what has become the “fastest growing” mobile operating system around?

        • Broadcom spins single- and dual-core A9 SoCs for Android

          In the handset arena, Broadcom previously focused on modem-oriented baseband processors or specialty PND chips and Wi-Fi chipsets. But now, it’s aggressively moving into developing processors for Android devices.

        • Android-based Cloud handsets focus on Facebook
        • Sony Ericsson launches Android phone with slide-out gamepad

          Sony Ericsson announced a 1GHz Snapdragon-based Android 2.3 phone that doubles as a handheld game-playing device. The Xperia Play offers a slide-out Sony PS3-style gamepad instead of a keyboard, a four-inch 854 x 480 pixel display, 8GB of memory with expansion, a five-megapixel camera, and all the usual wireless features.

    • Tablets

      • Honeycomb Hysteria: Pad Madness Strikes MWC

        The tablet market just got a lot more crowded as vendors like Samsung, LG and Acer pushed their new pads at Mobile World Congress. Each will use Google’s new Honeycomb version of Android. “It’s hard to call the eventual winners beyond iOS and Android, but 2011 may well end up seeing fewer battling mobile application platforms than it started with,” said IDC’s Al Hilwa.

      • Android Sharpens Its NFC Chops With Gingerbread Bump

        Google posted a new feature release for its upcoming Gingerbread version of Android that boosts the mobile OS’s abilities in regard to near-field communications technologies, otherwise known as “NFC.” One of NFC’s main attractions is the ability to use one’s cellphone to make point-of-sale payments at retail locations, and the feature could be a hot point of competition between Android and iPhone.

      • Qualcomm spins a Snapdragon for video-savvy tablets

        Some chipmakers overwhelm with data sheets, block diagrams, and other minutiae about their new processors. Not Qualcomm. However, yesterday’s high-profile launch of the WebOS-powered HP TouchPad tablet PC (right) inspired a press release providing a few tidbits of information about the dual-core, ARM-based CPU that’s inside.

      • Industry debates HP’s desktop ambitions for WebOS

        HP’s WebOS-based TouchPad tablet has received a surprisingly favorable response, but what really has pundits blogging is HP’s suggestion that WebOS will head for desktop PCs. Meanwhile, more details are emerging on the new WebOS 3.0 release that runs on the Touchpad, including an updated Synergy engine that HP intends to integrate a growing ecosystem of devices based on WebOS.

      • HTC’s Flyer tablet features pen interface, Android 2.4

        HTC announced a seven-inch, 1.5GHz tablet that features pen support and links to online video and gaming services. The HTC Flyer features a new version of HTC’s Sense UI layer atop a hybrid version of Android 2.4, and offers 1GB RAM, 32GB of flash, microSD expansion, five-megapixel and 1.3-megapixel cameras, plus HSPA+, 802.11n, GPS, and Bluetooth 3.0.

      • Acer reveals seven- and 10.1-inch tablets plus Iconia Smart phone

        Acer formally announced two previously tipped Android tablets, as well as an Android smartphone. The 10.1-inch Iconia Tab A500 and the seven-inch Iconia Tab A100 run Android 3.0 on a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and feature a five-megapixel and two-megapixel camera, while the 4.8-inch Iconia Smart phone runs Android 2.3 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon.

      • Intel showcases industry support for MeeGo, demos new tablet version

        Intel made loud overtures in support of MeeGo at Mobile World Congress, getting Toshiba, Fujitsu, Asus, and Acer to stand behind the Linux-based OS, despite Nokia’s defection. The MeeGo project also demonstrated the long-awaited MeeGo Tablet User Experience (UX).

Free Software/Open Source

  • Christchurch IT scene: Free and open source

    For Lane the open source model allows people to get credit for their work without stifling the creativity of others. He is against software patents, which he believes compromises personal freedom.

    His mobile device is a ‘rooted’ HTC Hero that he parallel imported from Australia. “Android phones are free and open source, but the carriers lock them down so they effectively prevent their users from gaining full access to the phones unless they achieve so-called root access, they root the phone,” he says.

    “A lot of people are buying phones that come with a badly outdated version of Android, because the phone has been sitting in a warehouse for the past six months and software moves so quickly that six months is an eternity in the mobile environment.”

