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07.24.10

Links: KDevelop 4.0.1, GNOME 3…

Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hardware

Summary: GNU/Linux news roundup

GNU/Linux

  • Rewards Of Using Linux Running Program on Playstation 3

    The Playstation 3 slim is not just a gaming console, but also a powerful PC besides the styled layout that the playstation 3 has. Everybody generally use the console for it?s main objective, to perform video games, with out realizing how significantly more the console can offer them . With Linux on Playstation 3 you can do almost everything a computer can do and then some with your Ps3. Not to mention installing Linux system on a Playstation 3 is very effortless. Here are some of the benefits linked with setting up Linux system on a Playstation 3 slim.

  • Revolutionary Desktop Switching: An Analysis

    This is an old favorite of mine. Here is the problem, switching desktops on a Linux machine with or without compiz is not intuitive. Why? because it is related to some window keys Ctrl+Alt+Right or Left Arrow, it is a secondary menu, or it depends on the mouse being at the corner of the window.

  • Is your PC slowing down?

    Defragmenting the hard drive. It’s hard to believe that even Windows 7, the latest operating system from Microsoft, is still prone to this problem. The NTFS filesystem (used by Windows NT and up) has other quirks, but it seems to slowly get fragmented and requires defragmenting from time to time. This process can take a long time depending on your hardware, and no doubtedly has to happen when you are not using your computer. It’s more like a band-aid to the problem, whereas Linux solves the problem up front by not even allowing fragmenting to happen at all. This has been the case since the ext3 filesystem was first used for Linux, and is still the case today with the ext4 filesystem. To quote the Linux System Administrator Guide: “Modern Linux filesystem(s) keep fragmentation at a minimum by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can’t be stored in consecutive sectors. Some filesystems, like ext3, effectively allocate the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. Therefore it is not necessary to worry about fragmentation in a Linux system.”. Again, this is brilliant.

  • Rebooting is for Windows

    So let’s look at two of the most common operating systems used today used in datacenters and on server systems. On one hand, Windows and the other Linux.

    Windows by nature has more downtime per system, because Microsoft releases patches that require frequent rebooting. Windows patches are scheduled to be released on the second Tuesday of each month, so at a minimum once per month Windows systems will need to reboot. Sometimes, patches are released even more frequently, depending on the severity. Windows just can’t activate a majority of software updates without rebooting the entire system.

  • Server

    • Well over half of the most reliable hosting companies run on Linux

      - Over two thirds (29 out of 42) of the most reliable hosting companies use Linux (would they use GNU along with it?)
      - 14.2% use BSD (FreeBSD to be more precise)
      - A little less than 10% use Windows
      - 3 out of 42 are a big question mark

    • IBM’s New Mainframe: The Key Is the Core

      The z196 can be configured to include up to 80 specialty engines to further reduce costs and increase performance including the System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) for integrating Java workloads with core business applications, the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) designed to help free-up computing capacity and lower IT costs, and the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) to optimize Linux workloads running on the mainframe, IBM said in its press release.

  • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • KDevelop 4.0.1 released

        I’m happy to announce the availability of our first patch level release for KDevelop 4.

      • A revolutionary road to get around.

        Well, here comes a good one I think. As I was talking to some people on the KDE IRC channel yesterday, there was a comment made about a possible way to orient new KDE users on how to use the desktop. However, I believe that users should be left clues to discover their desktop on their own. There should not be an intro popup or anything like that. Ponder about this for a moment.

      • KPresenter Invites Creative Minds to Template Contest

        Today, the KOffice team presents a contest to create great KPresenter slide templates, offering t-shirts for the winners and of course inclusion in the next KPresenter releases for all good submissions. Read on for information on the contest!

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3: The Future of the Desktop

        This September, a new desktop will be unveiled to the world in the form of GNOME 3. This desktop will change the way people view, work with, and think of the desktop. It’s different, it’s intuitive, and it follows the current evolution of what the desktop should be. But best of all, it’s all about Linux.

  • Distributions

    • Victorinox “Swiss Army” USB Flash Drives

      I have owned a Victorinox USB flash drive for several years now – long enough that it is only a 512MB unit, and it was considered “typical” at the time that I got it. I recently decided it was time to get a new one with a capacity more typical by today’s standards. My basic selection criteria was very simple – besides the capacity, it must not have any knife or scissors which would cause me problems when taking it in my backpack on commercial flights.

    • Reviews

      • Screenshot Tour Of Parted Magic 5.0

        Parted Magic is a Slackware-based Linux distro which is made for the sole purpose of partitioning hard disks. Parted Magic comes with tools like GParted, TestDisk, fdisk etc. The latest release, Parted Magic 0.5 was released yesterday and it includes Linux kernel 2.6.34.1, GParted 0.6.1 etc.

    • New Releases

      • T2 System Development Environment 8.0 arrives

        After several years of development, German T2 creator Rene Rebe has announced the release of version 8.0 of his cross compiling Linux distribution System Development Environment (SDE), T2 SDE. According to Rebe, the latest release includes more than 10,000 Subversion revisions, hundreds of new packages, performance improvements and several new features.

      • Sabayon Linux 5.3 XFCE and LXDE Spins Are Now Availble

        The Sabayon Linux team has now released two new flavours of the Gentoo-based Linux distro packed with alternative desktop environments for those who prefer them or have slower computers. The Sabayon 5.3 XFCE and Sabayon 5.3 LXDE ‘spins’ are more experimental in nature than the regular release though they are considered stable enough for regular use. This is just the first step, more spins are planned, and these two will continue to evolve until they reach a more mature state.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      Flavours and Variants

      • Xubuntu Artwork

        Some love Gnome, others love KDE, for me it’s XFCE all the way. When I jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon several years ago it was only natural that I’d use Xubuntu.

      • Linux Mint 9 (KDE Edition): The Kubuntu Killer

        If you’re looking for a great KDE distribution built on Ubuntu packages, Linux Mint KDE is the one to get. Forget Kubuntu, Mint does everything it does and more. In fact, it’s everything Kubuntu used to be. By itself, Mint’s KDE edition shines with custom tools, a customized appearance, and attention to detail at just about every turn. Distributions like this one make it harder for me to choose a single distro to stick with, as there are many great ones out there to try out.

        [...]

        Overall: 5/5 (Great!)

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Why open source doesn’t always mean open on smartphones [OSCON2010]

        I caught an excellent presentation by Aaron Williamson from the Software Freedom Law center here at OSCON yesterday examining why smartphones built on open source software aren’t as open as they possibly could be. What Williams talked about was often eye opening, though there were a few points I found myself disagreeing with him on.

        He started the presentation by talking about Motorola’s Droid X and the controversy that was stirred up when hacking enthusiasts discovered that Motorola had implemented an encrypted boot loader that forced the device to boot into a “recovery” mode in the event a custom ROM was detected on the device. While this was shocking (and even infuriating) to some, The only thing setting Motorola apart from the other Android OEMS in this case is that they’re actually enforcing the restrictions mandated by the OS maker.

      • FCam adds RAW and HDR capture to Nokia N900

        Mobile photography could get a shot in the arm thanks to the combined efforts of Stanford University researchers and Nokia Research, who have pushed a new open-source digital photography platform out the door. FCam – or “Frankencamera” – is initially available for the Nokia N900, and unlocks high-end functionality like RAW image capture, full manual controls and low-light imagery through combining multiple shots of varying ISO and exposure settings.

    • Android

      • Google to open Android NDK?

        In two reports filed from this week’s OSCON conference, The Register says that Google will open Android’s internal development kit to contributors, and that Linux maintainers are holding tough in negotiating with the search giant regarding Android’s readmission to the kernel. Meanwhile, Linux 2.6.35 RC6 was released, featuring enhancements to network scalability, memory management, and sleep-wait detection.

      • Linux Syncs Great With Droids

        Interest levels in syncing music collections have notched up a bit of late with the introduction of a plethora of new Android-based super phones. That is, unless you happen to be one of those owners with a large quantity of digital music encumbered by digital rights management (DRM) better known as copy protection. In that case, you might want to do some research into converting said digital files into a more portable format. Meanwhile, for the rest, with media ready to load up on a new cool phone, we’ll take a look at Linux options.

      • The Android Mobile Development Platform: A Reference Guide

07.23.10

Links 23/7/2010: Bank Fraud in Retrospect, Wikileaks Hunt

Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

  • The background to the Gray and Hilton libel case

    At about 2pm this afternoon the High Court will rule on whether the libel claim against Labour bloggers John Gray and Alex Hilton can be struck out for abuse of process.

    My friend Robert Dougans, who of course acted for Simon Singh, is formally representing Alex Hilton, and I am in turn one of the lawyers helping Robert Dougans.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs Can’t Say It Dodged This F-Bomb: Jonathan Weil

      While the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud lawsuit against Goldman Sachs may be over, the myths about what’s contained in the settlement agreement seem to have taken on a life of their own.

      There’s been so much misinformation floating around on this subject that it’s time to set the record straight. Contrary to many reports over the past week, the SEC didn’t back off any of its fraud allegations. Nor will Goldman be allowed to deny the SEC’s harshest accusations. Yet over and over, articles and analyst reports keep popping up asserting otherwise.

