11.08.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It would be difficult to overstate the popularity of the tiny Raspberry Pi computer that launched earlier this year, but it’s just one example of a rapidly growing class of small, inexpensive, Linux-powered devices, as I’ve already noted on several occasions before.
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Rod Aldridge, president of the Hamilton PC Computer Club Inc, tells Chris Gardner why his favourite gadget is a computer running Linux Mint.
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Server
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Linaro is ramping up its efforts to get ARM more deeply embedded into mainstream enterprise computing.
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Kernel Space
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As part of a process to reduce its staff by 15 per cent, AMD has closed the Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) and dismissed the centre’s employees. First indications of this move already surfaced last week, when several OSRC developers had announced on the Linux kernel developers’ mailing list that they will no longer be available on their AMD email addresses. At the LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Barcelona, The H’s associates at heise open learned that the Operating System Research Center has now been shut down completely.
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During a panel discussion with Intel’s Dirk Hohndel, Linus Torvalds discussed the latest technical advancements and problems in kernel development. The creator of Linux and Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist took the stage on day three of the LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain.
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The Linux Foundation made several membership announcements over the weekend, welcoming new members Cloudsoft, Cloudscaling, CloudSigma and DreamHost to the fold at LinuxCon Europe, currently being held in Barcelona.
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The Linux kernel has been ported to a new family of processors commonly found in TV set-top boxes, digital media players, and other devices.
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While AMD is letting go of their Linux staff responsible for new CPU enablement, there’s no slowdown on the Intel side for future hardware enablement under Linux. New Haswell Linux patches were published yesterday, which also reveal a few more details about the video playback improvements to be found on these Intel processors to be introduced in 2013.
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Graphics Stack
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Valve announced today that the closed beta for Linux is now beginning for those lucky few who were selected out of the 60,000 applicants. Those players will be able to start playing native versions of games like Team Fortress 2, but the performance may be a little spotty if the drivers aren’t up to date. It’s a good thing Nvidia is here with an update.
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Pekka Paalanen has published initial patches that allow Wayland’s Weston reference compositor to run from the popular low-cost Raspberry Pi ARM computer.
Pekka’s patches for Weston allow for a configurable Weston back-end at build time, contains a small fix to the OpenGL ES 2.0 support, and introduces a Raspberry Pi back-end for the compositor. The “RPI” back-end is around 2,000 lines of new code for Weston.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In Humble Indie Bundle 6, we wrote that Vessel was coming to Mac and Linux in 24-72 hours. Unfortunately, this estimate was way off, and Vessel is still under development. The port is still being developed as fast as possible, but has hit quite a few unexpected setbacks along the way.
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Scrolls is a fresh take on the collectible card games of old. It’s developed by Mojang – creators of Minecraft. You’ll create your own personalised army from a digital deck before unleashing it in battles with players around the world. It will eventually be released on PC, Mac, Android and iOS.
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Steam is a great source for any gamer. It is a place that will allow you to try out and enjoy many of the more popular video games that are available on the market today. Steam Greenlight will allow you to vote on games that you would like to see come available. It is a great system for gamers, so they do not have to drop $50 to purchase every game off the shelf. They can simply join Steam and enjoy the most popular ones at a reduced price.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.9.3 are available for Kubuntu 12.10 and Raring. You can get them from the Kubuntu Updates PPA for 12.10. Raring testers will get it with the regular updates.
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Today I am pleased to publish an interview with Gabriele, leader of the project SalentOS, as well as owner of the interesting blog gmstyle.org , in the past we exchanged emails and articles and today I want to write a little more information about him and his project.
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Slax is a Linux-based operating system that you can run from a CD or USB flash drive. Developer Tomáš Matějíček is getting ready to release version 7, and this week he’s launched the first release candidate of Slax 7.
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SLAX 7 is now up to a release candidate state and it packs a KDE 4 desktop environment while the entire operating system is less than 200MB in size.
SLAX is one of my favorite lightweight distributions that I have come across but hadn’t heard much about it in the past couple of years until receiving an email this week from Tomas, the SLAX maintainer. He was sharing that SLAX 7 is nearly ready for release and packs in KDE4 while still being fairly lightweight.
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The latest ARM Linux benchmarks to share at Phoronix is a comparison of Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux when running from the dual-core Cortex-A9 OMAP4460-based PandaBoard ES development board.
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New Releases
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The Zorin OS Team are pleased to announce the release of Zorin OS 6.1 Core, our operating system designed for Windows users and those who are dissatisfied with the Unity and Gnome Shell offerings. Zorin OS 6.1 Core builds on top of our popular previous release of Zorin OS 6 Core with newly updated software and a newer kernel out of the box. As Zorin OS 6.1 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 it is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, provided with 5 years of security updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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There was another go/no-go meeting today for the Fedora 18 Beta and it was decided to delay the release for a seventh time. The Fedora 18 Beta was decided to be delayed by two weeks (compared to the normal one week delays) and the final F18 release will be set-back into 2013.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) that took place in Copenhagen last week, the developer community for Canonical’s Linux distribution laid down the goals for the next release of the project, expected in April of next year. This information is now publicly available thanks to the work of Ubuntu community member Alan Bell, who extracted the meeting notes from the Etherpad instance used at the summit.
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The Citrix-owned enterprise collaboration platform Podio is keen to plug into as many other platforms as it can. That’s why it’s already integrated access to Google Docs, ShareFiles and Dropbox files, and why it’s just done the same for Ubuntu One.
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As I mentioned last week, our LoCo Teams are a core part of the Ubuntu community. They provide wonderful contributions in spreading the word about Ubuntu, introducing users in how to get started with the desktop/server, and providing a fantastic support safety net for new users. I want to help to better support the work of LoCo Teams in the 13.04 cycle.
One idea I was discussing with my team the other day was the idea of an Advocacy Development Kit (ADK). Let me explain…
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As always, the latest edition of Ubuntu was released on schedule. Ubuntu 12.10, code-named Quantal Quetzal, was released on October 18. What’s different about this release, is that it is the first October release that I can recall in a long time that comes with new features that are at once cool and controversial. End-to-end and bumper-to-bumper, it is the most interesting Ubuntu (Desktop) release in a long time.
Even as a non-Ubuntu user, I still find one of the new desktop features a true innovation. Unless another distribution or operating system beat Ubuntu to it. In this review, I’ll highlight what that new feature is, why I think it’s cool and a few other details about this latest offering from Mark Shuttleworth’s crew.
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Flavours and Variants
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The most recent buzz related to desktop Linux OEMs has centered around Canonical. But Linux Mint, the Ubuntu-based distribution that remains fiercely independent of Canonical, has been striking deals of its own with hardware manufacturers to preinstall Mint on their devices. Could there be a commercial future for this outspoken member of the open source channel?
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation yesterday announced the availability of RISC OS for the tiny computer. RISC OS dates to 1987, having been developed for ARM-based personal computers by the now-defunct Acorn Computers.
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RISC OS, the operating system with its roots in Acorn’s 1987 Archimedes micro and therefore the birth of the ARM processor architecture, has been released for the Raspberry Pi.
Available as a free download, or pre-loaded onto an SD card for £10 plus postage, the release for the Pi is version 5.19 RC6. There’s also a £35 software bundle on offer, dubbed NutPi, that includes all manner of useful applications to turn a RISC OS Pi into a viable everyday machine.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung has released some new open source Android files for some of its devices, the files ate for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and they apply to a number of devices.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Apple Inc’s share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition from Android devices such as Samsung Electronic Co’s Galaxy tablets and Google Inc’s Nexus 7.
Apple still had a solid lead and shipped more iPads worldwide than a year earlier, Monday’s study by IDC showed. Apple had no new tablets out in the third quarter and also might have seen sales slow amid expectations of a smaller iPad.
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Once-skeptical developers may be coming around to the idea of building tablet apps.
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Hundreds of people were due to celebrate the achievements of the open source software industry at its biennial awards in Wellington last night.
Technology awards can resemble a Hairy Maclary book, with lots of repetition as the same familiar names doing the same things crop up on every page.
But Don Christie, managing director of 150-person open source firm Catalyst IT, one of the award’s top sponsors, said these had again attracted a healthy tally of about 100 entries.
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The CloudStack project, based on Citrix’s CloudStack code which was contributed to Apache earlier this year, has had its first official release from within the Apache Incubator, where it is currently being mentored and matured into a future top-level Apache project. The Apache CloudStack 4.0.0-incubating release offers a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration system. Apache CloudStack competes with other open source IaaS platforms such as OpenStack, the European OpenNebula and the Amazon AWS-API compatible Eucalyptus.
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Having the Open Source Awards presentation ceremony last night, on the same night as the US election results were announced, allowed some analogies to be made between the spirit of open source and democracy.
In both systems, everyone is welcome to make a contribution and the profit motive is absent, said Awards judge and senior advisor at the Inland Revenue Department, Austin Sinclair, introducing the award for Open Source use in government.
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Events
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LinuxCon Europe has been buzzing with energy and lively ideas ever since its kickoff on Monday morning. As day two sessions wound down and everyone was gearing up for the much-anticipated Intel-sponsored reception at Gaudi’s Casa Batillo, we took a few moments to check in with attendees. They told us what’s inspiring them at this year’s conference—and how they’ll funnel that inspiration into action when they return to their workplaces next week.
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The OpenStack team, a software community collaborating on a standard open source platform, had to solve this dilemma—and solve it fast—when the tech community became “ludicrously excited” about their new project. “We experienced growing pains … I guess I’m supposed to call them ‘opportunities’,” said Monty Taylor, manager of automation and deployment at Hewlett-Packard, and one of the creators of the project.
In his Scaling an Open Source Community keynote presentation on Tuesday morning at LinuxCon Europe, Taylor explained how OpenStack overcame early challenges to create a truly non-hierarchical environment focused not only on open source, but also on open design, open development, and an open community.
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Several open source oriented conferences are calling for the submission of papers to their 2013 events. ApacheCon North America (NA), EclipseCon and the Northeast Linux Fest are all accepting talks from interested community members.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Chrome team has officially announced the latest update for Chrome, which arrives as Chrome 23 and for Windows, Mac and Linux users. More specifically, Chrome version 23.0.1271.64 has been released. This update will arrive automatically for current Chrome users. Or alternatively, those not using Chrome and those feeling like they simply cannot wait even a second — you can grab the latest version by navigating to google.com/chrome.
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Google is out with the new Stable Release version 23 of the Chrome browser, which is notable for several reasons. Thanks to the way it handles video decoding, users on portable devices such as laptops who are, say, watching YouTube videos will get longer battery life. And, with this version of Chrome, Google has finally adopted the Do Not Track privacy protection scheme that lets users choose not to be followed when online.
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SaaS
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Cloudera’s CEO has sold out to Oracle before. Will he do it again? And what are the economics of the Big Data business, anyway?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users.
Other skills and knowledge needed to become a Certified Developer include, researching and developing solutions to new or unknown issues, designing and developing one or more courses of action, evaluating each of them in a test case environment, and implementing the best solution to the problem. Once the solution is verified, it is delivered to the customer and given back to the community.
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Education
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Municipalities across America should be working to bring open source educational tools to schoolchildren so they will have the necessary digital literacy skills to tap into their creativity and imagination, or even to provide them with valuable future life and workforce skills. And the case of the Feoffees of the Grammar School in Ipswich, Massachusetts—the oldest charitable trust in America—illustrates this point well.
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Business
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BSD
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After talking about FreeBSD’s transition to Clang as the default C/C++ compiler rather than GCC, the move has finally happened where for x86/x86_64 systems the LLVM-based compiler has replaced GCC.
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Project Releases
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It is always a pleasure to announce the official release of the new stable version 0.8.0 of the FreeMedForms project. This anniversary version (the FreeMedForms EMR one and its main admin) brings two major innovations:
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Public Services/Government
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France is the latest government to move from open source-friendly to open source-active, to paraphrase the European Commission’s aspirational reference to Cloud Computing.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The BBC is trying to wriggle out of some responsibilities when it comes to responding to requests for data made under the Freedom of Information Act, claiming it’s more of a private body than a public one and should therefore be exempt from having to answer some personal questions.
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BBC lawyers are insisting the law treats the public-funded broadcaster as a private body in a battle to resist a Freedom of Information request.
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Open Access/Content
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Class2Go, developed by a group of Stanford engineers, will be the basis for online courses at the University of Western Australia accessible through mobile devices. The mobile app will then be available for use by Stanford – and anyone else.
The beauty of open-source technology is that people around the world can build things together. Like bricolage, technology can grow flexibly as developers respond directly and creatively to users’ needs and imaginations.
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Online classes are nothing new, but the University of Western Australia wants to take the technology one step further with the help of Stanford’s recently launched Class2Go platform. Using an open-source approach to content creation, Class2Go not only allows educators to fine tune their teaching material, but also provides a tool that can be used by anyone regardless of location or enrollment status. As explained by PhysOrg, David Glance, director of the Centre for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia, feels that platform paves way to the new methods of learning used in universities, allowing students to take entire classes using their smartphone or tablet via an app.
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Open Hardware
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The AlaMode board makes it possible to build a bridge between the Raspberry Pi mini-computer and the Arduino prototyping platform and the many shields available for it. Although the Arduino-compatible board connects to the Pi’s GPIO header, the two boards operate independently, sharing data via the GPIO connectors. The AlaMode board is able to connect standard Arduino shields.
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What’s cooler than a humanoid robot? Why, a humanoid robot that plays soccer, of course. And you can get one for just 25 grand.
The robot, developed by researchers at the University of Bonn, is more than just another droid headed for the intensely competitive RoboCup tournament. The little guy features some serious technical upgrades with a simple design and open source code so others can build their own ‘bot. The software and CAD files (.zip) are available on GitHub.
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Standards/Consortia
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If you’re creating Web apps, you’re designing APIs. Here are some things to keep in mind before you begin.
The Web was designed for people. When Tim Berners-Lee created the trio of standards that make up the Web—HTTP, HTML and URLs—the intention was for people to browse Web sites, submit information to them and be at the heart of the experience. But for some time now, the notion of the Web as a set of sites that people browse has been somewhat untrue. True, hundreds of millions of people visit an equally large number of sites each day; however, more and more of the visitors to sites aren’t people, but programs.
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Software architect Gabriel Nistor talks to Trevor Parsons about Ally-Py, the new Free Software framework designed to get the most from web APIs.
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This one is just funny. First noticed by folks on Reddit, former Presidential candidate Rick Santorum — perhaps most well known among internet kids for the Google bombing of his name to associate it with… something unpleasant — apparently has a picture of Chris Poole, better known as moot, the creator of the web’s most popular home for internet trolls, 4chan (and yes, there’s much more at 4chan, but… ).
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Health/Nutrition
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German pharmaceuticals firm Merck KGaA is no longer delivering cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals, a spokesman said on Saturday, the latest sign of how an economic and budget crisis is hurting frontline public services.
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Security
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Inspector Knacker of the Yard has fingered the collar of a 41 year-old man who he thinks hacked the websites of Theresa May and the Home Office.
The attacks were attributed to members of the hacktivist group Anonymous.
The Stoke man, who has not been named, allegedly carried out a DDoS attack on the sites. Coppers were seen removing computers, telephones and electronic storage devices from his house.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The sources added that as Palestinians medics rushed to the scene in an attempt to rescue the wounded resident, but Israeli soldiers fired several warning shots, and prevented the medics from reaching the wounded resident; six hours later, the medics were allowed to reach the resident who bled to death before the medics were allowed through.
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NGO says it fears the illegal settlements are part of renewed push to resume building outposts; IDF issues demolition orders.
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Some 80,000 Palestinians families depend on the annual olive harvest for their livelihoods. This year alone, settlers, with the backing of the army, have destroyed or damaged thousands of olive trees, threatening both a major source of income and an age-old agricultural custom.
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Under the law of occupation, which is part of international humanitarian law,’territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.’
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Campaigners call for end to ‘unjust poor country debts’ after government figures show arms were used against civilians
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Cablegate
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Searches for “WikiLeaks” in the public search engine for the US National Archives have been blocked, according to a posting at Cryptome.org. Any search containing the word “WikiLeaks (like “Congress” and “WikiLeaks”) turns up an error message.
WikiLeaks reacted on Twitter, “The US National Archives has literally turned into Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.” In another more vivid message, “The US state is literally eating its own brain by censoring its own collective memories about WikiLeaks.” And, in another message, “The US National Archives censoring searches for its records containing the word ‘WikiLeaks’ is absolutely absurd.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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What happens when a recycling plan is too successful? Sweden does such a good job recycling and turning its waste to energy that it has started importing trash from its neighbors.
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Finance
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Brian Rinfret likes imported beer from Germany. He sometimes buys Spaten. He enjoys an occasional Bitburger. When he was 25 years old, he discovered Beck’s, a pilsner brewed in the city of Bremen in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law of 1516. It said so right on the label. After that, Rinfret was hooked.
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Censorship
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The chilling effects of Lord Leveson are already being felt in every newsroom in the country — and it is the rich, powerful and influential who are reaping the benefits. I know this because after 17 years working in national newspapers, the last seven of which I spent on the Daily Mail, I have just walked away from a job I loved. The decision — one of the hardest of my life — was driven partly by a desire to spend more time with my young family. But a major factor was the menacing post-Leveson culture in which journalists are already forced to operate.
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More than 100 Nigerians have been charged with treason after a protest march calling for an independent state of Biafra.
Supporters of the Biafran Zionist Movement were arrested after an independence rally in the regional capital, Enugu. The protesters included many elderly war veterans from the bloody 1967 conflict in which Biafra tried to break away from the newly independent Nigeria.
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Privacy
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Smart appliances and devices connected to the web, the coming Internet of Things, will be like Americans planted bugging devices in their homes. The CIA is looking forward to such an opportunity for mass monitoring. In the not-too-distant future, household appliances and web-connected devices will offer the government unfettered access to spy on citizens.
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Civil Rights
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As people head to the polls today to cast their ballots, a critical “battleground” state in the presidential election faces a last-minute controversy over its voting machines.
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Earlier in the week I casually retweeted a note from the activist Bob Fitrakis. He’d posted a story about secret new software patches that had been rolled out to Ohio voting machines, with dark suggestions of shenanigans afoot in the counting of the votes there. Election maniacs may recall Fitrakis from the Ohio debacle of 2004, when he worked with Cliff Arnebeck to try to prove election fraud. (The questionability of the 2004 results is not quite in tinfoil territory; many not-outwardly-foaming observers do still believe that the Kerry-Bush election was stolen in Ohio.)
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Why did Amy Searcy, Hamilton County Board of Elections director of elections, tell the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post that Hart InterCivic is not involved with operations or maintenance of their voting machines in Hamilton County — when her signature is on a quote from Hart InterCivic for voting machine repairs? View the document as a PDF.
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Earlier today, Brad Friedman reported in detail on the uncertified, “experimental” software patches that Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) had secretly contracted [PDF] with Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) to create and install at the very last minute onto electronic central vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties, encompassing more than 4 million Buckeye State voters.
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Electronic voting machines being used by Ohio in today’s election contain a software “back door” that could allow manipulation of the results, a Green Party candidate for one of the state’s 16 U.S. congressional districts claimed in lawsuit.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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AS California voters consider Prop. 37 to require businesses to label genetically modified food, people should consider that the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding research to develop genetically modified crops around the world instead of more natural products.
In June, the foundation granted $9.8 million to British scientists at the John Innes Centre to investigate whether a symbiosis of cereal crops and bacteria could be genetically modified to fix atmospheric nitrogen.
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Footnote: the other side and engine of the Gates empire, Microsoft, got into the UN its so-called “Ambassador to Africa,” who just happens to be the brother of Ban’s then Special Adviser on Africa. Extra budgetary, indeed..
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Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today.
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California’s landmark Proposition 37 was soundly and sadly defeated on Tuesday by corporate interests and big money politics. As of Wednesday morning, with more than 94 percent of the precincts reporting, news outlets reported that the measure has been rejected.
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Copyrights
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Tuesday’s election marked the end of a career for an icon of southern California Democratic Party politics. After a race marked by intense attacks from both sides, fifteen-term Congressman Howard Berman lost to fellow Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman in the newly drawn 30th District in the western San Fernando Valley.
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Gabon’s government said Tuesday it was suspending the website www.me.ga, which Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom had planned to use to launch a new version of his defunct Megaupload file-sharing site.
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A few different folks have submitted variations on this story of singer Taylor Swift copying a single lyric from a singer for whom she’d long expressed admiration. That singer, Matt Nathanson, responded the way any normal person would: by being happy about the homage and recognizing how it might draw more attention… I’m sorry, what was I saying? I meant that he called one of his biggest fans, who just happens to be a hugely popular singer with a ridiculously loyal following, a thief.
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11.07.12
Posted in News Roundup at 1:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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I love Brian Proffitt’s setup for two reasons. First of all, it’s OpenSUSE, my current distro of choice, and I always love to see that represented here. But also, Brian’s setup is shockingly stock. And in more and more of these interviews, we’re seeing people who are able to get an impressive amount of work done without a lot of configuring or manipulating. It makes me appreciate what a great time it is for desktop Linux. And reading some of this week’s Windows 8 reviews, I wonder if a lot of Windows users might be jealous of just how easy Linux has become.
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Server
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China is increasingly using hackers to infiltrate U.S. military computers and defense contractors, according to a draft of Congressional report obtained by Bloomberg.
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In our last few posts we discussed the fact that over 90% supercomputers (94.2% to be precise) employ Linux as their operating system. In this post, a sequel to our last posts, we shall attempt to investigate the potentials of Linux which make it suitable and perhaps the best choice for supercomputers OS.
