• Distributions

Desktop

• Review: ZaReason Verix Laptop

  One of the challenges of being a Linux desktop user is the difficulty in finding systems that ship with Linux pre-installed. Major OEMs often offer a handful of Linux offerings, but to get a wider range of hardware and choices of Linux distributions you have to look to smaller vendors that are really interested in promoting Linux — like ZaReason.

  ZaReason sells a full line of Linux machines, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and servers. They also sell peripherals and some other gear, but what I was most interested in was a laptop with Linux. Specifically, a laptop with muscle. So I asked ZaReason to send me a review unit, the Verix 1656 with Intel’s Core i7 and maxed out RAM.

  [...]

  The Verix gets two thumbs up. It’s not perfect, but it’s a really good laptop and one I’d recommend to anyone who wants a solid and speedy Linux laptop. My main complaint with the Verix? It’s a review unit, which means I have to send it back. If you buy one, though, you won’t have that problem.

Kernel Space

• Next Generation of Btrfs Linux Filesystem Nears Prime Time

  Since at least 2008, the Btrfs Linux filesystem has been talked about as a next-generation technology one day potentially rivalling or supplanting the current dominant Linux filesystems.

  According to Chris Mason, founder of the Btrfs effort and now director of software development at Oracle, Btrfs is today generally stable and usable even though it’s yet to be finalized. And although he admits the filesystem still has some issues to overcome as development continues, Mason said he would like to see Btrfs ultimately replacing existing Linux filesystems like the popular Ext3 and Ext4 systems that are often the default on enterprise Linux distributions.

• No BTRFS In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat After all

  A while ago we were telling you there are 20% chances to get BTRFS support in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Well, it didn’t make it.

Applications

• Inkscape 0.48 review

• Review: Backupninja backups for Linux

  When you hear the word “backup,” what do you think? Critical? Complicated? Costly? When you think of backing up Linux desktops or servers what do you think? You don’t? You run screaming? Thankfully that is not necessary. There are tons of tools in the Linux-verse capable of running a multitude of backs. From the overly simple to the overly complex, in Linux you can find a tool for just about every situation and every experience level.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Kontact: How does it compare to the competition?

    With all of this talk about KDE 4.5 lately, I thought I should take a moment to mention a tool that hasn’t had much (or any) talk here on Ghacks. That tool is Kontact. But what is Kontact? Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that includes more tools than your standard suite, has a lot of pluses, and a few minuses. But even with its minuses, Kontact is a spot-on tool for anyone needing a solid groupware suite to keep them as organized as possible.

Distributions

• How to Choose a Desktop Linux Distribution

  With all the many reasons to use Linux today–particularly in a business setting–it’s often a relatively easy decision to give Windows the boot. What can be more difficult, however, is deciding which of the hundreds of Linux distributions out there is best for you and your business.

• Red Hat Family

  • Jefferies says Red Hat still well-positioned to capture share in Federal IT

    Jefferies & Co. maintained its ‘buy’ rating on business software company Red Hat Inc. with a price target of $35.

    “We believe Red Hat continues to be well-positioned to capture share in Federal IT, but the new 8 year, $2 billion social security administration (SSA) claims processing contract is likely to be spread across many vendors. If Red Hat does win a portion of it, they could be displacing International Business Machine Corp.,” said Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies.

• Debian Family

  • Debian at 17: As Important as Ever

    Debian kicked off when Linux distributions were still a relatively novel concept. The only older surviving distro is Slackware, Red Hat didn’t enter the picture until 1994. Depending on how you look at it, Debian either enjoys a very small niche user base, or one of the largest of any Linux distribution. Strictly speaking, Debian is widely (though it’s hard to say how widely) deployed on servers and not quite as popular on desktop systems compared to Fedora, Linux Mint, or Ubuntu.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • OpenOffice 3.2.1 Available In The Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Proposed Repository

      OpenOffice 3.2.1 (bug-fix release) was released almost 3 months ago but only now is available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx users, in the lucid-proposed official repository.

Open source media Centre Boxee adds Movie Library

Following its launch as public beta in January of this year, the Boxee developers have announced the release of a new beta – version 0.9.22.13692 – of their popular part-open-source cross-platform media centre with social networking and community features. According to Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen, the latest public beta adds “the foundations of a new Movie Library to complement the TV Show Library”.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Education for the open web fellowship: new deadline

    In May, Mozilla and the Shuttleworth Foundation announced a new Education for the Open Web Fellowship. The aim is to support practical ideas that help people learn about, improve and promote the open nature of the internet, as part of our commitment to supporting leaders working at the intersection of open education and the open web.

  • Firefox 3.6.9 release candidate rocks up for sturdy testers

    Mozilla pumped out a release candidate version of Firefox 3.6.9 yesterday.

    The pre-beta update is intended only for brave souls willing and able to have a poke around in the unfinished code.

Oracle

• The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the guily and the irresponsible.

  Once upon a time (1984), Sun created an RPC implementation for Unix, with the intent of implementing RFC 707 (High-level framework for network-based resource sharing). Now, in those days, a good way to ensure that people used code that you wrote was to upload it to usenet, and in 1985, Sun did that. (Google has one of the posts archived here: Sun RPC part 8 of 10)

• An update on JavaOne

  Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won’t be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we’ve participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.

Licensing

• Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements?

  A collaborative activity dubbed Project Harmony is now under way between corporate and corporate-sponsored participants in the free and open source software communities (not to be confused with the Apache Java project of the same name). The project seeks to harmonise the various participant and contributor agreements – collectively termed “contributor agreements” by some – used by many open source projects.

  The goal of the project’s initiators is to reduce the legal costs of analysing paperwork faced by companies contributing to open source projects. Initiated and sponsored by Canonical, meetings have already been held several times under the Chatham House Rule, including one recently during LinuxCon in Boston. The participants also number several people who are skeptical of the value of copyright aggregation, myself included. At the meeting I was asked to write about my skepticism; this article is the result. I’m by no means the first to tread this ground; you’ll also want to read the earlier article by Dave Neary, and the comprehensive article by Michael Meeks ends with a useful list of other articles.

“Legislative Guidance” on Fair Dealing: The Plan to Reverse CCH?

My post this week on several writers groups objections to Bill C-32 has generated considerable discussion, with some taking me to task for focusing on their letter’s warning of “unintended consequences,””years of costly litigation,” and “serious damage to the cultural sector.” Instead, they argue that I should have focused on the call for additional “legislative guidance” on the fair dealing reforms. After all, who could be against greater clarity in the law?

In the discussion that has followed, I believe that it has become increasingly clear that the “legislative guidance” is not really about the fair dealing reforms found in C-32, but rather fair dealing more generally. Unfortunately, the writers’ letter only speaks of their concerns and does not provide any specific policy or legislative reform recommendations that would clarify their intentions. However, with the government having opened up the fair dealing provision, those groups may see an opportunity to reverse the Supreme Court of Canada’s CCH decision that characterized fair dealing as a user right and established guidelines for its interpretation.

USA Today shaking up staff in ‘radical’ overhaul

USA Today, the nation’s second largest newspaper, is making the most dramatic overhaul of its staff in its 28-year history as it de-emphasizes its print edition and ramps up its effort to reach more readers and advertisers on mobile devices.

Security/Aggression

• Pentagon Official Reveals Computer Security Breach… As Part Of Effort To Get More Power Over Critical Infrastructure?

  We’ve already noted that various government officials have been engaging in a massive hype campaign about “cyberwar” threats, in an effort to get more control over certain networks. But there’s also a bit of an inter-departmental battle within government agencies over who should get to control these new powers

• Massive computer outage halts some Va. agencies

  A failure of servers at Virginia’s centralized information technology superagency has left several state agencies unable to do their work.

  At least two dozen agencies were affected by the Wednesday afternoon crash at the problem-plagued Virginia Information Technologies Agency.

• Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes

  Kyle Cassidy traveled 15,000 miles over two years photographing Americans in their homes and asking one question: “Why do you own a gun?” A good question, particularly since most of these guns are not easily reconcilable with the notion of self-defence and their true place should be somewhere in the Armed Forces.

• MalCon: A Call for ‘Ethical Malcoding’

  I was pretty bummed this year when I found out that a previous engagement would prevent me from traveling to Las Vegas for the annual back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon security conventions. But I must say I am downright cranky that I will be missing MalCon, a conference being held in Mumbai later this year that is centered around people in the “malcoder community.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• WikiLeaks under fire over child abuse files

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Why Does The NY Times Rely So Often On Single Anecdote Trend Pieces Not Supported By The Data?

  We saw it more recently in the NY Times piece we wrote about claiming that cable TV was winning against the internet by purposely keeping authorized content offline, based off of a single anecdote of a guy who ditched his cable subscription only to go back a year later… just a day or so before the stats came out showing that people are actually ditching their cable connections.

• NC State Senator Admits Broadband Companies Wrote His Bill & Says He ‘Carries Water’ For Companies

  What was most interesting about the situation in North Carolina, however, was how blatant state politicians were in highlighting that it was really the broadband companies who were calling the shots. In our story from April of 2009, it was noted that when the state representatives sponsoring the bill were asked questions about it during a committee hearing, they asked Time Warner employees to answer for them. Think about that for a second. The sponsors of the bill couldn’t answer the questions, so they asked industry folks to answer instead. We had thought that was about as blatant as a politician could be in admitting that the bill was actually written by the industry and that the politicians didn’t even understand what they were sponsoring.

• Salisbury to test fiber-optic cable system

  One local on-ramp to the Internet just got a lot bigger and lightning fast.

  The city of Salisbury begins beta testing of a brand new fiber-optic cable system next month.

  Salisbury and North Carolina’s Municipal League have overcome strong objections from a powerful state senator, Sen. David Hoyle of Gaston County, who supports the cable companies who say local government competition is unfair.

  After the implosion of the textile industry, Salisbury is trying to weave a new future with new fibers; fiber-optic cable.

• State Senator Admits Cable Industry Helped Write Pro-Industry Legislation

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ENDitorial: Leaked draft of the new Czech Copyright Act

    A leaked draft of the new Czech Copyright Act was obtained by Pirate News at the beginning of August 2010, after the Ministry of Culture has initially declined the request of Czech Pirate Party to have access to the document three days after the draft was sent out for feedback to organizations affected by the proposal. The draft presents a storm of “improvements” which grant millions of euro from public sector budgets to collecting societies.

    [...]

    That means that in order to achieve free distribution of copylefted work, the author has to notify the collecting society and he carries the burden of proof, that is, he has to prove that license has been provided, or if you like, the user of gratuitous license has to prove the collecting society has been notified, which is even harder. The amendment draft thus violates the declared support of public licenses.

  • Czech Gov’t Drafting Copyright Bill to Legally Gut Creative Commons, Chop Creators Royalties By Nearly Half

    If you ever thought that no one would ever actually legally attack Creative Commons and, if they did, you’d hear about it, consider this the article you “hear about it”. A draft copyright bill from the Czech Republic has leaked online and it may be one of the most disturbing copyright bills ever created.

  • Pirate Bay Receives Notice To Keep a Torrent

    The founder of the small software company Coding Robots was shocked when he found out that one of his works had been cracked and shared on The Pirate Bay. However, instead of asking The Pirate Bay to remove the torrent the company’s founder did quite the opposite. He sent a ‘Notice of Ridiculous Activity’ because the crack didn’t live up to his expectations.

  • Music Royalties Strangle Playlist.com

    Now called simply Playlist, the site allows users to create and share playlists using either song files that are hosted by the company itself or on third-party servers. When it plays the files that live on playlist.com, the service racks up millions of dollars in royalty costs. When the files play from external servers, the site functions, in a sense, as a playable search engine.

    As the screenshot from its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing shows (right), Project Playlist now owes millions of dollars in royalty costs to each of the major labels for playback of the music it hosted, having finally reached licensing agreements with all four major labels by May of this year. Those hard-won licensing agreements may well spell doom for Playlist.com, as they have for so many other start-ups.

  • DCC, Bittorrent and Usenet – Is Bittorrent so great?

    Before the days of the Internet when computers with 48k were deemed sufficient, I was one of a few who were accessing Micronet. Little did I know at the time (when I was downloading lawfully free software onto tape) was that I was taking the first steps into what would be a global phenomena and eventually something which would become so large, even the best of ISP’s could buckle under the demand to feed their end users hunger for data.

  • Open Bytes article – ‘DCC, Bittorrent and Usenet – Is Bittorrent so great?’ – is Tim wrong?

    It is unlikely that online copyright infringement would ever stop, no matter what was done, however it’s like smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes was once socially acceptable. It no longer is socially acceptable. Or drunk driving – at one time everyone did it, now it’s so socially unacceptable that very few do so anymore.

    The curious thing is that all of the laws which have been enacted, appear to have had virtually no effect on online copyright infringement. What has had a huge effect was legal options. People love to show their appreciation for value, especially when they can show that appreciation directly to the artist, or software developer.

  • Don Henley Still Really Confused: Actually Claims Copyright Office Is Not An Advocate For Copyright Holders

    This is incredibly laughable if you know anything about the Copyright Office, which has been the leader in pushing for ever more draconian copyright law and has a history of almost always siding with content creators over the public. The 1976 Copyright Act, which completely flipped copyright on its head in this country came out of the Copyright Office, and some of the same folks are still there (including the boss, Marybeth Peters) — and haven’t changed their opinion much. Peters, in particular, has always been a staunch supporter of copyright holders over the public.

  • Disney, WB Claim Ad Firm Working With Pirate Sites Is Guilty Of Contributory Infringement

    So, the websites themselves are already pretty far removed from the actual infringement. The files are hosted on other sites. They’re shared by other people. These sites just allow users to post links. And… then on top of that the studios aren’t even suing these sites, which are a few steps away from the actual infringement: they’re suing this ad firm, which is another degree of separation away. Wow.

  • ACTA

    • Dutch Green Left party has concerns about the ACTA Treaty

      Dutch political party Green Left (Groen Links) is completely fed up with the ACTA Treaty’s haziness, reports Webwereld. One of Webwereld’s readers tipped off Mariko Peters (GL) about ACTA’s continuing secret negotiations as well as contradictions in communications about possible changes in Dutch law as a result of the Treaty. Maria van der Hoeven, Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs replied.

    • ACTA: An international threat to freedom and liberty

      ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is currently being negotiated, largely in secret, between the United States, the EU and 9 other countries.2 This draft agreement seeks to regulate a wide range of copyright, patents and trademark issues, including, most controversially, providing for additional regulation of the Internet. There have been a number of leaks (here, here, here and here) and the European Commission published an official draft text on 22 April.

      ACTA is a covert attempt, at the global level, to further reduce the public interest element in copyright, patents and trademarks, in the balance between the rights of creators, users, and the public at large, without proper debate and scrutiny in each nation state. The current form of ACTA is a threat to future innovation and freedom of citizens. ACTA is primarily driven by the US and the EU. Developing countries such as India and Brazil have been shut out of the process from the start.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Indian admins love Linux, stuck on Windows

Microsoft took a bit of a bashing from panellists at the Indian Roundtable, attracting complaints for its complex and inflexible licensing policies.

Back to School With Ubuntu?

Earlier today, ZaReason sent me a group email offering back-to-school specials on Ubuntu-based computers. I receive similar special offers from System 76 from time to time. Going forward, I hope Canonical finds a way to turn up the volume on these third-party Ubuntu system promotions. Here’s why.

[...]

Companies like ZaReason and System76 deserve applause from Ubuntu community members. In ZaReason’s case, the company is offering a “back-to-school special” where, for one week, customers can receive a 5 percent education discount when they use LEARN42 as a discount code. The sale runs until midnight on Sept 1, 2010.

Server

• The Top 10 Linux Server Distributions

  You know that Linux is a hot data center server. You know that it saves you money in licensing and maintenance costs. But, what are your options for Linux as a server operating system? Listed here are the top ten Linux server distributions — some of which you may not be aware. The following chararistics, in no particular order, qualified a distribution for inclusion in this list: Ease-of-use, available commercial support and data center reliability.

Applications

• WeatherPaper puts the weather outside on your desktop inside

  GNOME users have long been left out in the cold when searching for a good looking & easily-themeable ‘Weather Wallpaper’ application. Over a year ago I ran down the Gnome-friendly alternatives to KDE’s slick weather wallpaper plug-in and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, very slim pickings. A year on, is the forecast looking brighter? (Last weather-related pun, honest!)

• Painless Panorama Stitching in Linux with Hugin

  A previous article described how to make small panoramas with fotoxx. But when you get serious about panoramas on Linux, there’s really only one answer: Hugin.