    • Did Goldman Sachs Get Off Easy? NYT Editorial

      Next is the more disturbing question: Did the S.E.C. let Goldman off too easy? As has been widely noted, the $550 million settlement, which has been approved by a federal judge, is chump change compared with Goldman’s bonus pool, and less even than Goldman’s depressed second-quarter profits.

    • Goldman to sell benchmark-size 5-year notes – IFR

      Benchmark offerings are typically at least $500 million in size. No timing was given for the deal.

    • Goldman Sachs reaches $60 million securities settlement with Missouri

      The investment firm of Goldman Sachs will repurchase up to $60 million in auction rate securities from Missouri investors who were caught up in the market meltdown in early 2008.

      The settlement was announced Wednesday by Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. This marks the 15th auction rate settlement in Missouri leading to the reimbursement of more than $1.5 billion for investors.

    • Morgan Stanley’s Pay Set-Aside Climbs as Goldman Sachs’s Falls

      Morgan Stanley, buoyed by rising revenue, set aside 37 percent more money to pay employees in the first half of 2010 even as rivals Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank lowered their compensation expenses.

    • Pay Czar to Cite Goldman, JPMorgan, Citi: Report

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Citigroup Inc are among those Obama administration pay czar Kenneth Feinberg will cite for having made “ill-advised” payments, the Wall Street Journal reported on its web site on Thursday.

    • Goldman Sachs Spends 40 Percent More On Lobbying In Second Quarter

      As Goldman Sachs faced arguably one of its most challenging quarter in decades — on several fronts, from SEC charges and lagging profits to financial regulatory reform and renewed scrutiny of all its activities — the firm increased its spending on lobbying by almost 40% in the second quarter of 2010 and has already spent almost as much in the first half of this year as it did in all of 2009.

      In its most recent lobbying report filed last night, Goldman spent $1.58 million to influence Congress and the White House on a host of issues including Wall Street reform — specifically derivatives regulation, bank tax and financial risk management — the much-debated unemployment benefits extension, municipal finance, small business funding, climate change legislation and transportation funding.

    • Who Really Won in Goldman Sachs’ Settlement With the SEC?
    • Daniel Dravot, Goldman Sachs, and the SEC

      Goldman is not a mere mortal king but has been viewed in some circles as a god on Wall Street. Unfortunately, when Goldman kissed Paulson, the latter bit and the former bled; and now Goldman is astride the rope bridge, bejeweled and crowned but imperiled as the SEC hacks away.

    • Goldman’s Go-Round

      When Goldman Sachs released its first-quarter results in April, its strong profits were overshadowed by news of a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission accusing the firm of fraud in a sale of mortgage-related securities. When it released its second-quarter results on Tuesday, its plunging profits — down 82 percent from the same period a year earlier — overshadowed the $550 million it paid to settle the S.E.C. case last week.

    • Federal Report Faults Banks on Huge Bonuses

      With the financial system on the verge of collapse in late 2008, a group of troubled banks doled out more than $2 billion in bonuses and other payments to their highest earners. Now, the federal authority on banker pay says that nearly 80 percent of that sum was unmerited.

    • Goldman Sachs Said to Give AIG-Hedging List to Investigators

      The list was sought by panels reviewing the beneficiaries of New York-based AIG’s $182.3 billion government bailout, said the people, who declined to be identified because the information is private. Goldman Sachs, which received $12.9 billion after the 2008 rescue tied to contracts with the insurer, has said it didn’t need AIG to be rescued because it was hedged against the firm’s failure.

    • SEC Inspector General Expands Probe to Include Goldman Sachs Settlement

      The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s internal watchdog said he will expand his probe into whether politics drove an agency lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to include the timing behind a $550 million settlement with the company.

    • Pimco Hires Goldman Sachs’s Gordon in Emerging Stocks

      Pacific Investment Management Co., the bond-fund firm that last year began a push into equities, hired Maria Gordon from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s asset- management unit to start an emerging-market stocks group.

      Gordon was head of the emerging-markets equity team at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London, where she oversaw about $8 billion in assets, the Newport Beach, California-based firm said in a statement. Gordon, who plans to join in October, will eventually run a group of four to six people and will be based in London.

    • Fairfield, Madoff, Goldman, BP, UBS in Court News

      Fairfield Greenwich Group co-founder Walter Noel was sued by the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard Madoff’s firm as part of an amended lawsuit that names 43 new defendants.

      Noel and the other defendants worked with Madoff and his firm “to commit, and exponentially expand, the single largest financial fraud in history,” trustee Irving Picard said in the complaint filed yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. “Every dollar the defendants purportedly ‘earned,’ and every dollar they kept to unjustly enrich themselves, was stolen money.”

    • Goldman Sachs Resort & Casino

      Goldman Sachs is proud to announce a consumer-enriching expansion from the hallowed halls of Wall Street to the glittering neon of Las Vegas. In addition to continuing our world-class wealth-friendly Private Wealth Management and Personal Banking services; our internationally-recognized client-focused Global Investment Research services; our award-winning, growth-facilitating Debt Financing teams, we are excited to unveil plans for the globally diversified, entertainment-enhanced, Goldman Sachs Lounge & Casino, perfect for both the high roller, and the high-net-worth individual, financial institution, corporation and/or government.

    • The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It

      While Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008 when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. We speak to Harper’s contributing editor Frederick Kaufman.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Assange No-Show at Hacker Conference

      Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was a no-show at the annual New York City hacker conference HOPE, after five Homeland Security agents turned up the day before he scheduled to speak.

      After an army intelligence analyst blew the whistle and leaked 150,000 State Department classified diplomatic cables and an aerial attack video to Wikileaks, conference organizers warned in June that Assange, a scheduled keynote speaker, might not turn up if hew wanted to avoid detention.

    • Top earning Tory: ban protests to save money

      In the past controversial plays have had to be shut down because the police did not want to bear the costs of policing the protests.

      With Boris increasingly displaying authoritarianism – banning Democracy village and threatening motorcycle protesters – it looks increasingly like the Tories aren’t as enthusiastic about civil liberties as they’ve claimed.

    • Comment: Labour must repent on civil liberties

      The term ‘progressive’ is a pernicious and treacherous thing. It is not a belief system. It doesn’t denote a series of beliefs or policies. It is a sentiment, a vague allusion. It translates as ‘leftish’. Its political usefulness lies in this absence of meaning, allowing right-wingers to attract moderates without actually committing to any specific proposals.

  • Net Neutrality

    • No need for net neutrality action, says UK regulator

      SNIPPET: While US telcos, politicians, user rights activists and big media companies have spent the past three years wrangling, tussling, lobbying and shouting about net neutrality, the issue has never caused much trouble elsewhere.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • P2PU Call for Courses

      The Peer 2 Peer University is gearing up to launch its third cycle of courses this coming September, and we’re looking for new faces to join the community. Do you have an idea for a six week course? Whether it’s Physics 101 or Poker and Strategic Thinking, all ideas are welcome. You can propose a course at http://wiki.p2pu.org/Create-a-Course (deadline is August 6, 2010).

    • Copyrights

      • Barry Sookman Works For The Canadian Recording Industry Association

        For the last six months I’ve been calling on Barry Sookman to disclose who he was working for. Barry claims that his blog is his personal thoughts. I claim that everyone is affected by their friends and relatives, their work, and other contacts, and that therefore his employer has an affect on his blog, and must be disclosed.

        Barry has avoided the issue. He knows that I know who he is working for. He knows that if I can get him to publicly state who he is working for, I can do damage to his cause, and therefore his best option was to say nothing (which is an oddity in it’s own right – Barry is ever more verbose than I am), while I continue to pretend that I don’t know who he’s working for, and that I can’t find out who he’s working for.

        But the cat is now out of the bag. A comment was made on the blog, and I decided to let it stand. Barry Sookman works for the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

Links: Free Software Grows in Europe

Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

British passport

Summary: This week’s news about Free software

Free Software/Open Source

  • Silicos NV ports proprietary software into open source domain

    On June 22, 2010, the Belgium-based computational chemistry company Silicos NV has made a strategic decision to port the majority of its proprietary software into the open source arena. The decision has been made to port all of these tools and the corresponding C/C++ API’s into the Open Babel environment under a GNU GPL licensing scheme. This strategic decision will position Silicos NV as one of the leading computational chemistry services companies to support the open source business model. According to Hans De Winter, Silicos’ CSO, “the decision will allow Silicos to move forward rapidly on the expanding wave of open source software tools, and will significantly expand its possibilities of providing services to customers in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry.”

  • TrueCrypt levels up: Hardware acceleration, convenience improvements

    There’s no killer feature update to TrueCrypt 7 as there was in version 6. Still, the latest revision to the popular open-source and free encryption program for Windows, Mac, and Linux debuts some new features and security enhancements that make it worth the upgrade.

  • Why Does FOSS Development Lag the Innovation Curve?

    Are open source developers on the ball about delivering alternatives to cutting-edge proprietary products and services, or do they lag the proprietary innovators? That topic came up at this week’s OSCON conference in Portland, and there is a case to be made for the idea that open source developers don’t deliver key products in key categories fast enough.

  • Libre Graphics Magazine #0 [PDF}

  • Events

    • O’Reilly Open Source Awards announced

      At the OSCON 2010 open source convention taking place in Portland, Oregon, O’Reilly Media’s Edd Dumbill has announced the winners of this years O’Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their “dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source”.

