11.27.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Philadelphia-area start-up Telikin has started taking orders for a “crash-resistant” computer with an 18.6-inch touchscreen and a custom Linux stack aimed at computer novices. Apparently based on the MSI Wind Top AE1920 all-in-one PC, the $700 Telikin computer incorporates a dual-core 1.8GHz CPU, 2GB of SDRAM, a 320GB hard disk drive, and four USB drives.
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Server
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This list of 10 free, essential tools is an amalgam of tools for all sizes of companies and networks. The range of tools covered here are generally cross-platform (i.e., they run on multiple OSes) but all are extremely useful to the system administrator, network administrator and first-level support personnel. While all of these tools are free to download and use in your network without payment of any kind to their developers or maintainers, not all are open source. The 10 essential tools listed here, in no particular order, are from various sources and represent the very best in tools currently used in large and small enterprises alike.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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It’s November, and all around the world aspiring novelists (including this reporter) have turned their attention to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). In the spirit of choosing the right tools for the job, I decided to look for an application more suited to fiction than my trusty Vim, and found FocusWriter. It’s certainly not a replacement for Vim, but it’s a suitable word processor for prose.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The first Developer Conference for the Free Software Virtual Globe Marble ended successfully on November 7. Almost a dozen developers from the Marble community (the “Marbleheads”) met for a weekend sprint at the basysKom office in Nuremberg.
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The weekend before Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, Nokia invited thirteen members of the KDE community to get together in their offices in that same city for a developer sprint. The topic was Ovi and KDE, specifically how they can work together to widen adoption for both communities, both from a software development perspective and from a purely collaborative effort perspective. The developers were also invited to the main Qt Developer Days (DevDays) event too.
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In January the KDE community is set to ship major new versions of the Plasma workspaces, the KDE applications and the KDE development frameworks. As usual, a series of beta versions and release candidates is released in the months leading up to the release day, with the purpose of letting users test the changes in the upcoming versions and help us find and fix bugs and regressions.
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The KDE project has announced the release of version 1.1 of ownCloud, an open, web-based storage application which runs on a user’s personal server. According to KDE contributor and openCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, thanks to a growing development team, the 1.1 update includes a variety of bug fixes, as well as new features.
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New Releases
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We are happy to announce the immediate availability of the collection of Salix Xfce 13.1.2 iso images. These include both 32-bit and 64-bit standard installation images, as well as a 32-bit live image, that can be used with an optical disk or a usb drive. Both standard and live images can be used for installing Salix Xfce to your harddrive, using a text-mode or a graphical installer respectively. As with all Salix releases, installation can be performed in one of three different modes, “full”, “basic” and “core”. The live image includes, among others, a persistence wizard, that will let the user keep changes, including extra installed packages, personalization etc, between different live sessions. LiveClone is another tool specific to the live image; using it users will be able to easily roll their own custom version of the Salix Xfce Live, that they will be able to install directly to a usb drive or create a new iso image for burning to a CD. These custom images will have all the features the official live image has, including the ability to install the customized system to a harddrive!
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Today we are going to release Core 42 which is a bugfix release and we strongly recommend to install this as soon as possible.
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Rocks v5.4 (Maverick) is released for Linux on the i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures.
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Besides that ZevenOS 3.0 also has a lot of new stuff in the Desktop area.
Thunar has gained a new contextsensitive entry to convert images.
The deskbar was updated to have a freedesktop.org compliant dynamic menu which is editable with standard tools just like alacarte. Besides that the deskbar gained a lot of contextual menus which allow you to have access to commonly used actions, like change time & date or mute the volume. The quicklaunch items now also have a context menu which allows you to quickly access files & folder bookmarks, webbrowser bookmarks mediaplayer actions and e-mail creation. The deskbar also gained a speed and ressource improvement.
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Macpup 511 is the latest and is based on puppylinux 5.1.1,”Lucid Puppy”, An official woof build of puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages.MP511 contains all the apps from Lucid puppy .Extra apps like Firefox, Opera or Gimp are available for easy download from the Quickpet App on the ibar or the Puppy Package Manager.MP511 also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.0 Beta and E17 version 52995 where compiled and installed from source..Please note that not all the options in the E17 system shutdown menu work with puppy linux.That is why the exit menu was added.This menu will also allow you to change window managers to Jwm or Icewm.
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Few sentences of the changes:
* Brand-new exterior and interior, because I took the liberty of use the testing repo’s.
* The E17 at least not alpha, but beta 
. Of course, there are still some annoying bugs, such as that if you want to start an application, which would need administrator rights, something incomprehensible error message we see, that stops the program starts. However, just write in the Sakura (terminal emulator) the smart-root –gui command, and simply launch the package installer or Control Center with the drakconf command, if you have the problem. The Live installer works fine. Of course, this is a non-permanent nature of the error occurs, but often.
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And again it’s NetBSD time. The long awaited new version of the LiveCD has finally arrived. It is freshly built from the NetBSD 5.1 sources, which is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 branch. It includes many bugfixes and contains the latest packages from pkgsrc. As always, it uses Xorg from base and the xfce4 window manager.
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We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.6. This release has Fedora 14, 4K sector driver support, and support for USB 2 and 192/24 USB DACs. The main goal of this release was to get VortexBox on a more current release of Fedora. This has many benefits including faster boot time, faster files transfers, and better hardware compatibility.
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The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.1 is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
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NexentaStor Community Edition 3.0.4 is now available. The major change is inclusion of many fixes to OpenSolaris b134 from later releases, and appliance enhancements.
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Debian Family
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After Fedora 14 proved a non-starter on this Lenovo, I could have gone straight to Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10. But I wanted to get back to Debian, a fast, stable (even though Squeeze isn’t technically Stable, capital “S,” it’s plenty stable, small “s.”)
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next major Ubuntu release cycle is slowly coming alive. Ubuntu 11.04 codenamed Natty Narwhal is going to feature some of Ubuntu’s most significant changes ever. All in all, Ubuntu 11.04 is going to be *the* most important release ever as far as Canonical is concerned. Now, lets see what makes this upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal release special.
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Phones
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Android
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Dear Vendors, please don’t try to sell more phones by adding proprietary software on top of Android. If you add software, contribute it back to the community. If you want to sell more phones, make better phones than your competition. (Please!)
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Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile announced a new “Isis” venture that will roll out a mobile commerce network based on smartphones embedded with near field communications (NFC) networking chips. Isis supporters include Apple and Nokia, as well as Google, which revealed this week that Android 2.3 will add support for short-range NFC wireless communications.
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Verizon Wireless has begun selling a new version of the Droid 2 Android slider with a faster 1.2GHz processor and quad-band GSM global roaming. Otherwise identical to the previous Droid 2, the Motorola Droid 2 Global is also said to offer an improved keyboard and lower battery life.
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Sub-notebooks
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An unlocked version of Hewlett-Packard’s Palm Pre 2 smartphone is now available in the U.S. via Palm.com and HP’s SMB channels for $449. The upgraded 1GHz Pre 2 runs the new version 2.0 of the Linux-based WebOS operating system.
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Tablets
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Acer announced three Android tablets due in April 2011, as well as a “Clear-Fi” media-streaming service and an “Alive” app store. The Android tablets include a Dell Streak-like 4.8-inch, telephony-enabled “smartphone” model with 1024 × 480 resolution, a dual-core, seven-inch, 1280 × 800 tablet, and a 10.1 inch model with 1080p video playback.
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Acer on Tuesday entered the tablet PC market, announcing that it will launch two Android tablets and a third running Windows 7 in early 2011.
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Tablet computers based on Android will comprise 15 percent of the worldwide market in 2011, nibbling at Apple’s iPad share similar to the way Android smartphones gained on the iPhone. That’s the prediction from IMS Research, which adds that by 2015, Android tablets will have garnered 28 percent of the market.
