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08.23.10

Links 23/8/2010: GNU/Linux in the Financial World, Linux 2.6.36 RC2, Gnash 0.8.8 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • I Lost the Discs (with the drivers)

    As she is 37 weeks pregnant and cannot move much, I found the box and checked it, but the camera driver was missing. For a split second, a flash of an ancient fear traveled through my body. My wife saw my face and calmly said to me: “Maybe I lost it…” I immediately understood my wife’s peace. SHE NEVER USES WINDOWS ANYWAY. If ALL the drivers are lost, what is the problem? No worry whatsoever. A Mandriva install gave her everything she needs to use her computer.

  • Open Source: Like A Damned Phoenix

    2007 was a different world. Linux was taking a harsh beating on all sides. While its smartphone OS market share was growing, that growth was far from rapid. Symbian held a commanding lead and, while iOS was still comparatively tiny, the astounding success of the first iPhone had everyone anticipating Apple dominance in the near future.

    In the realm of servers, a traditional Linux strongpoint, the open-source OS was starting to see a reversal of fortunes. Windows Server was ascendant, and over in the desktop market Linux barely even counted as a player. Open source failed in the world of big gray and black boxes, and for a time it seemed as if it might die out as a viable OS choice altogether. Articles fretting over the limited future of the open source movement feared that it was doomed to be marginalized at best.

    Then along came Android.

    Netbooks started to gain traction. Then they started to give way to something even more convenient (and sexy); the iPad.

    Now Linux is ascendent, while pundits fret over the death of the desktop. Consumers want to be mobile now. Apple addicted the whole damn world with that first hit of iPhone, and now we’re jonesin’ for any sexy, slim piece of tech with a touchscreen and decent wireless connectivity.

  • Desktop

    • More stuff you can, but shouldn’t, do

      Remember 3ddesktop? Before Compiz was adopted as the messiah of the Linux desktop experience, 3ddesktop was the way cool kids spun their work environments and dazzled their Windows-using friends.

      And it was pretty cool — it never was nearly the catalog of intricate bells and whistles that Compiz is, but it did a decent job in the eye candy department.

      Of course, it did require a little video muscle to use. But considering its last update was in 2005, you could — and still can — get away with running it on a single-core machine with a ground-level video card that has a little acceleration to it. Even something as underpowered as this should do it.

    • Is Linux Publicity Targeting the Right Market?

      As a matter of fact, what IS the right market for Linux?

      The mythical Average User? No way. The average user wants a computer that performs the tasks set for it. Those people are in the market for a computer, a real, physical machine, a tangible object with a keyboard (real or imaged), a mouse (or trackpad/trackball/touchscreen), and a display screen. The Average User scarcely notices, and certainly cares less, what sequence of binary commands course through the CPU to translate input into action.

    • A Glimpse of Ubuntu Desktops in the Financial World

      These guys easily have 35,000 square inches of LCD monitors running Ubuntu desktops, displaying in real time thousands of graphs, metrics, monitors, and statuses. Hundreds of multi-head desktops running 8.04 to 10.04, attached to 17″ to 42″ Samsung LCDs, Ubuntu logos everywhere I turned!

      There is no doubt that across both Server and Desktop, Ubuntu is proving itself in enterprise environments. Linux is here, there, everywhere, and Ubuntu is a very important player, helping make that happen. I take great pride in what we’re achieving together!

    • Dumping Windows, moving on with Linux, update

      I chose Fedora 13 and I am extremely happy that I did. Not only has it breathed new life into these PCs which were at crawling speeds with XP, but everything is working much cleaner and now I can rest assured that they will be virus and spyware free for quite some time. I’m not going to forget that Linux does have viruses and spyware, but it’s so uncommon that there’s no sense in worrying around the clock about it.

      In my cases, the various software that was required was already being used in Windows, with the exception of MS Office, which I have them using OpenOffice 3.2 as a replacement. There have been some minor formatting issues at first, with documents that were imported from MS Office. These will be corrected along the way as the documents are used. But other programs such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. are equivalent across multiple platforms, making the transition easier.

  • Server

    • IBM Cuts Power Systems Shops a Linux Price Break

      Big Blue has wanted you to run Linux and AIX on your OS/400 and i platforms for the better part of a decade now, and maybe you have and maybe you haven’t. Maybe Linux is now commercial enough that you feel like ditching Windows for certainly infrastructure and application serving jobs. If you do, and you have some latent capacity sitting around in your Power6, Power6+, and selected Power7 machines, then IBM has a deal for you.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.36-rc2

      Another week, another -rc. I didn’t really ever get around to announcing -rc1 when I released it, and we had enough niggling small problems (like a memory corruptor in the HID layer that ended up
      causing some random problems etc) there that I never got around to fixing that lack of announcement. And hopefully -rc2 is a good point to correct the lack of earlier commentary.

    • systemd Status Update

      It has been a while since my original announcement of systemd. Here’s a little status update, on what happened since then.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Make use of the KDE 4.5 Clipboard

        Klipper is the KDE 4.5 clipboard and it is not your average clipboard tool. Unlike most operating system clipboards, Klippy gives the user quick and easy access to not just the last object copied, but multiple objects copied. Klipper is so powerful a clipboard tool, you will wonder why other operating systems don’t mimic the features and functionality. Klipper is also so powerful that most users won’t take advantage of it’s full range of features.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • W7 Theme for Ubuntu Brings Windows 7′s Familiar GUI to Linux

        Linux: W7 Theme is a free script that skins your Linux desktop with a familiar Windows 7 look and feel.

      • Debian swirl in Gnome

        The Debian desktop is pretty much Gnome with some Debian wallpaper. The default Main Menu icon is the Gnome foot.
        To replace the Gnome foot with the Debian Swirl, replace the start-here.svg or start-here.png image with an appropriate Debian Swirl image.

  • Distributions

    • Which Linux is the most popular Linux?

      As everyone who ever tried it knows that trying to count how many people use a particular Linux distribution is almost impossible. Now, Rick Lehrbaum, founder of LinuxDevices and a friend and former editor of mine, has tried a new and interesting way to count Linux users on his new site, LinuxTrends: look at Google search results for the various Linux distributions.

      Some of the results aren’t surprising. Ubuntu has become far more popular than the other mainstream distributions of 2004/2005: SUSE Linux, Fedora, Debian and Mandrake/Mandriva.

    • Reviews

      • North Korea Linux (Red Star OS)

        Obviously, this is not a distro that most people should use. It’s a curiosity created by an oppressive government, and it’s a travesty that the open nature of Linux was used in this rather perverse manner. It’s a good example of how even the best things in life can be taken and distorted.

        I don’t recommend it to anyone, beyond simply being a curiosity. Distrohoppers might have a bit of fun installing it to play with, but it will also creep them out. It certainly creeped me out while writing this review. So perhaps it’s best if nobody else installs it.

        One thing puzzles me though; the North Koreans are usually heavy on the propaganda stuff (see the Vice Guide to North Korea videos at the beginning of the review). And yet, they appear to have blown a major propaganda opportunity. They could have released this distro around the world in different languages, with lots of propaganda built into it for each language. Instead, they released it only in Korean. Odd.

      • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 5 – Dreamlinux

        Day Five. If you are wondering, yes we have had other things going on this weekend. Among the things I did was try and get Dreamlinux 3.5 working for Elzje, and I spent my Friday evening with my friend Renier Meyer painting a wall in his new house and eating epic pizza.

      • Feature: Taking a Long Look at Salix OS 13.1.1

        The Salix OS developers do meet their stated goals: making a distribution for “lazy Slackers” rather than one that is generally easy to use for everyone. Some other Slackware derivatives, such as VectorLinux and Zenwalk, have done more to make their distributions friendly to Linux newcomers at the cost of straying further away from their Slackware roots. Salix OS developers made a conscious choice to go in a different direction. In some ways Salix OS reminds me of VectorLinux four or five years ago: it definitely takes me more time to install, configure and tweak it to suit my needs than a typical Linux distro does but, much like VectorLinux back then, the end results are definitely worth the effort. How much effort depends very much on the hardware used, as the very different results with my two systems illustrate.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo

        • Why this Linux Fan roots for MeeGo – not Android

          Some people will tell you fragmentation is one of the main things that is holding back Linux from desktop adoption. Not having a unified name, packaging system, or heck even desktop environment often confuses new users and puts them into overload – Too much choice can be a bad thing.

          Android is currently the only real player in the Linux mobile market. Now don’t get me wrong, I am glad Android jumped in record time to right near the top of the smart phone market. I’m also glad that through this success it has put the power of Linux into the hands of millions of people (many of whom are none the wiser about their penguin powered device).

      • Android

        • Pocketbook announces color touch screen Android powered e-reader and more

          Manufacturing upstart PocketBook is clearly still gung ho about e-readers, judging by the five new models it has announced will be released at IFA in September, which include a pair of entry-level ProBook 602 and 902 units, as well as the ProBook 603 and 903 premium units. The 60x designated models sport 6-inch screens, while the 90x models have a bigger 9.7-inch. All models will feature 2GB of internal storage, a Linux-based OS, and include WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Top Free Linux for Netbooks

        In one of my previous articles I talked about the use of Linux as a free alternative to Windows. Now most people choose to use Windows on computers mainly because of compliance, as some software/games run only on Windows. We wouldn’t even argue that some software are better functionally than their Linux-based alternative. No contests for guessing the superior office suite between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.

        Since the last two years, the inception of Netbooks has brought in a new wave of affordable computers that can be easily carried around anywhere. Netbooks were not designed to replace laptops and are meant to be used for basic tasks. Tasks such as browsing the net, working with office productivity suites, watching a movie or playing a few songs etc. You really don’t want to try and run 3D MAX or encode HD videos on it.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Using Open Source to Bootstrap Your Data Service

    Last week SimpleGeo and their partner Stamen Design jointly released a project they have been working on together called Polymaps. It’s absolutely beautiful and a stunning example of what you can do with the SimpleGeo API. They’ve released the Polymaps source code on GitHub so any developer can quickly see how the API is used, play around with real production code, and modify the base examples for their own use.

  • Are open source defences crumbling?

    What do you think? Are proprietary companies taking over the open source world? Are they, bit by bit, applying the divide and conquer strategy with a future outcome that open source as yet cannot see? Are open source defences crumbling because they only think about the here and now while proprietary companies look far beyond the horizon? So many questions and I have no answers.

  • Matterhorn: Open source lecture recording tool

    After more than a year of research and development, the Opencast project under the patronage of the University of California Berkeley has presented the Matterhorn 1.0 lecture recording system. The German (virtUOS) Centre for Information Management and Virtual Teaching at the University of Osnabrück was a major contributor to this undertaking.

  • Events

    • Judges named for NZ Open Source awards

      Seven open source experts will form the judging panel of the 2010 Open Source Awards, due to be held in Wellington on November 9th.

      The panel includes two New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) Presidents, current President Rachel Hamilton-Williams and past-President Don Christie; Foo Camp founder Nat Torkington; WebFund Chairman, Dave Moskovitz; Richard Wyles, Director of Flexible Learning Network/Mahara; and Telecom Mobile Engineer Amber Craig.

    • FOSDEM 2011 Is The 5th & 6th Of February

      The staff behind the Free Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) have just announced that the 2011 conference will take place on the 5th and 6th of February. This is the first weekend of February, which is right around the time that the other FOSDEMs have taken place. Like always, this event will be taking place in Brussels, Belgium.

  • Oracle

    • OpenSolaris Governance Board resigns

      As it had previously threatened, the OpenSolaris Governance Board (OGB) has now resigned. The dissolution motion was proposed and passed unopposed in a fourteen minute long meeting of the OGB.

  • BSD

  • Gnash

    • Gnash 0.8.8 Released

      We just released an improved GNU Flash player, Gnash 0.8.8. Gnash plays SWF (Shockwave Flash) files compatible with the Adobe Flash player. Gnash is portable software released under the GNU GPLv3. It runs on GNU/Linux, embedded GNU + Linux systems, and BSD, including x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and 64-bit systems. It comes with a standalone player as well as a browser plugin compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror, and all Gecko-based browsers.

    • Gnash 0.8.8 Claims To Support All YouTube Videos, But Is It Good Enough?

      So is it worth using Gnash over the proprietary Adobe Flash Player? I would say: not yet, but Gnash is taking huge steps forward and soon we should have a viable open source Flash Player alternative that can do everything Adobe’s Flash does, and with some actual Linux support, specially now that Adobe discontinued its Flash Player 10.1 64bit for Linux.

    • Gnash 0.8.8 Released, claims 100% of all YouTube videos now work
  • Government

    • EU: Guide on procurement of open source revised

      The Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software, was revised in June 2010. The latest version includes references to recent procurement policies developed by Spain and Malta and to this year’s approval by Italy’s constitutional court on the country’s Piedmont regional administration procurement law.

      Both Spain and Malta this year adopted policies that specify that when their public organisations distribute open source applications, they will by default use the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

Leftovers

  • Got a blog that makes no money? The city wants $300, thank you very much.

    In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Police Arrest Researcher Who Showed E-Voting Machines Are Not Secure

      A few months back, a research report came out noting that e-voting machines in India were not secure. I had seen it at the time, but considering how many stories we’ve seen of e-voting machines with security problems, I let it pass and didn’t write it up. However, the story has just taken a distressing turn. One of the researchers, Hari Prasad, who had obtained the e-voting machine from an anonymous source in the first place, has been arrested and taken into custody because he will not reveal who gave him the machine…

    • US cops: armed and dangerous?

      If mine were truly a free country, US police wouldn’t wield such immense power or employ such aggressive tactics against their own citizenry – a militarisation of our police forces that started with the war on drugs and intensified after 9/11.

      Consider: can you invent a realistic scenario wherein you shoot a man dead; justify it with a story witnesses contradict; confiscate any surveillance video; claim a “glitch” makes it impossible to show the video to anyone else – all while enjoying the support of state legal apparatus?

      Police in Las Vegas did that last month, after they shot Erik Scott seven times as he exited a Costco. Cops say Scott pointed a gun at them; witnesses say Scott’s licensed weapon was in a concealed holster, and five of those seven shots hit him in the back. The confiscated surveillance video might settle the question; too bad about that glitch.

    • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in web furore over Swedish rape claim

      The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was himself the subject of a rapidly spreading online story when news cascaded across the internet for several hours at the weekend mistakenly saying he was being sought in Sweden on rape charges.

      Before Stockholm’s chief prosecutor made clear on Saturday afternoon that Assange was in fact neither charged with rape nor due to be arrested, the story had spread, generating more than 1,200 articles, available through internet news search, that received more than 1m hits.

    • Daniel Rubin: An infuriating search at Philadelphia International Airport

      Thirty minutes after the police became involved, they decided to let her collect her belongings and board her plane.

      “I was shaking,” she says. “I was almost in tears.”

    • Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death by Jim Frederick

      This isn’t a book for armchair war junkies. It’s about what Wilfred Owen called “the pity of war”. The centre and the pity of Jim Frederick’s account is the murder of the Janabis, an Iraqi family, and the rape of their 14-year-old daughter by four US soldiers. The most chilling aspect of the crime was the casual manner in which it was carried out. It was almost a jape – something to break the boredom of endless hours at a checkpoint. The soldiers did it because they had the power to do it; they didn’t need a reason why – almost the invasion of Iraq in microcosm.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks

      Speculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.

      The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Horse-trading begins as Australia votes for a hung parliament

      Australia faces days of uncertainty and political horse-trading after prime minister Julia Gillard acknowledged that neither the ruling Labor party nor the opposition conservative coalition had won an outright majority in the weekend’s election.

    • Britain scraps annual assessment of human rights abuses across the world

      The coalition government is plunged into a major row today over its commitment to human rights amid claims that it will scrap the Foreign Office’s landmark annual assessment of abuses across the world.

    • Big Brother is searching you

      While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate 4th-Ammendment protection against unreasonable searches.

      Here’s what the 4th Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copycats vs. Copyrights

        We’re used to the logic of copyright. Movies, music, and pharmaceuticals all use some form of patent or copyright protection. The idea is simple: if people can’t profit from innovation, they won’t innovate. So to encourage the development of stuff we want, we give the innovators something very valuable—exclusive access to the profit from their innovations. We’ve so bought into the logic that we allow companies to patent human genes.

        And companies love copyright. They love it so much they persuaded Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Act, which extended individual copyright protections to the life of the author, plus another 70 years; and corporate copyrights to 120 years from creation, or 95 years from publication, whichever is earlier. That’s an absurdly long time, and it belies the original point of patents: does anyone seriously believe that a 40-year-old with a money-making idea is going to hold back because someone can mimic it 20 years after he dies?

        At a certain point, copyrights stop protecting innovation and begin protecting profits. They scare off future inventors who want to take a 60-year-old idea and use it as the foundation to build something new and interesting. That’s the difficulty of copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual protection. Too little, and the first innovation won’t happen. Too much, and the second innovation—the one relying on the first—will be stanched.