  Named after a raven of Norse legend who brought information to the god Odin, Hugin and the Panorama Tools libraries have been around for years. But until recently they’ve been quite difficult to use. That’s no longer true: today, with just a few clicks, anyone can create a spectacular panorama in Hugin.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 3 Types Of Backup You Need For Complete Data Protection

  • Securely delete files with secure-delete

  • Linux cpio Examples: How to Create and Extract cpio Archives (and tar archives)

  • Six things I wish Mom told me (about ssh)

  • Migrating mail from KMail to Evolution

  • Perl Debugger Tip: A Session Startup File

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 3.8 has landed with a lot of new features

  • Using PlayOnLinux to run applications already installed by vanilla WINE.

    RTS is an acronym for real-time strategy. It’s a game genre. There’s a classic RTS game known as StarCraft. Although only a casual gamer (say, might I recommend Machinarium?) I have played (and somewhat enjoyed) a few more “hardcore” games – like for instance, StarCraft. Although being pretty pathetic at it, I did enjoy it and appreciated the balanced strategy between the various “races” you could control in the game. With StarCraft II already out (hell, it’s about time!) I decided to revisit the original StarCraft: Brood War game to refresh my memory.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Demystifying Akonadi

    For reasons I don’t fully understand, KDE faces a PR problem. When compared to a project like Ubuntu, where the slightest change is fawned over by a hundred blogs, KDE seems to have a very hard time getting the word out.

  • KDE e.V. Publishes Quarterly Report for Q2 2010

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • Google Talk Plugin

    Google Blog announced the make a phone call from gmail yesterday. It’s google so it has to be good right? Getting it working can be the fun part tho. There appears to be two ebuilds out there that one can try. Gentoo Bugzilla 333769 has a 9999 version and cj-overlay has 1.4.1.0 version to try. If we follow Sabayon wiki article for 3rd Party ebuilds we can get it installed in no time.

  • Systemd in Gentoo

    A lot of folks are raving about the next generation in init systems (aka systemd), and how it’s (almost certainly) going to be the default init system for Fedora 14 (paid article, subscribe to LWN to read! [or wait a week]). It also seems that OpenSuse will be moving to systemd sometime in the near future (don’t take my word for this though), and Debian has at least considered it. It is also well-known that Ubuntu will not be using systemd for the foreseeable future.

• Red Hat Family

  • Interesting Options Volume for Red Hat

  • Fedora

    • Features/MeeGo 1.0

    • In Bucharest: digital billboards advertising using Fedora Linux!

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project News – August 26th, 2010

    Different aspects of the port of the Debian operating system to the FreeBSD kernel have made great progress recently. The Debian installer has been upgraded to the FreeBSD kernel version 8.1, which also allows the installation system to be used in languages other than English. Also the debian-cd scripts used to create CD and DVD images now support the creation of the new architectures. Daily build images for Debian unstable are already available; daily and weekly builds for “Squeeze” will be made available with the next beta release of the Debian installer. However, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD related web pages are outdated, and help is needed to fix the web and wiki pages.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Second update to the Ubuntu Light themes

      It has been a great couple of weeks for me, where I continued working jointly with our visionary design lead Otto Greenslade, who I would like to thank for everything: working with him is really an exciting and valuable experience… he is fun, and the more I work with him, the more comfortable I feel and that means improving our productivity day-by-day.

    • Preparing for Ubuntu 10.10 with the Platform Rally

      With every release, Canonical sets a certain amount of specifications it wants to deliver itself for the next Ubuntu release. These tasks are mainly created at UDS, within the public view. These blueprints are those that Canonical engineers are tasked to work on, and are generally maintained on Launchpad and the Ubuntu wiki. While Ubuntu and Canonical are well versed in the style of distributed development, it seems that occasional real-life collaboration helps to stimulate the development cycle: by collecting the right people, together focusing on the specifications they are tasked with.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • HTC EVO 4G Froyo Update Rooted!

      Owners of the Sprint-exclusive HTC EVO 4G have been pining for a root for the Android 2.2 Froyo update to the phone’s software since its release at the start of the month, and this week XDA developer and resident rooting guru regaw_leinad has posted the first guide to doing so.

Events

• European embedded Linux conference colocates with GStreamer event

  The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced the program for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), scheduled for Oct. 26-28 in Cambridge, U.K. ELCE 2010 features keynotes by MIPS/Linux maintainer Ralf Baechle and Texas Instruments OMAP director Ari Rauch, sessions on mobile Linux, Android, and MeeGo, plus a co-located GStreamer conference.

  The Embedded Linux Conference Europe program runs from Oct 27-28. In addition, two half-day, hands-on tutorial sessions are available on Tuesday, Oct. 26. Taught by Linux trainer and consultant Chris Simmonds, the sessions cover basic embedded Linux bring-up and an introduction to Android development, respectively.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 Beta 4 opens a new Panorama

    For a long time, most new browser releases have seemed to primarily offer “me-too” features to match the competition, together with interface tweaks and theoretical speed improvements measured in milliseconds. But Mozilla’s recently released Beta 4 of Firefox 4 rolls out two of the best new browser features to come along in quite some time. The excellent tab-handling capabilities of Panorama and the multicomputer synchronization prowess of Sync mean that Firefox offers some of the best browsing and productivity tools now built into any browser.

CMS

• Open Source Company Explores CwF+RtB In Getting Sponsorship For Whitepaper

  Of course, some will note that finding a “sponsor” for a whitepaper is hardly a new idea — and that’s absolutely true. Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy doesn’t necessarily mean doing something “new” or totally out of the ordinary. It’s about looking at what’s available, and how it can be used more efficiently.

• Diaspora arriving September 15

  Now September has come, and they’ve broken their long silence. Diaspora will launch on September 15.

• Diaspora Three Weeks Away From Unveiling Open-Source Facebook Alternative

  Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s just three weeks away.

Project Releases

• IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 is now available

Licensing

• GNU/Linux – finally it’s Free software

  One of the long-running projects I had at Sun was to get the (pre-GPL, permissive) license on Sun RPC changed. Why would that interest anyone? Well, the code in question is the original implementation of Sun RPC, which went on to become RFC 1057 and today is a core part of every UNIX-family operating system. Including Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora, both keen to be 100% Free-licensed software.

Openness/Sharing

• Open textbooks to the rescue

  Mark Horner is a Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The model of the Foundation is unusual: we identify interesting change agents, like Mark, who are articulating powerful ideas that seem like the offer a hint of the future, and we fund them to work on those for a year. We also offer them an investment multiplier: if they put their personal money into a project, we multiply that by 10x or more, up to a maximum amount. In short, find good people, back them when they put skin in the game.

Haitian music star Wyclef Jean’s presidential candidacy a distraction

The on-again-off-again presidential candidacy of music star Wyclef Jean is a distraction for Haiti.

On Friday, Aug. 20, the Haiti Electoral Council ruled that 15 out of the 34 candidates had not met the legal requirements to run for president of Haiti. Jean was one of the rejected candidates and he’s chosen to appeal the decision.

Vedanta mine plan halted by Indian government

Campaigners, who have been backed in their fight against the mining giant’s plans by Joanna Lumley and Michael Palin, described the move as a “stunning victory”. Monty Python star turned professional traveller Palin expressed “absolute delight” in the news adding: “I hope it will send a signal to the big corporations that they can never assume that might is right. It’s a big victory for the little people.”

The project had been thrown into doubt last week when a government inquiry said that mining would destroy the way of life of the area’s “endangered” and “primitive” people, the Kutia and Dongria Kondh tribes. The four-person committee also accused a local subsidiary of Vedanta of violating forest conservation and environment protection regulations.

Science

• Stem cells, politics and the law

Security/Aggression

• The boring truth about those Julian Assange smears

  But the speed with which the conspiracy theories spread throughout the moronosphere was enough for The New York Times London correspondent, the terrific John Burns, to produce an article headlined, “Plotting doubted in Wikileaks case”. That would be the Pentagon/CIA plotting to destroy Assange, obviously. Assuming that Assange knew the identity of his accusers when contacted by prosecutors, he nevertheless told any reporter within earshot that “we have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us. And I have also been warned about sex traps.” After expressing scepticism that it was an American intelligence job, Harpers magazine nevertheless warned that “as this incident makes clear, the war on WikiLeaks will be fought with unconventional tools and those following the story are advised to accept nothing at face value.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• French activists uproot GM vines at research centre

  For the second time in less than a year, genetically modified vines being tested by the French National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) in its Colmar centre in eastern France have been uprooted and destroyed. Now that France no longer grows or tests GM corn, which used to be a regular summer target of the Faucheurs Volontaires (voluntary reapers) movement, attention has turned to the vines.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Blasphemous posters hit New Zealand

  I realize that this is a highly controversial campaign and I want to make sure it is clear to everybody that the fact that we publish any campaign it doesn’t mean we support it too. We’re just publishing it for the world to see and comment on. Apologies to anyone offended.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Guess Who Is Trying To Trademark The Word “Face”? (And Guess Who Is Trying To Stop It?)

  When it comes to trademarks, Facebook is proving to be a bully. It is going after Teachbook in court for using a similar name, and already forced Placebook to change its name. But that is only half the story.

  It is not just the word “book” at the end of a company or product name that Facebook might object to. If it has its way, the word “Face” at the beginning of a name might also bring out its lawyers. In fact, Facebook is currently trying to register the word “Face” as a trademark. (It already owns the trademark on “Facebook”). Facebook took over the trademark application for “Face” from a company in the UK called CIS Internet Limited, which operated a site called Faceparty.com. Presumably, Facebook bought the application sometime around November, 2008, which is when its lawyer started dealing with the USPTO.

• Copyrights

  • Is the DMCA Still Controversial?

    The courts’ newfound sensitivity to the risk of DMCA overreach, and the Library of Congress’s efforts to keep the statute confined to the purposes that actually prompted its enactment, have me wondering whether the DMCA controversy is now behind us; whether the worst of the statute’s sharp edges haven’t now been effectively worn away.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The People Who Support Linux: It’s a Family Affair

Alex is an individual member of The Linux Foundation and has been using Linux for five years. She started using it when she moved in with her partner, who is a programmer and built her computer using Ubuntu. Since then, Alex, her 7-year old son, her parents, and even the neighbor have all become regular Linux and open source software users.

“I am not a computer programmer or very skilled when it comes to figuring out what to do to make things work. So I need something that is easy and intuitive. I can load new applications, software and peripherals without having to look up manuals or finding that drive disc that always goes missing when you need it.”

Is your company afraid of Linux? (2 of 3)

How about salary comparison? Comparing salaries in this economy is like throwing darts in the dark. I’ve seen Windows and Linux employee’s being hired at ridiculously below average salaries but generally speaking the salaries are all over the place. Various studies and statistics show that Unix Server Administrators are the highest paid, then Linux and then Windows. The margin between Linux and Windows salaries is small and is shrinking due to higher numbers of Server Admins with Linux experience. Supply and Demand. This is good news as a business owner or IT manager.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Apple Mac OS X OpenCL Performance vs. Linux

    The results were mixed showing Apple still has room to optimize their OpenGL stack compared to NVIDIA’s Linux implementation and in not all areas did this package update result in performance enhancements

Applications

• Avant Window Navigator Update (PPA) Finally Brings Multiple Docks And Helpers

  An update today brings helpers and multiple docks to Avant Window Navigator from the AWN trunk PPA. “Multiple docks” means you’ll be able to run multiple instances of Avant Window Navigator, each with its own configuration.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Bcache Testing: Throughput

  • Stupid tar Tricks

  • Avoiding memory leaks in POSIX thread programming

  • Database Considerations for PHP 5 CMS

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Demystifying Akonadi

    Many people have been asking what the status of the new, Akonadi-based Kontact Groupware suite is. As I’ve been working closely with the PIM hackers, I thought I’d give my readers a heads-up on what’s going on and what to expect. In this article, I will often take KMail as an example for the port, but similar things apply to the other PIM applications that form the Kontact suite as well.

Distributions

• Reaching way back: Bonzai Linux

  Here and there, where I can, I have come across some workable distros that will run on a 150Mhz Pentium with only 32Mb of memory. It’s a rarity though, and even more unusual to find one that will boot and install, in that small a space.

  In fact, more than ever it seems the issue I have to confront is not a lack of processor speed or even hard drive speed, but simply memory overhead. That’s my limiting factor.

• Reviews

  • Review of Qimo: Linux for Kids

    We’ve talked about Linux software for kids a few times here at MakeTechEasier, but so far we’ve never actually sat down to take a closer look at whole distributions intended for children. Many people are familiar with Edubuntu, the Ubuntu spinoff intended for school and other educational institutions, but you may not know much about Qimo. Unlike Edubuntu, which is designed for a client-server network model, Qimo is intended for a sole desktop user – in this case children 3 years old and up. It uses a customized version of the XFCE desktop, with large icons and simple menus, to make it easy to navigate. Included are many of the top titles in kids software for Linux, such as GCompris and TuxPaint. Today we’ll take a look at what Qimo has to offer, and submit it to the ultimate test: a real live toddler.

  • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 8 – Puppy 5.10 (WOW)

    Hi, Quintin here. For the most part I am flying solo today. I came back late from the Lets Talk Geek podcast last night where I elbowed myself into being their guest for the week and I did not have the chance to get Elzje’s insight into our featured distro for the day.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat has the Best Relative Performance in the Technology Sector (RHT, CTRP, VECO, FNSR, TDC)

  • Brush, Celgene, JDS, Red Hat, Wal-Mart: U.S. Equity Movers

  • Red Hat @ Year Highs

    Red Hat is currently trading 3.64% versus its previous trading session close, and it has calculated support and resistance at $30.29 and $33.50 respectively. Clearly with this action this range has been penetrated, and traders will be reviewing price action to establish a new tradable range

    The overall market index S&P 500 is trading lower by -0.03% from its previous trading close, which means that Red Hat stock is outperforming the overall market.

  • RHT Hits 52-Week High

  • Notable 52-Week High’s and Low’s of the Day 08/26: RHT, MIPS, SLW HIgh; TRMA, RUE, SCON Low

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) high of $34.75. Could be seeing some upside to M&A in the cloud computing market today. Shares are up 3.9% as Dell makes a stronger bid for 3PAR (NYSE: PAR) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) buys up privately-held Stratavia.

  • Red Hat Deltacloud Aspires to Become an Industry Standard

    Yesterday Red Hat hosted a virtual press conference titled “The Evolution of Cloud Foundations.” The press conference served to outline Red Hat’s plans for the future of their cloud services and JBoss, but the big announcement was that the company would be open sourcing all of its cloud APIs.

    During his portion of the presentation, Red Hat cloud product manager Bryan Che explained that third-party governance was necessary to achieve true interoperability and portability.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Linux on the Cloud: The Ubuntu Way

      Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has always had many enthusiastic user and developer fans. It’s a different story within the enterprise. Canonical has been trying to improve its business reputation though in both the server and cloud spaces. In particular, according to Neil Levine, Canonical’s VP of Commercial Services, Canonical has been working hard to bring Ubuntu’s well-known ease of use on the desktop to cloud deployments.

    • What Will Ubuntu 10.10 Look Like?

      Ubuntu 10.10 is currently in its third alpha release, with the final version expected on October 10. Current home and business users of older versions of Ubuntu will have to decide if the benefits make it worth upgrading the free software.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • N900 OtterBox – Hands on Review

  • Android

    • Droid Incredible Now Expected to See Froyo Update Tomorrow

      Think of this post as a Monopoly-style “Bank error in your favor”. The Droid Incredible is now expected to see Android 2.2 updates as early as tomorrow, August 27th. This is a few days earlier than what we had last heard and only a couple of weeks beyond the initial rumored time frame. If you have one of these HTC beauties, you’ll soon be experiencing Flash 10.1, automatic app updates, 3G mobile hotspots, and much more! In the meanwhile, you brave rooting souls can grab it yourself.

58 Open Source Replacements for Small Business Software

Many small business owners have never heard of open source software. That’s unfortunate because in many ways small businesses are ideal environments for open source applications.

In a small business, every dollar matters. Open source offers opportunities for companies to cut their software costs. Even if you need paid support, you’ll probably pay less for an open source solution than for a comparable closed source solution.

Events

• Resources for learning about open innovation

  Last April, many of the big names in open innovation gathered at the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) “Open for Business” conference in London. Didn’t make the cut? Catch some videos of the event, plus a very informative whitepaper to share with the higher-ups.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • New Firefox Mobile versions

    AMO has been updated with 2.0a1 and 2.0b1pre versions for Firefox Mobile. Alpha 1 will be released in the next day or so, so please test your extension if you already are compatible with 2.0a1pre, it is very likely that your extension will still work.