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The Android-based Nook Color offers a seven-inch display, 8GB of storage space expandable through a microSD slot, Wi-Fi capability, Web surfing, and the option to share selected passages from e-books via Facebook and Twitter.
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Android now matches Apple’s iOS in ad impressions, with each mobile operating system garnering 37 percent, says Millennial Media. Meanwhile, fellow mobile analytics firm Chitika estimates that the original Motorola Droid has the highest mobile traffic in the U.S. among Android devices at 19 percent, followed by the HTC Evo 4G and Droid X.
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SaaS
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Cloud computing is not only the latest buzz term, it might well be the model of computing that powers the 21st century. However, it’s easy to forget that personal computing, in which each user has a standalone system that can operate without a network, is itself a relatively new approach.
The first practical computers were enormous behemoths composed of clicking resistors and vacuum tubes. Much of the early development of these multi-ton monsters had been spurred by the allied code-breaking effort during World War II. For the first thirty years of the history of general purpose computers, computer time was the exclusive privilege of large institutions and governments.
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Healthcare
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APCO Worldwide, the PR firm that operated the front group for insurers during the summer of 2007, was outraged — outraged, I tell you — that I wrote in the book that the raison d’être for Health Care America was to disseminate the insurance industry’s talking points as part of a multi-pronged, fear-mongering campaign against Moore and his movie. An APCO executive told a reporter who had reviewed the book that I was guilty of one of the deceptive PR tactics I condemned: the selective disclosure of information to manipulate public opinion.
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Programming
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Two weeks ago, iHackerNews.com made available a Hacker News related dataset via bittorrent. For those of you unfamiliar with Hacker News, it’s a portal for developers to discuss relevant items of interest run by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. Hacker News may not be considered representative of developers broadly, but it is generally well trafficked by alpha geek types, and thus conclusions drawn from it have predictive value.
The dataset that was made available included a little better than 1.7M items from Hacker News in a basic XML structure. Believing that this represented collective wisdom of a sort, I collected the set shortly after it was made available, which proved to be shortly before it was taken down.
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An Anderson father says that because he professed religious doubt in a custody hearing, a judge took his children from him.
Craig Scarberry, 29, this month was stripped of joint custody of his three children, Kaelyn, 7; William, 6, and Ayvah, 4, because he changed his religion from Christian to agnostic.
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On Friday, the Senate passed funding approval for the $1.25 billion Pigford settlement announced last February. The settlement – aimed at putting to bed a class-action brought by black farmers who claim long-time discrimination by the USDA — was brokered following nearly a decade of legal wrangling.
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Health/Nutrition
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Europe’s plans to let countries choose for themselves whether to grow or ban GM crops would be unacceptable under EU and probably international law, says official legal advice offered to member state governments and leaked to the Guardian.
The advice is highly embarrassing for the European commission (EC) which has long advocated more openness by member states about the technology. The EC appeared to make a major concession in July when it told the 27 member states that they could decide for themselves.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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There’s not much mystery about how Henry Glover ended up a charred corpse in a burned-out car in the heart of New Orleans. One police officer has admitted to shooting the young black man. Another has confessed to throwing flares into the car where Glover lay covered in blood on the back seat. He then put a couple of shots through the window as the vehicle was consumed by fire. The officer has since called that “a very bad decision”.
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A security researcher who specializes in online privacy had his laptop and cell phones temporarily seized after returning to the U.S. on an international flight last night.
Moxie Marlinspike told CNET in an interview today that he had been detained and questioned after an international flight last week and appears to be on a federal “watch list” for domestic flights too but doesn’t know why.
Asked if he is a volunteer with WikiLeaks, a whistleblower Web site that the U.S. government is seeking to shut down for publishing classified Afghan war files, Marlinspike said: “Definitely not. If anything, I’m slightly critical of WikiLeaks. I question the efficacy of that project.”
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Israel’s military today condemned the publication of the names and photographs of 200 Israeli soldiers on a website that labelled them war criminals.
The site also published the home addresses and ID numbers of many of the Israelis. They included senior commanders and low-ranking soldiers whom the site claimed took part in the three-week offensive in Gaza that began in December 2008. The accuracy of the published details could not be confirmed.
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On November 17th, the Lincoln Tunnel was closed for nearly an hour while police chased a group of people dressed in camouflage who were seen running through the tunnel. Officers of the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force as well as armed Port Authority police sped after the suspects, finally catching them as they neared the Manhattan end of the tunnel and forcing them to their knees at gunpoint.
Turned out the dramatic operation had protected New York from the onslaught of eight 16-year-old dancers who were trying to make it to a TV appearance.
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In his analysis of the videos revealing the brutal interrogation of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers, Dr Brian Fine of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture says: “All allegations of torture and other ill-treatment should be fully investigated and anyone found to be responsible brought to justice” (Important step toward the truth, 6 November). But what if those responsible include his professional colleagues and mine?
The accompanying news article raises precisely this concern, stating that “almost all the former inmates complain that they were severely beaten when arrested … On arrival at a British base, most of the inmates say that they were photographed and examined by a military doctor who would take no interest in their injuries” (Abuse claims lift cloak of secrecy over Britain’s Iraq interrogation base, 6 November).
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Tens of thousands of students and school pupils walked out of class, marched, and occupied buildings around the country in the second day of mass action within a fortnight to protest at education cuts and higher tuition fees.
Amid more than a dozen protests, estimated by some to involve up to 130,000 students, there were isolated incidents of violence and skirmishes with police, mostly in central London.
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This topic should be of concern to everyone — you should read the article. It’s of special note if you have children, since they are particularly sensitive to radiation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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UN research shows that the pledges and promises made last year by 80 countries to reduce climate change emissions fall well short of what is needed to hold the global temperature rise to 2C and avoid the worst consequences of global warming.
The findings by 30 leading scientists suggest that if countries do everything they have promised, there will still be a 5bn tonne gap per year between their ambition and what the science says is needed. This gap, said the UN, is the equivalent of the emissions released by all the world’s vehicles in a year. Many countries have committed themselves to holding temperature rises to no more than 2C (3.6F) by 2080 but to achieve this global emissions must be reduced from 56bn tonnes annually today to 44bn tonnes by 2020.
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The high-profile conservation conference called by Russian president Vladimir Putin and World Bank chief Robert Zoellick mobilised political, financial and celebrity support behind a goal of doubling the number of wild tigers by 2022.
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The tar balls are being analysed by the US Coast Guard to determine if they are from the catastrophic BP oil spill.
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Finance
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Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.
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Autumn, Berlin, 2013 and Angela Merkel is anxiously eyeing a third term as German chancellor. The Germans are fed up with Europe. They’re used to being the paymaster, but there are limits to their largesse.
The Greeks, the Irish, the Portuguese, maybe even the Spanish, have pushed those limits to breaking point through reckless spending, feckless policy–making and then asking the Germans to write them a large cheque.
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In rural communities and urban areas alike, one of the least expensive and most unheralded new initiatives of the stimulus bill is quietly saving hundreds of thousands of Americans from homelessness.
Now housing advocates want Congress to boost the program’s $1.5 billion funding as the vast need for more assistance becomes evident nationwide.
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Britain has just promised £7bn towards a €90bn package aimed at rescuing Ireland’s economy. But the bailout has not worked. Instead, we are sinking billions into a temporary rescue of the euro that will prolong Ireland’s economic misery. So we should change course and prepare to offer a dramatically different solution – help Ireland decouple from the euro and allow the country to default on its debts.
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Hold the moules et frites: Belgium has joined Portugal, Spain and Italy on the hit list of countries that may be heading for financial crisis.
