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09.01.11

Links 1/9/2011: Beta of GNOME 3.2, Ubuntu Core

Posted in News Roundup at 9:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Fragmentation within the NTFS filesystem

    Recently while troubleshooting an issue on a Windows 7 PC, I noticed a number of events in the Application Log labelled “Defrag”. Sparking my curiosity, I looked further and discovered that there was approximately one entry per day in the log. I looked around some more at other Windows 7 PCs and found that they too have “Defrag” entries scattered about. It turns out that Windows 7 now automatically runs a defrag on its NTFS filesystem, compared to Windows XP which never did this. This is a great idea on Microsoft’s part, rather than letting things stockpile up and forcing the user to defrag while waiting for minutes or even hours while it churns away.

    This got me thinking back to when I read more about other filesystems, most notably ext3 and ext4 filesystems on GNU/Linux (which are standardly used now), which never need defragmenting. Yes that’s correct, they do not need to be defragmented.

  • Desktop

    • Build a Better Sub-$200 Linux PC: For a Few Dollars More…

      As we’ve hopefully shown, building a $200 PC is a fun experiment—and, provided you really modulate your expectations, you can get a solidly usable computer out of the deal. But when it comes right down to it, we admit that the $200 figure is a bit arbitrary. Is anyone going to complain if the final total is $225.87, or even $250.94? Of course not. The goal is to find components that have the best balance between low prices and high (or, perhaps more appropriately, decent) performance. And if you’re willing and/or able to spend a bit more money, you can get a better system still. Here are a few of our recommended upgrades if you want to take your $200 to slightly more expensive—but still solidly affordable—places.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Nepomuk Frameworks – kdelibs 5.0: What To Do

        Development of kdelibs 5.0 has begun in the framework branch of its git repository. The main goal for kdelibs 5.0 is that there will be no more kdelibs as it is now. kdelibs (and kde-runtime) will be split up into smaller pieces to lower the barrier for non-KDE developers to use part of the power we as a KDE development community provide. The rough idea is that there will be three groups of libraries/frameworks:

        1. Tier 1: components which only depend on Qt and no other lib/component from KDE.
        2. Tier 2: components which depend on Qt and other libraries from Tier 1.
        3. Tier 3: components which depend on anything.

      • tracking what happens in your DataEngine

        For lack of a better place, I plopped it into the kdeexamples repository so that others (and the future me ;) can easily include it into their project (DataEngine, Plasmoid, application, ..) and see what a given DataEngine is doing. It’s BSD licensed, so it can be used pretty much anywhere.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Web application mode in GNOME 3.2
      • First beta version of GNOME 3.2

        The GNOME Project has released the first of two beta versions of GNOME 3.2. The pre-release version, designated GNOME 3.1.90, comes just a few days after the user interface freeze, which, along with the beta, was recently put back a week to allow time to incorporate further modifications.

      • GNOME 3.2 Beta 1 (3.1.90) Has Arrived

        The first beta for the upcoming GNOME 3.2 is here for eager users to enjoy. This is still unstable code, so most users will want to hold on until the final, stable version lands, but if you want an early peek, this is your chance.

  • Distributions

    • Tiny Core Linux

      Several projects exist that purport to be small, run-in-memory distributions. The most popular probably is Puppy Linux. Puppy has spawned several variations, and I have used it several times myself on older machines. But, I have discovered one that bowled me over completely—Tiny Core Linux. This distribution is a totally different beast and fills what I think is as of yet an unfilled category.

      To start, Tiny Core is tiny—really tiny. The full desktop version weighs in at approximately 10MB—this is for a full graphical desktop. Not many other options can deliver something like this. People of a certain age may remember projects like Tom’s root/boot, or muLinux. Tiny Core fits somewhere in between those older floppy-based projects and “heavier” small distributions like Puppy.

    • ArchLinux vs Slackware

      This posting is not meant to start another flame war between these two great Linux distribution. It’s just meant to be my personal opinion after trying ArchLinux for several days and compare it with the distribution i have been using for the last six years. I know it’s not completely fair to compare few days experience with six years, but i will try to be as fair as possible.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Desktop 2011 review

        Considering that this was a major and highly expected release of a major Linux distribution, did anybody in management bother to take it for a spin to see if basic features work? I have visions of Steve Jobs getting involved in every phase of his company’s products development. There does not seem to be a Steve Jobs in Mandriva’s management team.

        None of the shortcoming of Mandriva 2011 will stop me from upgrading one of my permanent test systems running Mandriva 2010.2, but my laptop, which I use for serious stuff, on which physical security is just as important as any other feature, will continue running the old system until I figure out how to configure disk encryption when installing my favorite Linux distribution.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s move to downtown Raleigh could ripple widely

        Now that Red Hat has made public what had become the worst-kept secret in Triangle real estate circles, it’s worth delving into what the company’s move to downtown Raleigh will mean for interested parties.

        In the near term, the decision eliminates uncertainty about whether downtown would be left with an empty building once Progress Energy and Duke Energy complete their merger and consolidate operations.

      • Top 10 Reasons Why Red Hat is Moving to Downtown Raleigh

        It’s Thursday, and you know what that means? Even if we can’t get Christine to wake-up long enough to write one of her articles, you can always depend on us to be here like clockwork for the Top 10 List.

        A while back, Red Hat announced they might be leaving the big city of Raleigh to find a new location to continue tweaking their code. A little later, they announced they’d decided to remain in the North Carolina capital city after all – but they’d be looking for new digs since they were getting somewhat crowded at their old location. This week they announced they’d found their new home, a big ol’ office tower in Raleigh’s downtown.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • RaspberryPi £15 ARM Linux computer due for Christmas

      The RaspberryPi Foundation, which aims to put computers in front of children for £15, has taken delivery of 50 engineering prototypes, and intends to get the final version to customers by the end of the year, writes Steve Bush.

      Based in Cambridge and founded by six high-tech high-flyers, the foundation’s aim is to cure the programmer shortage by inspiring people to take up computing in childhood – as Sinclair Spectrums and BBC Micros once did.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Sony Ericsson Unveils Xperia Arc S

          Now, about the camera. The idea here is that the 8MP camera can take photos in 3D (SE used “panorama” quite a lot in the description of the photos). But since the Arc S’s screen isn’t a 3D display, the images are shown in 2D. When the device is plugged up to a 3D-capable TV via the MicroHDMI port, they’re shown as 3D photos. So you can (sort of) take 3D photos, but you won’t be able to view them without a 3D TV. The concept of a 3D camera on a non-3D device baffles us, but we’ll leave such judgments to you.

        • Samsung unveils small tablet, giant smartphone

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Not Dead Yet? Top Three Possibilities for HP’s webOS

        Reuters is reporting that webOS may not be dead, yet. In an interview, the head of HP’s PSG group Todd Bradley hinted HP may not be done with the webOS or tablet. So what does HP have up its sleeve? Bradley was elusive, but here are my top three ideas for what the PSG spinoff could do, along with some channel implications …

      • Samsung Unveils Dual-Core Galaxy Tab 7.7 And 5.3-Inch Galaxy Note

        Samsung understands this, and has thus tried to build a tablet for just about any size pocket or backpack you may own. We all know about the GalTab 10.1 and 8.9, but today even smaller models join the pack. At the IFA conference in Berlin, Samsung today announced the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note.

      • Toshiba Unveils The Thinnest Honeycomb Tablet Yet, The 7.7mm-thick AT200

        Just like the rumor stated, Toshiba used IFA 2011 to announce its latest Android tablet and it’s just as tiny as it looked. The AT200 packs a 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430 CPU, up to 64GB of memory, and most of the ports that made the Toshiba Thrive popular: micro-USB, microSD, and micro-HDMI. Toshiba claims that the battery is good for “eight hours of video consumption.”

      • Toshiba put its Android tablet on a crash diet
      • HTC’s first Honeycomb tablet supports 4G LTE network

        HTC announced its first 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet, which is also AT&T’s first tablet to run on the carrier’s new LTE/HSPA+ 4G network. The HTC Jetstream runs Android 3.1 and HTC Sense on a 1.5GHz, dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, features eight-megapixel and 1.3-megapixel cameras, offers an optional HTC Stylus, and start selling Sept. 4 for a pricey $700 with 32GB of memory.

      • Amazon 10-inch tablet PC to start mass production in 1Q12

        Amazon’s 7-inch tablet PC, which is supplied by Quanta Computer, is expected to start shipping in October, the sources added.

      • Lenovo announces IdeaPad A1, the $199 Android tablet, we go hands-on (video)

        If you thought you couldn’t get a real Android tablet from a brand you’ve heard of for less than $200, think again. Lenovo’s just announced the IdeaPad Tablet A1, a 7-inch Android unit that we got a sneaky first glimpse of back in July. Now it’s real, and it’s cheap, it’s running Gingerbread, and while it doesn’t hold a candle to the Galaxy Tab 7.7, it honestly feels like something far above its price point. Read on for our impressions.

      • Why I bought a $99 HP TouchPad

        Aside from the default webOS software, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to install Android onto the TouchPad at some point in the foreseeable future. Teams of Android enthusiasts like the gang from RootzWiki are already hard at work creating Android ports for the product. For the moment, the phone-focused Gingerbread will be as good as it gets — the tablet-optimized Honeycomb release, remember, was never made open source — but with the all-purpose Ice Cream Sandwich release on the horizon, the future holds no shortage of interesting Googley possibilities.

        A 9.7-inch dual-core Ice Cream Sandwich tablet for $99? Yeah…exactly.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Police Report on Wisconsin Supreme Court Quarrel Describes Hostile Work Environment
  • Desktop computers changing, not dying

    There’s been a lot of dying technology predicted lately. The death of the desktop. The death of the PC (or, in more market-friendly terms, the “post-PC Era”). The death of Windows. The death of the mouse… you name it, if it’s desktop-connected, its demise been predicted in the last couple of months.

    So much anger has been leveled at the desktop operating systems and the PC, it really makes me wonder what the PC did to tick so many people off. Seriously, it’s not like it ripped you off and then asked the government for a bailout, right?

  • The Dawn of the Post-PC Era. Not.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Rick Perry’s Texas Health Care Hoax

      In his quest to win the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is perpetuating a convincing hoax: that implementing Texas-style tort reform would go a long way toward curing what ails the U.S. health care system.

      Like his fellow GOP contenders, Perry consistently denounces “Obamacare” as “a budget-busting, government takeover of healthcare” and “the greatest intrusion on individual freedom in a generation.” He promises to repeal the law if elected.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Guardian Investigative Editor David Leigh publishes top secret Cablegate password revealing names of U.S. collaborators and informants… in his book

      The UK’s Guardian newspaper’s Investigative Editor, David Leigh, author of the “Get this Wikileaks book out the door quickly before other Wikileaks books are published” Wikileaks book has messed up.

    • WikiLeaks: Cables detail concerns of U.S. contractor held in Cuba
    • Why Does Jeanne Whalen Have a Hardon for Julian Assange?

      It seems like just days ago that Luddie asked me to begin looking into the curious case of Jeanne Whalen’s WSJ story, which claimed that five human rights organizations had written a letter complaining to WikiLeaks that it was not taking proper care to protect civilian informants. As we soon discovered, the article was riddled with errors. To wit: not all the signatories were with human rights organizations, most of the signatories were not speaking for their organizations, and the letter was a call to meet with Assange, not an upbraiding. That the letter (which Whalen won’t release) quickly made it into her hands made whole thing smell of Newscorp astroturfing.

    • WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says
    • PJ Crowley: No US Policy Changed Because of the WikiLeaks Revelations

      Former State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has written an op-ed on the recent release of more than 130,000 US State Embassy cables. Likening the cable publication to “pestilence,” Crowley provides his perspective on what he thinks will happen now that the cables have been published.
      Crowley was forced to resign in March after he made some comments that called attention to how accused whistleblower to WikiLeaks, Pfc. Bradley Manning, was being treated at Quantico Brig. When WikiLeaks published the war logs in July, he knew he had to do an assessment and figure out what might be put at risk if US State Embassy cables were released. What he says on WikiLeaks carries a lot of credibility. In fact, he has spoken about his work during the WikiLeaks release and why he made the comments he made about Manning on multiple panels.

    • Global – Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords

      A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.

      Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world.

      For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do.

    • WikiLeaks, media last bastions of trust for US

      The release of diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks last year has given people more insight into how the US government works according to Suelette Dreyfus.

      Dreyfus is the author of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, the 1997 that featured the exploits of Mendax — the hacker handle of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.

      Dreyfus told this week’s Q&A show that people in the US now understand how their government worked behind “closed mahogany doors.” She said that WikiLeaks has also shown that governments don’t always act in the interests their own people. “In that sense, it’s a true whistle blower,” Dreyfus said.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Federal agency: Texas Gov. Perry wrong in comments about new license rules for farmers

      U.S. Department of Transportation officials are disputing Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s statement at the Iowa State Fair today that federal administrators plan to require a farmer driving a tractor across a public road to obtain a commercial driver’s license.

      “We are absolutely not requiring farmers” to obtain commercial licenses, such as those required of semi-trailer operators, said U.S. DOT spokeswoman Candice Tolliver in Washington, D.C.

      She said U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood had put out a statement last week making the DOT’s position clear.

      “We have no intention of instituting onerous regulations on the hardworking farmers who feed our country and fuel our economy,” LaHood’s statement said.

  • Censorship

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright term extension returns. Again.

        Back in April we asked ORG supporters to write to their MEPs to help campaign against a Directive that would extend the term of copyright protection in sound recordings (for the reasons why, see our previous posts and the campaign site ‘Sound Copyright’). We had a fantastic response, with thousands of letters sent to MEPs across Europe.

      • The Coalition Has No Digital Rights Policy

        A key moment was the BT/NewzBin2 case. A clutch of Hollywood studios took BT to court in order to force them to restrict access to the website “NewzBin2″. The site in question provides only links to film downloads – it does not even host copyrighted content. The studios were extremely pleased to have the court find in their favour, seeing it as a crucial precedent. They were beginning to lose patience with how slowly the Government was implementing the Digital Economy Act, and saw this as a convenient shortcut. Culture and communications minister Ed Vaizey enthusiastically welcomed the judgment – ironically enough, online, by tweeting: ”Interesting judgment in Newzbin case, should make it easier for rights holders to prevent piracy”. He went on to continue defending the result, and his statement, from a barrage of replies.

Links 1/9/2011: Mandriva 2011.0 Reviews, MeeGo-based Phones in Australia, Sony Tablet With Android

Posted in News Roundup at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

08.31.11

Links 31/8/2011: RHEL 7, LibreOffice 3.4.3

Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.3

      The Internet, August 31, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) maintains the speedy pace of LibreOffice development with the announcement of version 3.4.3, intended for enterprise deployments. The new release arrives two weeks after version 3.3.4 (intended for more-conservative users) and one month after the previous release of the 3.4 family, which provides a larger feature set based on cleaner and leaner code.

    • LibreOffice 3.4.3 Is Now Available for Download

  • CMS

    • Jekyll and other static site generators are, currently, harmful to the free, open source software movement

      My blog is powered by WordPress. WordPress remains at its core a monstrous amalgamation of PHP spaghetti code. Thus, despite the fact that WordPress is free (beer+speech), easy to use, well supported, well documented, and all that jazz… it still pains my hacker sensibilities to use it. For similar reasons, a lot of hacker types are moving away from WordPress and similar blog software to static site generators like jekyll.

  • Healthcare

    • VA Open Source Health Software Site is Open for Business

      The Veterans Affairs Department open source electronic health record software website went live today with a pitch that it will serve as the nexus for an “open source community designed to unleash innovation in electronic health record software.”

    • VA open source agent set to go live

      The Veterans Affairs Department is set to make its open source agent operational tomorrow and make available the software code of various applications in the electronic health records of VA and the Defense Department.

      Users of the applications will also have a method to report back to the open source agent changes to the software.

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Open source: Driving change in the software industry

      The subsequent development of automotive technology was rapid, due in part to the hundreds of small manufacturers competing to gain the world’s attention. What we saw was the start of an international, industrial revolution as well as a struggle between automobile manufacturers for commercial dominance that is still fought today. As a result of greater competition for customers, and customers’ greater demand for innovation, car buyers now have an infinite number of brands, makes, models and pricing options to choose from to meet their individual needs.

  • Funding

    • MapR makes friends of Hadoop and the enterprise, raises $20M

      Hadoop is open source software that allows companies to store data on clusters of cheaper servers and run software very quickly on top of those clusters. It organizes and prioritizes data, so often-used data is pushed to the top of the stack for easy access. Along with the organization, Hadoop uses a graphical user interface and heat maps to help data managers monitor usage and locate problems. The software also offers analytics for companies that want to watch their data to spot emerging trends.

  • Project Releases

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • It’s Most Certainly Not The End of the OS
  • Asus Tech – You will NOT fool me Twice
  • This USB 3.0 Flash Drive Has 2 TB of Storage
  • Google and OpenDNS join forces to speed up DNS

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • WikiLeaks reveals Atrocities by US forces

      US forces had committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, four children, and one infant were summarily executed, a State Department diplomatic cable released last week by WikiLeaks revealed.

      The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

      American troops had approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March 2006.

      “It would appear that when the MNF (Multinational Forces) approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued.” Afterwards, “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (age 23) were killed during the raid.

      Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

  • Cablegate

    • WikiLeaks cable: US expected Congress bribes in TransCo deal

      The US embassy expected money to change hands in Philippine Congress before it granted a franchise to a consortium in 2007 to operate the Philippine National Transmission Company (TransCo), a cable published by whistleblower group WikiLeaks said.

  • Finance

    • Big Reason to Shut SEC, Start Over: William D. Cohan

      Thanks to Darcy Flynn, a longtime attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, we now have all the ammunition we need to do what should have been done years ago: terminate the SEC, with extreme prejudice, and in its place construct a new regulatory watchdog for Wall Street free of obvious conflicts of interest.

      Flynn’s courage has almost been lost in all the recent apocalyptic talk of earthquakes and hurricanes, but a few weeks back he did something remarkable. After raising concerns internally at the SEC last year — and getting nowhere — Flynn went public and alleged in a formal whistleblower complaint that for at least 17 years the SEC “followed a policy of systematically destroying documents” related to what are known as Matters Under Investigation, or MUIs, most of which were focused on possibly illicit or illegal behavior at Wall Street firms. MUIs are the first step in investigating a case that may lead to a formal SEC inquiry.

    • Matt Taibbi on the SEC and Wall Street

      For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed.

    • Citigroup, Goldman Big ‘Super Committee’ Donors

      Goldman Sachs(GS), Citigroup(C), JPMorgan Chase(JPM), Bank of America(BAC) and General Electric(GE) all rank in the top 10 organizations in terms of their campaign contributions to a special Congressional committee charged with finding ways to reduce the deficit, according to MapLight.org a nonpartisan organization that studies the relationship between money and politics.

    • Panel tallies massive waste and fraud in wartime U.S. contracts

Links 31/8/2011: KDE Speed to Improve, Firefox for Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Big Brother Still Thinks He Knows Best

      There are folks in the world of FLOSS just as determined to sabotage their installed base. Ubuntu Unity, KDE 4.x and GNOME 3 come to mind. Perhaps those new interfaces are “better” in some ways, but the users will notice the learning curve. I don’t doubt some will not even be able to start using them because they are used to clicking on things they can see in front of them just as they have been seeing and grasping since infancy. Unnatural may be new but it’s not intuitive. Training had better be built in or it will be resisted.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Performance Boost Ahead

        Have you experienced performance issues when using KDE? If so, then you aren’t the only one. While things have been improving as KDE 4 matures, some users still have registered complaints. And one KDE hacker is trying to address them.

        Martin Gräßlin had begun working towards “rendering at 60 frames” per second. Gräßlin stated in a blog post today, “I could not imagine how a frame could take longer to render than the 16.67 msec.” But after some thought he realized where a couple of bottlenecks may be hiding.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Introducing Documents

        Many people asked me at Desktop Summit about the work I’ve been doing recently on implementing the awesome Documents designs from Jon and Jakub; so here it is, I am very happy to announce the first release of GNOME Documents. Here’s the obligatory screenshot.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Review: Mandriva 2011 “Hydrogen”

        Aside from a few isolated instances, Mandriva generally felt quite snappy and fast. It used 400 MB of RAM at idle, which I think is about average for KDE 4.
        KWin desktop effects worked well after I enabled them. The only issue I had was that there was no keyboard shortcut to directly change the virtual workspace; I had to zoom out to see the whole desktop cube to change workspaces, which is a little more cumbersome and time-consuming. What I mean is there’s no shortcut like CTRL+ALT+LEFT to switch to the workspace immediately to the left. For some reason I also couldn’t find any way to set such shortcuts to my liking.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat goes for OpenStack’s community jugular

        Red Hat has chosen to announce its new cloud management software Aeolus with a fresh spin of being more community-oriented than Aeolus’ competitor, OpenStack.

      • Red Hat’s Aeolus to ‘out-Linux’ Rackspace’s cloud

        Red Hat is leading a Fedora-like effort to succeed where OpenStack has struggled in building an open-source cloud founded on broad community input.

        Red Hat’s engineers are building Aeolus, a software suite to spin up, manage and deploy applications from physical and virtual servers to any public or private cloud.

      • Why Jim Whitehurst is Right to See VMware as the Competition

        Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is never one to mince words, and is often full of surprises. Recently, although his position is arguable, he contended that both the PC and fat client operating systems are headed for obsolescence. Now, he has told ZDNet which company he forecasts will be Red Hat’s primary competitor by the year 2016: VMware. There are some excellent reasons to believe that forecast.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Begins to Take Shape

        The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t scheduled for general availability for another couple of years, making this the right time for Red Hat to get started on its development.

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 is now starting to take shape as the Linux vendor begins the multi-year process that will ultimately result in a new enterprise distribution release. RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010 and RHEL 7 is currently scheduled for release in 2013.

    • Debian Family

      • Vaio tips for Debian Squeeze

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Picturing the end of the road for another cycle
          • 10 Reasons Why I’m Done With Windows. (or why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime!)

            2. Ubuntu is lovely. Yep there, I’ve said it. Linux for the desktop is now a great product. Not a perfect product yet, but great. How do I know? Well I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on the wife’s machine and it worked flawlessly out of the box. No having to configure networks, fiddle with arcane video driver settings or anything like that. It just worked. OK, there was one glitch later on, where her HP inkjet printer driver was incorrectly installed (so I had to hunt around on the forums to find the fix) but I said it wasn’t perfect. And even so it easily compares with the best that Windows has to offer in terms of ease of installation. Surprised? Yeah me too. Last time I looked Ubuntu was a pain. Now it’s not. ‘Nuff said?