  • Panorama in Firefox 4, your new eye-candy tab canvas

    Mozilla posted the fourth beta of its Firefox 4 browser on Tuesday. The release comes with a brand new interface that takes tab management to the next level. Aptly named Panorama and invoked by clicking a new tile button on the rightmost end of the tab toolbar, it looks like a visual overview of your open tabs but it’s really a highly customizable canvas designed to reclaim your browsing experience.

  • Hands-on: Firefox 4 beta 4 brings Tab Candy and Sync

Brazil

• Brazil is open to open source

  I’ve been traveling quite a bit recently to meet with Lucid’s customers and partners around the globe. Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking at an event organized for business executives by our partner in Brazil, Primeware. The topic – no surprise – was open source enterprise search software. What I saw and heard seems to indicate the country’s broader sentiment about open source and growth.

  Lately, Brazil has been getting a lot of attention. In 2014, it will host the next World Cup. In 2016, it will be the site of the first Olympics to be held in South America. And next week, LinuxCon will launch in Brazil. It’s the world’s eighth largest economy, and people are sitting up and taking notice.

• LPI Hosts September Exam Labs at LinuxCon Brazil and Ohio LinuxFest 2010

  The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) at LinuxCon Brazil (São Paulo, Brazil, September 1, 2010) and Ohio Linux Fest (Columbus, Ohio, USA, September 12, 2010). This is LPI’s second event as the exclusive Free and Open Source Software certification provider at LinuxCon and their fifth year as certification sponsor of the Ohio LinuxFest.

• Running On Empty

  My adventures in the translation (or localization) world started some time in the middle of 2005. I had just started using Ubuntu as my main distribution and being carried away by the buzz and excitement surrounding this new comer, I started looking for ways to “give back”. Not that I hadn’t tried it before, but to tell you the truth, Ubuntu had back then the only friendly and welcoming community out there that wouldn’t treat you with scorn and arrogance if you were a new user.

Oracle

• A very grumpy editor’s thoughts on Oracle

Healthcare

• VA Hospitals Embracing Open Source Medical Records System

  Beth Lynn Eicher, co-chair of Ohio LinuxFest, writes about her mother, Susan Rose, and how VA hospitals are using the VistA open source medical records system. Beth Lynn writes, “Mom did not understand what I was up to with open source. I did not understand what she was up to with open source.”

Licensing

• Dell checks for open-source licensing misstep

  Dell responded to the criticism via a post on Twitter Wednesday, saying, “We’re reviewing concerns re: the #dellstreak source code. We intend to comply with all applicable requirements. More details soon.”

• Dell promises to open-source Streak code

  The version of Android 1.6 used by Dell is based on a Linux kernel and by definition fits under the GNU Public License (GPL), which requires that it open-source any new code. Without Dell’s custom portions of software, programmers haven’t had access to the drivers and other code that talks to the Streak’s exact hardware. Using the GPL doesn’t carry a deadline for when code must be published, but it’s usually assumed code will be available almost immediately or shortly before any hardware or software ships.

Openness/Sharing

• Give me some of that old-time, open source religion

  The Church of Scientology, in particular, seems to suffer from its proprietary way of thinking–at the hands of a rather forced kind of open sourcing. Vast quantities of online effort go into actively refuting or even denouncing Scientolgist beliefs and practices–up to and including publishing what are claimed to be the secret, closely-protected religious documents of the group’s inner orders. Anti-Scientologist website Operation Clambake presents an equal yet opposite view of a religious organization that is very technology-savvy and new-media friendly. Though the Church of Scientology has a massive website, replete with cutting-edge videos and presentations, their foundation–their doctrine–is clearly very proprietary. Beginners buy-in in book form or in person. The information they offer publicly and freely is quite limited. This un-free knowledge is the very thing that a group like Clambake takes advantage of.

• Open Data

  • New Public Spaces 2: Practical Design Guidelines

    I’m still focused on virtual spaces where there’s a requirement to be official or government run. We know, exemplified beautifully through open data initiatives, the notion that government has to be the central point for everything has changed and will continue to transform. Using and facilitating community or nongovernmental channels is another matter.

Legal Threat Demands We Shut Down Techdirt

Here at Techdirt, unfortunately, we get an average of about one legal threat per month. The threats are almost always frivolous — and often made in anger without the individual realizing why the threats are frivolous. While some sites take the position that they will publish any and all legal threats, we have always tried to give the threatening party the benefit of the doubt, and to recognize that they made their demands in a moment of excess anger and misunderstanding. As such, we generally explain our position as to why any legal action would be a mistake — and in nearly every case, we never hear back from the person who threatened us.

Gmail Calling: Google’s Bid to Rule Your Communications

This is all part of Google’s strategy to be a VoIP powerhouse for consumers and businesses, as I wrote last November.

ARM virtualization tech adds more fuel to server fire

In a presentation at Stanford’s Hot Chips conference on Tuesday, ARM added a few more drops to the trickle of information that’s coming out which suggests that the UK-based mobile and embedded processor designer is very seriously pursuing the server market. Specifically, ARM’s David Brash described a new set of virtualization extensions for the ARM-v7-A architecture, which will be included in the follow-on to Cortex A9. Brash also described an OS-managed address extension that will alleviate some of the I/O and memory pressure that goes with ARM’s 4GB memory limit.

My Favorite 10 xkcd Comics Part-2

As I have said before, I started searching for top 10 xkcd comics initially but ended up with nearly 20 of them. So here is the part-2 of my favorite 10 xkcd comics. Between, don’t miss top 10 xkcd comics part-1.

Science

• Canon Introduces 120MP Camera Sensor

  One could say that the megapixel race as we know it is over, or it’s at least less of an ordeal now than it used to be. Camera makers cranked up the megapixels as fast as they could for years, but now we’ve reached somewhat of a peak, or a plateau, maybe. But there’s no question that camera makers will continue to push the megapixel envelope, and there are obvious advantages to doing so. Some medium format cameras today have sensors with over 40 megapixels, but that’s beginning to sound a little small.

• The longer you sit, the earlier you die

  Researchers say that’s even for people who exercise regularly after long sit-a-thons at the office and aren’t obese.

Security/Aggression

• Military Computer Attack Confirmed

  A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever,” a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Morgan Freeman, Ted Danson support post-oil spill Gulf impact expedition

  Over the next 2 months, scientists from Oceana, an international organization focused on ocean conservation, will conduct a research expedition across the Gulf of Mexico to assess the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on underwater ecosystems, administrators said today.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Why Are Gay Porn Producers So Quick To Get Involved In Shakedown Copyright Pre-Settlement Schemes?

    In July, we noted that one such gay porn producer had filed a bunch of lawsuits for sharing films via BitTorrent, and now THREsq is reporting that litigious porn producer Io Group is also suing a bunch of John Does for the same thing. If Io sounds familiar, that’s because they were also one of the first to sue a video site for infringement, in this case Veoh, in a lawsuit that Io lost.

  • Another Reason To Buy: A Unique CD For Fans That No One Else Will Get

    The latest such example is from musician Brian Hazard, who recently recorded his 8th full-length album. He claims this is his last physical release (in the future, it’ll all be digital), he decided to still press the CD after he won a songwriting contest for free CD manufacturing. With that process underway, he decided to “improvise” a bit on the business model side, and see if any of his fans would be interested in an Individual Edition CD. This isn’t a “special edition,” but a totally uniquely individual edition, that no one else would get:

    As a souvenir of your support, I will create a personalized custom CD featuring unique mixdowns of each of the 12 songs I recorded for the album. The outtakes “Touch” and “Release the Hounds” are not on the standard Limited Edition CD and will not appear on any future physical release. The disc will open with a token of my appreciation — a spoken “thank you” mentioning you by name.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Ubuntu 10.04 (Initiator And Target)

  • Upgrading OpenCart

  • Making Ubuntu look like Windows 7

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • digiKam 1.4.0 released…

    Dear all digiKam fans and users!

    digiKam team is proud to announce digiKam 1.4.0 release!

Distributions

• Indamixx Portable Studio Refreshes It’s Line of Mobile Music Making Netbooks. Portable Linux Daw, Releases It’s Fastest Netbook to Date.

  Trinity Audio Group Inc.’s Indamixx featuring Transmission 4.0, a custom audio OS aimed at the professional recording and DJ market ships pre-installed on faster Intel Atom based Netbook. Linux based product now available at Retailers such as Musician’s Friend and Guitar Center.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s extended support option offers breathing room

    Red Hat is taking good care of its customers — and that’s one of the intended benefit of open source software.

    The Linux giant recently announced that it would offer an optional subscription to extend the life cycle support to 10 years for its enterprise Linux.

  • N.C. Technology to honor Szulik

    Szulik, who stepped down as chairman of Raleigh-based Red Hat this month, was the company’s CEO for nearly a decade and transformed it into one of the Triangle’s largest and most successful technology companies.

  • Vyatta 6.1 Is Certified for IPv6

    Vyatta has released a new version of its software-based router/firewall solution. Vyatta 6.1 is the first update to the 6.x line, but is a solid release by itself. The update brings IPv6 certification and new tools for those using cloud solutions.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 14 Alpha Has Linux Kernel 2.6.35 and KDE SC 4.5

      Highlights of Fedora 14 Alpha:

      · Linux kernel 2.6.35;
      · KDE SC 4.5;
      · GNOME 2.31.2 desktop environment;
      · Session and system management;
      · Desktop virtualization;
      · Faster JPEG compression and decompression;
      · Updated and new programming languages;
      · Better utilities for developers;
      · Sugar 0.90 desktop environment;
      · Better netbook experience with MeeGo;
      · Fedora EC2 images;
      · IPMI server management made simple;
      · SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) support;
      · Perl 6 support with Rakudo;
      · Powerful data analysis tools.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 9 Xfce Final Released

        The Linux Mint team has gotten another flavor of its latest release out the door. Linux Mint 9 Xfce is now deemed ready for a wider audience and has shed the ‘release candidate’ label.

Devices/Embedded

• Iomega says its removable drives will be USB 3.0

  NAS units have grown in popularity as users’ want to stream data to multiple devices. Some units allow users to ditch the standard operating system, usually a customised version of Linux, and install their own fully fledged Linux distribution, meaning a pint sized, energy efficient server is easily had.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Critics’ Choice: Smartphone Review Roundup of Droid 2

      OK, so that was a wee bit sarcastic. Fact is, this has been the year of Android phones, starting with Google’s Nexus One. The tide has crested in recent months, with the HTC Incredible, HTC Evo 4G, Motorola Droid X, and now, Motorola’s Droid 2 ($200 on Verizon after a $100 mail-in rebate and new two year-contract). It all adds up to a horn of plenty for Android smartphone fans, making it difficult to choose between models, especially since many are offered on Verizon.

    • Huawei to Launch Android 2.2 Smartphone at IFA

      Huawei Technologies plans to launch the U8150, which is based on Android version 2.2, at the Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) consumer electronics show, the company said via e-mail.

    • How to root the Droid 2

    • Rumor: DROID Incredible Froyo Update Coming September 1st?(Updated)

    • Verizon pushes out first Droid 2 update, doesn’t cure signal woes

    • Exclusive: Motorola MB520 Kobe / Diablo for AT&T in the wild

      As we’d heard before it’s definitely destined for AT&T bearing Android 2.1 with Blur (complete with Blur logo on back), though our tipster tells us we can expect an update to 2.2 over the air.

    • Top 10 Android Business Apps

      While I’m always a skeptic when it comes to analyst prognostications (you don’t sell reports if you don’t predict multi-million dollar markets), this forecast is well on its way to being spot-on. In a recent interview for the Guardian in the UK, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said 160,000 Android phones are being activated each day, up from 100,000/day in May and only 60,000/day back in February. That’s an impressive growth curve, although actual devices shipped are still well behind the iPhone. To apply a betting metaphor, I’ll take the under on Android catching iPhone in 2012.

      As Android grows, so does the importance of the Android Marketplace. Apps are what smartphones are all about, and while Android still trails there too, it’s catching up even quicker than with the platform. Finding good apps, though, is still a bit hit and miss — frustratingly so for a company that built its reputation on search. With scores of new apps flooding the Marketplace each day, I expect to be writing app roundups like this for quite a while.

    • Will AT&T ever sell an open high end Android device?

      Other Android devices you can find on AT&T include the HTC Aria (the best of the bunch), Motorola Backflip (strange design and older OS), Samsung Captivate (nice hardware, but locked down a bit and poor overall performer with AT&T junk), and Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 (again Android 1.6 loaded at launch). We even see the smartphone/tablet device, the Dell Streak, launching with Android 1.6.

    • Introduction to Android 2 application development

• Sub-notebooks

  • Netbooks The Next Target For Google Chrome OS

    This is all starting to change however with many Linux based OS’s getting some love and now Google’s Chrome OS is looking to jump in as well. Tuesday, reports leaked of a Acer netbook coming very soon with Google Chrome OS backing it up.

• Tablets

  • Acer Chrome OS netbook specs leaked in bug reports

    It’s no surprise that Acer is working on a netbook that will run Google’s Chrome OS. So far Acer’s been pretty quiet about the details, though. But Macles spotted a few details by following a rather convoluted paper trail.

ROSE Blog Interviews: Susan Rose, OLF Medical Track Committee Chair

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 Gets Sweeter in Beta 4 With Tab Candy

    Mozilla developers are out this week with the latest major update of the Firefox 4 Web browser. With the beta 4 version, Firefox 4 integrates two new key features into the open source browser, providing a new way to organize tabs and synchronize browser activities.

    The new tab features come by way of a Mozilla project known as Tab Candy, which enables users to group and organize sets of tabs together. In Firefox 4, Tab Candy has been rebranded as Firefox Panorama as it heads for public release.

  • Firefox Beta 4 comes with Panorama Tab Manager

    Previously known as Tab Candy, this is a new way to arrange your tabs in a more visual manner while working with large number of tabs. Watch this video by Firefox developer – Aza Raskin.

SaaS

• The Technology Behind the OpenStack Cloud Computing Project

  In NASA’s case, they just want to focus on their responsibilities (processing massive amounts of data coming in from space exploration) and avoid having to maintain an in-house, proprietary processing infrastructure.

• Welcome to CloudBees

Databases

• Oracle case against Google :Winners real open source databases like FirebirdSQL and PostgreSQL

• Why Large Hadron Collider Scientists are Using CouchDB

  The Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) will deploy the NoSQL database CouchDB into production this summer, CouchDB corporate sponsor Couchio announced today.

Project Releases

• IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 is now available

Iranian Government Runs Public Warez Server

The Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology is directly connected to the Iranian Government. Aside from evaluating and advising policy makers on science and technology issues, the largest research outfit in the country also provides a warez server where Photoshop, MS Office and many other applications can be downloaded for free, totally legal thanks to Iran’s lenient copyright policy.

Attorneys General Continue Grandstanding Against Craigslist

This is hardly a surprise, given the well-coordinated media campaign against Craigslist, but despite multiple “settlements” with various state attorneys general, it appears that those AGs keep going back to the headline-generating well of demanding Craigslist “fix” things. You may recall that nearly two years ago, after being hounded by some AGs, Craigslist settled with the AGs, despite clearly being protected by Section 230 of the CDA. However, despite it being “settled,” some AGs felt it wasn’t enough and six months later there was another settlement. And, of course, it wasn’t long before the AGs started complaining again.

Science

• Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries

Security/Aggression

• Fine for Edinburgh data snooping policeman

  Defence agent David Hunter said: “Although there is the statutory defence of accessing the information for police purposes that does not really apply here.

  “His nose got the better of him and he was curious.”

  Sheriff Derrick McIntyre asked Mr Hunter if Merron could be described as a “nosy parker” who was “filling in time”?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Emails about BP oil spill rig say cement job went ‘to plan’

  An email exchange on the day the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded revealed that workers thought that the cementing of the well had gone “well”, it has emerged.

Finance

• Despite Reform, Banks Have Room for Risky Deals

  When Congress passed a new financial regulation bill last month, it sought to prevent federally insured banks from making speculative bets using their own money. But that will not stop banks from making bets that some critics deem risky, even as the rules go into effect over the next few years.

• Kotlikoff: U.S. Financial System Fundamentally Corrupt

• Fiscal Austerity and America’s Future

  There are three main views of the financial crisis and the most recent recession. In the first two views, the debate over the fiscal deficit is quite separate from what happened in the crisis. But in the third view, the financial crisis and likelihood of fiscal austerity are closely linked.

• As economy slows and Fed voices conflict, markets look to Bernanke for guidance

  With the housing market retreating, unemployment lingering and top officials at the Federal Reserve in open disagreement over what to do, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is under rising pressure to offer solutions in an address Friday that is likely to be his most important since the end of the financial crisis.