  • Oracle

    • Woah, It Looks Like Oracle Will Stand Behind OpenSolaris

      As the first email of its kind in months, Alan Coopersmith who is a known X.Org contributor and longtime Sun Microsystems employee now working for Oracle, has written a new email entitled “IPS distro-import changes needed for X packages for nv_145.” Alan immediately began this public email by saying, “Just when you thought you’d never see another one of these biweekly mails….”

      The rest of Alan’s email goes on to talk about the X.Org packages in Nevada build 145 that need to be updated. Beyond the technical details for the X IPS package changes needed, no details were given about when we may actually see an OpenSolaris Nevada Build 145 released publicly or the stable release of OpenSolaris 2010.XX. Unless Oracle is just misguiding their employees about the future of Sun’s OS or letting them waste more resources on the OS while knowing it will be killed off, it looks like we may see Oracle starting to get behind OpenSolaris.

      For now we can only hope Oracle issues an official statement shortly, which would ideally be backed by the long-awaited Oracle OpenSolaris 2010 release.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Who You Gonna Call? Q&A With Software Freedom Law Center’s Eben Moglen

      The Software Freedom Law Center provides free legal representation and other law-related services to open source software developers. The organization began in 2005 under the direction of Eben Moglen, a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School.

      His law center represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects. The SFLC’s goal is to help non-profit FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) projects succeed.

      [...]

      LIN: How is your office organized?

      Moglen: We are an actual nonprofit entity with lawyers on staff. I have six lawyers working in New York City and two lawyers working in India. These people are salaried, working full time on behalf of our clients within the structure of the organization.

  • Project Releases

  • Europe

    • The increasing importance of open source for the EU

      An interesting video message from Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, was published last week. The message was recorded in support for GNOME and its events, such as the upcoming GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference.

      [...]

      Additionally, Kroes stresses the importance of strong communities and the role they play in shaping Europe’s digital future. And now the EU commission has the opportunity to put the money where their mouth is, as it recently announced to fund projects worth 1.2 billion Euros to be launched in 2011. This is a genuine opportunity to invest in open source software and in open source companies to make sure that the open source offering can compete better with companies that offer proprietary alternatives.

    • IT: Bolzano region begins discussion on open source strategy

      The administration of the Bolzano region in Italy will discuss its IT strategy with advocates of free and open source. The director of the IT department has accepted an invitation by the regional Linux user group (Lugbz) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

    • Idea of her Majesty’s Treasury: Switch to Free Software

      What ideas does her Majesty’s Treasury follow in those days to reduce costs? First they asked 600000 people working for the government about that, got 60000 ideas out of it (that equals one idea per 10 people asked), processed them and put that into 31 proposals. Two of them deal with Free Sofware…

  • Openness/Sharing

    • An Uncommon Commons in Linz

      As its name suggests, a commons is an outgrowth of things held in common, like common land. This has been extended to the digital sphere with great success – notably in the world of free software. But here’s an interesting move that takes the commons back to its common-land roots: the Austrian city of Linz is creating an “open commons region”…

    • Move Commons: Moving Beyond Creative Commons

      Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier’s Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new force (and I want to emphasise that I am not at all bitter about the fact that he didn’t mention Rebel Code once in his description of the early days of free software – nope, not bitter in the slightest.)

      I bought a dead tree version, but it’s freely available online under a CC licence (sadly not an option when Rebel Code came out…for the simple reason Creative Commons was being formulated at the same time I was writing it.) That’s appropriate, since the book is largely about the evolution of the CC licences – and a fascinating tale it is, too.

  • Programming

    • Perl Creator Hints at Imminent Perl 6 Release

      In his annual “State of the Onion” speech at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Perl creator Larry Wall hinted that the long-awaited version 6 of the Perl programming language might finally be released soon. He also ruminated about the effect that Perl 6 would have, once it is released.

    • PHP 5.3.3 and 5.2.14 Officially Released

      The PHP Development Team just announced today the availability of PHP 5.3.3 and PHP 5.2.14. The PHP 5.3.3 comes on improving the stability and security of the 5.3.x branch with more than 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related so all users are highly encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Links: GNU/Linux Breakthrough in India, Linux 2.6.35 News

Posted in News Roundup at 2:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Indian man

Summary: India’s next generation may commoditise computers with GNU/Linux (and other good news)

GNU/Linux

  • Why I Love Linux, by Kale Stedman

    From time to time, we like to give our sponsors the ability to talk about their products and share them with our readers. These posts are clearly labeled as “Sponsored Posts” as to not confuse them with our regular daily content. Our sponsors are offering products that are targeted to our reader demographics, so hopefully you’ll find something that is appealing as you read through these posts.

  • Three Tools I’d Love to See in Linux

    AIX has two tools that, as a Linux enthusiast, I’m envious of: makesysb, and cfgmgr. The first tool, makesysb, can clone a running system onto a bootable DVD. It’s very similar to other cloning tools like G4L and Clonezilla, but it’s built into the operating system, and doesn’t require a reboot. It’s great for system migration, and for keeping a backup around for disaster recovery. We try to keep makesysb images on DVD for all of our systems quarterly.

  • A response to OSGUI video 6 disadvantages of Linux

    I follow a number of technology websites, video and podcasts when I get the time. This video has hit me as a bit of a surprise as it’s from someone that is normally pro-linux. Here’s my response to the issues raised.

  • India

    • India unveils $35 computer for students

      The Linux-based computer is equipped with an Internet browser, a PDF reader and several other facilities, she said.

    • India Unveils $35 Laptop

      An inexpensive laptop is one of the most commonly-discussed “want” devices for any poor second or third world country. While the OLPC $100 laptop, with its Linux OS and hand-cranking charger has been a serious boon, it’s still fairly expensive to produce and sell to interested companies, so the Indian government has decided to fill its own need by producting a $35 laptop that features a touch screen, 2GB of storage, USB port, color display, and WiFi Internet capabilities.

    • India Reveals Linux-Based $35 Tablet, We Reveal Why It’s Likely Fake

      The happy man you see above is not the nine gazillionth owner of an iPad, but the Indian minister for HR Development, Kapil Sibal. What he’s holding in his hand is, he claims, a $35 tablet that will give the OLPC a run for its money. It is, he told the press, “our answer to MIT’s $100 computer.” Developed by students and professors at India’s tech universities–including the IITs of Madras and Bombay.

  • Audiocasts

  • IBM

    • IBM Launches ‘Smart Cloud’ To Optimize Dev-and-Test Lifecycle

      Inside IBM’s dev-and-test cloud environment, there is an ‘open’ foundation architecture which supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise, as well as Java. For extensibility, clients can work with their own images, as well as images from IBM Mashup Center,

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.35-rc5
    • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.35 (Part 3) – Network support

      Several patches submitted by a Google developer will enable the kernel to push considerably more data through network cables on multi-core systems. Some of the LAN and Wi-Fi drivers also promise greater throughput, or to use less power, due to various driver enhancements.

    • Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle?

      The “scalability of Linus,” in fact, was the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet earlier this month on LWN, and it’s sparked quite a discussion.

      “The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the ‘official’ repository,” Corbet begins.

      A problem with that scenario, he notes, is the potential for repeats of what calls “the famous ‘Linus burnout’ episode of 1998.”

    • GStreamer “Safety First” Gets Released

  • Graphics Stack

    • [ANNOUNCE] xorg-server 1.8.99.905
    • The ATI Radeon R600/700 Gallium3D Driver

      We have talked about the ATI R300g driver a lot lately since it’s working quite well with the R500 hardware and many times is faster than the classic Mesa driver while it also provides OpenGL 2.1 support (compared to OpenGL 1.5 with the classic stack) and works with more games and applications. The R300g driver, which started out as a Google Summer of Code project by Corbin Simpson, soon enough may end up replacing the classic Mesa R300 driver as the default open-source driver. Unfortunately, the R600g driver hasn’t been moving along quite as fast.

    • ATI Gallium3D + Wine Is Bettered A Bit

      If the impressive rate of Gallium3D improvements was not enough, there’s more good news for those of you running ATI Radeon R300-R500 graphics cards (up through the Radeon X1000 series) with the open-source Gallium3D driver: the Wine graphics support just got a tiny bit better. Committed to the Mesa repository this afternoon is support for the GL_ARB_depth_clamp OpenGL extension within the Mesa state tracker and as of right now it’s hooked-up for use by the R300g driver.

  • Applications

    • The All in One Deskbar Applet

      A few words of warning before you start adding Deskbar-applet to the panel. It might take some time to start, took around 10+ seconds on my system. So, be patient. Once done, you know where to find it. Now, click on the icon and you will see a search bar.

    • Ear Candy Automatically Fades And Raises Volume Levels In Linux

      Linux only: Free utility Ear Candy makes your sound system smarter. If you’re listening to music and a Skype call comes in, or you load a YouTube video, Ear Candy gently lowers your music volume to let the other sounds through.

    • Proprietary

      • Is this the end of the road for VMware Server?