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More than 24,000 jobs will be cut, taxes raised and welfare payments reduced in plan announced by Brian Cowen
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As sales to developing nations become ever more important to giant tobacco companies, they are stepping up efforts around the world to fight tough restrictions on the marketing of cigarettes.
Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on ads in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns in Africa and Asia, and in one case provided undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A Chinese veteran of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 is acting as a go-between in preparations for next month’s controversial Nobel peace prize award ceremony in Oslo.
The Chinese government reacted furiously to the choice of the dissident Liu Xiaobo as this year’s recipient of the prize and is pressuring other countries to boycott the event. Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting the subversion of state power” by publishing pro-democracy tracts. However, Yang Jianli, now a Harvard-based campaigner for democracy and a friend of Liu and his wife, Liu Xia – currently under house arrest – believes that his empty chair on 10 December will send a message more powerful than any speech or slogan. Yang was asked by Liu Xia on 15 October to work with the Nobel committee to prepare the ceremony.
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In a further sign that Barack Obama’s faux “progressive” regime will soon seek broad new Executive Branch power, The New York Times disclosed last week that FBI chief and cover-up specialist extraordinaire, Robert S. Mueller III, “traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.”
Times’ journalist Charlie Savage reported that Mueller and the Bureau’s chief counsel, Valerie Caproni, “were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions.”
Unity Default In Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal [Pre Alpha!]
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Third, I’m grateful for all the Linux distribution developers that have not only provided an operating system that have kept my machines humming, but also allowed me to find my niche. Some of my favorites are MEPIS, Sabayon, PCLOS, Mint, Mandriva (who first released me from Windows), Debian (for my server), and openSUSE.
Next, I’m grateful for all those application developers that help me get work done while running Linux. At the top of that list is Aaron Seigo and the gang at KDE. I’ve used KDE for over 10 years now and KDE had a big hand in freeing me from Windows. Others are Liferea, TVtime, Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Drupal, Apache, GNU tools, and so many more.
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So Turkey Day has come and gone for another year here in the good old U-S-of-A, but what comes next might be even better — at least from a geek’s perspective.
That’s right, it’s Black Friday once again, and the tech shopping deals are ripe for the picking.
Who has time to worry about Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL), Attachmate, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) or all those vulnerable newly acquired patents? And that next round of the ages-old “Year of Linux on the Desktop” debate will just have to wait. There’s shopping to be done!
Linux Girl is considering an excursion into the netbook waters this year, and is now gathering her strength for the adventure down at the blogosphere’s Broken Windows Lounge.
It might take more than a few Peppermint Penguins to make that happen, of course. In the meantime, she couldn’t resist asking her fellow geeks what their own shopping plans entailed.
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Server
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The University of Warwick has awarded a contract for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) facility to OFC.
Under the £1.3 million contract, HPC solutions provider OFC will deliver the facility at the university’s Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC), where it will be mainly used for research in the field of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). MHD is the study of dynamics of electrically-conducting fluids such as plasma and metal liquids.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This edition includes comments on Xerox and Microsoft, wireless keyboards and mice on Linux, the importance of source code, Adobe Flash as a control mechanism and older software, 24 minutes in duration. I may have misspoke about the Xerox Alto, it came out in 1973.
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In this episode: Attachmate Corporation pays $2.2 billion for Novell. A Linux kernel patch dramatically improves desktop performance, while Fedora considers a move to Wayland. We ask whether a lack of blockbuster games is holding Linux back, and hear us completely forget discovery of the fortnight.
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Kernel Space
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inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility, dnotify, which had similar goals.
The original developers of inotify were John McCutchan, Robert Love and Amy Griffis. It has been included in the mainline Linux kernel from release 2.6.13 (June 18, 2005), and could be compiled into 2.6.12 and possibly earlier releases by use of a patch.
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Graphics Stack
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Some two years ago there was a branch of Mesa created by Zack Rusin named “Clover” with intentions of providing OpenCL over Mesa. While it looked hopeful at first, this code to support OpenCL over Mesa was never finished and after a while it didn’t receive any further work. It’s been months since there’s been much activity in this area of GPGPU support for Mesa/Gallium3D, but recently Zack has renewed his interest in getting Mesa Clover working.
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Ubuntu is going through a lot of changes now. It will use Unity for the desktop instead of GNOME Shell in the next release i.e. Ubuntu 11.04. However one of the biggest changes is that X.org will be replaced by the Wayland Display Server. This is a huge change and will likely take a few years.
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Applications
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Computer monitoring software enables systems and applications of all kinds to be watched autonomously, so that the state of a system is continuously known. If the hardware, software, or the operating system is not functioning properly, the system administrator needs to be alerted at the earliest opportunity to ensure fast problem resolution. Using monitoring software, technical staff can often take remedial action at the first sign of a problem, before business processes, end-users, or customers are even aware that there is an issue.
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Bored of drab panels and dull docks? Want something a different, lighter and new to play with?
Try the very capable ADeskBar.
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Written in Java, Weka (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) is a well-known suite of machine learning software that supports several typical data mining tasks, particularly data preprocessing, clustering, classification, regression, visualization, and feature selection. Its techniques are based on the hypothesis that the data is available as a single flat file or relation, where each data point is labeled by a fixed number of attributes.
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Even though open soure applications have rapidly extended themselves toward fulfilling exotic purposes, many of us still spend a great deal of time in one of the old-school applications: the word processor. The good news is that in both the open source arena and the world of freeware, there are many writerly tools that can help you, and some of them serve their own exotic purposes. In this post, you’ll find a bushel of good, free application choices aimed at writers of all stripes.
For a collection of five open source apps for writers worth looking into, check out Lisa’s post on Kabikaboo, Storybook, Celtx, LyX, and Scribus. From desktop publishing (Scribus) to academic writing (LyX) to story and novel writing (Storybook), these applications go beyond what general purpose word processors do.
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If you diden`t hear before about Peazip, it is” A cross-platform file and archive manager. Features volume spanning, compression, authenticated encryption.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Beginners are mostly afraid of command prompt. Whenever they see a command prompt, they immediately say “its very difficult”. But it’s not true. The Command prompt is as friendly as GUI (Graphical User Interface), provided if you use it with proper procedure.
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I have written a few days ago a rant about the gold linker, that really messed up the 64-bit tinderbox to the point I have to recreate it from scratch entirely. Some people asked me why I was interested in using gold, given I’m the first one who was sceptic about it — but not the only one as it happens.
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.8 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Icons in the “open with” menus.
– Man pages for all installed binaries.
– Support for schemas in MSXML.
– Many installer fixes.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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Games
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While open-source game engines are beginning to progress in terms of features and graphics capabilities — thanks in large part to id Software making open their older game engines — as a whole the open-source game engines and other “indie” game engines are far behind their commercial counterparts. There is the Unreal Development Kit that is available for non-commercial use, but now Unigine Corp is getting behind a game development competition to spur Linux game development efforts.
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Unigine Corp. announced a competition to support Linux game development. It will give a free license for its top-notch Unigine engine to an experienced team willing to work on a Linux native game.
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Indie developer Swing Swing Submarine have recently entered their new creation “Seasons After Fall” into the 13th Independent Games Festival and is also slated for a 2011 release.
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Like a lot of people I have a major zombie fetish and will collect anything with the name “zombie” in it. I someday dream of fulfilling my lifelong ambition of being a zombie extra in a film *cough* anyway back at the subject at hand. Indie developer Blendo Games has announced their new indie title wonderfully named “Atom Zombie Smasher”.
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Desktop Environments
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Do you get kinda’ tired of the same ol’ offerings for your windows managers; be they KDE, Gnome, Xfce? I trolled Xfce-Look and snarfed up most of the good stuff there over the past couple years. Sometimes though, you just gotta’ do it yourself. Here’s how to customize already existing Xfce themes the easy way.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Back when I first started using Linux I was using a very underpowered computer that I got donated as part of my research at school. So OpenOffice.org was a real pain in the butt to use. It took forever to load! KOffice, on the other hand, loaded up quickly. At that time, with KOffice 1, they had the presentation program, the spreadsheet, and the word processing program.