      • ACTA

Clip of the Day

Sorting Algorithms


08.22.10

Links 22/8/2010: Valve Disappoints, More Tablets With Android

Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Win-Lin situation: moving a small office over to Linux

    Michael Pope is a pragmatic person by nature – a developer who, before he sets out on a task, takes sufficient care to create a soft-landing in case it is needed.

    Hence, when he was asked by his employer to convert a small accounting firm from Windows to Linux, it is not surprising that his methods embodied his whole approach to things in general, and computing in particular.

    [...]

    He is quick to point out that the cost savings of converting to Linux will be obvious after using it for a year. “The conversion itself will most likely cost money but in the end it will be more stable, faster and more efficient,” he adds.

  • User friendly showdown: Ubuntu 10.04 versus Windows 7

    That is, most certainly, the question. It’s hard to draw any sort of conclusion on such a topic because it’s a very subjective issue. If you have not used any of the more recent releases of a Linux distribution you really have no business making a comparison. So…if you really want to draw a conclusion for yourself you need to break down and install a recently released distribution on a machine, use it for a week or so, and THEN compare it to what you normally use. Once you have done that, you can draw as many conclusions as you want. Until then, don’t try to say you know FOR SURE that Windows is more user friendly than Linux.

  • If the PS3 is Jailbroken, Can We Have Other OS Back?

    With the removal of Other OS, everything changed. A feature was lost, and now it appears that Sony’s previously unhackable machine is defeated through unrelated means. I’m skeptical of OzModChips’ solution, which costs $170, until it’s verified by an independent source, but if it’s legitimate, why should Sony pretend that removing Other OS keeps the Playstation 3′s integrity intact?

  • PS3 Jailbroken, Sony Should Allow Other OS Feature

    That feature was mostly used by Linux users to use the powerful machine as a regular PC as well as wired supercomputers. In the last couple of year while the feature was active there we no security breach or cracking reported on the console.

  • Desktop

    • Thanks for the Memory

      These generous car dealers have asked to remain anonymous and I understand that. Often when I donate to things I believe in, I don’t particularly want any recognition. Just getting the job done is enough for us.

      We will be doing some bulk ordering of laptop and desktop RAM if this works out for us. We will also use the money to purchase decent video cards and hard drives.

  • Kernel Space

    • USB 3.0 works under Linux

      After writing to the drive for an hour straight, the enclosure is warm but not hot, and after removing the drive from the enclosure, the drive itself is warm; this is compared to the Seagate 7200.12s in my RAID 5 array which could burn you at this point.

      Many drives fail in enclosures because they overheat; I don’t think this will happen due to Vantec’s thick aluminum design in the NexStar series enclosures, and the fact that the HW203WI has low power usage.

      After formatting with ext4, the file system uses 29GB out of 1.82TB total. Its kind of funny when I’ve owned drives smaller than the space consumed by an empty file system.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Working with KDE desktop effects

        So you’ve followed the latest series on KDE 4.5 (see Ghacks KDE 4.5 content) and you are now using the spectacular latest release from the KDE team. You want to use Compiz, but quickly realize that it is not necessary as KDE has it’s own built-in compositing effects. What you will find is that the built-in KDE compositing is not like Compiz – but it is comparable and much easier to use. And the fact that it is built-in, ensures you will have less issues with integration.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva’s future?

        Recently it became clear that Mandriva was once again in serious financial trouble. Mandriva 2010.1 was even delayed because of that, although not much explanation was given. In the end the company was saved by a new investor, but how things will involve in the more long-term, remains unclear.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Preparing SonATA software for Open Sourcing

    We announced our Open Source program three weeks ago. Yet our open sourcing process will take another one year. Why the delay, you may wonder. There are a number of reasons – code reorganization, resourcing, documentation, and the biggest one of them all , complying with the various open source and commercial licenses we are using in our codebase as we open source it.

    Our good friends at Palamida scanned our entire code, and came up with a list of 75 instances where SonATA software was using external third party code – parts that warranted further investigation. It was a pleasure to have Jeff Luszcz from Palamida walk the software team through the entire list.

  • What to Look for in Open Source Systems Management Products

    Looking at all of these systems management tools, it can be difficult to parse any real advantage between these companies. Zenoss, perhaps the best known of this group, but their product offerings seem little different from those of, say, Hyperic’s. To add to the confusion, products in this space can even include each other: the GWOS and Hyperic offerings incorporate Nagios for event tracking, and both Zenoss’ and GWOS’ products make use of the Multi Router Traffic Grapher for resource graphing.

  • Oracle

    • The Tap Is Turned Off

      From here on out, Illumos and Oracle Solaris diverge. The funny thing is, based on the calls I’ve had today, I could hardly be more optimistic about the future of illumos and the code base that was formerly called Solaris. Even more talent is getting behind this effort every day.

    • Oracle Takes Aim at VMware

      OracleVM, which is based on open source Xen virtual machine software, can be packaged with templates from Oracle and deployed using Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder software that makes it easier to deploy Oracle applications on top of OracleVM that can run on multiple tiers of Intel or Sparc servers.

    • Oracle v. Google Timeline
  • Healthcare

    • The software behind the VA health care transformation

      It’s a truism that open source software development (and perhaps all software development ) is best driven by the people who will ultimately use it. So we can understand why VistA meets certain essential needs — such as allowing an emergency room doctor enter an order within a few seconds — that are missed by most proprietary software in the health care field. But I find it surprising that the system could work so well when each piece was developed in isolation. Perhaps the software used can provide a clue.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software, Real Profits

      That’s how it works with software. We have a computer to “cook” for us, but we usually don’t write the “recipes” – the software. We get it from various sources, either for free or for cash — ranging from single digits for your cool mobile app and up to millions for high-quality corporate software.

      Either way, we don’t know what the code looks like; we only see the output. That’s why it’s called closed software. We can’t learn from it; we hope it does what we want, but it might have bugs or do something differently than we expected. We’re largely stuck with what we got.

      Free as in beer, free as in freedom
      When software is given away for free, like those free apps, that’s fun — like free beer. However, the software is still closed, and you can’t understand how it does what it does or how to change it. But when you can see the code, and you’re allowed to change it and redistribute it — then it is called free software — free as in freedom.

    • Free Software on the reservations

      Today is a fine day, and while I have shared this elsewhere, I thought I would take the time to share this here. In many ways the struggle of the North American Indian remains to this day one to simply be recognized as and treated with common human dignity, and there remains I think an interesting and potentially important role for free software in this process, especially in overcoming some of the vast deprivations of both past and present faced by the communities in the captive nations. Given that I was asked several years ago to help speak for the people of the Lakota nation, it seemed appropriate to do so presently here once more.

      Well before considering free software as an economic model, some of the captive nations in North America have tried many different things in the past to create self-sustaining economic development, including of course casinos and call centers. Some have tried meat packing for freedom. Yet, unemployment remains high, over 80% for some communities, such as on the Lakotah reservations in North America. Similarly, per capita income often remains below the poverty line. On the Lakotah reservations, per capita income in fact is less than $4,000 annually, and average life expectancy is now under 47 years. These are not statistics from communities in Haiti , but rather from within the United States itself. The exact story is of course different for each of the captive nations, but the overall results of even the best of these efforts have usually been rather bleak.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Is Relying on Open Access Materials “Irresponsible”?

      The fact that I rely on openly accessible materials led Access Copyright supporter John Degen to describe my approach as a “shockingly arbitrary and irresponsible policy that will only place artificial (and highly political) limits on education.” Degen then implies that the choice is based on attempting to find cheap materials or ones that are consistent with my political leanings.

    • Open Governance – How can open communities make good decisions and get stuff done?

      At Peer 2 Peer University, we pride ourselves in being an open education community. I have a fairly good idea what it means for content or software to be open, but I find the complex human dynamics that make up open communities much more intriguing than the arguments over which license is the right one. And so, over the past year, I have enjoyed exploring what it means to be an open community, by helping shape the developments at P2PU. What are the structural differences between open communities and closed ones? What is good leadership in open communities? How can groups of volunteers make decisions efficiently and get stuff done? In a nutshell, how does open governance work? I want to better understand these questions and find answers that help P2PU remain the healthy, vibrant and wonderful community it is today, and enable the next phase of expected growth.

    • Aug. 19, 1839: Photography Goes Open Source
    • Open Access/Content

      • How Science Is Rediscovering “Open” And What It Means For Government

        Pretty much everybody in government should read this fantastic New York Times article Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s. On one hand the article is a window into what has gone wrong with science – about how all to frequently a process that used to be competitive but open, and problem focused has become a competitive but closed and intellectual property driven (one need only look at scientific journals to see how slow and challenging the process has become).

        But strip away the talk about the challenges and opportunities for science. At its core, this is an article is about something more basic and universal. This is an article about open data.

  • Programming

    • Ruby 1.9.2 Boasts ‘Production Ready’ Update as Rails 3.0 Approaches

      The new release, which features performance improvements as well as some fixes and new features, comes at a critical time for the Ruby ecosystem. For one thing, the popular Rails framework for Ruby (Ruby on Rails) is gearing up for its 3.0 release, making Ruby 1.9.2 not just a long-anticipated update, but one that’s been closely watched due to its implications for a wide array of related projects.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Legislative Open Document Format (LODF)

      Data standards are critical components of all enterprise architectures but they are absolutely central to e-Democracy and e-Legislation. Data standards are the primary vehicle through which seamless data interoperability, data interchange and transparency can be achieved whilst at the same time ensuring information longevity and vendor independence.

    • Demo: Attachment viewer supports JAR files and ODF thumbnails!

      A new extension has been added to the attachment viewer to support ODF thumbnails. As I learned from a colleague last week the ODF file format is really just an archive (ZIP to be exact) so the same Java API’s I used for the ZIP provider work equally as well in the ODF file provider.

Leftovers

  • Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Further Aligns Itself With the GOP

    According to recent filings from the Republican Governors Association, News Corp., parent company of Fox News and the New York Post, donated $1 million to the RGA this June. Politico calls it “a new step toward an open identification between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the GOP.”

  • Umashankar I.A.S, a victim of Crony Capitalism.

    C.Umashankar IAS, an honest and efficient officer joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1990. He started his journey as an assistant collector in 1992 in Mayiladuthurai, Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu. He questioned irregularities in cyclone relief work taking place in the area and was promptly transferred to Seiyar, Thiruvannamalai district. This is indeed is part of the vicissitudes in the professional life of an honest official.

  • HP hires headhunter to replace Hurd

    The headhunting firm was established in 1956 and is a privately held partnership with expertise in consumer goods that expanded into technology, communications, and media in 1982 and followed up with life sciences, financial services, legal firms and non-profits, among other industries. The company found Louis Gerstner his top job at cookie maker RJR Nabisco, and was one of the two firms picked to find a replacement for flailing IBM CEO and chairman, John Akers, when IBM went aground badly and nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s.

  • Another Woman Asks Google To Name People Who Were Mean To Her Online

    You may remember last year when model Liskula Cohen went to court to get Google to hand over the name of a blogger who was mean to her, calling her a skank. Of course, in doing so, it brought a lot more attention to the blog which almost no one had read before. In fact, it seems clear that a hell of a lot more people now associate “Liskula Cohen” with “skank” due to her legal actions, than the blog. Eventually a court said Google should unmask the anonymous blogger — which it did.

    [...]

    Either way, it looks like we’re getting something of a repeat — as another woman, this time a former model and actress, and now a consultant named Carla Franklin — has gone to court to get Google to hand over the names of some YouTube users who posted some videos of her, and referred to her as a “whore.”

  • Brainy ex-model Carla Franklin suing Google to expose cyberbully who called her ‘whore’ on YouTube

    Franklin, a 2008 graduate of Columbia Business School who works as a consultant, was alerted to the slurs after her friends checked her out in a series of YouTube videos.

  • Science

    • Real-Time, Detailed Face Tracking On a Nokia N900

      “Researchers at the University of Manchester this week revealed a detailed face tracker that runs in real-time on the Nokia N900 mobile phone. Unlike existing mobile face trackers (video) that give an approximate position and scale of the face, Manchester’s embedded Active Appearance Model accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jawline. The extra level of detail that this provides potentially indicates who the user is, where they are looking and how they are feeling. The face tracker was developed as part of a face- and voice-verification system for controlling access to mobile internet applications such as e-mail, social networking and on-line banking.”

    • To infinity and beyond: The struggle to save arithmetic

      IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and multiplying by the number you first thought of, it almost always went wrong somewhere. And all the while you were plagued by that subversive thought- provided you were at school when such things existed- that any sensible person would just use a calculator.

      Well, here’s an even more subversive thought: are the rules of arithmetic, the basic logical premises underlying things like long division, unsound? Implausible, you might think. After all, human error aside, our number system delivers pretty reliable results. Yet the closer mathematicians peer beneath the hood of arithmetic, the more they are becoming convinced that something about numbers doesn’t quite add up. The motor might be still running, but some essential parts seem to be missing- and we’re not sure where to find the spares.

  • Security/Aggression

    • DOD: Our Bad, We DID Talk to WikiLeaks

      The Pentagon is walking back initial denials that it tried to contact WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, in recent days to discuss still-unreleased secret files from the Afghanistan war. And new details divulged by defense officials suggest their middleman for contacting the website was an obscure lawyer based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

    • U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks, 18 Mar 2008

      This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. “The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that “Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the WikiLeaks.org website. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.

    • Why WikiLeaks must be protected

      The case of the Afghanistan war logs and the hounding of Julian Assange prove that there’s never been greater need to speak truth to power than today.

    • Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder hits out at rape smears as Swedish warrant for his arrest is withdrawn

      Julian Assange’s supporters are quick to point the finger at American intelligence agencies and say they were expecting slurs after he posted 77,000 Afghanistan war documents online

      [...]

      According to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, the 39-year-old Australian had been wanted in connection with two separate incidents. The first involved a woman from Stockholm who reportedly accused him of “molestation”. The second involved a woman from Enköping, about an hour’s drive west from Stockholm, who had apparently accused Assange of rape. The warrant was withdrawn yesterday afternoon.

      Assange claimed he was the victim of a smear campaign. He denied the charges on WikiLeaks’s Twitter page, saying they were “without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing”.

    • Thaileaks

      For unknown reasons the Thai Government has closed access to the Wikileaks website. This means that Thai internauts and webizens are not allowed to take part in the current netbased movement of freedom. This is not acceptable, anywhere in the world. Therefore we make all Thai-related content from the Wikileaks website available for direct download. We will continue doing this for every country that blocks essential internet infrastructure. The internet is an intricate system of tunnels, we will dig a hole in every national firewall.

    • WikiLeaks counters Thai censorship

      Yesterday, “Thailand is blocking domestic access to WikiLeaks under the country’s 2005 emergency powers”, said p2pnet, quoting the Bangkok Post.

      At the end of the story, “It doesn’t say if the censorship means Thai authorities fear documents damaging to them may suddenly show up on WikiLeaks”, we added.

    • Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing’s Seven Secrets

      While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by WikiLeaks of classified US documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.

      Party archives in China exist at local, provincial, and central levels and have always been secret and extremely closely guarded. At local levels, some, in recent years, have been digitized, but at the highest levels the original paper is guarded physically, and rules of access are complex and extremely rigid.

    • Prosecutors Eye WikiLeaks Charges

      Pentagon lawyers believe that online whistleblower group WikiLeaks acted illegally in disclosing thousands of classified Afghanistan war reports and other material, and federal prosecutors are exploring possible criminal charges, officials familiar with the matter said.

      A joint investigation by the Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still in its early stages and it is unclear what course the Department of Justice will decide to take, according to a U.S. law-enforcement official.

    • Pratap Chatterjee: Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373

      Fast forward to 2007, the first time Task Force 373 is mentioned in the Wikileaks documents. We don’t know whether its number means anything, but coincidentally or not, chapter 373 of the U.S. Code 10, the act of Congress that sets out what the U.S. military is legally allowed to do, permits the Secretary of Defense to empower any “civilian employee” of the military “to execute warrants and make arrests without a warrant” in criminal matters. Whether or not this is indeed the basis for that “373” remains a classified matter — as indeed, until the Wikileaks document dump occurred, was the very existence of the group.

      Analysts say that Task Force 373 complements Task Force 121 by using “white forces” like the Rangers and the Green Berets, as opposed to the more secretive Delta Force. Task Force 373 is supposedly run out of three military bases — in Kabul, the Afghan capital; Kandahar, the country’s second largest city; and Khost City near the Pakistani tribal lands. It’s possible that some of its operations also come out of Camp Marmal, a German base in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Sources familiar with the program say that the task force has its own helicopters and aircraft, notably AC-130 Spectre gunships, dedicated only to its use.

    • Why won’t the Pentagon help WikiLeaks redact documents?