        There has been quite a bit of interesting chatter and a whole lot of speculation within the VMware community lately about the future and viability of its free VMware Server product. VMware does seem focused on the vSphere product and how it ultimately relates to cloud computing, but have they turned a blind eye to VMware Server?

    • Instructionals

    • Games

      • 0 A.D. Reaches Third Pre-Alpha Release

        0 A.D., the open-source RTS game that could radically alter the gaming scene on Ubuntu when it’s completed, recently reached another milestone with its third pre-alpha release. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s playable yet in any meaningful sense. But it has come a long way since we last checked in with the project in March 2010, so here are some updates.

      • Babylon 5: I’ve Found Her

        Thanks to humberto for letting us know Space Dream Factory have released their first beta of the game Babylon 5: I’ve Found Her for Linux.

    • Desktop Environments

    • Distributions

      • One floppy, dozens of tools

        It may have been a tiny bit misleading the other day, to drop a hint at a floppy-based OS that superseded anything I was discussing at the time. It’s true that I do have something very useful and very flexible to mention — mostly as a note to myself, of course — but it wasn’t 100 percent accurate to allude to it in the context of floppy OSes.

      • Reviews

        • Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Edition On My Dell Mini 10 v

          So how does the netbook edition look on my dell mini ? amazing ! the icons/interface look better and the interface setup is perfect for the small screen estate of the netbook. the old 8.04 ubuntu version was boring , and this version is alive and makes me want to use the netbook even more. the 8.04 version doesn’t have an update OS feature compared to the later releases so it’s best to upgrade to a later version or 9.10. I can see why a lot of netbook ubuntu users are upgrading to the netbook version , it simply rocks !

        • Salix OS 13.1 LXDE Screenshots

      • Mandrake

        • Mandriva Spring 2010

          If you have some spare time, you can give Mandriva Spring 2010 a try. I’m interested in two other products by Mandriva, the InstantOn and Flash. InstantOn boots in less than 10 seconds while Flash is a mobile desktop in a USB key. Unfortunately, they are not free.

        • 10 years, time to change

          Now is a good time to change, so I’m leaving Mandriva at the end of this month (I’m already off, so don’t search me on irc / mail ).

      • Debian Family

        • Debian Linux Benchmarked Against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD & FreeBSD

          Back in January, we published the first benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: the spin of Debian that replaces the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD kernel while retaining most of the same GNU user-land and it uses the GNU C library. With those original tests comparing Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Linux version ended up winning in 18 of the 27 tests. However, over the past six months, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has matured and it’s also moved to using the FreeBSD 7.3 kernel by default (compared to 7.2 back in January) and the FreeBSD 8.0 kernel is also emerging as a viable option that can be obtained using Debian’s package management system. Today we have updated test numbers looking at the performance of Debian with the FreeBSD kernel using two different notebooks where we ran the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD packages with both the FreeBSD 7.3 and 8.0 kernels, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, and then finally we tested the pure FreeBSD 7.3 and FreeBSD 8.0 operating systems.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The best advert for Ubuntu you probably never saw

            OMG! reader Sebastian stopped by the OMG! Mailbox to drop off a link to this immensely impressive Dell/Ubuntu promotional video that, curiously, I – nor anyone I showed this to prior to posting – had ever come across previously.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 9 LXDE: A Quick Glance

              Breaking with past tradition, the Linux Mint folks have done away with “Community Editions”, instead bringing the non-Gnome flavors of Mint fully under the Mint umbrella. Linux Mint 9 LXDE is now in general release. Here are my thoughts.

            • Linux Mint 9 (KDE Edition): The Kubuntu Killer

              As time goes on, I am becoming more and more fond of Linux Mint. The latest version of Mint (Isadora) was released back in May, and when I reviewed it I fell in love with it. However, I’m primarily a KDE user so I’ve been anxiously awaiting the KDE edition, which is about to be released. Will it be worth the wait? Absolutely.

            • Ubuntu Muslim Edition 10.04 (Sabily)

              Summary: Sabily 10.04 is a fine update for anyone looking for a Muslim version of Ubuntu. It takes all of Ubuntu 10.04’s new features and gives them an Islamic flavor.

              Rating: 4/5

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Phones

        • Can WebOS Rise in the Enterprise?

          HP and Palm officials are now largely silent on plans for WebOS as they figure out the details of what to do with it. There’s been some talk about using WebOS in HP printers (perhaps so they can directly run some applications around photo editing and document management) and porting WebOS to work on tablets, not just smartphones — both are obvious directions for WebOS.

        • GENIVI goes with MeeGo

          Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the GENIVI Alliance has chosen MeeGo as the basis of their next reference release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI).

Links 23/7/2010: Misc. News and BSD Talk

Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

Leftovers

  • Hack the government

    Code for America has a rather novel notion. It is that the U.S. would be a far, far better place if we stopped complaining about local government and started hacking it

    No, no, they don’t mean hacking it open. Well, actually, they do in a way. What Code for America would like to do is to open up city governments to citizens and move into the 21st century. That’s because, as Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media stated at the The O’Reilly Open Source Convention, we need to stop thinking of the government as a semi-broken candy machine and get to work on fixing it.

    The “fixing it” part is where non-profit Code for America Executive Director Jennifer Pahlka wants to see developers start devoting their efforts. Why? Because she’s found that much of the government isn’t just using out-dated IT, it’s using idiotic IT practices.

  • Facebook Wants to Own All Your Social Graphs, Not Just One

    Facebook has popularized the use of the term “social graph” as a way of describing all the various social connections you have to people in your life, both online and in the real world. But Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch.com and an angel investor in a number of web startups, says in a blog post published today that there is more than just one kind of social graph — in fact, he argues that there are actually about half a dozen different kinds, including graphs related to location and recommendations. Whether he is right or not, one thing seems pretty clear: Facebook not only wants to own them all, but is well on its way to doing so.

  • Newspapers

    • Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits

      Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

      “We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.”

    • What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?

      Rupert Murdoch is trying to make news at the Times and Sunday Times in London—but he’s not reporting on it. Will his paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that’s being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2£ ($3) a week for what’s heretofore been free.

  • Science

    • Aussie lasers stop satellite collisions, death

      An Australian company is developing a laser tracking system that will help prevent collisions between satellites and space debris, thanks to a $4 million grant from the Federal Government.

    • Heftiest Star Discovery Shatters Cosmic Record

      Astronomers have discovered the most massive stars known, including one at more than 300 times the mass of our sun – double the size that scientists thought heavyweight stars could reach.

  • Security/Aggression

    • US army heat-ray gun in Afghanistan

      A newly-developed heat-ray gun that burns the skin but doesn’t cause permanent injury is now with US troops in Afghanistan.

    • U.S. Navy Laser Weapon Shoots Down Drones in Test [Video]

      In a grainy, black-and-white video that looks like a home movie of a UFO attack a sleek aircraft streaks through the sky one minute, only to burst into flames the next and plummet into the sea. The silent video, which Raytheon Co. debuts Monday at the U.K.’s Farnborough International Air Show 2010, however, is not science fiction. The defense contractor says it depicts part of a test conducted in May during which the U.S. Navy used a solid-state laser to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles over the Pacific Ocean.

    • Security vs. Convenience

      Although my intent is not to start the next GNOME/KDE-level war, it seems there must be a happy medium between total desktop insecurity and total desktop unusability. Linux offers so many ways to secure data that it’s important to realize it’s okay for folks to have different needs and desires. Sure, there are some basic security measures we all should take—things like:

      * Don’t write your password on a sticky note fastened to your monitor.
      * Don’t leave your e-mail account logged in on a public computer.
      * Keep your system updated.
      * Do have a password.
      * Don’t use “password” as your password.

  • Environment

    • Possibilities for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?

      Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size – extra large.

  • Animal Abuse

    • It’s the World’s Strongest, Most Expensive Beer — Inside a Squirrel

      Oh, and did we mention that the bottles come in stuffed animals-like stuffed animals that were once alive? The 12 bottles have been made featuring seven dead stoats (a kind of weasel), four squirrels and one rabbit. James Watt, one of the two guys behind BrewDog, put it better than we ever could: “The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between taxidermy, art and craft brewing.” Just like we’ve all been waiting for!

  • Finance

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Turkish Citizens Take To The Streets Over Internet Freedoms

      Outrage and concern finally boiled over in Istanbul on Saturday as thousands took to the streets in protest of Turkey’s Internet Censorship policy.

      Physical protests of Internet policy are really a never-before-seen occurance, even with all the twists and turns of cyberspace regulation that have occurred in the past decade. While the protests thankfully remained peaceful, they drove home a strong point of disapproval to the Turkish government that will hopefully be heard and acknowledged.

    • Internet in China: real names, please

      A leading Chinese Internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in China’s portion of cyberspace, calling for new rules to require people to use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, according to a human rights group.

    • Australian government blocks out 90% of document on web-spying plans

      Australia’s web-censors have outdone themselves. After Stephen Conroy (the Australian minister notorious for proposing the Great Firewall of Australia) promised greater transparency in his government’s efforts to regulate the Internet, they replied to a Freedom of Information request on plans to monitor Australians’ internet traffic with a document that was 90 percent blacked out…

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Copyrights

    • Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing

      Acting as a middleman between business owners and graphic designers, the 99designs site hosts contests in which clients post their needs–website design, logos, print packages–and designers compete to fill them. Instead of bidding for the job, designers submit finished work tailored to the client specifications in the contest listing. 99designs calls it a win-win scenario: Its clients gain access to the site’s pool of 73,000 active designers, while the designers are given a chance to compete for “upwards of $600,000 in awards paid out monthly.”