• Fraud Ruling Is Reshaping Federal Cases

  Just hours later, his office filed a motion to dismiss its most prominent criminal case, a seven-year-old corporate-fraud prosecution against two former top executives at Westar Energy, the state’s largest electric utility.

  The reason? The United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in June that narrowed the scope of the statute known as theft of “honest services,” leaving him with little choice but to drop the charges, Mr. Grissom said in a short statement.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• WikiLeaks builds a legal shield in Sweden

  Two young Swedes hammer away at computers in a space that is part garage, part college dorm, littered with cables, Coke cans and an empty bottle of ketchup.

  It looks like an unlikely place for the U.S. Pentagon to be worried about.

  But this cramped room in a Stockholm suburb acts as a nerve center for WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website which has published thousands of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to post many more.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Rights Holders Launch Initiative To Protect Content In Africa

  Foreign content producers and broadcasters hope the soon-to-be-launched Africa Media Rights Watch will help convince the region’s regulators and consumers alike to increase respect for copyright.

  DISCOP, which organises television content markets in emerging regions, opened shop in Africa last year to bring together broadcasters seeking African and international programming with content distributors, DISCOP Africa Executive Manager Cherise Barsell said in a 24 August interview. But with film and TV piracy rampant in Africa, Basic Lead, the organiser of DISCOP Africa, and consultant Balancing Act-Africa decided to see how the problem affects the continent’s audiovisual sector, she said. Basic Lead is headquartered in Paris and Los Angeles.

• “Writers Groups” presume too much

  Even assuming that every member of each of the collectives actually represented by this “coalition” understand the issues and agree with the letter’s stated position, surely the signatories are aware there are other writer collectives in Canada. Like, say, the Writers Guild of Canada. Further I would hope that they are also aware that there are professional Canadian writers who do not belong to any collective at all. Like me.

• Copyrights

  • Meeting with BIS about the Draft copyright infringement code

    BIS were able to give us some information about likely dates. Everything is falling behind schedule. The cost consultation will result in a ‘Statutory Instrument’ which will decide what portion of the scheme is paid by ISPs (ie, ends up on consumers’ bills) and whether Appellants will have to pay. We should have a public response by the end of this month. We won’t. This is holding Ofcom’s work in turn.

    Additionally, the fact that TalkTalk and BT remain angry and opposed to the Bill’s implementation, and are contesting it via Judicial Review in the High Court, means that Ofcom cannot properly proceed with their work to get the Code implemented.

    Government timetables are never quite as easy as they might seem, but these very tight deadlines, mandated by an Act that did not get proper scrutiny, are continuing to cause error and uncertainty, and failing to give proper reassurance about the effect on our fundamental rights.

  • Big Win for Copyright Collectives

    Some writers groups have reacted angrily to the education exception, claiming it will cost them millions in revenue and arguing that it amounts to an “expropriation of property.” Yet a new decision from the Federal Court of Appeal provides powerful evidence that these fears are exaggerated with the new expanded fair dealing rules still striking a reasonable balance between creators and users.

  • Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation

    The debate surrounding the GBS settlement is important to students, writers, researchers, and the general public, as it may decide whether a federal appellate court or even the U.S. Supreme Court allows the best research tool ever designed to survive. If the theory of Microsoft and some publishing trade associations is accepted, the courts may enjoin and destroy GBS, just as Napster was shut down a decade ago.

  • Musopen Wants to Give Classical Music to the Public Domain

    Music lovers take note: the classical music archive Musopen needs your help to liberate some classic symphonies from copyright entanglement. Museopen is looking to solve a difficult problem: while symphonies written by Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky are in the public domain, many modern arrangements and sound recordings of those works are copyrighted. That means that even after purchasing a CD or collection of MP3s of this music, you may not be able to freely exercise all the rights you’d associate with works in the public domain, like sharing the music using a peer-to-peer network or using the music in a film project.

  • BMI Appeals Ruling That Lets Venues Route Around BMI, Claiming It Somehow Harms Musicians

  • ACTA

    • Has the U.S. Caved on Secondary Liability in ACTA?

      Following the ninth round of ACTA negotiations in Lucerne, Switzerland in July, it became apparent (after the updated ACTA leaked) that the U.S. had caved on some of its demands to include DMCA-like anti-circumvention language in ACTA. The ACTA provisions still go further than the WIPO Internet treaties by mandating the inclusion of provisions to address circumvention devices, but the treaty moved much closer to the EU approach and became more consistent with the WIPO Internet treaty flexibilities. This represented a major shift for the U.S. and was clearly a loss from what it hoped to achieve within ACTA.

    • Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Accord Likely To Be Signed In September

      The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is likely to be signed here in September, at a vice-ministerial level meeting of 11 parties, Kyodo News quoted the Trade Ministry as saying.

      The International treaty is designed to create an international framework to halt the distribution of counterfeit brand goods and pirated music and film products.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: New X Server, 3D drivers for Radeon 5000 and new stable kernels

  While the new kernel versions mainly correct minor bugs, X.org’s next generation X Server offers a range of improvements. Various code segments released by AMD developers allow the X.org open source drivers for Radeon GPUs to utilise the 2D and 3D acceleration features available with Radeon series 5000 graphics cards.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • O³Spaces Workplace Certified for Univention Corporate Server

    O³Spaces has certified its Workplace Enterprise and Express document management solutions for the Univention Corprate Server (UCS) enterprise Linux operating system.

  • Embarcadero unveils big plans for Delphi

    Embarcadero, which acquired CodeGear in 2008, is set to extend Delphi beyond its roots as a language for building 32-bit Windows applications. Developers will be able to leverage 64-bit systems and run applications on Mac OS X and, later on, Linux and other platforms.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Fix Analog Devices AD1986A Speakers not working in Ubuntu 10.04

  • Fix the Brasero copy/burn error

  • Your own local repository for Mandriva

  • Set up an LDAP server on Fedora

  • How to Make Incremental Backups With Rsync

  • Packet Analyzer: 15 TCPDUMP Command Examples

  • 15 (More) Awesome Conky Configurations

  • Is packaging new software hard?

  • How to use custom keyboard shortcuts for a better workflow

  • Unix How-To: Checking Responses with ckrange

  • PostfixAdmin and Fetchmail

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Tagging: KDE SC 4.5.1

• GNOME Desktop

  • Nautilus’s revamped ‘places’ sidebar

  • publicly thanking dwdiff

    High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well.

    So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Linux Mint 9 Xfce Screenshots

    Most people that come into contact with Linux Mint tend to agree that it’s an excellent distributuion for beginners. In my opinion this is accomplished by the visual appeal and mint-specific tools you won’t find anywhere else.

  • Trying out the Chakra Project

    The Chakra Project looks very promising, albeit very unpolished at the moment. If they can manage to fix up the rest of the distribution, getting it just as polished feeling as the installer, this will definitely be one to look out for. I look forward to trying it out again once it hits a stable release.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat plays Switzerland in balkanized cloud world

    Bryan Che, manager of cloud computing products at Red Hat, said that the DMTF was chosen among many different possible standards bodies because Red Hat has a history with the organization. “We do not want Deltacloud to be under the control of any one vendor, including Red Hat,” Che explained, which is why the project was moved to Apache and the API specs are being handed to DMTF. (Red Hat, by the way, is a member of the DMTF Cloud Management Work Group.)

• Debian Family

  • The Debian apocalipsys

    All my started projects about contributing to Debian gets stopped, until I see Debian as Debian. It’s a pity, but I have to migrate too many systems and that is a lot of work for the next days, only at home… and then I need a solution at work too. This is not for vicious, I’m going to loose skills learned about my OS of choice to jump to others where I will be a newbie. And Debian still has very very nice things.

  • Making Debian Rule, Again (Margarita Manterola)

    She conducted a survey (about 40 respondents) to ask what Debian’s problems are, and grouped them into categories like “motivation” and “communication” (tied for the #1 spot), “visibility” (#3, meaning public awareness and perception of Debian) and so on. She went on to make some suggestions about how to address these problems.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Multi-Touch Videos: Evince And Inkscape

      Keep in mind that the multi-touch feature is still very early in development. Even so, it already looks impressive as both Evince and Inkscape can’t handle multi-touch by default yet it works great as you can see in the videos above.

    • Allison Randal appointed Technical Architect of Ubuntu

      Allison Randal has been appointed Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Randal is known for her work as an architect of the Parrot virtual machine and chairman of the Parrot Foundation and is a board member of the Perl and Python Foundations.

    • 5 Short Yet Beautiful Ubuntu Ads For Your Inspiration

      Ubuntu is already the most popular Linux distribution and probably the first ever Linux distro to overshoot popularity of Linux itself. Now, what Ubuntu needs is a lot of promotional activism from the community. Here is a few Ubuntu adverts from YouTube that I hope will inspire designers among you to get up and start working.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Use Puppy Linux 5.0 for secure on-the-go browsing

        This version especially seems to be stable, fast, and capable. I have taken to running it from a bootable USB drive and the performance has been very nice. Being able to drop these onto untrusted systems and use them as a browser, VPN client, and productivity tool has been handy. Using HoneyPoint Personal Edition, the nmap plugins and some other Puppy installs of security tools gives me a great platform for working incidents, gaining visibility and catching rogue scans, probes and malware that are in circulation when I pull in to help a client. Over and over again, the distro has proven itself to be a very powerful tool for me.

        I suggest you take a look at the distro, LiveCD or USB and see how it can help you. I think you’ll find it fun, easy to use, and quite addicting. The pictures of the puppies dont hurt either.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Ubuntu Fans, This Theme Is For You: Download Ubuntu Theme For ADW Launcher

      Ryan launched the theme 4 days ago and so far it’s been well received scoring a 4.28/5 average with more than 5000 downloads.

    • New, inexpensive color e-readers have Android under the hood

      Although Google’s Android mobile operating system is principally designed for phones, it is also increasingly showing up on low-cost tablets and other kinds of mobile devices. The platform is rapidly emerging as a major contender in the e-book reader market, where it is attracting a growing number of hardware vendors.

      Barnes and Noble’s popular Nook is arguably the most prominent Android-based e-book reader, but there are also a number of intriguing offerings from other vendors. Some are differentiating their readers by eschewing battery-friendly e-ink in favor of color LCD screens. These products take a more tablet-like approach and give users the advantage of a multifunction Internet-enabled device at nearly the same price point as regular e-book readers.

    • WordPress for Android adds new comment feature

      The WordPress developers have announced the release of version 1.3.4 of their WordPress for Android app. Using the mobile application, users can easily post to and edit their WordPress blogs from an Android mobile device.

    • Dell Answers Critics Demanding Streak’s Source Code

      The problem, according to a small but vocal group of developers and enthusiasts online, is that the Streak uses code licensed under the GNU General Public License, which allows third parties to both use and modify the code, provided that the company or person publishes the object code, either as part of a shipping device, on a physical medium, or publicly available via a server.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Jolicloud, an Ubuntu netbook OS

    Krim had already used Ubuntu servers for Netvibes and had been using Linux for 18 years so the OS choice for Jolicloud was a no brainer. Despite having scant experience with desktop Linux for a while, Krim’s team went full steam ahead with his next project. From initial conception to release, it took them just over a year to get Jolicloud rolled out.

    “We built Jolicloud on top of Ubuntu because I met Mark Shuttleworth at a Google event and I used Ubuntu servers for Netvibes. This Debian based Linux had a good reputation and good drivers. We could have picked Fedora. To be honest we didn’t spend too much time thinking about it.”

Blender Gets Mixamo Motions

Mixamo has announced new support for Blender users looking to create high-quality character animations for their 3D projects.

Bossies Awards 2010: The best open source software of the year

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free All Software

  “Software should always be free because all users of software deserve freedom,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, and a longtime activist.

• Hacking for change

  In Bangalore, Linux was used exclusively and extensively by academia. Early adopters of Linux, the scientific community in the Indian Institute of Science and research organisations deeply benefitted from free, collaborative and open nature of the GNU movement. So, the earliest informal Linux Users Groups were perhaps born in these academic circles.

Project Releases

• Rails 3.0: Release candidate 2

  The release candidate process is progressing as planned. This second candidate has very few changes over the first, which means that unless any blockers are discovered with this release, we’re targeting the final release of Rails 3.0 for this week(!!!).

Licensing

• The future of open source licensing

  Glyn argues that this “is worse than the GNU GPL with copyright assignment”, where a single copyright holder is able to provide a closed-source version. Is it really worse to have a situation in which everyone has an equal opportunity to go closed-source than one in which the control and power lies with a single vendor?

  Either way, Glyn also notes that the ability of the copyright holder to act as a monopolist is “hardly what Richard Stallman had in mind when he drew up the GPL”. This is probably true, but it should be noted that Stallman has defended selling license exceptions (also known as dual licensing), which is the practice that enables vendor-controlled open core strategies (which Stallman opposes).

  In fact, it is worth considering that the issues that seem to cause the most controversy around open source-related business strategies – vendor-controlled open source projects, open core licensing, copyright assignment, and dual licensing – are all perpetuated by copyleft and the GNU GPL.

  It doesn’t have to be the case that the GNU GPL leads to a dominant open source vendor, of course. Glyn explains how assigning copyright to a non-commercial entity, such as the Free Software Foundation, avoid this problem. Another approach (although one that has problems of its own), is to ensure that individual contributors own the copyright to their own contributions.

USB 3.0: Everything You Need to Know

After a lengthy gestation period, the third generation of the Universal Serial Bus is making its way to the market. But is it already obsolete?

Consumer electronics and computer vendors used the Consumer Electronics Show this past January to launch USB 3.0, an update to the popular standard external data transfer interface. The new speed of USB 3.0 generated a lot of interest.344

Insider’s View: How Grandstanding State Attorneys General Make Life Miserable For Law Abiding Tech Companies

For years, we’ve pointed out how various state attorneys general seem to focus much more on grandstanding against certain companies, rather than actually helping in certain situations. What was really amazing was the incredibly clear pattern every time it happened. It would involve an attorney general who was running for higher office, going to the press and threatening some company, even if there was no legal basis whatsoever for the threat. It’s as if every AG running for higher office has taken a page out of the playbook of Eliot Spitzer who used this strategy for years to get him headlines that took him right into the NY governor’s mansion (which, of course, he then left due to a different sort of headline a few years later…).

Health/Nutrition

• What’s New for Dinner

  Recent estimates blame agriculture for as much as 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and nitrogen fertilizers account for more miasma than all those methane-belching cows and sheep combined. But even as the power of the American food movement waxes, organic farms still make up less than 1 percent of this country’s cropland. The unignorable presence of that other 99 percent has forced many environmentalists to a singularly pragmatic conclusion: If there is going to be a significant attempt to slash the use of water, fossil fuels, fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides — the resource-sucking carbon and chemical footprint that has come to define the modern agro-industrial complex — the bulk of that effort will have to emerge from the operations of large-scale, conventional farms. The assault on business as usual will come from the everyday operations of Frank Muller’s farm.

Security/Aggression

• Who is Andrew Wilke?

  A former Duntroon cadet, he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and worked for US defence giant Raytheon.

  He continued his defence career as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessment.

  He caused a huge storm in 2003 when he resigned and spoke out against the Howard government on the Iraq war, saying there was no intelligence to indicate Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

  Dr Peter Bowden from Whistleblowers Australia says Andrew Wilkie is a hero.

• Secret US military computers ‘cyber attacked’ in 2008

  A 2008 cyber attack launched from an infected flash drive in the Middle East penetrated secret US military computers, a Pentagon official says.

  The attack by a foreign spy service was the “most significant breach” ever of US military networks, Deputy Defence Secretary William Lynn said.

  Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mr Lynn described it as a “digital beachhead” to steal military secrets.

  [...]

  Mr Lynn, a former defence lobbyist and military budget official under former President Bill Clinton, warned the Pentagon had to speed up the process by which it develops and acquires cyber defence kit.

• Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested Over Anonymous Source

  About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about a research paper in which Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and I detailed serious security flaws in India’s electronic voting machines. Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are “tamperproof,” but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source.

  The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.

• Hotel raider caught red-handed after burglary escapes due to ‘lack of evidence’

  But they were forced to drop their haul when staff spotted the pair on CCTV and raised the alarm.

  The security video then captured the duo running through the hotel and jumping 15ft from a roof into the car park to escape.

  At that moment police arrived and arrested one of the offenders on suspicion of attempted burglary at the Hotel Rembrandt in Weymouth, Dorset.

  But hotel staff were shocked when they received a call from the police three days later to say they were dropping the case because of insufficient forensic evidence.

• Look what I found at the bus stop

  …a CD containing the scans of 112 patient records taken from the Intensive Care Unit of New Cross Hospital’s Heart and Lung Unit in Wolverhampton.

• Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans

• Fixed Penalty Notices

  Prior to this I discussed FPNs on Radio 4, when I made it clear that FPNs are a way of disposing of a case without any admission of fault on the part of the person who takes them and no criminal record of any kind. Nevertheless, anecdotally I gather that they have wrongly been treated as such in our criminal courts when it comes to good character directions in trials and so forth.

Finance

• Will Perpetrators of Financial Crimes Ever Face Justice?

  A review of the settlements shows an array of fraudulent and illegal actions.

  * Predatory, deceptive and abusive lending related to mortgages
  * Securities fraud, including creating investment vehicles designed to fail
  * Accounting fraud
  * Brokerage fraud
  * Bribery of government officials
  * Undisclosed conflict of interest in financial analysis and advice
  * Lying to shareholders and investors
  * Robbing consumers with abusive overdraft fees
  * Robbing homeowners by overcharging them by hundreds or thousands of dollars, when they were already in bankruptcy and foreclosure

  A review of cases reveals a pattern: no admission of wrongdoing, earnest promises to do a better job and a fine representing a fraction of the infraction. Because the fine is paid by shareholders, no one is held accountable and the whole incident is swept under the rug.

• Lessons from the Bell, California Fiasco

  High government salaries means soaring pension costs that taxpayers cannot afford.

• Leaked Documents Provide Glimpse Behind Baseball’s Financial Curtain

  From that, we know that the New York Yankees’ valuation sits at a cool $1.6 billion, with the average club worth just under $500 million.

  [...]

  Maury Brown of the excellent Biz of Baseball blog has done a tremendous job of breaking down all the nitty gritty in the Deadspin exclusive. Here are some of the juicier tidbits:

  • Of the five teams who had their info leaked, only the Mariners didn’t make a profit in a given year, losing $4.5 million in 2008.

  • Thanks to the league’s generous revenue-sharing program, the Pirates received some $69 million from MLB over the 2008 and 2009 seasons.

  • As it relates to revenues received from concessions – which are typically run by outside entities, which then cut the team in on some percentage of the profits – the Marlins made $1.64 per fan in attendance last season.

  • The Pirates franchise, for all of its on-field ineptitude, invested some $44 million in player development over the ‘07 and ‘08 seasons.

  Don’t think MLB will sit idly back as this story develops.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Rise of Branded Journalism

  Once upon a time, the writers and analysts who covered Kaspersky Lab as it slogged towards victory against the likes of McAfee and Symantec included Dennis Fisher at eWeek, Paul Roberts at The451 Group, and Ryan Naraine of ZDNet. These men were among the top editors and analysts covering the anti-virus space of the day (2004–present).

  Now, each and every one of these highly credentialed gentlemen produce superb content for Kaspersky Lab — as employees. They are contributing to the Company’s well-regarded global IT Security news site, Threatpost. With talent like Fisher, Roberts and Naraine working the levers, Threatpost is, well, a legitimate threat to the ZDNet’s, CNet’s, and SC Magazine’s of the world…

• Public Campaign, CMD & Media Matters Issue Joint Letter After News Corp.’s $1 Million Donation to Republican Governors Assoc.

  We are writing today to ask that the White House Correspondents Association reconsider its decision to allow Fox News Channel a front-row seat in the White House briefing room in light of reports that Fox News’ parent company, News Corp., has donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association — a massive ethical lapse that demonstrates Fox News’ inability to function as an objective media institution.

  Media outlets are supposed to cover elections and issues to inform voters, not help to elect candidates who espouse certain positions. With so much News Corp. money invested in the election of Republican gubernatorial candidates, can Fox News be expected to disinterestedly cover those races or Republican politics in general?

• Bill O’Reilly and the Fox-Comcast Crushing Machine

  Some felt the choice of O’Reilly was improper given his reputation for inflammatory rhetoric and bullying of people who disagree with him. One person who took exception to the award was Barry Nolan, host of another cable show produced by Comcast called “Backstage with Barry Nolan.” One month before the awards ceremony, Nolan emailed the Academy’s governing board and asked them to reconsider giving the award to O’Reilly. Nolan also made public his opposition to the award.

• Bombastic TV Host Glenn Beck And Religious Right ‘Professor’ David Barton Team Up To Rewrite American History

  David Barton, a Texas-based Religious Right activist and self-styled historian, recently cited the Muhlenberg tale as evidence that Christian pastors were involved in “every aspect” of the founding.

  Unfortunately for Barton and his allies, the story is almost certainly untrue. No contemporary accounts of it exist. The tale first appeared in 1849 – long after Muhlenberg’s death – during a time when an influx of immigrants from Germany was eager to prove its loyalty by holding up a hero with genuine revolutionary credibility.

  Most likely, the tale is a “pious legend” designed to inflate the importance of a historical figure by underscoring his essential goodness. It’s akin to stories of the young George Washington refusing to tell a lie about that cherry tree.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• New Law to Stop Companies from Checking Facebook Pages in Germany

  Good news for jobseekers who like to brag about their drinking exploits on Facebook: A new law in Germany will stop bosses from checking out potential hires on social networking sites. They will, however, still be allowed to google applicants.

  Lying about qualifications. Alcohol and drug use. Racist comments. These are just some of the reasons why potential bosses reject job applicants after looking at their Facebook profiles.

  According to a 2009 survey commissioned by the website CareerBuilder, some 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. And some 35 percent of those employers had rejected candidates based on what they found there, such as inappropriate photos, insulting comments about previous employers or boasts about their drug use.

• Julian Assange Gets The Bog Standard Smear Technique

  The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat”. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.

  Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Madonna Slapped with Material Girl Lawsuit

  Talk about a fashion don’t! Madonna is being sued over the rights to use the “Material Girl” name for the trendy juniors clothing line that she designed with daughter Lourdes. Apparel manufacturer LA Triumph slapped the superstar with a lawsuit Thursday, claiming that it had been marketing clothes under the “Material Girl” brand since 1997.

• Copyrights

  • Publishing Raymond Carver’s ‘Original’ Stories as ‘Fair Use’

    This is a paper on copyright law as it relates to the controversy of publishing Raymond Carver’s stories in their unedited form.

    The controversy arose when Raymond Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, expressed her desire to publish these stories because Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, had dramatically changed their character and style. Indeed, she claimed that these unedited stories represented the “real” Caver, whom she wished to reveal to the world. However, Carver’s estate no longer owns the copyrights to these stories.

    The issue is particularly interesting because the “original” versions of the stories are considerably different from the published versions as edited by Lish. Thus, there is some ambiguity as to whether they are covered by the copyright of the published stories; in essence, they are the building blocks of the published versions, and thus it is unclear whether they would be considered derivative works.

    These questions aside, this papers explores the role of an editor and various ways that editors receive recognition for their efforts. It then explores joint authorship under American law, and how the Carver situation would be different in a jurisdiction where moral rights are recognized. Finally, “fair use” is applied to to the particular facts to permit the revelation of Carver’s unedited oeuvre.

  • Pirates Not Liable For Violating Publicity Rights

    Jordan, whose real name is Ashley Gasper, claimed that the defendants wrongfully misappropriated his name and likeness by selling counterfeit DVDs featuring his “dramatic performances” and by using his name and likeness on the covers. The jury agreed with Jordan and awarded him approximately $2.85 million, including $2.5 million in punitive damages.

  • Samsung Blu-ray players won’t play Warner, Universal movies after firmware update, require a rollback

    As annoying as continuous Blu-ray player updates are, usually having the latest one is the best way to play more movies. Unfortunately the opposite was the case for Samsung (again) with the v2.09 update posted recently for its 2009 BD-Px600 line of players. Forum posters on CNET and AVSForum report the upgrade blocked them from playing Universal and Warner Bros. movies, which conveniently lock up after displaying the title image.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• My Linux Computer is Acting Weird

  But here comes the most remarkable thing: my computer, regardless of the quantity of viruses I store in my USB drive (if I decide not to delete those files, of course), keeps WORKING, unaffected by the frightening threats! Now, that is TRULY WEIRD. Why would a person want to have a computer like mine, that is invulnerable to the scourge of USB viruses?

  I turned to my student and said to him: “You think that my keeping of the USB viruses is weird. Well, they are harmless in my computer. I believe it’s weirder to know that these viruses can destroy your OS and you, as a meek sheep, simply accept to live with that condition”.

  I saw something sparking in his eyes as another student asked me to help him install Linux in his computer.

• HeliOS Project Gets Local Support

  The HeliOS Project, a well-known non profit that builds computers for disadvantaged kids, has caught the attention of 2 local business men.

Server

• A Cluster In Your Pocket

  Sometimes there are ideas that won’t go away. The other day, the Linux Magazine publisher asked me about a “cluster of smart phones.” As the processors in cell phones continue to get more powerful, the question is actually worth asking because many smart phones only need to be smart part of the time. Cluster HPC mavens are always looking for latent CPU cycles, why not check your pocket.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI Catalyst 10.8 For Linux Brings OpenGL ES 2.0

    Last month the Catalyst 10.7 driver for ATI Radeon/FirePro graphics cards brought Eyefinity support to consumer-grade graphics cards after it had been available within the Windows Catalyst drivers for months. Meanwhile, the Windows version of Catalyst 10.7 brought OpenGL ES 2.0 support so that web browsers can take advantage of it for accelerating HTML5 rendering and WebGL. While the Catalyst 10.7 for Linux release went without this support, it’s been added to the just-released Catalyst 10.8 build.

  • Apple’s Enhanced OpenGL Stack Versus Linux

    While our primary focus at Phoronix is on providing Linux benchmarks, we do enjoy trying out and benchmarking other operating systems like FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X. When Apple originally launched Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” we were the first to provide detailed Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks compared to Mac OS X 10.5 and also how Apple’s new operating system at the time compared to Linux. We have continued to monitor the performance of Snow Leopard and found that some point releases had introduced some regressions and we have compared the performance of Mac OS X 10.6 to Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. With Apple’s release last week of the “Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0″ that is reported to bring “stability and performance fixes for graphics applications and games in Mac OS X”, our interest was piqued and we set out to run a new set of Apple OpenGL benchmarks. In this article we are looking at the OpenGL performance of Mac OS X 10.6, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, and 10.6.4 with this graphics update installed.

  • Now You Can Run Wayland From Mainline Mesa

    The work going into Mesa the past few months that will eventually be released as Mesa 7.9 continues to get more exciting. There’s many improvements and new features in Mesa and Gallium3D for the 7.9 release and the latest feature was brought this morning by Kristian Høgsberg with merging support for the EGL_MESA_drm_image extension.

Applications

• 2 Task Manager Apps: Choose the Features You Can Live Without

  Both gToDo and Tasque task manager apps feature to-the-point, simple interfaces for helping you keep track of your busy to-do lists. While both have lots of useful features, picking one really comes down to deciding which features you can live without. Once taste in third-party to-do list systems like Remember the Milk also comes into play.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Remote Administration with Linux

  • How to Upload Photos to Facebook From Ubuntu

  • SSH: Tips And Tricks You Need

  • Introduction to Java programming, Part 1: Java language basics

  • Hack a Website Using Remote File Inclusion

  • VMware Server 2.0.2-x On Ubuntu Server 10.04 With VMware Remote Console Plug-in

  • Wiring Up Android Buttons

  • DVD Slideshow with Linux

  • Learn Linux, 101: Maintain the integrity of filesystems

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KPackageKit = new UserInterface;

    KPackageKit 0.6.1 has received lots of love regarding it’s user interface, last KPK (KPackageKit) was released 5 months ago, after that release I decided to work on things that were also upsetting me like printer-manager (my last post), well it was a good exercise although I couldn’t make printer-manager for KDE SC 4.5 (due not being able to add printers yet). And because of that KPK got abandoned for a while (my mailbox had more than 1000 of bug emails), this was definitely good.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Thoughts on Sabayon Gnome 5.3

    After having a horrible experience with certain distribution (maybe the version number didn’t help much) I was desperate to install anything else, so it was either Ubuntu 9.04, which I remember left me quite pleased plus it is still maintained and it should have got better with age, or Sabayon 5.3 Gnome. I was going to install PCLinuxOS 2010 Gnome Zenmini but Fed…. the distro I was using couldn’t even burn a cd properly. I gave the buring process a second chance with Ubuntu 9.04 but this time the drive wouldn’t even get recognized. So I opted for Sabayon with unetbootin, which luckily it worked.

  • Spotlight on Linux: Parsix 3.6 (RC)

    Parsix GNU/Linux is a great little distro hailing from the exotic lands of Persia. It features a lovely customized GNOME desktop and lots of handy applications. It reminds folks of Ubuntu in many ways and is often described as a nice alternative to Ubuntu.

    Parsix made its debut soon after the first release of Ubuntu and long before Ubuntu reached any measurable level of popularity. This is why its resemblance to Ubuntu may be coincidental, but this resemblance is so strong that one can’t help but think its intentional. Regardless, earlier incarnations featured the same orangy-brown theming and later, around version 1.0, it looked very much like Ubuntu Studio. These days, with version 3.6rc, it looks like Ubuntu again and their attempt to slightly mimic Mac OS X. Whatever the developers’ intentions, Parsix always appears polished and unobtrusive.

  • Dell Vostro V13 review

    One reason the V13 would work well as a notebook you use for most employees – even including developers and artists – is that the system is streamlined for getting work done. It is remarkably thin, at just 16.5mm, so it has a low profile. There’s aluminium plating and hinges made from zinc to add durability. The notebook weighs just 1.6kg so it has a pick-up-go quality that’s ideal for mobile users, yet has the specs of a full notebook with a powerful enough processor and 4GB of RAM.

    One slight complaint is that, when testing the system, it is a little too easy to accidentally brush the mousepad, situated as it is directly under the space bar. Type too fast or without much accuracy and you may find your mouse jumps to a different location in OpenOffice. Other notebooks, such as recent Toshiba models, position the mousepad a bit farther away from the space bar to avoid stray finger swipes.

• New Releases

  • SchoolOS is announcing 41 iso distribution centers across the whole India.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Red Hat heads into the clouds, not into an acquisition

      Get over it people. Red Hat is not getting acquired anytime soon. I know, I know, you’d heard all the rumors. Here’s the truth as I see it: If Red Hat gets acquired anytime soon, I’ll eat my fedora. It’s not happening.

      What is happening, as Paul Cormier, EVP of Red Hat, announced this morning is that Red Hat spelled out more about its cloud strategy. Sorry, I know that’s not a tenth as exciting as an acquisition, but it’s just not in the works right now.

    • Is 10 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?

      Almost exactly a year ago, I posted a blog article titled Is 7 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?. In that article I make the case that with RHEL major releases moving from 1.5 years to 3 years and virtualization reducing the importance of hardware life cycles, RHEL support should be extended beyond 7 years.

    • Fedora 14 alpha gets ROOT

      On the security front there is new SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) support built-in which is a huge bonus for Fedora in my opinion. I saw a session on the new tech at LinuxCon a few weeks back and I was blown away by it.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha: Slouching Toward Ubuntu GNOME

      Many of the other features of the Maverick alpha are simple version changes of standard features and applications, such as the GNOME and KDE desktops, or the Linux kernel. Still others are changes in default applications, such as the replacement of F-Spot with Shotwell. For the most part, though, such changes have minimal effects on the Ubuntu menus’ content or order. If you know earlier versions of Ubuntu, you are unlikely to have much trouble navigating the Maverick menus.

    • Natty Ubuntu release

      It’s just under two months to go to the release of Maverick Meerkat, the October release of Ubuntu, and Mark Shuttleworth has named its successor.

      The Ubuntu chief this week formally named the release scheduled for April 2011 as Natty Narwhal, continuing the tradition of alliterative animal names. Natty Narwhal follows such names as Maverick Meerkat, Lucid Lynx, Karmic Koala and Jaunty Jackalope.

Devices/Embedded

• Pocketbook 302 eBook Reader review

  OS: Linux derivative

• New QorIQ SoCs feature datapath acceleration

  Freescale Semiconductor announced three new Linux-ready, PowerPC-based QorIQ system-on-chips (SoCs) incorporating the company’s Data Path Acceleration Architecture (DPAA) technology. The single-core 800MHz P1017, dual-core 800MHz P1023, and quad-core 1.2GHz P2040 processors all offer the DPAA programming model, which is said to accelerate packet parsing, classification, and distribution, says the company.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo Extends Call for Proposals

      MeeGo Community Manager Dawn Foster announced that the call for proposals for the first-ever MeeGo Conference had been extended to August 26.

    • MeeGo at the crossroads

      If any good is to come out of Oracle suing Google over Android, the one to benefit could be MeeGo, the Intel-Nokia joint-venture mobile operating system.