      After the last release, the Pentagon very flamboyantly accused WikiLeaks of endangering the lives of innocent Afghans, even accusing them of having “blood on their hands” (despite the absence of a single claim that anyone was actually harmed from the release of those documents). If Pentagon officials are truly concerned about the well-being of Afghan sources identified in these documents — rather than exaggerating and exploiting that concern in order to harm WikiLeaks’ credibility — wouldn’t they be eager to help WikiLeaks redact these documents? That would be the behavior one would expect if these concerns were at all genuine.

    • David Kelly’s death was textbook suicide, pathologist says

      The pathologist who performed the autopsy on the government scientist David Kelly said today his death was a textbook case of suicide but he would have “dearly loved” to have found evidence of murder.

      Nicholas Hunt, a Home Office pathologist, told the Sunday Times he had been horrified at the treatment of Kelly by the Labour government.

      He spent eight hours examining the 59-year-old’s body for evidence of murder but found nothing to support that theory.

    • WikiLeaks supporters blame spy agencies for sex claims

      Friends of the secretive founder of WikiLeaks, the website behind the biggest leak of United States military documents in history, claimed yesterday that he was the victim of a smear campaign after prosecutors withdrew a warrant for his arrest in connection with rape and molestation allegations.

      On Saturday a spokeswoman for the Swedish prosecutors office in Stockholm confirmed that an arrest warrant for Julian Assange had been issued and urged him to “contact police so that he can be confronted with the suspicions”.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Minnesota Tornadoes 2010: We’re #1!

      Maybe we should update the state slogan to say; “Welcome to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and 100 tornadoes.”

    • War dividend

      OME experiments are hard to conduct. Fisheries biologists are, for example, reasonably confident that creating protected areas in the sea, in which fishing is forbidden, encourages the recovery of those species that stay put in the area. This has worked in several places in the tropics, notably the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, where fish populations in protected zones have doubled in five years. They are less confident, however, that it applies to places where the fish of interest are migratory, as is often the case in temperate-zone fisheries like those of the North Atlantic and its adjacent seas.

    • BP rejects claims it is hiding data on rig explosion

      Energy giant BP has been accused of hiding key data needed to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

      Transocean, the company that owned the oil rig, alleged that BP is refusing to hand over information it needs about the explosion.

      The claim is made in a letter from one of Transocean’s lawyers sent to members of President Barack Obama’s cabinet.

  • Finance

    • The cruel bonds cult

      But in America we do have a choice. The markets aren’t demanding we give up on job creation. On the contrary, they seem worried about the lack of action on the fact that, as Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco put it earlier this week, we’re “approaching a cul-de-sac of stimulus” which he warns “will slow to a snail’s pace, incapable of providing sufficient job growth going forward”.

    • Hate crimes against the homeless

      If you’re curious to know what’s giving more than 6 million viewers on YouTube a thrill, you should go to the site and enter the key words “bum fight”, which will produce in excess of 5,000 videos showing homeless individuals in the US, mostly older men, being plied with lethal alcohol and goaded into performing ridiculous acts such as punching walls with their bare hands, diving from heights into dumpsters, fighting each other and generally being humiliated, mostly by younger men who have a home.

    • SEC Now Offering Big Payoffs To Whistle-Blowers

      Under the program, which is already live, anyone who provides a tip that leads to a successful Securities and Exchange Commission action will be able to collect between 10% and 30% of the amount recovered — as long as the total amount exceeds $1 million. This means the minimum payout is $100,000. The whistle-blower could be a company insider or a private investor, if they’re able to offer information or analysis that leads to an action. And with potential payoffs netting millions — or even tens of millions — of dollars, experts are bracing for a surge in tipoffs.

    • Settlement in Tribune bankruptcy case collapses

      The contentious Tribune Co. bankruptcy case lurched into a new state of uncertainty Friday as a settlement at the heart of the company’s proposed reorganization plan fell apart and big creditors said they would attempt to negotiate a deal without Tribune’s participation.

    • What the Double-Dip Recession Will Look Like

      “Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the economy has yet to hit bottom, a sharply higher percentage than the 53% who felt that way in January,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.

      A growing and vocal minority of economists believes that there will be a double-dip recession primarily because of the intransigence of high unemployment and the rapidly faltering housing market. The notion of a “jobless recovery” has been around since the recessions of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a concept built on a relatively simple idea: employment lags during a recession but it is always part of a recovery cycle. Production rises as businesses see the end of a downturn and anticipate improving sales. They are reluctant to hire new workers until the recovery is confirmed, but once it has been, hiring picks up.

    • Michael Moore vs Goldman Sachs ( with bill maher) video
  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups

      Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in “Zionist editing” for Wikipedia, the online reference site.

    • ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Imam Was A Bush-Era Partner For Mideast Peace

      Tuesday, Reps. Peter King (R-NY) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) called Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — best known for his work with multicultural Cordoba Initiative to build a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan — a “radical” and criticized the Obama Administration for including him on a Middle East speaking tour. That tour, which includes stops in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, is designed by the public diplomacy office to explain to Muslims abroad what it’s like to be a Muslim in America.

      Outside of how getting constantly called a radical by American politicians busy flacking the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” for political purposes might affect Rauf’s view of what it’s like to be a Muslim in America, there’s one other big problem with King’s and Ros-Lehtinen’s accusation: Rauf already represented America in this way, under the Bush Administration.

    • Why oil billionaire David Koch is secretly funding Astroturf to repeal CA clean energy laws

      Much has been reported about how Texan oil companies Valero and Tesoro have been fighting to repeal the landmark clean energy climate change law, AB 32. The Wonk Room recently obtained a PowerPoint from Tesoro showing that the company made a pitch to oil companies, including BP, to join their effort known as Proposition 23.

      But there is another powerful out-of-state fossil fuel interest trying to eviscerate California’s pioneering climate change law: Koch Industries. The Wonk Room has learned that Koch Industries is funding the lead “grassroots” group organizing support for Proposition 23, and is also funding the Pacific Research Institute, the main think-tank producing junk studies smearing AB 32.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • The Audacity of Warner Brothers and Re-Spawning Zombie Cookies

      A lawsuit in federal court alleges that several companies like Warner Bros. Records, Disney, Ustream and others “hacked the computers” of millions of consumers “to covertly, without consent, and in an unauthorized, deceptive, invasive, and fraudulent manner” implanted “rogue” Flash tracking cookies. The group referred to collectively as “Clearspring Flash Cookie Affiliates” are accused of spying on users, including kids, by intercepting online transmissions with tracking code, that even if the user deleted, would be used to “re-spawn” Flash cookies.

    • Germany to roll out ID cards with embedded RFID

      The production of the RFID chips, an integral element of the new generation of German identity cards, has started after the government gave a 10 year contract to the chipmaker NXP in the Netherlands. Citizens will receive the mandatory new ID cards from the first of November.
      German RFID identity card

      Various German authorities will be able to identify persons fast and reliable by scanning the RFID citizen card. These will be the police, customs and tax authorities and of course the local registration and passport granting authorities.

      The new ID card will contain all personal data on the security chip that can be accessed over a wireless connection.

    • Court OKs Covert iPhone Audio Recording
  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Suit: Off With Their Heads!

      Mkrtchyan claims the “Alice” chairs are a dead ringer for his design … in fact, he claims he has a chair for every suit in the deck — including spades, clubs and diamonds.

    • Safeguarding the BBC’s archive

      The BBC’s legacy Radio and Television programme collections have resided at the Windmill Road Archive in Brentford, West London, for 42 years. There are almost five million items held on a wide variety formats including film, dating back to 1936, videotape, first introduced into the BBC in the late sixties and numerous audio tape and disc including a small collection of wax cylinders which date back to the early 1900s.

    • ‘Pizza Pizza Pizza’ Menu Under Fire

      Little Caesar’s is claiming that a Royal Oak restaurant is infringing on the copyright of the slogan “Pizza -Pizza.”

    • Copyrights

      • Piracy Is Promotion, Says CEO of Porn Multinational

        Adult entertainment and piracy go hand in hand, so to speak. While some players in the industry use legal tools to bring piracy to a halt, others are not bothered about unauthorized sharing. In a recent video interview the CEO of one of the largest porn distributors said that the more people pirate his company’s work, the better.

      • Porn Company Embracing ‘Pirates,’ Planning To Monetize Experiences
      • The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?

        Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

      • Could The Legality Of Google’s Cache Kill Righthaven’s Copyright Claims?

        As Righthaven continues to file lawsuits, it seems that various lawyers who are concerned about copyright, free speech and chilling effects online have been rushing to help defend some of those sued. I can’t recall a situation (even with US Copyright Group) where lawyers have been so eager to take on a company filing copyright infringement claims. Of course, the really interesting part is how some of the lawyers are testing out a variety of defenses to the lawsuits, some which seem to have a much better chance of passing judicial muster than others.

      • RIAA Wants Piracy on the Table in Net Neutrality Talks

        A group of 13 trade organizations representing all corners of the music industry is calling on Google to incorporate mechanisms for cracking down on piracy as it attempts to broker a deal on net neutrality.

        “The music community we represent believes it is vital that any Internet policy initiative permit and encourage ISPs and other intermediaries to take measures to deter unlawful activity such as copyright infringement and child pornography,” the groups wrote in a letter to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt.

      • ACTA

        • Lunch with the ACTA negotiators, August 17, 2010

          At the lunch meeting the U.S. negotiators explained the reason for this — they said it was obvious that regardless of what the ACTA provisions say, the U.S. can ignore the provisions in cases where there are statutory exceptions. “It is not necessary to say that in the ACTA text” I was told. “It’s obvious.”

        • ACTA Negotiators Don’t Seem To Know Or Care About What They’re Negotiating

          Yes, it appears we’re negotiating an agreement where the US isn’t too concerned with the fact that it goes against key points in US law because we’ll just ignore the parts we don’t like. But, you can bet that we’ll put massive pressure on any other country that tries to do the same. And, when there’s any discussion of improving US law, we’ll be told we can’t, because of our “international obligations” under ACTA.

        • US-EU food fight dogs anti-counterfeiting talks

          A long-running battle over the right to use European place names, like Parma or Roquefort, for some of the world’s most popular foods and beverages looks to be the toughest remaining issue in international trade talks aimed at reducing copyright and trademark theft.

          The 27-nations of the European Union want the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to cover “geographical indicators”, which are names for food and alcoholic products drawn from a particular location, such Champagne or Cognac, both in France.

Clip of the Day

Richard M. Stallman Speech Patents Calgary Canada 2005


08.21.10

Links 21/8/2010: X Server 1.9.0, Droid 2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • “Public Software”: a serious symptom of the crisis in the Free Software Social Movement

    “Public Software? The so-called Public Software is a political project which aims to remove the Free Software main feature: the Freedom. It tries to put the people in the role of mere “viewing public”. The Free Software Social Movement historically called the participation of the entire society for the transformation of the surrounding reality, it aimed to create PRODUCERS of free culture, free software, free computer networks and free hardware in order to achieve a freer society .

  • I, open source robot

    It is common for market laggards to go open source. It is less common for market leaders to do so.

    Thus we need to celebrate the Affero GPL 3.0 version of Urbi, software that powers (among others) the Segway RMP and Lego Mindstorm.

  • Bringing Some Harmony to Open Source Development

    When Amanda Brock joined Canonical two and a half years ago, she discovered something rather surprising about open source.

  • Commercialization of volunteer-driven open source projects

    Within the Drupal project, we don’t have a paid staff to advance the software. However, many of the developers who contribute to critical parts of the Drupal code base make their living by building complex Drupal websites. Some Drupal developers are paid by customers to contribute their expertise to the Drupal project or are employed by companies “sponsoring” Drupal development.

  • Telecommuting

    I’ve been working as a freelancer for almost a year now, and I cannot help noticing how free software helps making this possible. Working in an international setting, most of the work is done from my home office. This requires techniques to get the work done. Small motivational “rewards” (or really fun customer assignments so that one forgets lunch…) The other half is the communication with the customers itself. This is where free software enters the picture.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle

    • Enterprise Java: Oracle’s real reason for suing Google?

      By now you’ve read that Oracle has sued Google for patent and copyright infringement related to the Android platform. Google has responded that the claims are baseless and counter to the open source community movement. In all the hullabaloo, the press, pundits, Oracle, and Google seem to have ignored the impact on enterprise Java.

  • Healthcare

    • VA approaches open source day of reckoning

      Long before open source entered the lexicon, the Veterans Administration (VA) was known to techies for VistA, an electronic medical record (EMR) program written in MUMPS that was developed in an open way and published as a public record, freely available.

Leftovers

  • L.A. Times Ranks City Teachers by Effectiveness

    Do parents have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective? That’s the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times’s Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper’s announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city’s elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers’ union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Friday Notebook: The New Simon-Ehrlich Teaching Story

      Indeed, for Transitionists who dream of moving quadrillions of BTU demand, currently supplied by oil in global transport, over to a new electrified grid it behooves us to think harder about resources such as Copper. Like Kedrosky, and surely some of my readers, I have marveled over the possibilities of material upgrading and other technological wonders of resource substitution–the kinds of methods that often appear in presentations from places like MIT’s Solar Group. That said, we need to confront the fact that in conjunction with new lows in global copper ore grades, the price of copper–just like oil–has entered a new regime. Expecting a miracle of substitution in copper, or a price reversal downward away from the current regime, is certainly not realistic if we are on the threshold of hitting hard global copper resources to electrify world transport. Simon-Ehrlich recasted is another important step, therefore, towards the realism we need to actually solve the challenge of energy-transition.

  • Finance

    • Why Goldman Sachs is expecting to make as much money as ever

      If you’re expecting the new financial reform law to cut into Goldman Sachs’ profits, think again, says Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Goldman executives are privately — and with conviction — assuring analysts that they won’t make any less money than they did before. Goldman appears to be “seriously preparing for some major changes,” since the new rules bar banks from engaging in proprietary trading, or investing the firm’s own money. The idea is to prevent federally-insured depository institutions from “engaging in high-risk speculation,” but apparently there are enough “loopholes” in the new law to “allow the bank to continue gambling as before.”

    • Goldman Sachs economists: No double dip (probably)

      What to make of their latest research note? It is something of a glass half-full, glass half-empty story. Here are excerpts from the report, by Ed McKelvey, issued Thursday. Make your own call on whether to view this take on the U.S. economic outlook as fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic.

    • Forbes: Goldman Sachs to profit from FrankenDodd fake financial reform bill
    • Lawsuits Against Goldman Execs Over Abacus Merged

      A New York judge has combined two shareholder lawsuits against executives and directors of Goldman Sachs Group Inc and put the case on hold pending progress on resolving it and 16 related federal lawsuits.

      All of the lawsuits concern Abacus, a transaction that led to Goldman’s agreement in July to pay $550 million to resolve a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission civil fraud lawsuit.

    • Bloomberg’s McCracken Discusses Goldman’s Role in GM IPO: Video
    • Goldman: A Self-Analysis Likely to Surprise

      That’s not the way Goldman handled its image, though. With few exceptions, Goldman dismissed the verdicts of its critics. That just created more of them, culminating in an ignominious Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charge and settlement. It all tarnished the firm’s stated goal of unparalleled client focus.

    • Mortgage Bonds Slump on `Mega-Refi’ Concern: Credit Markets

      Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Bill Gross urged government officials today to allow all borrowers who haven’t missed payments on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans to get lower-cost mortgages. Dachille, who oversees about $8 billion of fixed-income investments, supported the idea yesterday in a telephone interview, saying such financing should be offered without consideration of homeowners’ incomes or house values.

    • Paulson’s Hedge Fund Acquires 1.1 Million Goldman Sachs Shares

      John Paulson, the hedge-fund manager who became a billionaire by betting against U.S. mortgage markets, bought 1.1 million shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in the second quarter.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • German Guy Wants to Photograph Those Buildings People Want to Exclude from Google Street View

      Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those (German) buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove. He then wants to add those photos to Picasa, including GPS coordinates, and in turn re-connect them with Google Maps. Jens believes that for the internet “we must apply the same rules as we do in the real world. Our right to take panoramic snapshots, for instance, or to take photographs in public spaces, both base laws which determine that one may photograph those things that are visible from public streets and places.”

    • Sweden drops warrant for WikiLeaks founder

      “I do not consider there to be any reason to suspect that he has committed rape,” chief prosecutor Eva Finné said in a statement explaining her decision.

      The statement was issued at 4.30pm on Saturday to confirm that Assange was no longer a suspect and is thus no longer required to contact the police.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • RIAA: Google/Verizon deal needs yet another gaping loophole

      Plenty of people are worried that the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal has too many exceptions. The recording industry is worried that it doesn’t have enough.

      In a letter sent today to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet’s tubes. Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of “chaos.”