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Brocade has announced that the company is acquiring the privately held Vyatta. Brocade produces a range of data and storage networking products, and considers the acquisition to be a good fit. Vyatta specialises in developing a software defined networking (SDN) and builds that software atop of an open source Debian-based distribution, Vyatta Core, which it commercialises as Vyatta Network OS.
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Kernel Space
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Componentality Oy is an automotive Research and Development company that builds passenger-oriented devices for public transportation; entertainment and connectivity for cars and road infrastructure; and unique technical solutions for special purposes in the automotive field, focusing on DSRC communications and eCall/ERA GLONASS systems.
Host Concepts is a software development company specializing in Guest Interaction Experiences. From hotels and restaurants to cruise ships, cars and convention centers, the company designs, develops, supports and hosts custom software solutions. They specialize in universally accessible applications designed and coded for web, mobile and native operating systems.
Micware is software integrator and is developing Linux-based software stacks for reference hardware systems for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).
MIRACLE LINUX (an apt name) is a Linux distributor for enterprise and embedded market based on Japan. It is also co-owner of Asianux Co. Ltd. which is based in China . The company has more than 13 years of experience in the field of Linux business.. It is joining to participate in the Long Term Support Initiative and the Automotive Grade Linux workgroup.
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AMD has indeed shutdown its Dresden-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) in the latest round of cost-cutting efforts.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s been another improvement to Mesa with the Radeon Gallium3D R600 driver by Marek Olšák that can improve the OpenGL performance in certain situations for this open-source AMD Linux driver while also conserving memory usage.
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Alex Deucher announced the release of the xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 driver this morning, which is the first open-source ATI Linux graphics driver release that is strictly KMS-only.
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The NVIDIA 304.64 Linux graphics driver was released today with support for new graphics cards, address performance issues related to recent Linux kernels, and provide other fixes for those relying upon this closed-source driver.
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Similar to last week’s testing of comparing the open-source vs. closed-source Radeon Linux driver performance from a stock Ubuntu 12.10 installation, the tables have now been turned to look at NVIDIA hardware on this latest Ubuntu Linux release. Benchmarks were done of the stock Nouveau open-source graphics driver, the official NVIDIA proprietary driver, and the proprietary driver when it was underclocked to match the clock frequencies as used by the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver.
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Daniel Stone has updated the XWayland patches for supporting X.Org/X11 applications on Wayland.
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Applications
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The hosts of the The Linux Action Show, a popular podcast about free software and Linux have previewed Lightworks running on Ubuntu. Lightworks is award winning and professional grade video editor. The source code of the editor was open sourced last year and developers are now trying to port it to Linux.
Lightworks works great, both for newbies as well as professional movie makers. Some of the features that this editor supports are wide format support, full-fledged timeline with drag & drop support, insert & replace commands, option to change the clip speed, add effects and transitions support, hassle-free precise trimming, etc.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It used to be that the Linux desktop’s one real adoption problem was that it had comparatively few games. Now, with the Steam for Linux beta release, that’s changing.
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Alright, all of you Linux nerds, listen up: The Steam beta process has finally begun, kicking off with Ubuntu 12.04. The beta is closed right now but will be rolling out to more and more users in the coming months. Get ready to play more than 2,000 games on your super niche OS.
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Gaming in Linux is just about to take a Proton Energy Pill. Steam is chugging ahead at an accelerated rate, doing what many of you would not have imagined a few short years ago. With beta testing for Steam under way, some pretty amazing things have happened in a relatively short amount of time.
1. Is filed under “well, duh”….real, honest, native gaming is coming to Linux. You would have to be tending goats on the Serengeti in order to have missed this.
2. It would strongly appear that Valve’s foray into Linux is driving (sorry) GPU improvements for Linux Users.
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Desktop Environments
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At the EFL Development Day, part of LinuxCon Europe, the Enlightenment developers have announced the release of the first alpha of Enlightenment E17. As the developers point out, the desktop environment has been “under development for a couple years” but they are now “happy enough with it” to do a first official release.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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New Releases
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Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced last evening, November 5, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of the Snowlinux 3 operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012 has been released under a new name: “Moondrake GNU/Linux 2012″. In the release announcement, Mandriva Linux Project Leader Per Øyvind Karlsen says that “The name of the distribution used for this release isn’t actually the final name chosen, but only one of the likelier candidates under consideration, which we’re taking out for a test drive to try it on for now and prepare for a rebranding process.” While a possible new name has yet to be chosen for the distribution, last month it was announced that the foundation for the open source project would be called “OpenMandriva”.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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There are some Linux distributions that hold steadfast to their release schedules no matter what. That’s not the case with Fedora, which is aiming for quality and stability and will often delay a release and its milestone components for that reason.
Fedora developers decided to push back the Fedora 18 beta release by at week during a go/no go meeting on Thursday November 1st. The decision to delay the beta release was due to a number of blocker bugs as well as issues with the upgrade tool.
The anaconda installation tool currently has 7 blocker bugs listed for it that will need to be addressed for the release to go forward.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After receiving over 60,000 beta applications since last week, Valve has begun sending out the first wave of invites for the Steam for Linux beta today.
The Linux version of Steam currently only works on Ubuntu 12.04, reflecting what Steam for Linux team member Frank Crockett said in a statement was “an overwhelming majority of beta applicants [reporting] they’re running the Ubuntu distro of Linux.” Other popular Linux distributions will be supported in the future, Valve said. The service will be opened to more beta testers going forward, then expanded to all Linux users “once the team has seen a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems.”
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Valve has launched a limited access beta for its new Steam for Linux client. There was an encouraging excitement around Steam for Linux. Valve received over 60,000 responses to its request for participants in the Steam for Linux Beta within its first week. The company has selected the first round of beta participants from those early adopters.
The arrival of Steam for Linux owes a lot to Microsoft which has started to turn Windows from a platform for OEMs and developers into a Microsoft only product inspired by Apple’s walled garden.
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The event started with keynotes from Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth…
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The Unity Launcher shows a hefty finessing — this is the icon bar that is hard-wired to the left edge of the screen for launching frequently used applications. Its displayed icons are more appealing visually with their rounded, uniform appearance. The ability to hide the Launcher bar until the mouse pointer touches the left screen edge makes the Unity icon row less annoying.
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Phones
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Android
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Looks like Sony Mobile is rescheduling plans for the Sony Xperia V (LT25i). Sony Mobile France this morning confirmed that the handset that was originally scheduled to arrive by the end of the year for €549 with Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, is now planned to arrive in late January 2013 with Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.
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Mary Meeker, an analyst and KPCB research partner, has published a mid-year report which reflects the growing dominance of Android. According to her report, the adoption of Android is six times faster than that of iPhone making Android the fastest growing platform.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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UK based media conglomerate Pearson, famous for brands like Penguin Books and Financial Times has launched a new tabled based education solution for schools in India. The MX Touch, will contain digital learning content and will be priced under Rs 7000 for the 7 inch version and the 10 inch pack will cost approximately Rs 12,000.
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Diaspora was one such project, which has become a community venture recently. Dispora stores user information in pods, which are servers where information and data of the users are stored. As its open source, user can run a pod in his own server and invite friends and co-workers to use it. Thus he may form a private social network without relying on other third party social site.
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Are you a science buff who is curious how the world would look like if you travel at the speed of light? Will it twist everything around you as the light from different objects reach you at a different interval as per the special theory of relativity? How will everything look like if the speed of light is slowed down? This is what an open source game developed by MIT Game Lab tried to do.
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Okay, that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but when I tweeted out a request for suggestions for an opening line, that was the most interesting response (thank you, @kantrn). I got others that were a lot more helpful (thank you, @justinlilly)—that’s the power of community, right?
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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While many more people are using mobile devices than ever before, there are still a lot of people who have no experience running remote control software, which allows you to control a remote computer from anywhere. For example, using your laptop at a library, you might access files on a computer that you have at home. It’s very useful functionality.
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Mozilla
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For years now, a lot of people have misunderstood how the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation works. It is, of course, one of the most influential entities in all of open source, but Mozilla gets the vast majority of its revenues from Google, in exchange for favorable search placement in the Firefox browser, which benefits Google. According to the nonprofit law blog, last year the Mozilla Foundation got 88 percent of its revenues from Google.
The IRS has been investigating the Mozilla Foundation with an eye toward the taxes that it pays, and the good news for Mozilla fans is that Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla is getting off with a very light $1.5 million tax bill.
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One of the most hotly debated topics in years is now bubbling up in the Mozilla community as people debate the position of Web vs. Firefox.
There was a time when Firefox was just a browser, the view by which freedom loving people could see and interact with the web. The primary brand was Firefox as an enabler of the Web. That’s now sliding a bit as Mozilla brands Firefox as its own operating system and ecosystem of app.
“To what extent, if any, are we willing to promote ‘the open web’ or ‘HTML5′ over ‘Firefox’, when the success of one and the success of the other are in tension?” Mozilla staffer Gervase Markham wrote in a mailing list message.
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The only way I can describe this to you is that it’s the most idiotic ruling ever handed down by any group or judge anywhere. I’m shocked that it’s really come to this. OK, the story is this: The European Commission (EC), whoever they are and whose real purpose and power is questionable, handed down a ruling that stated that Microsoft has to give Windows users in Europe a browser choice. And, the fact that they didn’t in Windows 7 Service Pack 1, means that Mozilla lost millions of downloads of its Firefox browser. Mozilla estimates that loss in the range of six to nine million downloads during the non-compliance timeframe.
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Education
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Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira’s organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Recently I reported that GCC 4.8 was nearing the end of stage one development — the period during which features and new development work can be merged — and will be moving to stage three. As of this morning, GCC 4.8 / the trunk code-base is now into this next stage where only bug-fixes and new ports not requiring changes to other parts of the compiler can be made. New functionality/features are not allowed during this period that will last for approximately two months until the official release happens.
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I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the FSF’s office.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Last week, the UK Cabinet Office released its Open Standards Principles: For software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT specifications. It became effective November 1, 2012, and applies to IT specifications for software interoperability, data, and document formats for all services delivered by, or on behalf of, central government departments, their agencies, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), and any other bodies for which they are responsible.
For the open source community and advocates of open standards, the UK’s Open Standards Principles policy is a welcome and positive development. It follows a lengthy, and often tumultuous, consultative process that began in 2011.
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Can we make search organic again? Or should we look past search completely?
Searching has become shopping, whether we like it or not. That’s the assumption behind the results, and behind recent changes, at least to Google’s search features and algorithms. I’m sure this isn’t what Google thinks, even though it is a commercial enterprise and makes most of its money from advertising—especially on searches. Credit where due: from the moment it started adding advertising to search results, Google has been careful to distinguish between paid results and what have come to be called “organic”.
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Science
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A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives.
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Hardware
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MIPS Technologies has announced today that their patent portfolio is being bought out by a company largely backed by ARM while Imagination Technologies will be taking over the MIPS company.
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Health/Nutrition
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Sitting on one of the many crowded benches in the waiting room of the International Red Crescent’s pharmacy in central Tehran, Ali, 26, was working his phone. After nearly six weeks of chasing down batches of Herceptin, an American-made cancer medicine, Ali, an engineer, was wearing out his welcome with friends and relatives in other Iranian cities, who had done all they could to rustle up the increasingly elusive drug.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Washington) RFK Human Rights Laureate Aminatou Haidar is the latest victim of systemic violence and police brutality by the Moroccan government against the Sahrawi people. The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (RFK Center) has received multiple reports in the last week that indicate dramatically increased police presence, repression, and assault against civilians in El Ayun, the of capital of Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, coinciding with Ambassador Christopher Ross’s arrival in the area.
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The 16-year-old son of Bassem Tamimi, a detained Palestinian rights activist in the occupied West Bank, was himself arrested by Israeli soldiers today during the regular weekly protest against the encroachment of Israeli settlers onto Palestinian land.
Wa’ed Tamimi was arrested along with four activists during the demonstration on Friday afternoon in the West Bank village of al-Nabi Saleh, 21km northwest of Ramallah.
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Is there a good reason that Long is on the no-fly list? I have no idea. There might be. But what’s outrageous about this, aside from the sheer number of people we’ve placed on the no-fly list over the past decade, is the lack of judicial oversight. Someone has put you on the list, but you don’t know who. There’s presumably a reason for being put on the list, but no one will tell you what it is. There’s a procedure that provides you with a “redress control number,” but it often appears to be meaningless. If you go to court, a judge will tell you it’s a national security issue and there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s a cliche to call this kind of system Kafkaesque, but what other word is there for it?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Between President Obama’s ineffectual proposals and Mitt Romney’s loving embrace, bankers have little to fear from either administration, and that leaves the rest of America on perilously thin economic ice. Neil Barofsky, who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, joins Bill to discuss the critical yet unmet need to tackle banking reform and avoid another financial meltdown.
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Labor unions and liberal interest groups are going all-out for President Barack Obama’s reelection — but they’re just as ready to turn that firepower back on him if he betrays them with a grand bargain.
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Censorship
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I’m shortly off to Baku for the Internet Governance Forum. Azerbaijan is a country with serious issues of media freedom – where journalists regularly face arrest or imprisonment, and the suppression of very basic human rights. While I’m there I’ll be raising a number of concerns about how protection and promotion of human rights.
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Ninety-three years ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote what is perhaps the most well-known — yet misquoted and misused — phrase in Supreme Court history: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, “the law”–as some have curiously called it–can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes’ quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.
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The Harry Fox Agency (HFA) is the main licensing agency for mechanical licenses (i.e., actual reproductions of recorded works — which is different from things like ASCAP who handle licenses for performances). While it doesn’t get into as many ridiculous copyright scrapes as others, it still has been known to insert itself where it doesn’t belong at times. The latest, courtesy of BoingBoing is that HFA made a copyright claim on a YouTube recording of Thailand’s Youth Orchestra (Siam Sinfonietta) playing the Radetzky March by Johann Strauss. The work is 164 years old and clearly in the public domain. Furthermore, since HFA only covers mechanical licenses, and this is a new performance, not a use of a recorded song that HFA has rights over, the whole thing is completely ridiculous.
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People who’ve e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn’t get much of a response.
That’s because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with “Occupy Oakland” in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases “stop the excessive police force,” “respect the press pass” or “police brutality.” Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.
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The Russian state has created a blacklist of blocked websites and internet addresses – but the list itself is secret.
It was drawn up following the enactment of a statute called the “law to protect children from information detrimental to their health and development”, which is ostensibly aimed at protecting minors from harmful content.
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Privacy
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The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC ) is planning on increasing the pressure of the participants in the W3C standardisation process for the Do Not Track (DNT) header. “If by the end of the year or early next year, we haven’t seen a real Do Not Track option for consumers, I suspect the commission will go back and think about whether we want to endorse legislation” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz talking to Politico.
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Data protection legislation may protect our data locally, but internationally privacy is not just a personal issue, it lies at the heart of ensuring competitive markets.
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Thanks to the real state website Zillow, it’s now super easy to profit from your neighbor’s suffering. With a few easy clicks, you can find out “if a homeowner has defaulted on the mortgage and by how much, whether a house has been taken back by the lender, and what a house might sell for in foreclosure,” as the Los Angeles Times recently reported. After using the service, you can stop by the Johnsons’ to make them a low-ball offer, perhaps sweetening the exploitation with a plate of cookies.
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Civil Rights/Voting
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A not-so-surprising thing happened this morning: My Instagram feed morphed from photos of dogs, kids, fancy coffees and food porn into a stream of people’s voting ballots.
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Security experts warned that New Jersey’s plan for e-mail-based voting was a recipe for problems, and anecdotal evidence is starting to trickle in that the system isn’t working as well as organizers had hoped. One address used to request ballots was not even accepting e-mail late Tuesday morning. And in another county, an election official responded to problems with the county e-mail system by inviting voters to send ballot requests to his personal Hotmail address.
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The assertion that Internet voting is the wave of the future has become commonplace. We frequently are asked, “If I can bank online, why can’t I vote online?” The question assumes that online banking is safe and secure. However, banks routinely and quietly replenish funds lost to online fraud in order to maintain public confidence.
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I tend to think that partisan politics is a big problem, and am always interested in truly independent politicians — a few of whom always pop up every election season. This year, for example, we’ve got Angus King in Maine, who ran (and won) as an independent for the US Senate (as he had formerly done in winning governor of the state). I got to meet King earlier this year, and without being beholden to partisan lines on things, he seemed a lot more reasonable than many politicians on key issues. Plenty of other politicians I’ve met seem reasonable on certain issues, but also are often pressured to toe the party line on certain issues, even if they’re apologetic about it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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For years, we’ve pointed to the series of ridiculous trademark lawsuits filed against Google over Adwords, and wondered when it would finally be settled and understood that advertising on a third party site against a competitor’s trademark is just good marketing, not trademark infringement. To bring up an analogy, many of us are used to supermarkets that display coupons near competing products — or where you get handed competing coupons printed out at checkout. This is the exact same concept. It’s perfectly reasonably that if you’re searching for a certain brand name, a competing company may seek to buy clearly marked advertisements that attempt to offer you a better deal. There’s no confusion by the consumer and no “dilution” of the original brand. It’s just good competition. Even more bizarre is the fact that these lawsuits targeted Google, rather than the advertiser directly. After all, Google just provides the platform. If an ad is actually confusing to users, then the only trademark claim would be against the company who actually created the confusing ad, not the platform that hosts it.
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Copyrights
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Last month, we wrote about how the band Death Grips, an indie sensation who had signed with Epic Records (owned by Sony Music), had decided to release their latest album for free all over the internet, after some sort of dispute with Epic over the release date. The band was already considered one of the top authorized downloaded bands on BitTorrent due to earlier releases it had put online for free itself. However, with Epic trying to take a standard “slow down and wait” approach, the band posted its new album to various file lockers and started tweeting out links, noting that “the label will be hearing the album for the first time with you.”
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Following a meeting of the European Union member states on 5 October, leaked documents have shown this week that the EU plans to back away from criminal sanctions in its copyright agreement with Canada.
CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, is currently being negotiated. It initially included many paragraphs lifted directly from the controversial ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) pact that was shot down spectacularly by the European Parliament earlier this year. ACTA triggered widespread protests from citizens concerned that it would breach their online civil liberties.
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Usually when I have the godly duty of writing about porn on this site, it has to do with a pornographic company acting (shockingly) nefarious. Maybe they’re reaping millions in a judgment over a handful (unintentional innuendo) of films. Or else they’re attacking speech using IP laws to silence critics of their jack-ass-ery. It might be very easy for readers to assume that pornographers as a whole (still unintentional, I swear) would be aligned against the philosophies and economics that we discuss every day. They’re an easily painted “bad guy” for a host of social reasons.
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It was about five years ago that we first wrote about best selling author Paulo Coelho revealing that he was eagerly helping create pirate foreign translations of his books, and noting that sales of legitimate copies always seemed to increase whenever he did this — initially pretending to be someone else, under the username “pirate coelho.” The first time this happened was in Russia, where the Russian translation resulted in his books — which had almost no market previously — suddenly shot up into huge sales (from less than 1,000 to over 100,000). While he’s seen similar success stories elsewhere, it really seems like the Russian ebook market is an interesting one to observe.
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Send this to a friend
11.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is a very viable platform for Steam
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Acer is pretty peeved with Microsoft’s hardware push and continues to let the software giant know it.
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Server
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Brocade, the networking and switch company, is buying Vyatta, a company that pioneered the idea of open-source routing software, in a bid to compete in a networking world where software-defined networking severs the link between networking software and the box that it sits on.
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Thanks to projects like OpenStack and the mighty operation that is Amazon’s EC2, open source and Linux are quickly becoming the building blocks of “cloud” computing.
OpenStack, which started life in 2010, releases compute, storage, networking and other components under an Apache licence, and it is being adopted by huge companies such as telecom giant NTT in Japan and IT behemoth Hewlett-Packard in its fledgling cloud.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated toaccelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that HP is making astrategic, long-term investment in Linux by upgrading to Platinummembership. Linux Foundation Platinum members include Fujitsu, IBM,Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center and Samsung. HP waspreviously a Gold member.
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At LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona, Spain, the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, announced that HP “is making a strategic, long-term investment in Linux by upgrading to Platinum membership. Other Platinum members include Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, and Samsung.”
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Hewlett-Packard has become a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation, the organization responsible for Linux and other open-source software projects.
A Platinum membership costs $500,000 a year and brings with it a seat on the board of directors and a say in which kinds of projects the group pursues.
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At the start of LinuxCon Europe 2012, currently being held in Barcelona, the Linux Foundation has announced that both Citrix and HP have moved up the membership hierarchy of the organisation. The foundation has also announced four new members, which are all cloud service and hosting companies.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, November 5, the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.
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Graphics Stack
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After looking at Wayland’s development history this weekend, uploaded today are some visualizations that reflect upon the X11 Server’s development as well as Mesa.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The game engine behind Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis 2 may soon land up in Linux. According to Chris Robert, the creator of Wing Commander series, Crytek are currently discussing plans of porting the game engine to Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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An alpha release of Enlightenment’s E17 window manager was released today after one decade in development.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome developers are working on a model that allows a user to search everything and anything right from Gnome search box. This will hopefully be integrated in the next big Gnome release, Gnome 3.8. Gnome 3.8 is scheduled to release next year with some new apps and a hell lot of improvements.
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Mutter and Gnome Shell 3.8 will be port to use latest input X.org extensions XI2! Porting Mutter to XI2 is the prerequisite for enabling multitouch and gesture support in gnome-shell. It is also needed for triggering the message tray by downwards pressure, as it was designed to do.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc, the No 1 Linux developer in the United States, is considering investing more in its research and development and sales team in China, said the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst.