    • Designer Leading The Charge For Fashion Copyright… Caught Copying Someone Else’s Design

      For many, many years, we’ve pointed to the growing body of research on how the fashion industry thrives, in part, because of its lack of copyright. However, time and time again, we hear about attempts by big designers to add a special fashion copyright. This makes no sense. The purpose of copyright law is to create incentives to create new works. Yet, the fashion industry is thriving. It’s highly competitive and very innovative, as designers keep looking to outdo one another. At the same time, the “knockoffs” help spread the concept of “what’s fashionable” up and down the economic spectrum in record time. This is not an industry that needs “incentives” for creativity. The only reason to put in place such a law is to prevent competition, not to encourage more innovation.

    • German court overturns injunction against RapidShare

      File sharing service RapidShare doesn’t have to employ a word filter to combat the sharing of copyrighted files, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has now confirmed. The court reversed a preliminary injunction against RapidShare it issued last year, handing the company another legal victory.

    • U.S. publisher hits schoolgirl, 10, with £1,300 bill for using Chaplin song in her charity video

      It seemed the perfect way for a budding young actress to raise money for a good cause.

      Inspired by her grandfather’s love of Charlie Chaplin, ten-year-old Bethany Hare dressed up like the legendary comic to star in her own video tribute.

    • Digitisation and its discontents

      The band of analogue holdouts is gradually dwindling. Because they are so few and so large, the holdouts are valuable: any technology firm that can persuade the Beatles to go digital will reap fat rewards. Theft provides another stimulus. All the analogue holdouts are widely available online—just not legally. That seems to be persuading even Harry Potter to look more closely at digital distribution. As Neil Blair of the Christopher Little agency, which represents J.K. Rowling, admits, holding the books back from e-readers “is not the best strategy for combating piracy”.

    • U.S. targeting China in new anti-piracy drive

      The United States will make China “a significant focus” of its beefed-up efforts to fight global piracy and counterfeiting of U.S. goods ranging from CDs to manufactured products, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
      A customs officer displays a counterfeit branded mobile phone at a rubbish dump site in Kunming

      A customs officer displays a counterfeit branded mobile phone at a rubbish dump site in Kunming, Yunnan province April 26, 2010.

      “It’s fair to say China raises a particularly troubling set of issues,” Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, said in prepared testimony to the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

      “Therefore, China will be a significant focus of our enforcement efforts as we address intellectual property infringement abroad,” Espinel said testifying on the Obama administration’s new intellectual property enforcement strategy, which was mandated by Congress.

    • Fan Feeding Frenzy: AFP’s New EP FTW

      From our view here at Bandcamp HQ, yesterday’s launch of Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele less resembled a record release than a coordinated strike of ravenous piranha. In one three minute period, her fanbase snapped up $15,000 in music and merch. It didn’t let up much from there: 4,000 digital EPs were sold, the vinyl sold out, most of the high end packages disappeared in minutes, and at the time of this writing, it looks like every other package will be gone in a matter of days. Late last night I caught up with Amanda’s Man-Who-Make-Internet-Go, Sean Francis, just before he passed out (he’d slept five hours in the last 48).

    • Google Spent $100 Million Defending Viacom Suit

      We wrote about all the top-notch lawyers Google used defending its YouTube division against Viacom’s copyright claims.

    • The copyright cops

      In fact, as a glance at the composition of the PPCA’s board underlines, the agency is run largely by and for the record industry. The board is stacked with record industry executives such as Warner’s Ed St John, Sony’s Denis Handlin and Universal’s George Ash, along with former Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison and prominent artist manager Bill Cullen. Representing around 75 per cent of the recorded music industry by sales, the PPCA is effectively a legalised cartel. (Like APRA, it even has a special dispensation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to operate as a monopolistic collection agency.)

    • ACTA

      • Could the EU Walk Away From ACTA?

        Over the past week, I have had several posts on ACTA in the wake of the most recent leaked text, including a scorecard on the major remaining areas of disagreement, one assessing the growing rift between the U.S. and E.U., Canadian positions on ACTA, the changed U.S. position on anti-circumvention rules, and a look at geographical indications, a key issue for the EU. On top of these posts, there is additional information disclosed last weekend that Luc Devigne, the lead EU negotiator is taking on new responsibilities (though the EU says he will continue on ACTA).

      • Continuing secrecy on ACTA is unacceptable

        The main progressive group in the European Parliament today complained to EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, that Euro MPs have been denied the documents on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations.

        Mr De Gucht today held a one-hour discussion with members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs at the European Parliament. But S&D MEPs said there could be no serious debate since members do not know the content of the negotiations.

Clip of the Day

Jason Dixon Closing Remarks of DCBSDCon – BSD is Still Dying


Links: ForgeRock’s First Post, Firefox 4, LpOD 0.9.2…

Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Jump for joy

Summary: News links about Free/libre software

Free Software/Open Source

  • IT: Is Open Source SNORT Dead?
  • Free Software – Relevance and Utility

    I do not understand the concept of Free Software being evil in any way. We do not view family or community as evil. How could Free Software be evil? Families raise children and set them free. It would be frowned upon to raise children as slaves. Family, neighbours, communities and nations donate their labour and resources to help individuals and groups. That’s not evil. It is because we are social beings that we help one another.

  • Five Reasons You Don’t Need Microsoft Office 2010

    Have you looked at the new Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2010 yet? How many of its few, new features does your company really need? And are these features worth the investment? Here are five reasons your company doesn’t need to purchase Office 2010.

  • Inside Facebook’s Open Source Infrastructure

    Facebook connects its 500 million users using an array of open source software to enable social networking as well as data intelligence. Facebook’s open source Web serving infrastructure has a lot more than just the traditional LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack behind it.

  • Can one sponsor sustain a FOSS project on the long term?

    These days I am receiving quite a number of mails that ask the same question: If a FOSS project is sponsored by only one company or entity, do you think it’s a healthy project?

  • How to create an open source community

    Community. This little nine-letter word is the lifeblood of open source. Barely a day goes by without some aspect of it impacting our lives, be that via Linux, a local book club, your closest group of friends or any one of a million other places. In an age when anyone over 45 seems to have stories about the end of local communities, the open source community is thriving.

  • ForgeRock/SUN

    • ForgeRock Releases OpenAM 9.5 Software

      ForgeRock today announced general availability of OpenAM 9.5 software, the latest release of the OpenAM access management product, part of the I3 Platform. This represents the first full release of OpenAM since ForgeRock commenced sponsorship of the open source OpenAM project and provides a smooth migration option for Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8 users.

    • ✩ First Post!

      It’s significant for open source because it signals that the OpenAM community – especially the part on ForgeRock’s own team – is up to speed maintaining and evolving the code and that the transition from its former home is going well.

    • What does Oracle plan for Sun’s open-source projects?

      I get that Oracle runs on open-source software. I know that Oracle is a major Linux supporter. But, please, please dont mistake Oracle as an open-source, open-core, or any other kind of “open” business at heart. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, is all about making billions of dollars. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what all businesses are about. But, to Ellison open source is just the means to that end and nothing else. If a program doesn’t fit into his plan, it’s not going to get supported.

      So, while Oracle recently put up a page listing its native open-source projects and the ones that it inherited from Sun, don’t think for a minute that all those programs are actually going to be supported. They’re not.

  • Events

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla’s New JavaScript Engine Shows Its Teeth: Launch On September 1

      Mozilla has reached an important Milestone as its new JavaScript engine “JaegerMonkey” is now faster than the current “TraceMonkey” in a key benchmark. Mozilla wants JaegerMonkey to be faster than the competition and launch on September 1, which means that JaegerMonkey will make it into Firefox 4.0.

    • Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 Pre Brings App Tabs [For Linux Too!]
    • Firefox 4 ready to go

      A beta version of Firefox 4.0 has been released with a new look and new features

    • Mozilla’s open source evangelist takes new role

      As such, Blizzard will no longer be leading the the Evangelism group inside of Mozilla and will instead help to manage the web-facing side of Firefox full-time as the Web Platform Director. During his time at Mozilla, Blizzard notes that he has already worked closely with Mozilla’s engineering team, helping to determine what was important and what wasn’t inside of the project. Blizzard says that, while the ‘new’ job will be interesting, “It’s entirely built of soft skills: listening closely to web developers, both front end and back end.”

  • SaaS

    • Is the Cloud without risks?

      In February 2008 Amazon S3 crashed and the whole of Amazon S3 stopped for a few hours. In March 2009 a bug inside Google Docs had allowed unintended access to some private documents. Some people with cloud concerns ask, “What if my documents, stored by the provider of the web office (eg Google Docs) are lost?” Different question: what if your laptop is stolen or your hard disk crashes? If you are using cloud services or not, it’s always a good advice to have a backup of your data.

      [...]

      These hints can be used exactly the same when not using cloud services and they prove that it’s not very dangerous to use cloud. Or do you install non-open source software from sources you can’t trust? And you keep your credit card numbers secure all the time? And you do backups of your local data, don’t you?