  • 53 Open Source Replacements to Spice Up Your Desktop

    We’ve collected 53 different open source projects that can make your desktop environment faster, prettier, easier to use or just a little different. They run the gamut from small utilities that do just one thing to open source operating systems that can replace Windows. We’ve included a number of tools for Linux users that can help you customize your desktop to meet your unique needs and tastes.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Ready for Firefox 4

        I LOOK forward to the day when the folks at Mozilla decide that Firefox 4 is ready to launch without the word “beta” attached to it.

        Boasting significant speed improvements and an overhauled interface, Firefox 4 is a vast improvement over the current stable release, Firefox 3.6.

  • Government

    • Open Source Finds a Friend in Big Government

      Major federal agencies in the U.S. are gradually getting the hang of dealing with open source technology — a situation that bodes well for commercial open source providers.

      In a recently released “report card,” Open Source for America (OSFA) says that a handful of top level cabinet departments have achieved a high level of success in adopting the technology, and that other departments have at least committed themselves to pursuing appropriate open source options.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 kicked into 2014

      HTML5 won’t be finished for another three years, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has warned.

      On Monday, the standards body said that it has extended the charter of its group hammering out HTML5, with plans to advance the proposed spec to last-call status in May. Then we wait – for three years.

Leftovers

  • Accuracy of search engine results called into question

    Even more disturbing is a story in last Saturday’s New York Times, which suggested that for several months, when you entered searches such as ‘skinny jeans’, ‘dresses’ or ‘area rugs’ into Google, JC Penney was consistently showing up at the top of the results. The article explained this was the result of some Search Engine Optimization tricks including buying oodles of paid links to the JC Penney site to enhance its place in the results (a violation of Google rules, which JC Penney denied being involved in).

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Firing range owner sounds off

      An owner of a local firing range Tuesday called a Zoning Board of appeals decision to restrict the use of his range “idiocy.”

      Robert C. Hodgkins III, one of the owners, said that he disagrees with the board’s ruling and plans to get the National Rifle Association involved in the issue.

      “Let the NRA take care of these knuckleheads,” he said. “I think it’s about time.”

      After hearing from the public last week, the board voted Monday to limit activity at 74 Village Hill Road to the level of use in 2003, when the current zoning laws went into effect.

    • This time, the people of Haiti may win

      In 1915, the US Marines invaded Haiti, occupying the country until 1934. US officials rewrote the Haitian constitution, and when the Haitian national assembly refused to ratify it, they dissolved the assembly. They then held a “referendum” in which about 5% of the electorate voted and approved the new constitution – which conveniently changed Haitian law to allow foreigners to own land – with 99.9% voting for approval.

    • Pentagon budget largest ever as security threat list grows

      Despite calls on Capitol Hill for major defense budget cuts, the Pentagon next week will unveil the largest budget in its history — driven by an expanding list of what defines national security.

      Defense Secretary Robert Gates said his proposed $553 billion budget “represents, in my view, the minimum level of defense spending that is necessary, given the complex and unpredictable array of security challenges the United States faces around the globe.”

    • The Eleventh Annual Herzliya Conference: The Balance of Israel’s National Security

      From the speeches by Israeli politicians, that answer is a loud, frustrated, angry YES. In her keynote, opposition leader Tzipi Livni ripped into Bibi’s government, accusing it of everything from ignoring Iran, purposely stalling on committing to serious negotiations with the Palestinians, alienating Obama by refusing to extend the settlement freeze, to furthering the rampant culture of corruption.

    • Panel Review Questions FBI Theory in Anthrax Attacks After 9/11

      Today, the National Academy of Science raised more questions.

      A review panel said that the FBI overstated the scientific evidence that linked the anthrax flask controlled by Dr. Bruce E. Ivins to the anthrax used in the 2001 attack letters. Dr. Ivins, a researcher at Ft. Detrick, MD., was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in the case. He maintained his innocence until his suicide in 2008.

    • Government tough-on-crime policies worsening prison conditions, guards say

      Double-bunked inmates are attacking each other in the night, Canada’s prison guards say, warning that the Harper government’s tough-on-crime laws are creating dangerous conditions in jam-packed corrections centres.

      Members of Parliament looking for answers on the impact of recent justice bills got an earful Tuesday when they heard from the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers.