In its fiscal year 2012, Red Hat’s revenue exceeded $1 billion. The company wants to reach $3 billion in the next five years.
In order to fulfill this goal, the US-based open-source software company said it will place greater emphasis on the Chinese market, where IT spending and cloud computing technology are booming.
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Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is looking to invest more in its research and development in China.
The company, which stands as the No. 1 Linux developer in the United States, is planning to expand by 100 new employees by the end of the year and could open more offices in China.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says in an interview with China Daily that the world’s top Linux software developer and services provider wants to do more business in that country.
As part of that plan, Red Hat will add 100 additional employees by the end of this year and also consider opening new offices.
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Debian Family
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Debian, my favorite OS, is frozen and on schedule to make another stable release, Wheezy, within the next few months. I’ve installed Wheezy on my “new” Thinkpad T420 and got some interesting results to report, particularly on idle power consumption (battery life). But let me build up to that.
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He was reacting to allegations by a fellow kernel developer Matthew Garrett, who called him a “rape apologist” over comments that Ts’o had made on a mailing list in February 2011.
Garrett’s comments came after the executive director of The Ada Initiative, Valerie Aurora, exhumed Ts’o’s comments and commented on them in an article on the organisation’s website; she used recent comments on rape made by a US Republican Senate candidate as the lead-in.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Tualatrix Chou proudly announced that the famous Ubuntu Tweak utility has been updated and it now has full support for the Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.
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The latest release of Ubuntu, when compared to the previous release in April 2012, has only two significant feature addition — the inclusion of Web applets that serve as quick links to websites and the Ubuntu Music store right from the desktop dashboard.
But these enhancements have created a tumult in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities because the default Web applet on the dashboard is that owned by Amazon, the dada in the e-commerce space. Many in the community, see this as an indicator of Ubuntu’s growing tendency to go against its grain by succumbing to commercial considerations. Whatever Ubuntu may say in its defence, it is clear that it is charting a course that is very different from its origins.
Ubuntu started off as a tributary project (derivative) of the Debian operating system, which aimed at making the desktop experience for users on Linux-based operating systems better. With this primary focus, Ubuntu, under the reigns of Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu project) steered the diverse skills of the Ubuntu community to yield a stable and refined operating system.
Ubuntu started off with support for purchasing applications from the Ubuntu Software Center, on the models of the Apple application store.
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A new version of Ubuntu customization and tweaking tool, Ubuntu Tweak is out. This is the second release after the developer had announced his plans to abandon the development of Ubuntu Tweak. However, with awesome support from other users, he restored the development of this app. This version packs some new features, along with bug fixes and comes with full support for recently released Ubuntu 12.10.
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After almost deciding to end all development on the project last month, Ubuntu Tweak founder and lead developer Tualatrix Chou released a new version his open source application for customising the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The most notable change in version 0.8.2 of the tool is the addition of official support for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”, the latest stable release of the operating system.
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Companies like Steam, Lightworks and others are discovering that Ubuntu has the largest user base and a stable company supporting it.
Still, some users out there may not be all that thrilled with Ubuntu or the Ubuntu core underpinnings. For these folks, I believe that it’s worth exploring Ubuntu alternatives. There are plenty of Linux distros that aren’t related to Ubuntu in any way, yet are still usable for new and intermediate Linux users alike.
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Experimental graphics driver updates will be needed on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for properly running Valve’s Source Engine games through the forthcoming Linux Steam client.
While the Valve Wiki page was created on Ubuntu.com a few weeks ago, it cites a new AMD Catalyst driver is needed for being able to properly support the Source Engine on Linux. This new Catalyst driver will be packaged in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as fglrx-experimental-9. This new fglrx/Catalyst driver that works really well with the Source Engine games has yet to be released (likely it will be fglrx 9.02/9.03 release streams).
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“The goal of Ubuntu is to be on every cloud, including Azure.”
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Bulgarian device maker Olimex is offering a small single-board computer called the OLinuXino. At first glance it looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi, but the OLinuXino has a faster processor, more built-in input and output ports, and the developers say the project is completely open source, including the hardware and software.
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Phones
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Android
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John Lagerling, director of business development for Android, talked to Brian X. Chen of NYTimes and spoke about the range of Nexus devices Google recently announced, the aggressive pricing and why Motorola is missing from the Nexus program.
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We hope there’s still room for more numbers and statistics regarding the mobile space in your life. While we’ve seen IDC released its worldwide figures for the smartphone and tablet race in Q3, here’s one more coming your way from Mary Meeker, an analyst and a partner of research firm KPCB, renowned for her annual Internet Trends report.
The 2012 Internet Trends report was actually released in May this year, so the following is more of a mid-year update of what’s hot and what’s not, instead of a full-blown report.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Lots of people may have bought Apple’s new iPad mini, but that doesn’t mean that they bought the best 7″ tablet. When it comes to the display, graphics expert Raymond M. Soneira, president of DisplayMate, found that the two most popular 7″ Android tablets, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Google Nexus 7, had better displays.
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Kobian has announced the Diwali Festive scheme on their Mercury range of tablets. Here’s how it works: If you buy a Mercury tablet between 1st to 25th November, you’ll get a gift of a 4GB Micro SD card and be in with a chance to win prizes like a LCD TV.
The company’s latest tablets are the Mercury MercurymagiQ, running Android 4.0.3, with a ARMv7 processor, 4GB Internal Storage, 5 inch display (a thin line between tablet and smartphone) 512 MB of RAM and a 0.3 Mega Pixel Front Camera with a 12 Mega Pixel Camera in the rear. Selling for around 12,700 Rupees.
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There’s so much going on in the small tablet device space, with Apple recently announcing the iPad Mini and Google heavily pushing its Nexus 7 tablet devices. The Nexus 7 is notable because the entry-level device is priced at under $200.
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Indian company Mitashi, maker of video games, TV’s and DVD, MP3/MP4 players and so on, has dipped its toe in the tablet market with the Play BE100.
It’s billed as a ‘first of its kind Business Entertainment Tablet’ with a 7 inch display, Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, 1GHZ processor, 512MB RAM and has the option of a KB 100 Keyboard, aiming it at the business market.
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I live in one of the most wired parts of the United States—the San Francisco Bay Area—but for the presidential election, I’ve already voted by mail. On a piece of paper. From the comfort of my living room. Between folks like me who vote by mail and everyone else who votes by marking paper in some way, we comprise about two-thirds of all American voters. Approximately 25 percent of all Americans, however, will use paperless and electronic voting machines to cast their ballots on November 6.
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In the extremely overcrowded open source marketplace, marketing managers find it difficult to think of innovative ways to raise their brand’s visibility. With so many brands jostling for attention, the low signal-to-noise ratio might tempt marketers into adopting an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach, attempting every idea from the marketing playbook in the hope that one will stick. However, this would be a mistake: careful niche marketing offers greater opportunities for brand advancements and market share. Let’s see how.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The ongoing discussion about the “readiness” of HTML5 is based on a lot of false assumptions. These lead to myths about HTML5 that get uttered once and then continuously repeated – a lot of times without checking their validity at all.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Business
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Any industry requires a proper technology set-up to accelerate growth. Modern trend speaks out loud about the use of ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) in the corporate world for a smooth and efficient functioning of any enterprise.
On shifting the focus to SME specific market, one needs to be well verse with the barriers in the path of SME growth and be aware of the investment capacity.
Therefore there is a need for an Open Source technology which is available at exceptionally low prices and custom made for these SMEs.
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Semi-Open Source
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BSD
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The clustering-centric DragonFly BSD distribution has had its database performance boosted in the newly released version 3.2.1. Work on the scheduler has allowed performance with PostgreSQL to perform five times as many transactions per second compared to the previous DragonFly BSD 3.0 in some scenarios, according to benchmarksPDF. The performance is now roughly of the same magnitude as that of Scientific Linux 6.2 (and by extension, probably similar to that of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Remember when we told you about MediaGoblin, the open source media publishing system? Now they’re building higher and higher, and they’re looking for help.
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“I like the fact that they approached this in a more light-hearted manner than the Free Software Foundation sometimes does,” offered Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I am proud to be a FSF member, but I sometimes cringe when they get a little too much ‘holier than thou.’ I thought this hit the right tone.”
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But all things have their season and it may be that GCC’s significance will now begin to reduce over time. Or it may respond to competitive pressure being brought to bear by LLVM.
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GCC developers have brought up the topic of tagging a GCC 5.0 release soon based upon recent changes.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Sometimes free costs too much. As of January 1, 2013, Flat World Knowledge, which used to describe itself as the world’s largest publisher of free and open textbooks online, will no longer offer content at no charge.
Cost partly motivated the decision, according to Jeff Shelstad, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “We’ve got to be smart with the limited capital that we have” if the company is to survive 10 years from now, he said.
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The beauty of open-source technology is that people around the world can build things together. Like bricolage, technology can grow flexibly as developers respond directly and creatively to users’ needs and imaginations.
That is the case with Class2Go, Stanford’s homegrown, team-built platform for hosting online classes. When the director of a software center at an Australian university caught a glimpse of the platform after its September launch, he immediately envisioned how his university could adapt it and at the same time contribute to it.
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Open Hardware
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You might not be a fan of it, but there are a few things to admire about the Amazon Kindle. It’s an eReader with a simple job and employs the technology it needs to do it and not much more. At a point in time where people routinely ask whether a Core i3 or Core i5 system is best for word processing, it’s refreshing to have technology that’s chosen and tailored for a specific task.
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Programming
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A growing number of the inquiries we field at RedMonk center around the need for quantitative guidance on technology uptake. Even with technologies on clear growth trajectories, developers, enterprises and vendors alike frequently want better, more detailed data on growth. How fast is it growing? What impact is this having on competitive projects or products? And so on.
Recently, the inquiry volume regarding decentralized or distributed version control technologies such as Git has spiked. Some organizations are considering migrations to such technologies, others have committed to the move but require data to justify their decisions internally.
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Standards/Consortia
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Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world in its long and colourful history, new research has found.
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The three Florida Supreme Court justices had angered lawmakers and voters, embarrassed the high court and faced uncertain futures.
In 1975, Justices Joseph Boyd, Hal Dekle, and David McCain were accused of giving behind-the-scenes favors to friends and writing opinions to benefit campaign-contributors. Boyd eventually was reprimanded after lawmakers required he take and pass a mental exam. Dekle and McCain resigned before the Florida House of Representatives could impeach them.
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THE PRESIDENTIAL election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is incredibly close.
It’s close in the way you read about every day in the media: Opinion polls show the two candidates are neck and neck, with just days to go. But it’s also close in ways you never hear about–not from the press, nor the candidates, nor their supporters. On important political questions, Obama and Romney stand so close to each other that their similarities outweigh their differences.
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For years the Nutz Poker League, along with several competitors, has been running free tournaments at bars and restaurants in the Tampa Bay area. It makes money by taking a cut of what players spend on food and drinks. The players accumulate points based on their spending as well as their poker performance and can ultimately win prizes such as vacations, cruises, laptops, cameras, and “various unique poker gifts.”
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What was missing was nearly as disturbing as what was scattered; a Passport, credit card, cash and Emily’s grandmother’s jewelry were missing from the locked, smashed up closet; also missing were an external backup drive containing “my entire life,” and an iPod, camera and old laptop; Ugg boots and a Roots cap. Also creepy was how the vandal emailed her repeatedly during his or her week long stay, “thanking me for being such a great host, for respecting his/her privacy, telling me how much he/she was enjoying my beautiful apartment bathed in sunlight.”
Emily has been working with the San Francisco police — they reportedly have a suspect — and with her banks and the credit bureaus. She says she hasn’t slept or eaten in days.
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Hardware
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In the microprocessor wars, ARM and its many partner allies have always had the most units sold in the market. But Intel, which can sell chips for $100 or more, has always had the lion’s share of the profits in a $30 billion-plus industry. With the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, ARM is a rising star while Intel’s core PC market is weakening. And this week, Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices announced it would move beyond Intel-compatible chips to making ones based on ARM designs.
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Security
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The Mexican military is trying to dismantle an extensive network of radio antennas built and operated by the notorious Zeta drug cartel. But the authorities haven’t had much luck shutting Radio Zeta down. Not only is much of the equipment super-easy to replace. But the cartel has also apparently found some unwilling — and alarming — assistance by kidnapping and enslaving technicians to help build it.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Kuwaiti security forces have fired teargas to disperse a banned demonstration by about 2,000 opposition supporters against new voting rules for parliamentary elections due on 1 December.
Kuwait, a US ally and member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has so far avoided the mass pro-democracy unrest that has toppled rulers in four other Arab countries since last year, but tension has mounted this year in a long-running power struggle between parliament and the government which is dominated by the ruling al-Sabah family.
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Aldo the German shepherd and Franky the chocolate Lab are drug-detecting dogs who have been retired to opposite ends of the ultimate retiree state.
But their work is still being evaluated, and on Wednesday it will be before the Supreme Court. The justices must decide whether man’s best friend is an honest broker as blind to prejudice as Lady Justice, or as prone as the rest of us to a bad day at the office or the manipulation of our partners.
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The District Court in Jeddah pronounced the verdict on Saturday after the girl confessed that she had a forced sexual intercourse with a man who had offered her a ride. The man, the girl confessed, took her to a rest house, east of Jeddah, where he and four of friends assaulted her all night long.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Environmental and climate change evangelist James Cameron – best known for being non-executive Chairman of UK-based Climate Change Capital (CCC) – gave an inspiring talk at the international Open Knowledge [OK] Festival, recently held in Finland.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection produces incomplete lab reports and uses them to dismiss complaints that Marcellus Shale gas development operations have contaminated residential water supplies and made people sick, according to court documents.
In response, state Rep. Jesse White, D-Cecil, Thursday called on state and federal agencies to investigate the DEP for “alleged misconduct and fraud” revealed by sworn depositions in a civil case currently in Washington County Common Pleas Court.
“This is beyond outrageous,” Mr. White said. “Anyone who relied on the DEP for the truth about whether their water has been impacted by drilling activities has apparently been intentionally deprived of critical health and safety information by their own government.”
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The shock of Sandy is still rippling across the northeastern United States. But in the microcosm of New York City, we can already see who’s going to bear the brunt of the damage. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, floodwaters have a way of exposing the race and class divisions that stratify our cities.
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Hurricane Sandy’s wrath shows that U.S. regulators should swiftly implement nuclear-safety rules developed after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, a top lawmaker said, as industry officials said the lack of major problems during the storm showed that they were ready.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a mortgage securities class-action lawsuit that it said could cost Wall Street tens of billions of dollars.
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On Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolff, Wolff and guests will discuss the current state of the economy, both locally and globally in relation to the economic crisis.
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Many MMT posts and other writings on fiscal responsibility, including my own, focus on the myths of neoliberalism, pointing out why they are myths and developing an alternative MMT perspective in some detail. Off hand, and I may have forgotten something, I couldn’t think of a brief positive MMT narrative containing primarily the truths, rather than the myths. So, here’s my version. Comments, criticisms, recasting in more effective form, are all welcome.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The White House race has narrowed to a fight over less than 10 states ahead of Tuesday’s tight election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
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IN this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just women.
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It’s election day. While your actual ballot is (supposed to be) secret, a lot of people don’t know that whether or not you voted at all is public information. A few weeks back, On the Media covered some ways that campaigns try to get out the vote and looked at some research suggesting that letters to people with a “voter report card” showing when they’ve voted in the past was a somewhat effective way of shaming people into voting.
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Censorship
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A court in Vietnam has sentenced two musicians to prison for writing and distributing protest songs, a decision that drew fire from the United States and international human-rights groups, The Associated Press reported. The musicians, Vo Minh Tri and Tran Vu Anh Binh, were convicted on Tuesday of spreading propaganda against the state after a half-day trial in Ho Chi Minh City, a defense lawyer said. Mr. Tri received four years in prison, Mr. Binh six.
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According to reports this morning, Twitter has withheld the first Tweet from one of its users on copyright grounds. Normally, disputed Tweets will simply disappear if there is a complaint, but one belonging to F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen has now been replaced with a copyright notice. While Twitter has indeed introduced a welcome policy change that will lead to more transparency, the first ever “withheld” Twitter comment was faked by a rather mischievous F-Secure employee.
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Now, Craig Brittain, the owner of “revenge porn” site “Is Anybody Down” (whose first skirmishes with Marc Randazza were covered here) is trying to remove posts criticizing his site, his inability to keep his story straight, his likely extortionate “photo takedown service,” and, well, pretty much everything, actually. He’s sent a DMCA notice demanding the removal of three posts at Popehat, claiming that these posts contain copyrighted material.
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Civil Rights
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On January 16, 2006, two federal agents pulled off of Oregon’s Route 66 and onto a dirt road in the Southern Cascades, about nineteen miles northeast of downtown Ashland. They didn’t get far. There was a blizzard, and the road was buried in snow. The agents were forced to stop just a couple miles short of their destination.
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Uncertified, “experimental” software patches have been installed on machines in 39 counties of the key swing state
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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We’ve seen some absurd trademark threats in recent years, but this one sets the bar at a new low: The Village Voice is suing Yelp for trademark infringement based on Yelp’s creation of various “Best of” lists. Yes, that’s correct, the publisher behind the paper (as well as several other weeklies around the U.S.) has managed to register trademarks in the term “Best of ” in connection with several cities, including San Francisco, Miami, St. Louis and Phoenix. And it now claims that Yelp’s use of those terms infringes those trademarks and deceives consumers.
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Copyrights
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Internet millionaire Kim Dotcom’s American lawyers have launched another bid to dismiss charges against his file storage company Megaupload.
His lawyers today filed documents in the United States Federal Court in Virginia, arguing Megaupload is being denied due process by not having been granted a court hearing, ten months after Dotcom was arrested at his mansion in Auckland.
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Kim DotCom, the flamboyant founder of the now defunct MegaUpload, made news today by announcing the coming of Mega, a new cloud storage service that is similar to MegaUpload.
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The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files risks “compound[ing] the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation” unless proper safeguards are taken to prevent the further dissemination of illegally copied material. (See the MPAA’s brief embedded below.)
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There’s nothing like the smell of duplicity in the morning and maybe that stench is strongest around the annals of the copyright parasites that seek to lobby, legislate and fine, those “evil” people they call “Pirates”.
Of course over the years there has been much pillaging and plundering, but I’d suggest thats more from the large corporatations selling you second rate entertainment products under the false promises of big budget advertising. ”Piracy” has a nasty habit of exposing the rubbish, whilst highlighting the good stuff (which seems to make healthy profits). So maybe Piracy is responsible for highlighting the poor, low quality products that people dump onto the market? No wonder some people in the industry are scared.
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Okay, maybe “love” is too strong a word, but a new study suggests that newspapers enacting paywalls should emphasize financial need, not profit motives, when announcing them to readers.
The study, “Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall,” is by Columbia University associate research scientist Jonathan Cook and Indiana University assistant professor Shahzeen Attari. They surveyed 954 New York Times readers shortly after the paper announced, in March 2011, that it would enact a metered paywall, and then again 11 weeks after the paywall was implemented. In the post-paywall survey, participants read one of two “justification” paragraphs, one emphasizing a profit motive and one emphasizing financial need (that paragraph concluded, “if the NY Times does not implement digital subscriptions, the likelihood that it will go bankrupt seems high”).
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So I hear there’s some sort of election happening this week (have you heard anything about it?). Earlier this year, we wrote about an awesome effort by the folks at NPR’s Planet Money to bring together a group of five different economists, from all over the political spectrum, and see if they could find points that all of them agreed upon. They came up with a list of six things that all of them agreed would be smart ideas for a President to implement — and what was striking about all six was that not a single one of them was anywhere near politically tenable. Every one of them would be argued down immediately.
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On the heels of the announcement of Megaupload’s pending resurrection as Me.ga, Kim Dotcom has come up with a yet another way to promote himself, annoy the US and New Zealand governments, and rally public support in his battle to stop his extradition and end the copyright infringement case against him: he wants to give everyone in New Zealand free broadband service.
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Recently, the Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society (SOZA) has once again tried to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable.
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For all their talk about piracy and yearly losses measured in billions, the big movie studios sure do seem to enjoy smacking their paying customers around with anti-piracy warnings and ads. Consider the poor sucker who actually went out and paid cash money for the latest shiny disc and now has to watch a multitude of eagle-laden logos and horrible analogies parade unskippably across his or her screen before finally being allowed to watch the unskippable trailers before finally being allowed to watch 15 seconds of unskippable animation before they can actually watch the movie they’re now regretting having shelled out actual retail price for.
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Send this to a friend
11.04.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Two of the four robots inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame on Oct. 23 ran embedded Linux. Aldebaran Robotics’ humanoid, partially open source Nao robot, known for its use in RoboCup robot soccer competitions, won in the Education & Consumer category. And iRobot’s PackBot remote sensing robot, which runs proprietary Linux, took the Industrial & Service award.
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Kernel Space
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While it hasn’t been a news item for a couple months, a group of developers are still hard at work to advance the LLVM/Clang compiler and the Linux kernel to a point where this alternative compiler to GCC can be used for building the Linux kernel.
Going back two years ago when a concerted effort began to build the Linux kernel with LLVM’s Clang compiler. At the time a number of patches were needed to both LLVM/Clang and the Linux kernel itself plus there were lots of broken parts. Patches are still needed, but more of the Linux kernel is properly working and it’s an easier process than it once was.