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This is a BIG DEAL. The KDEPIM suite of applications, including kmail, kaddressbook, korganiser and knotes has been ported to the akonadi framework. This change was originally scheduled for KDE SC 4.5, but was deemed too buggy to be included. 4.6 sees its introduction, and finally we can see how this technology works, and where the KDE developers may take this forward.
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So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music. So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed.
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In my initial post, I talked about the wall of text. I described some of the symptoms of the wall of text, and proclaimed that kde.org is terrible. I listed some of the basics of cleaning up text, and gathered some information about the “why” of kde.org.
Unfortunately, KDE.org is representative of a very large and vibrant community, and although formatting and eyecandy insertions will come in good time, we have to first understand the site’s structure to make informed decisions before tidying up small details. KDE.org’s wall of text problem is not simply due to a few bad aesthetic choices, but instead a side-effect of a more fundamental problem in KDE-www’s structure.
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GNOME Desktop
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Time for the second instalment of the Evolution redesign saga. My first run threw out some ideas and generated some really useful feedback (thanks for that, everyone). Since then, I’ve gone back and developed the designs into something a little more coherent and much more Evolution-y.
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Version 3.0 of GTK+ that is set for introduction with GNOME 3.0 already boasts a bold feature set. GTK+ 3.0 is less dependent on X11 (meaning it can work with Wayland and better support on Mac OS X, etc), provides X Input 2 support, uses Cairo more for drawing, eliminates DirectFB support, and boasts cleaner rendering. A new feature though for GTK+3 is being worked on and its quite interesting: an HTML back-end that allows GTK applications to run natively within a HTML5 web-browser off a web server.
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The answer is no, of course. And Canvas is not a plugin. That said, here is an interesting proof of concept blog and video from Alexander Larsson: a GTK3 application running in Firefox without any plugin.
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With these last mods Gnome Activity Journal becames fully compatible with Drag ‘n Drop…..well, you can’t drop a file on GAJ and expect that it’s added to the current day’s list: you can’t because it doesn’t make sense. Except for that you can do everything else: you can drag ‘n drop an item in your Desktop and the item is copied, you can drag an item in a chat conversation and the item’s uri is copied and much more.
Wise men say that a screencast is better than 1000 words…so here you are (in this screencast you can see also the other feature I’ve implemented: audio preview).
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Reviews
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Linux is really a versatile piece of software. You can use it as your daily working OS, a server that runs most of the website in the world, as a multimedia center or even as a way to promote your religion. A more creative use of Linux is to turn it into an educational piece of software for kids. We have gone through several ways of configuring Linux for kids. DoudouLinux is yet another Linux distro that you will want to check out.
[...]
It is always interesting to see how Linux is used in various aspect of our life. DoudouLinux is definitely one of such interesting project that deserved to be commended. It is dead easy to use, so let your kids try it out and let us know if he/she likes it or not.
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New Releases
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Offensive Security, leaders in Online information security training, proudly announced a few days ago, on November 19th, the immediate availability for download of a new BackTrack 4 release, their extremely popular security oriented operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Here it is! The association has now been officially created as you can see on the “Journal Officiel”. (You can now send us postcards and gifts! )
The association base members:
- President: Anne Nicolas
- Secretary: Arnaud Patard
- Treasurer: Damien Lallement
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After the wonderful news that Mandriva would be continuing as usual despite financial difficulties and an exodus of developers comes the technical specifications and other tidbits for Mandriva 2011. There are quite a few exciting changes ahead, many of which prove that Mandriva is still a cutting edge distribution.
With 2011, Mandriva will be switching to RPM5. This news was announced by Per Øyvind Karlsen last week and is the first item in the list. RPM5 is actually a fork of RPM with the main goals of supporting XAR, an XML based archiving format, and featuring an integrated dependency resolver. This move has been in the works for quite some time but Mandriva 2011 will be the first release fully committed. Per Øyvind Karlsen said RPM5, “is the only sensible choice.” Relatedly, their software center is scheduled a face-lift for a “more modern and simple to use interface.”
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A release candidate is scheduled for April 25 and final is planned for May 30.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) EPS is expected to grow 80% year-over-year, better than the company’s long-term growth rate of 17.6%. Based on the forward P/E of 54.5x its PEG ratio is 3.09, which signifies a premium valuation given for growth.
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With Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) and its SuSe Linux sold for $2.2 billion this week, just how much is highly profitable and Linux dominator Red Hat worth?
Too much for a bigger suitor – say IBM or Oracle – if someone is looking to buy, says one Wall Street analyst.
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The Company’s percentage change increased 2.51% closed at $43.31. RHT overall traded volume during the last trading session was 2.24 million shares as compared to its average volume of 2.12 million shares.
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All in all I really got to like this release and the recent Fedora 14. Red Hat are doing the best implementation of Gnome (you´ll probably disagree if you´re part of the school that prefers Gnome Linux Mint or openSUSE style with one bottom panel and a slab menu and stuff like Gnome-Do, but I´m a traditionalist in this sense) , perhaps no surprise considering how many contributors are working there. I just hope that once my 30 day subscription has run out it will be possible to just switch to CentOS 6 update sources once it is out and resume updating from there.
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Fedora
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Earlier this month the folks behind the Fedora Linux distribution released Fedora 14 with a number of new features including MeeGo technology to improve performance on netbooks and other devices with low power processors and small screens. But Fewt, the guy behind the Jupiter power management applet for Linux netbooks, decided to go a bit further in optimizing Fedora to run on a netbook.
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Debian Family
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HP Deskjet all-in-one printers are selling for silly prices at the moment. I recently saw a Deskjet 2050 j510 printer/scanner in PCWorld for £40 and was tempted. Then I saw the same printer in Asda for £35 and was even more tempted. Then I saw a HP Deskjet 3050 j610 wireless printer/scanner in PCWorld for £34 and almost couldn’t resist- I just thought I should check compatibility with Linux.
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Colin Watson is not a high-profile Debian figure, you rarely see him on mailing lists but he cares a lot about Debian and you will see him on Debconf videos sharing many thoughtful comments. I have the pleasure to work with him on dpkg as he maintains the package in Ubuntu, but he does a lot of more interesting things. I also took the opportunity to ask some Ubuntu specific questions since he’s worked for Canonical since the start. Read on.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Testing Stable Release Updates (SRU) for Ubuntu in the certification lab is a de-risking move that will enable the Ubuntu Platform team to release SRUs frequently (bi-weekly). This week was the first time that we did it! but there is still areas for improvements.
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What I am reminded of is the Windows equivalent of what may happen, which used to be called DLL Hell. It would happen when all the earlier features of a DLL were not carried over into a new one, and a program would fail because it was looking for those features in an identically named DLL file. It worked both ways, with some programs failing because their newer DLL had been overwritten by an older installation program , and the replacement of the newer DLL with one of earlier timestamp and functionality.
The fact however, that Ubuntu has the ability to act as a clearing house for all the code that works its way into the Ubuntu distribution should mean that these things will not happen. Still, there might be some hair pulling for the coordinators at Canonical along the way.
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Get ready to get your hands dirty. Alpha 1 of Natty Narwhal is coming December 2, 2010. Kate Stewart, on behalf of the Ubuntu release team, announced on the mailing list, “This first milestone is important for testing the new kernel on a variety of hardware, as well as the result of the autosyncs from Debian and first wave of merges and package updates.”
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Developers are a crucial part of any successful software platform. In the same way that an operating system is “just” a means for people to use applications, a platform is “just” a means for developers to create applications and make them available to people.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution that supplants the usual desktop environment of GNOME, KDE or XFCE with something lighter – and better looking: the Enlightenment desktop.