    • Telenet ISP: One of our customers downloads 2.7TB every month

      Posting on the userbase.be forums, the ISP was kind enough to share data on its top 20 subscribers (with their permission). In the top spot was a user who managed to transfer 2.7TB of data in a single month. 2nd to 5th spots counted 1.9TB, 1.4TB, 1.3TB, and 1TB of data transferred. After that the numbers fall quickly.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • ACTA Round Ten Concludes: Deal May Be One Month Away, Updated Text To Remain Secret

          Round ten of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations in Washington concluded on Friday with countries confirming progress on all fronts and hopes to reach agreement on all remaining substantive issues at the next round in negotiations in Japan in late September. While the joint statement is not yet online, Reuters reports that the U.S. believes the remaining issues – including the U.S. – E.U. divide over geographical indications – could be resolved at the next meeting. The statement repeats earlier assurances about the impact on fundamental rights, cross-border transit of generic medicines, and iPod searching border guards.

Clip of the Day

Ps3 hack by Modchip with Jailbreak [ps3club]


Links 21/8/2010: Wine 1.3.1, Urbi Goes AGPLv3

Posted in News Roundup at 2:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 2 Episode 15

      In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 is going to add gesture support and 11.04 is going to be called the Natty Narwhal. Debian 6.0 has been feature frozen while Oracle sets its sights on Google. Discover how we fared with our Nethack challenge and how we filled the Open Ballot section without an Open Ballot.

    • FLOSS Weekly 131: Vyatta
  • IBM

    • IBM: Innovation is the key driver for CIOs, not Cost

      Remember ten years ago, IBM made a $1 billion bet on Linux, and in so doing, helped create the momentum for Linux in the enterprise data center that we all enjoy today. Back then, IBM concentrated on three areas:

      - Making Linux better – providing contributions to help improve Linux with respect to reliability, availability and serviceability

      - Enabling IBM products – both across major server lines and throughout the IBM middleware portfolio

      - Extending Linux into new opportunity areas – Helping to expanding the total addressable market for Linux (e.g. Real-Time, HPC, SoNAS)

  • Kernel Space

    • DisplayLink Is Already Looking Towards Linux 2.6.37

      The Linux 2.6.36-rc1 kernel was released earlier in the week and while it will still be a couple months until the Linux 2.6.36 kernel will be officially released, the developers behind the open-source DisplayLink graphics driver are already looking forward to the Linux 2.6.37 kernel. This next kernel release that will make it out in early 2011 will bring new features and fixes to this driver that supports many graphics products over USB.

    • Decorate with Linux
    • Graphics Stack

      • Progress On The ATI R600g Gallium3D Driver

        Since our last R600g status report, some of the changes to this driver that will eventually replace the R600 classic Mesa driver include support for new TGSI opcode instructions, segmentation fault fixes, OpenGL occlusion query support, fixed pitch alignment, user-clip plane support, an improved texture format checker, point/sprite rendering support, and various other technical changes. Some of the new instructions supported include POW, COS, SIN, SSG, SEQ, SGT, SNE, FRC, FLR, DDX, DDY, SGE, SLE, TXB, and many more. You get the point.

      • The ATI Evergreen Mesa Code Has Now Landed

        Nearly two hours ago we shared the news that there’s finally open-source 2D/3D/video acceleration for ATI’s Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” family of graphics processors, which is currently the newest and best consumer-grade GPUs from AMD’s GPG unit. At the time though only the xf86-video-ati DDX driver code was publicly pushed into a branch of the driver, but now the 3D portion of the code has publicly landed.

      • Notes from the LSF summit storage track

        LWN readers will have seen our reporting from the Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit (day 1, day 2), held on August 8 and 9 in Boston. Your editor was unable to attend the storage-specific sessions, though, so they were not covered in those articles. Fortunately, James Bottomley took detailed notes, which he has now made available to us. Many thanks to James for all of what follows.

      • How To Configure The AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) File Integrity Scanner For Your Website

        A file integrity scanner is something you need to have. Imagine a hacker placing a backdoor on your web site, or changing your order form to email him a copy of everyone’s credit card while leaving it appear to be functionally normally.

  • Applications

    • IBM Lotus Symphony – Weird but good

      Lotus Symphony is an interesting project. Although somewhat archaic and seemingly outdated, it is a very useful office suite, with many new, modern features on top of an older design.

      The 32-bit only version and the Hardy stamp for the Ubuntu version give an impression that IBM does not place too much focus on this program. And yet, lots of cool and modern options are available in the software, making it quite useful and relevant. It’s a confusing mix of old and new, wrapped in unique.

      Overall, Lotus Symphony performed well. If you don’t mind spending some time getting used to new looks and some non-standard features, the office suite will serve you rather well. It has that deep, corporate tinge that only giants can offer. Well, it’s free, so you’re welcome to try and see for yourself.

      Version 3 is coming soon and it will be based on OpenOffice 3, so you should expect a very decent, very modern office suite, with lots of IBM-specific additions. I believe Lotus Symphony 3 will be a very useful software. But only time will tell.

    • Gmail Voice and Video Chat – Too Little too Late?

      After waiting two years for the service, most Linux users that want video chat capabilities are probably already using Skype or something similar by now. The next few weeks will tell for sure, but this service may not be of much interest to Linux users anymore anyway.

    • Guake drop down terminal

      Drop down terminals were originally inspired by in game consoles like ones found in first person shooters like Counterstrike and Quake. Yes, Guake is just Quake starting with a ‘g’ instead of an ‘q’. Drop down terminals run in the background and can generally be toggled on and off by pressing one of the function keys (F12 by default in Guake). This simplifies life for people that make regular or sporadic use of the command line. Instead of starting a new terminal window or navigating to a currently open one, you can toggle the terminal on, execute the necessary commands, and have it out of your way again by just hitting one key. It really simplifies tasks like compiling code while working on a project and routine administration tasks.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine

      • Wine Announcement

        The Wine development release 1.3.1 is now available.

        What’s new in this release (see below for details):
        – Support for drag & drop between X11 and OLE.
        – New ipconfig.exe builtin tool.
        – Support for favorites in builtin Internet Explorer.
        – Beginnings of a shell Explorer control.
        – A number of DirectDraw code cleanups.
        – Improvements to the calendar control.
        – Various bug fixes.

  • Desktop Environments

    • Xfce

      • Lightweight Linux Desktop Alternative: Xfce

        GNOME and KDE may be the first desktops that come to mind when you think of the Linux desktop, but they’re not the only ones. From the overly minimalistic Rat Poison window manager to the eye candy of the Enlightenment E17 desktop, Linux has just about every type of desktop you can imagine. Want a desktop that’s lean and resource friendly without giving up features? It’s time to take a look at Xfce.

        For many users, the major desktops feel a little bloated. Fast hardware is cheaper than ever, but performance is still king on the Linux desktop. The ideal desktop is somewhere in the middle ground, between overly minimalistic and overly bloated. Xfce is right at the center of the Venn Diagram of features vs. speed. It’s lightning fast and still offers most of the features users have grown accustomed to. The problem? Most new users, and even some experienced Linux users, aren’t familiar with Xfce.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • ASRock Core 100HT NetTop

      Last summer we reviewed the ASRock NetTop ION 330, which was the first Atom-powered NetTop computer that had come out of this vendor known for their affordable motherboards. The NetTop ION 330 combined an Intel Atom 330 CPU with NVIDIA’s ION platform to provide a low-power PC while offering modest computing and graphics capabilities.

    • Hardware manufacturers and the proprietary problem

      This is why I get so frustrated when people quickly dismiss Linux. I don’t have a problem with them preferring Windows, or even passing up the idea of giving Linux a try. But I do find it quite depressing that there’s no appreciation of what’s going on under the surface. I’m not talking about a sudo command, or lines of code. I’m talking about an ethos that standards are there to help consumers, to provide a level playing field for us all.

      Instead, it seems the legwork is being done, and then greedy manufacturers are rubbing their hands with glee as they mess around with said standard in a bid to line their own pockets. It can and should be stopped. But sadly, I fear that not enough people – aside from a quick grumble in a pub – really care that much. For what it’s worth? I do.

    • Mini PC includes dual-core Atom, Ion 2 graphics
    • Video-focused ARM/DSP SoC gains Linux development kit

      ChipWrights announced a Linux application development kit (ADK) for its CW5631 SoC, aimed at low-cost IPTV STBs and IP cameras. Like ChipWrights’ Linux-based CW5631 SDK announced earlier this year, the H264-ready ADK supports the CW5631, which combines a 400MHz ARM9 core, a DSP, and a RISC core.

    • Low-cost PowerQUICC chips offer flexible interconnect options

      A Linux-ready evaluation kit called the MPC830x-KIT is available, containing a single MPC830x carrier card. There are also system-on-modules available for each of the MPC830x devices, and Freescale also offers an MPC8308-RDB reference design board.

      All the evaluation boards and modules are provided with a Linux 2.6 board support package (BSP) that includes optimized drivers to support peripherals, says the company. The BSP is also said to include a quick-start guide and a six-month evaluation license for CodeWarrior development tools.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Exclusive: Dell Thunder prototype preview (video)

          Christmas came early at Engadget HQ this year, as evidenced by the picture above — you’re looking at two Dell Thunder prototype smartphones, each with some surprising quirks, and hints that they might include global HSPA, AWS for the likes of T-Mobile, and maybe even a dash of CDMA support. We’ll warn you ahead of time that these are labeled EVT1 for “engineering verification test” and date back to the April leak, so they’re about as early as you can get — don’t expect the final handset to arrive without some significant differences. Good? Then peek the gallery below, hit the break, and let’s get on with the show.

        • Exclusive: T-Mobile G2 in the wild!

          These shots of a real, live G2 confirm what we’d already suspected from renders: this is basically an Americanized version of the upcoming HTC Vision.

        • Next Version of Android to be Called “Honeycomb”?
        • Android 3.2 Honeycomb to Follow Gingerbread 3?

          Android 2.2, or Froyo, is just now rolling out to smartphones including the Droid 2 and HTC Evo 4G, but the blog TechRadar today is citing “multiple sources” as confirming that the next version of Android will be called Honeycomb, following the dessert-themed monikers of the mobile OS. Prior versions of Android were codenamed Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Froyo.

        • Droid X upgrade to Android 2.2 leaks out

          What we’re looking at here is allegedly the leaked over-the-air update to Froyo that Verizon plans on deploying to Droid X customers in the next few weeks, which means two critical things for customers: it should generally be faster all the way around, and — of course — you’ve got support for Flash, which was a big topic of interest at Motorola’s launch event for the phone a couple months back.

        • Ubuntu ported on Galaxy S
        • Ubuntu ported on Samsung Galaxy S

          It was merely a week back when Coralic, through his blog enlightened how to develop a chroot environment for ARM architecture based processors and run Ubuntu Linux OS.

          A week back Armin Coralic, posted on his blog details on how to create chroot environment for ARM architecture based processors and run Ubuntu Linux OS. However this Ubuntu Linux version is a stripped down form of the same. Later, Coralic posted a step-by-step method of porting Ubuntu on Galaxy S.

        • 7 Best Android Apps for System Administrators

          System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.

        • Will Google Drop a Chromlet on Black Friday?

          If true, the move will fulfill Google’s announcement earlier this year that it would launch Chrome OS tablets in time for the holiday season.

          However, it’s not yet clear how Chrome OS tablets will coexist with those running the Android operating system, which is also offered by Google. Will they be targeted at different markets?

          Also, could Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) lawsuit against Google hamper sales of Chrome tablets?

        • 75 Awesome Android Apps
        • Adobe AIR to arrive on Android later this year

          Adobe has confirmed that it will deliver its cross-platform Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment for Google’s open source Android mobile operating system by the end of this year.

    • Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Urbi Robotic Software Platform Goes Open Source

    Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today.

  • Urbi robotics software open sourced

    Urbi source code is licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).

  • The State of Open Source System Automation

    The number of servers (both physical and virtual) is becoming uncountable. Automation of system administration is a must to handle the deluge; else swarms of sysadmins would be needed to handle all these systems.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Healthcare

  • Project Releases

    • Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta 2 Is Shining
    • The OpenSolaris-Based Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 Released

      Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 is derived from OpenSolaris Build 134, which is roughly what was supposed to be released as OpenSolaris 2010.02, then OpenSolaris 2010.03, and lastly prior to its slow death was just referred to as OpenSolaris 2010.1H. Nexenta CP 3.0 is also carrying various back-ports and other fixes onto the b134 stack.

    • Javascript server Node.js moves to 0.2.0

      Inspired by frameworks such as Ruby’s Event Machine or Python’s Twisted, Node.js avoids thread based networking and moves to an event driven model, where one thread executes all the code as demanded by events, such as the opening of network connections, or the completion of I / O operations. This has the advantage of being memory efficient and avoiding dead-lock issues, as there are no locks. Within Node.js code, HTTP is a first class protocol, with a library designed to allow for the handing of streamed data through the framework.

    • Clojure 1.2: A combination of scripts and functional programming

      The Clojure developers have released version 1.2 of their dynamic programming language. Clojure is one of the youngest programming languages executable on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and has recently been competing for public attention with the increasingly popular Scala language. The Lisp dialect is dynamically “typed” and was developed specifically for the JVM. A general-purpose language, it aims at combining the advantages of script languages with those of multi-threaded programs.

  • Licensing

    • Which Licence is Best for the Future?

      The GNU GPL might seem the obvious answer. After all, the GPL was drawn up specifically to make collaboration work and to create a community based on sharing code. But the experience of the last ten years of open source business has shown that, ironically, the GNU GPL actually allows companies that adopt it to act more, not less, like a traditional closed-source company.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source’s roots in the 19th century

      Wired states that the first instance of open-sourcing occurred in 1839, which is much earlier that most people might think. This progenitive incident also has some basic principles in common with more recent events in the computer field of somewhat dubious distinctions. I will leave those particulars out, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which companies I’m talking about in the events to follow.

      Try to guess which modern examples follow the example set by Louis Daguerre if you want.

      Before Daguerre came along, a permanent photo would take about eight hours to make. At the time, photographers could only make a negative image on a pewter plate. Daguerre worked out a chemical process that reduced this time to mere minutes, and etched out a positive image. Without that process, a significant step in the history of photography might never have happened. So what tips can we glean from Daguerre’s example

Leftovers

  • My Favorite 10 xkcd Comics Part-1
  • Five billionth device about to plug into Internet

    Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.

  • Security/Aggression

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Tech industry holds closed door talks on open internet

      Last week a crowd of about 100 people marched to Google’s headquarters in California to present boxes that they said contained 300,000 signatures upholding the values of net neutrality, a founding principle of the net that states that all web data is treated equally no matter where it comes from.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Should you be able to copyright a shirt?

        On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 co-sponsors — including three Republicans — and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I — well, not I, but someone who can sew — can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.

        We’re used to the logic of copyright. Movies, music and pharmaceuticals all use some form of patent or copyright protection. The idea is simple: If people can’t profit from innovation, they won’t innovate. So to encourage the development of stuff we want, we give the innovators something very valuable — exclusive access to the profit from their innovations. We’ve so bought into the logic that we allow companies to patent human genes.

      • 7 Sources of Free Sounds for Multimedia Projects

        In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students’ presentations. Here are seven tools that your students can use find and or create sounds for their multimedia presentations.

Clip of the Day

Richard M. Stallman Speech DebconfII Indonesia


08.20.10

Links 20/8/2010: PlayStation 3 Allegedly Hacked, MeeGo-based Nokia N9

Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • GNU/Linux Share of Minds

    A recent survey of IT decision-makers leads to the inescapable conclusion that FLOSS on the server will soon take many mission-critical roles that it has not already taken. Competitive forces will do the rest. Business is about making money and if your cost/performance is better with GNU/Linux you have the potential to compete well against others who cling to the old ways. About the only thing soon left to the monopoly will be managing its own clients. FLOSS can do everything else much better. Eventually the last barrier will fall, acceptance of that other OS on the client as the standard.

  • PlayStation 3 Security Foiled by Jailbreak USB Stick?

    Sony’s PlayStation 3 was long popular with the homebrew and tech-savvy gamer crowd, in part because Sony initially supported running Linux on the console. However, Sony removed Linux capability in a firmware update earlier this year, allegedly to staunch game and content piracy, and since then PlayStation 3 security has been garnering more than a little attention from enthusiasts and console modders eager to get back inside the console.

  • Rumor: Playstation 3 Has Been Jailbroken

    Hopefully Playstation 3 users won’t lose more functionalities (like Linux) because of this.

  • Sony PS3 gets jailbroken to run Linux

    According to PSX Scene a bunch of open source hardware hackers have released a dongle called PS Jailbreak that will turn the PS3 back into a Linux machine.

  • Poll: One in five plan to buy Apple Mac

    The remaining 7.7 percent answered ‘Linux system’.

    “I’ve been using Linux for too long. I can see no good reason to switch to Windows,” commented octal.