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Graphics Stack
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With 2D color tiling enabled by default in the R600 Gallium3D Radeon open-source driver as of this week, here are new benchmarks showing off the OpenGL performance impact of the 1D and 2D tiling methods for this common open-source AMD Linux graphics driver.
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With the recent release of Wayland 1.0, here’s a visualization that looks back on the development of Wayland/Weston going back to 2008 when it was born as a small project by Kristian Høgsberg at Red Hat.
After being reminded about Gource from the libvirt 1.0 release article this week, I decided to apply Gource to the Wayland Git tree followed by the Weston reference compositor.
The visualization of Wayland’s development begins in 2008 when Wayland was born as a small personal project of Kristian Høgsberg. At the time he was working at Red Hat and this was just a side-project, before being hired by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center to work on Wayland full-time where there is also numerous other developers now also dedicated to this X11-alternative.
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Applications
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Writing is one of the essential skills in modern society. Being able to communicate effectively is paramount both at work and at home. It makes your thinking visible to others, and is the main way in which work, learning, and intellect is judged by others.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.5.16 is now available.
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Games
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Few days back we reported that Linux Game Publishing is planning to bring all games in their catalog to Ubuntu Software Center and Desura. Some of their games like Sacred Gold and Majesty have already been released in these distribution services.
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Few days back we reported that Linux Game Publishing is planning to bring all games in their catalog to Ubuntu Software Center and Desura. Some of their games like Sacred Gold and Majesty have already been released in these distribution services.
Now RuneSoft, another company that specializes in porting games for Linux, is planning to bring their games to Desura. Alongside their own published games, they have also ported games like Software Tycoon and Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom for Linux Game Publishing.
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Desktop Environments
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He’s unhappy with the second part–retorting that you can’t attribute a trend toward extreme weather to climate change. But it’s actually the first part that’s most obviously problematic: Contrary to Kolbert, it’s possible to attribute every weather-related event to climate change.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Just as another year is passing by and summer is on its way, KDE Brazil gathered and fled south, just like migratory birds. Dragons are like birds, you know? Konqi the KDE Dragon is a little bigger than a bird, but he still has wings. We all had a common destination in this trip, the beautiful Itaipu, the biggest water-powered power plant in the Americas. (It used to be the biggest in the world, but a bigger one was built in Asia last year.)
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GNOME Desktop
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That’s a question the GNOME project would do well to contemplate. The once mighty Linux desktop has stumbled and looks like it might be poised to come crashing down after the release of GNOME 3.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Fedora Linux developers have decided to, yet again, delay the release of Fedora 18′s Beta by another week. But, by taking a week out of the beta test period, they still plan to make a final release on 11 December. The decision to take a week out of the schedule has been made to avoid overrunning into the Christmas holiday period.
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The statistics alone for the Norfolk Makerfaire are impressive alone. They had 46 tables on display (including Fedora), 1300-1400 attendees, and they issued one Band-Aid over the course of the day. When put in perspective that it was the first faire put on by members of 757 Labs, they are even more impressive.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Through improving the publicly available Ubuntu Linux documentation and reaching out to new developers — along with existing Windows developers that may now be thinking of targeting Ubuntu as their next supported platform — the Linux OS hopes to increase its developer and application count.
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XZ compressed packages have been used for a while by various distributions, including the Gnome repositories, but Ubuntu’s developers are still reticent about switching to another compression.
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While the Western world flounders in its debt crises and stagnating growth, much of the developing world is telling a different story.
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It’s been a big year for Canonical and Ubuntu, with big releases and lots of controversy highlighting the last six or so months. The company is steaming ahead with its plans though, and has announced that they’re joining the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).
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I’ve been reading the Microsoft Surface RT reviews, and while the Surface Pro x86 is really the one everyone should judge the line on, they are pretty much the same when it comes to the Windows RT software. If you don’t know the difference between Windows RT and full Windows 8 (which will be on the Pro) it’s basically this – Windows 8 runs millions of PC programs, Windows RT does not.
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After releasing plans for the ARMv8 64-bit micro architecture a year ago, UK-based semiconductor developer ARM has now announced actual implementations: the Cortex-A57 and the Cortex-A53. Both implementations can be used on their own or work together according to the big.LITTLE processing concept to increase chip efficiency when processor loads are low. The new CPU cores will initially target highly integrated server SoCs and can be combined with CoreLink components; this allows multiple chips or CPU cores to be linked together tightly and coherently. Powerful and energy-efficient cluster interconnects are expected to be pivotal for the future success of certain microprocessors.
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As the ARM architecture prepares for a future not only powering consumer devices but also driving a new generation of power-sipping high-density enterprise servers, Linaro, the not-for-profit group created to develop open source software for ARM, has announced the creation of an enterprise group to help drive forward collaboration in the new space.
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If you’re looking for a creative use of a Raspberry Pi, or maybe just want to get your retro game on, this DIY coffee table arcade machine is perfect for you. You’ll need some supplies, but Instructables user grahamgelding will show you how it’s done.
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A British project to design and sell a self-assembly arcade cabinet for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer has won backing on Kickstarter, just days after the site opened up to donations from the UK.
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Phones
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Dawati was an interesting desktop shell for the Tizen operating system that was pulled from the MeeGo project, but work on the project has more or less been halted for the past six months.
Tizen is still around with the Tizen 2.0 Alpha from September that’s expected to be officially released in December, but the Dawati Shell hasn’t seen real activity since April of this year.
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Android
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While Apple is busy pushing a smaller tablet to take on Google and Amazon’s 7-inch offerings, Google is thinking big.
The company has teamed up with Samsung for the new Nexus 10 tablet, a direct competitor to the full-size iPad.
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Asus CFO told The Wall Street Journal late Tuesday that the Nexus 7, Google’s well-received, affordable 7-inch Android tablet was nearing 1 million in sales per month, having picked up the pace considerably over the last month in particular. Chang noted that unit sales rose from roughly 500,000 around the time of its introduction in June/July, and rose steadily after that. Tablet sales for Asus beat analyst expectations, likely as a result of the Google-branded Nexus device, which got an update earlier this week in terms of base storage specs at both price points.
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Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ finally has 3 percent usage share in its sights, but Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ continues to gain ground faster, currently powering more than a quarter of Android devices.
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Samsung’s Galaxy S III is doing pretty well, the company has announced that it has sold 30 million units of the smartphone worldwide.
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Over 300 Android enthusiasts got into a huddle this week, discussing, debating, writing code and sharing geek wisdom on Google’s Open Source mobile operating platform, Android.
Organised by HasGeek, the second edition of the two-day conference, Droidcon India, was held at the MLR Convention Centre, Whitefield. Participants included cross-platform mobile app developers, Android developers, enterprises developing products and services for the Android platform, and front-end designers and engineers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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This week, Google announced a new lineup of devices that would be running its Android OS, Jelly Bean version 4.2. Those new devices are a phone, the Nexus 4, and a 10-inch tablet, called the Nexus 10. I’ve had a chance to play with both devices, specifically the Nexus 10, and I was actually surprised with how the device has fit into my daily routine.
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The problem is that people often take what writers say as fact without realizing that there is a lot of intentional disinformation being used to gain a certain objective. Sometimes the author is not spreading disinformation, but putting information in the wrong context to get the desired result. In the old days, news used to be disseminated by journalists who were trained to at least look objective. Now, any skillful writer has to power to inform or misinform people.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In a previous post I looked at how LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats, claiming to have far more users than it actually has. Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives were peddling anything other than the plain, honest truth. No one seemed to noticed that the claims did not pass the” sniff test”. No one investigated more deeply. Until now. I hope that after reading these posts that you, gentle reader, will exercise your brain the next time you read a press release or blog post from LibreOffice, and try harder to separate fact from fiction. It will not be easy.
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Funding
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Maia is a colony management simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux from indie developer Simon Roth. Launched on Kickstarter the day the service became open to projects based in the UK – October 31st – the game has already received £26,721 over 1,500 pledges at the time of writing. With a goal of £100,042 to be pledged by November 28th, that means the game is already 27% funded.
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BSD
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DragonFlyBSD 3.2 brings kernel scheduler improvements, updates to the GCC compiler, and a port of the FreeBSD USB stack. It’s the kernel work though that’s interesting since in multi-threaded benchmarks it has been shown to do much better than DragonFlyBSD 3.0 and to compete with Scientific Linux 6.2.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I have recently been working on RaspberryPi GNU sipwitch servers. I actually have two things in mind for this. The first is a simple and complete stand-alone secure free software voip “switch” anyone could deploy and use, much like a FreedomBox for VoIP, as a kind of wallwort with ethernet you can plug into any router. A low cost and general purpose secure VoIP server does I think have appeal, and producing complete pre-configured and assembled servers would certainly be more interesting than selling project t-shirts. The second idea is a sipwitch VoIP public wifi access point to enable anonymous secure calling, like pictured here.
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Openness/Sharing
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Marcin Jakubowski dreams of living off the grid. Over the past few years, he’s been working on a set of 50 machines he believes necessary to found and sustain an independent, modern community. He wants to “take everything that civilization has learned to date” and use it create a blueprint for a “Global Village Construction Set” that others can use to follow in his footsteps. His Factor e Farm has already developed and built a tractor, brick press, table saw, and bread oven, as well as many other machines. The farm hopes to have the complete set of 50 ready in 2015.
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Programming
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ESL, the Embedded Systems Language, is a new programming language intended for embedded/small systems and its compiler was implemented atop the LLVM infrastructure.
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Standards/Consortia
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While figuring out what niche operating systems to benchmark on Phoronix next, I realized the AuroraUX operating system project quietly disappeared.
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About a week before election day, a young girl, maybe 10 years old, confronted Colorado House candidate Sal Pace in a pew at his Pueblo church. “She said, ‘Is it true that you want to cut my grandmother’s Medicare?’” Pace remembers.
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Back in 2000, Republican election officials in Florida led by then-Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris kicked nearly 60,000 mostly African American voters off the rolls just ahead of the election.
They said that these people – who comprised 3% of the entire African American electorate in Florida – had been convicted of felonies and were thus ineligible to vote.
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Earlier this week, ThinkProgress released internal documents from the Romney campaign detailing how it is training poll watchers to mislead voters in Wisconsin. Now, according to new documents, Wisconsin may not be the only state where Romney’s campaign is equipping volunteers with deceptive information.
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With Election Day on the horizon, most voters have settled on their choice for the oval office. But let’s not forget about the all the other choices on the ballot, many of which will have a great affect on the lives and livelihoods of Americans — Congressional and State representatives, local officials, and referenda.
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The just-launched Windows 8 has been nothing short of polarizing, in both the online community and users at large. But we can all agree it’s new, and a little bit confusing. Google wants to help — help you get your old Google back, anyway.
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After using a Surface tablet, it became crystal clear that the Surface is really an Office appliance, not a tablet à la the iPad. But it’s not a very good Office appliance. One reason is that the hardware doesn’t work well for Office, even with the bundled keyboard cover, because the Office apps are nearly unusable with the touchscreen and just so-so with the keyboard’s trackpad. You’ll want a laptop’s superior input hardware if you do a lot of Office work. Even then, you’ll suffer from the poor Windows touch environment, where text selection is difficult, gestures are limited, and the heavy reliance on menus is interruptive.
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Security
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Over the last decade, judges have repeatedly told torture victims that they don’t have the right to a day in court when they seek compensation. Even when victims have substantial publicly available evidence to support their claims, our government and its private contractors have remained above the law.
Under most circumstances, these plaintiffs would have their day in court. Our constitutional and civil rights demand that. But when it comes to national security, the Bush and Obama administrations asked courts to toss these cases, even before plaintiffs have a chance to share their side of the story, invoking the state secrets privilege and other procedural hurdles.
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Vupen occupies a gray area of computer security research, selling vulnerabilities to vetted parties in governments and companies but not sharing the details with affected software vendors. The company advocates that its information helps organisations defend themselves from hackers, and in some cases, play offense as well.
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A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”
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The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered.
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Yesterday, EFF, on behalf of its client Kyle Goodwin, filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload’s service and denied third parties like Mr. Goodwin access to their property. The government also filed a brief of its own, calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require third parties—often individuals or small companies—to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings, just to get their own property back.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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I don’t normally focus on civil liberties here, but today’s news about John Kiriakou’s guilty plea really strikes a nerve. During the last decade, CIA operatives allegedly tortured accused terrorists in an effort to extract information to them in violation of US and international law. Kiriakou, appalled by his colleagues’ behavior, leaked the name of one of the participants to a reporter. The Obama administration brought charges against Kiriakou for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Kiriakou’s guilty plea makes this the first successful prosecution under the act in the last quarter-century.
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The Portland Police Bureau said the event, which grew to several hundred demonstrators…
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Leaks
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eam GhostShell, the hacker group responsible for the recent leak of some 120,000+ records raided from top universities around the world, has done it again.
“GhostShell is declaring war on Russia’s cyberspace, in ‘Project BlackStar’. The project is aimed at the Russian Government. We’ll start off with a nice greeting of 2.5 million accounts/records leaked, from governmental, educational, academical, political, law enforcement, telecom, research institutes, medical facilities, large corporations (both national and international branches) in such fields as energy, petroleum, banks, dealerships and many more,” the wrote in the statement accompanying the leak.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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There’s been a noticeable shift in the way that prominent figures talk about how to deal with climate change. Many advocates have shifted from a more accommodating “let’s all join together and develop clean energy” message to directly targeting the fossil fuel industry as a villain. This effort, embodied in 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour, has become a central piece of messaging in the environmental community.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs has been getting a string of bad publicity recently, with former Goldman board member Rajat Gupta being sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. And in March, London executive Greg Smith resigned in an op-ed in The New York Times, where he accused the company of corruption.
Smith, who started as an intern at the firm in 2000, worked him way up to a position as a vice president before ending his 12-year career in spectacular fashion. His subsequent tell-all book, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story” comes out this week. Greg Smith comes to “Starting Point” with more on his story.
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The city of Allentown, Penn. is making steps towards the privatization of its public water and sewage systems.
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But the hurricane has also revealed divisions in the city that existed long before Sandy touched ground: between rich and poor, and between the workers who make the city run and the wealthy who reap the benefits.
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Apple is the poster-child for the claim that, despite its present troubles, America is destined to prosper in this de-regulated global economy.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Because of technological advances, we must spell out what used to be taken for granted.
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Civil Rights
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The Kuwaiti authorities must drop charges against Musallam al-Barrak, who faces prosecution purely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression with remarks he made that have been deemed to undermine the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah, Amnesty International said.
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A Bangkok court acquitted the netizen Surapak Phuchaisaeng two days ago of charges of insulting the king (lèse-majesté), for which he had been remanded in custody since September last year.
Reporters Without Borders is satisfied with the outcome of this case. “This case, involving a year in custody, underlines the failings of the Thai judicial system, particularly concerning allegations of lèse-majesté,” the press freedom organization said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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When the Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to vindicate the rights of Megaupload users who used the locker site for non-infringing purposes, they put forward Kyle Goodwin. The Ohio videographer used Megaupload as a backup service, but he lost commercially valuable footage thanks to the unlucky combination of the government’s January raid and a personal hard drive crash. Since May, he has been seeking the return of his files.
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Not only did publishers not get the injunctive relief they sought in a closely watched case over e-reserves, last week they paid the tab. In a final order in the Georgia State E-reserves case, Cambridge University Press vs. Patton, Judge Orinda Evans directed the publisher plaintiffs to pay the defendants nearly $3 million in legal fees and costs, including $2,861,348.71 in attorneys’ fees and $85,746.39 in other court costs. And, last week, on October 26, records show that the publishers deposited more than $3.2 million into the Commercial Registry of the Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The money, however, isn’t gone yet—publishers have appealed the case, and the money will stay in escrow under a stay order until the appeal is settled.
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Send this to a friend
11.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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When many of us think of Linux, we think of our own roll-your-own deployments of it on our own devices, but there is a fast-growing trend toward powerful companies with commercial interests driving desktop and server systems that run Linux.
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Server
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Globetom today announced that GP3, globetom’s charging and fulfilment platform, has achieved Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Linux Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Today’s announcement demonstrates that globetom supports GP3 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Linux.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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At the beginning of the week I reported that AMD got rid of at least three of their Linux kernel developers. It’s becoming more clear though that it’s not only three long-time Linux kernel developers they have let go.
Since the posting on Monday, there’s been talk and speculation within the forums what is happening at AMD. We have known since last month the company has been making plans to let go around 15% of its staff due to poor financial performance out of the company, but it seems their Linux work will take a material impact in this latest round of “layoffs” at the organization.
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Linus Torvalds takes to social media to call for 2560 x 1600 to become the new standard for laptops.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Penumbra games collection developed by Frictional Games and distributed by Paradox Interactive, have appeared in the Steam for Linux application database.
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Last year there was the release of CoreBreach, a racing game originally developed for Mac OS X that came out of the Austrian-based CoreCode game studio. Back in June the studio exclusively shared with Phoronix that they want to open-source CoreBreach while now to kick off November, they have released the game’s source-code. CoreBreach was ported to Linux from OS X using GNUstep, etc.
It’s not yet been announced yet on the CoreCode web-site, but they sent in an exclusive email to Phoronix yesterday and then this morning proceeded to announce it in the Phoronix Forums. Their brief announcement reads, “the source code to CoreBreach (GPL) and its 3D engine (MIT) has now been published on GitHub. enjoy.” The code is available as Core-Code on GitHub.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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To express myself mildly, I’m not a fan of interfaces for mobile devices. At best, they seem clumsy makeshifts, tolerable only because nothing better is available. The only exception is KDE’s Plasma Active, which not only works well on tablets, but, with its recently released version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface I can tolerate on a workstation — and that includes Unity and Windows RT.
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He has now given KDE a try after a long time. Linus using your software is double edged sword, it cuts both ways especially if Linus doesn’t like it, get ready for the harshest, yet the most honest and useful criticism.
So, what does Linus think of KDE? It looks he did not use KDE for a long while as his statement clarifies, “I’m trying out KDE after a long absense.”
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Pear Linux 6 is based on Ubuntu 12.04, and features many new and cool features. In fact, the version of Pear Shell that comes with Pear Linux 6 is a near-complete overhaul of the edition in Pear Linux 5. And by my assessment, it is probably the best GNOME Shell adaptation available. It is most definitely better than the stock GNOME Shell.
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New Releases
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Tiny Core Project lead Robert Shingledecker has released version 4.7 of his minimal desktop Linux distribution. Shingledecker says that the major theme for the new version is improvements to its bundled GUI programs. The OnDemand system has been overhauled to add support for Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications OnDemand menus and icons.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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While Adam Williamson emailed a serious proposal about considering Fedora as a rolling-release distribution, so far there haven’t been many other Fedora developers/users in favour of such a change. Most of those expressing dissenting opinions are concerned that Fedora would just become too unstable and that a rolling-release model isn’t too different from the “Fedora Rawhide” development packages as it stands today.
It’s unlikely that Fedora as a rolling-release will get picked up, but for
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s VP of Sales and Business Development, Chris Kenyon, shared some interesting stats on Ubuntu’s uptake in the world in a presentation to attendees of the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit.
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Early in October I wrote that Ubuntu TV would be a focus for 13.04 as the TV-focused Ubuntu spin was still being ported to Unity 3D. This week in Copenhagen at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, new plans for Ubuntu TV were drawn.
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Flavours and Variants
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Facebook, Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard and other big vendors have joined a project to develop Linux OS software for the upcoming generation of ARM-based servers, the companies announced Thursday.
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Red Hat, HP, Facebook and other big vendors have joined a project to develop Linux OS software for the upcoming generation of ARM-based servers, the companies announced yesterday.
Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Micro, Calxeda, Canonical, Cavium and Marvell are among the other companies to join the Linaro Enterprise Group within Linaro, a not-for-profit, multivendor engineering group. They join existing members ARM, HiSilicon, Samsung and ST-Ericsson.
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The tiny, wildly popular $35 Raspberry Pi Linux computer may become a player in the game emulation world. A new Kickstarter project, launched on Tuesday, aims to create kits that will use the ARM devices to power little gaming cabinets: the Picade and Picade Mini.
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At the end of September, after years writing about how ARM Holdings (ARMH) was beating Intel (INTC), I decided to run an experiment.
I sold some Intel shares, which I’d had since the 1990s, and bought 100 ARMHs.
Since then ARMH is up about 20%, while INTC is down 1%. It’s true INTC carries a fatter dividend, which gets me even on the period once that comes in later this month, but for now I’d have to say that my intuition about these stocks was right and I’m profiting from it.
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Phones
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Android
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t’s been five days fat with Android achievement this week to the point that the maestros over at Mountain View must think Christmas has come early. Following the disappointing cancellation of Monday’s launch event in New York City due to the horrendous hurricane Sandy, we learned that the Google Play store had gained an incredible 25,000 extra apps in the last month alone and was now home to a whopping, Apple App Store rivalling, 700,000! News enough for one week, you might think, however…
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Google’s Android OS has grown a lot since its humble beginnings in 2008. Some may have thought that it couldn’t beat iOS, but its spread across multiple devices from multiple OEMs has insured its success. That success can be plainly seen in smartphone shipments during the third quarter.
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GnuCash is an open source accounting app for Linux, Windows, and Mac computers. It’s sort of an open source alternative to Quicken, allowing you to track your income and spending, run reports, view graphics, and do much, much more.
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Oh, sure, Android appears to be on track to dominate tablets, just as it does the smartphone market. But Android is hardly a paragon of open-source virtue. In 2011, VisionMobile concluded that Android is one of the most closed open-source projects, at least when compared to other major open-source projects like Linux, Firefox and others. Google, not surprisingly, chafes at this characterisation, but its own engineering directors admit Android is “both open and closed depending on business needs at any given time.”