          • Series: Introduction to Ubuntu Development – Part 1
          • 44 Community Wallpapers Shortlisted for Ubuntu 11.10
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 230
          • Quick Look: Ubuntu 11.10 Beta

            In two days, September 1st, Canonical will unleash to the world the first Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for final release on October 13th, 2011.

            With this occasion we thought it will be a great idea to inform our Ubuntu readers about some of the interesting features that will be included in this first Beta release of Ubuntu 11.10.

            We also remind everyone that just like the previous release (Ubuntu 11.04), this version of the Ubuntu operating system will have two Beta releases; the second one will be availble on September 22nd.

          • Don’t Hate the Playa…Hate the Game!

            So I was reading a recent article in NetworkWorld where once again, the “Canonical doesn’t give back” bullshit is raised. The author seems to take a couple “jabs” by bringing up Greg K-H’s infamous plumbers rant talk, the fact that Microsoft is in the top 10 of kernel contributors (and Canonical isn’t even top 30), and even says Canonical is unprofitable as “general understanding”…nice, thanks! Thankfully, it seems from the comments, that people see this as the sensationalized, we-need-click-through-traffic journalism it is. I could go into an epic long posting of how wrong the basis for the “doesn’t give back” argument is, or take jabs at other distros profitability, how they got there or why they were sold…but I won’t. Instead, I’d like to issue a bit of urban education on those of you who seem to hate Canonical/Ubuntu because it succeeds where others have failed.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The end of the OS is nigh
  • Gone with Windows 7 : RunAs for Explorer

    But, with Windows 7, suddenly this no longer works. Running Explorer with RunAs, simply opens a new instance of Explorer as the currently logged in user. Back when we started migrating users from XP to 7, we searched and searched for the solution for Windows 7 that works like XP. But, even today, none has been found. The workaround? To use Switch User and log in to the PC as an administrator account, and run Explorer. But, the drawback is when trying to switch back to the regular user that is logged in, their password needs to be typed in. This is counterproductive if the user is not at their desk while the admin is troubleshooting.

  • Developer Q&A: Syllable OS

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Interests Guide U.S. Diplomacy, WikiLeaks Cables Show

      We know Monsanto and other biotech giants have been pushing genetically modified crops around the globe, but new diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last week make it clear how entangled our government is in corporate agricultural interests.

  • Security

    • The Apache Web Server’s Not-So-Secret Weakness
    • Akamai employee tried to sell secrets to Israel

      Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai’s clients and contracts, information about the company’s security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • In Spain, police violence against press sparks concern

      Spanish press associations have expressed concern about recent episodes of police violence against journalists covering demonstrations against Pope Benedict’s four-day visit to Madrid and protests staged as part of the anti-corruption 15-M movement.

      Freelance photographer Daniel Nuevo was covering August 18 protests in Madrid against the Catholic Church-sponsored World Youth Days, which featured Benedict XVI and attracted hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Grassroots church groups and civic organizations organized the demonstrations to denounce the “waste” incurred by the celebration, which is partly financed by government and corporate sponsors.

    • Bahrain king pardons protest abusers

      King Hamad of Bahrain said Sunday he was pardoning all those who insulted him during a month of Shiite-led pro-democracy protests, in a bid to bring normality back to the Gulf kingdom.

      He also said that civilians that were being tried in military courts for their participation in the protest which was crushed in mid-March, will eventually be handled by civil courts, while those who were dismissed from their jobs will be reinstated.

    • Thugs break hands of Syria’s top cartoonist for Assad lampoon

      Syria’s most renowned political cartoonist, who recently drew a sketch comparing President Bashar al-Assad to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, had both his hands broken in an attack yesterday by masked gunmen who dragged the 60-year-old out of his car.

      Ali Ferzat, whose satirical art once drew death threats from Saddam Hussein, was treated in hospital. He was attack as he left his Damascus studio at four o’clock yesterday morning.

    • The City: Beijing

      Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

      Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

  • Cablegate

    • US forces repeatedly ‘commit crimes’ in Iraq

      The chief executive of the Cordoba Foundation says a WikiLeaks report which accuses the U.S. forces of killing ten people in cold blood in Iraq in 2006 is just the tip of the iceberg.

    • WikiLeaks Down Under

      There’s been a sudden explosion of interest in Wikileaks cables down under, after every single one of the US diplomatic cables on Australia was suddenly released online to the public this week. While hardened Aussie journalists insist there are no major “bombshells,” plenty of intriguing new stories are now exploding onto the media landscape. Overall, the US cables reveal a sovereign nation absurdly subservient to US foreign policy, with Australian ministers queuing to discuss confidential party deliberations with their friends in the US embassy.

    • ‘WikiLeaks docs embarrassing, not perilous’

      Israeli experts downplayed the security risk posed by the leaked documents, which name alleged Israeli, Iranian and Jordanian intelligence agents, but said that WikiLeaks has definitely taken a more brazen stand vis-א-vis Washington.

    • Malaysia judgement looms amid Wikleaks furore

      A wealth of Wikileaks revelations have embarrassed Labor and the Coalition, while a High Court ruling could further damage Labor.

    • A response to recent comments by Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland.

      Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland bemoans having his department being publicly caught out, ratting out, 23 Australians to the US embassy without due process.

    • Attorney-General Robert McClelland has attacked a WikiLeaks list of Australians linked to al-Qa’ida

      ATTORNEY-GENERAL Robert McClelland has accused WikiLeaks of “incredibly irresponsible” conduct after the self-styled whistleblower group released a cable that named 23 Australians accused by ASIO of having contact with Yemeni terror group al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula.

    • Wikileaks Reveals The Strange Story Of 120 Chinese Children Who Disappeared in Stockholm

      A recently released WikiLeaks cable from 2006 reveals 120 Chinese children vanished from Swedish immigration centers within a period of 18 months.

      The Embassy of Stockholm believes the disappearing acts were managed by organized traffickers residing in several European countries.

      The children — ages 10 to 18 — arrived in Sweden unaccompanied and, oftentimes, without travel documents, to seek political asylum. They all claimed they had relatives who were victims of religious persecution and seemed “very professionally coached” during questioning, according to a Swedish official.

    • Ten More WikiLeaks You Missed
    • Cables Reveal 2006 Summary Execution of Civilian Family in Iraq

      Women and children had their hands tied behind their back and were shot in the head in house raid, which was covered up by the military

    • Terror alert on local women

      SIX women living in Australia have been named by American intelligence agencies as potential targets of an al-Qaeda plot to recruit women for terror attacks, according to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Is China’s nuclear power risky?

      By settling for cheap technology, China has “vastly increased” the risk of a nuclear accident, claim diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, The Guardian newspaper reports.

      The U.S. Embassy cables from August 2008, released by WikiLeaks, warned that China’s choice of technology would be a century old by the time dozens of China’s reactors come to the end of their lifespan.

    • CLIMATE SHOCK: UC-Berkeley Scientist, Dr. John Harte, Puts the World on Notice

      Dr. John Harte is based at the University of California-Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. With a PhD in physics, his research encompasses the most serious biochemical and climate-ecosystem feedback processes of global warming and theoretical ecology. He has been at the forefront, for decades, of some of the most important studies pertaining to the biological impacts – particularly in alpine environments – of climate change, as well as humanity’s role in the disruption of critical ecosystems.

  • Finance

    • U.S. Cities Criminalize Homelessness, Violate Human Rights Agreements

      The challenges poor and homeless Americans often face accessing clean drinking water and restroom facilities violate international human rights standards, according to a report issued by a United Nations investigator this month.

      Catarina de Albuquerque, a U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, visited the United States in late February at the invitation of the U.S. government.

    • Matt Taibbi on the Explosive Investigation Revealing the SEC’s Cover-Up of Wall Street’s Crimes

      MATT TAIBBI: Under the authority of the enforcement division. Now, this—there’s no legal authority to do this. And, you know, apparently, according to my sources, this was illegal. You can’t just unilaterally shred any government document, no matter how insignificant. And these are significant law enforcement investigatory files that they were unilaterally destroying.

      AMY GOODMAN: Talk about just what the SEC does, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

      MATT TAIBBI: Well, they police the financial markets. They’re the main cops on the beat on Wall Street. It’s basically a two-tiered structure. It’s—you know, for Wall Street crime, it’s the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York are the two main sort of policing organizations that prevent things like insider trading, market manipulation, securities fraud. They also make sure that all publicly traded corporations—they have to make regular disclosures, you know, every year, and they make sure that those disclosures are accurate, that you don’t have an Enron situation, for instance, where a company is reporting profits that they don’t have and hiding losses that they do have. The SEC is supposed to be the number one cop on the beat preventing all of this stuff. And if they’re not doing their job, which they apparently haven’t been, you know, what results is a situation like 2008, where just corruption overwhelms the markets, and you have this explosion of, you know, a lack of confidence all around the globe.

    • First Federal Reserve Audit Reveals Trillions in Secret Bailouts

      The first-ever audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve has revealed 16 trillion dollars in secret bank bailouts and has raised more questions about the quasi-private agency’s opaque operations.

    • How Rick Perry became a millionaire

      He’s very good at making investments that look remarkably like examples of blatant corruption.

  • Censorship

08.30.11

Links 30/8/2011: Many New Linux Tablets, Thunderbird 7 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Xbox 360 reset glitch hack, Xbox 360 Linux on its way?

    This means it’s now possible to run homebrew & backups on all Xbox 360s, no matter which firmware is loaded, in the past this was only possible on Xbox 360s with a certain firmware-level. This also opens the possibility to run quite easily Linux on your Xbox 360!

  • As Linux Moves Into a New Decade, Companies Look for Linux Talent

    The Linux community has been united around the globe over the last few weeks in celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux. As we head into a new decade, many of The Linux Foundation’s members are looking for Linux talent to help advance the OS for everything from cloud computing to virtualization and super computing to embedded development and mobile computing.

  • Desktop

    • The Linux Setup – Dusty Phillips, Developer

      Dusty Phillips certainly falls into the power user category and his answers reflect that status. Dusty runs a tight system that’s optimized for his workflow. And it’s fascinating that he does so much with just one machine.

  • Kernel Space

    • Six Months With OpenBenchmarking.org

      There’s a variety of features and other enhancements to OpenBenchmarking.org that are still forthcoming. I’ve been talking about several of them over the past six months that I look forward to implementing as soon as time allows.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Graphics Stack, Requirements For Ubuntu 11.10

        If you’re thinking about trying out the Ubuntu 11.10 Beta release later in the week or are beginning to wonder about what the graphics driver options for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” when released in October, here’s a collection of information you’ll want to know about the graphics drivers to be found in Ubuntu 11.10.

        [...]

        The Linux 3.1 kernel isn’t making it out for a few more weeks and just before the final release, so Canonical is playing it safe and sticking to the Linux 3.0 kernel although the still-in-development release does provide some nice improvements to the DRM graphics drivers and other areas of the kernel. Users can manually upgrade to the Linux 3.1 kernel and it should be relatively safe.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Linux desktop progress: Innovation vs. power-user backlash

      Recently word spread like wildfire across the net that Linus Torvalds, Father of Linux himself, had proclaimed GNOME 3 an “Unholy Mess.” The hatred for all things GNOME 3 didn’t stop there. Pundits, grand-standers, tinkerers, and media-types alike went on and on about how GNOME 3 had become nothing more than a failure. At the same time, Ubuntu Unity had been given a similar title as a nearly worthless desktop.

      Let’s step back in time a year or so ago when KDE 4 came out of the starting gate. Yes it was hampered by a complete rewrite, but like it’s GNOME brethren, KDE was lambasted as too buggy to ever work correctly.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • New ‘Cool’ Developments

        “World must be crazy” say fellow hackers when realized that one day I left Samsung’s Linux Mobile Lab to work on Smart Refrigerators.