  • Desktop

    • Dell, Let Me Help You With the Maths

      but it took in only $2.9 billion for consumer PCs. Imagine if those PCs had shipped with GNU/Linux and they had been able to pocket another $50-$100 per PC. That would have been another $100-$200 million revenue. Compare that to a $21 million loss.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Google

  • Kernel Space

    • The 2010 Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit, day 2

      The summit was widely seen as a successful event, and the participation of the memory management community was welcomed. So there will be a joint summit again for storage, filesystem, and memory management developers next year. It could happen as soon as early 2011; the participants would like to move the event back to the (northern) spring, and waiting for 18 months for the next gathering seemed like too long.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Open-Source 2D, 3D For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series GPUs

        AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn’t yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration.

        The ATI Radeon HD 5000 series family launched back in September of last year with the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards, which was followed by the launch of other GPUs like the Radeon HD 5750, Radeon HD 5770, and Radeon HD 5970. Following those product milestones, in December there was the release of some Evergreen shader documentation and by this February, there was finally Evergreen KMS support for utilizing kernel mode-setting and other basic functionality with your new ATI Radeon hardware. This initial KMS support was merged into the Linux 2.6.34 kernel, but it went without any X-Video or 2D EXA acceleration support. In April there was another AMD code drop for Evergreen and it implemented the command processor, interrupts, and graphics initialization support along with providing new microcode for these ASICs.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Choosing a Distribution of GNU/Linux

      3.

      There are many more factors than 7 that could have been tested. Updates, local services, games, etc. all may affect choices. Installing and trying things out from several distros is an option users of that other OS lack. Installing using a package manager is cool. It’s fast and you use the same tool to install the OS as the applications. Be sure to visit Distrowatch.com to help choose your distro.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Pursuing Certification For RHEL 6, Hypervisor

        Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.

      • GARM Technologies Partners with Cloud Linux Inc.

        Cloud Linux Inc., a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today announced that GARM Technologies, a hosting provider, will add CloudLinux to its shared hosting infrastructure. The company says that GARM Technologies specialize in shared and VPS hosting and selected CloudLinux for its new Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology that will deliver substantial performance improvements to its hosting customers.

      • Support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux extended by 3 years

        Red Hat has added an additional 3 years to support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) via its new “Extended Life Cycle Support” (ELS). Available as a paid subscription, the added package prolongs the support of the Linux distribution for corporate customers from seven to ten years; this of particular interest to customers who are currently still using RHEL3, which was released in October 2003, as the regular support for this distribution will expire at the end of October.

      • Oppenheimer Reiterates Outperform Rating on Red Hat (RHT)

        Oppenheimer is out with a research report this morning, where it reiterates its Outperform rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT); it has a $40.00 price target on the stock.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Massive Changes Coming to Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ Installer

          Proposed welcome screen looks pretty, readable and non-intimidating. Thats more like it. As a long time Ubuntu user, I really know how far these changes can help a newbie trying his luck in the new found Ubuntu world.

        • Ubuntu’s SPARC & IA64 Ports Have Been Killed

          A few months back we reported that the IA64 and SPARC versions of Ubuntu were in trouble and would be decommissioned if no individual(s) were to step-up and maintain these ports of Ubuntu Linux for these architectures that are much less popular and common than x86 and x86_64 hardware. Well, there still is no one backing the Intel IA64 and Sun SPARC versions of Ubuntu Linux so they are being dropped completely.

        • Canonical Teaches Ubuntu to Phone Home Every Day

          No user-specific data is sent, Phoronix notes; rather, the package reportedly transmits only the operating system version, the machine product name and a counter.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 Release Schedule

          The release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will be released at the end of April 2011.

        • Reasons to switch to Ubuntu from Microsoft Windows

          It’s hard to say why features are left the same or barely upgraded, but it is most likely done to familiarize the general public with Microsoft Windows itself. Interestingly enough, it comes in many forms and with different features, and the price seems to always be somewhere in the clouds, large price to pay for something so stale.

          Perhaps one of the worst features of Microsoft Windows are the fact that users are extremely bound by computing law, even if they haven’t noticed it because of customizable features. For example, Microsoft Windows cannot match the customizing abilities of Mac and Ubuntu, and it never will.

          One should find it hard to believe that developers would even consider working with Microsoft Windows to create new applications and games if it wasn’t for its popularity. The operating system itself is extremely unstable, one rouge application could crash the whole system or at least freeze the screen.

        • Canonical discontinues Itanium and SPARC support in Ubuntu

          Ubuntu 10.10, code-named Maverick Meerkat, will not be ported to the Itanium and SPARC platforms. The Ubuntu developers were already dissatisfied with the quality of the two ports in the recent 10.04 LTS release, because the two processor platforms have been without a dedicated maintainer for some time.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Unison Ultra Tiny Linux OS Now Available for Actel SmartFusion Devices

      Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) and RoweBots today announced the immediate availability of Unison, an ultra tiny Linux® compatible OS for SmartFusion™ devices. Developers now have the option for Linux-based embedded design when using SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGAs. With continued broadening of its ecosystem, Actel continues to provide ease of adoption of SmartFusion devices for embedded designers.

    • ChipWrights Stacks Linux Application Development Kit with Major Enhancements for IPTV Set-Top Boxes and IP Cameras

      ChipWrights, Inc.’part of AD Group’New Linux Application Development Kit for the CW5631 System-on-Chip provides the components to develop low-cost IPTV set-top boxes and IP cameras and significantly improve time to market. The Kit’based on the OpenEmbedded build system’leverages thousands of open source packages.

    • Phones

      • Programming for Androids with App Inventor

        Other open source mobile platforms are available, including Maemo on the Nokia N900 and the LiMo platform. Palm’s WebOS is also worth keeping an eye on, which is Linux based even if closed source. That said, none of these make programming quite so easy as Google have just done for Android.

      • Nokia/MeeGo

      • Android

        • Symbian popularity drops as Android advances

          “The software giant will have a difficult time maintaining its market share above 5 [per cent] as the launching of its new Windows Phone 7 OS has been delayed to the fourth quarter and sales of Windows Mobile smartphones [are] still showing no signs of rebound.”

          We have hand it to Digitimes for showing such diplomacy. A more frank version would be that the Vole is sinking without a trace, Windows Phone 7 will be late and nobody wants its current crop of phones, but then again not everyone displays our lack of tact and sensitivity.

        • Android App Roundup: 75 of the Best Mobile Linux Downloads

          Unlike the rigidly controlled Apple App Store, the Android Marketplace is a bit freewheeling. It can be hard to tell the gold from the dross. To help you find the gems, here’s a list of 75 of the best apps the Android Marketplace has to offer.

        • Google’s Tablet to Run Android or Chrome OS?

          When Google first briefed the media last November on its plans to help spawn a new generation of Chrome OS-powered netbooks, the company said the first set of devices would be released this fall.

          Despite some analyst’s skepticism that the effort is on track, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), as recently as last week, said it expects Chrome OS netbooks to be available later this year.

        • Acer may delay tablet PC launch for another quarter to wait for Android 3.0

          Acer’s ARM/Android-based tablet PC is expected to be delayed to the first quarter of 2011, from the fourth quarter of 2010, as the company plans to wait until Google launches Android 3.0, which will feature support for larger display resolutions, according to sources from notebook players.

    • Tablets

      • Google Chrome OS tablet headed for Verizon?

        HTC is building a Chrome OS tablet for Google, set for a Verizon launch on Nov. 26, an industry report claims. Meanwhile, Pandigital released its second seven-inch Android-based e-reader tablet, with more memory than before plus a smaller, lighter design.

      • Google targeting Apple iPad with Chrome tablet?

        Google Android was always going to be the heart of many Linux-based iPad like devices. That’s not news. What is news is that Google and Verizon appear to be working together to create a Chrome operating system-based tablet.

        According to a report from the Download Squad, HTC is building the Chrome OS tablet. The device will be sold in partnership with Verizon starting on November 26th. That date is already engraved in every retailer’s heart as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and usually the biggest shopping day of the year.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Waiting out FLOSS

    Some proprietary software businesses assume that FLOSS projects/businesses will die from lack of income. They expect they can buy up the projects and convert them to proprietary products or kill them. They don’t get FLOSS. It’s the licences that keep FLOSS free, not the price. FLOSS can be forked and escapes the trap. The current suit by Oracle to capitalize on Java or to kill it will fail both because there is no legal basis for the suit and because even if Java is killed, FLOSS can work around the problem. If Oracle wishes to become a patent troll, its days are numbered as everyone will know it is risky to do business with them. They cannot sue the world as SCOG found out.

  • Ready to be an open source contributor but don’t know where to start?

    OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don’t know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for “bite-size bugs,” the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla: Firefox Security Bug Won’t Fool Users

        A bug in the Firefox browser that can be used to bypass an alert for obfuscated URLs is unlikely to trick users, according to Mozilla.

      • Firefox 4 beta 4 adds hardware acceleration

        Mozilla hopes to release its fourth beta of Firefox 4 on Monday, adding hardware-accelerated graphics for some Windows users but leaving it turned off by default.

        Also coming is a major user interface change called tab sets, formerly known as tab candy.

  • Databases

    • CUBRID vs. MySQL: SSD Performance Test Results

      The test confirmed that TPS levels of CUBRID and MySQL database systems increase on SSD equipped machines. During the I/O Bound workload CUBRID had 4.2 times increase in TPS, while MySQL had 2.8 fold improvement.

  • Oracle

    • Oracle’s anti-OSS stance

      The next to fall victim was the PostgreSQL database. Although not owned by Oracle, the open source database software is a competitor to MySQL, now owned by Oracle. Sun Microsystems was contributing servers for the development of PostgreSQL, but at the end of July Oracle shut these down, leaving PostgreSQL work in limbo, and raising further questions about Oracle’s commitment to open source.

    • Is Oracle building its own software stack?

      I begin to wonder if Oracle is beginning to build its own stack. What brings this to mind is the announcement by Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, that Oracle wants to give companies access to a world where data centers have become “service centers.”

      Oracle has long had many of the parts: an operating system, Unbreakable Linux, and now Solaris; a DBMS, of course; and with the acquisition of Sun, Java and all the middleware you could ever want.

    • Is Oracle Taking OpenOffice.org Closed-Source?

      I have written many articles in the past about how much I love OpenOffice.org. In fact OpenOffice is one of the applications that first gave me the confidence to switch to GNU/Linux six years ago. Today I downloaded and installed the latest stable version of OpenOffice, version 3.2.1. This is the best version of OpenOffice that I have ever used from a technical standpoint. However, there were a few things that I noticed that gave me great reason for concern. Based on what I saw, I have serious doubts as to whether OpenOffice.org will continue to be free software/open source in the distant future. Oracle seems to be allowing forces that could be seen as hostile influence, or at least interact with, the OpenOffice community. Perhaps more disturbingly, they appear to be trying to distance OpenOffice from the free software license under which it has propagated for so many years.

    • Is Oracle going after Google because Ellison is buddies with Jobs?

      I can think of all kinds of reasons why Oracle is suing Google over its use of its Java IP (intellectual property) in Android. Making money from its Java patents strikes me and most experts as the most likely reason. But, I’ve also heard suggested, time after time, that the real reason is that Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO is buddies with Steve Jobs, aka Mr. Apple and he wanted to help Apple fight Android.

      Could that be the case? Here’s the logic that supporters of this theory use. First, Google and Apple are competiting head-to-head in the smartphone space. The iPhone certainly has more users, but the Android phone family is quickly catching up.

  • Healthcare

    • VA sees problems in open-source development for VistA

      The Veterans Affairs Department sees advantages in using open-source software to modernize its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, but it anticipates several problems if it takes that step.

      The VA issued a request for information Aug. 11 asking for industry to deal with anticipated concerns related to open-source development for VistA.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The State of Free Software

      * Free Software has come from being ignored and ridiculed to being required by everyone. The world of IT now depends on Free Software.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Launchpad programming with Linux

      Mike wrote a guide for programming MSP430 microcontrollers using the TI Launchpad under Linux. It makes use of the open source compiler MSPGCC rather than using a code-limited proprietary IDE.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Coder cooks up Java-built Flash Player

      A version of Flash is being built using Java, two years after Adobe Systems opened the player’s closed formats to external inspection.

      Programmer Joa Ebert has demonstrated a Java build of Flash executing SWF. The player is apparently called JITB, and it was recently unveiled at an event in San Francisco.

    • Venezuelan press ban on crime pictures

      The leading Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional printed the word “censored” across a white space on its front page today.

Leftovers

  • Connecticut AG Conducts E-Book Price Fixing Investigation
  • The Government’s License To Steal

    Almost none. This weekend, the Indianapolis Star ran a front-page article looking at where all the forfeiture money is going. I’d like to link to it, but in an apparent effort to keep the paper as irrelevant as possible, the Star has lately adopted a policy of not putting its most important pieces online. But as it turns out, Indiana attorney Paul Ogden actually beat the paper to the story by several weeks. Last month, Ogden put up a post on his blog that came to many of the same conclusions the Star published this weekend. Here’s what Ogden found:

    * Of Indiana’s 92 counties, just five have paid any forfeiture money into the school fund over the last two years. Three of those made just one payment. One county made a single payment of $84.50. Only one county could arguably be seen as complying with the law: Wayne County made 18 payments totalling $38,835.56.
    * The total amount of forfeiture money paid into the account from all 92 Indiana counties over the two-year period was just $95,509.72.
    * To put that figure into perspective, Ogden notes that attorney Christopher Gambill—the private attorney who, as I noted in my article, handles civil forfeiture cases for three Indiana counties and argued the case for Putnam County to keep Anthony Smelley’s money—made $113,145.67 in contingency fees off just a single forfeiture case.

  • Superman Lawyer Claims Warner Bros. Lawsuit Is A SLAPP

    Earlier this year, we wrote about the odd decision of Warner Bros. studio to personally sue Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who successfully represented the heirs of the creators of Superman to win back some of their copyright, by using copyright’s termination rules. Toberoff is making a career of this, and has been helping numerous other content creators start the process of reclaiming rights using the termination process — which makes him somewhat… disliked in the entertainment industry. Still, to sue him personally seemed quite extreme. As we noted at the time, the lawsuit seemed to be based on the idea that Toberoff is a jerk and a savvy business person. As we noted at the time, that doesn’t appear to be illegal.

  • OMG! My Job is Threatened

    I was horrified to read, “The days of DIY system administration are rapidly coming to a close.” All those lovely GNU tools about to be replaced by automatons. Sigh. Change is a given in IT. Fortunately my system is small enough my home-made configuration works well and it will take some effort to implement puppet or one of the other automatic systems.

  • Autotune The News Becomes A Billboard Hit

    From a cultural perspective, though, this whole story again shows how culture is changing in very interesting and powerful ways. When we talk about things like “remixing” and “mashups,” we tend to hear from a chorus of folks who brush off such things as mere copying and not worthy of being considered art in itself. But there’s a lot more to it than that. What makes culture culture is the shared experiences around that work. This song is not only musically interesting, but also calls attention to a horrible incident that happened as well. And, again, some will brush it off as being meaningless, but the power with which it has interested so many people is not something that should be ignored.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Council’s CCTV Spy car on double yellows again

      Medway Council’s CCTV spy car has once again been captured parked on double yellow lines.

      The all-seeing camera car, one of two operated by the council, was parked in a cul-de-sac outside Blockbuster’s Chatham town centre store, off Best Street, on Saturday, July 31.

    • Ex-soldier forbidden from cutting grass around mother’s grave

      Derek Evans started tending the cemetery where his mother is buried after noticing the grass needed cutting.

      The Army pensioner bought a £300 lawnmower and within a year was helping spruce up the gravesides for more than 70 grateful owners.

    • Ciggy Busters

      Gutsy students from Medway have been snatching shoppers’ cigarettes, in an effort to persuade them to kick the habit.

    • Feds: No charges in Philadelphia school laptop-spying case

      Federal prosecutors will not file charges against a school district or its employees over the use of software to remotely monitor students.

      U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

    • US combat forces pull out of Iraq

      Sources say that the final section of combat troops in Iraq, the United States Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade, based at Fort Lewis, Washington, have made their way across the border between Iraq and Kuwait, formally ending combat operations within Iraq.

    • Iris Scanners Create the Most Secure City in the World. Welcome, Big Brother

      Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) announced today that it is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.” In a partnership with Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, with a population of more than a million — GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners. That will help law enforcement revolutionize the way we live — not to mention marketers.

    • Facebook login page still leaks sensitive info

      Facebook’s login system continues to spill information that can be helpful to phishers, social engineers and other miscreants attempting to scam the more than 500 million active users of the social networking site.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Biotech Beets Banned

      Last week, a federal district court judge in northern California issued an injunction against planting biotech sugar beets next year. Why? He accepted the activist argument that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must issue a full environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act before permitting the improved sugar beets to be grown. An EIS is required when a federal government agency engages in actions that might be “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”

    • Rising temperatures reducing ability of plants to absorb carbon, study warns

      Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world’s plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said today.

      Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain’s annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

    • Environment needs Muslim support

      In early March, just days after the Kingdom of Morocco announced plans for a landmark environmental charter called “the first commitment of its kind in Africa and the Arab world”, Mohamed Attaoui was sentenced to two years in prison in the Atlas mountains. His crime? Speaking out against illegal logging of shrinking cedar forests and corruption among the ranks of the forest service and local government officials.

    • Activists set up Climate Camp at Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters

      Hundreds of climate activists have occupied land at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters in protest at its multi-billion pound loans to the oil and mining industries, including firms involved in exploiting Canadian tar sands.

      The protesters cut through a perimeter fence on Wednesday night, erecting scores of tents and marquees on landscaped meadows a few hundred metres from the headquarters building.

    • BP oil spill: scientists find giant plume of droplets ‘missed’ by official account

      A 22-mile plume of droplets from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico undermines claim that oil has degraded

  • Finance

    • Barclays settles ‘data stripping to beat sanctions’ case

      Barclays – which is settling criminal charges of breaking US sanctions by effecting wire transfers with Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma – was accused of stripping out identifying data in the transfers, it has emerged. The bank is awaiting court approval for the $298 million (£190 million) settlement.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • San Francisco’s Free “Organic Biosolids Compost” is Toxic Sludge, and Not Good For You!

      Independent testing commissioned by the Food Rights Network found toxic contaminants in San Francisco’s sewage sludge “compost.” In the sludge product given away free to gardeners from 2007 to March 4, 2010, are contaminants with endocrine-disruptive properties including PBDE flame retardants, nonylphenol detergent breakdown products, and the antibacterial agent triclosan. The independent tests were conducted for the Food Rights Network by Dr. Robert C. Hale of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

    • USA Today Drinks the Tea

      USA Today’s article emphasizes the decentralized nature of the Tea Party movement, reinforcing the idea that it is solely a grassroots movement. That has been far from the case. USA Today doesn’t mention that, unlike other “grassroots movements,” the Tea Party benefits from major media sponsorship by Fox News, and receives financial backing from corporate lobbyists. The article also fails to describe the many factions of the movement and their origins, which are confusing to many: the Tea Party Patriots (arguably the least well funded and most “grassroots” faction of the movement); the for-profit Tea Party Nation (a domestic for-profit business entity that sells baubles like bejeweled tea bags for $89.95 apiece) and the Tea Party Express, which is basically a professional PR campaign sponsored by FreedomWorks, which is headed by former Republican Majority Leader-turned-lobbyist Dick Armey.

    • Big Farmers Use PR to Boost Their Image

      Documentary movies about the American food industry, like “Food Inc.,” “Fast Food Nation”, “King Corn” and “Supersize Me” for the first time gave millions of people a hard look at modern food production practices, including distasteful realities like factory farming. As a result, more people have become skeptical of modern farming practices and mindful about where their food comes from. But big farmers are starting to fight back.

    • Target Gets “Flashmobbed” for Supporting Right-Winger

      Last month, it was revealed that Target contributed 150,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of conservative, anti-gay candidate Tom Emmer. Agit-pop activists have something to say about that: “Target ain’t people so why should they be, allowed to play around with our democracy!” Watch:

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Google rattles Germany

      Google Inc.’s plans to launch its “Street View” mapping service in 20 German cities by year’s end has ignited a debate in Germany over how to reconcile the country’s cherished privacy laws with the realities of the digital age.

    • Ten ways to protect your privacy online

      9) wi-fi – if you’ve got wi-fi at home, give it a good password (see above). Otherwise it allows intruders in with few barriers to overcome.

    • Julian Assange wins Sam Adams Award for Integrity

      The award is judged by a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.

    • Michael Moore praises suspected WikiLeaks source

      Filmmaker Michael Moore is praising an Army private suspected of releasing classified war records to WikiLeaks and said he would contribute to his defense.

    • North Korea Twitter account banned in South Korea

      South Korea has blocked access to the official North Korea Twitter account, a matter of days after the secretive state started posting messages.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pirate Bay Typo Squatter Applies For US Trademark On Pirate Bay As Well

      It should be no surprise that various malicious typo squatters have targeted The Pirate Bay with fake sites that try to install malware, however Torrentfreak looked a bit deeper and found that one of the typo squatters, a company called BladeBook, appears to be trying to trademark the actual name, as well. Apparently, BladeBook’s Craig Pratka first filed for the trademark the same day that it was announced that The Pirate Bay had been sold to GGF, a deal that eventually fell apart (as did the initial trademark application).

    • Copyrights

      • The High Cost of Copyright:

        In my classes in IP law and copyright, I sometimes have difficulty conveying to students the “cost” side of the copyright regime. That is, though we often make reference to implementing the right copyright “balance” in our law, I think students (and others, for that matter) are often uncertain as to exactly what is being balanced against what. The benefits of a copyright regime are pretty obvious — if you give people a property interest in their creations, they’ll be able to work out market arrangements to receive compensation for them; knowing that in advance, they’ll create more works of art than they otherwise would absent that protection, and we’re all better off as a result. That’s easy enough to see. What’s harder to see is why that principle should ever be limited — if protection yields more creative works, why won’t more protection yield more creative works (to the benefit of all)? Why not make copyright perpetual, and copyright rights as broad and as deep as possible — won’t that get us even more creative works to enjoy? [That’s a viewpoint that many in Congress apparently share, as copyright protection has indeed gotten longer and longer and deeper and broader over the past 50 years or so — helped along, I suppose, by those stacked bundles of unmarked hundred dollar bills left in Congressional anterooms by representatives of the “copyright industries” — hey, don’t sue me, that’s just a joke).

      • Shameful Moments In American History’s Copyright Censorship

        Here is one of the nation’s most prominent television critics at the time effectively admitting that a single copyright suit prevented countless of creative comedic works from being produced at the time – a shameful fact that is surely ignored in most law school and history classes today.

      • Grooveshark Pulled From Apple App Store Amid Record Label Complaints

        After several months of battling App Store reviewers, the on-demand music service finally released its official iOS app last week. The reason for the app’s removal? According to the Grooveshark blog, Apple received a takedown notice from Universal Music Group UK.

        In February, UMG filed a lawsuit against Grooveshark over the service’s use of IP. Grooveshark has also battled — and settled — with the music label EMI.

      • Professor Says News Should Get Special 24 Hour Protections So No Aggregator Can Link To It

        We’ve seen all sorts of really bizarre and downright dangerous plans to change copyright law to favor newspapers, but a new one, posted at Henry Blodget’s Business Insider may be the most ridiculous of all. It starts off with a bunch of really bad assumptions, and then suggests special copyright protections for publications against aggregators, including that no one could repost (even fair use reposting) any content from a daily publication for 24-hours or a week for weekly publications:

        A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.

      • Las Vegas Review-Journal Thinks Suing Sites Over Copyright Will Mean More People Link To It

        Amusingly, the article also has the Righthaven folks admitting some “kinks” that need “to be worked out,” such as the time it sued the very source for an article (apparently, this has happened more than once). In the one case that we wrote about, after that came to light, Righthaven dropped the lawsuit. I’m guessing that after some more lawyers start fighting back against Righthaven, it’s going to discover quite a few more “kinks” in its system.

      • Rocker John Mellencamp likens Internet to A-bomb

        Rocker John Mellencamp said on Tuesday that the Internet was the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb, although new technology could paradoxically delay the inevitable demise of rock ‘n’ roll.

      • Felicia Day’s Success With The Guild Highlights The Importance Of Authenticity With A Community

        This is a key point that often gets lost in business model discussions. When we talk about different offerings, it’s amazing how much people discount the importance of authenticity as a scarcity. We see it all the time with companies who want to sponsor something, and then have tremendous level of control — losing all of the authenticity and, with it, much of the value (and, eventually, audience). It’s nice to see a situation where a company (in this case, Microsoft) properly recognized when not to get too involved.

      • Our shrinking commons

        “Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures.”

        What’s with the many movies we watch at home launching with this threat? You can’t even fast-forward past it! And what’s with day-care centers being threatened for decorating with Mickey Mouse images? And club proprietors who must caution open-mike artists against strumming published songs? Are rockers who fold in a few seconds from some popular work, and visual artists who quote commercial imagery, really thieves?

        It wasn’t always that way. Such cultural expression was, for centuries past, sharing, not theft. We’ve moved radically far in a long process of intellectual enclosure, privatizing and shutting down a vigorous cultural commons.

        Lewis Hyde, MacArthur Fellow and professor at Kenyon and Harvard, offers a brilliant and absorbing account of the development of restrictive and enduring private ownership of shared experience. “Common as Air” develops, in Hyde’s own words, “a model and defense of our ‘cultural commons,’ that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that we continue to create.”

Clip of the Day

Microsoft The Embarrasing moments


Links 20/8/2010: Google Chat Now on GNU/Linux, GNOME 2.32 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Supporting Multi-Touch In Non-Multi-Touch Linux Apps

    After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.

  • Desktop

    • [compiz] The final piece of the puzzle
    • LLVMpipe & Compiz 0.9 Still Don’t Play Along

      LLVMpipe is an especially interesting Gallium3D driver since it allows accelerating the state trackers atop any modern CPU, but for any close to decent level of performance when using OpenGL you need a hefty multi-core CPU (here’s some LLVMpipe benchmarks just from last week) that supports the latest SSE4 instructions as well. While some OpenGL games will run with LLVMpipe and the performance of this driver that leverages the Low-Level Virtual Machine is much faster and better than Mesa’s old software rasterizer or the Gallium3D Softpipe driver, Compiz nor the GNOME Shell (and most other compositing window managers) yet work with this driver.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Linux Outlaws 163 – The Frostbite Empire

      In this special episode we interview blind Linux user Jonathan Nadeau about his company Frostbite Systems that sells blind-optimised computers, his podcast network Frostbite Media and much more…

    • Episode 0x2D:Updated Discussion

      Karen and Bradley discuss the enforcement activities of the Software Freedom Conservancy, recent conferences and medical devices.

    • Podcast 81 Mona Interview (GentooApologetin)

      Interview with longtime Gentoo user Mona, third place finisher in the recent 2010 Gentoo screenshot contest. If you would prefer to read the interview, Mona provided a transcript below.

    • Podcast Season 2 Episode 15

      In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 is going to add gesture support and 11.04 is going to be called the Natty Narwhal. Debian 6.0 has been feature frozen while Oracle sets its sights on Google. Discover how we fared with our Nethack challenge and how we filled the Open Ballot section without an Open Ballot.

  • Google

    • Google now supporting voice and video chat on Linux

      Google now supporting voice and video chat on Linux

      Google has finally updated their web based talk service to support voice and video chat on Linux.

    • Google’s App Engine now multi-tenant capable

      Further details about the release can be found in the release notes. Version 1.3.6 of the Google App Engine SDK is available to download from Google Code.

    • Chrome Web Store Slated For October Launch, Google Taking A Mere 5% Cut Of Revenue

      Gaming portal 1Up.com has detailed a presentation given by Google developer advocates Mark DeLoura and Michael Mahemoff at GDC Europe that contains new details about the Chrome Web Store — a feature first announced at Google I/O that will allow users to purchase web applications from their Chrome web browsers. During their talk, the Google employees revealed that the Web Store is going to (probably) launch in October, and they gave more details on how the web store’s payments would work.

    • Android Developers Bemoan Paid App Limits

      Android developers can distribute their software for free in 46 countries, but they can only sell apps in 13 countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.

  • Kernel Space

    • The IRMOS realtime scheduler

      In the context of the IRMOS European Project (Interactive Real-Time Applications on Service-Oriented Infrastructures), a new realtime scheduler for Linux has been developed by the Real-Time Systems Laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of this new scheduler, describe its features and how it can be practically used, provide a few details about the implemented algorithms, and gathering feedback by the community about possible improvements.

    • Graphics Stack

      • ATI’s 2D Performance With X.Org Server 1.9

        With the imminent release of X.Org Server 1.9, last week we delivered benchmarks of Intel’s 2D driver performance with X.Org Server 1.9. In those tests we found Intel’s UXA (UMA Acceleration Architecture) performance only changed a bit — for either better or worse — with the updated X Server, but today we are looking at the 2D EXA performance using ATI Radeon hardware using this soon-to-be-released X Server.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Ingo Malchow
      • KDE 4.5 Trades Revolution for Evolution

        By the standards of previous releases in the KDE 4 series, KDE 4.5 is tame. It has few new applications, and introduces no new technologies. Yet with its combination of small innovations and interface improvements, KDE 4.5 still manages to be a release worth installing. Although it does not try to expand the concept of the desktop, it does make KDE easier to use in dozens of small and satisfying ways.

        Released August 10, KDE 4.5 is already packaged for many major distributions, including Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, although in some cases you will have to look in the developmental repositories rather than the main ones. Source code is also available from the project. Those who want to try it before installing can download the latest CD from openSUSE’s KDE Four Live site.

      • The KDE 4.5 Semantic Desktop

        My last article I spoke about the new KDE Activities features Search and Launch Containment Activity (see my article “Using the KDE 4.5 Search and Launch Containment Activity“). This is the first visible sign of KDE’s use of the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop. Nepomuk is a system that uses metadata throughout the desktop to aid in file search and peer to peer collaboration. So far the project has yet to reach its full potential (as it is quite new to the desktop).

        Strigi, on the other hand, is the desktop search daemon that runs on the KDE desktop. It is these two components that help to create the KDE 4.5 Semantic Desktop (a desktop who’s data is easily shared between components). In this article I will introduce you to these two components and how you interact with them to make your KDE desktop as fluid as possible.

      • Working Upstream.

        On the website of an Austrian (no kangaroos!) newspaper, I read an interview with Canonical’s Jono Bacon. In this interview, Jono talks about the process of developing central components of the desktop inside Canonical. The process is basically that Canonical’s design department, Ayatana develops components. When they are finished, they’re offered for inclusion into GNOME, which was not a successful in all cases yet. According to Jono this is “working upstream”, explaining that in this context Ayatana is the upstream. GNOME is seen as a provider of components, building blocks for Ubuntu’s user experience.

        The definition Jono handles of upstream development is quite different from how it works for me. I can speak of personal and professional experience in this context, as I have been working quite a lot on central components of the Plasma Desktop (and Netbook as well). I have done this work both, as a voluntary contributor in my Free time (pun intended), and continue to do so in my working hours for open-slx. open-slx happens to sell and support Linux deskop operating systems.

      • Ubuntu One – The KDE Way

        Over the past couple of months I had the great opportunity of taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code. I moved out to bring Ubuntu One to the KDE desktop and I think I was rather successful with it, now all I need to do is find someone who is willing to maintain it … ;-) Now that Google Summer of Code is over I will continue focusing my efforts on Kubuntu and general distribution development which is the reason I would very much like to find someone who is willing to maintain it.

      • How to Install KDE 4.5

        For other Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and other operating systems, you should check the official websites, wikis, announcement sections of forums, and mailing lists to see if KDE 4.5 will be included in their repositories and/or future releases.

      • The KDE 4.5 Notification Area
      • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-08-18

        This week on a very steamy episode of KDEMU we have Lydia Pintscher, GSoC and Season of KDE cat herder.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 2.32 Beta 1 Is Here

        The first beta of the upcoming GNOME 2.32 has landed to give early adopters, distro builders, developers and generally curious people a taste of things to come.

        GNOME 2.32 Beta 1, technically GNOME 2.31.90, is somewhat of a new development since the next release of the popular desktop environment was supposed to be the all-powerful GNOME 3.0.

      • The GNOME Developers Put Out The First SeedKit Release

        The GNOME developers have announced their first public release (v0.1) of SeedKit, consisting of both the GNOME SeedKit Viewer and the SeedKit library. GNOME’s SeedKit is designed to blend web technologies (namely HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) into the GNOME desktop by allowing native user-interfaces to be written in these web technologies. SeedKit leverages GTK+, WebKit, and Seed to lower the barrier to creating new user-interfaces for the GNOME desktop. SeedKit was inspired by Palm’s WebOS SDK and Mozilla’s JetPack.

  • Distributions

    • Untangle Gateway- An open source solution for blocking spam, spyware, viruses, adware and unwanted content on the network
    • Reviews

      • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 2 Linux Mint LXDE

        Day Two. Our weapon of choice: Linux Mint 9 LXDE.

        On the face of it Linux Mint LXDE is just a tweaked Lubuntu, but there is more to it than that.

        It features (many) more software packages on install, codecs pre-installed, and some “heavier” packages like Thunderbird.

      • Arch Linux – Minimal, Lightweight, Flexible & Easy to Use Linux Distribution

        Arch Linux is a lightweight, flexible and simple Linux Distribution which is targeted at competent GNU/Linux users. Its Development focuses on a balance of minimalism, elegance, code correctness and modernity. It provides a minimal environment upon installation, (no GUI), already compiled and optimized for i686/x86-64 architectures. We already discussed about a lot of Linux Distros and also How to create your own Linux Distribution.

      • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 4 – Sabayon Five-Oh LXDE

        Today we give Sabayon Five-Oh a run. Three of the four distros we reviewed this week have been using LXDE as its desktop environment.

        Sabayon is the first distro we are having a look at that have not been Ubuntu based or a variant of Ubuntu.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva S.A. – Financial and Strategic Analysis Review – new company profile and analysis released

        Mandriva S.A. Mandriva is an online retailer of Linux software products. The company is engaged in the development and distribution operations of Mandriva Linux products, software applications, storage devices and drives, USB speakers, support and training applications and goodies. Mandriva’s main products are Mandriva directory server, Linbox rescue server, corporate server 4, Pulse 2 and corporate desktop. The company also
        provides online download of its software products. The company caters to corporate enterprises, government organizations, and educational and technical institutions. The company has operations across 140 countries, and offices across France, Brazil and the U.S.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Pursuing Certification For RHEL 6, Hypervisor

        Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.

        The Linux vendor has entered into an agreement with Atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4, according to a Red Hat blog post.

      • Red Hat (RHT) Price Soars Above the 50-Day Moving Average

        Red Hat shares have crossed above the 50-day moving average on lighter than usual volume. The crossing of the stock price above the moving average may signal the beginning of a bullish trend. Today, shares of RHT rose $0.86(+2.77%) to $31.88. RHT traded between the range of $31.20 – $32.08. Today’s trading activities for Red Hat stock may be a sign that the shares will continue to head higher in the foreseeable future assuming the moving average has upward slope.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle Support Launched

        Today, the Red Hat team is excited to launch Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is an optional subscription offering that provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for longer than its standard seven-year life cycle.

        With Extended Life Cycle Support customers can receive limited software maintenance and technical support services for an additional three years, extending the life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a full ten years. The seven-year life cycle of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release generally applies to major versions, so, for example, the standard life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 runs from October 2003, when it was released, to October 2010. For customers who purchase ELS, which is sold as an add-on to an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, the support life cycle can be extended to October 2013.

      • Fedora

        • Droid X and Fedora.

          I’d heard really good things about the new generation Android phones, especially their playing nice with Linux hosts. So I decided it was high time I tried something new rather than simply queuing up for a new and spiffier prison cell (iPhone). Based on the reviews of service in Consumer Reports, Verizon was far and away the leader in customer satisfaction. I decided to concentrate on their offerings, and was thrilled to find the new Droid X (info: Flash site) was now shipping, albeit with a few weeks’ wait.

        • fedoracommunity.org website design progressing

          So a while back I talked a bit about the fedoracommunity.org website project that the Fedora Websites team has been working on, including the vision behind it and the work that had been done on it up to that point.

        • Fedora 14 Alpha is go!

          As John posted last night, Fedora 14 Alpha was declared ready for release next week. Although there was a one-week slip to handle the fact that our blocker list wasn’t clear, Fedora developers and testers in the community have worked hard together both to resolve the remaining issues and make sure that our Alpha would pass the release criteria. There were a number of developers who hopped in to fix things quickly to yield package builds that would clear the runway, so thanks to all of you guys.

    • Debian Family

      • Where do Debian Developers Come From?

        In a study not likely to cause controversy, Christian Perrier has published the results of his analysis of the number of Debian developers per country. He ran the analysis last year for the first time, so one can see the progress or recession in the last year. No matter where you call home, the numbers are quite interesting.

        The land that gave the world Linus Torvald also gives the world the most Debian developers per million population. Ranked number one last year as well, Finland is home to 3.92 active developers per one million souls. In second place is Switzerland with 2.83 per million. New Zealand holds a very respectable third place with 2.51 per million. The United Kingdom beats out the United States with their 1.03 developers per million to .53. In last place is the Ukraine, China, and India. Making their first showing this year is Ecuador with one new developer or .07 developers per million people. Sweden, who ranked third last year, fell to sixth this year. Ireland has gained three new developers bringing their total to nine which allows them to hold ninth place, up from 13.

      • Debian Project News – August 9th, 2010

        Welcome to this year’s ninth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

        * The Debian project Release Team announces an official Freeze
        * Annual Debian Developer Conference 2010 ended
        * A free (as in speech) Debian book in the making
        * Second alpha version for “Squeeze”-based Debian Live images
        * Net-installation CD images with firmware available
        * Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.0 alpha0 test release
        * ZFS support in unstable on kFreeBSD ports
        * Debian-Accessibility is using Blends web sentinel
        * Debian GIS project will release Blends metapackages in “Squeeze”
        * DebiChem project will release Blends metapackages in “Squeeze”
        * DebConf11 logo contest
        * When should services started by init.d scripts be operational?
        * Different statistics about Debian
        * Building all files from source

      • Debian: Yesterday’s Distribution?

        For another thing, while some distributions are more concerned than others about ease of use, today what increasingly determines that factor is not distributions themselves so much as the desktop that is in use. Using GNOME or KDE on Debian is not so different than using GNOME or KDE on Ubuntu, despite Ubuntu’s recent usability efforts.

      • Developers with feet in Debian and Ubuntu

        This is a list of people who are in ubuntu-dev or ubuntu-core-dev AND have their key in the Debian keyring, it’s not an indicator of how active that person may or may not be. Here are the scripts they used if you’re interested in working on this sort of thing.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 206

          In This Issue

          * Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!
          * Feature Freeze in place for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
          * Making Ubuntu More Accessible
          * Talking about Ubuntu Studio with Scott Lavender, Project Lead for Ubuntu Studio
          * Another Heated Discussion In the Ubuntu Community
          * Ubuntu Stats
          * LoCo News
          * Launchpad News
          * This week In Design – 13 August 2010
          * Finding The Ubuntu Font Design
          * How are your users feeling? Example from Rhythmbox
          * An Update to the Ubuntu Light Themes
          * Awesome Work Others Have Done
          * Hugs For Bugs!
          * Can We Count Users Without Uniquely Identifying Them?
          * Revving up the Ubuntu Manual Project for Maverick
          * Behind MOTU Relaunches As Behind The Circle
          * In The Press
          * In The Blogosphere
          * Linux Foundation Makes Enterprise Open Source Boring
          * KDE’s New Releases Make a Splash
          * LinuxCon Grapples With Challenges, From Mobile To Multicore
          * Fotoxx — the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You’ve Never Heard Of
          * Zenoss Releases 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey Report
          * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
          * Upcoming Meetings and Events
          * Updates and Security
          * UWN Sneak Peek
          * And Much Much More!

        • Reasons to Love Ubuntu
        • Ubuntu 11.04 Codename “Natty Narwhal” Release Schedule
        • Calling my shot

          I predict that Ubuntu 11.10 will be named “Ostentatious Ocelot”.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Peppermint Ice review

            Does Peppermint Ice, the new cloud-oriented desktop distro, have what it takes to do for desktops what Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks?

Free Software/Open Source

  • Be A Community Manager

    Some communities put a great deal of emphasis on the developers/testers group with limited time for users while others engage the users at a higher rate than developers/testers and also increase time on champions. I believe in solution B as an engaged user community significantly increases the feedback for developers and allows the project to expand into a significant force in the industry. I also believe that champions come from the user group and the more champions a community has the more successful it is.

  • Open-source cuts through intell community’s red tape

    Intelligence analysts will soon have a new idea- and decision-management tool. Called Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, the software is an open-source version of a proprietary program developed for the intelligence community.

    ACH allows analysts to start with a great deal of data and find those data points that support or undermine various hypotheses, but it is a single-user system. Matthew Burton, a Web strategy consultant and former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, has tried for three years to develop a collaborative version so that multiple analysts could study the same hypotheses simultaneously, but he has been stymied by incompatibility with proprietary software specifications and licensing issues.

  • Open Source Contributor Agreements: Some Examples

    The first part of this article explained the purpose and scope of Contributor Agreements in open source projects. This article presents an overview of some Contributor Agreements that are used in the community.

    Contributor Agreements come in all shape and forms, ranging from full-fledged Contributor License Agreements (CLA) that have to be signed to informal consent to some set of rules. This article will take a look at a number of different agreements in order to show that community norms can vary widely.

  • Performance vs Readability: the biggest dilemma

    Let’s say you want to start a FLOSS project.
    How many people did that up to now? Many.
    But there is a problem, or better, a conflict of goals.

    In one hand, you have the need of making your code fast enough. Which task is even more complex if you are using an interpreted language (for reasons out of the scope of this blog post). On the other hand (:D) there is the very important requirement of keeping your code human readable.
    Languages, in general, have several “syntax levels” basing on developer’s skills. Newbies tend to stick to what is the standard way of writing, say, a for loop, while more skilled people are able to exploit all the potential of the language by using very exotic “code constructs”. Again, I don’t want to get into any particular language here, I just want to explain the trade-off that a developer, especially a FLOSS one has to accept when writing software

  • Free Interaction Design for your FLOSS Project

    Now, I know there are tons of you out there who are ready for interaction design help and are definitely willing to work with designers, because I hear from you all the time! There’s not enough interaction designers in the FLOSS community, and I believe programs like Matt’s that engage up-and-coming designers in the FLOSS community early on will help build up our interaction designer population. They provide a wonderful mutual benefit – the design students get to work on real-life projects, not just throw-away designs that are abandoned forever at the end of the semester – and the developers involved get the design help they desire but have such a hard time finding because of the dearth of designers. Help provide these students a great experience in interacting with our community, and maybe they’ll stick around!

  • Reaching Out To Which Community?

    That non-technical user is the future of FOSS. If we don’t reach out to that person and get them using FOSS, it’s only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop is synonymous with OS/2. Yes, I acknowledge that Linux powers the Internet, and most of the search traffic and the most e-commerce and most supercomputers, etc . . . but that’s not enough. People have to know they are using Linux and FOSS and that means it has to power their desktop. In the absence of an awesome Linux desktop marketing machine (Canonical is good, but they’ve got a ways to go before they can match the awesome marketing of Microsoft, or that up and comer, Apple, it’s up to us. The community. We’ve got to speak with something resembling a unified voice, delivering a consistent, inclusive message.

  • Reducing Code Risks with Open Source
  • Ready to be an open source contributor but don’t know where to start?

    In early 2009, as the stories of many websites begin, a few college friends were considering what kind of project they might start together. In this particular case, the result was OpenHatch.

    OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don’t know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for “bite-size bugs,” the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4: One generation ahead of everyone else speedwise
      • Mozilla Sees You Using Chrome Alongside Firefox

        Blizzard also notes that the next major version of Firefox, 4.0, will be “a generation ahead” in terms of Javascript speed, but does it really matter if it’s so much faster than Chrome. Every iteration of benchmark tests between the two seems to show them neck-and-neck. As Blizzard notes many people are doing, I’m going to stick with both open source browsers, which, at this point, are defining browser innovation.

      • The popularity of Firefox around the world

        Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

        Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

  • Oracle

    • When open source sells out.

      An open source project is generally conceived and implemented by a single person or small group. This conceiver and controller of the open source project has the most knowledge of the project. It is their vision which determines the direction of the project and they have the ultimate say in what contributions are accepted. When an open source project is sold out it is generally with their blessing and they continue working on the project under the mantle of the new owner.

    • OpenOffice by the book

      Called Open The Door, the book is not so much a manual for the office suite as it is a guide to making the most of OpenOffice.org. So while it includes advice on installing and using OpenOffice.org on Windows and Mac OS X machines, it is also focused on helping users make effective use of OpenOffice.

    • Illumos begins diverging from OpenSolaris

      According to Garret D’Amore, Illumos project leader, the recently launched derivative is beginning to diverge from OpenSolaris. D’Amore has noted in his blog that he believes the last commit to Oracle’s public repository for ON, the core of OpenSolaris, has been made. According to a leaked memo revealed earlier this week, Oracle are ceasing open development of Solaris and will discontinue OpenSolaris, migrating users to Solaris Express 11.

    • The OpenSolaris-Based Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 Released

      Last week we found out that Oracle is killing off OpenSolaris and that there will no be OpenSolaris 2010.xx release as we’ve been waiting on for months, their Solaris code-base will be developed behind closed-doors, and only after the enterprise Solaris release will there be a “Solaris Express” release intended as the replacement to OpenSolaris. Though derived from the OpenSolaris code-base there has been a few community derivative operating systems such as Nexenta, StormOS (based off of Nexenta Core Platform but shipping as a desktop OS), and BeleniX. While OpenSolaris may now be dead, Nexenta at least is still living and today they’re out with their Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 release.

    • Oracle loses another DTrace creator

      Leventhal said, in a blog posting, that at Sun he had found himself “surrounded by superlative engineers” and that he felt lucky to have worked with Cantrill and Shapiro on DTrace. Most recently, Leventhal had been working on Fishworks, Sun’s Solaris based storage system technology. Leventhal does not say what he will be doing next, only that he is “off to look for my next remarkable place and time beyond the walls of Oracle”. It is possible he could follow in Cantrill’s footsteps; within days of leaving, it was announced he had become Vice President of Engineering at Joyent, one of the companies involved in the OpenSolaris derivative Illumos which was launched at the beginning of August.

    • Oracle vs Google: Triple Damage!
  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Eben Moglen on what it takes to keep defending FOSS

      Eben Moglen’s keynote address at LinuxCon last week, “Doing What it Takes: Current Legal Issues in Defending FOSS,” called for a strategic shift in the free software movement. Moglen, the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and one of the principal drafters of the GPLv3, said the economy of sharing and the economy of ownership are not mutually hostile, but mutually reinforcing, then outlined three steps for ensuring the continued coexistence between the free software and business communities. For those who missed Moglen’s speech, here is a summary of his ideas on what it will take to ensure the health of the FOSS ecosystem.

  • Government

    • Spook developer speaks! An interview with Matthew Burton

      I’ve never seen it in action, but DHS’s Virtual USA project sounds remarkable. On top of using open source software to build it, the objective of the project is to break another government taboo: sharing information with other agencies and levels of government. Having been an intelligence analyst who relied a lot on mapping tools and was constantly frustrated by the inability to share geographic data even within your own building, it’s apparent that if Virtual USA delivers, it’s going to dramatically change how first responders work.

  • Programming

    • Vim editor learns Python 3

      More than two years since the 7.2 release, Vim creator Bram Moolenaar has announced the arrival of version 7.3 of his open source text editor. Vim, an acronym for “Vi iMproved”, was originally created for the Amiga computer as an extended version of the vi editor, with several additional features aimed at editing source code.

Leftovers

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Russian Scholar Warns Of ‘Secret’ U.S. Climate Change Weapon

      As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

      In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.”

    • Earth’s Overdraft Notice
    • Why has extreme weather failed to heat up climate debate?
    • Scientists dispute White House claim that spilled BP oil has vanished

      Earlier this month, government scientists reported that about 75% of the oil had been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf.

      But University of South Florida scientists, returning from a 10-day research voyage, said they found oil on the ocean floor in the DeSoto canyon, a prime spawning ground for fish far to the east of BP’s rogue oil well. Preliminary results suggested that oil was getting into the phytoplankton, the microscopic plants at the bottom of the Gulf food chain.

  • Finance

    • The Revolving Door Between Goldman Sachs and the Obama Administration

      At a time when Congressional hearings are set to call testimony from some Goldman Sachs employees, it is vital to understand how widespread that institution’s ties are to the Obama administration. This diary shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and Goldman created institutions (like the Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution), employees and influence peddlers in the Obama administration.

    • UPDATE: The Revolving Door Between Goldman Sachs and the Obama Administration
    • Wonkbook: GM announces IPO; FinReg covers banker pay; small biz losing jobs; the tax cuts and you

      In what is due to be among the biggest stock offerings in history, GM has announced its initial public offering after being bailed out by the federal government. You’ll be hearing a lot about this as the administration tries to sell its record this fall. Meanwhile, a little-noticed provision in FinReg will allow the federal regulators to limit executive pay if they so choose; the bulk of private-sector job losses are coming from small businesses; a handy interactive graphic allows you to see how different approaches to the expiring Bush tax cuts would affect you; a handy paper will help you figure out the Fannie and Freddie debate; and a handy cover of some 90s alt-rock will start your morning right.

    • New rules on student debt shouldn’t be limited to for-profit colleges

      The Obama administration wants for-profit career colleges to better prepare students for gainful employment and to improve debt-repayment rates. The government is threatening to pull access to federal student aid for colleges that fail to show progress.

      Under the administration’s proposed rules, if a program graduated a large share of students with excessive debt compared with potential earnings in their chosen fields, it would be required to disclose this information to current and prospective students.

    • Wall Street reform gives regulators power over executive pay

      The pay decisions made by regulators will apply not only to banks but also to brokerages, credit unions, investment advisers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and other financial firms with $1 billion or more in assets.