      Oracle’s threat against the search giant for its alleged use of patented Java technology could, if it succeeds, open the way for MeeGo to jump into the mobile market more fully. And right now MeeGo could do with a boost.

    • Intel and Nokia pick MeeGo for mobile 3D research

      Nokia, Intel and the University of Oulu have opened the newest branch of Intel Labs Europe, which will be dedicated to researching compelling new mobile user experiences — particularly in 3D. The “Intel and Nokia Joint Innovation Center” will be “well aligned” with the MeeGo open source platform launched earlier this year, the companies said.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Acer supplying advance Chrome OS netbooks to Google?

    A discovery late Monday has revealed that Google may already be testing Acer-made netbooks running Chrome OS. An “Acer ZGA” system has surfaced in a Linux kernel changelog that would be consistent with Aspire One netbooks made by Quanta and which has shown in Google’s own bug trackers for the open-source version of Chrome OS, Chromium OS. The details found by Macles make clear references to Intel’s 1.66GHz Atom N455 and a SanDisk pSSD for storage.

  • Dual-core Atom for netbooks finally breaks cover

    Ironically, Intel appears to have been pushed into releasing a dual-core processor for netbooks by AMD, which originally had little interest in the netbook market at all. The latter’s dual-core, 1.3GHz Athlon II Neo K325 was released earlier this year as part of AMD’s 2010 AMD ultra-thin platform, and has since been employed by Acer, Gateway, and, most recently, Dell (in the Inspiron M101z pictured below).

• Tablets

  • Multi-touch tablet will run Linux, Android

    The Belgian company Point Net announced a ten-inch tablet that is available now with Linux, with an Android version promised for the future. The Dune has a resistive touchscreen, 1.67GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 3G cellular modem, according to the company.

Why Open Source/Free Software Rocks!

I believe that having access to code, being able to extend other’s ideas, and being able to combine code accelerates the art of computing through a form of evolution.

Fork me? Fork you!

The scenario goes like this. Open source develops a popular project. Proprietary company buys it out. Open source worries what proprietary company will do with open source project. Proprietary company assures open source that nothing will change. Open source applauds proprietary company. Proprietary company scales back on open source project. Open source complains. Proprietary company cuts communication. Open source becomes angry and now hates proprietary company.

Dreamwidth Studios: Bringing the Corner Store to Open Source Publishing

Starting with a Fork

Paolucci, who manages business and non-programming volunteers, says that FOSS has “resonated” for her since she first encountered it in the early 1990s. However, her first direct experience came when she was hired in 2001 as community manager for LiveJournal.

[...]

Only two years old, Dreamwidth is still in rapid development. For the rest of 2010, the goal is to improve the tools for posting and searching for content. Paolucci herself is also focusing on a survey of other blogging platforms to ensure that Dreamwidth’s features are competitive, and on adding media hostings “for people whose creativity lies in areas other than text. Other goals include improving usability and accessibility.

But, most of all, Paolucci hopes that Dreamwidth can preserve its spirit of openness as it matures. “When we started Dreamwidth, we went into it with the idea that we never wanted to be Wal-Mart; we always wanted to be the Mom and Pop corner grocery story, where everyone knows who we are and knows that we’re doing this out of love,” Paolucci says. “That spirit has served us incredibly well so far, and I hope we never lose it.”

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • 10 Compelling Reasons to Switch to Opera from Firefox

    When it comes to innovation, Opera leads on many fronts (which we will be discussing today) but it hasn’t seen the success it deserves. It is a remarkable browser, which is still not too familiar to regular Internet users, but it should be praised.

SaaS

• OpenStack Community Update

  It’s been four weeks since the launch of OpenStack, and we’ve been amazed by the response. A huge thank you to the developers who have been working tirelessly to move the OpenStack Object Storage and Compute projects along at a rapid pace, and to the commercial supporters who have been rallying around an open source cloud alternative.

• Marten Mickos defends honor of Ubuntu’s Koala food

  Marten Mickos – the former MySQL chief executive who now heads build-you-own-cloud outfit Eucalyptus Systems – has defended the Eucalyptus platform against recent criticism of both its “open core” model and its ability to scale beyond a relatively small number of servers.

  His comments come as Eucalyptus releases a new incarnation of its open source platform, which exists alongside the company’s for-pay enterprise platform. Version 2.0 of the open source Eucalyptus is designed to, yes, improve the platform’s ability to scale.

Government

• Aussie Govts don’t know how to buy open source

  Open source offers a diverse range of applications which are robust, feature-rich and compliant with current standards. Indeed, the government has publicly recognised its benefits for years. For example, the 2005 release of the Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies notes that “[Open Source] has the potential to lead to significant savings in Government.”

  Despite the potential benefits, however, government uptake of open source is surprisingly low. Why? Because government purchasing practices inadvertently hinder the procurement of open source. Government purchasing guidelines favour business models that build closed systems and apply lock-in tactics over the sharing and collaborative business practices used by open source communities.

Licensing

• “Which Open Source Licence” Is The Wrong Question

  The debate over the demise of “Open Core” has led to a reprise of “which open source license is best” arguments again. But the real driving force is not the licence; it’s the equality of participants.

  Various commentators are beginning to pick at the threads of the rediscovered collaborative model for open source now that the “open source bubble” is being superceded. This is a return to what many of us regard as “real open source”(the co-development of software by a community of people who align a fragment of their self-interest in order to do so, using their software freedoms under an open source license and open governance).

Openness/Sharing

• Five questions about open innovation with Stefan Lindegaard

  Another common view on open source within the open innovation community is that open source is very much about co-creating as well as co-owning what is being developed in order for everyone to benefit. This is definitely not the case with the leading open innovation companies. They try—some better than others—to set up partnerships that create true win-win situations, but the leading open innovation companies are much more focused on their own benefits than the overall benefits for a larger society.

• Building a positive meritocracy: It’s harder than it sounds

  In Young’s book, standardized testing and other ranking systems are essentially coded systems of enforcing class differences. The genius of the meritocracy, Young asserts, is the way it reinforces the values of the ruling classes by declaring what comes easily to them to be “of merit,” thus building their sense of entitlement. They are successful because they are at the top and define what is important for success.

  Meritocracy provides the enticing possibility for upward mobility and the illusion of equal opportunity. Someone born with the right set of gifts, plus a good bit of ambition, can rise in a way that would have never been possible in an aristocracy. (The converse unfortunately holds true; someone without those gifts is left with a general sense of hopelessness.)

[Tfug] OT: Election update and plea for help…

Basically, we caught Maricopa County elections in a felony today – cross-wiring the central tabulator to a non-secure laptop owned by Sequoia Voting Systems, complete with cellular modem card in there and live. And I couldn’t get a picture. Need a micro-cam of some sort to get the proof. See also my affidavit filed with our attorney today.

Remember: by law, the central tabulator system on what’s supposed to be an isolated local network is completely unpatched – it’s not allowed to be modified in any way since the day it shipped in 2006 or 2007. Even if the Sequoia tech didn’t cross-connect the cellmodem to the Ethernet (and both appeared to be live), he could have easily “pwned” the “secure” systems with any number of ancient script-kiddy exploits.

The great university con: why giving degrees out willy-nilly doesn’t actually help the economy

So predictable, so rote is the newspaper coverage of exam season that I can only presume editors of mid-market newspapers have to sit their own A-level on how to report them. Shots of exuberant blondes jumping up and down clutching their results? That gets you a basic pass. Fancy-that story about an Asian lad with top grades in maths and science – even though he’s only 10 and in all likelihood faces an adolescence of Belmarsh-style bullying? Now you’re up to a B. Oh, and the conviction that university is the best place for any 18-year-old? Bingo: you’ve scored the A* required for a place at Associated Newspapers.

Which do you think is the most evil tech company these days?

Health

• Nuns donate their brains to Alzheimer’s research

  la-na-nuns-brains-20100822

  Catholic nuns are known for their acts of charity, but Sister Adrienne Schmidt has found a way to give beyond the grave: She will donate her brain to science.

• Government funding for stem cell research blocked by US court

  US government funding for research using embryonic stem cells has been thrown into disarray after a judge ruled that it violates laws prohibiting the destruction of human embryos.

Security/Aggression

• Airport Scanner Technology Mounted On US Gov’t Vans To Scan What’s In Nearby Vehicles

  Already thought those full body scanners at the airports were a bit much when it came to privacy? How about having government officials sitting in a van next to you scanning your car as you drive by with the same basic technology, without you even knowing about it? Jay points us to the news that a version of the same backscatter x-ray scanner technology found in airports has also been sold to the US and other governments to mount on vans to scan nearby vehicles to see what’s inside. Apparently, the company has sold 500 of these already.

• The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS

  Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Greenpeace mobilises as firm strikes oil in Arctic

  A British oil firm will tomorrow announce that it has struck oil off Greenland, a find that could trigger a rush to exploit oil reserves in the pristine waters of the Arctic.

  Cairn Energy, the first company to win permission to drill for oil in this sensitive environment, will break the news to the London stock market along with its half-yearly financial results.

  The company declined to comment tonight, but sources confirmed that hydrocarbons had been found, and Greenland’s foreign office said it was hopeful Cairn would have something positive to reveal.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Nokia Siemens slammed for supplying snoop tech to Iran

  An Iranian journalist imprisoned in that country without trial since June 2009 is suing telecommunications concern Nokia Siemens for allegedly providing the surveillance equipment that led to his capture.

  Isa Saharkhiz went into hiding following Iran’s 2009 presidential elections, after publishing an article branding the Grand Ayatollah as a hypocrite who was primarily responsible for vote tallies widely regarded as being fraudulent. According to a complaint filed in federal court in Virginia, officials with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iran tracked him down with the help of cellphone-monitoring devices and other eavesdropping gear provided by Nokia Siemens.

• Iran bans mention of opposition leaders in press

  Iranian newspapers have been banned from publishing the names or photos of the leaders of Iran’s green movement, according to a confidential governmental ruling revealed by an opposition website.

  The move is part of a new round of censorship, which follows the recent closure of a newspaper and the suspension of two magazines.

• WikiLeaks founder cleared of sex allegations

  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange no longer faces sex abuse charges in Sweden after a prosecutor decided Wednesday to investigate only one of two complaints against him, and not as a sexual offense.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Android antipiracy cracked, Google says devs used it wrong

  In a report published by the Android Police blog, third-party Android application developer Justin Case explained how pirates can circumvent the LVL protection mechanism by using a simple decompilation tool. He says that applications using LVL can be disassembled and patched to make them consistently appear to have passed the validation check. Once patched, users can simply sideload the application package onto an Android device and use it without paying. Users don’t even need to root their devices in order to run the pirated software.

  He believes that it would be possible to build a tool that can automatically patch applications that use LVL, rendering the system ineffective. Despite the weaknesses of LVL, he acknowledges that it is an improvement over previous antipiracy systems for Android software and is currently the best solution available for the platform.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Not welcome in this town

  After trademarking the phrase “Welcome to Parry Sound,” Nick Slater, owner of an Internet service provider in the Ontario town, began invoicing local groups using the greeting on their websites, among them the Town of Parry Sound, the Bobby Orr Hall of Fame (which the town, the hockey great’s birthplace, owns), and the non-profit Parry Sound Snowmobile District. When the $1,000 invoices persisted, the recipients consulted a lawyer, who advised them not to pay. Undeterred, Slater brought a $23,000 small-claims suit against the snowmobile club and threatened the town with the same.

• Copyrights

  • The Costs of Ownership: Why Copyright Protection Will Hurt the Fashion Industry

    It’s worrisome to think about the frivolous litigation that such legislation could introduce (that’s not exactly what our over-taxed court system needs right now) as well as the ethical problems associated with conferring an arbitrary right of ownership to any Joe Blow who decides to lay claim to a certain combination of design features which used to belong to the public domain.

    Right now, designers pore over vintage magazines and patterns and visit museum archives in order to find inspiration for the next season’s look, cherry picking design elements that feel fresh and in line with the current zeitgeist. It’s a refreshingly open process unhindered by legal consultations. Those archives could become battlefields where litigants try to find evidence to support their assertion that a design is or is not unique. The geeky librarian in me is worried that some powerful people may attempt to limit access to particularly rich collections of design history and some unscrupulous types may destroy or hide rare materials that prove that their new design isn’t as unique as they claim.

    The scope of items that the bill intends to protect is larger than you probably think. It’s not just ornate red carpet gowns: it also includes coats, gloves, shoes, hats, purses, wallets, duffel bags, suitcases, tote bags, belts, eyeglass frames and underwear. I can only imagine the lengths to which some companies with deep pockets will go to lay claim to an exclusive right to an iconic popular design.

    The sad thing is that just about everyone will suffer (well, except for lawyers). Consumers will pay higher prices (someone has to pay those legal fees) and they won’t have the same access to the plethora of knock-offs that allow them to participate in global fashion trends without paying aristocratic prices. Designers who can’t afford legal counsel will worry about being accused of copying and they probably won’t be able to sue if someone copies them because, well, litigation is expensive.

  • Anti-Piracy Campaigns Fail, People Keep Downloading

    For as long as Internet file-sharing has been considered a problem, copyright holders and their respective anti-piracy groups have been mobilizing with campaigns they hope can reduce the phenomenon. Despite the efforts, downloading continues unabated. Against the law? One in four in Denmark certainly don’t.

  • Treating Houses Like Copyright… And Then Securitizing And Selling Off The Revenue From Future Resales

    Reader Mark points us to another article about this attempt to contractually create a resale right for homes. This article has a lot more details about the plans, put together by an financial firm called Freehold Capital Partners (which the last article called a Texas company, but is now referred to as a New York company — which is interesting, given that the last article also noted that Texas law probably prohibited this practice). However, this article notes that the whole plan is prefaced not on actually giving the builders a cut of all future sales, but (of course) to securitize and sell off the potential future revenues to investors. Forget securitizing mortgages, now we’re talking about securitizing a bizarre contractual resale right that means you have to pay some random investors any time you sell certain houses. Yikes.

  • Stevie Nicks Claims The Internet Destroyed Rock; Seems To Think You Need A Record Label

    First of all, I’m not quite sure what rock and roll and “social graces” have to do with one another. But the rest of her comment reveals an amusing misunderstanding of what is actually happening with “the kids trying to make it in this business today.” You see, many of them are realizing they don’t need a major label to become successful any more, and they celebrate when they get dropped from a label, because it means they can take control over their own business models and actually do things that make fans happy, rather than piss them off. And many of those things involve using the internet to help create, promote and distribute works, while also building up a strong, loyal and committed fan base. The internet hasn’t destroyed rock at all. It’s destroying the old gatekeeper system that kept so many out before.

  • Entertainment and Hypocrisy

    It’s the KDE logo! Disney animators are using Free Software on their desktops! Disney affirms our rights under the General Public License! After all, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for the rest of us, right?

    Wait a minute. I thought the MPAA opposed my right to use my computer as I see fit. Wasn’t that the whole point of encrypting DVD’s, so that I couldn’t watch a movie without a properly locked, licensed and blessed DVD-playing program? Yeah, a whole lot of good that did. So here is a question for Disney et al…

    If Free Software is good enough for your movie production companies, why is it not good enough for us, their customers?

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Introducing Windows users to Linux

Like many current Linux users, I once used Windows exclusively. Luckily, I learnt that there are alternatives that are just as good, if not better. When I started using Linux, I was constantly surprised as I unfolded its many impressive features. I quickly became a Linux enthusiast, passionately presenting it to friends and family. Unfortunately, I learnt the hard way that there are many things that can get in the way of a smooth transition, resulting in frustration and eventual rejection by the potential new user. I would like to share some of my thoughts and experiences here, so that anybody reading can avoid them.

Server

• Virtualization Through Thick and Thin

  Back in the good old physical server days, you bought a server system, added disks to it and, after a time, when you came close to filling those disks, either you added more disks or replaced them with larger ones. Times have changed in the virtual world. You can still provision a static disk (Thick provisioning), which is typically much too large for the workload and any reasonable amount of growth. But, you do it to prevent that middle-of-the-night ‘disk is full’ call. With thin provisioning, you don’t have to worry about that call anymore. Or, do you?

Themes

• Top 20 Bright Wallpapers For Ubuntu

  Cool bright wallpapers collection most wallpapers including Ubuntu logo, or kinda related to Ubuntu and another different distributions based on it, such as ” Kubuntu, Lubuntu “. All bright wallpapers looks great specially on bright themes.

• Conky Colors Gets A Beautiful New Cairo Mode, Elementary Theme

  Conky Colors – a script to easily configure Conky with lots of built-in options -, added some cool new features recently: cairo mode (–cairo) and a new theme: Elementary.