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It’s just another day at the office for Android handsets, kicking everybody else’s behinds. According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Android-powered handsets maintain their commanding lead over Apple’s iOS devices and others in the global smartphone market for Q3 2012.
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With the release of version 1.5 of the Free Edition of its Burp Suite, PortSwigger has given the security tool suite a fresh new look and taught it to listen to Android devices. The Burp developers say that Android deviates from the SSL standard when establishing encrypted connections but added that this no longer causes problems for the analysis tool as they have implemented a workaround for the non-standard CONNECT requests.
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There are many business advantages of vendor-supported open source software over proprietary software, such as greater business flexibility due to no vendor lock-in and better business support.
Jan-Jan van der Vyver, MD of Linux Warehouse, says this is a key finding of the ITWeb-Linux Warehouse Open Source Survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for a fortnight in September, attracting 192 responses.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome/ChromeOS
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Indeed, we’ve already seen Ubuntu loaded up on the cloud-centric laptop, along with a port of openSUSE and a published guide to accessing the Gentoo Linux kernel that powers the versatile Chromebook.
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Mozilla
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VIEW ALL PHOTOS IN GALLERY
It’s a continuation of one of computing’s longest-standing dilemmas: Open or Closed.
An earlier episode of this saga was Apple’s closed desktop OS platform, which can only be installed on Apple’s hardware, versus Microsoft Windows’ ability to be installed on any manufacturer’s PC hardware. Then there was closed source like Windows versus open source like Linux. The latest strife is between mobile apps and Web apps based on HTML5. Mobile apps are obtained through the platform makers own gate-keeping app store, and run only on the one platform, while HTML5 apps should run an any device with a browser.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Australian Drupal development shop PreviousNext has launched a beta program for a new open source offering intended to make adoption of the open source content management system (CMS) more appealing to government agencies.
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WordPress is something of a dark secret on the Internet. The blogging platform, which is nearly a decade old, powers an incredible one-sixth of the Internet (including this blog).
The secret of WordPress’s domination, said its youthful founder, Matt Mullenweg, is being open source. “It is not about openness, it is about responsiveness,” he told the audience at the Founders Festival in Vienna. “Users, customers and for us, our developers are all the same thing. They tell you what they want–if you listen.”
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Education
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A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.
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Business
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Cloud services provider Acquia has commissioned a Forrester report on open source WCM, and while the results are not overwhelming, it does show more enterprise companies are employing open source systems.
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Digium this week released Asterisk 11, (though I bet more than a few people missed it since Digium didn’t do a particularly good job in promoting the release IMHO, great tech terrible marketing/PR). This is the first major Long Term Support release (LTS) since the 1.8 release that came out two years ago in October of 2010. So yeah, a bit of a number jumble here..
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As part of Microsoft’s attempt to convince us all that Windows 8 is not the dogs’ dinner some claim it is, Steve Ballmer announced this week that the company had sold 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in the first three days of general availability. While that number (which must include some combination of downloads and discs) sounds impressive, it leaves me cold. After all, I remember the open source download metrics at Sun Microsystems.
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Funding
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Entrepreneur and inventor website FundaGeek has launched a software development stream at fundageek.com/software to assist software developers in securing funding for their projects.
With a strong leaning towards independent open source innovators, the site aims to help all areas of software development – web applications (e-commerce), games, social media apps, open source, mobile apps and traditional “shrink wrap” software.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Libvirt, the virtualization API born at Red Hat seven years ago for interfacing with KVM/QEMU, Xen, LXC, OpenVX, VirtualBox, and other virtualization components, has finally reached version 1.0.0.
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Public Services/Government
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Sirius has confirmed that it has been awarded a place on the UK government G-Cloud Framework. The firm will be making its full range of open source products available through the CloudStore.
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Tang and velcro aren’t the only things that NASA helped to invent that are part of our modern world. NASA has also played a pivotal role in the emergence of cloud technology that could reshape the vast IT world here on Earth.
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Openness/Sharing
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Standards/Consortia
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Members of the independent Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have approved version 1.0 of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) as a standard. AMQP is an open protocol for exchanging messages between systems that defines transmission formats, queuing behaviour and the implementation of services.
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I agree with nearly everything Jill Stein of the Greens and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party say: except when they say “vote for me” in swing states.
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The privatization of public goods and services turns basic human needs into products to buy and sell. That’s more than a joke, it’s an insult, it’s a perversion. It generally benefits only a privileged group of businesspeople and their companies while increasing inequality and undermining the common good.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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THE US mission in Benghazi that came under attack by militants on September 11 was mainly a secret CIA operation, the Wall Street Journal reports, shedding new light on the deadly assault.
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What happens when one of the biggest media groups in the world sets up its own private security force? What happens when part of this operation goes rogue? Fairfax reporter Neil Chenoweth’s new book, Murdoch’s Pirates, investigates News Corporation’s links to worldwide piracy. Here is an extract from the book.
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The story is complex, but I’ll attempt to summarize. In the late 90s, NDS (the branch of News Corp that deals with private security and anti-piracy activities) sent top hacker Oliver Kömmerling undercover to Toronto, under the pseudonym Alex, with a mission: pose as a satellite pirate and infiltrate the rings selling hacked DirecTV smartcards. Oliver was also one of the hackers directly involved in the hacking of competitors’ smart cards, but in this case he was being put to work defending News Corp’s own satellite operation. But NDS made one big mistake: they never told DirecTV, which had its own security/anti-hacking division led by a former FBI agent, and they believed Oliver was still a bonafide satellite pirate at large. They had no idea he was now working for NDS—and one of the Canadian hackers Oliver met with turned out to be working for DirecTV, and ratted him out to them. Moreover, no matter NDS or Oliver’s intentions, he was breaking the law by hacking and selling smart cards to track down the “real” hackers—so he ended up facing potential arrest or detainment at the border.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The fossil fuel industry has paid a hefty price for the privilege of framing the political discourse about America’s energy future. Hundreds of millions have flowed into campaign coffers from energy companies attempting to purchase complete freedom to drill, frack, and burn. Huge “dark money” groups, the Koch’s, Karl Rove, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, join dozens of oil and gas industry associations in pouring money into television ad campaigns demanding “energy independence,” while trashing wind and solar.
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Finance
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Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama even mentions six alternative economic policies that, deployed together, would reduce unemployment, increase workers’ real earnings and decrease the federal deficit.
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Kostas Vaxevanis hates being the centre of attention. On Thursday moments before taking the stand in one of the most sensational trials to grip Greece in modern times, the journalist said he was not in the business of making news. “My job is simply to tell the news and tell it straight,” he averred. “My job is to tell the truth.”
Truth in the case of Vaxevanis has been a rollercoaster that has catapulted the 46-year-old from relative obscurity to global stardom in a matter of days. But , after a hearing that lasted almost 12 hours – with a three-member panel of judges sitting stony-faced throughout, he was vindicated: the court found him not guilty of breaking data privacy laws by publishing the names in Hot Doc, the weekly magazine he edits, of some 2,059 Greeks believed to have bank accounts in Switzerland.
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The stakes couldn’t be higher for the $60 billion global diamond industry, and Israel’s burgeoning diamond industry in particular, as the dynamic forces of economics, human rights, and politics careen towards a major showdown in Washington. The fallout is likely to blow the lid on a cozy cartel that has kept the scandal of cut and polished blood diamonds hidden from public scrutiny.
In November members of the Kimberley Process (KP) diamond-regulatory system, ostensibly set up to end the trade in blood diamonds, will come under severe pressure to adopt a US proposal, rejected last June, which would slightly broaden of the definition of a “conflict diamond” to include rough diamonds linked to violence by government forces associated with diamond mining.
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Censorship
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A civil court has sentenced an online activist to six months in prison on charges of insulting the Gulf nation’s king in Twitter posts, the official news agency said Thursday.
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Kuwaiti police used teargas and smoke bombs on Wednesday to disperse thousands of protesters marching on a prison where an opposition leader is being held on charges of insulting the emir, witnesses said.
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Does a tweet on reports of corruption, sent out to 16 followers, deserve a possible penalty of three years of imprisonment? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to Congress leader and Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s son Karti, who filed a complaint against small-time Puducherry businessman Ravi Srinivasan, and the Puducherry police which charged Mr. Srinivasan under Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act, 2008.
Section 66-A deals with messages sent via computer or communication devices which may be “grossly offensive,” have “menacing character,” or even cause “annoyance or inconvenience.” For offences under the section, a person can be fined and jailed up to three years.
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The Russian government has opened a blacklist of websites that will be blocked from domestic internet users to avoid them harming themselves with too much information.
The new rules mean that ISPs will automatically block websites that the courts have deemed inappropriate. The law was introduced with the usual caveats about it being to protect children from online predators and to stop drug distribution, but political websites that criticize Tsar President Putin have already been blocked by the courts.
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I’ve been buried in a book deadline for all of October, and haven’t been paying much attention to anything else. When I finally took some time to catch up reading email, I noticed I had many authors (more than twenty) contacting me because their Amazon reviews were disappearing. Some were the ones they wrote. Some were for their books. One author told me that reviews her fans had written–fans that were completely unknown to her–had been deleted.
I took a look at the reviews I’d written, and saw more than fifty of them had been removed, namely reviews I did of my peers. I don’t read reviews people give me, but I do keep track of numbers and averages, and I’ve also lost a fair amount of reviews.
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Privacy
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Larry Ward will concede that he “poked the bear.” As president of the D.C.-based Political Media Inc., Ward administers the Facebook page of a group called Special Operations Speaks (SOS), an anti-Obama group consisting of “veterans, legatees, and supporters of the Special Operations communities of all the Armed Forces.” Essentially hard guys who want the president out of office. “These are the toughest sons of a guns out there and they say what they mean,” says Ward.
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Civil Rights
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Today ORG have launched a new campaign to fund a legal project which will allow us to create new case law and lead on bringing digital rights issues to the courts.
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When I read and translated that post, I immediately thought of what happened and is happening in my home country, Argentina. I was about to start my vacations in Europe and I thought that particular trip would help me write this. I was not wrong.
We Argies are not new to biometric data. One of the existing fingerprint-recording systems was invented in Buenos Aires and used as a tool during the military dictatorships the country suffered (particularly during the last). In fact, thanks to a law enacted during one of those dictatorships, every citizen must have a government-issued ID, consisting of his/her name, last name, address, date of birth, sex, fingerprint and photograph.
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Every week, somewhere in the US, there’s a story of some kind of police activity that leads people scratching their head, or saying ‘That isn’t right’. It’s an issue that’s been around as long as police officers have and has become a cliche, accepted without question. The problem is that it’s a problem that’s only getting worse, not better, and it’s a problem that’s not being addressed.
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The Iranian authorities must protect all detainees and prisoners from harassment and degrading treatment, Amnesty International said today, after nine female political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, started a hunger strike in response to alleged abuse by prison guards.
The women, who are all held in Tehran’s Evin Prison include activists and journalists. They say they were subjected to humiliating and degrading body searches by female guards from the Prison Security Section who subsequently confiscated some of their personal belongings on Tuesday
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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We’ve had plenty of stories concerning open WiFi, and there seems to be a general opinion among some that open WiFi is “a bad thing.” Some have even tried (and failed) to argue that having an open WiFi network makes you negligent. In some areas, law enforcement has even gone around telling people to lock up their WiFi. Those who argue against open WiFi are generally conflating different issues. It is true that if you use an open WiFi network without securing yourself you do open up yourself to snooping from others. Similarly, if others are using your open WiFi, it it could lead to at least an investigation if your access point is used for nefarious purposes. But combining those to claim that open WiFi itself is bad or illegal is a mistake. It is entirely possible to secure your own activities, and to set up an open WiFi network in a reasonable manner that minimizes any such threat.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Village Voice is claiming that Yelp’s infringement is “willful” because it notified the company, and Yelp apparently told them to go away. It’s also ridiculously claiming that Yelp’s usage has “irreparably harmed” the company. I realize that’s standard language used in such lawsuits, but seriously?
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Copyrights
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The laws governing intellectual monopolies in the UK are in a state of flux at the moment. After the previous government in its dying hours rammed through the shoddy piece of work known as the Digital Economy Act, the present coalition government took a more rational approach by commissioning the Hargreaves Review into the impact of digital technologies on this area. One of its key proposals was that policy should be based on evidence, not “lobbynomics”; the fact that this even needs to be mentioned says much about the way laws have been framed until now.
As a result, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has been trying to gather evidence in order to help politicians draw up new policies that correspond to the data, not just dogma. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those that have done well under the previous evidence-free approach have been mounting a rearguard action against the changes.
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The third party DMCA patrolbot featured today first made its name known by claiming malware uploaded by a computer security researcher as its own, resulting in a shutdown of the researcher’s Mediafire account. LeakID, the “company” (and we’ll explore those scare quotes in a moment) behind the takedown practices what many other sketchy content enforcers do — bulk keyword searches. This results in false positives that get swept up with all the actual infringement, such as in the case linked above. LeakID also ordered a Microsoft Office patch (freely available at Microsoft’s website) be removed from this user’s account.
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A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case. In a default judgment defendant Kywan Fisher from Hampton, Virginia is ordered to pay $1,500,000 to adult entertainment company Flava Works for sharing 10 of their movies on BitTorrent. The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law. It’s expected that the verdict will be used to motivate other BitTorrent defendants to settle their cases.
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Earlier this year, we applauded District Court Judge Alsup for getting it right and holding that, as a matter of law, one could not copyright APIs. The case, Oracle v. Google, is now on appeal to the Federal Circuit, where a three-judge panel is going to revisit Judge Alsup’s ruling.
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11.02.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I use LibreOffice for writing and spreadsheets and either Rhythmbox or XBMC to listen to music. I’m afraid I don’t do anything exotic.
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My fiance started a new class this week – an MIS (Management Information Systems) class. While we were having dinner tonight she brought up the fact there are some – lets say – colorful definitions of Linux in her wonderful “Experiencing MIS” text book.
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Desktop
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It’s no secret that many here in the Linux blogosphere greeted Windows 8 with jubilation — not because they had any intention of using it, but because of the opportunity they think it represents for Linux to capture a greater proportion of mainstream users.
That, indeed, was the hot topic du jour last week, but this week — now that the Win 8 dust has begun to settle — the conversation has shifted slightly. Specifically, bloggers are pondering the growing assortment of PCs that are coming with Linux already preloaded.
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Server
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In the November 2012 survey we received responses from 625,329,303 sites, a modest increase of 4.8 million sites since last month’s survey.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, October 31, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.
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Graphics Stack
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For those not yet familiar with GEM, the Graphics Execution Manager, that Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver uses for in-kernel memory management, here’s a brief guide.
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Following yesterday’s article comparing the AMD Radeon Linux drivers on Ubuntu 12.10, Marek Olšák looked into some of the cases where the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver was much slower than the proprietary Catalyst driver. Already with one patch that touches only two dozen lines of code, Marek was able to quadruple the open-source driver frame-rate for at least one game.
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For those pulling down the Git master of the xf86-video-ati X.Org graphics driver this week, 2D color tiling is finally enabled by default for Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000/6000 series graphics cards, from R6xx through the “Cayman” GPUs.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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Few desktop environments have benefited from the recent diversity of interfaces more than Mate and Xfce.
A year ago, Mate hadn’t even reached general release. However, since then, it has been influential in making Linux Mint the distribution of choice among experienced users. Similarly, after years of being the third most popular desktop environment, Xfce has become one of the major alternatives.
However, despite their similarities, which one is likely to appeal to you depends on what you are looking for in an interface.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE office and productivity suite Calligra has been updated to a new beta version. Among tons of bug fixes, this version also includes some new features and stability enhancements. As the 2.6 branch has been merged, no more new features will be added to this release, and only some major bugs will be fixed.
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Just two weeks after the alpha arrived, a beta for version 2.6 of the Calligra project’s set of open source productivity applications has been released with additional enhancements and new features that were not ready in time for the alpha. The beta is aimed at testers and includes general improvements to Open Document format handling, such as support for loading and saving 3D shapes and annotations; this should, the developers say, provide better interoperability with other office programs.
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Advent of Ubuntu actually spurned up quite a few Linux distro releases, giving users plenty of options as well as some very interesting flavors to play with. For example, you think Unity is buggy, you can either try out gnome fallback or have all the goodness of Ubuntu and lightness of XFCE or LXDE in Xubuntu or Lubuntu. A cross with E17 and you have a Bodhi! And who can forget Linux Mint – right now the God of Linux!
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Oh, it’s karma. Damn. Yes. Well, exactly one year after testing version 2011.09, I have decided to take Chakra for another round of testing. Please note I have purposefully made an ambiguous title so as not to disclose my satisfaction with the distribution, giving you only a sweet taste of bad humor.
I was quite pleased with Chakra, so much in fact I added it to my annual best distro list as one of the top five candidates. While not everything was perfect, and the GTK integration on this otherwise pure KDE distro needed some polish, Chakra offered a fresh, unique and elegant experience. Let us whether we can get the same level of satisfaction this time around, and maybe even enhance it, because that’s the goal.
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Ballnux Family
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Red Hat Family
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Investors buy or sell stocks based on short-term time horizons. We measure earnings against expectations. We turn thumbs up-or-down on acquisitions and management changes. We follow the drama of the action like spectators at a sporting event.
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Yeaney: I’ve been asked that question several times over the years. First, let me say that I am incredibly grateful that my first real job out of college was serving our country. I learned more about leadership, trust, and respect than I could ever imagine. I also learned that one of my gifts in life was the ability to orchestrate lots of complex activities towards a vision. I had always thought I was going to get my Ph.D in electrical engineering, but being a captain in the US Air Force taught me that business may indeed be a far better path for my skills. So I chose MIT’s business school instead of its engineering school.
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Fedora
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The release of Fedora 18 has already been delayed five times and it’s still uncertain when this next Fedora Linux release will actually ship.
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We had posted earlier about ChrUbuntu, a Ubuntu derivate specially designed to run on Chromebooks. Developer Christopher Hewitt has now successfully run Fedora 17 ARM with Xfce desktop on a $249 Chromebook. He as also posted instructions on Google+ for you to follow and try out.
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The Fedora ARM team has announced the release of Fedora 18 Alpha for ARM class CPUs. This announcement comes after the announcement of OpenSuse 12.2 release candidate for ARM. Fedora 18 is codenamed Spherical Cow. While there is a delay of over 5 weeks, the beta for x86 and x64 CPUs are not ready yet.
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A few minutes ago, November 1, the Fedora development team proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the first Alpha version of the upcoming Fedora 18 operating system for the ARM architecture.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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An important item discussed in Copenhagen this Monday, regarding app development, was the emergence of an Ubuntu SDK at some point in the not too distant future.
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Right now it’s looking like the Linux 3.8 kernel will be used for Ubuntu 13.04 since it will be released likely in mid-March, just one month ahead of the 13.04 release. With Ubuntu 13.04 not being a Long Term Support cycle, this is what the Ubuntu kernel developers believe will be their best bet. In terms of other fundamental kernel changes or new flavors, there aren’t likely to be any except for PowerPC possibly coming back to Ubuntu.
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At the Ubuntu Development Summit (UDS-R) in Copenhagen, the Ubuntu community has decided plans to create a more streamlined, continuous development for future versions of Ubuntu Linux – but this will see the end of all alpha releases and only one beta release. The current development summit is discussing plans for the development of Ubuntu 13.04, aka “Raring Ringtail”.
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Now, don’t let the post title fool you. I have nothing really bad to say about this podcast. I listen to plenty of stupid podcasts regularly. 40-Year Old Boy and Jordan Jesse Go come to mind here. But this one takes the cake. Why? Because it has nearly nothing to do with Ubuntu… Instead it just seems to be like what it might be to hang out with a handful of dudes that simply enjoy Ubuntu. Actually, it’s more like a handful of Canadian dudes with vivid imaginations talking about Ubuntu. Just imagine if you will The Kids In The Hall crashing a C64 convention. Yeah, I think that pretty much sums things up.
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With Ubuntu 13.04 there will likely be an AArch64 (64-bit ARM) spin of the popular Linux distribution.
Aside from the Ubuntu 13.04 talk, on a similar note were discussions about an Ubuntu 13.04 AArch64 spin / AArch64 package archive for this next-generation ARM architecture.
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Now that Ubuntu’s been ported to the Google Nexus 7 and there’s other interesting Ubuntu work going into the tablet/mobile-space, developers want more open-source games ported to using OpenGL ES rather than the full OpenGL stack.
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Privacy activists have taken Canonical to task for exposing users’ web searches and searches of their local hard drives to sites such as Amazon, Facebook and the BBC.
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While the date hasnt been announced yet, you can get your questions ready, and let them answered by Mark Shuttleworth himself. Mark Shuttleworth earlier has done several sessions of question answer round, mostly about, Ubuntu, Canonical and free software culture. However, in this session, you can “Ask him anything.”
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Notebooks with “hybrid graphics” — two GPUs that come down to a low-power integrated graphics processor and a high-performance discrete graphics processor with being able to dynamically switch between GPUs based upon performance/power needs — has long been a problem for Linux. It wasn’t until recently that the Linux stack has had rudimentary hybrid graphics support via PRIME / DRI2 offloading, but still it doesn’t handle the dynamic power management at the moment, there isn’t any easy-to-use configuration interface, and all bugs have yet to be ironed out.
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If you liked yesterday’s post by Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center that covered going over the Graphics Execution Manager for memory management, today he’s around with a second part that details command submission handling for the Intel open-source Linux driver.