    • SEC will discuss ‘proxy access’ rules for shareholders to nominate directors

      The SEC has considered permitting so-called proxy access since 2003, only to back away in the face of opposition from companies. Public pension funds, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers), say the change is needed to make directors more accountable to investors rather than rubber stamps for management.

    • Judge criticises US over ‘soft’ fine for Barclays BankJudge criticises US over ‘soft’ fine for Barclays Bank

      A judge has attacked the US government for striking a “sweetheart deal” with Barclays to settle criminal charges that the British bank flouted international sanctions by doing clandestine business with Iran, Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Burma.

      At a court hearing in Washington yesterday, judge Emmet Sullivan refused to rubber-stamp an agreement under which Barclays consented to pay $298m to settle charges that its staff deliberately concealed transactions with financial institutions in regimes frozen out by US foreign policy.

    • Prosecutors under fire from US judge over leniency for Barclays

      Barclays Barclays told a US court that the bank has tightened its procedures and improved staff training. Photograph Andy Rain/EPA

      A US judge reluctantly accepted a $298m (£191m) fine from Barclays today to settle criminal charges of flouting international sanctions, despite criticising federal prosecutors for using “kid gloves” by failing to throw the book at specific executives within the British bank.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Net Neutrality: Threat or Menace?

      My personal take on Net Neutrality is that ISPs should treat all packets equally. I do not like the idea of being forced to host all my videos on YouTube or another huge site that can afford to make special deals with broadband providers such as Brighthouse, my local cable TV monopoly, instead of on my friend Joe’s Globaltap hosting service.

    • U.S. Representatives Urge Net Neutrality

Clip of the Day

KDE Plasma Mobile Tablet edition


08.19.10

Links 19/8/2010: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, Many New Events

Posted in News Roundup at 6:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Innocuous Network Solutions Web Widget Served Malware

      Growsmartbusiness.com is running a standard LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) stack and was hit with the Trojan Horse/PHP backdoor attack r57shell.

    • Windows in the cloud: long boot times, other difficulties not seen with Linux

      Running Windows servers in the Amazon cloud may have just gotten a lot easier, but a project by the management vendor RightScale to improve Windows support shows that people who use the Microsoft operating system in cloud networks face difficulties not seen in the Linux world.

    • The right to know – and to condemn to death

      Some news stories can be misleading, such as a recent one about the next version of Linux. It was reported that the “next Linux kernel has been released with a tidy little warning from Linus Torvalds for code committers to pay more attention and be more careful”.

      Many read this to mean that the next Linux version has problems. The actual story and comments from Torvalds was concerning the way people are dropping items into the Linux-next bucket which is for the next version(s) after the latest release. He and Andrew Morton have been annoyed that some of the items are not very stable and when it sits in that pile, people expect to see it in the next release. Linux-next is supposed to be for items ready for the next merge, not items that still need a lot of work before they can be. It pays to read a little deeper into some news stories.

    • Kernel Progress Entering New Era of Innovation

      The last 12 months in Linux kernel development may have been less than exciting, but that may be just a breather before what’s coming up next, according to kernel developer and Linux Weekly News editor Jon Corbet.

      Last week at LinuxCon, Corbet delivered what has become a ubiquitous fixture in many Linux gatherings: The Kernel Report, a highly detailed and informative look at the current state of the Linux kernel, and what’s on the way. Corbet’s unique position as journalist and kernel developer lends the Kernel Report a sweeping scope over many facets of kernel development.

      Corbet is in strong company. 2,800 developers worked on the last five kernel releases, 16.6 percent of them volunteers. Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and IBM filled the remaining top five contributors’ slots, respectively.

  • Instructionals/Technical

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Accenture predicts open source adoption, but does it “join in” too?

        Technology consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture used its appearance at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston earlier this summer to talk about mainstream adoption of open source. As such, the company says it is continuing its own investment in open source solutions and that it predicts the systems integration services around open source is a £4 billion market.

        [...]

        According to the Red Hat corporate blog channel, “Accenture is already investing in open source solutions like AMOS, which is built on Red Hat solutions. Accenture continues to invest in open source through its Innovation Centre for Open Source, which leverages Red Hat Solution Stacks, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat has worked with Accenture to create the Accenture SOA Reference Architecture, Accenture Foundation Platform for Java, Accenture Mobility Operated Services, and the Accenture Public Service Platform.”

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS Is Available for Download

          This first maintenance release brings to its dedicated users a lot of security updates and corrections, all with a single goal: to keep Ubuntu 10.04 LTS a stable and reliable Linux distribution!

          Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS fixes some installation bugs, various upgrade issues, improves support for many hardware components, and fixes annoying desktop bugs.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Taking the Android plunge

          The technology in question is the T-Mobile Pulse Mini smart (sic) phone, which runs the Android operating system. A smart phone with an Open Source operating system, that has a Remember The Milk app which means I can Get Things Done, all for under four ponies? What could possibly go wrong?

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Software Soaring to Success

    Linux server operating system vendors like Red Hat and even Novell could be heading for bumper sales over the next 12 months. Almost 40 percent of organizations are planning on migrating mission-critical workloads to open source software in that time frame.

    That’s Accenture’s line anyway, and perhaps the mega-consulting firm has good reason for saying so: It asked 300 private and public sector organizations with annual revenues in excess of $500 million about their plans for open source software, and announced the results earlier this month. “What we are seeing is a coming of age of open source, ” said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology architect chappie.

  • Keep it simple, stupid

    Koroth says that their company firmly believes in the power and strength of Open Source. Worldwide inventions have taken place because of the Open Source movement, he says. Further, it is simply because of Open Source technologies that people like him can start a company, and now be able to break even. “We will give back to that technology. People ask us if it isn’t an issue that people may be downloading Fedena and using it in their own name. But I believe that if the technology is good, they will come back, they will return to the source for more!”

  • Events

    • Linux Security Summit 2010 – Wrapup

      The first Linux Security Summit (LSS) was held last Monday, 9th August in Boston, in conjunction with LinuxCon 2010 North America.

      This event has its roots in the Linux security development community which emerged in the early 2000s, following the development of LSM and with the incorporation of a wide range of new security features into Linux. We’d previously met, as a community, in OLS BoF sessions, various conference hallway tracks, and at project-specific events such as the SELinux Symposium. There have also been very successful security mini-summits at LCA in 2008 and 2009, and a double security track at the 2009 Plumbers Conference.

    • New Zealand Open Source Awards open for nominations and judges announced

      The panel includes two New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) Presidents, current President Rachel Hamilton-Williams and past-President Don Christie; Foo Camp founder & author Nat Torkington; WebFund Chairman and tohunga rorohiko, Dave Moskovitz; Richard Wyles, Director of Flexible Learning Network/Mahara; and Telecom Mobile Engineer and gadgets and geeks evangelist Amber Craig.

    • David Farrar joins Open Source Awards judging panel
    • OpenOffice.org Celebrates Tenth Anniversary at OOoCon in Budapest
  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome Dev 6.0.495.0 Released, Chrome 7.0 Coming Right Up
    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla eases fears over phishy URL alert

        Developers of the open-source browser have known of the URL warning bypass since at least June, when it was reported here. Under most circumstances, Firefox will display a warning when users click on links that contain addresses that have been obfuscated to hide their true destination. But when users encounter encoded URLs in inline frames embedded in a webpage, no such alert is delivered.

  • Oracle

    • Oracle sticks a fork in Illumos, OpenSolaris community

      The problem the OpenSolaris open source community has faced in the last several years is that important parts of the code distributed with OpenSolaris is closed sourced. But when he launched Illumos, D’Amore said progress has been made in some key areas of the Solaris closed source code. However, critical work in certain closed areas still needs to be done, such as the NFS/CIFS lock manager, full kdf module/daemon, trusted extensions and other drivers.

    • Shuttleworth: Oracle dooms its prospects in open source business

      Oracle’s ill-advised patent infringement case against Google will backfire, and hurt its prospects in the growing open source business market.

      That, according to Ubuntu creator and Linux giant Mark Shuttleworth, is the natural outcome of Oracle’s case against the Linux-based Android operating system.

    • Larry Ellison Goes Postal On Fortune Writer

      Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on a feisty emailing tear, in the wake of his pal Mark Hurd’s ouster as CEO of HP.

      First, Ellison emailed the New York Times to tell them that HP’s decision to kneecap Hurd after a sex scandal was the worst HR move since “idiots” on Apple’s board fired Steve Jobs long ago.

      That prompted Fortune writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt to point out that Oracle seemingly had different ethical standards than HP, noting that Ellison had “a long history of office dalliances and at least one sexual harassment lawsuit (decided in his favor).”

  • Healthcare

    • VA moves toward open source for electronic health record system

      The Veterans Affairs Department asked industry, government agencies and academic researchers last week for insights on using open source software as a key component of a modernized electronic heath record system, a move that could have serious implications for the Obama administration’s initiative for adoption of digital medical files nationwide.

    • Open VistA for AHLTA?

      Last week the Military Health System detailed plans to replace its AHLTA electronic health record system — loathed by its clinicians — with a new system based on commercial products.

      At about the same time, the Veterans Affairs Department issued a request for information seeking comments on developing a new version of its VistA electronic health record system based on open source software and asked, “How would other federal agencies participate or benefit from an open source approach to VistA EHR?”

  • Government

    • WhiteHouse.gov Expands Open Source Efforts

      The White House has jumped aboard the open source bandwagon. And we’re not talking about some cleverly named Silicon Valley upstart. This is the real deal.

      In late April, White House blogger Dave Cole announced plans to release some of the custom code the White House has developed.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Web Could Be Stylized by New W3C Font Platform

      The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Fonts Working Group has launched version 1.0 of the The Web Open File Format (WOFF). This format will provide a platform for open source and commercial providers of fonts to make their creations easily available across the Web, according to W3C fonts activity lead Chris Lilley.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Investors Chide Michael Dell

      Dell’s shareholders delivered a sharp rebuke of Michael S. Dell, the company’s founder and chief executive, when a fourth of the investors withheld support of Mr. Dell in a recent vote.

      In a regulatory filing released Tuesday, Dell disclosed that about 378 million of 1.5 billion votes opposed Mr. Dell’s continued presence on the company’s board. Dell held its annual meeting with shareholders earlier in the month.

    • Michael Dell given an unsubtle hint by displeased shareholders
    • How Two Former Ringtone Giants Are Faring As That Market Crumbles

      Last week, on the eve of Jamba’s party, News Corp. confirmed rumors of its intentions to sell off the mobile division, and Fox Mobile, like other ringtone providers, are left scrambling to find new business models as the clock runs down out their traditional revenue streams.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Your fears confirmed: “up to” broadband speeds are bogus

      Broadband providers in the US have long hawked their wares in “up to” terms. You know—”up to” 10Mbps, where “up to” sits like a tiny pebble beside the huge font size of the raw number.

      In reality, no one gets these speeds. That’s not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report (PDF) shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that “up to” speed they had hoped to achieve.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Negotiators confirm ACTA not really a “counterfeiting” treaty

          What’s in a name? Not much, when it comes to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. As Luc Devigne, the top EU negotiator on ACTA made clear today, he has no intention of limiting ACTA to, you know, its name.

          ACTA negotiators gathered today for an informal luncheon at which some outsiders were invited, including several civil society folks. According to American University’s Mike Palmedo, who attended the DC event and took notes later sent to Ars, “[Devine] asked more than once how you could have an ‘IP Enforcement’ treaty and not include patents—and dismissed suggestions that ACTA was specifically an ‘Anti-Counterfeiting’ treaty rather than a broader enforcement treaty.” (Australia still objects strongly to including patents in ACTA, but the EU wants them included.)

Clip of the Day

digiKam for KDE4 : new drawing sketch search tool


08.18.10

Links 18/8/2010: PC-BSD 8.1 Reviewed, Vim 7.3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Mini-Education Summit LinuxCon Boston 2010

      I spent most of last week at LinuxCon helping Spot at the Fedora booth. However, the day before the main conference, Sebastian Dziallas organized a Education Mini-Summit to take place in conjunction with LinuxCon.

      I gave a talk on the Inkscape class Red Hat has done plus some other related initiatives, including one we are planning for next fall with the Free Software Foundation. The slides are available here.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 8.1 review

      PC-BSD 8.1 was released on July 20, 2010, roughly five months after version 8.0 was released. Some of the suggestions made in the review of PC-BSD 8.0 have been carried out in this latest release. In fact, the changes were made within one month of that review being published. It is an encouraging example of how some distro developers respond to suggestions (or critical reviews).

      While I still think that PC-BSD is not yet ready for the masses, it is coming along very well. This review will offer another detailed look at some of the good and bad sides of this FreeBSD-based distribution, with the attendant recommendations and suggestions for improvement.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking

      WikiFactCheck wants not only to crowdsource, but also to centralize, the fact-checking enterprise, aggregating other efforts and creating a framework so extensive that it can also attempt to be comprehensive. There’s a niche, Lih believes, for a fact-checking site that’s determinedly non-niche. Wikipedia, he points out, is ultimately “a great aggregator”; and much of WikiFactCheck’s value could similarly be, he says, to catalog the results of other fact-checking outfits “and just be a meta-site.” Think Rotten Tomatoes — simple, summative, unapologetically derivative — for truth-claims.

Leftovers

  • NY Times Tests A Paywall With A Regional Paper

    The idea is to hide certain local content behind the paywall — which will charge a whopping $14.95 per month to access. Now, looking around, it certainly does appear that the Telegram & Gazette is really the only major news source in Worcester (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find anything else significant). However, with various local news operations springing up all over the place, it certainly seems like it could make sense for one of them to quickly target Worcester and get a nice jump in traffic.

  • Blizzard Wins $88 Million in Private Server Lawsuit

    Back in October, Blizzard Entertainment filed a lawsuit against Alyson Reeves and her company Scapegaming, for violating the end user license agreement of World of Warcraft by setting up a private server for her own profit. On Thursday, the California Central District Court ruled in favor of the game maker and ordered Scapegaming to pay back “$3,053,339 of inappropriate profits, $63,600 of attorney’s fees, and $85,478,600 of statutory damages.”

    What, you ask, is a private server, how do you make a profit off of it, and why is it against the EULA? Allow me to explain.

  • Court Says California Mall Can’t Ban Customers From Talking To Each Other

    The Westfield Galleria in Roseville, California takes the comfort of its patrons seriously–so seriously, in fact, that it wants them to shut up and focus on shopping, or else ask for permission first if they want to talk about any topic that’s not mall related. Last week, the state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal found that the rule violated the state’s constitution, so now mall shoppers can gab as much as they want to each other.

  • Health

    • Can you hear me now? More teens can’t

      The authors of the report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. eliminated ear infections and exposure to loud noises in the environment as causes for the hearing loss, but could not identify a specific cause. A recent Australian study, however, found a 70% increased risk of hearing loss associated with the use of headphones to listen to portable music, and many experts suspect they are the primary cause of hearing loss in teens.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Infected Widget Compromises Parked Domains

      Researchers at Armorize Technologies reported that as many as 5 million parked domains belonging to customers of Network Solutions fell victim to an infected widget and were serving up a side order of malware.

    • Hackers: ‘ColdFusion bug more serious than Adobe says’

      A recently patched vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion application server may be more serious than previously thought following the public release of exploit code and blog posts claiming it can be used to take full control of systems running the software.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Will this summer of extremes be a wake-up call?

      This summer has been one of weather-related extremes in Russia, Pakistan, China, Europe, the Arctic – you name it. But does this have anything to do with global warming, and are human emissions to blame?

    • Vedanta’s Indian mining project under threat

      In a strongly worded report, a four-member committee set up by India’s environment ministry accused Vedanta Alumina, a subsidiary of the London-listed firm, of violating forest conservation and environment protection regulations and displaying “total contempt for the law”. The report also noted “an appalling degree of collusion” by local government officials with Vedanta.

    • Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief

      According to the UN Environment Programme, the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. Around 15% of mammal species and 11% of bird species are classified as threatened with extinction.

  • Finance

    • US Treasury is Running on Fumes

      With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Big Brother: Obama Demands Access to Internet Records, in Secret, and Without Court Review

      The Obama administration is seeking authority from Congress that would compel internet service providers (ISPs) to turn over records of an individual’s internet activity for use in secretive FBI probes.

      In another instance where Americans are urged to trust their political minders, The Washington Post reported last month that “the administration wants to add just four words–’electronic communication transactional records’–to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval.”

    • Chinese dissident Yu Jie tells of jail threat for criticising PM Wen Jiabao

      The political pressure on writers in China is growing, an outspoken critic of the government said today, as his highly sensitive book about the country’s premier went on sale in Hong Kong.

      Yu Jie said state security had warned him last month not to proceed with the release of his book, China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao.

    • Thailand blocking WikiLeaks — official

      Thai authorities have used their emergency powers to block domestic access to the WikiLeaks whistleblower website on security grounds, a government official said Wednesday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Clip of the Day

LXDE development tree visualized with Gource


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