    • VMware Channel Set to Attack Microsoft Exchange On Aug. 1

      VMware is preparing to attack Microsoft Exchange across the IT channel. The strategy calls for VMware’s channel partners to begin selling Zimbra — an open source email system — starting on Aug. 1, 2010. Here are the details, which The VAR Guy confirmed at HostingCon.

      [...]

      Pflaum also pointed out that VMware and Zimbra have no plans to build a VMware cloud and/or to host Zimbra directly for partners. Instead, Zimbra plans to leverage existing relationships with roughly 500 hosting companies that offer Zimbra.

  • CMS

    • Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress

      In the past few days, WordPress has become entangled in a debate about WordPress theme licensing. It was specifically centered around Thesis, one of the last notable proprietary theme holdouts. Chris Pearson, who develops and sells Thesis, refuses to license Thesis under the GNU General Public License that applies to WordPress and all WordPress-derived code.

    • WordPress vs. Thesis: The battle is over.

      If you’re not familiar with the background, however, the Cliff’s Notes version comes down to Thesis Theme using a license other than GPL, which created a conflict between Thesis Theme creator Chis Pearson and Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic (the parent of WordPress.com).

      For more in depth coverage, please take a look at our original post about the subject, and then the follow-up as well.

      Suffice it to say, we’re happy to see that Pearson will be working under GPL. It is worthy to note, however, that Thesis is now licensed under a GPL split.

    • WordPress vs Thesis: Put your money down

      If I were really vested in this issue and had money (and my last name was Mullenweg) this is what I would do: I’d just buy a copy of Thesis and then start distributing it. From the front page of WordPress. Hell, I’d make it the default theme, push it out as a “critical update”, and announce it all on video in a leotard with my face painted up like The Ultimate Warrior. (Don’t miss the “Warrior Fine Art Gallery”!)

  • Education

    • Schools and the NHS: does Linux even get a look in?

      So the NHS has decided not to renew a large Microsoft licensing deal. Basically it had agreed a while ago to spend £500 million on Microsoft software in return for a £300 million discount.

      What a bargain!

      No more though, in this time of cuts, just when we needed the money the most, the deal has been ditched and the NHS faces a massive licence bill. But it gets better; according to sources on the ground ‘the only option would be to move to free open source software’…but wait for this… ‘the staff would not move to an unfamiliar system’.

      So that’s it then.

      Literally they will pay for MS products with money they would otherwise use for the good. That’s how hard it is to introduce FOSS onto the desktops, even when those desktops are running crummy old DOS screens within MS XP home!

  • Semi-Open Source

    • The relationship between Open Core, dual licensing and contributions

      Open core is usually built by a set of internal open source components held together by a dual-licensed wrapper, plus proprietary modules on the outside. One of the best examples of this is Zimbra (an excellent product on its own) but MySQL in recent editions can be included in the same group. As discussed in previous posts, dual licensing hampers contributions because it requires an explicit agreement on ceding rights to the company that employs it, in order to be able to relicense it for the proprietary edition. This means that Open Core companies, in itself, will have an easier time in monetizing their software, but will receive much less contributions in exchange. As I wrote before, it is simply not possible to get something like Linux or Apache with Open Core.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Defects in Cardiac Medical Devices are a Life-or-Death Issue, says SFLC’s new report.

      New York, NY, July 21, 2010//Software vulnerabilities in life-sustaining medical devices such as pacemakers and infusion pumps pose a growing threat to public health, warns a new report published by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

      Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices will be presented at OSCON 2010 on July 23. It addresses the potentially fatal risk of source code defects in implantable medical devices and explores why patients, doctors and the public should insist that free and open source software be the standard approach.

      “The findings of the paper are important to anyone who has a friend or loved one with a pacemaker or insulin pump,” said the paper’s author and SFLC General Counsel, Karen Sandler. “Clearly, we need mandatory, public, and broad safety review of code that runs these devices. At the very least, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must require device manufacturers to submit software to the agency for review and safe keeping.”

  • Project Releases

    • SOGo 1.3.0 Final released

      The Inverse Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo 1.3.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on new features and improved stability over previous versions.

  • Government

    • Neelie Kroes Endorses FLOSS

      Kroes mentions Munich which has implemented FLOSS and open document flows but is still dragging its feet on GNU/Linux. They plan to be finished in 2013… If they run FLOSS apps, it is a puzzle to me why it is taking so long to move the OS. Maybe there is less urgency because the price of PCs dropped and they are running XP now… I just don’t know. Things like moving accounts and issuing memos on a few basic operations could be done on a weekend per department.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Help build a history of OCW

      As a start and a workspace, I’ve posted the timeline I pulled together for the MIT OpenCourseWare Milestone Celebration in 2007 on the Consortium wiki. I invite the community to log onto the wiki and add additional events and items (I obviously have to cover 2008-2011 still as well), or if you are note comfortable editing the wiki, simply send me an e-mail (scarson at ocwconsortium dot org) with your items and I will add them in.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source Hardware Gets Defined

        Members of the open source hardware community publicly issued a list of standards that define a specific piece of hardware as open source. Among the signatures on the document were MIT Media Lab and Arduino lead software developer David Mellis, Adafruit founder Limor Fried, Creative Commons VP of Science John Wilbanks, and Wired editor and DIY Drones founder Chris Anderson.

        There are eleven tenets to the open source hardware definition.

  • Programming

    • Fear of failure? Embrace it by failing fast.

      Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has a famous quote, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In the open source world, it is taken for granted that you want to open your work to the world quickly for the very simple reason that if you do, you make it possible for others to help you make it better faster (and you find the bugs).

  • Standards/Consortia

    • LpOD 0.9.2

      lpOD — languages & platforms OpenDocument. Definition of a Free Software API implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 standard. Development, for higher level use cases, in Python, Perl and Ruby languages. of a top-down oriented API.

Links: Many New Releases of GNU/Linux, More Tablets

Posted in GNU/Linux, News Roundup at 4:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Blue balloon

Summary: Latest steps taken towards operating systems freedom

GNU/Linux

  • Sony now facing single class-action for PS3 other-OS removal

    Sony did not make many friends in the tech community when the company forcibly removed the option to install Linux via a mandatory firmware update. The problem was simple: Sony had previously pushed this feature as an advantage its system held over its competitors, and later assured gamers that it would continue to be supported. That is, until Sony became spooked about the possibility of piracy. Lawsuits were filed, and Ars Technica has now learned that the court will bundle all seven suits into a single class-action case.

  • Use GNU/Linux

    GNU/Linux is an operating system. It allows us to run computers and create, find, change and display information better than that other OS:

    * Of the million busiest web sites 66% use Apache
    * The London Stock Exchange is switching to GNU/Linux because it works
    * 90% of the top 500 supercomputers use GNU/Linux
    * Brazil installed 356800 GNU/Linux desktops in schools

  • Relationships

    Fortunately, the world is filling up with young people for whom migrating to GNU/Linux is a welcome, refreshing change. The current generation of young people will live in a world where there is choice in computing platforms. There are many forces leading to that result. One of them is exposure to GNU/Linux in schools. Another is the access to GNU/Linux on low-priced gadgets (smartphones are getting to that state soon…).

  • Good News From All Over

  • Desktop

    • Linux First Steps

      First, most of the people who write me aren’t interested in the fine details of Linux. They are just sick and tired to death of Windows’ endless security problems or its costs. Indeed, most of them aren’t that interested in learning Linux. They just want a cheap operating system that will let them read e-mail, browse the Web, and run some office applications without worrying about malware.

      So, here’s what I tell people who just want a good, working PC, and couldn’t care less about the specific differences between “free software” and “open source” or how KDE 4.4 compares to GNOME 2.30

    • Windows vs Ubuntu: in a nutshell

      You may recall how Dell dug itself into an almighty hole last month, after proclaiming that Ubuntu was safer than Windows, before swiftly changing its mind and declaring itself more neutral than Switzerland.

      Well, now the PC maker’s had time to think the matter through, another page has appeared on the Dell website, condensing the whole Windows vs Ubuntu debate into about 100 words.

      From Dell’s perspective the choice is clear. You should choose Windows if (and I swear I’m not paraphrasing here):

      * You are already using WINDOWS programs (e.g. Microsoft Office, iTunes etc) and want to continue using them
      * You are familiar with WINDOWS and do not want to learn new programs for email, word processing etc
      * You are new to using computers

    • Why does Dell hate Linux so much?

  • Server

    • Canonical Seeks Ubuntu Cloud Wins at HostingCon
    • Canonical Seeks 10 Ubuntu Cloud Hosting Partners

      How do you eat an elephant? In small bytes. That old saying applies to Canonical’s emerging Ubuntu cloud strategy. Instead of attacking the entire hosting industry and attacking big rivals like Red Hat and Microsoft head-on, Canonical is quietly pursuing 10 hosting partners to pilot Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Here are the details from HostingCon in Austin, Texas.

    • Ubuntu Linux brings IBM DB2 to the cloud

      Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has always had many user and developer fans. Enterprise business fans? Not so much. Canonical hopes to change that with today’s, July 21, launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform, in private and public cloud configurations. The company also announced that IBM has validated the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04.