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While Fedora has been using XZ-compressed packages for their RPMs for a while now with having a greater compression ratio than Gzip, Ubuntu developers remain unsure of switching to using XZ compression for the Ubuntu 13.04 release.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen today, developers discussed audio latency for gaming on the premise that “audio latency is relatively high on Linux and we need to be competitive with other platforms.”
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s not unusual for Linux distributions to have somewhat offbeat names — Ubuntu (named after an Africa-originated philosophy), Red Hat (the creator of the original distro, Marc Ewing, had a red lacrosse hat given to him by his grandfather), and the wonderful CrunchBang Linux (named after the characters usually used at the start of a script — #!). In the case of Fuduntu, the origins of the name are quite simple: It’s a combination of Unbuntu and Fedora, the Red Hat-sponsored Linux distribution.
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Hello from Peppermint headquarters in western North Carolina! As a project, Peppermint continues to grow and grow, and we are at the tipping point where we could use some immediate assistance. Are you willing to bring your talents and skill set to an established and trusted open source project? Do you get as fired up about Linux based systems as we do? Would you like to join Team Peppermint? If you’re ready to join our ranks, we are about to dive into development of Peppermint Four which is slated for release in June 2013. Please examine the following team spots we are looking to fill.
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Phones
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Android
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The developers are also planning to release a SDK by the end of this year so that game developers can get started with their development. Since Ouya comes with only a console with a few keys, game devs will need to modify existing Android games so that it becomes compatible with Ouya.
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This screenshot tour was created in preparation for DeviceGuru’s upcoming in-depth review of Lenovo’s IdeaPad 2110 10-inch Android tablet. The comprehensive tour includes over 500 images showcasing numerous aspects of the tablet’s Android 4.0-based user interface, home screens, customization, and apps.
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Sony’s alleged next flagship droid has leaked anew this time with an official photo. The Sony Xperia C650X Odin official photo is a render, which looks pretty close to the Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 and slightly resembles a Motorola RAZR with its beveled edges and use of metal in the frame.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Sales of Google Inc. ’s Nexus 7, made by Taiwan’s Asustek Computer Inc. , are closing in on 1 million units a month, the Taiwanese maker revealed.
The 7-inch tablet has created a big buzz this year with its low starting price of US$199, but both Google and Asustek have been cagey about revealing actual sales figures.
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What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
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People in several states in the Eastern United States are still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, and there are many kinds of disaster relief efforts going on. At the same time, many event organizers are working overtime to ensure that some normalcy is preserved. As evidenced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, technology–including open source technology–can help organize disaster relief efforts and coordinate people. Here are just a few examples of tools that can make a difference.
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One framework in particular has taken the world of Web development by storm during the past year: Twitter Bootstrap. Bootstrap first was released in summer 2011, and it was written by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, both of whom work at Twitter. Bootstrap, which was released under an open-source license on GitHub, has become an almost-overnight sensation. Indeed, it is currently the most-watched open-source project on GitHub, surpassing even Ruby on Rails.
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South Africa may be up to five years behind the rest of the world in terms of vendor-supported open source software adoption, but the old misconceptions are falling away and adoption is picking up.
This is according to Jan-Jan van der Vyver, MD of Linux Warehouse, who says certain sectors are leading the way in terms of increasing adoption, such as telecommunications and certain technologically advanced banks, such as FNB. The public sector, which has long had an open source policy, has been slow in meeting its own adoption targets, but is now taking steps to remedy this.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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It’s interesting to note that amidst all the hullaballoo about OpenStack and open source cloud computing, Amazon Web Services remains the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud, and even less talked about platforms such as the commercial arm of Citrix’s CloudStack strategy have surprisingly strong user bases. The open source cloud has enormous promise, but many people still need to be convinced that necessary support offerings and other aspects of reliable infrastructure are in place. Recently, HP’s Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, SVP Converged Cloud and HP Cloud Services, spoke with InternetNews on these topics and had interesting things to say. Above all, he expressed commitment to open source in the cloud.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Semi-Open Source
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Digium, Inc., the Asterisk Company, unveiled Asterisk 11 at its annual AstriCon users’ conference meeting, a new release that features multiple contributions from the Asterisk developer community. Asterisk 11 includes a number of new features, including support for WebRTC over SIP and native integration with Digium’s line of VoIP telephones. It is also a new Long Term Support (LTS) version of Asterisk, the world’s most widely adopted open source communications engine.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Although crowdsourcing is all the rage at the moment, there has to be a worry that this is just the latest fad in the world of technology, and will soon follow portals and the blink tag into justified oblivion. Occasionally, though, an application of crowdsourcing appears that seems to address a real problem in a way that would be otherwise intractable.
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It makes little sense for any Internet business to be dependent on a single data center. With server virtualization it is possible to put images of your server here and there to cover almost any failover problem. Not just multiple servers but multiple servers on multiple backbones in multiple cities supported by multiple power companies and backed by multiple generators. We do that even here at I, Cringely and we’re known to be idiots.
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Health/Nutrition
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The big five health insurance companies have begun reporting their third quarter 2012 earnings and so far, they are pleasing their shareholders with profits that are better than Wall Street expected, in large part because they are doing especially well in one key area: Medicare.
[...]
A Romney-Ryan victory likely would be the equivalent of winning the lottery for the big institutional investors that own the majority of health insurance company stock. Citigroup analyst Carl McDonald predicts that should Romney win and the GOP take the Senate, the value of health insurers’ shares would rise 10 to 20 percent.
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The US Food and Drug Administration is notorious for bowing to food-industry interests at the expense of public health. Consider the case of trans fats—whose damaging effects the FDA ignored for decades under industry pressure before finally taking action in 2006, a story I told here. Then there’s the barrage of added sweeteners that have entered the US diet over the last two decades, while the FDA whistled. This week, Cristin Kearns Couzens and Gary Taubes, who has been writing hard-hitting pieces on the dangers of excess sweetener consumption for a while, have a blockbuster Mother Jones story documenting how the FDA rolled over for the food industry on added sweeteners.
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Security
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“Open-source software, developed by multiple programmers in collaborative environments, underpins much of the information technology we rely on every day-from communication networks to the databases that manage our personal records,” says Livny. “By its very nature, open-source software allows for rapid progress. Yet, the collaborative environments that facilitate open-source innovation have offered limited access to tools and resources for continuous cybersecurity assurance.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The energy industry tries to sell us ‘ethical oil’, ‘clean coal’ and ‘natural gas’, but this extreme weather is mobilising people to act
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Finance
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This column discusses one of the more subtle issues raised by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) civil fraud action against Bank of America (B of A). The issue was so subtle that of the three articles about the lawsuit that I choose to review the night after the suit was filed, only the NYT article mentioned one of the most important aspects of the suit – the key role that the whistleblower played in making the action possible. The AP and the WSJ articles ignored the fact.
The lawsuit threatens to impose steep fines on the bank. The Justice Department filed the case under the False Claims Act, which could provide for triple the damages suffered by Fannie and Freddie, a penalty that could reach more than $3 billion.
The act also provides an avenue for a Countrywide whistle-blower, Edward J. O’Donnell, to cash in. Under the act, the government can piggyback on accusations he filed in a lawsuit that was kept under seal until now.
Mr. O’Donnell, who lives in Pennsylvania, was an executive vice president for Countrywide before leaving the company in 2009. The government’s case in part hinges on the credibility of his claims.
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Decrease in government spending set to leave low income families with a stark choice: buy less food or move out
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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It’s useful to note that Westminster Hall debates aren’t particularly formal interventions or statements of the Government’s policy. They are secured by MPs who want to discuss something important to them, and can indicate MPs feelings and signal to the Government what Parliamenarians’ priorities might be.
But even though it’s just a Westminster Hall debate, it seemed important to note that I spotted Claire Perry MP citing a statistic that I haven’t seen before, and which got my spidey senses tingling. She suggests that the number of parents installing network filters at home has dropped ten percent over the past three years, standing now at 39%.
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A U.S. company that makes Internet-blocking gear acknowledges that Syria has been using at least 13 of its devices to censor Web activity there—an admission that comes as the Syrian government cracks down on its citizens and silences their online activities.
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Defamation is only supposed to apply to cases where there’s a factually false statement made about someone. It shouldn’t apply to cases where the facts are accurate, or the statements are opinions. But while the US’s defamation laws generally deal pretty well with this, it’s not as clear elsewhere. The UK, unfortunately, is somewhat famous for its bad defamation laws, where the burden is generally on the accused to prove they didn’t defame someone — which can be an expensive process. Over the past week or so, video gaming journalists and industry watchers have been dealing with a bit of controversy. Eurogamer columnist Rab Florence wrote a column questioning the close relationship between some gaming journalists and the companies they cover, where it sometimes seems like the journalists are pitch people, rather than objective journalists. This is not a new concern, especially in video game journalism, where such accusations tend to show up pretty regularly (sometimes more accurately than others).
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Privacy
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A Shawnee County District Court judge has ordered The Topeka Capital-Journal to relinquish identifying information of a CJOnline.com commenter claiming to be a juror in a high-profile murder trial.
District Judge Steven Ebberts on Friday denied the newspaper’s request to quash the district attorney’s subpoena for the information. As a result, CJOnline will have to release the poster’s name, address and Internet Protocol address to the district attorney.
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Civil Rights
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Under draft plans, service providers will have to store details of all internet use in the UK for a year.
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Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian free/open source developer and Creative Commons activist, has been in prison in Syria since June, and his colleagues around the world have been agitating for his release
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Rosetta Stone Inc. (RST), a maker of language-learning software, agreed to drop a lawsuit it brought against Google Inc. (GOOG) for selling its trademarks to other companies for search-engine advertising.
The companies agreed that all claims in the infringement case will be dismissed, according to a filing today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. No terms were given with the stipulation of voluntary dismissal. Rosetta Stone had claimed the keywords were being sold to competitors and counterfeiters.
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Copyrights
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The Hollywood Reporter recently had an article which is pretty much all doom and gloom about the movie industry, based on a conference at USC about the “Entertainment Law and Business.” Seeing as it’s an LA event, it’s not surprising that much of the story took the typical Hollywood line about how terrible things are these days. But what’s amazing is that it seems to treat the success stories as if they’re failures. It quotes YouTube star Sam Tsui, who points out that “you can’t become complacent as a content creator — you need to do new, exciting stuff” and turns that into the complaint that artists have to spend all their time running “to keep in the same place.” Most of us call that “a job.”
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Jepsen and her two bandmates recognized it was best to strike when the iron was still tepid and ventured into the studio with enough co-producers and songwriters to choke a “Tribute to Lou Perlman” compilation. Jepsen’s debut album was released and promptly fell off the public radar, failing to surpass 100,000 sales. This sort of situation is hardly unique. Plenty of big hits have been followed by a loud sucking noise as fans rush off to examine the Next Big Thing, creating a temporary vacuum in their wake.
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By seizing the servers of Megaupload, the U.S. Government also confiscated the personal belongings of many innocent users. One entrepreneur has asked the court to return his data but this request is meeting resistance from the authorities. The U.S. Government points out that the Megaupload user in question may not technically be the owner of his uploaded files. In addition they accuse him of hosting pirated copies of popular music.
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We’ve written about John Mellencamp’s anti-internet rants before, but this latest one doesn’t just take the cake, it takes the whole bakery and turns it into a reality show on the Learning Channel, but with more melodrama and an even looser definition of learning.
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10.31.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I miss the days when I would get excited about the latest desktop interface to come from the GNOME or KDE projects, or downloading and installing the umpteenth Linux distribution on the continuing quest to find Linux nirvana.
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Kernel Space
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I’m looking for someone to help me out with the stable Linux kernel release process. Right now I’m drowning in trees and patches, and could use some one to help me sanity-check the releases I’m doing.
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Much ado about an ultimately irrelevant issue: a bug in the ext4 filesystem has turned out only to be exposed when several exotic options are combined. Apparently, the problem has only affected a single user.
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After an accident last year left him with severe brain trauma, Alan Lumley is miraculously back at work as an IT Manager and even more serious about Linux.
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The outspoken creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, called for laptop makers to follow the tablet world’s lead in using the highest-resolution displays possible on mobile devices, in a post on Google Plus.
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Applications
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Professional grade video editor ‘Lightworks‘ makes it Linux debut today as an alpha-quality release for Debian-based distributions.
But before your imagination runs away with dreams of becoming the next Scorsese, there’s a catch: You won’t get to play with it.
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Proprietary
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Thought about changing to Linux but have some Windows application you just can’t live without? Today’s a good day for you. CrossOver, a for-pay, supported version of Wine that usually costs $59.95, is available free today only. It includes one year’s worth of support and upgrades. Visit CodeWeavers’ Flock The Vote site to download CrossOver starting at midnight Central Time (+6 GMT).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For those of you who don’t know, Steam is an online game store and distribution platform that is a product of a gaming developer called Valve. Valve has been know for creating several very popular gaming franchises such as the Half Life series, Left 4 Dead, Portal and Team Fortress among a couple of others. Steam is their online store/software client that gives consumers ability to purchase and install over 1,500 games from other developers. The key features of Steam are ease of use and the ability to keep games you’ve purchased linked with your user account, so games you’ve bought are yours forever and will carry along with your User ID for years and years without any need to keep track of installation CDs or key codes to install the game, not to mention automatically download and install updates for every game you have automatically and cloud sync save-game data between different computers (if supported by the game itself, and many games do).
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Osmos, a physics-based arcade game that features some amazing visuals and a minimalist, electronic soundtrack, has been added to the Steam for Linux database.
The player takes the role of a mote and it has just one purpose, absorb other motes. The only way to propel yourself is by ejecting matter. The downside is that the size of the mote will shrink and other motes will be able to absorb you.
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Desktop Environments
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Enlightenment is one of the oldest open source desktop projects in existence. With E17, the developers are gearing up to their latest release, an occasion that has been a long time in the making. The word is that the team will make some announcements at the EFL Developer Day taking place as part of Linuxcon Europe on 5 November. With a release likely being close at hand, The H spoke to project leader Carsten “Rasterman” Haitzler about how the desktop environment has been progressing and what the goals are for the project.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Yesterday we pushed a small but significant clean-up to a feature set we’ve been working on for a couple of years now which is perhaps one of the more interesting things we’re doing in Plasma: the idea of “one code base, multiple form factors.”
The idea is that whether your application is running as a widget on the desktop, docked in a panel, running full screen as part of a mediacenter, running in a touch based environment or as a regular ol’ app-in-a-window, much of the code can be shared. We often put the non-graphical bits into shared libraries, and traditional we’ve built multiple front ends that are optimized for different form factors and input methods which use these libraries.
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Being a Technical Writer involves a lot of reading and research of new and emerging technologies. And one project that recently came to my attention through my email inbox was an Illumos kernel based Unix operating system called XStreamOS.
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When I booted Luninux for the first time I noticed that this operating system is using the Gnome 3.4.1 shell which basically makes it look like Gnome 2 as well. At a first glance you could be confused into thinking that there isn’t much difference between Luninux and Fuduntu except that Luninux is based on Ubuntu and Fuduntu is based on Fedora.
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Red Hat Family
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University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Laboratory Tests Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for IPv6 Interoperability Against USGv6 Host Profile
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In October of 1994, on All Hallow’s Eve, Marc Ewing released the first publicly available distribution of Red Hat Linux. It’s a release that has become known as the Halloween release.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Historically, Windows hasn’t been tremendously effective in the area of backwards compatibility. Anyone who has migrated to a new Windows release with older peripherals has likely felt the pain I’m talking about.
On the flipside, the idea that Windows 8 will drive Windows users to Ubuntu in droves is unlikely. If a new PC buyer has been content with the Windows OS, switching suddenly to something else is highly improbably. Even if keeping their existing hardware and locating a good Linux distro might be a more economical solution, most people will stick with what they know. It’s simply a matter of familiarity for most Windows users looking to upgrade.
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Canonical and Ubuntu are both drifting away from the free software (or even from the open source) movement, and they are doing this by adopting some ugly tactics like the one mentioned above.
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Another 6 months, another Ubuntu Developer Summit event for Canonical, where Mark Shuttleworth is always present and keeps his audience captivated.
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Canonical QA coordinator Nicholas Skaggs announced that the company’s popular Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu, would be moving to a substantially different release schedule.
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At Ubuntu Development Summit held in Copenhagen this year, developers of Canonical have decided to drop alpha releases of Ubuntu, and publish just one beta release prior to final stable release. Thus, next Ubuntu releases beginning with Ubuntu 13.04 will have just one beta ISO.
The decision was taken to ensure better quality of ISO and a more full proof development cycle. Also, Ubuntu derivatives like Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc have the freedom to follow their own release cycles. They can follow Ubuntu’s 6 month cycle or choose their own, something new.
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Ubuntu 13.04, the next major release of Ubuntu will include Windows installer, popularly known as Wubi. This software allows one to install Ubuntu inside Windows operating system as a program and allows easy setup of disk partitioning, user setup etc. The installer was included by default in previous versions of Ubuntu but was dropped in Ubuntu 12.04 and Quantal.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint founder, Clement Lefebvre, has done an amazing job monitizing his Ubuntu offshoot. Not only does the project have sponsors in the business community who wish to assure Mint stays in production, but his monthly donations are impressive as well. Now Lefebvre has announced yet another partnership and the ribbon-cutting of his Minty fresh store.
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Phones
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Android
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Using data from 230,614 positions posted in Q3, Freelancer.co.uk saw 16 percent growth in the number of Android jobs, at 4,795. Meanwhile, the number of iOS jobs rose a comparatively small eight percent to 5,509.
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What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”
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We take a look at Ubuntu for Nexus 7, made possible with the new one-click installer promoted by Canonical. What we found certainly surprised us…
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SaaS
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Mattmann became involved in Nutch, an open source search engine program, when studying for his doctorate. Nutch was created by Doug Cutting, who went on to found the big data system Hadoop.
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Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, SVP Converged Cloud and HP Cloud Services, has some big responsibilities. Singh is responsible for HP’s cloud efforts, which increasingly involve the open source OpenStack platform.
In an exclusive interview with InternetNews Singh detailed his views on the cloud and how HP can leverage the open approach and still provide competitive differentiation.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation is looking for infrastructure sponsors: Internet service providers, webhosters, universities and corporations can contribute to LibreOffice by sponsoring the use of dedicated machines.
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If you do an apples-to-apples comparison, of Windows and Mac users, which together constitute 97% of the desktop market, Apache OpenOffice, although it took a while to make its first release, 3.4.0, has taken off like a rocket, and has eliminated any head-start advantage LibreOffice had, and is racing ahead with 4x the downloads that LibreOffice is reporting. And since the LibreOffice numbers are inflated by duplicate counting of upgrade downloads, OpenOffice is probably already ahead of LibreOffice in users on these platforms by a factor of 10 or more.
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CMS
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The Plone Foundation has warned users that there are multiple vulnerabilities in its open source Plone content management system (CMS) as well as the Zope toolkit. According to the security advisory, these security holes could be exploited by an attacker for privilege escalation, allowing them to bypass certain security restrictions, or to execute malicious arbitrary code on a system.
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Education
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Open source can provide schools with high quality, well-functioning IT solutions at low cost, according to a case study done by VTT, a Finnish government research institute. The researchers looked at the use of Linux and other open source applications by the Kasavuoren Secondary School in Kauniainen, a municipality near Helsinki. The case study, available since May 2011, underpins a plea to schools to increase their use of free and open source software.
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Project Releases
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After a multi-year effort, the much anticipated Samba 4.0 platform, with new support for Microsoft Active Directory, is now slated for release on November 27
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Licensing
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This is the second installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
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Openness/Sharing
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/bg8l8v/open_source) has announced the addition of Woodhead Publishing Ltd’s new book “Open Source Software in Life Science Research: Practical solutions to common challenges in the pharmaceutical industry and beyond” to their offering.
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Open Hardware
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Standards/Consortia
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An effort is emerging to take the Markdown plain text formatting conventions originally developed by John Gruber in 2004 and create a standardisable specification. Markdown’s syntax allows a minimal set of plain text ‘markup’ characters to offer useful basic formatting, for example, underlining text with “=” or “-” makes the text a heading as does preceding text with one to six “#” symbols. The apparent simplicity of the format has seen it used on many blogs, Reddit, GitHub and other sites as a way for users to present formatted text through the system. With this wide take up, developer Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, has called for a standardisation of Markdown.
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Windows 8 has caused Microsoft’s worst fears to come true – users will no longer choose Windows because it is familiar and comfortable. Windows will no longer compete on a “devil we know” basis, but will need to compete on a usability basis. In our case, users said Linux Mint actually felt far more familiar and comfortable than Windows 8.
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The U.S. Congress is on an extended election hiatus, yet there has been no noticeable decline in its productivity. As polarization and legislative gridlock have worsened in recent years, the nation’s great legislative body has withered, losing not only popular support but the ability to exercise its constitutional powers.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Israeli soldiers took position behind a hill at the beach, facing a number of Palestinian fishermen who were fishing a few meters offshore, and opened fire at the fishermen.
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There was a time many years ago, under Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, when Israel abided by the international rules of warfare codified in the Geneva Convention and helped the Arab residents of the occupied Territories live normal lives according to the Geneva rules.
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An Israeli judge has acquitted a border policeman of the negligent killing of a Palestinian boy during a demonstration in the West Bank but found him guilty of improperly discharging his firearm.
The case relates to an incident in the West Bank village of Nilin on July 29, 2008 when a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead during a demonstration against Israel’s separation barrier.