        But well, it’s still in the same company, the same city. Yet this does not mean I am stopping to dig in Linux stuff for living: we’re talking about Linux fridges.

        However, there is something even less expected: these are full four-doors Qt fridges. I dare to say, except for cars or airplanes with infotainment modules, for me these cooling monsters are one of the biggest ‘Qt devices’ available on the consumer market.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Important GNOME Shell, Mutter Updates

        Owen Taylor announced a new version of the GNOME Shell and Mutter releases this afternoon for what will be incorporated into the GNOME 3.2 desktop. While it’s late in the development cycle with the final GNOME 3.2 release coming next month and the beta release being set for Wednesday, the Mutter 3.1.90 carries two important changes along with prominent changes to the GNOME Shell.

  • Distributions

    • New Distribution: Dream Studio Introduced

      Lost in all the news of and attention paid to Mandriva 2011, a new distribution was added to the Distrowatch database. This Ubuntu-based distribution is designed to provide users the means to “create stunning graphics, captivating videos, inspiring music, and professional websites.” Version 11.04 was released the other day, so let’s take a peek.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo: GNOME Keyring And Subversion
      • Quick Look at Sabayon 6 Continued (KDE)

        This spin of Sabayon on the other hand, although the better one, feels average when compared to other KDE 4 distributions like Kubuntu, Kanotix, Debian and in particular when compared to SimplyMEPIS which is just unreal. SalixOS does KDE 4 faster with only 512 MB ram. Kongoni is snappier and also allows to compile updates and any additions via its ports system. So does Slackware with sbopkg. So choose your poison, if for whatever reason you like Sabayon more than any other distribution you’re going to use it anyway, regardless the resource usage and speed. (Slightly updated 30/08/11 15:03)

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Fair Use Face-Off, Canadian Edition

          As professors and librarians in the United States await a judge’s ruling on a copyright lawsuit by publishers against Georgia State University over its e-reserves practices, a similarly themed battle in Canada has seen a number of high-profile research universities walk out on licensing agreements with that country’s major copyright clearinghouse.

          More than a dozen Canadian universities — including heavyweights such as the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary and York University — have said they will not renew their agreements with Access Copyright, a government-created nonprofit that sells licenses to its library of copyright-cleared content.

        • Best Free Android News Aggregators

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Fujitsu’s Android tablet is ready for bathtub readers

        Fujitsu and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo will next month release an Android tablet you could use in the bathtub, featuring a 10.1 inch touchscreen and dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor, according to the Datacider.com website. Meanwhile, Toshiba’s poised to release a slimmer followup to its chunky Thrive, according to a Notebook Italia report.

      • Amazon.com Tablet Could Ship 5 Million Units

        Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) could sell anywhere between 3 million and 5 million Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android tablets in the fourth quarter, making it far and away the most successful slate provider on the open-source platform, according to Forrester Research.

      • Fujitsu Prepping Rugged Honeycomb Tablet

        Fujitsu, known for making lower-end computers and other devices, is apparently ready to throw its hat into the Android tablet game, with the Fujitsu “Arrows Tab,” a rugged Honeycomb tablet. They’ve announced the 10.1-inch device, and it’s set to launch next month on NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese carrier. The tablet could have HSPA, UMTS, and LTE connectivity, as well as GSM and GPRS capabilities, for roaming and such. The Arrows Tab will also be packing a TI IMAP 4430 1GHz dual-core processor, so it won’t be slow by any means.

      • Toshiba Thrive Review

        One of the biggest obstacles Toshiba faces with the Thrive is that the company has no Android presence to help the company gain a foothold. They have no track record of Android phones or tablets to speak of and nothing reputable to bring to the table. At $429 the 16GB version is roughly $70 less than its Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 counterpart. Is it worth paying the extra money for Samsung’s 10-inch tablet? That depends on what’s most important to you. Do you want a functional tablet with great hardware and function? Or do you need to look cool and hip with the slimmest, sexiest tablet on the market?

      • As PCs Wane, Companies Look to Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source for America Awards

    OSFA recently celebrated its second anniversary and would once again like to recognize some of the individuals, projects and deployments that support OSFA’s mission.

  • Web Browsers

    • Extreme tab browsing

      I have a pathological use of browser tabs: I use a lot of them. A lot is probably an understatement. We could say I use them as bookmarks of things I need to track. A couple weeks ago, I was saying I had around two hundred tabs opened. I now actually have much more.

      It affected startup until I discovered that setting the browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs pref to 0 was making things much better by only loading tabs when they are selected. This preference has/will become browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand. However, since I only start my main browser once a day, while other applications start and while I begin to read email, I hadn’t noticed that this was still heavily affecting startup time: about:startup tells me reaching the sessionRestored state takes seven seconds, even on a warm startup.

    • Shiny new UI in Empathy 3.2

      *

      One of our main goals during this developement cycle was to continue improving Empathy’s user experience by re-designing different parts of the UI. To do so our Empathy team at Collabora worked closely with designers from the awesome GNOME Design Team.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Cable: US pressured EU to approve Oracle-Sun merger

      The US Government met with European competition officials to lobby on behalf of Oracle during its purchase of Sun Microsystems, according to leaked diplomatic cables.

      The cables, released this week by whistleblowing site Wikileaks, reveal that the Obama administration had monitored the European Union’s investigation into the competition issues that could arise from the merger and tried to convince them to let the deal go ahead.

      The EU had investigated the merger due to concerns for the future of Java and the open source MySQL database.

  • Healthcare

    • VA, DoD take next step to open source EHR

      The Veterans Affairs Department is set to make its open source agent operational Tuesday and make available the software code of various applications in the electronic health records of VA and the Defense Department.

      Users of the applications will also have a method to report back to the open source agent changes to the software.

  • BSD

    • GhostBSD: not “just another BSD”

      This article continues series of reviews of non-Linux operating systems which you can find existing. Another big family of OSes is based on BSD core. PCBSD, BSDanywhere, FreeSBIE… you can read more about them. It’s time to start our today’s adventure.

      [...]

      Forum, Documentation and FAQ sections are pretty much empty on official site. I have not found any information about LiveUSB creation process for GhostBSD in the Internet either.
      Finally, I decided to look at DVD-RW option. This means the test could only be carried out on Toshiba L500 laptop. Expectedly, it would be a hard task for BSD since not every Linux distribution worked fine on that laptop so far. This laptop has Realtek 8191 WiFi card which is not the most popular among free open source software developers. But let’s talk about this later.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source is illegal?

      While the Slovak Republic is slowly moving forward on the issue of open licenses, Romania appears to have taken a step backwards. The Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs recently banned open source solutions from a public tender of almost 3 milion euro due to ‘internal and European interoperability requirements’. The tender specifically says “All versions of software that are part of the offer may not be published under a ‘free software license’ – GPL or similar”.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Syllable OS developer interview: Building a better operating system
  • Microsoft bashes VMware at VMworld, again

    In what has become an annual tradition, Microsoft celebrated the start of the VMworld show in Las Vegas this week with more satirical bashing of VMware. This year Microsoft launched a Web site called VMlimited in which it likens VMware to a guy who still thinks it’s circa 1977. However, Microsoft’s viewpoint doesn’t jive with the news of new partnerships and wares streaming out of the VMworld show this year.

  • Disney factory faces probe into sweatshop suicide claims

    Disney’s best-selling Cars toys are being made in a factory in China that uses child labour and forces staff to do three times the amount of overtime allowed by law, according to an investigation.

    One worker reportedly killed herself after being repeatedly shouted at by bosses. Others cited worries over poisonous chemicals. Disney has now launched its own investigation.

    It is claimed some of the 6,000 employees have to work an extra 120 hours every month to meet demand from western shops for the latest toys.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • 83 Died in U.S.-Guatemala Syphilis Experiments: “We’re talking about intentional deception.”

      It made headlines when historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College discovered a decades-old program run from by the U.S. Public Health Service’s studies in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. That’s because the researchers deliberately inoculated subjects with syphilis in order to study sexually transmitted disease, and they did so without informed consent for the procedure.

    • Warrantless Surveillance Memos Stay Classified

      The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos the George W. Bush administration used to justify his warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president’s time in office.

      In responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the department is withholding two legal analyses by then-government lawyer John Yoo, and is revealing just eight sentences from a third Yoo memo dated Nov. 2, 2001. That memo is at least 21 pages long.

    • Another ‘Collateral Murder’ Incident Highlighted in the WikiLeaks Cables

      The communication logs show the admirable but futile efforts of UN Special Rapporteurs to gain answers and information on horrific incidents of torture and possible war crimes or crimes against humanity. The incidents Special Rapporteurs are seeking information about are not necessarily unknown, but what makes them significant is how the US has done little if not nothing to address and investigate the killings of journalists in the Iraq War.

    • Fears grow over Britain’s last inmate at Guantanamo Bay

  • Cablegate

    • WikiLeaks: Embassy’s “Privatization Update” Shows Shock Doctrine in Action in Haiti

      IGOH refers to Interim Government of Haiti, the unelected government installed after a US-backed coup ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

    • Apple reportedly assembled anti-counterfeit team in 2008 to combat fakes

      CNN is reporting that recent Wikileaks cables have revealed that Apple assembled an anti-counterfeit team in 2008 to combat counterfeited iPhones and iPod touches. Apple’s early plans to attack Chinese counterfeits were to go after retailers and street vendors, work with police to raid manufacturing facilities, and to go after online retailers.

    • Timeline: Daniel Domscheit-Berg

      This is the story of Daniel Berg aka Daniel Schmitt aka Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the many collaborators with WikiLeaks in the ‘nascent period’ up to but not including the big releases of 2010.

      Daniel was an employee of the US storage giant EDS in Rüsselheim Germany when he heard about WikiLeaks. Daniel’s not a programmer – and certainly not a hacker – but seemed to ‘dabble’ in political topics such as ‘anarchy’ and transparency.

      But we’re getting ahead of our story. The following data was culled over the past few months when the opportunity (and the inclination) came to research Daniel’s bizarre life and relationship with WikiLeaks and the website’s founder Julian Assange. All items are referenced online save Domscheit’s own book.

    • WikiLeaks: Russian Foreign Ministry ‘Bastion’ of Sexism and Low Pay

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • If ACTA Is Approved In The US, It May Open The Door For The President To Regularly Ignore Congress On International Agreements

          On of the sneakier parts of ACTA is that the White House has insisted from the beginning that the document is not a binding treaty. Instead, it insists that ACTA is merely an “executive agreement.” Of course, the only real difference is that an executive agreement doesn’t require the Senate to ratify it. Basically, the US is calling it an executive agreement so that the administration can sign on without any oversight or scrutiny on the treaty. The Europeans, in the meantime, never got the “ix-nay on the inding-bay eaty-tray” notice from the US folks, and have been happily declaring ACTA a binding treaty as it clearly is.

          However, many legal experts have noted that this raises serious constitutional questions, as the Constitution simply does not allow this kind of agreement to be signed without Senate approval. Amusingly, Senator Biden — back during the previous administration — was one of the leading voices in trying to prevent President Bush from signing an “executive agreement” with Russia, without getting Senate approval. One wonders if he’s magically changed his mind.