• GNOME Shell Themes Now Have an Equinox Variant

  GNOME Shell is a component of GNOME 3.0, the next generation of the GNOME desktop environment scheduled for release in March 2011. We did introduced Sonar, Elementary and Ambiance GNOME Shell themes before and we have one more to showcase, Equinox GNOME Shell theme.

Applications

• Itroducing Ekiga, Free your speech!

• CaC (Catch And Convert) – Easily download and convert Videos from Videosites like YouTube, Google Video etc

• Get website metrics with AWStats

• Free PhotoShop

  Since moving to the Linux operating system, an entire treasure of free, open source software was placed at my feet. One of the best graphics applications, and available for all platforms, is The Gimp.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linuxables: Introduction to the Nano Text Editor

  • Firefox 4: Drawing arbitrary elements as backgrounds with -moz-element

  • How To Make Your Firefox Browser Start Up Faster

  • 10 Productivity-boosting Tools for Your PHP Development

  • MaverickMovies: How to Make (and How Not to Make) an Ubuntu Commercial

  • Power nap via the command line in Linux/Mac OS

  • Install PPASEARCH Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10

  • Centralized Logging with a Web Interface

  • Installing Enlightenment E17 using Subversion

  • Installing And Using OpenVZ On Ubuntu 10.04

  • Review of “Python 3 Object Oriented Programming”

  • Remove All Files Except Some – Command Line

  • Create a repository with subversion

  • Introduction to Das U-Boot, the universal open source bootloader.

  • How to get Ralink 2870 wireless usb adapter working in SalixOS/Slackware-13.1

• Games

  • Top native Ubuntu (Linux) games

    For those who have switched from Microsoft Windows or Mac OS to Ubuntu, finding native games to play can be a challenge. Fact is, some of the Windows games most of us have come to love don’t work on other operating systems. Sadly most gaming studios these days don’t support Linux however that may be starting to change.

    The typical reason that developers choose not to support Linux is the fact that Windows has a massive share of the market. Aside from that there are a lot of misconceptions that Linux distributions are complex or unstable. Interestingly enough this is not true in most cases and Ubuntu is designed to be user friendly and is extremely stable.

  • ColorCube – Puzzle Game Released !

    ColorCube from the indie game developer ColorCube Studio is an unique puzzle game done with the FOSS 3D program Blender using the Blender Game Engine.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Smarter KGpg

• GNOME Desktop

  • Top 20 Apps for GNOME Fans

    With this in mind, I’ll highlight twenty great applications I like to use on the GNOME desktop.

    1) Geany – Gedit, among other GTK text editors, are all fine and dandy. But what about when you want something with a bit more kick to it? Geany is a lightweight Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides all the functions of a good text editor, in addition to features one might find with similar alternatives. The big features here include code folding and syntax highlighting.

Distributions

• Linux distro focuses on audio recording

  Trinity Audio Group announced an upgrade to its Linux-based “audio operating system,” with an improved user interface, the real-time kernel 2.6.31, and a player that lets users change the speed of a song without altering pitch. “Transmission 4.0″ is available as a download, on a USB stick, or preloaded on a netbook or ultra-mobile PC (UMPC), the company says.

• Gentoo needs you! A few things that would definitely be useful

• Reviews

  • Alpine Linux 2 review

    Alpine Linux is a distribution designed primarily for use as a router, firewall and application gateway. The latest stable version, Alpine Linux 2.0, was released last week (August 17, 2010). This review is the first for this distribution on this site, and also marks its first listing in the Firewall & Router category.

  • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 7 – Impressions So Far

    Will I switch to a lightweight distro myself? Not likely, I am a pampered boy right now – it is way to cool to be able to have a moving globe wallpaper on my secondary monitor and a world map on my primary, both moving with the sun too!

    Am I confident that Elzje and I will find a distro for Grandma’s old clunker of a PC? YES!

    In fact, if we were to stop this experiment right now we would probably go with Linux Mint LXDE or maybe Xubuntu.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat: Will SAP Acquire Linux Leader?

    Rumors are swirling that SAP may acquire Red Hat. But does it make sense for SAP — the German software giant — to open its wallet and buy Red Hat, which is pushing beyond Linux to promote open source middleware and virtualization? The VAR Guy’s answer: A potential SAP-Red Hat combo makes sense. Here’s why.

    First, a disclosure: The VAR Guy owns about $5,000 worth of Red Hat stock. Our resident blogger believes in Red Hat’s long-term business strategy regardless of M&A chatter.

  • Red Hat’s Matthew Szulik to be Honored at NCTA “0021” Awards

  • Fedora

    • Btrfs in Fedora 13 – Interview with Josef Bacik

      So Btrfs is not the default for Fedora 13?

      Oh no, its not ready for primetime yet. It’s still very much an experimental fs that is under heavy development. A lot of the key features are there, but a lot of stabilizing and such needs to be done still

    • First pre-release version of Fedora 14

      The most profound change is a behind the scenes switch to systemd, an alternative to sysvinit and upstart released in May. Lately Fedora has been using upstart to launch the system and services, but has continued to use sysvinit scripts. The current state of systemd development and background information on the state of integration into Fedora is summarised by Lennart Poettering, the main developer behind systemd, in a post on his blog. In discussions on systemd on LWN-net, he has stated that faster booting is just one of many objectives for systemd – some systems boot significantly faster with systemd, whereas others see little difference.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 207

      * N-imal?
      * Join the fun at the Ubuntu Global Jam
      * Welcome New Ubuntu Members
      * Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS released
      * 10.10.10.10.10…..
      * Gestures with multitouch in Ubuntu 10.10
      * Ubuntu Translations Interviews: Ricardo Pérez (Spanish Translation Team)
      * Ubuntu Stats
      * LoCo News
      * Ubuntu One Technical Aspects
      * Thankyou, Debian
      * Planet KDE Update
      * Beginners Team
      * Ubuntu at the Creative Arts Charter School
      * Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 Second Edition released
      * UbuCon at Ohio LinuxFest
      * In The Press
      * In The Blogosphere
      * Multi-touch Support Lands in Maverick
      * Canonical Announces the Release of uTouch for Ubuntu OS
      * Interviewing Mr. Gwibber (Ryan Paul)
      * Geode Driver Update
      * Puppy 5.1 codename Lucid is out- Now is compatible with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx package
      * Oracle puts OpenSolaris to rest
      * KDE & GNOME cross-desktop development
      * OpenLuna – An Open Source Project Aimed at Returning Humankind Back to the Moon
      * Ohio LinuxFest Schedule
      * Featured Podcasts
      * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
      * Upcoming Meetings and Events
      * Updates and Security
      * And much much more!

    • Interview with Ubuntu IRC Council Member – Jussi Schultink

      Today I am speaking to Jussi Schultink. Jussi is an active Ubuntu Member as well as and Ubuntu IRC Council Member. Thank you Jussi I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and share your thoughts on being an IRC Council member and more.

    • Rethinking Canonical’s Ubuntu Business Strategy

      If you’d asked us in 2007 or 2008 to summarize Canonical’s grand strategy, our answer would have centered around beating Red Hat and Novell on the Linux server front. But fast forward to the present and a lot has changed. That’s why it’s time for a reevaluation of Canonical’s goals and future, and its relationship with other major players in the Linux ecosystem.

      For a long time, Ubuntu’s success as a traditional server platform seemed crucial to Canonical’s viability. While the desktop version of Ubuntu has fueled the distribution’s enormous popularity within the Linux community, it was hard to imagine Canonical becoming self-sufficient without competing head-on with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and other major commercial server-oriented distributions.

    • Meerkat’s Software Centre gets a background…

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 9 Xfce released!

        The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 9 Xfce.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Keep the “Linux” out of it Please

      Android and Ubuntu are arguably the two largest Linux success stories to date. Ubuntu with its soaring success over other Linux-based desktop solutions and Android with its seemingly single handed domination of the mobile market.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Nepal estimates its overall OLPC costs

    Rabi Karmacharya runs OLE Nepal, the local team in charge of implementing the current project in Nepal (with 2100 children and teachers at 26 schools). Today he posted an estimate of the total cost of their XO project — $77 per child per year. This includes network connectivity, school infrastruture, teacher training, repair, content creation, and administrative overhead for the project.

Web Browsers

• WebM codec ‘outperforms’ H.264

  Videoconferencing specialist VideoPort has conducted some tests which should give Google’s WebM video codec a shot in the arm – demonstrating, as they do, that in certain scenarios the open source codec can outperform the proprietary H.264 codec.

  According to the company’s tests, the WebM codec – previously known as VP8 when it was being developed by On2 Technologies before the company was bought by Google and the codec renamed and the codec released under an open source licence – surpassed the performance of the popular H.264 video compression codec in high bit-rate scenarios on their video conferencing platform.

• The New Browser Wars: Chrome vs. IE vs. Firefox

  Video in particular has been a thorny tangle of legal issues over what video codecs to support natively, with each browser picking a different approach and the HTML 5 spec not officially supporting any one of them.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 To Be Feature Complete On September 1

    Mozilla is still aiming for a feature-freeze of Firefox 4 on September. Features that are not included then, will not make it in the final version.

  • Firefox 4 Beta Updated with Sync and Panorama

SaaS

• Take your desktop to the cloud with eyeOS

  Why settle for different web-based applications when you can have a full-blown cloud-based desktop, offering a complete solution for daily computing? If a personal cloud desktop appeals to you, then eyeOS is exactly what you need…

Oracle/SCO

• [Oracle cartoon]

• Some lessons from Bruce Steinberg

  Bruce Steinberg was the best Linux Journal reader I ever had, qualifying on the grounds of correspondence volume alone. His letters to this one editor were always long, and always thick with good humor, good advice, and rich history. Bruce was a Unix/Linux geek of the first water, and worked for many years at SCO, long before that “brand” was shamed at the end of its life. He was also a veteran of the rock & roll world, and knew more about the band Tower of Power than most people know about life. (It mattered to us both that the band, at the time traveling under another name but using the same horn section and singer Hubert Tubbs, played at our wedding.)

• Illuminating the Illumos Project

  Though the Illumos Project is a community-driven project directed by an independent team, it does have a lot of corporate cheerleaders. One of these is Nexanta Systems, Inc. In fact, the Illumos project was announced in early August 2010 at a Nexanta facility in New York City by Nexanta engineer Garrett D’Amore. What interest does Nexanta have in Illumos? Nexanta is a popular enterprise network data storage solutions company that used OpenSolaris extensively. They prefer to provide clients with completely open solutions that prevent vendor lock-in. They had a vested interest in OpenSolaris, hence they have a vested interested in seeing that some sort of open sibling of Solaris thrives moving forward. I find it to be a very likely scenario that Illumos will end up being far more popular than OpenSolaris ever was because the veil of uncertainty will be removed. There will no longer be the inherent FUD associated with an upstream vendor whose commitment is questionable. Nexanta is a major sponsor of the Illumos project, but they do not direct the project. This independence will be one of the keys to Illumos’ success.

Project Releases

• OpenSSH 5.6 Released into the Wild

• Inkscape 0.48 lined up and released

  In 2009, the Inkscape Node tool was rewritten as part of a GSoC project and the subsequent changes have been incorporated into the core of Inkscape for further development; for example, in the new multipath editing. The text tool now allows users to control line, letter and word spacing, horizontal kerning, vertical shifts and character rotation while adding support for superscripts and subscripts; this work was funded through Linuxfund.org.

Government

• IT: Municipality of Modena removing vendor dependency office tools

  The Italian municipality of Modena is well on its way to become independent from a major IT vendor for its office productivity tools, reports Laura Seidenari, instructor at the city’s IT department.

  The city council of Modena has installed OpenOffice on about 1500 of its 1600 workstations. The city started replacing the proprietary office tools in January 2008. Seidenari says this has helped save the city some 250.000 Euro on licences for proprietary software.

Openness/Sharing

• So you think you can open source

  Street dancing also shares an obvious parallel with the principles of open source. B-boys develop their moves through collaboration and barter. This effort most often occurs in the open public, and the final product is usually available for free (or a donation to the “crew”). Choreography, on the other hand, is a partnership between a writer (literally a “dance writer”) and highly-trained artists. The partnership can be stunning, moving, and even political. But unlike street dancing, choreography takes place outside the public gaze and descends—deus ex machina—onto the stage to a very entertained audience. There is no doubt that choreographed dance is beautiful.

Security/Aggression

• Rustock botnet responsible for 40 percent of spam

  More than 40 percent of the world’s spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec’s MessageLabs’ division.

  The Rustock botnet has shrunk since April, when about 2.5 million computers were infected with its malicious software that sent about 43 billion spam e-mails per day. Much of it is pharmaceutical spam.

• Users are still idiots, cough up personal data despite warnings

  The authors approached the issue with a simple question: what motivates people to reveal personal information on the Internet? Understanding the phenomenon could go a long way towards explaining everything from blogging to phishing victims, but the authors chose to focus specifically on whether people would hand over embarrassing personal information, including sexual habits and illegal acts. After several rounds of tests, they conclude, “A central finding of all four experiments, is that disclosure of private information is responsive to environmental cues that bear little connection, or are even inversely related, to objective hazards.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Free That Tenor Sax

    Copyright laws are designed to ensure that authors and performers receive compensation for their labors without fear of theft and to encourage them to continue their work. The laws are not intended to provide income for generations of an author’s heirs, particularly at the cost of keeping works of art out of the public’s reach.

    The Savory collection, like other sound recordings made before 1972, is covered by a patchwork of state copyright and piracy laws that in some cases allow copyrights to remain until the year 2067. Congress needs to bring all these recordings under the purview of federal copyright law, which generally applies during the lifetime of the author or musician plus 70 years. That time period has been criticized as too long, but is unlikely to be changed because it is part of a global trade treaty.

  • File-Sharing Lawyers To Face Disciplinary Tribunal

    A law firm that says it has made more than £1 million by sending threatening ‘pay or else’ letters to alleged file-sharers in the UK, will now face a disciplinary tribunal. ACS:Law, believed to be the most complained about law firm in its field, has been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. This is the second time in front of the tribunal for principal Andrew Crossley.

  • Lawrence Lessig’s new journey (part two)

    I think I was a surprised as anyone when I heard that Larry Lessig was stepping away from Creative Commons. It seemed like a sudden change of direction, because Lessig has been a vocal advocate for freedom and choice for so many years. But as I hear Lessig describe his journey from Creative Commons to Change Congress, I’m reminded of Daniel Okrent’s history of the prohibition movement in the United States, “Last Call”.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• What Google’s Data Center Can Teach You

  These clusters all run a Google-optimized version of Ubuntu Linux, according to Google’s open source programs manager Chris DiBona in a 2010 presentation at OSCON, an open-source developer conference. The company uses a wide variety of open-source programs that create the Google search engine and applications many of us use every day.

• Cut Costs by Using Linux Appliances for Branch Offices

  It’s not that Linux isn’t expensive. It sometimes is. But if a department or a branch office just needs one or two specific server jobs, there are plenty of obsolete PCs and easy-to-set-up, special-purpose Linux servers that can fill the bill for little or no cost.

  Linux answers these needs because companies like Novell, rPath, and network security vendor Vyatta offer dedicated Linux appliances for specific jobs. These Linux distributions, instead of giving you everything, give you just enough to fill a particular need.

Applications

• Leonardo – An Open-Source Java Drawing Application

  Leonardo is written in Java and designed for creating UI mockups, presentations and sketches. The hope is that one day the application can take full advantage of the Internet. Designers could download online images for a presentation, share their designs with an online community or even pool design components.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Getting Started As An Open Source Contributor

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Astaro 8.001

  • Release Notes for Alpine 2.0.0

  • Mandriva 2010.1 “XfceLive”

  • Greenie 7.1L

  • Parted Magic 5.3

  • TinyMe RC2010.08.20

  • Frugalware 1.3 (Haven) released

    The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.3, our thirteenth stable release.
    No new features have been added since 1.3rc2, but 94 changes have been made to fix minor bugs. I

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Articulating IRC Contributions Concisely

      Today I had a call with Jussi from the Ubuntu IRC Council. We spent some time discussing a range of different topics, but then Jussi raised an important question which I think could benefit from some community discussion.

      Today we have many methods of providing free support for our users – the Ubuntu Forums, Launchpad Answers, Ubuntu StackExchange and of course IRC. With each of the web resources there is a method of identifying those who are providing a significant and sustained contribution when providing support by checking their account profiles.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Nokia and Intel team up on open-source mobile 3D

      Nokia and Intel are teaming up again, this time to bring 3D interfaces to mobile devices.

      The pair are following up their shared work on the MeeGo mobile operating system with a 3D-focused research project at the University of Oulu in Finland – making it the most northern of Intel’s 22 research labs.