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Speaking in Jerusalem today President Jimmy Carter said Israel has turned a corner in its foreign policy and `abandoned` a two-state solution for a `Greater Israel.`
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You create an app that anyone trained in first aid signs up to, creating a mobile community. You then station defibrillator-equipped drones on top of tall buildings across the city, linked by sensors. When someone needs help, they, or someone nearby, sends a request. The nearest first-aider accepts the task, and rushes to the site, and the unmanned vehicle sweeps from the sky, delivering the kit where it’s needed.
This could have a big impact on the numbers of deaths from heart attacks. According to the same article in Co.Exist quoted above, 76,000 of the 250,000 deaths caused by cardiac arrest outside US hospitals could have been prevented, had the right equipment arrived soon enough. Now, it may not always be enough to use a drone to deliver a defibrillator to heart attack victims, but it seems likely that many tens of thousands of lives could, in theory, be saved in this way.
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Human Rights Watch on Thursday sent a letter to Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos slamming a proposed constitutional amendment “to expand the scope of military jurisdiction.”
The group said the amendment “would virtually guarantee impunity for military atrocities,” and would make Colombia “fail to comply with human rights conditions for U.S. military aid.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was handcuffed and arrested this morning after bringing food and supplies to a coalition of climate justice activists, known as the “Tar Sands Blockade,” who are attempting to stop the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas. She is currently at Wood County Jail awaiting processing.
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One clue might come from a Romney campaign memo dated October 4, 2011 — just weeks before the candidate flip-flopped on climate change — indicating that Romney had been actively seeking the endorsement of Koch Industries heir David Koch. David and his brother Charles are top funders of climate change denial front groups and have long played an important role in choosing GOP political candidates, both via direct donations and through organizations like the David Koch-founded-and-led Americans for Prosperity.
Romney at the time was struggling for Tea Party support, and the memo, obtained by the conservative Washington Examiner noted that the Kochs were the “financial engine of the Tea Party.” According to the Washington Examiner, just a few days after Romney announced his new agnosticism on climate change he bypassed an important Iowa event in advance of that state’s crucial primary to speak at an AFP event. Romney also had scheduled a meeting at Koch’s home in Southampton, NY, but it was cancelled because of the last natural disaster to pummel the East Coast, Hurricane Irene.
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The reports of damage as the storm hit New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Delaware were stunning.
The flooding in Lower Manhattan was unlike what even meteorologists at The Weather Channel had predicted. It was worse than they feared, one meteorologist said during coverage.
There was ample time to anticipate Hurricane Sandy after it killed at least 52 people in Haiti. New Jersey, New York and Washington, DC, all were very public about preparations that were being made. This gave media in the United States an opening to get in and cover before the storm did any damage.
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Finance
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Britain faces a choice between a generation of stagnant living standards for millions of lower-income households, or an alternative that tackles low pay, low skills, and childcare costs, according to a landmark report written by the Commission on Living Standards.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Wisconsin-based, right-wing website Media Trackers reached a new low on Monday when it printed a libelous story against the partner of State Rep. Mark Pocan, accusing him of sending bizarre text threats to a volunteer for Chad Lee, Pocan’s opponent in his race for Congress. Although Media Trackers took down the story late in the day, the damage had been done. It was picked up by right-wing sources in Wisconsin and across the nation. The organization’s “mea culpa” fails to apologize or take responsibility for its role in the smear and the outlet still has a picture of Pocan and his partner Phil Frank on the front page of its website with a note that it would “continue to follow developments in this story” — as if there were a story to follow.
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The adult film industry gets mentioned on Techdirt frequently because, as everyone knows, “the internet is for porn.” Typically, we get to write fun little stories about silly journalists believing horse-poop statistics on home pornography. Or else an ice cream company is suing an adult film studio over a porno-parody of their silly flavors. Those stories are good for a laugh because, let’s be honest, there’s something inherently funny about movies of people bumping uglies coupled with the far less fleshy world of news and IP law. What isn’t laugh-worthy is when a tragedy occurs, such as the senseless slaying of a 10 year old girl, and the result is a bunch of grand-standing jackwagons lining up to use her death to promote their own false agenda.
Yet that’s what is happening with the case of Jessica Ridgeway’s murder, now that the accused killer is a young man who reportedly is addicted to pornography. Let’s highlight one of the aforementioned grand-standing jackwagons, just so we can identify who is saying what before I get to the elephant-in-the-room-sized problem with his nonsense.
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In fall 2009, Comcast planned to launch an Internet service for the poor that was sure to impress federal regulators. But David Cohen, the company’s chief of lobbying, told the staff to wait.
At the time, Comcast was planning a controversial $30 billion bid to take over NBC Universal, and Cohen needed a bargaining chip for government negotiations.
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On a brisk spring Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in “the forging of public opinion.” The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John “JW” Tatem Jr. and Jack O’Connell Jr., the Sugar Association’s president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they’d just pulled off.
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Censorship
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We’ve been somewhat excited that we’re rapidly approaching one million total comments on Techdirt. We thought it was quite a nice milestone. But we feel a bit small to learn that the Huffington Post already has over 70 million comments just this year alone. Over at Poynter, Jeff Sonderman has a fascinating interview with the site’s director of community, Justin Isaf, about how they manage all those comments. Apparently they have a staff of 30 full time comment moderators, helped along by some artificial intelligence (named Julia) from a company they bought just for this technology.
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We’ve been talking about the unfortunate set of cases in the UK lately, in which people acting like jackasses online are being held criminally liable for being a jerk online. There are, of course, significant problems with this. And if you thought it was just limited to Europe, where they tend to have a slightly less absolute view of the right to free expression than the US, well, don’t be so sure. There’s a lot of talk about whether or not legal action should be taken against one jackass who used Twitter (using the account @comfortablysmug — which, perhaps, should have been a tipoff) to spread fake news about emergencies and damages, while most people were sharing legitimate news. The guy in question was eventually outed by Buzzfeed as hedge-fund analyst and political consultant Shashank Tripathi.
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Even before the massive storm named Sandy battered the northeast U.S. last night, I was already planning a posting about the “link war” now brewing around the world.
A few days ago, newspapers in Brazil pulled out of Google News, claiming they wanted compensation for the indexing of their freely available public Web sites.
And in France, the government is directly threatening Google with laws that would require news indexing payments to public, freely available media sites in that country.
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Privacy
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Restrictions on the sale of radio-controlled helicopters and planes have been imposed in Beijing as China heightens security before a once-in-a-decade leadership change, state media said Wednesday.
For some models of helicopters and planes — which can only be guided within a few metres — purchasers must prove their identity to the shopkeepers, Beijing’s Youth Daily reported.
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Civil Rights
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One of the more ridiculous things about the government’s ongoing campaign of secret surveillance on Americans is how hard it’s fought back against anyone who has sought to have the policy tested in the courts. If the feds were confident that what they were doing was legal, they wouldn’t be so aggressive in blocking each and every attempt. When the ACLU and others filed suit over the warrantless wiretapping under the FISA Amendments Bill (the Clapper v. Amnesty International case) the lower court rulings were especially troubling, because it was ruled that there was no standing to sue, because there was no direct proof of such spying. So that leaves the public in quite a bind. They can’t complain about the program unless they can prove they’ve been spied upon, but they can’t do that unless they know more about the program, which is secret. Someone page Joseph Heller.
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A federal judge has ruled that police officers in Wisconsin did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly installed cameras on private property without judicial approval.
The officers installed the cameras in an open field where they suspected the defendants, Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana, were growing marijuana. The police eventually obtained a search warrant, but not until after some potentially incriminating images were captured by the cameras. The defendants have asked the judge to suppress all images collected prior to the issuance of the search warrant.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is probably the most important trade agreement you’ve never heard of. Sometimes described as our “21st Century trade agreement,” its terms are being negotiated in secret by 11 countries, big and small, arranged around the Pacific Ocean.
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Copyrights
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As we were discussing, on Monday, the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments in the Wiley v. Kirtsaeng case over whether or not you have the right to resell (or even display) a product you bought that was made outside of the country, which contains content covered by copyright. First off, a big caveat that needs to be mentioned every single time we write about oral arguments in a court case: it is not uncommon for what is discussed, and the questions asked, to really have almost nothing to do with the final decision. Everyone loves to read the tea leaves based on the questions the Justices ask, but, quite often, the questions (and answers) don’t necessarily have much bearing on the final decision. The written briefs usually have a much bigger impact. That said, it doesn’t mean the questions are meaningless, or that we can’t learn a little bit from them.
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But it’s starting to feel as if it might be “The Last Picture Show.”
Next year’s Academy Awards ceremony — the 85th since 1929 — will be landing in a pool of angst about movies and what appears to be their fraying connection to the pop culture.
After the shock of last year’s decline in the number of tickets sold for movies domestically, to 1.28 billion, the lowest since 1995 (and attendance is only a little better this year) film business insiders have been quietly scrambling to fix what few will publicly acknowledge to be broken.
That is, Hollywood’s grip on the popular imagination, particularly when it comes to the more sophisticated films around which the awards season turns
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A 2010 ruling in this case led dozens of big-name musicians to sue such corporations as Universal Music Group to collect more money from iTunes sales, ringtones and the like.
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Well, well. Last year, there was a lot of attention paid to a so-called “revenge porn” site called “Is Anyone Up”? The site reposted submitted nude photos, linked to the person in the photo’s social networking accounts. The “idea” (a horrific one) was that spurned people, who had naked photos of their ex’s, could publicize them. Not surprisingly, many people were completely horrified by the concept and the media coverage was not kind. The site eventually went down, but others popped up to take their place. Lawyer Marc Randazza has decided to go to war with one of them, which uses the very similar name “Is Anybody Down” (and, no, I’m not linking to it). Randazza points out that he has no problem with porn or porn sites, but when the participants are not consenting (and not necessarily adults) he has serious problems.
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A day after Sony is sued over a quote in ‘Midnight in Paris,’ a second copyright infringement lawsuit is filed over a full-page Northrop Grumman ad in the Post.
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What the music industry is interested in is the powers granted by the IT Rules, which allow content to be taken down within 36 hours, without any notice to the content creator or uploader. There’s no doubt many in the content industry would like such a rule to be implemented worldwide, but considering how many bogus DMCA takedowns there are, it would definitely be a bad thing for anyone not protected by the legislation.
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It’s been almost a year since Kyle Goodwin lost access to the lawful property that he stored on Megaupload. EFF, on his behalf, has asked the Court to order his data returned, and, more recently, has also asked the Court to unseal the confidential search warrants surrounding the third-party data at issue. And it appears Mr. Goodwin is making some headway: the Court is at least contemplating holding a hearing to get to the bottom of what really happened when the government shut down Megaupload, seized its assets, and deprived millions of customers of their property.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Now that Windows 8 has made its long-awaited and widely trumpeted debut, there seems to be a fresh air of excitement and purpose here in the Linux blogosphere.
This, of course, is not to say that many of us here are particularly excited about Microsoft’s new OS, per se. Quite the opposite, in fact: Many of us are excited about the opportunity Win 8 means for Linux.
[...]
“This is the question that’s often on my mind,” Google+ blogger Linux Rants began.
“At this point, Linux is in an interesting position in that its interface (which before was considered ‘foreign’) may actually seem more familiar to the average computer user than the interface for Windows 8,” Linux Rants explained.
At the same time, “our ever-present problem is still there, and that’s the fact that Linux has a reputation for being hard to install and even harder to use,” he added.
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ThinkPenguin is an American company that sells Linux computers and related products and services and ships them Worldwide.
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Desktop
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A couple of Months ago I found a CR-48 at ebay, just an hour away from the auction deadline. So I place my bid, not to exceed $140, and guest what! I won it. Thus I Finally got my own Chromebook. The first couple of days were rough. A previous owner had installed a new boot loader into the machine, so that you could run others Operating Systems from the usb port and even install them into the Chromebook if you wished.
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We’ve already seen Ubuntu loaded up on Samsung’s $249 ARM-powered Chromebook, but the Linux modding hasn’t stopped there.
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Server
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Linux is a common and familiar bare metal operating system used by many hosting providers on their server infrastructure today. Among them is hosting vendor Dreamhost, who could soon be moving from just using Linux to actively contributing code to Linux.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Apparently, problems caused by last week’s Ext4 bug only occur when combining several critical mount and umount options; this renders the bug harmless for most Linux users – so far, it has only affected one user. Nevertheless, ext4 lead developer Theodore “Ted” Ts’o plans to draw the necessary conclusions from the incident.
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Steven Rostedt works for Red Hat and maintains the stable Linux kernel releases of the real-time patch. In this interview, part of our ongoing series on Linux kernel developers, Steven explains how his career took him from Lockheed Martin to tinkering with the Linux kernel, to landing his first kernel job at a startup. What would he do if he wasn’t a kernel developer? Open a Starbucks franchise.
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At least three Linux kernel developers are no longer employed by AMD.
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Torvalds describes this third release candidate of the Linux 3.7 kernel as “Nothing particularly stands out here. Lots of small fixes, exemplified by the series of memory leak fixes in usb serial drivers. Just a lot of random stuff.. Most of it is drivers (all over: drm, wireless, staging, usb, sound), but there’s a few filesystem updates (nfs, btrfs, ext4), arch updates (arm, x86 and m68k) and just random stuff.”
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Jon Masters examines the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community – and the release of the 3.6 kernel, hot off the press
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Video game publisher and digital-distribution giant Valve continues to take it to Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system.
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The Ubuntu Developers Summit now happening in Copenhagen this year has put forward some interesting facts about gaming on Ubuntu platform. Some of the Valve’s employees were present during the summit and discussed the future of Steam on Ubuntu in particular, and Linux in general.
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Desktop Environments
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Eastern city of Ningbo halts work to expand petrochemical complex after week of protests over environmental impact
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Ubuntu developers will be looking to stick to “stable” GNOME components and not closely track the unstable GNOME development releases within the Ubuntu 13.04 cycle. There’s several reasons why Ubuntu will be distancing itself from the latest upstream GNOME packages.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Thanks to digiKam’s geocorrelation capabilities, you can geotag photos using a GPX file created with apps like Open GPS Tracker. But there is also another way to use your Android device for geotagging. The built-in camera app of most Android devices is capable of geotagging photos. This means that you can take a geotagged snap with the Android camera and then transfer geographical coordinates from it to other photos using digiKam. So next time, when you are done shooting with your main camera, remember to take a reference snapshot with your Android device (make sure that the geotagging option is enabled).
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GNOME Desktop
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In the recent few days, I got several emails from readers asking me to rethink my position vis-a-vis Gnome 3 and retake the most recent 3.6 edition for a spin. My eyes would be opened, they said. How can I resist my readers?
All right. So I did that. I downloaded the official Gnome 3.6 ISO, which uses FC18 as its underlying system, and booted, to see what gives. Once again, I will address all those issues that bugged me, including aesthetics, ease of use, power off button, and all the rest. So let’s see if a year and a half down the road, Gnome 3.6 can be a redeemer.
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Now, here’s a clickbaitful topic. But it’s the truth really. Some Linux distributions are designed with all the gusto of an armadillo suffering from liver cancer dancing on a highway full of speeding cars. Not exactly the most fortuitous effort.
Luckily, it is quite possible to enliven dead-looking distributions, shipping with rigor mortis by default, into practical and useful systems, with only some small proverbial pimping, the word I so love to use, including first and foremost the installation of one or two alternative desktop environments, called Cinnamon and MATE, followed by some extra makeup and polish. You may argue that bling bling beauty makes not, but then you can argue that having a nice face lends nothing to human aesthetics either. I win. You read.
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In the hard time for the Mandriva as the company and as a distribution, which currently struggles with their internal structure and the definition of their future, some other teams continue development of their forks of Mandriva operating system.
Namely, these teams are Mageia, which currently works on Mageia 3, and ROSA, which prepares the Rosa Desktop 2012 release.
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A lightweight distro running XBMC that is designed for temporary or permanent use – how does it fare?
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Linux Lite is a Linux operating system based on the Ubuntu distribution, developed in New Zealand. Its main objective is to show people just how easy it can be to use a Linux based operating system, dispelling myths about how scary Linux operating systems are.
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There have been a number of releases of Linux distributions in the past couple of weeks but no release gets me more excited than a new version of Puppy Linux.
The latest release of Puppy Linux is called “Precise Puppy” and can be downloaded from the Puppy homepage.
I downloaded a version at the weekend and using Unetbootin I installed it to a USB drive and this is my review of the latest version of Puppy Linux.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, including the KVM hypervisor, has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ – the highest level of assurance for an unmodified commercial operating system – for the Operating System Protection Profile (OSPP) including extended modules for Advanced Management, Advanced Audit, Labeled Security, and Virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on Dell, HP, IBM and SGI hardware.
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At Red Hat we are involved with a lot of cool open source projects. One of these is the popular LibreOffice productivity Suite, where we are putting in a lot of effort to make sure Red Hat customers and the community in general have a dependable and feature rich Office Suite available.
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Fedora
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A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown “encouraging” results.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu is one of the most commonly used Linux-based desktop distributions. The Ubuntu distro and its various community projects are used the world over and a new release always turns heads. This past week I took the latest release from Canonical, Ubuntu 12.10, for a spin. The new release promised improved integration between the desktop and social media, the ability to treat web applications as local programs and search results in the Dash which would include products from Amazon. In short, it seems Ubuntu is looking to become more integrated with on-line services. While this may be convenient for some people, it has raised a number of privacy concerns in the community and, looking over Ubuntu’s legal notice about privacy does not provide any reassurance. The notice informs us Canonical reserves the right to share our keystrokes, search terms and IP address with a number of third parties, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the BBC. This feature is enabled by default, but can be turned off through the distribution’s settings panel.
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There’s a lot of action going on in the small tablet space with Apple recently announcing the iPad Mini and Google heavily pushing its Nexus 7 tablet devices. When most people think of open operating systems for these devices, they think of Android, but it’s actually very easy to put Ubuntu on a Nexus 7 tablet. In fact, Canonical has posted complete, easy instructions for doing so.
As we’ve reported, Canonical is very interested in taking Ubuntu to tablets, TVs and other new devices. Some have even speculated that Canonical might consider becoming a player in the hardware business, as Google has. But it looks increasingly like Canonical will concentrate on how to take Ubuntu to devices made by others.
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It would appear that the folks at Google – or at least one of their ranks – wants to prove the versatility of the hardware behind the newest Chromebook on the market with a port of Ubuntu as an operating system. We’ve reviewed the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook in full and can say with some confidence that it’d be amazing to have more options than just Chrome as an OS, especially given the undeniably low price point of the unit at $249 USD. The process has already begun with Google’s Olof Johansson, right on down on the case – with a dirty port going strong here right as the Chromebook is arriving in mailboxes!
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As we near the release of the biggest consumer-oriented commercial software to ever hit Linux, some negative realities from other platforms may make a nasty appearance in Ubuntu. Why? That’s easy; as Ubuntu gains traction with the desktop buying masses, there will be more and more individuals who are simply not educated enough to discern between quality software and not.
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On October 28th, Canonical officially announced that their Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system is no longer supported.
If you’re watching our website regularly, than this should be no news for you, as we’ve announced the end of life for Ubuntu 11.04 two months ago.
“This note is just to confirm that the support period for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) formally ends on October 28, 2012 and Ubuntu Security Notices no longer includes information or updated packages for Ubuntu 11.04.” said Kate Stewart in the announcement.
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At a talk given this morning at the Ubuntu Development Summit (UDS) which is currently taking place in Copenhagen, Drew Bliss from Valve Software has announced the beginning of Valve’s beta test of its Steam client for Linux. As Canonical employees have reported on Google+, Valve has also given developers attending the summit access to the beta program. Other Linux users may fill out a hardware survey on the company’s site to be considered for the program as well; a Steam account is required to fill out the survey.
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For Ubuntu 12.10 Canonical decided to abandon the Unity 2D desktop and just only support the standard Unity desktop with Compiz. When there isn’t a proper OpenGL/3D driver available, LLVMpipe is used for running the GL commands on the CPU. This move caused lots of upset Ubuntu Linux users and the developers are now looking at what to do for a desktop that doesn’t require 3D support.
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In the absence of Canonical changing the behaviour of Unity in these regards, the EFF suggests that concerned users try installing an alternative desktop such as GNOME 3, KDE or Cinnamon.
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Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns.
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It’s a major privacy problem if you can’t find things on your own computer without broadcasting what you’re looking for to the world. You could be searching for the latest version of your résumé at work because you’re considering leaving your job; you could be searching for a domestic abuse hotline PDF you downloaded, or legal documents about filing for divorce; maybe you’re looking for documents with file names that will gave away trade secrets or activism plans; or you could be searching for a file in your own local porn collection. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want any of these search queries to leave your computer.
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The mascot logo for Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” is on show at UDS, which starts tomorrow in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Mark Shuttleworth delivered a keynote on the opening day of the UDS and ha announced future plans that he has with Ubuntu.
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But the EFF’s statement brings a particularly loud and influential voice into the debate. Unlike individual Ubuntu users upset by the search functionality, the EFF is a venerated organization that generally commands a great deal of respect within the open source channel for its support of digital rights. It’s also an organization Canonical has helped support in the past through proceeds donated from games sold in the Ubuntu Software Center.
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As part of the push to make Ubuntu a competitive gaming platform, developers at Canonical and within the Ubuntu community will be working to improve the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager performance for Ubuntu 13.04.
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As I wrote over the weekend, Canonical is planning to eventually ship its own SDK (Software Development Kit) for Ubuntu Linux to ease software development on the open-source platform. The Ubuntu SDK won’t happen for the Ubuntu 13.04 release, but work is being planned about what to include in this Ubuntu-specific SDK.