08.29.11

Links 29/8/2011: Linux 3.1-rc4, 3.0.4, 2.6.32.46, and 2.6.33.19

Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 162
  • Linux and the financial crisis

    The financial industry is out-innovating regulators, experts and common investors. For years, the financial industry hired the best hackers it could find. They have a sizable share of the most creative and smart engineers on the planet. And Linux is one of their favorite tools. It is not difficult to understand: you can literally rewrite, or help rewrite, the Linux kernel. Today, Wall Street runs on Linux and it thrives thanks to its elite programmers.

  • Virtualization With KVM On A CentOS 6.0 Server
  • Jailbreak Only: Linux – Coming Soon To Your iPhone, iPad

    A team of jailbreak developers has recently managed to install the Linux desktop operating system on Apple’s A4 equipped iOS devices. The news comes as the image of an iPad running Linux was tweeted by one of the team’s developers.

  • Linux spotted running on an iPad

  • Server

    • UNIX Special 4: Linux vs. UNIX

      Although many still consider UNIX the best option for high-demand applications, the technical differences between Linux and UNIX are “going to be pretty minimal” going forward, argued Gartner analyst George Weiss in a recent report.
      Things going in favour of Linux were – better hardware features, internal multitasking and multiprocessing, less expensive resource requirements, stronger application independence and other such bullets.

      Gabriel Consulting Group takes the same vein.

    • In pursuit of affordable shared-storage options

      The breaking of ties between Unix flavours and specific RISC processors was the stand-out example, and Linux OSes on commodity x86 servers were the agent of change to bring this about in the early part of the last decade.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.1-rc4

      Or how about the wiimote driver changes? Or the iscsi target changes?

    • Stable kernels 3.0.4, 2.6.32.46, and 2.6.33.19

    • Graphics Stack

      • Nouveau Fan Management Code Published

        At long last, if your computer has previously sounded like a jet engine when using the open-source Nouveau driver with your NVIDIA GeForce/Quadro graphics card, there is a solution. Fan management code has now been published by the Nouveau developers to support controlling the graphics card’s fan speed when using this in-kernel Linux driver.

        Martin Peres writes to the Nouveau mailing list this morning, “Just saw the bitching on Phoronix about lack of fan management in nouveau (no offence Michael, it was justified ;)). Since it has been working flawlessly for more than a week on my desktop, I decided to let you guys know about it and ask for testing.”

      • A 40-Way Gallium3D Graphics Card Comparison

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva 2011 is here!
      • Mandriva Linux 2011 Officially Released, Screenshot Tour

        Mandriva proudly announced last evening, August 28th, the immediate availability for download of the final and stable release of the highly anticipated Mandriva Linux 2011 operating system.

      • Mandriva Linux 2011.0 Released
      • First look at Mandriva Linux 2011

        I have mixed feelings about Mandriva Linux 2011. On the one hand, I can understand the developer’s motivation to simplify the distribution in order to create a more uniform, newcomer-friendly and easy-to-support installation class. This would be a perfect scenario for schools and government offices and with Russia’s highest political echelons reportedly encouraging more free software deployment in the country, one can easily see the reasons for having a simple, easy-to-use and pre-configured desktop system provided locally. On the other hand, long-time Mandriva users are likely to be disappointed with the sudden lack of options previously available to them. Yes, the hybrid live/installation DVD image is a step in the right direction, but those users wishing to use Mandriva in a different deployment scenario than the default KDE desktop might be discouraged by the amount of post-install customisation work and the unequivocal endorsement of KDE as the only supported desktop.

        This inevitably brings up the subject of comparison between Mandriva Linux 2011 and Mageia 1 (read our review of Mageia 1 here). As always in these situations, it is best to try both releases and decide which of the two better meets the user’s needs, but in my view, it’s clear that Mandriva 2011 has departed too far from its roots. In fact, Mageia 1, which resisted the temptation to make large scale changes to its first release, is now a more genuine “Mandriva” than Mandriva itself. Those users who enjoyed the older Mandriva Linux releases will undoubtedly feel more at home with Mageia 1 than with the latest Mandriva release.

        Mandriva 2011 feels like a completely new distribution, extravagantly disconnected from its past and with dramatically new values, concepts and orientation. I suspect that it’s targeted mainly at larger organisations with a need to have a uniform desktop setup across dozens of computers and, to a lesser extent, at newcomers to Linux. The only thing that still links this release to the old Mandriva is its superb control centre, but everything else has changed or, as in the package manager’s case, is about the change. This is not necessarily a bad thing and it’s entirely possible that this new philosophy will find acceptance among certain users and organisations where too many choices would present a new set of problems. Furthermore, the Rosa Labs set of desktop tools is an interesting addition, perhaps not entirely bug-free, but presumably well-tested on less technical users. As such, Mandriva could be in a good position to attract new Linux converts, but in the process it has probably shunned many of the more technical users.

      • Five Good Reasons to Try Mandriva Linux 2011

        Canonical’s Ubuntu may frequently dominate the headlines in the Linux world, but the fact remains that it’s just one of many popular desktop distributions of the free and open source operating system.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat 5 STIG: Network Settings

        The draft release of the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) “Red Hat 5 STIG” earlier this year has a few system administrators panicking. For Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5 administrators, this Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) has supplanted the generic UNIX STIG.

        The generic UNIX STIG had the single potential discrepancy indicator (PDI) “GEN003600 – Network Security Settings.” The checklist document required you to check four network settings in the running kernel. The new Red Hat 5 STIG, however, has many more settings and provides better explanations.

      • Red Hat’s biggest enemy? VMware

        Let’s play a game. Who do you think Red Hat’s biggest enemy will be in a few years? Will it be Microsoft, Linux’s traditional enemy? Could SUSE, the number two business Linux distributor, make a try for the top? Might Ubuntu’s Canonical make its big break into corporate Linux? All good guesses, but Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, is pretty sure that Red Hat’s biggest competitor in 2016 will be VMware.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • A closer look at Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric with Jono Bacon
          • Google Music App For Ubuntu with Sound Menu and Native Notifications Support

            Google Music Frame runs Google Music web interface in its own window and provides integration with Ubuntu sound menu and notifications. It also remembers last session and the current view (album, genre list, etc.)

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux: First Impressions

              What I like the most about Bodhi Linux are freedom of choice for applications and profiles (Bare, Desktop, Laptop and Tablet/Netbook) that I truly need, the familiar Synaptic Package Manager and vast choices of themes and icons for customization. It’s a great surprise for such a minimalist OS with such highly customizable aesthetic interface! There are more to learn about the lightweight Enlightenment Desktop and other configurations, though.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Video: Eben at the Bletchley Park Educating Programmers Summit

    • Phones

      • Android

        • LG Enlighten Spotted in Walmart Catalog

          We first heard about the LG Enlighten earlier this month, and we got a better look at it on Tuesday. It appears that the Enlighten will be making its way to Big Red through Walmart, as someone has gotten their paws on a Verizon catalog that’s advertising the device.

        • Rumour titbits: Sony Ericsson Nozomi is global phone; SK19 is cancelled

          Secondly, we recently wrote about the Sony Ericsson SK19 suggesting it could be a Xperia ray pro. However, he says this model is now cancelled. It was a keyboard slide phone being developed for AT&T in the US and would have sat in between the Xperia mini pro and Xperia pro. The reason we trust him? He told us all about the Xperia neo V before today’s announcement including the difference between it and the Xperia neo. We’ll bring you more news as we have it.

        • CyanogenMod Team Gets Android Working On HP TouchPad

          There have been a flurry of efforts in recent days aimed at getting a workable version of Android up-and-running on the webOS-based HP TouchPad. The mission has been funded in part by modding community called HackNMod, which is hoping to give the tablet’s early adopters an operating system with a more certain future: Android.

          It appears that the CyanogenMod team has finally made that happen. According to a public statement and accompanying video, the developers say they now have an alpha version of the CyanogenMod 7 firmware running on the TouchPad.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Sony S2 Tablet is the Tablet P, Specs Continue to Leak

        More specs have recently leaked about the upcoming Sony Tablet S and the codenamed Sony S2 which are expected to launch next month. The S2 will launch as the Sony Tablet P, the dual 5.5″ screened clamshell will weigh 370 grams, have 512Mb RAM, 4GB of storage with a 2GB SD card and connectivity over 4G or WiFi. Both the Tablet P and Tablet S will use Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor and have 0.3MP front-facing cameras. The Tablet S will weigh 600g, have 1GB of RAM and come in 16GB or 32GB flavours. No word on price or exact shipping dates, but it shouldn’t be too much longer before they’re known.

      • Samsung unveils LTE-equipped phone, tablet

        Samsung announced LTE (long-term evolution) editions of its Galaxy S II smartphone and Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet computers, claiming potential download speeds of up to 100Mbps, and uploads of 50Mbps. The phone also upgrades to a 4.5 display and eight megapixel camera, while the slate weighs only a pound and is just over a third of inch thick, the company says.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

    • CUBRID Bug Bash Event!

      Today at CUBRID we are very happy to announce yet another contest which will start on September 1st, 2011, and will last for one month.

      The idea of this Bug Bash event is to fix potential bugs which may exist in the latest version of CUBRID Tools and Web Apps, thus, increase the quality of this software, and engage users in CUBRID development.

    • EnterpriseDB Brings PostgreSQL to the Cloud

      Managing the open source PostgreSQL database has often been the domain of command line tools and scripts. That’s now about to change thanks to the release of Postgres Enterprise Manger from commercial PostgreSQL firm, EnterpriseDB.

      EnterpriseDB is also taking PostgreSQL beyond the confines of traditional data center deployments with a new Postgres Plus Cloud Server service. The new services and tools come as EnterpriseDB ramps up their PostgreSQL offerings in the wake of Oracle’s takeover of Sun and the MySQL database.

      “What we’re trying to do at EnterpriseDB is to really make it easier for the user to deploy more PostgreSQL,” Karen Tegan Padir, Vice President, Products and Marketing at EnterpriseDB told InternetNews.com.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Untapped: Why the developing world must treat IT as a national resource

      The open source movement has the potential to empower developing countries to use IT as an important national resource — to communicate to its citizenry, expand its educational platform and address national disasters. Open source software is not only free from license restriction; it is also free to be used as a basis for innovation, allowing custom solutions for the unique context of specific issues faced by developing nations. But for many nations, software is not enough.

    • Defence conducts OpenOffice.org trial

      The Department of Defence has reportedly conducted an informal trial of the open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite involving some 100 users.

      According to iTNews (click here for the full story), the initiative was kicked off by Defence chief technology officer Matt Yannopoulos over the past year. However, it does not appear likely the initiative will immediately broaden into a wider rollout at Defence, with Yannopoulos noting it would be a major decision for the department, which has long been a Microsoft shop.

  • Licensing

    • Desktop Summit: Copyright assignments

      Copyright assignment (or licensing) agreements for projects is a rather contentious issue that reflects differing views of how free software will be best-positioned to grow over the coming years. Several perspectives were on display at the “Panel on Copyright Assignment” held on August 6 at the Desktop Summit in Berlin. The panel consisted of two opponents of such agreements, Michael Meeks and Bradley Kuhn, as well as perhaps their most outspoken proponent, Mark Shuttleworth, with GNOME Foundation executive director Karen Sandler handling the moderation duties. In the end, each position was well-represented, but, as might be guessed, neither side convinced the other; each will likely continue to pursue its path over the coming years.

    • The Mozilla Public License – almost 2.0 (part 1)

      Over the past 18 months, the Mozilla community has been revising the Mozilla Public License. See earlier post. We recently announced, in true community development fashion, a release candidate–the text that we hope will become MPL 2.0 after one last set of eyes review it. This piece is a brief backgrounder on what has changed in the new MPL, explaining why we’re proud of this work and we hope you’ll consider reviewing it – and maybe even using it for your next project.