    • Canonical, IBM: Expanded Ubuntu DB2 Cloud Partnership Coming
    • Canonical launches IBM DB2 database virtual appliance

      Canonical has released a virtual appliance for running instances of IBM DB2 database software, the company announced on Wednesday. The software appliance will contain a copy of IBM’s DB2 Express-C, which will run on the company’s Linux-based server distribution, Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.

    • Will Canonical-IBM Relationship Attract Oracle to Ubuntu?

      Canonical and IBM, as expected, have expanded their relationship. The latest move involves a virtual appliance, comprising IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. At first glance the Canonical-IBM relationship is a nice win for Ubuntu. But perhaps there’s a deeper story angle here… involving Canonical’s continued pursuit of Oracle on Ubuntu. Here’s the speculation.

  • Audiocasts

    • Podcast Season 2 Episode 13

      In this episode: A SCO representative finally reveals some of the Linux code SCO had a problem with and OpenSUSE 11.3 is here. Listen to the results of our new challenge, and we ask whether the likes of Red Hat, Novell and Canonical contribute enough back to the community.

  • Google

    • Release Early, Release Often

      Over the next few months, we are going to be rolling out a new release process to accelerate the pace at which Google Chrome stable releases become available. Running under ideal conditions, we will be looking to release a new stable version about once every six weeks, roughly twice as often as we do today.

      So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time:

      * Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
      * Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope
      * Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release

  • Graphics Stack

    • A line in the sand for graphics drivers

      Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has mostly been solved – for desktop systems. The situation in the fast-growing mobile space is not so comforting, though. As can be seen in recent conversations, free support for mobile graphics looks like the next big problem to be solved.

  • Proprietary Applications

  • Instructionals

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Successful KDE Finances Sprint Held

      On April 23rd, developers from various finance-related KDE applications gathered in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, Germany for the first ever KDE Finance Sprint. The fellowship was composed of developers from KMyMoney, Kraft and Skrooge. This was a week after the ash cloud stopped all flights over Europe. Until the last minute, it was not clear whether those who were coming by plane would be able to make it. Fortunately, the airports opened just in time. Read on for a report for the meeting.

    • Albert Astals Cid: KDE Edu, Okular, Akademy and Life

      Last time in the KDE contributor interview series, we talked with the KDE developer Stephen Kelly from KDE PIM. We’ve been digging around in the KDE interview vaults and found this interesting discussion we had with Albert Astals Cid on 12 May 2010. Albert is well known in KDE from his work with KDE España, as maintainer of Okular and the KDE Edu applications. The original interview in Italian is also available.

    • Creating plasmoids with JavaScript

      With KDE 4.4, plasmoids can now be written in JavaScript or QtScript, thus opening up a whole new class of applications. Marcel shows how easy it is to build JavaScript plasmoids.

    • Ever wanted your ownCloud?

      Akademy is a great time to meet people and understand some of the exciting new projects and buzzwords in KDE. One project that has been generating a lot of interest recently is ownCloud, the KDE cloud computing project launched by Frank Karlitschek. We caught up with Frank to understand ownCloud better, find out about the current status, and plans for the future.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Pinguy OS – Distro Review

        My favourite type of distros are Ubuntu based. For some time now I have been making a case for why you should be using Linux Mint. Even though I think Mint is fantastic, I still make it a point to try other distributions. I made a pit stop at Zorin 3 for a short while and even though it had many wonderful qualities it didn’t quite knock Linux Mint out of my top spot.

    • New Releases

      • [T2] 8.0 Changes

        User visible

        * GCC 4.5(.0)
        * GlibC 2.11(.2)
        * X.Org 7.5
        * preliminary (basic) support for LLVM/clang
        * preliminary (basic) support to target MinGW / Win32
        * over 200 new packages (now nearly 3221)
        * most existing packages received an update
        * over 10000 SVN revisions since the 7.0 branch!

      • Netrunner 2 – Official Release

        Today, we released the official Netrunner 2 – Blacklight ISO.
        Compared to the RC, we fully integrated Ubuntu Software Center back again,
        and updated VLC to 1.1.0.

      • Linux Mint 9 LXDE released!
      • [Tiny Core Linux] v3.0

        All new kernel, modules, libraries, and support for unlimited loops make up the new Tiny Core / Micro Core 3.0. Freedesktop support and many improvements to Apps Audit and OnDemand features. Also support for RAID disks and new bootcode to blacklist modules.

    • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Debian declassification delayed

        In 2005, the Debian project voted to declassify messages on the debian-private mailing list after a period of three years. That is easier said than done, apparently. The General Resolution (GR) calls for volunteers to do the work of declassification, and few Debian Developers seem eager to do the work required to make it happen.

      • Flavours and Variants of Ubuntu

        • Cloud-oriented distro gets site-specific

          The team behind the cloud-based Peppermint variant of Ubuntu Linux released a scaled-down, fast-booting, site-specific browser (SSB) version. The “Peppermint Ice” distro switches to Google’s Chromium as the default browser, and while still supporting native apps, is even more focused on web-based apps than is Peppermint.

          Written by Kendall Weaver, the creator of the Pepperment distro, which shipped in May (see farther below), Peppermint Ice was designed as a mechanism for launching web applications and/or cloud applications such as SaaS (Software As A Service) apps, says the Peppermint team. When a web based application is called from within Ice, the distro also pulls up a custom SSB using the default Chromium Browser, the open source version of Chrome. Chromium is used in place of the Firefox browser used as the default in Peppermint.

        • Peppermint Ice Is Here: Screenshots Included

          After tons of popularity surrounding the Peppermint OS release last month, today Cloud lovers get a treat in the first release of Peppermint Ice, version 07142010. This Peppermint project was developed around the Chromium web browser and a new SSB or Site Specific Browser developed by Kendall Weaver aka “Ice”. This is where Peppermint Ice got its name. If you want to compare Peppermint Ice to Peppermint OS One, I did a Peppermint OS One screenshot review last month you might find useful.

        • VLC Default In Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat?

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-ready NAS devices run dual-core Atoms

      Synology America is shipping two network-attached storage (NAS) devices running its Linux-based Synology DiskStation Manager 2.3 software. The desktop DiskStation DS411+ and rack-mount RackStation RS810+ are both equipped with dual-core Intel Atom D510 processors, as well as four bays supporting up to 8TB each, with the RS810+ expandable to 16TB via Synology’s RX410 add-on unit.

    • MontaVista revs IDE for new Linux build engine

      MontaVista Software announced a new version of its Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for embedded Linux. DevRocket 6.1 has been upgraded to better support the MontaVista Linux 6 commercial embedded Linux development platform, adding tight integration and a graphical interface to the new MontaVista Integration Platform build platform, plus enhanced analysis and debugging tools, says MontaVista.

    • Nokia/MeeGo

      • Android may have the phones, but MeeGo may get the cars

        Google’s Android is already hot in smartphones, and it’s going to be hotter than hot in Linux-powered tablets. So, where does that leave Intel and Nokia’s embedded Linux, MeeGo? In the dust? Actually, it looks now like MeeGo is going to have its own niche where it will be the embedded Linux of choice: Car entertainment, Internet, and navigation systems.

        Tomorrow, the Linux Foundation will announce that GENIVI, a non-profit auto industry alliance committed to driving the adoption of an open-source IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) reference platform. With members like BMW, GM, Peugeot Citroen, and Renault this is a big deal. These aren’t hangers-on in the car business; these are core car companies.

    • Android

      • Sony Ericsson earnings up thanks to Android

        Sony Ericsson has returned to profitability thanks in part to its Android phones, and it’s contemplating dropping its Symbian and Windows Mobile phones, says the Wall Street Journal. The company has found success with its Android-based Xperia X10 and Xperia Mini and Mini Pro, says the story, and the company is now prepping a mid-range Xperia X8 model.

      • Ex-Palm VP Says It’s A Two-Horse Race Between Android And iPhone

        As Palm’s VP of developer platform, part of David Temkin’s job was to build out the app catalog. But now as VP of mobile at AOL (NYSE: AOL), his focus is on Android and iPhone. “We are in a eyeball business. To the extent that Palm (NSDQ: PALM) or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) turns it around, we’ll pay more attention to it. It’s a two-horse race.”

      • Android leads booming location based services market, study says

        IE Market Research Corporation (IEMR) released a report projecting that the global market for GPS navigation and location-based services (LBS) will rise by 51.3 percent through 2014 to $13.4 billion, and will be led by Android. Meanwhile, location-enabled search and advertising will see the biggest growth in market spending, growing at 131 percent by 2014, says IEMR.

      • Barnes and Noble spins Nook for Android app

        Barnes & Noble released a Nook for Android application, competing with a similar Android app released for the Kindle, and Amazon announced that its Kindle e-books are outselling its hardcover books by almost two to one. Meanwhile, Entourage Systems, which makes the Entourage Edge dual-screen Android e-reader, announced several e-book content partnerships.

      • Working Windows 95 Port for Android
      • Five deadly sins of Android Development

        1 Poor Performance
        If your application is not responsive enough, your users will receive an ugly ANR (Application Not Responding) message. An ANR is thrown when your application is not able to respond to user input within five seconds, or the Broadcast Receiver does not complete in ten seconds.
        An ANR message allows the user to either close the application or wait for it to respond. You know what most users will do, so optimise your application for performance. Or else.