Bodhi is based on Ubuntu 10.04, uses the LXDM login manager and the Enlightenment desktop environment. It comes with a minimal selection of pre-installed applications and an even lower set of hardware requirements.
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Announced by TheeMahn on November 25th, Ultimate Edition Gamers 2.8, a popular Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, brings to Linux users lots of pre-added games in a 4GB, downloadable DVD ISO image. Being built off Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) by hand, Ultimate Edition Gamers 2.8 is definitely one of the most awaited and fun Linux operating systems.
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Two days ago, I helped a friend (whose identity I will not reveal here) perform a Linux Mint installation on her computer. That computer had Microsoft Windows 7 on it which was becoming extremely slow and unreliable by her own count. Because of this, she was willing to try something new. She doesn’t really do much aside from web browsing and document creation; hence, I figured that something like Linux Mint would be perfect for her.
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Need proof that technology is all consuming and eventually will make it’s way into every crevice of our society? Then look no further than this Electrolux fridge. It runs Linux and has an ARM chip embedded.
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These innovations were possible thanks to the use of opensource softwares like GNU/Linux and the EFL libraries. By uniting the strengths of Electrolux and ProFUSION, the platform was optimized to extract the most from the Freescale i.MX25 processor. All the modifications done in these opensource projects were sent to their respective communities and will also be available at Electrolux’s website.
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Sub-notebooks
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And the winner is… Jolicloud 1.0
Jolicloud is hands down the most impressive Linux distribution designed for netbooks. Discarding the tried and tested desktop metaphor and building a new interface from scratch is a risky proposition, to say the least. But Jolicloud’s developers did a fantastic job of developing an interface that not only makes the most of the netbook’s limited screen estate, but is also intuitive enough even for non-technical users. But the look is only part of Jolicloud’s appeal.
The distro boasts a few unique features that make it a truly cloud-oriented and social computing platform. The system makes it supremely easy to install conventional and cloud-based applications, and the ability to sync them between multiple machines is a real boon for netbook users. In addition to that, the distro sports its own social feature that lets you follow other Jolicloud users. All in all, we are deeply impressed with Jolicloud and can highly recommend it to anyone looking for a distro that has the potential to transform your humble netbook into a cloud computing platform with a pinch of social functionality.
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Bearing in mind Google’s focus on speed for Chrome OS, the name makes a lot of sense.
The search giant is only looking to devices with solid state drives, which boot faster than traditional hard disk drives, because speed is very much the core tenet of the entire operating system.
The first devices, which are likely to be netbooks rather than tablets, are expected to make an appearance early next year, with CES 2011 a likely venue.
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Google says it will become clearer by the end of the year, when the company will introduce to the public a lightweight netbook computer that runs Chrome. Though Google declined to give details of the device, it is expected to be manufactured by another company and branded by Google, similar to the way Google released its Nexus phone, which runs on Android.
Google has high hopes for Chrome, and as the company weathers criticism for relying too much on search advertising for revenue, its executives have been describing Chrome as one of Google’s new businesses with huge potential.
With Chrome OS, Google is stepping once again into the territory of its archrivals, Microsoft and Apple, both of which make operating systems as well as widely used desktop software like Microsoft Office and Apple iPhoto and iTunes.
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he Jolicloud Jolibook — oh, it’s a real product, and it’s an interesting one at that, but one we’re not entirely sure you need for £279 ($443).
[...]
And ultimately, that’s what it comes down to — if you’re looking for a netbook that’s all about Jolicloud, the Jolibook and its crazy lid will fit the bill, but if you’re not all about one Linux OS, giving up Windows, or having a cartoon all over your netbook you’re best just scooping up one of our preferred netbooks like the Toshiba Mini NB305 or HP Mini 5103, downloading Jolicloud 1.1, and making a Jolibook of your own.
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OpenOffice.org has failed to provide effective user support via email. LibreOffice can and should avoid the same mistake.
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If you want to jazz up your open office presentation, you can install openoffice OpenGL transition library to get very cool 3D transition effects.
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Some background information on Nagios and Icinga. Nagios – whose name is a recursive acronym (”Nagios Ain’t Gonna Insist On Sainthood”) ironically refers to the original name NetSaint changed to avoid trademark troubles – is among the most popular open source network management tools and application. Nagios has been designed and developed by Ethan Galstad over the last 11 years. Recently Ethan started to empower other developers, a transition that is slowly happening. Icinga is a Nagios fork born over one year ago, which aim was and is to make it a community-led project, probably not devoid of business logic. Nagios and Icinga Sustainability.
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Rumors of the death of Google Wave are perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Google may have pulled the plug on the short-lived Google Wave, but the concept lives on in an open source project being embraced by the Apache Software Foundation.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla Project developers have announced the release of the first alpha for version 3.3 of Thunderbird, code named “Miramar”. According to Mozilla Messaging Product Manager Rafael Ebron, Miramar Alpha 1 is aimed at “testers, extension developers, and other friends who are curious to follow the development of the next release of Thunderbird”.
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On Wednesday, Mozilla released Firefox 4 Beta 7, with significant JavaScript improvements, more support for accelerated graphics, and even 3D support.
Furthermore, Mozilla said, the plug-in API support is now considered stable so that developers can begin finalizing their plug-ins for the final version of Firefox 4, now due in 2011.
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Business
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CBR talks to the boss of open source CRM vendor SugarCRM about cloud, competitors and why Europe is a better market for that business model
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Project Releases
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Government
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The day after signing a Berlusconi-like deal with Microsoft, Nichi Vendola, president of the Puglia Region, published an explanation on the website of its party. These are my comments to the main parts of that article.
Vendola: “Who is the enemy for Puglia and for Italy? Is it Microsoft, or any other software giant?”
Stop: The first enemy is lack of competence and interest in ICT by Public Administrators. Is this the case with Vendola? Maybe not, but frankly this explanation isn’t enough to be sure, even if there are some good parts in it.
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Today, after the initial surprise caused by knowing that Left party leader and president of the italian region of Puglia, Nichi Vendola, has just signed a Berlusconi-like deal with Microsoft offering an explanation that, alas, doesn’t really explain much, we started to know something about the content of the deal (because the bigger, problem in this whole business, much more of the presence of Microsoft, is lack of transparency).
The Region of Puglia published a press release titled, more or less, “Protocol of understanding between the Region of Puglia and Microsoft. Vendola says: (this is for) technological neutrality (a summary of the press release was also published by Italian newspaper Corriere del Mezzogiorno.
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Openness/Sharing
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Instructables is the first of its kind Open Source restaurant in the world, perhaps the only one to exist on planet Earth. There are no secret recipes at Instructables restaurant, everything is Open Source. You can simply log on to instructables.com and download your favorite recipes at no extra cost.
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This facet is even more important for languages with a relatively small numbers of speakers, or perhaps threatened with outright extinction. Wikipedia acts as a natural focus for the creation of texts in these languages that might otherwise be missing – a repository of linguistic wisdom that can be shared and built on. In this way, it plays an important role not just in spreading knowledge about the world, but also about the languages that people use to talk about that world.
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Open Data
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As a I wrote a couple of days ago, the current flood of open data announcements, notably by the UK government, is something of a two-edged sword. It’s great to have, but it also imposes a correspondingly great responsibility to do something useful with it.
Interestingly, this isn’t just my view, but also that of someone who has probably done more to make open data happen in the UK than anyone else: Tom Steinberg, who was the driving force behind key sites like WriteToThem and FixMyStreet.
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A tweet today from … someone?! … alerted me to the fact that COINS data has just been published as Linked Data over on the TSO Open Up Labs website. The documentation is still in the works, and as yet there aren’t any example queries available showing how to get started with querying the dataset, so I thought it might be worth trying to pull a few simple queries together to at least providing a jumping off point for exploring the data via the SPARQL interface.