    • Pentagon Faces Class Action Suit Exposing Military Sexual Abuse Crisis

      The lawsuit, brought on behalf of seventeen plaintiffs, including two men, was filed in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District in Virginia by Susan L. Burke, and announced at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. No stranger to controversy, Burke is also litigating another major lawsuit against Blackwater, LLC, in a whistleblower case on behalf of the U.S. government. Burke was joined today by Bhagwati, Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Fund, and some of the plaintiffs participating in the lawsuit, including twenty-five year-old Kori Cioca (video) who said she was hit in her face by a superior in 2005 and later raped by the same man while serving in the Coast Guard.

  • Cablegate

    • WikiLeaks Backers Fight Twitter Data Demand in Probe

      Three WikiLeaks backers will seek to block the U.S. from reviewing their Twitter account data at a hearing today in federal court in Virginia, arguing that the government’s demands violate their constitutional rights. Bloomberg’s Lizzie O’Leary reports.

    • The Forgotten Man: Bradley Manning (2011) 3/3

      The inside story of the security breach that enraged the American Government, and a profile of the man who made it all possible.

      While WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange has been cast as a heroic champion of free speech, his ongoing expose of US foreign policy would not have been possible without the work of Private Bradley Manning. It was Manning who allegedly stole the classified documents published by WikiLeaks. It is Manning who now languishes in a US military prison.

      Now reporter Quentin McDermott tells the inside story of Bradley Manning and his daring intelligence heist. David House is one of the few civilians allowed to visit Bradley Manning in jail. He describes the young soldier’s mental deterioration and his struggle to deal with long hours of confinement.

      He tells the program: “…the US Government is just trying to put immense pressure on him in order to get him to crack open.”

      In Monday’s Four Corners we hear the only recording of Bradley Manning’s voice and we listen to the logs of alleged conversations with the man who ultimately betrayed him.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • English forest sell-off put on hold

      The government has taken 40,000 hectares of public forest off the market, in the latest twist in the furore over the proposed sell-off of England’s woodland.

      About 15% of England’s public forests had been slated for sale, with the aim of raising £100m for government coffers, but on Friday morning the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said it would hold on to the forest until the fate of the rest of the Forestry Commission’s land had been decided.

    • Taking Climate Denial to New Extremes

      The spending plan the House GOP was supposed to roll out on Thursday included a number of cuts meant to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from doing anything about climate change. But Republicans had to take that plan back to the drawing board Thursday night after tea party members claimed the package of cuts didn’t go deep enough. And if a trio of House members get their way, we won’t ever have to worry about the climate—since we won’t know what’s happening with it, anyway.

    • Climate change forces UK rare fish reintroduction further north

      Plans to reintroduce one of England’s rarest and most ancient fish to a key site in the Lake District have been abandoned because of climate change.

      The vendace, Coregonus albulaa, a species of freshwater whitefish that can be traced back to the ice age, became extinct at Bassenthwaite in 1991 as a result of agricultural pollution, increased sediment and the illegal introduction of new fish species. It is one of only two lakes in England where the fish had survived.

    • Chevron Runs From Judgment in Ecuador

      “He went swimming, then began vomiting blood.” Then he died.

  • Finance

    • State of Michigan settles with Goldman Sachs

      Goldman Sachs gives Michigan investors access to $32 million in capital, pays state over $90,000

      The State of Michigan has reached an Auction Rate Securities (ARS) settlement with Goldman, Sachs and Co., the Office of Financial and Insurance Regulation (OFIR) reported Thursday. The settlement requires Goldman Sachs to offer full buybacks of up to approximately $32 million to any eligible Michigan customer who purchased an ARS from the brokerage firm.

    • Former F.D.I.C. Deal Maker Joins Goldman Sachs

      Joseph Jiampietro, one of the government’s top deal makers during the financial crisis, has joined Goldman Sachs as a senior investment banker covering the financial services industry.

      Mr. Jiampietro was previously a senior adviser to Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, during the throes of the financial crisis, where he helped coordinate more than 100 government-assisted bank deals.

    • When Factories Vanish, So Can Innovators

      No one paid much attention beyond the people in the town itself, even though the closing represented the demise of an industry that had flourished in this country for generations. Paul Revere, in fact, was a flatware craftsman.

    • Imagining Life Without Fannie and Freddie

      The report, entitled “Reforming America’s Housing Finance Market,” zeros in on the perverse incentives created by the nation’s mortgage complex during the years leading up to the panic of 2008. The Treasury’s recommendation that we wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and let the private mortgage market step in is spot on.