      “3D and virtual worlds have the potential to improve mobile and internet interfaces,” said Mika Setälä, director of strategy alliances and partnerships at Nokia.

  • Android

    • Android: Making Small Things Big

      Android is an operating syst em for mobile devices. This does not only mean cellular phones but also tablet computers and netbooks. Android gives its users a complete package – an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications.

    • Now we have to jailbreak our Android phones, too

      Meanwhile, Google has made ominous common cause with Verizon in the policy arena, saying that it’s OK to toss out network neutrality — the idea that carriers shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of content — on mobile networks. Add it all up, and Google’s retreat is distressing.

• Tablets

  • HTC’s Google Chrome Tablet to hit stores on November

    According to an anonymous source from the blog Downloadsquad, this HTC tablet with Google’s open-source operating system Chrome OS, will be out in the market by late November and distributed by Verizon Wireless. This HTC tablet could be an alternative for consumers who cannot afford an iPad or other high-priced tablets that are out in the market.

  • How to build the perfect Android tablet, part 1

Streams of Thought: WebM Strategies for the Hacking Crowd

Given the nature of code modification in the open source and free software movements, this type of software tends to stay in beta or in developer-preview status much longer than the typical proprietary software code.

Between code tweaks and full branches, modifications can muddy the code. The Google-sponsored WebM project is not much different from the typical open source project, with three exceptions: Google is throwing its financial muscle behind it, it has a long list of work items on the road map, and the company has tagged the current release as a developer preview, with a full release sometime in the future.

Open source ECM firm introduces apps store

The newly-launched Marketstore is in preview mode at the moment, but according to Nuxeo’s chief marketing officer Cheryl McKinnon, it will be ready for full launch in September. The company has upgraded its dashboard to make management and control of the apps even easier to handle.

Open source tools at heart of DARPA’s virtual satellite network

Open source software and algorithms will play a key role in the next stage of development for the military’s advanced virtual satellite system that promises to replace monolithic spacecraft with clusters of wirelessly-interconnected spacecraft modules.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) will next month outline the key technologies it wants to develop to build its Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft or System F6 satellites. The System F6 is intended deploy what DARPA calls “fractionated modules” of current all-in-one satellites. For example, each module would support a unique capability, such as command and control, data handling, guidance and navigation, payload. Modules could replicate the functions of other modules as well. Such modules can be physically connected once in orbit or remain nearby to each other in a loose formation, or cluster, harnessed together through a wireless network they create a virtual satellite, DARPA stated.

TECH KNOW: Free software for a small office

But before you pay another kobo to Microsoft or another software publisher, consider whether you can use a free or open-source application instead. Just about every commercial application you use on a daily basis has an open source alternative.

OpenStack cloud fluffer does VirtualBox

According to a blog post by Mark Collier, vice president of business and corporate development at Rackspace, Ewan Mellor (a coder from Citrix Systems) has tweaked the OpenStack Compute cloudy infrastructure fabric so it can now support the XenServer hypervisor, and Justin Santa Barbara, a programmer who hails from database-as-a-service provider FathomDB, has added support for Oracle’s open source VirtualBox hosted hypervisor.

BBC Red Button Team Announces Open Source Release of its MHEG+ Interactive TV Toolkit

In a posting on its Internet blog, Monday, by Mark Hatton, a senior software engineer from the BBC’s TV Platforms Group, the BBC Red Button team announced the open source release of its MHEG+ toolkit under the Apache 2.0 license.

MHEG+ toolkit gets Open Source release

David Cutts, director of leading MHEG developer Strategy & Technology said the company would be contributing a number of overseas extensions to the Open Source pool. “We think having tools for MHEG out there is a good thing,” he told Broadband TV News.

Wireshark reigns among the sea of network sniffers

Organizations seeking a reliable ally to help defend the network should seriously consider enlisting Wireshark, a free, open source network protocol analyzer that has been around since 1998. Created by Gerald Combs and worked on by hundreds of contributing developers, this tool has been the go-to soldier in the trenches for tens of millions of network troubleshooters and the envy of almost every other open source program.

Whamcloud to Put New Sheen on Lustre

Whamcloud Cofounder and CEO Brent Gorda still is waiting to sign the dotted line with his company’s first customer. Given the popularity of the open source Lustre project, he is sure that will only take a bit longer to achieve.

Events

• Registration Opens for ApacheCon North America 2010

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and Stone Circle Productions today announced the opening of registration for ApacheCon North America, taking place 1-5 November 2010 at the Westin Peachtree in Atlanta, Georgia.

• FOSDEM 2011 dates confirmed

  The eleventh annual Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) will take place on the 5th and 6th of February, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. According to the conference organisers, FOSDEM is the largest free, non-commerical event that’s organised by and for the community. Its aim is to provide a place for all free and open source developers to meet. Preparations have already started and a call for Developer Rooms (DevRooms) and speaker suggestions will be sent out soon.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 beta 4 gets GPU acceleration

    A HOST OF GOODIES have been announced by Mozilla in the beta 4 version of Firefox 4, including GPU acceleration.

SaaS

• Standards and Open Source for Cloud Computing

  OpenStack and Apache Deltacloud have similar goals – building lightweight REST APIs that allow cloud provider access via an HTTP network. OpenStack is more focused on public cloud service providers and Deltacloud is more focused on private clouds.

• Apache’s Cassandra Adds Column Data Analysis

  Cassandra is an open source project sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation to push forward the development of the key value store, NoSQL system. Jonathan Ellis, who founded the project while working for Rackspace, was the keynote speaker at the Cassandra Summit held at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center Aug. 10. Current uses of Cassandra include Facebook, Digg, and Twitter, which stores 15 million tweets a day in Cassandra.

• More Open Source Cloud with Apache Nuvem?

  The wiki page also talks about the need for a common API to help avoid vendor lock-in when moving between cloud implementations. As with Deltacloud and libCloud, it seems that Nuvem will target Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It is interesting to note that according to the submitters, there is a prototype under development which uses Tuscany, the Apache SCA implementation. So perhaps this effort will go some way to answering the questions around SOA and its relationship to Cloud.

Databases

• MongoDB Update Adds Scale Out Features

  10gen, the company behind the MongoDB open source code project, added automated sharding to Release 1.6 on Aug. 5 and has been airing the feature in interviews and webinars since.

Oracle

• Oracle and open source

  So I was a little amused to see the Oracle logo pop up when I ran the latest updates of two programs that I use quite a bit, OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox, on my Linux-based PC at home.

  The two open source programs, of course, went to Oracle as part of its $7.4-billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year, along with Java, Solaris and MySQL. At the time the deal was announced, questions swirled around the fate of these projects, given that Oracle’s open source credentials were somewhat less benevolent than Sun’s.

• Oracle takes over JavaOne conference

  Next month’s revamped JavaOne conference, the first under Oracle’s jurisdiction, will feature a keynote presentation from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, as well as the latest on Java technologies ranging from the GlassFish application server to the JavaFX rich media platform.

• Oracle forms new ‘axis of evil’ against open source, claims Adobe

  The lack of love Oracle has shown for the “open source culture of Sun [Microsystems]” since Larry Ellison’s company bought the MySQL database firm earlier this year has unnerved many in the FOSS world. And McAllister couldn’t resist putting the boot in about the whole sorry affair.

CMS

• Open Source CMS Made Simple Reaches One Million Downloads

  Currently up to version 1.8.2, the recent releases have consisted of bug fixes and polishing to improve the experience for users.Version 2.0 will pack in a lot of new features including a code rewrite to improve speed and scalability, improved API with jQuery implementation, new templates and PHP 5.2 support.

• Gluster’s Open Source Storage Solutions Selected by Acquia

  The company aims to offer running on Amazon Web Services (News – Alert) (AWS) on its Drupal website hosting with this agreement. Similar to Apache, Linux and MySQL, Drupal is a LAMP stack

• Acquia releases Drupal Commons open source social software suite

  Hawes says other open-source Enterprise 2.0 tools have been around, but this one has a better shot because it’s been designed as a complete platform to replace the proprietary products currently available. “There have been a few open-source collaboration tools available, but none formulated specifically as a community platform. The availability Drupal Commons should fuel additional growth for social business in general.”

• e107 open source CMS version 0.7.23 Released

Healthcare

• VA investigates VistA EHR open source

  The RFI recognizes pros and cons with open source adoption. Open source’s attractive qualities include greater innovation caused by collaboration with the open source community, improvements in capabilities, and broader proliferation of common EHR software, the RFI states.

  [...]

  Responses to the RFI are due by 1 p.m. on August 25.

Business

• Openbravo Launches QuickStart 2 for Rapid Deployment of Open Source ERP

• Open Source: Quality now leads Affordability as Main Selection Criteria

  During the last ten years Open Source has had a profound influence on both software companies and consumers of software, indirectly if not directly. And along the way, Open Source has changed, morphing itself in ways so as to become now widely accepted by all types of businesses. In many instances, the cream of the Open Source crop is software that rivals the best software created by commercial companies. Quality and reliability are no longer features which commercial vendors have a monopoly on

Government

• Tech roundup – August 20

  Mr Muckleston said he wasn’t part of those negotiations, and was now looking forwards – to the 2012 negotiations.

  Here’s a tip for the New Zealand Government – investigate open source. Subsidised is good, but there’s potential for taxpayer money to be saved with completely free software. Open Office is Microsoft’s worst nightmare.

• Cost is only part of the Gov 2.0 open source story

  Acknowledging the limits of open source savings is key to ongoing use. It’s all about managing expectations: If I expect 100 percent savings and your open source solution only offers 50 percent, I won’t be pleased. But lead with the real story and show me the other benefits and maybe I’ll commit for the short- and long-term.

Openness/Sharing

• Army intelligence buys intelligence like Netflix?

  Everyone knows that the U.S. government collects and produces intelligence, using information from sensitive Tippy Top Secret sources to the lowliest “open source” material found readily on the Internet. When it comes to translations and unique databases — from the scientific to the most intrusive personal information — the intelligence community also has virtual carte blanche to tap the expertise of the private sector.

• Curriki: Bringing the open source model to education

  So says Scott McNealy, whom you may be more familiar with from his time leading Sun Microsystems. He spends time these days proslytizing for his labor of love, Curriki, a nonprofit repository/community/social network that seeks to gather the best educational materials in one spot for educators, parents and students to use.

• Fighting for students, 2 professors go straight to source

  About a year and a half ago, White met with a representative from the open-source textbook website Flat World Knowledge. White adopted a textbook from the site, which gives students free online access, the option to buy a PDF version for about $25 or a discounted paperback copy.

• Lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding development of new medicines

  Called open-source drug discovery, the new approach involves an online community of computer users from around the world working together to discover and develop much-needed new drugs. It could lead to inexpensive drugs to treat a wide variety of diseases, including tuberculosis and malaria, that claim a huge toll in developing countries.

• Lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding development of new medicines

  The upheaval in traditional practice would make key data available to college students, university professors, and others in an open, collective process.

• Open Hardware

  • GardenBot Brings Geek Power to Green Thumbs

    For less than $200, Frueh has created a garden automation system called GardenBot that uses open source hardware (such as the Arduino) to monitor humidity, temperature and soil conditions. The data is then poured into charts so you can view the world as the plants see it, he says.

  • Crudbox Turns Any Gadget Into an Electronic Sequencer

    It is an open-source project based around an Arduino microcontroller–an electronics prototyping platform popular with music artists and those making multimedia projects like the Crudbox.

  • Roboteers go open source

    The open source robot, called Qbos, was developed by the Thecorpora, which started the project five years ago. Roboteer and open source developer, Francisco Paz started working on Qbo to help bring robot technology and artificial intelligence to the masses. While he didn’t name a price for Qbo, we’re betting that it cost a bit less than the £700,000 price tag for one of Honda’s Asimo robots.

AMD Finally Honours the Netbook

Other moves by OEMs to push the borders of what is a netbook should mean the netbook market will be revitalized. AMD’s chips set to arrive in 2011 could make 2011 a great year for netbooks. I still think ARM will continue to expand its role because the smaller instructions and instruction-set mean less bandwidth to and within the CPU. The same thing applies to internal storage. You need less if your code is more dense. There is nothing sacred about x86 instructions and ARM does not carry that baggage.

Science

• Richest Planetary System Discovered

  Astronomers using ESO’s world-leading HARPS instrument have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. The researchers also have tantalising evidence that two other planets may be present, one of which would have the lowest mass ever found. This would make the system similar to our Solar System in terms of the number of planets (seven as compared to the Solar System’s eight planets). Furthermore, the team also found evidence that the distances of the planets from their star follow a regular pattern, as also seen in our Solar System.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Pakistan’s Climate Change Floods, Seen From Above

Finance

• Bank Settlements: Judges Take A Stand, Shift Focus To Individual Responsibility

  Jed Rakoff has been called many things: a maverick, a prosecutor, a hero, and acerbic. As a judge on cases involving high finance, his rulings have often been described as blunt and sometimes wry. When asked if he’s anti-Wall Street, he once suggested that some prosecutors fear he’s pro-Wall Street.

• Two Top Investigators Leave Financial Crisis Commission

  Two senior staffers have quietly left the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel working under a tight deadline that has been dogged by rumors of discord among key personnel.

  Matthew Cooper, a former journalist who joined the FCIC as a senior adviser, left the unit Aug. 13. Bradley J. Bondi, counsel to the Securities and Exchange Commission who joined the financial crisis investigation as an assistant director and deputy general counsel, left Aug. 6. Neither immediately returned emails or phone calls seeking comment.

• Wonkbook: Fed split on more action; new fees on mortgage lenders; school overhauls delayed

  The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy body was split down the middle on its latest decision. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is leaning toward financing federal support for mortgages through fees on lenders. And despite the administration’s push, school overhaul plans in many states are not being implemented in time for the new school year.

• AIG repaying nearly $4 billion in federal loans

  In its single biggest repayment of bailout loans so far, American International Group Inc. said Monday it is paying back nearly $4 billion in taxpayer aid with proceeds from a recent debt sale.

  The insurer’s aircraft leasing company, International Lease Finance Corp., completed the sale of $4.4 billion in debt. AIG will use more than $3.9 billion of the proceeds to repay the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, trimming the balance on its credit line with the Fed to about $15 billion. Adding interest, the total is about $21 billion.

• Overestimating the Safety of Bonds

  Most of us invest in bonds or bond mutual funds to keep our principal safe and to earn a bit of income. People think bonds are safe because when you buy an individual bond, like a U.S. government bond, you have a stated interest rate and a known maturity. In other words, you know exactly what income you will earn and exactly when you will get your principal back, much like a certificate of deposit at a bank that is backed by the F.D.I.C.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• True stories of bloggers who secretly feed on partisan cash

  Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information “like piranhas in a pool.” But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.

  “It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”

  In California, where former eBay executive Meg Whitman beat businessman Steve Poizner in a bitterly fought primary battle in the campaign for governor, it sometimes seemed as if there was a bidding war for bloggers.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Jennifer Aniston’s Representatives Threaten Gawker For Showing Her [Allegedly] Sans Photoshop

  However, it appears that some Hollywood types still haven’t quite figured this out. Apparently Jennifer Aniston’s representatives are threatening to sue Gawker because the site dared to post an image that it claims is a pre-Photoshopped photo of Aniston, which her people insist are doctored. Either way, Gawker is standing up for its fair use rights, and as this is the story, it seems entirely newsworthy to publish the image in question….

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• EPUB: The final barrier for Kindle Adoption

  Frankly, I really don’t understand why Amazon would leave this out of their current generation of devices. I can understand why they would want to continue with AZW and their own DRM for content sold on their own store, but frankly, Amazon doesn’t sell every electronic book that you can possibly buy.

  I may want to go buy specialized content from say, O’Reilly, or Cisco Press, Pearson Education, and any other vendor doing educational books, which are all adopting the industry-standard EPUB format, which was established by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). And yes, I do realize many of these vendors also provide content in PDF format, which the Kindle can read, but lets face it, PDF isn’t exactly an efficient format for electronic books.

  Amazon’s competitors, Barnes & Noble, SONY and Apple have embraced both DRM-free and DRM-enabled versions of EPUB.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Ticketmaster Says People Don’t Like Service Fees Because We Don’t Understand Them

  If you follow the music business, you probably already know about or follow Ticketmaster boss Irving Azoff’s Twitter feed, which he kicked off earlier this month by calling two different reporters “jerks,” and generally jousting with some of his critics. He went quiet for a bit, but caused a bit of a stir over the weekend by announcing (sort of) that Ticketmaster had “full disclosure pricing.” Considering just how much hatred there is towards Ticketmaster’s “service charges,” this certainly picked up some attention.