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The UK Government Licensing Framework (UKGLF) provides a policy and legal overview for licensing the re-use of public sector information, both in central government and the wider public sector.
It sets out best practice, standardises the licensing principles for government information, and recommends the use of the Open Government Licence (OGL) for public sector information.
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Linked Open Data Around-the-Clock (LATC) is a new project that aims to make it easier for government agencies and web developers across the globe to gain access to information from other organisations.
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Open Hardware
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Starting with a very basic premise—’What will cars be like in the future?’—car manufacturer Fiat began the Fiat Mio project to capture the many different answers to that question. The project sought to conceptualise and ultimately manufacture a concept vehicle that was informed by the crowd.
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The creation of the Internet has created plenty of good in the world. People now have access to more information, tighter connections with more friends, and the ability to make a difference. But some things haven’t had an easy time making the adjustment.
Here are just a handful of technologies that the Internet is transforming for better or for worse.
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What speech acts are permitted under the various restrictive laws current in the British Isles, and what penalties accrue to people who step outside the bounds laid down by the law? As I have often mentioned here before, the UK has no real constitutional guarantee of free speech, so a lot of things that any American would take to be unquestionably expressible turn out to bring down fines or imprisonment if you say them in the UK. But since all the cases have hidden complexities, and the issue strikes me as important, and I am currently the only Language Log correspondent in the British Isles, I thought I would give you an update. I will deal with four cases: the Ranting Diplomat, the Mad Bishop, the Robin Hood Airport Twitter Bomber, and (perhaps the strangest of them all, a story from Ireland): Fruit Bat Fellatiogate.
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The Government today invited experts, public service managers and providers of public services to submit their ideas for public service reform.
Their views will help shape the Government’s Public Service Reform White Paper, announced in the Spending Review, which will be published next year.
The Government wants to reform public services by shifting power away from central government to the local level – to citizens, communities, and independent providers, so that they can play a greater role in shaping services.
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FedEx says it has located a shipment of radioactive rods used in medical equipment that had vanished while being sent from North Dakota to Tennessee.
The rods, which are used for quality control in CT scans, were found at the FedEx station in Knoxville, Tenn., FedEx spokeswoman Sandra Munoz told FoxNews.com Friday.
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Health/Nutrition
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We all know that, thanks to worries about superbugs, taking antibiotics isn’t the best course of action when all you’ve got is a bit of a cold… but it seems like we may be throwing them in our bodies anyhow just through the food we eat. According to China Daily, almost half of the antibiotics – 97,000 out of the 210,000 produced in China – are being used on livestock.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Since there are now three conflicts in the greater Middle East; Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel/”Palestine” and maybe another Lebanese war in the offing, it might be a good idea to take a look at the cost of war.
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at around 3pm, i spotted a line of around 80 police standing in front of the national gallery at the top of trafalgar square.
this was odd because in the square there were very few people and only half a dozen students with a banner.
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In order to block its real enemies, free Americans, TSA closed down its chertoscanners today so that people could not opt out. Gee, it turns out the expensive equipment was not necessary to fight terrorism after all, and was only designed to humiliate and dehumanize tax victims.
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In this funky, funky remix, a fiery Barack Obama tells the TSA: “Don’t touch my junk.”
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Britain’s most senior police officer warned today of a new era of civil unrest as the national campaign against university fee increases and education cuts gathered momentum.
Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said the two large-scale student demonstrations of the past fortnight had been marred by a previously unseen level of violence, adding: “The game has changed.”
His comments were seized on by critics, who said the hard-line rhetoric risked escalating tensions with students organising the nationwide grassroots campaign against education cuts.
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Writing in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny documents the brutal, savage treatment dealt to the London demonstrators who marched against cuts to education and found themselves “kettled” (detained without arrest, toilet, shelter, or charge) for eight hours in freezing weather; many of those kettled were children and young teens, as well as pregnant women.
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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said this week that her department is considering beefing up security on trains, ships and mass transit amid a public backlash over the body scanners and “enhanced” pat-downs at airports across the country.
When asked what terrorists will be thinking in the future, Napolitano said Monday on “Charlie Rose” that they will “continue to probe the system and try to find a way through.”
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A woman has complained that the TSA’s new security measures saw her picked out for further screening because of her breasts.
Eliana Sutherland had been flying from Orlando International Airport and said she felt objectified by security workers.
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A police medic sprayed a fire extinguisher at point-blank range into a crowd of student campaigners, it was revealed on Thursday night.
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Fires, fights and parties break out as a new generation of young protesters take their anger over education cuts to the streets of Whitehall. WARNING: This video contains strong language
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Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks is endangering the lives of U.S. forces and people who support the United States around the world, the top U.S. military officer said, ahead of the expected release of more classified U.S. documents.
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Brendan Latimer was knocked down by a herd of fellow protesters during a G20 demonstration at Queen’s Park.
Lying on the ground, police moved in and arrested the delivery worker. That’s when one of the officers allegedly struck him in the face, causing a fracture.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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What connection might these droughts have to rising concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere and what might we expect during the course of this century as GHG concentrations continue to rise?
The connections between rising GHG concentrations on the El Niños is a matter of scientific interest and debate. El Niño-Southern Oscillation patterns in the tropical Pacific appear to be changing and some research suggests the changes may be related to climate change (see El Niño in a changing climate, Nature, 24 September 2010). However, the science is very much unsettled, so we cannot say anything definitive about the relationship between rising GHGs and the El Niños that preceeded the 2005 and 2010 droughts.
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If we ask ourselves what has been lost, that we really care about, in the last 50 years, what has gone from the natural world in Britain that was special and is now much missed, we might come up with many different answers.
Some people would undoubtedly say the red squirrel, stunningly beautiful for a small mammal, in fact almost feminine in its beauty, and now driven to extinction south of the Lake District (apart from a few corners) by its grey cousin. Others might instance the cornflower, that heart-stopping bloom of the crop fields, which was of such an intense deep blue that it almost seemed to be radiating heat. Intensive farming did for that.
Butterfly enthusiasts might mention the large tortoiseshell, handsome as a lion, which wasn’t common but still appeared to be flourishing in a few places after the war, and then was suddenly gone (nobody really knows why). And many bird lovers would doubtless bring up the red-backed shrike, the magnificent mini-predator that was still pretty visible half a century ago but then dwindled to nothing by 1990 (although the odd pair still breeds here).
You could lament the disappearance of any of those, and if you put them together, you’re embarking on a true litany of loss. But although I regret them all as keenly as the next person, they’re not what I mourn most. I mourn the loss of abundance.
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Finance
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Complete list of bondholders inside, and BBC footage of Sir Eveylyn de Rothschild. The deceased Guy de Rothschild, pictured, no longer exploits the masses for banking profit, but his progeny carry on his legacy effectively.
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We’ve seen what our towns and cities look like when people move out and nature moves in – but why does abandonment happen? What factors turn towns into ghost-towns, city centres into wastelands and treasured homes into piles of crumbling debris? Here’s a look at eight modern urban settlements that are either in danger of or in the process of losing their inhabitants – places that might gives clues about how to keep our cities alive.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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According to host Glenn Beck’s own transcript, Beck’s very next utterance was to proclaim that the “mystery” jet contrail recently seen in California (explained weeks ago (even by Fox News online) as almost certainly an optical illusion created by still air and a jet contrail from a known UPS delivery flight) was in fact a secret two-stage missile launch by the Chinese government to assert their power over America, “sending a signal that the world has changed.”
Beck then went on to state that the Chinese “control the world.”
Did Sarah Palin, would-be leader of the United States, disagree with any of this? Nope.