    • Citrix CloudStack Shifts to Single GPLv3 Flavor

  • Programming

    • Five easy ways to get you coding
    • Getting Started with the Fuel PHP Framework

      Regular PHPBuilder readers are well aware of my personal affinity for framework-driven development. These days I opt to use a framework for every conceivable web project, no matter how minor. Thankfully many other developers feel the same about the framework’s amazing breadth, because a wide range of framework solutions are available for projects large and small. For large projects, you might consider using CakePHP, Symfony, or my personal favorite, the Zend Framework. Smaller projects might take advantage of one of the many microframeworks, such as Fat-Free or Limonade.

    • Opa – a unified approach to web programming
    • Retiring the DLJ

      With Java SE 7 and JDK 7 out of the door, and with OpenJDK as the official Java SE 7 reference implementation, and OpenJDK serving as the basis for future Oracle JDK 7 update releases through the now up and running JDK 7 Updates Project it’s finally time to retire the “Operating System Distributor License for Java” (DLJ).

    • Oracle retires licence for distributing its Java with Linux

      With a brief news item, Oracle has retired the “Operating System Distributor License for Java” (DLJ) that was created by Sun in 2006. The non-free licence had allowed Linux distributors to package and distribute Sun’s, and later Oracle’s, Java versions in their Linux distributions. Sun made this licence available after releasing Java as open source at the JavaOne conference in 2006. It was designed to ensure that users had easy access to packages containing the well-tested Sun Java during the development of the free OpenJDK.

    • sun-java6 packages removed soon from Debian/Ubuntu (and all other linux distros)
    • An LLVM backend for Sparse

  • Standards/Consortia

    • TransferSummit: Innovation, commoditisation and value creation

      In the second of a short series of articles introducing some of the topics which will be discussed at the upcoming TransferSummit in Oxford, IBM’s Don Harbison discusses the benefits of an open approach to the development of document standards.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Republicans Against Science

      Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Mr PM, what’s in our food?

      Last week, I visited Vanashree, an eco-farm about a 100 km outside the city. Run by IT professionals Srikanth and Priti, the place is an embodiment of minimal human interference with nature. The duo use no pesticides — chemical or otherwise — on the lush eight-acre farm that has bananas, coconuts, chikoo, betelnut, poultry, dairy and bee-keeping, among other things. They’ve been running the place for about six years and by now, a lot of their methods have made the land more fecund, the soil soft and fertile. In their rainwater harvesting ponds, the fish are jumping.

    • Volunteer Doctors Can’t Keep Up with Needs of Uninsured and Underinsured

      A few months before I left my job in the insurance industry in 2008, I was working on a “white paper” to try to persuade people — especially lawmakers and candidates running for office that year—that the problem of the uninsured in this country was not a big deal.

      At that time, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were an estimated 47 million Americans who were uninsured, a number that has increased since then by about 4 million. My job was to slice and dice the Census data in such a way to convince people that most of those without coverage were just shirking their personal responsibility to buy it.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • 00. Editorial – Wikileaks Statement on the 9 Month Anniversary of Cablegate: Release of 133,887 Cables

      Over the past week, WikiLeaks has released 133,887 US diplomatic cables from around the world – more than half of the entire Cablegate material (251,287 cables). The new release was met with a sustained Denial of Service (DOS) attack during the first 36 hours. WikiLeaks had to rely on back-up servers for some hours. With supporters’ help, WikiLeaks was able to bring in additional servers to stave off the attack.

      For the first time, the diplomatic cables are available from every country that has US diplomatic representation. Until now, many countries had been excluded from the news stories, partly due to WikiLeaks media partners’ geographical bias, and partly due to Wikileaks’ resource constraints in establishing new media partnerships (there are now over 90).

    • Will the guilty try to implement ways to suppress freedom of speech?

      I write this letter to commend Wikileaks founder Mr. Julian Assange in his brave role in leaking highly confidential and important information in the Embassy of Georgetown cables.
      Wikileaks has been described by Time Magazine as “Could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act.”

    • 00. Editorial – 30 new revelations from #wlfind
    • Fairfax hoards explosive cable
    • How WikiLeaks has changed the role of journalism

      “The timidity of the New York Times came as a surprise and disappointment to me,” Hrafnsson told the assembly of 60 news executives, editors and reporters. “It was not the New York Times of the early 1970s where the Times was willing to take on the Nixon administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers.”

      It’s pretty much a given that Hrafnsson, or any WikiLeaks official, would be arrested if he set foot in the United States. Hrafnsson also is certain that the National Security Agency monitors every email he receives.

      After his presentation, I asked Hrafnsson, a veteran journalist from Iceland, why he was singling out the Times for criticism. (I spoke to the same group a few hours later.)

      When WikiLeaks released 77,000 Afghan War documents to news organizations in July 2010, the New York Times was accorded the right to publish the scoop on its website. Instead, Hrafnsson said, the Times apparently was so worried about the likely furor over release of the Afghanistan war logs that critical minutes passed, and the Times decided to report the news only after other publications had done so.

    • Diplomatic cables claim Australia has failed to stabilise ‘fragile’ Solomons

      MORE than a billion dollars and eight years of effort by Australia has failed to build political and economic stability in the Solomon Islands, according to secret United States diplomatic assessments.

      The assessments say Australia’s intensive policing and aid effort has not succeeded in stabilising the country and predict it would relapse into turmoil within weeks if the multinational Regional Assistance Mission were withdrawn.

    • WikiLeaks: USA made “enormous concession” in talks on Czech radar

      The Czech team negotiating on the SOFA treaty in 2008 achieved “an enormous, unprecedented concession” of the U.S. delegation by limiting the treaty’s scope to a planned missile defense radar site, according to a Prague U.S. embassy’s cable released by WikiLeaks on August 25.

      The U.S. negotiators pointed out that the USA has general, broad-scoped Supplemental Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) with other NATO allies, the embassy’s cable from April 29, 2008 says.

    • 240 Wikileaks cables on pharmaceutical data exclusivity

      The following are the cables identified in an August 29, 2011 search of the wikileaks cables, from http://cablesearch.net, using the search terms data exclusivity and pharmaceutical. This search identified 240 cables. Some 40 countries are mentioned in the cables. More than half of the cables involve 5 countries: Turkey (76), Taiwan (21), El Salvador (11), Honduras (11) and Tunisia (10).

    • The Guardian blames Wikileaks for the arrest of Bradley Manning
    • US interested in what makes American-born settlers tick
    • WikiLeaks: Washington and Brasilia Monitoring Chávez in the Caribbean

      As more and more WikiLeaks cables get released, the Brazilian-U.S. diplomatic relationship has become increasingly illuminated. Though somewhat wary of each other, Washington and Brasilia sometimes saw eye to eye on matters of geopolitical importance. Take, for example, both countries’ handling of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Under the helm of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, Brazil cultivated a strategic alliance with Venezuela and publicly the two nations embraced South America’s “pink tide” to the left. Yet, WikiLeaks documents reveal that Brazil may have shared Washington’s concern over Chávez’s rising geopolitical importance, particularly in the Caribbean theater.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs targeted as ‘Jaws’ joins battle over banking crash

      He is known as “Jaws”, the perfect nickname for a lawyer entangled in a lawsuit filed against a massive investment bank that has been dubbed a “vampire squid” by its critics. But Jacob Zamansky, a renowned Wall Street defender of the little guy, with a record of extracting large settlements from giant firms, does not fear the tough reputation of Goldman Sachs.

      Indeed, he is happy to be helping on a class-action lawsuit against the bank taken out on behalf of a group of shareholders seeking millions of dollars in damages for alleged illegal behaviour. “Goldman misled these investors. So they came to me,” Zamansky said.

      However, Zamansky’s lawsuit is just one o

    • Ceiling at 16: California’s Lack of Recovery

      Total employment in California fell in June from 15.974 million to 15.910 million. The bigger story however is that, in addition to making a lower low in 2010, California employment never regained the 16 million mark first achieved early last decade.

  • Civil Rights

    • Revealed: the secrets of Scotland’s dna database

      Given exclusive access to police information, the Sunday Herald today reveals that one in 10 Scottish adult males now has their DNA held on a database containing 300,000 profiles – with 3000 a day being added to the total By Judith Duffy

  • Copyrights

    • Web-blocking and Illegal Sites

      In the last week there have been three stories in the news concerning copyright infringement and “illegal websites”. In each case, a group with an interest in enforcing copyright has called for or announced measures against such websites, but this raises an important question of what makes a website illegal. In terms of copyright infringement this is a very tricky question as there is no easy way to tell whether content or a service is unlawful.

Links 29/8/2011: Mandriva 2011, Raspberry Pi (Linux Board) Runs Quake 3

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kids today need a licence to tinker

    Back to school time and millions of British kids are heading back to classrooms to embark on the national curriculum so beloved of busybody ministers. One item in particular on that curriculum will bemuse the youngsters. It goes by the initials ICT, short for information and communication technology. If they are in primary school, they will have to get through key stages 1 and 2. Secondary pupils have to get through stages 3 and 4 which, the soon-to-be-abolished Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency tells us, “have been developed to enable schools to raise standards and help all their learners meet the challenges of life in our fast-changing world”. Michael Gove, the government’s education supremo, has set in train a root-and-branch overhaul of the national curriculum, but for the time being our kids are stuck with the current version.

    [...]

    Another takes students through converting their paper-based designs for data entry forms and invoices into “the real thing”, using “a spreadsheet program”. Guess which spreadsheet program? If you answered Microsoft Excel, go to the top of the class, because that’s what the vast majority of British schools have.

    [...]

    How we got to this ridiculous state of affairs is a long story. It’s partly about how education departments, like generals, are always preparing for the last war. Thus, while we’re moving into a post-PC age, our ICT curriculum is firmly rooted in the desktop computer running Microsoft Windows. It’s also partly about the technophobia of teachers, local councillors and officials. But it’s mainly about the chronic mismatch between the glacial pace of curriculum change in a print-based culture, and the rate of change in the technology.

    There might have been a time when computers and networking were so exotic that ICT deserved a special roped-off space in the curriculum. But those days are long gone. Retaining it nowadays as a discrete subject is as absurd as it would be to have “books” as a special component of the national curriculum – a point nicely made by the educational research group Alt-C in its recent submission to Michael Gove.

    [...]

    When will the Raspberry Pi go into production?

    We are hoping to start shipping them in November. The first customers will be probably hobbyists, but I have had hundreds of emails from all over the globe. I’ve had inquiries from headmasters in Kenya asking where they can get 1,000 units for their schools. Moreover, at £15 it could help get a computer into low-income households in the UK and create opportunities for children in those families to develop an interest in programming.

    What kind of stuff can you do with it?

    You can program it using scripting languages like Python, or compiled languages like C and C++. You could write a game of a similar level to Angry Birds or Quake 3. You can run Firefox on it and free office software such as OpenOffice.org.

  • Linux Australia to live stream SGM

    Linux Australia is holding a special general body meeting tonight to vote on some pending issues – and for the first time the organisation will be live-streaming the meeting.

  • Desktop

    • What’s Wrong With This Picture?