    • At Last, Bernie Madoff Gives Back

      His evil deeds, in their afterlife, are now serving as a recurring wave of financial body scans. Each new Madoff revelation sheds light on an entire culture that allowed far loftier flimflams than his to succeed — though the loftier culprits, unlike him, usually escaped with the proceeds. That financial culture largely remains in place today.

    • JPMorgan to Start Social Media Fund

      Hoping to seize upon investor excitement over social networking companies like Facebook, JPMorgan Chase is planning to start a new fund to invest in an array of Internet and new media companies, people briefed on the matter told DealBook on Sunday.

      The proposed fund, which will be run by JPMorgan’s asset-management unit, is seeking to raise between $500 million and $750 million from wealthy investors to put into privately held technology companies like Twitter and Groupon, these people said.

    • Housing: For many cities “another season of pain”

      Watching existing home inventory will be very important this year. Areas with high levels of inventory will probably see more price declines. It is hard to tell about inventory right now – usually inventory is pretty low in December and January, and then increases sharply from February into the early summer – so we will know more about inventory soon.

    • Who’s Unemployed?

      Larry Mishel emails me to second my concern about Charles Plosser’s blithe assertion that unemployment is about shifting workers out of construction. As Larry points out, the BLS provides data on the previous employment of the unemployed. There were 7.7 million more unemployed workers in 2010 than there were in 2007; of those extra 7.7 million, only 1.1 million had previously been employed in construction.

    • Ron Paul, opponent of the Fed and fan of the gold standard, a lone wolf no more

      But if you tilt at windmills long enough, sometimes you hit. And Wednesday, Paul did: He held his first hearing as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on monetary policy, inviting two Austrian-school economists and one lonely representative from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute to debate how Fed policy affects the unemployment rate.

      This may be Ron Paul’s moment. The question now is what he does with it.

    • Federal investigators expose vast web of insider trading

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Protect Honesty in Canadian Journalism

      Fair and balanced news in Canada is about to be a thing of the past. The CRTC is about to pass a huge “loophole” to the rule prevents the media from telling blatant lies to Canadian public.

      Surprise, surprise, this loophole comes just in time for the launch of Prime Minister Harper’s Fox News North (Sun TV).

      Fox News has made its living spreading lies and conservative propaganda in the United States. But Canada’s broadcast journalism rules would have prevented it from using the same strategy to pump up ratings and push it’s right-wing agenda.

  • Censorship

    • Man arrested after Crawley fan ‘mocks Munich air crash’

      A man has been arrested following a complaint that Crawley Town’s FA Cup song featured a supporter mocking the victims of the Munich air crash.

      The non-league side and musician Mike Dobie recorded The Specials’ A Message To You Rudy as A Message To You Rooney, ahead of their Manchester United match.

      A United fan complained that the video, posted on YouTube, featured a supporter making aircraft gestures.

      The 1958 air crash left 23 people dead, including eight United players.

      Manchester United were returning from a European Cup tie against Red Star Belgrade when their plane crashed on a runway in Munich.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • The Fourth-Stupidest Thing the CRTC Has Done this Month (So Far)

      Whatever the exact opposite of being on a roll is, the CRTC has spent the last month doing just that. Proposing to lower the standards which prohibit false or misleading news didn’t get as much attention as their plan to let Bell and Rogers impose usage-based billing (a plan so noxious and so blatantly favouring big business that even the Conservative Party balked at such a corporate-friendly move), but it was arguably even worse.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The Death of (Analogue) Patents

      But by copying itself and using the replicated machines to make more RepRaps together with that lonely comb, the 3D printers collectively would outpace the traditional injection moulding machine in just 19 days (Bowyer also pointed out that after a month everyone on the planet would have their own RepRap machine – and comb….)

      So that’s a glimpse at the future of personal manufacturing, which is about scaling. The other fascinating aspect of RepRap involves making copies of analogue objects. There’s a site dedicated to doing just that for original 3D artefacts created from digital files. It’s called Thingiverse, and many of its files use the GNU GPL or Creative Commons licences.

      But what about copies of pre-existing objects? That’s already possible to a certain extent, using a 3D scanner to produce a digital file. It’s true that only a limited number of materials can be printed using RepRap and similar systems, but the range is being expanded all the time. It’s not unreasonable to assume that over time it will be possible to scan and print more and more everyday objects.

Clip of the Day

HTC Flyer Android Tablet hands-on at WMC 2011


Credit: TinyOgg

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