Palin’s verbatim response: “Well, that’s right.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Location breadcrumbs left by mobile phones, along with other communication traffic data, are kept as part of a mass surveillance operation. They are collected by the mobile networks, retained for a year, and handed over to the police and other bodies on request. This is such an accepted fact of life that lack of traffic data has become suspicious. As shown in Voluntary electronic tagging, not carrying a mobile phone was considered a ground for arrest in Germany in 2007 and in France in 2008.
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Facebook has defended a move by the National Health Service (NHS) to share data about the pages social networkers look at, claiming its helps ‘educate’ web users on the latest health issues.
The social network told PC Pro: “By deciding that I ‘like’ something, that will come up in news feeds and that will drive people to those pages that have a ‘Like’ button”.
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Police could soon have the power to seize any domain associated with criminal activity, under new proposals published today by UK domain registrar Nominet.
At present, Nominet has no clear legal obligation to ensure that .uk domains are not used for criminal activities. That situation may soon change, if proposals from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) are accepted.
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If proposals from the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) go through Britain, already deeply in thrall to the entertainment cartels in its role as corporate copyright cop, will step even closer to becoming a true police state.
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Congress finally hammered out a bill on last Thursday (November 18), called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which would empower the government to take action against websites offering unauthorized copyrighted or counterfeit content.
Last week Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill, in which the Attorney General gains the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site.
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It’s fairly simple these days for enforcement agencies to call a torrent site infringing. It’s been done many times. But in this case, Torrent-Finder does not host a tracker or any torrent files. It’s only function is search. All the search results from existing torrent sites are displayed in an iframe. This may be a subtle distinction lost on those not familiar with the technology. But in practice this is a huge difference from sites like The Pirate Bay. it brings up some interesting questions. For example, is just linking to a torrent site considered infringing behavior?
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This is such a jewel that I felt like sharing. Click on this link with a video presentation from Larry Lessig entitled “What CC Was For?” When you try to go to the presentation, you are introduced to this screen…
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ORG received a response to our complaint about the truncated, unpublicized RIPA consultation today, the day after we sent a joint civil society letter to Pauline Neville Jones.
The consultation will create new powers to fine organisations who engage in illegal interception, and decide who will investigate. Currently, this may not include the police, and the fines may be laughably small – perhaps only £10,000.
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A 15-year-old girl has been arrested in the West Midlands on suspicion of inciting religious hatred after allegedly burning an English-language version of the Qur’an – and then posting video footage of the act on Facebook.
The teenager, from Sandwell, in the Birmingham area, was filmed on her school premises burning the book. Police have confirmed the incident was reported to the school and the video has since been removed from the social networking site.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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With the agreement between Access Copyright and Canadian universities expiring at the end of the year, UBC Library is taking a lead on promoting responsible use of copyrighted and licensed material, including databases and journals. This includes the development of the License Information Database, which answers many questions that instructors may have about using the Library’s resources.
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Heritage Minister James Moore has some simple advice for consumers who don’t like his government’s proposal to make breaking digital locks on DVDs, e-Books and other content illegal: Follow his example and don’t buy them.
The proposed copyright bill — the subject of a heated debate Thursday at a special parliamentary hearing considering amendments to the legislation — would make it a violation to circumvent a digital lock under any circumstance, including for personal use.
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Heritage Minister James Moore is not opposed to discussing a levy on MP3 players, but says no group has ever come forward with a detailed proposal on how it would work.
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The Wire Report reports that the Liberals are preparing amendments to Bill C-32 to address digital locks and fair dealing. The digital lock reforms will apparently address the consumer rights concerns, as Garneau notes in the article that “we believe that if somebody has legitimately bought a work and wants to transfer it to another device for personal use only, that should be allowed.” In order to ensure that consumers have those rights, it would be necessary to both remove the digital lock restrictions in the consumer provisions and amend the general anti-circumvention provision (to do one without the other would still leave consumers locked out).
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A better definition of the public domain is needed, but copyright and public domain are not antagonistic, said a study commissioned by the World Intellectual Property Organization presented this week. Also this week, a book on the role of copyright in access to knowledge in Africa was launched.
The study was presented in a side event to the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP), which monitors the implementation of the 45 recommendations of the WIPO Development Agenda and is meeting from 22 to 26 November. Among those recommendations, some are specifically targeted towards the preservation of the public domain.
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In an important first-instance ruling, the UK High Court has upheld a stipulation that operators and customers of paid digital news monitor services should pay newspapers for crawling their stories.
The case was lodged by UK news publishers’ Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) against PR monitor Meltwater, to gain endorsement for their stipulation that the services and their customers, who subscribe to receive alerts containing mentions of their company, must pay them for the privilege of “copying” news stories.
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Yesterday’s issue was 88 pages. Today’s is a record-breaking 92 pages. Why? Because the adverts are rolling in. As editor Geordie Greig likes to joke, his paper isn’t so much free, it’s priceless.
No wonder its main owners, Alexander Lebedev and his son, Evgeny, are said to be very happy with the way things are heading.
Doubtless, the other (25%) shareholder, Associated Newspapers is pleased too (though also probably miffed at never taking the plunge itself when it had the chance).
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Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.
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The verdict against three people associated with The Pirate Bay just been announced. The Swedish Appeal Court found Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström guilty of “contributory copyright infringement” and handed down prison sentences ranging from 4 to 10 months plus damages of more than $6.5 million in total.
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Three of The Pirate Bay’s founders have lost an appeal against their prison sentences in a Swedish court.
Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström appealed their one-year jail sentences, which were doled out last year after they were found guilty of helping to make copyright material available via the torrent site.
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It is a truism that slow-moving law cannot keep up with fleet-of-foot digital technology, so that makes the rare court decision dealing with the details of how people use the Web of particular importance. Here’s an interesting case that has just been handed down.
Reading the entire judgment (I did so you don’t have to), I don’t think the judge did a bad job. The big problem is simply that copyright law just cannot cope with what is going on routinely a billion times a day.
The case was about a company indexing content from a group of newspaper publishers.
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Joeblack69 says, “Our Justice Minister in Zimbabwe is currently steering a bill through Parliament that I believe requires scrutiny. The General Laws Amendment Bill, among other issues, seeks to amend the Copyright and Neighbouring Act by giving copyright protection to legislation, notices and other material in the Government Gazette, court judgments and certain public registers. Copyright in all these documents will vest in government. Government, as copyright holder.”
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The first thing I noticed was that all of these legal scholars accepted an instrumental view of IP law: that the purpose of IP law (which includes patent, copyright, and trademark) is to foster maximum societal innovation, for the good of all. I didn’t hear a peep about a competing view that you might call the property view: that my ideas and creations are my personal property, and I have an inalienable right to own them, just like I own my house or my classic BMW motorcycle. That’s fine with me, because I also believe that IP law should be designed to foster the maximum creativity of all. My own studies of creativity demonstrate how each new creation is always a rather small advance on the large body of knowledge and expertise that has come before, so being overly possessive about your own ideas is always an error.
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ACTA
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Yesterday the European Parliament adopted the resolution on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a trade agreement between various states and global economy players, proposing solutions for copyright violations and so-called piracy from a sole economic perspective and ignoring any social or sustainability impacts this may bring about. The resolution was adopted with a slim majority. The majority was slim mostly due to the concerns by several parliamentarians about the procedure and implications of the resolution. Not only is it doubtful whether it is possible to adopt ACTA within the current EU framework, but the whole basis of the document raised objections amongst the EP factions.
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The European Parliament approved a resolution Wednesday signaling its willingness to support a controversial trade agreement aimed at boosting international cooperation in combating counterfeiting and piracy.
The resolution calls on the commission, the European Union’s regulatory arm, to move forward with submitting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the European Council and parliament for a vote while stressing that the agreement “requires parliament’s consent and, possibly, ratification by the member states in order to come into force.”