      These fail to notice that GNU/Linux does make it on the desktop around the world in particular markets, like the BRIC countries. All of the “reasons” vanish when monopolistic control of retail shelves and OEMS is weak. The reasons GNU/Linux makes it on the desktop are many:

      * the four freedoms work for real people,
      * because GNU/Linux is Free Software it may be freely copied, lowering the cost of acquisition for everyone,
      * there are millions of developers of FLOSS working cooperatively around the world to deliver software the world needs,
      * the four freedoms also ensure the software is flexible and can be used for optimal benefit to users, not restricted by the marketing plans of a business,
      * the low cost of acquisition is a huge advantage for the poor, students and young people who are not rich,
      * the low cost of acquisition keeps the bulk of expenditures for supply and distribution in the local economy, where the software is actually used, maximizing benefits of the activity,
      * the software works on ARM just as well as it works on old and new computers of all kinds, and
      * the software works faster and more reliably because the only objective for its existence is to run, not to lock-in users to some corporation’s plan for world domination.

  • Kernel Space

    • 20th Anniversary of Linux Gallery Tour
    • Linux at 20: the quiet giant

      Linux, the operating system that grew out of Linus Torvalds’ “hobby”, now runs the majority of the world’s web servers, including those (CDN networks) that deliver The Telegraph website.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa Kills Old Hardware Support: No More 3dfx Voodoo

        The death sentence to legacy Mesa drivers was carried out over the night. All DRI1 drivers have been removed from the Mesa tree along with support for BeOS and other old code, in an effort to remove drivers that receive little maintenance and are just causing a greater burden in re-factoring core Mesa code for the modern drivers. This means though that the Linux desktop loses its support for hardware like VIA Unichrome and 3dfx Voodoo graphics cards.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Gentoo Family

      • Quick Look at Sabayon 6 (GNOME)

        A bit more than a year ago I had a look at the LXDE and Xfce spins of Sabayon 5.3 and came away quite unimpressed as they even refused to install on my low end hardware, but to be fair both these editions are still experimental and the advice is to use the more mature main GNOME and KDE editions.
        So today, with number 6 out, I’ll finally write about those, and without hardware restrictions because I do not expect them to perform with less than 512 MB RAM. Some distributions still manage to do so, but Sabayon is known to be on the heavy side, and it isn’t a problem on this Acer Aspire 5551 with 4GB.

        Sabayon is a customized distribution spin based on Gentoo, for those who don’t fancy doing the whole compile and configure from absolute scratch. That’s also already where the problem lies for me. What’s the point of wanting to use a distribution whose strength it is apparently that everything is custom compiled for the machine it is on, when you then use a pre-compiled version of it done by somebody else on their machines. Why not just use any other binary distribution or ArchLinux as a happy medium, which does provide ready made packages but is both faster and just as configurable, with the option of compiling extra packages that you want to add to the small base should you be so inclined, or just go with what’s available in the repository. Anyway, the choice is yours.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • A Complete Review of Bodhi Linux With Screenshots

          Bodhi Linux was recommended to me as a possible solution to try after I mentioned having system resource issues with Ubuntu One. I have to admit I’ve been rather curious about Bodhi as I have read several rave reviews on it.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Full Circle magazine #52 is out!
          • Ubuntu One Developer Evening In Manchester On Thursday

            On Thursday 1st September at 7pm in Lecture Theatre C014 at Manchester Metropolitan University the ever-enjoyable Stuart Langridge will be giving a presentation about how to write applications that harness Ubuntu One. He will talk about the different APIs, how to write web, desktop and mobile apps using the technology, and the interesting ways in which Ubuntu One can empower your apps.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Demo – Raspberry Pi running Quake 3

      Here’s something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We’re still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, there seems to be a library issue which means our framerate, while good, isn’t quite as spectacular as we know it can be; we’re working on it as I post this) – but this is what test boards are for, and we’re making great progress getting the boards running smoothly.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Ten… budget Android tablets

        Tablets, eh? A nice idea but a shame about the price. From the iPad to the Xoom, the PlayBook to the TouchPad prices starting at or near £400 are a little on the steep side for many folk. Well, the TouchPad maybe an exception these days but only very recently.

        You’ll pay a premium to buy into fondleslabs from Apple, HP or RIM, but Android users have another option, a cheap tablet. These can be picked up for anything between £100 and £230 and sometimes less if you are in the right place at the right time.

        Across the board cheap Android tablets are nowhere near as ghastly as they were just a year ago. Of course, there are sacrifices. You are not going to get Honeycomb or a glass screen or a true multi-day battery life. Increasingly, what you will get is a capacitive rather than resistive screen, Android in it’s 2.2 or 2.3 incarnation – rather than antediluvian 1.6 version – and even access to the Android Market and Google mobile apps.

Free Software/Open Source

  • It’s Not About the Software

    A few days ago, I had an epiphany. I, like many of my readers, have spent a good portion of my life advocating for libre software. There has always been a particular glow to the idealistic concept of information flowing through society, and to the possibility of adaptation to a particular context. Unfortunately, as most advocates and critics alike have come to learn, a good portion of libre software is known to few beyond the developer, and modifications to suit a particular need are not nearly as common as advocates would have one believe.

    What, then, is the allure of libre software? Is it the simple possibility of these theoretical ideals? Why should we use, develop, or recommend libre software over the alternative proprietary platforms that my have more features? “The development model,” claim some, “is collaboration based, and ensures no malignancies will enter into the codebase.” However, only some libre software is developed this way. Many projects are quite unforgiving to new contributors, and most projects never pique the interest of anyone at all for contributions. Because of this, malignancies cannot necessarily be avoided. When nobody is interested in or capable of (without a fork) making changes, the hypothetical options available to prevent intentional dysfunctions dissolve in practicality.

  • Mozilla

    • Why Mozilla’s Firefox Rapid Release Cycle Works and Why it Doesn’t.

      There has been a lot of discussion this week about Mozilla’s Rapid Release cycle. Much of that discussion was fueled by a blog post from Mozilla Chief, Mitchell Baker.

      Baker’s post is a defence of the new cycle, which has caused lots of concern in the Mozilla community and elsewhere. Baker’s view is that the browser needs to be more like the Internet.

    • Light Switch, Dim Everything But Media In Firefox

      It can sometimes be very irritating to interact with elements on a web page if other page elements catch your attention as well. Have you ever tried to watch a video on a web page only to be distracted by an animated banner on the same page? Or maybe you have played games and more than once failed to complete your objective because you have looked over at the auto-updating chat window?

    • Future Firefox Features, What I’m Looking Forward To
    • Open Fire Fox inside Fire Fox Tab -Firefox Tips and Tricks
    • About Firefox About
    • Firefox 7.0 Beta 2

      Firefox Beta is the build for those who like a little bit of jeopardy, but who don’t want to risk everything by trying out Firefox Aurora. It gives you a sneak peek at the next version of Firefox with a relatively stable build that’s not quite ready for primetime, but still pretty solid.

    • Firefox 6 already sees bump in traffic soon after debut

      Firefox 6 officially debuted last week with a host of new features and security fixes. Internet users must already be flocking to the latest version of Mozilla’s browser at a rapid pace — at least according to Chitika Insights (a.ka. the research arm of online advertising network Chitika).

    • Firefox Ships with 6000 Potential Bugs, Community Lead Departs

      A blog post published by Community Lead Tyler Downer rocks Mozilla as he claims that Mozilla Triage QA process is broken and he believes that the current rapid release process drowns Firefox in a sea of bugs with no land in sight.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Hacking Joomla! — the fast and easy way

      Popular open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) like Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress, are regularly subject to source code reviews as well as blackbox pentesting. Thus, vulnerabilities in these systems are quickly identified and fixed. And security updates are frequently released.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Defence bolsters search for open source software

      The Department of Defence has stepped up its push for open source software to reduce its $100 million annual software licensing bill.

      Last week, it joined five other government agencies in forming the Open Technology Foundation, which aimed to facilitate collaboration and interoperable technology in the public sector.

      Defence chief technology officer Matt Yannopoulos said the department had been considering open source software for more than three years.

      Prior to the Federal Government’s introduction of a more aggressive open source policy in January, Defence had not “specifically encouraged” open source software tenders from the market.

    • “Giving Back” Instead of Paying for Licences

      We all know The City of Munich is in the process of migrating the majority of its PCs to GNU/Linux and has migrated all its employees to OpenOffice.org. DBI Gmbh is a business that provides IT services especially software migration. These are two examples of organizations giving back to the FLOSS community to make better software for the world.

Leftovers

  • Say What? Top Five IT Quotes of the Week
  • H-P’s One-Year Plan

    Let’s say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here’s how you do it:

    Fire well-performing CEO Mark Hurd over expense-report irregularities and a juicy sexual-harassment claim that you admit has no merit. Fire four board members, as publicly as possible. Foment a mass exodus of key executives who actually know how to run the giant computer company.

    Hire new a CEO from German competitor, SAP, which sells business software, not consumer products. Tell the new CEO, Leo Apotheker, that Mr. Hurd “left H-P in great shape.”

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Prosecuting War Crimes? Be Sure to Read the Fine Print

      Especially if they’re convicted. Justice is better than revenge. And justice must be done for the relatives of the victims as well as for the dead. Part two of the Mubarak trial this month was a case in point. Egyptians want to know exactly who ordered the killing of innocent demonstrators. Who was to blame? And since the buck stops—or is meant to stop—at the president’s desk, how can Mubarak ultimately escape his just deserts? The same will apply to Gaddafi when—if?—we get him.

    • WikiLeaks: U.S. Embassy asked State Department to vet IDF chief Gantz in 2008

      The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked the U.S. State Department to carry out a background check on current Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz in October 2008, according to a diplomatic cable leaked by the WikiLeaks website.

      Gantz, then the IDF’s attache in Washington, came under scrutiny due to the Leahy Law, which bans the United States from assisting foreign military units that violate human rights.

    • New WikiLeaks Cables Show US Diplomats Promote Genetically Engineered Crops Worldwide

      Dozens of United States diplomatic cables released in the latest WikiLeaks dump on Wednesday reveal new details of the US effort to push foreign governments to approve genetically engineered (GE) crops and promote the worldwide interests of agribusiness giants like Monsanto and DuPont.

      The cables further confirm previous Truthout reports on the diplomatic pressure the US has put on Spain and France, two countries with powerful anti-GE crop movements, to speed up their biotech approval process and quell anti-GE sentiment within the European Union (EU).

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • Madoff whistleblower: Here’s the next big fraud

      The man whose e-mails detailing Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme were ignored by the Securities and Exchange Commission has a new target — foreign exchange fraud.

    • Wikileaks: Speculators Helped Cause Oil Bubble

      When oil prices surged to a ridiculous $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, conventional wisdom held that normal supply and demand issues were the cause. Both the Bush administration (in the form of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and most of Wall Street (through both media figures and market analysts) blamed such factors as increases in oil demand from the Chinese industrial machine, and the failure of Americans to conserve, for the surge in crude prices.

    • Let’s Get Political…Government Should UPHOLD the Law NOT Help Break It.

      Politics and our government specifically has, in my opinion, done more to break and circumvent laws. This complete disregard for our laws and the protection of our people has been led by the leaders of our government from the President on down to our Congressmen, Senators, Governors, Mayors and even Judges. This has been gong on for quite some time but became blatantly evident during the George W. Bush administration. It matters not Republican or Democrat. Both sides are guilty and seem to work from the same play book in what I have called a Democratic Dictatorship.

      From illegal wiretapping to allowing white collar crime (for a select group of elite primarily in the finance industry), our government – past and present – continue to violate our Constitution and our constitutional rights if it works to their advantage.

    • Dylan Ratigan Interviews Director Charles Ferguson – How Wall Street Took Over Government

      Both Glenn Hubbard and Laura Tyson have played major roles in American economic policy, and both also, unfortunately, exemplify the disturbing, opaque conflicts of interest that pervade the economics discipline.