Among the items that were talked about on Monday during the Ubuntu 13.04 Developer Summit in Copenhagen were how the SDK is to be integrated with Ubuntu, language/tool-kit support, form-factor support, performance, availability of documentation, the stability/maturity/support-life of an Ubuntu SDK, application sandboxing, and abstraction of the actual implementation.
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Ubuntu developers are hoping to redesign Wubi, the Ubuntu Windows Installer, for the Ubuntu 13.04 release in April.
Wubi allows for Ubuntu Linux to be installed on a Microsoft Windows host that you can then launch at boot-time but without having to re-partition the drive, etc. It’s a nice concept, but the Ubuntu Wubi performance is slow for I/O access.
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Discussions were held this morning in Copenhagen at the Ubuntu Developer Summit about improving audio and graphics support for Ubuntu Linux in order to propel the distribution as a first-rate gaming platform.
Ubuntu wants to be a great gaming platform and as part of that audio and graphics support are two of several areas that need to be improved.
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The new version of Ubuntu Linux slated for release in October introduces a feature that some users claim is at worst a violation of privacy or, at best, generally annoying. Ubuntu 12.10 introduces search results from Amazon into the Dash. That means you could be searching for a file or application on your computer and get shopping results under a “more suggestions” section after your general results.
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A widget mechanism with a formal Unity widget API will be delivered for Ubuntu 13.04. There’s still lots of decisions to be made, such as whether these widgets will be constructed in HTML5/JavaScript or Qt, but more details should be forthcoming in the near future. Unfortunately the slides for this Unity widget support aren’t currently available on the Internet but should surface shortly.
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With Ubuntu trying to improve their OpenGL driver support state to push the Linux OS as a platform for gaming, Valve going to be promoting the closed-source NVIDIA and AMD drivers on Linux, and various other challenges still turning up for those trying to use the different Linux OpenGL drivers, here are some new benchmarks comparing the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver against the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver.
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Hardened sysadmins and operators often spurn graphical user interfaces (GUIs) as being slow, cumbersome, unscriptable and inflexible. GUIs are for wimps, right?
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Flavours and Variants
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A new flavor of Ubuntu has been developed, and this one now runs on ARM Chromebooks. The release is still in alpha stages, meaning you can expect a few glitches and have some experimental features. You can run the OS in your Chromebook, but its still not recommended for daily work.
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The Raspberry Pi mini computer that’s become popular with the maker community but was originally conceived as a device to help kids learn how to code has had the lightweight TinyBASIC programming language ported to it.
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One Christmas in the mid 1980s when I was 10 or 11 years old my parent’s bought me the best gift I have ever received.
My parents know nothing about computing or technology so they would never have come up with the gift if they hadn’t asked “What would you like for Christmas this year?”
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A new update of SD card image is available for Raspberry Pi that supports partitioning of memory between CPU and GPU. This means if you need more of RAM, you can do that by editing a single configuration file. Also, if you need some graphical memory for running some games, you can just go and increase the memory.
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Use Python to make your first game on Raspberry Pi in our easy to follow step by step tutorial
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Wireless communication chipset solutions provider HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd., and Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced that HiSilicon has joined Linaro as a core member.
HiSilicon will appoint a representative to the board of Linaro and work with other members to develop the future of Linux on ARM. The company will contribute resources to work together with the engineers from other Linaro members. In addition to joining the board of Linaro, HiSilicon will join the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), which directs the shared Linaro engineering team of over 100 engineers.
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Phones
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The latest version of the Enyo JavaScript framework now comes with LESS-based theming support and globalisation/localisation support. The update comes after the HP-sponsored development team recently added four new team members and are looking to expand. The Enyo project is part of the software foundation of WebOS and open WebOS, but since then, Enyo 2 has become a general purpose JavaScript framework for all browsers.
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Android
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The solution to this issue? I’ve been told I need to compile a custom kernel module to add ext4 support. If I am going to spend that much effort getting Android to work I would rather devote that effort towards getting Debian to boot on the MK802 instead. So much for Android being easy.
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We were looking forward to the big Google Android event which was scheduled for October 29th. Unfortunately, the event was called off and many devices which were rumored to be released at the event remained unannounced. However, Office Depot could no longer keep its patience and unveiled the 32GB Nexus 7 at its stores.
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Lately we’ve seen an explosion of low-cost media players designed to access the web and run Android apps on TV with plain old Android. In part one last week we explored the diversification of products beyond the Google TV platform toward pure Android. In part two we explore each category of Android TV in depth and assess their roles in the TV ecosystem and potential for success.
Android TV options can be broken down into the following categories, including products based on the Google TV platform: low-end, sub-$100 media players; HDMI sticks; high-end, Google TV-based devices; cable-ready Over-The-Top, Set-Top-Boxes; and smartphones and tablets.
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When Google announced its new Nexus tablet and smartphone line, the search giant also announced, almost in passing, that there’s a new version of Android on its way: Android 4.2.
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1) Multi-user support
On Android 4.2-powered tablets, but not on smartphones, you’ll be able to have multiple users. Each user will get his or her own setup. That means, for example, you can have your own home-screen, background, widgets, apps and games, while your spouse or office partner can have their own unique tablet experience. You can set this up so a new user must login to the tablet or they’ll be able to simply hit a button and away they’ll go with their own tablet take.
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Google Inc. (GOOG) said there are about 700,000 applications available for downloading onto mobile devices that run the Android operating system, challenging Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s lead in the race for software tools.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Though there was no Google show on Monday, its Nexus 10 tablet would have been the star — and it may even outshine the iPad. It has higher resolution than the iPad with Retina display, and unlike the iPad, it has a 16:10 aspect ratio that nicely accommodates the wide-screen format. It will offer movie buffs a superior viewing experience. Plus, it sells for a full $100 less than a comparable iPad.
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Two new Android devices, the Nexus 4 handset and Nexus 10 tablet will go on sale on 13 November, Google has announced.
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Only after a year of Steve Jobs’ death Apple has started to look mediocre when compared with competitors. This year did not see a new category of devices from Apple, all the company is trying to do is catching up with Android. iPhone 5 was an effort to catch up with bigger screens of Android (the reception was negative), and now the iPad Mini is nothing but ‘blatant copy’* of 7” Android tablets such as Galaxy Tab 7, Amazon Kindle Fire HD or the best selling Nexus 7.
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Lack of competition in the desktop segment, Microsoft being an old dinosaur held the world hostage to old obsolete technologies, as it was repulsive to any innovation in the desktop. You can’t pick a single revolutionary innovation in the desktop computing in the last 2 decades. I consider Windows XP – Windows 8 era to be dark ages for innovation in the desktop PC segment.
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One of the worst hurricane in the US history, Sandy, washed Google’s much expected event yesterday. But the resilient company anyway made the announcement of its much awaited Nexus series of products.
Yesterday Google captured all three form factors with its latest Nexus family of devices Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. Nexus 4 is already been praised as one of the best looking and the most powerful smartphone. Nexus 4 coverage has overshadowed the less talked about Nexus 10 tablet. So, how does this tablet stacks up against it’s competitors namely the iPad and Microsoft Surface?
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Taiwanese PC and tablet maker Asus has reported healthy third quarter results, spurred on by strong sales of the firm’s tablets and notebook computers.
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Como “todos” sabéis, “Skype” fue adquirido por Microsoft, y en su momento les prometí una alternativa libre. Pues bien, esa alternativa se llama “Jitsi”, antes conocido como “SIP Communicator”.
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Back in January of 2011, the Eclipse Foundation announced the development of Orion, a browser/cloud based IDE. At the time, Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation told me that Orion is more than just Eclipse in a browser. It’s a view that he re-iterated today with the official launch of Orion 1.0
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In my early-October discussion of tech simplification at my former primary home, I’d mentioned that I was able to dispense with my powerline networking setup. But when I re-visited the CA residence a couple of weekends ago, I realized I’d forgotten about one particular node; my Power Mac G4 Cube upstairs. Instead of resurrecting a powerline spur, which would have necessitated a re-expansion beyond my solitary eight-port switch at the router, I instead decided to connect the G4 Cube to the LAN via an Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi bridge.
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Events
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The list of accepted “dev rooms” for the FOSDEM 2013 conference have been announced.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In the most basic sense, programming code allocates specific locations in a program (or memory) that can be used for specific tasks. When code (malicious or otherwise) escapes those locations, trouble isn’t usually far behind.
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SaaS
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Open source companies have managed to get on board the UK Government’s G-Cloud supplier framework, which enables public sector bodies to access and buy services from a range of listed suppliers. The idea of the G-Cloud is to make it less complex for public sector organisations to purchase by allowing companies to sign up and be validated with the CloudStore.
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According to figures revealed by the Cabinet Office, 75% of suppliers named in both the first and second round of G-cloud framework are SMEs.
Since taking office in 2010, the coalition government has adopted a new public sector ICT strategy focused on sharing services and improving efficiency by reducing duplication of efforts and creating new ways for government departments to procure IT products and services.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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OpenOffice’s graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365′s debut nears. Plans for “Cloud Apache OpenOffice” will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks
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The PackageKit/Session Installer integration is implemented in UNO, that allow extensions and macro creators to trigger the installation of software from trusted archives in general — quite a nifty feature in itself. As we have this now in place, in the future we can also use it to complete the LibreOffice install by adding missing packages for certain actions that are not available in the default Ubuntu installation (which leaves out some parts of LibreOffice).
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Semi-Open Source
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek issued a new 4.8.0 status report where he mentions “I’d like to close the stage 1 phase of GCC 4.8 development on Monday, November 5th. If you have still patches for new features you’d like to see in GCC 4.8, please post them for review soon. Patches posted before the freeze, but reviewed shortly after the freeze, may still go in, further changes should be just bugfixes and documentation fixes.”
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Project Releases
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PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, free and open source network access control (NAC) system.
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The latest major update to Clementine, version 1.1, expands the open source media player’s streaming support and adds long-awaited podcast functionality. Clementine is a cross-platform program that, its developers say, is designed to be both fast and easy-to-use, and was inspired by version 1.4 of Amarok (the current release is Amarok 2.6). It supports playback of local music libraries and streaming of online radio stations, and can be used to transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC and AAC files.
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Sourcefabric has released a new version of its open source radio automation software that brings with it several new features. Airtime 2.2 includes improvements to the rebroadcasting features of the application as well as new “Smart Blocks” that allow users to automatically assemble randomised playlists according to a set of parameters.
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The Bootstrap developers have announced the release of version 2.2.0 of their open source web front-end toolkit. This new major update is the project’s first release since leaving Twitter, which made the framework available as open source in August of last year, and brings with it dozens of fixes as well as new templates and a new media component.
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Public Services/Government
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To help reduce the government’s debt, Portugal’s public administrations should switch to free and open source software, pleads the country’s Association for Free Software, Ansol. In a manifest published earlier this month, the group exposes recent violations of European public procurement rules, accusing public authorities of what it calls ‘an unacceptable waste of public money’.
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While the U.S. government has historically leaned towards the use open source software, lately there have been a few signs to remind us the government can still very much be a proprietary software consumer. Is the love affair with open source cooling in the halls of government?
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Smaller governments, typically those in rural towns, don’t have the IT capacity to foster serious innovation in citizen participation like governments in larger cities do. Two groups decided it was time to give back and have come together to share their technical knowledge and expertise: OpenColorado and Colorado Code for Communities will combine community, platform, and digital literacy to create a hosted service platform that includes open data with different web and mobile applications.
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FEMA could get crushed by sequester: If the sequester takes effect in January, the White House estimates that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would lose about $878 million, according to The Washington Post. Most of that budget goes to programs that provide disaster relief, such as the response happening now to the devastation of megastorm Sandy.
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Openness/Sharing
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One of the premises of this blog is that the success and methodology of open source are not one-offs, but part of a larger move towards open, collaborative activity. Thus, by observing what open source does well – and not so well – lessons can be learned that can be applied in quite different fields.
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Open Access/Content
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With the cost of college textbooks as high as they are, students are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. The edtech world is finally starting to take notice: companies and edtech leaders are working to create resources for open-source textbooks. Online Colleges has created an infographic on the numbers behind the shift toward open-source textbooks, and some of the statistics will surprise you.
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Open Hardware
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Computer scientists from the University of Bonn have developed a new robot whose source code and design plan is publicly accessible. It is intended to facilitate the entry into research on humanoids, in particular, the TeenSize Class of the RoboCup. The scientists recently introduced the new robot at the IROS Conference (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Portugal.
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Programming
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This month from CPUs based upon AMD’s new Piledriver micro-architecture I have delivered results of compiler tuning on AMD’s Open64 compiler as well as GCC bdver2 tuning. That initial testing from an AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core processor didn’t show any big boost out of the “bdver2″ target with the new BMI/TBM/F16C/FMA3 instruction set extensions. Testing in this article from the AMD FX-8350 are GCC compiler benchmarks of the 4.6.3, 4.7.2, and 4.8.0 development snapshots to look for performance improvements on this new high-end AMD processor when using the very latest GCC compiler code.
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It was early in the proceedings here on Monday night when I was struck with a horrible vision. It may have been right about that moment in the final presidential debate when Willard Romney — who, for most of the past two years, has been the most bellicose Mormon since they disbanded the Nauvoo Legion — looked deeply into the camera’s eye and, inches from actual sincerity, said, “We can’t kill our way out of this mess.” Or, perhaps, it was when, in a discussion of his newfound dedication to comprehensive solutions to complex problems, he announced his devotion to “a peaceful planet,” or when he cited a group of Arab scholars in support of loosening the grip of theocratic tyranny in the Middle East.
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Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took a dig at Microsoft’s soon-to-be released Surface tablet during Apple’s earnings call on Thursday, referring to it as a “fairly compromised, confusing product”.
“I haven’t personally played with a Surface yet,” Tim Cook said in response to a question about the Surface and the competitive landscape in the tablet market overall.
“What we’re reading about it is that it’s a fairly compromised, confusing product.”
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iFixit determines Microsoft’s tablet is pretty tough to repair, coming in only slightly easier than the iPad.
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52 percent of respondents had not heard of Windows 8 and that 61 percent had “little or no interest”
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In studies conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, a software consultancy, experienced Windows users had trouble finding applications on the Desktop interface.
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We’ve raised questions in the past about the relevance of “Klout” scores. If you don’t know, Klout is one of a few companies that try to measure “influence” online by looking at your social media activity. The whole process seems kind of silly, but for whatever reason, once you put a number on things, people take it seriously, no matter how bogus the number might be. Lots of companies now use Klout scores to determine who they should give special perks to, leading to plenty of people just trying to game their scores. However, should Klout scores count towards your grade as a student? Adam Singer sent over examples of two separate journalism professors who think so.
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New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten a lot of abuse for his campaign to ban the sale of sugary drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. There are lots of reasons for this, but among the economically literate his proposal is widely viewed as gratuitously inefficient. Simply taxing sugary sodas would be a lot more sensible, so why not do that instead?
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Science
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Well, that was a waste of $30-some dollars…
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Hardware
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is to release its first ARM-based chip in 2014.
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Health/Nutrition
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In tonight’s ‘Conversations with Great Minds,’ Thom talks with Frederick Kaufman, author and Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine. Tonight’s ‘Big Picture Rumble’ panel discusses Romney campaign Co-Chair John Sununu’s racist comments on Colin Powell, how simply living near foreclosed homes has cost families trillions and whether Hurricane Sandy will prevent the oligarchs from stealing the election.
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As the head of Greece’s largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Over the next couple of minutes the man is also pepper-sprayed and beaten with a truncheon by the female officer, all while posing no threat to the officers’ well-being whatsoever.
After a good two minutes of sadistic thrashing, the officers are joined by a squadron of their peers, and successfully put him in handcuffs and under arrest.
A source confirmed with CrownHeights.info that the man had full permission to be there, and had been living there for a month without any trouble. It is unknown who called the police or why.
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Has there ever been a more crazed, cruel, anti-people, corporate-indentured, militaristic and monetized Republican Party in its 154-year history? An about-to-be-released list of some of the actual brutish votes by the House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor, will soon be available to you from the House Democratic Caucus.
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Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
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Leaks
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Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov created one of the only websites in the world to successfully replicate WikiLeaks’ model of anonymously leaked bombshell documents. Now their project may face a similar fate to WikiLeaks’: Crippling attacks by the financial institutions of the country they’ve embarrassed.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Biggest increase in coal usage for 50 years could throw the UK’s green ambitions off course
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Two aging oil and natural gas pipelines running under the sparkling waters of the Straits of Mackinac in northern Michigan are time bombs that could devastate the upper Great Lakes if they rupture, according to a report issued today by the National Wildlife Federation.
The pipelines are owned by Enbridge Inc. and carry an estimated 20 million gallons of oil and natural gas every day under the pristine water from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario. The company announced in May that it plans to increase the volume of oil it pumps through the lines, a proposal the federation says could strain the 59-year-old pipes to the breaking point.
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No Dash For Gas protesters scale cooling towers in protest at UK government’s energy plans
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Finance
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Senator Bernie Sanders called out a group of the top US CEOs Thursday in a new report revealing top corporate tax dodgers in the US and urged those dodgers to ‘look in the mirror’ for the causes of America’s ballooning deficit. The report followed a joint statement issued Thursday morning by the top 80 US CEOs, pleading to Congress for a deficit reduction plan that would include cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and a decrease in taxes “for the top 2%.”
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After learning that the journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested this morning, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its appeal to the Greek authorities to respect all of his rights
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The former head of the FDIC warns that the financial system remains far from stable – and that regulations like the Volcker Rule may be too complex to be effective. These five steps, she suggests, could lead to more sensible reforms.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Earlier this year internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a major hub of climate change denial and right-wing extremism, were publicly leaked. The documents exposed the Heartland Institute’s funders and strategies for attacking climate science, and led to a mass exodus of Heartland’s corporate funders.
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One Wisconsin Now and theGrio have uncovered that the Milwaukee-based Einhorn Family Foundation is the “private family foundation” that funded controversial billboards in Milwaukee which warned: “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY! 3 1/2 years and a $10,000 fine.” The billboards were denounced as voter suppression by Mike Wilder, director of the African-American Round Table, and other community groups. The billboards were put up in largely African-American and Latino communities in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Columbus by media behemoth Clear Channel, but the client remained anonymous.
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When Phyllis Cleveland first saw the billboard on East 35th Street warning of prison time and a $10,000 fine for voter fraud, the city councilwoman concluded it had one purpose: to intimidate the constituents of her predominantly low-income ward in Cleveland, Ohio.
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Censorship
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Earlier this year, we wrote about how a minority owner of the Miami Heat, Ranaan Katz, was so upset about an “unflattering photo” that a blogger/critic had posted of him, that he apparently bought the copyright on the photo and sued the blogger, claiming copyright infringement.
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2012 has been yet another year filled with meritless lawsuits filed solely to chill First Amendment free speech rights — so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP). As websites relying on user-generated content continue to increase in popularity, we also see a rise in SLAPPs targeting online speech, from the everyday blogger to the one-time online reviewer. Some of the most talked about SLAPPs this year include:
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Tension rises between Greek government and media after TV presenters are suspended over criticism of public order minister
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Privacy
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The long-awaited inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics of the British press” being run by Lord Leveson is nearing completion, and rumblings of a proposal to regulate the press are beginning to surface.
Let us be clear – a free press is a fundamental part of a democratic society. From bloggers to broadsheets, the idea that the state should be able to decide who gets to publish is entirely at odds with the essential role the press plays in holding the state and authority to account.
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In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.
The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
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Civil Rights
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For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Reacting to the All Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group’s report, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:
“We welcome the group’s desire for evidence based policy but think this sits ill with its’ call to move the Intellectual Property Office to the Department of Culture Media and Sport, which has had a dire record of inventing policy initiatives without a shred of evidence.
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If you’ve been paying attention to the news about food lately, you’ve probably read about the now infamous “Seralini study,” in which University of Caen (France) molecular biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini demonstrated major health issues associated with eating Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) corn and the herbicide used in conjunction with it, RoundUp.
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Over the past year or so, there has been a slow and steady effort to generate support for a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. The Obama administration is now behind this, and there is no reason to think a President Romney would change gears. Thus, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election, this trade initiative is likely to go forward.
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Trademarks
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A couple years ago, we wrote about Hebrew University suing GM for using an image of Albert Einstein in an ad without first getting permission (i.e., paying up). Einstein left his assets to Hebrew University (of which he was a founder and a big supporter), and Hebrew University has taken that to an extreme, more or less arguing near complete ownership over Einstein’s likeness, and has been ridiculously aggressive in trying to enforce those rights — to the point of tricking print shops into printing Einstein images, only to threaten them with lawsuits. All this despite the concept of publicity rights barely even existing in Einstein’s time, and no indication that he cared one way or the other about such things.
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Copyrights
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As promptly reported yesterday by the IPKat, the Orphan Works Directive has just been published in Official Journal of the European Union, thus becoming Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works. This Kat agrees with Jeremy that there’s plenty of material for preliminary references to the Court of Justice of the European Union, as the various provisions in the Directive look, to say the least, open to various interpretations.
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But the more urgent motivator for lawmakers was the bruising battle early this year over SOPA—a bill aimed at reducing online copyright infringement that would have dramatically increased civil and criminal penalties associated with even minor violations of the law.
What looked like a slam dunk for the entertainment industry, which authored the bill, instead sparked a revolt among Internet users that culminated in a day of website blackouts. Millions of average citizens called and wrote to Congress to complain, bitterly, about lawmakers’ casual and admittedly inexpert tinkering with the one growing sector we have left.
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