      • Re: Apple. Will history repeat itself?

        My question is: Is Apple doomed to repeat its own history? Should we continue to expect Apple market share growth? Or will this plateau as more and more Android devices flood the market offering more affordable and feature rich mobile computing experiences?

      • Master Android Development

        Android is changing the way that Linux is perceived. It has become the single most widely adopted type of Linux on embedded devices. It is not only popular in the smartphone space but also expanding its coverage to tablets, set‑top Boxes, televisions and appliances. For an Android application developer, this means a broader market to reach out to. We have already covered the introduction to Android development back in issue 83, so this time we go beyond the ‘hello world’ basics and give you the tips and recipes you need to become a better Android developer…

    • Sub-notebooks

    • Tablets

      • Sharp, Lenovo, and Toshiba ready consumer tablets

        Presumably, the new version will maintain the Intel/Windows base, but replace Skylight Linux with the Linux-based Android, although this was unclear from the report. The Skylight netbook is definitely coming out with Android, says CNET, but the fate of the IdeaPad UI is still up in the air.

      • Android tablet to offer telephony

        Tattu Mobile is prepping an Android-based tablet based on ZiiLabs’ ZMS-05 SoC, with the help of Intrinsyc’s RapidRIL telephony technology, says Intrinsyc. Meanwhile, CNET reviewed the Dell Streak Android tablet (pictured) and dubbed it “the best Android-based tablet we’ve seen so far.”

07.22.10

Links: Net Neutrality and Digital Economy Act Under Fire

Posted in News Roundup at 2:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Big Ben in London

Summary: General news with emphasis on the Internet

Leftovers

  • Lobbyists Promote Asbestos Use in the Developing World

    Asbestos has long been known to cause debilitating and often fatal diseases such as lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis. It is banned or restricted in 52 countries, and its use has plummeted in the United States since its peak in the early 1970s.

    But since the mid-1980s, a global network of lobbyists has spent nearly $100 million to maintain a market for asbestos, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Borrowing a page from the tobacco industry, these trade associations have funded scientists whose studies raised doubts about the health risks of asbestos and have preserved significant sales by focusing on the developing world.

  • The meaning of #StupidScientology

    Now let me introduce you now to the Church of Scientology in the United Kingdom.

    I will leave you to form your own opinion of them, to be expressed once you have received legal advice.

    One member of this organisation, which is of course NOT recognised as a “church” in the United Kingdom, did some searches of Twitter.

    Presumably he used the search terms “Scientology” and perhaps “Church”.

    Or perhaps he used the search terms “Scientology” and “stupid”.

  • OS Review: Haiku Alpha 2

    At the time, this open source re-implementation of BeOS, held a great deal of promise: It was fast, visually clean and surprisingly full featured for an “Alpha 1″ release of any operating system (certainly more polished than early alpha/beta releases of Windows or MacOS X tend to be).

  • Security/Aggression

    • Tomlinson’s killer not charged

      Breaking news has just come in concerning the police officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests last year. Tomlinson died shortly afterwards, but the incident in which he was struck by a police baton while walking home from work, and thereafter pushed to the ground by an officer, was captured on camera and released to the public.

  • Environment

    • EPA slams State Department tar sands pipeline study

      As John Podesta has said, the phrase “green tar sands” is like “error-free deepwater drilling” and “clean coal”. Thankfully, a key Canadian energy goal – construction of a 1,700 mile pipeline to bring dirty tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast – has hit a significant speed bump, the U.S. EPA. CAP’s Tom Kenworthy has the story.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • T-Mobile to Abandon Net Neutrality for Mobile Video

      T-Mobile is planing to ask companies like Apple and Google to pay for their mobile offerings, according to an interview that René Obermann, CEO of T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom, gave the German Manager Magazin. Obermann said the company could charge more for offering better quality of service or high transfer rates for mobile video or music, which should be “priced differently.”

      He added that well-produced and successful online platforms should not be able to use the mobile Internet for free. Deutsche Telekom is already in discussions with Google about this very subject, according to Obermann. The Telekom CEO didn’t say whether T-Mobile would want to use this approach universally or restrict it to countries with less stringent net neutrality protections. The company operates mobile networks in more than 10 European countries, as well as in the U.S.

    • A potential Net neutrality win-win-win

      The Net neutrality debate remains polarized, with broadband network operators opposing consumer groups and Internet content providers. Even the current discussion of legal authority for regulation elicits hyperbole, and many observers assume that final resolution of the issue will entail a win for one “side” in the debate and a loss for the other.

      Although such a zero-sum game existed when Congress was considering competing versions of Net neutrality legislation a few years ago, there now is a real opportunity for an outcome in which network operators, consumers, and content providers all would be better off than they are today. This would be a win-win-win result, without compromise.

      Radical solutions to Net neutrality, one way or the other, are politically impossible today. Neither the imposition of substantial common-carrier regulation nor, for example, permission to block lawful Web sites could be accomplished in Congress or at the Federal Communications Commission. Heavy government intervention is unwelcome, and the fundamental openness of the Internet obviously has been good for consumers and innovation.

  • Copyrights

    • The Stock Photo Industry’s Massive Copyright Campaign

      Since the RIAA has stopped its litigation campaign, the odds of being sued for one night of casual, or even less-than-casual music sharing is almost nil. The same is true for movie file sharing. Though the U.S. Copyright Group has ramped a very large litigation campaign it only targets a small subset of movies, largely independent films such as “The Hurt Locker” and even then can only target a small percentage of the potential sharers.

      Surprisingly, your best chance of getting hit with a copyright infringement demand letter, almost certainly, is for posting stock photos to your blog or website. Though it may seem like a relatively harmless thing, stock image companies have been especially aggressive in dealing with copyright infringement and have mounted a campaign that has lasted almost a decade against those who use their images without permission.

      [...]

      Simply put, image matching technology has moved forward a great deal in the last five years and the early adopters of it were primarily stock photo and image companies. However, rather than simply issuing takedown notices or cease and desist letters, many of the companies, most prominently Getty Images, have been sending out demand letters, telling infringers they have to pay as much as $1,000 or more per image.

    • Anti-Piracy Group Accused Of Blackmailing Teen File-Sharers

      Anyone familiar with file-sharing operations and those who seek to disrupt them will be aware that there are many techniques used by both sides to thwart the other. While tracking solutions, fancy technology and sheer numbers perpetuate the fight, there are claims that a more traditional technique is in use against file-sharers – good old-fashioned blackmail. But that weapon can work both ways.

    • We are not amused? Jokes, twitter and copyright

      The Grauniad reports today on the latest spat in the turf war that is developing on Twitter between comedians trying out jokes and material, and passing other parties quietly re using thus material, sometimes explicitly under their own name.

    • ACTA

      • Will ACTA outlaw the EU home copy and other liability rules?

        The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) text will require far-going changes to EU legislation with regards to compulsory licenses.

        Knowledge Ecology International has stressed the importance of liability rules. Under such rules, rights owners can not exercise injunctions against infringements of intellectual property rights, but only are entitled to compensation. This is important in cases of government use, public health, interoperability, the fight against climate change, etc.

    • Digital Economy (UK)

      • A Guide to the Digital Economy Act – Part 1

        Sections 3-7 of Digital Economy Act form a framework for an Initial Obligations Code. This is a set of rules, drafted or approved by Ofcom (and to be put into law via a statutory instrument by Parliament), which gives instructions to ISPs and copyright owners on how they can or must deal with cases involving online copyright infringement. The Act contains some guidelines as to what must be included in the Code (in the new Section 124E of the Communications Act but it is up to Ofcom to come up with a final version. This is expected to be done by September, so it can be sent to the EU for approval (about three months) before coming into force early next year.

      • Draft filesharing code flawed, says Open Rights Group

        Ofcom’s draft code to cut down on illicit filesharing is flawed and should be torn up and redrafted, according to the Open Rights Group (ORG), an advocacy organisation pushing for more freedom on the internet.

        The ORG said that the draft code “misses vital requirements to outline the standards of evidence” in determining whether to take action against alleged filesharers – and that this means it fails to comply with the Digital Economy Act, passed at the tail end of the Labour administration, which puts an onus on Ofcom to reduce the amount of illicit filesharing in the UK.

      • Will The House Of Lords Block The Digital Economy Act?

        Last week I had tea with Lord Lucas in the House of Lords (I know – whodathought?). He wanted to have a chat about what the Lords could do to help artists and music creators.

        As soon as we sat down, he brought up the Digital Economy Act, a subject that had been discussed at length during the Westminster eForum, which he attended, a few days earlier. It was the part pertaining to the possible temporary disconnection of persistent illegal downloaders that had created heated discussions among indie labels and ISPs. “It’s dead in the water,” he proclaimed. “There’s no way we will alienate our voters and punish individuals.”

        [...]

        Lucas concluded that we need copyright reform. He doesn’t want any restrictions on usage, but obligatory remuneration – an impressive idea, but almost utopian in its implementation. Like so many who present a panacea to the music industry, he fell slightly short in his understanding of it. For example, he was under the impression that different songs were paid at different rates by the PRS, according to their genre and popularity. I explained that the composers of a popular song only get paid more because it gets played more.

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