      Over the last thirty years, academic economics has been penetrated by special interests, particularly financial services, in the same way that America’s political and regulatory systems have been compromised by campaign contributions and the revolving door. In fact, the “revolving door” is now a triangular trip between industry, government, and academia.

08.28.11

Links 27/8/2011: Free Software in India, a Lot of Cablegate Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • A Brief History of My Life on Linux: Part II

      Two distributions I found myself playing with time and time again were Ubuntu and Mepis. Ubuntu was still a fledgling at the version Breezy Badger, so I restricted it to a separate partition from Mepis. Mepis quickly became my main squeeze in the place of Mandriva. It came on a Live CD (which many distributions had yet to do at this time period), came with handy tools for repairing botched installations (which happened a lot with all my tinkering and learning), was easy to use, and was blazingly fast. Best of all though the community welcomed me with open arms and never in the entire time I spent there made me feel like a “stupid noob”.

  • Server

    • BICTU readying for eTRACS deployment, holds Linux Training

      Linux systems have long been used as server operating systems, and have risen to prominence in that area. They have become increasingly popular in the last decade due to pricing, compared to other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. In fact, the ten fastest supercomputers in the world run on Linux.

      The development of Linux has been one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially, by anyone under an appropriate license.

  • Kernel Space

    • Samsung Puts Out New Open-Source ARM DRM Driver

      Samsung has published the code to a new open-source DRM driver for its EXYNOS4210 System-On-a-Chip. The EXYNOS4210 has impressive 3D graphics capabilities, uses the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and is used in various smart-phones. The Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the smart-phones using the Exynos 4210 SoC. Samsung is hoping to push this DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Digikam : premier photo management on GNU/Linux

        In Fedora Linux 14, the default photo manager and digital camera application is Shotwell. I tried using it, I really tried, but I ended up giving up because it was not easy to use in my opinion. In fact, I also tried to run one of my relatives through it on his desktop which also runs Fedora 14, and I concluded it just wasn’t worth fighting. For one, Shotwell seems to want to keep all information about photos and their data in its own database. That’s fine, but it makes it non-intuitive when you want to move photos into folders and sort them in ways that are different than Shotwell sorts them (which by default is to create one folder per year, month, and day). When simply moving photos to subfolders, Shotwell loses the thumbnails and doesn’t know where the photos are moved to. Also, Shotwell has its own Trash folder which makes it confusing when trying to clean up photos. While Shotwell’s features could be an advantage to some, in this case it did not work out so well.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME3 and AMD – in a nearby future…

        A long time has gone since I posted the (in)famous bug regarding graphical corruption on GNOME3 seen only by ATI users who use the proprietary case. After long hours of frustration I’ve decided to jump into Intel chipsets which work very nicelly out of the box and leave ATI behind, but new developments suggest that ATI/AMD has fixed the bug and it’s under internal testing, so it seems that within one or two releases this bug will be fixed.

  • Distributions

    • AppSet: a refreshingly nice package manager for Arch Linux in the times of app stores

      I’m a rather outspoken user of Arch Linux after having used and tried many other distributions (MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, Suse, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, SLAX, Chakra and even a few others) and I think I got to like the rolling release concept quite a lot. The rolling release concept essentially takes away the notion of milestone release for a Linux distribution and replaces it by incremental and almost continuous updates. Which means that everyday I can update my system and it’s thus almost always running the most recent stable software versions. Note that the upgrade is my choice only, I could stop doing this for 3 weeks instance and that would be fine. Using Arch Linux does not only mean embracing the rolling release distribution model. It also means being ready to install your system from the command line (granted, you only do that once in theory) which can be tedious but not reall difficult. Another “side effect” of using Arch Linux is that the distribution’s package management is done entirely through the command line and with the help of the excellent package manager pacman. Pacman is however not a graphical package manager, or rather, it does not come with a default, out of the box graphical front-end. Several of them do exist but it does not seem to be in the culture of Arch Linux to use one on a regular basis. Enter AppSet. AppSet is a very nice graphical package manager written in Qt; it even got me use KDE again on par with Gnome. AppSet does not only run on Arch Linux, it also supports Chakra (a very close fork of Arch Linux) and works in theory with any other packaging system.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • 12 Things New in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric[Screenshot Tour]

            Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot is marching ahead. Through our detailed reviews of Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 releases, we followed Ubuntu 11.10 in its each and every developmental phase so far. A lot of things have changed since the third alpha release and as we had promised, here is a preview of latest round of changes in Ubuntu 11.10 and a quick screenshot tour.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • ENT: Bodhi easy to install, operate – Online with Bob Vaillancourt

              There is a new Linux distribution making the rounds and it is pretty impressive for a number of reasons.

              The first is the minimal requirements it has and the second is the clean look and feel of this distribution.

              It is called Bodhi Linux and is available at bodhilinux.com.

              Among its many features is that this distribution will run on just about any piece of hardware. It has reportedly been successfully installed on a 386 machine from decades ago. In fact, the stated minimum requirements for this free operating system are a 386 processor, with 1.5 gigabytes of hard drive space and only 128 megabytes of ram.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Most phones shipped in 2015 will be smartphones

        Most phones shipped in 2015 will be smartphones
        ANALYST OUTFIT IHS Isuppli claims that smartphones will make up the majority of mobile phone sales by 2015.

      • Android

        • HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom prices are slashed

          TWO IPAD RIVALS, the HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom tablets have had their prices slashed by several retailers.

          Although the tablets haven’t seen the same deep price cuts as HP’s Touchpad, which was reduced to around $100 last week and is now sold out, the Flyer can be picked up for £150 less at Carphone Warehouse.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Is this what Amazon’s tablet will look like?

        It remains to be seen if it’ll materialize and cannibalize Amazon’s own bestselling Kindle e-reader, or if those two devices will remain separate draws for buyers (as a recent Nielsen survey suggests). Msnbc.com’s own Wilson Rothman thinks that when it does appear, it’s going to give the iPad a run for its top spot, mostly because of its might as a retailer. It’s a major factor that Kravitz agrees with: “Not only does Amazon have the name and reach to get an attractive piece of hardware into millions of hands at a competitive price, but they also have the content and retail inventories to sweeten the pot with all sorts of tie-ins.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • Your Zorp remains strong
  • ICE FOSS 11 inaugurated

    He said that world class open source digital resources are developed and used in the education sector in India.

  • ICFOSS to prepare roadmap on future of FOSS in India

    As part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of FOSS in India.

    The consultation session is first of a series of similar sessions that build on Kerala’s early lead in FOSS initiatives and serving to consolidate and leverage the lead with international initiatives. The participants of the consultation, representing a cross-section of stakeholders from the Government, technology organizations, institutions of Higher Education, NGOs, and the FOSS community, outlined their vision for the future of FOSS in their respective domains, highlighting gaps and limitations to be resolved, and making suggestions on the way ahead.

  • Lemma a Free Open Source Twitter Client For the PlayBook

    If you are not satisfied or want more options for PlayBook twitter clients here is a new one called Lemma. The application is free and offers quite a few options. The creators also said they created the app as a proof of concept to show the PlayBook potential. They promise to release the source code so that the BlackBerry development community can keep improving the app. So far the app has received good reviews from PlayBook users.

  • Computer and internet briefs

    The site, which is run by the US-based company Geeknet, lists Open Source software broken down in various categories such as ‘Audio & Video’ or ‘Graphics’. All told, there are more than 300,000 programs available for download on the site, which also includes short summaries about the applications and the developers. The site also allows programmers the chance to manage their projects.

  • Web Browsers

  • Project Releases

Leftovers

  • An Introduction to Giganews’ & Golden Frog’s VyprVPN!
  • Steve Jobs: a reality check

    Hard-core journalists appear to have put all their scepticism aside and wallowed in trying to outdo each other in superlatives.

    The emotional tributes give Jobs the credit for anything and everything that Apple has ever done, especially its achievements in the noughties.

    The reality is a bit different. And if one strikes a sour note, there are no apologies – this is not a reality TV show where selective reality is played out. No, this is life and the warts and sores are as real as the plastic and the botox.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks: Kenya still paying ghost Anglo leasing Companies

      Kenya continues to lose millions of shillings in corrupt payments to Anglo Leasing companies, according to a new cable by online whistleblower, WikiLeaks.

    • US Top Diplomat Monitored Internet in Cuba

      Chief of Mission of the US Interest Section in Havana, Jonathan Farrar, monitored the Internet for possible subversive actions, according to a cable released by Wikileaks and reproduced by Cuban websites on Saturday.
      Farrar’s monitoring of the Internet along with his wife occurred in August 2008, when he addressed a memorandum to the US State Department described as sensitive, without reporting any obstacle from Cuban authorities.

    • Full Commission Of Inquiry Report Released

      More than two years after it was completed, Sir Robin Auld’s complete Commission of Inquiry Report 2008-09 of alleged corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands government has been made public.

      “I believe that the people of the Turks and Caicos Islands deserve to see the entirety of the final report,” His Excellency the Gov. Gordon Wetherell said Aug. 19 in one of his last actions before leaving office and the country Aug. 22.

    • Armenian police forced homosexuals to reveal gay public figures – US Embassy

  • Finance

    • Factbox: Goldman faces myriad legal challenges

      Conventional wisdom in legal circles has long held that Goldman Sachs (GS.N) might escape further large fines or criminal charges for its role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis after reaching a $550 million settlement with securities regulators in July 2010.

      But news that Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and other senior executives have hired their own lawyers — separate from the army of attorneys already retained by the company — was a powerful reminder for markets that Goldman is still the subject of myriad investigations.

    • Nurses Take the Message “Heal America Tax Wall Street” to 60 Congressional Offices

      Across the country on September 1, nurses will converge on local congressional offices to demand a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, a move they say is a step towards healing the nation, trimming the deficit, and preserving social programs.

      National Nurses United (NNU) is planning a day of action in over 60 congressional offices in 21 states. In Wisconsin, the group is sponsoring a soup kitchen outside of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Janesville office “to provide residents with the sustenance they are not getting from Paul Ryan,” says NNU spokesman Charles Idelson.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Paul Ryan’s Office Locks the Door on Unemployed Constituents
    • Since 9/11, Koch Industries has fought against tougher government rules on chemical plants
    • Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at Risk of a Poison Gas Disaster

      In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of climate change science and a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, and the environment. This report, Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at risk of a Poison Gas Disaster, examines how Koch Industries has quietly played a key role in blocking yet another effort to protect workers and vulnerable communities; comprehensive chemical security legislation.

    • The Lewis Powell Memo: Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy

      Forty years ago today, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.

      Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing “attack on the American free enterprise system.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Why Michael Robertson of Mp3Tunes deserves our gratitude

        To recap the decision in the Mp3Tunes case, EMI sued the company for what it said were a number of copyright-infringing features of the service — including that users could “sideload” songs to their online lockers, by transferring them directly from online sources such as Amazon, and that the service “de-duplicated” songs stored on its servers, so users who shared a specific song would simply access one copy instead of having to store two separate copies. As with many similar music-sharing lawsuits, EMI also argued that the simple act of copying a song to a cloud service was an infringement of copyright.

      • Hey, Music Industry. You’re suing the wrong people

        You’d never know this by watching the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry’s trade organization, which has spent over a decade launching lawsuits against individuals and groups within the United States. And although the RIAA decided to drop its strategy of mass lawsuits back in 2008, it continues to collude with the MPAA to hound ISPs into spying on their users in an effort to fight piracy.

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