Lisp Game Development Screencast 1
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11.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Applications
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To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 7 powerful document management systems. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who needs to control records and documents. We give our highest recommendation to Alfresco and OpenKM.
Now, let’s explore the 7 document management systems. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ever wanted to control an Ubuntu-logo shaped space-ship to blast bugs out of the sky with? Well, it’s coming.
Earlier this week we posted an Ubuntu-themed Space Invaders style retro wallpaper that left many of us wanting it to be that little bit more than a collection of static pixels sat stagnant on our desktops.
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The developers of the “Runes of Avalon” series, Anawiki have finally returned to GNU/Linux with their newest title Dress-Up Pups !
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Holarse-Linuxgaming reports that the indie developers Frozenbyte which developed Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds Survivor (which were ported to GNU/Linux by Igios and published by LGP) are porting Trine and Trine 2 to GNU/Linux.
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Blob Wars : Blob And Conquer is a game written by Parallel Realities.It is a 3D action-adventure game and a direct sequel to the 2D platform game, Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid. Again, the name is a play on a popular game franchise, this time Command & Conquer.
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Desktop Environments
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I have been asking myself numerous times before: what does we miss to have the best Desktop? No matter if it runs Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or anything else.
And the answer I have for myself is that we are limited by the fact that we know what should one expect from his average desktop.
So, what do we know about it?
Well, the de-facto standard for the desktops includes a integrated environment, standardized appearance across all the applications, ability to quickly launch applications and switch between them, possibility of working with many documents easily… Possibility to easily work on different types of documents, graphical applications, use the resources located in some distant place over the world-wide network. And all the other small things that became so tightly integrated into our lives that we cannot imagine a computer without that.
And now, most desktop environments and desktop projects have it. We have it in Windows. We have it in Mac. We have it in Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva (or better – in Gnome, KDE, XFCE and other desktop environments).
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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New Releases
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The first release of Liberté Linux is available. “Liberté Linux is a secure, reliable, lightweight, and easy to use Gentoo-based LiveUSB Linux distribution intended as a communication aid in hostile environments. Liberté installs as a regular directory on a USB/SD key, and after a single-click setup, boots on any desktop computer or laptop. Available internet connection is then used to set up a Tor circuit which handles all network communication.”
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Equities research analysts at Piper Jaffray upgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from a “neutral” rating to an “overweight” rating in a research note to investors on Tuesday, with a price target of $50.00.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We have grown up with Linux over the years and seen the best of operating systems come and go. The best of Microsoft’s and Apple’s have given us in-depth entertainment options to choose from and it has certainly been able to live up to their name.
But what about Open Source Operating Systems? Who reigns supreme? Without a doubt, we give it to Ubuntu.
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OS tested Ubuntu 9.04.1 ARMEL
Processor Feroceon 88FR131 1.2GHz
Memory 512MB DDR2
Storage 512MB NAND Flash
Expansion SDHC-compatible SD card slot
Network Gigabit Ethernet
Additional ports USB 2.0, eSATA
Debugging Serial console, JTAG over mini-USB
Actual size 110 x 69.5 x 48.5mm
Weight 200g (excluding cables)
Price: £97 / approx $129
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OSADL, which has been overseeing real-time Linux (RTL) development patches to the Linux kernel, announced a “quality assurance testing farm” where manufacturers can test a variety of RTL systems under simulated production conditions. The multi-platform test center aims to prove RTL as a capable, and more flexible, alternative to real-time operating systems (RTOSes).
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Phones
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Android
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Better video, marketplace improvements and an interface upgrade look likely to top Android 2.3′s release notes
Gingerbread, the latest update for Google’s Android smartphone operating system, is now just weeks, or perhaps even days away from release. The Android 2.3 release was rumoured for November 11 but Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Web 2.0 summit earlier this week, said Gingerbread would only ship “in the next few weeks.”
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Just read this article over at zdnet. What it basically says is condensed in these two points:
1. Android is a failure for Google because it is open and carriers/OEMs are stripping off google search from it and putting replacements like baidu/Bing. (BTW, half the people say Android is fail because it is not open and the other half say it is fail because it is open. Which one is it, please decide 
)
2. The solution is a Google Phone with google branding, sold unlocked at full price.
Let me answer 2nd point first. Dana Blankenhorn, thanks for that nice blast from the past advice. Google already did it with Nexus One, like, one year ago duh..
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Simon Brew wonders if there are 20 billion reasons why the spirit of open source is being distorted…
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Back when the 2010 Linux Plumbers Conference was looking for presentations, the LibreOffice project had not yet announced its existence. So Michael Meeks put in a vague proposal for a talk having to do with OpenOffice.org and promised the organizers it would be worth their time. Fortunately, they believed him; in an energetic closing keynote, Michael talked at length about what is going on with LibreOffice – and with the free software development community as a whole. According to Michael, both good and bad things are afoot. (Michael’s slides [PDF] are available for those who would like to follow along).
Naturally enough, LibreOffice is one of the good things; it’s going to be “awesome.” It seems that there are some widely diverging views on the awesomeness of OpenOffice.org; those who are based near Hamburg (where StarDivision was based) think it is a wonderful tool. People in the rest of the world tend to have a rather less enthusiastic view. The purpose of the new LibreOffice project is to produce a system that we can all be proud of.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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One of the design elements that I did not like in the development builds of Firefox 4 until now was the add-ons manager. I have reviewed it in detail in the article How To Uninstall Add-ons In Firefox 4. Basically, what I did not like was that it looked kinda messy, hard to read and out of place.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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In September 2010 I went to the Open World Forum to present some first results of my research about local impacts of Open Data. The Forum was an interesting and varied event, that gave space to very interesting talks, keynotes and comments about freedom, education and gender diversity in software. Another great moment for me was the contribution to the final panel by John Wilbank, Vice-President for Science Creative Commons.
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Open Hardware
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The Arduino is a small programmable device that can hold a small program and perform tasks such as reading temperature sensors, turning on or off switches, and can even serve as the ‘brain’ for a robot. I have used the Arduino (actually freeduino) for projects related to HVAC and hydroponics automation.
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An industry group of 130 hardware maintenance providers has complained to the Department of Justice that they’ve been unfairly squeezed since Larry Ellison bought Sun Microsystems.
The Service Industry Association has been complaining about Oracle’s tactics for some time, but has now written to the DoJ.
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Young family members of this district in southern Tamil Nadu have been pushing their infirm, elderly dependents to death because they cannot afford to take care of them.
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Health/Nutrition
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In the face of a cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of over 1000 people, infected many thousands and is feared to intensify due to widespread flooding in the wake of Hurricane Tomas, officials have stated that the elections scheduled for November 28 will go ahead as planned. While some candidates have questioned the wisdom of holding elections during such turmoil, a rising chorus of critics is disputing the elections’ very legitimacy and is urging the US, a primary funder, to take responsibility in guaranteeing a truly democratic process.
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Security
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Following Thanksgiving is Black Friday, which is followed by Small Business Saturday, and then comes Cyber Monday, the biggest day for online retailers.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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From 2001 to 2010, the US military spent about $32 million on construction projects in Oman. In September, the Army upped the ante by awarding an $8.6 million contract to refurbish the Royal Air Force of Oman’s air field at Thumrait Air Base.
US efforts in Bahrain are on a grander scale. This year, the US Navy broke ground on a mega-construction project to develop 70 acres of waterfront at the port at Mina Salman. Scheduled for completion in 2015, the complex is slated to include new port facilities, barracks for troops, administrative buildings, a dining facility, and a recreation center, among other amenities, with a price tag of $580 million.
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Barack Obama’s hopes of reshaping US foreign policy stand on the brink of failure tonight, after two of his most cherished initiatives — nuclear disarmament and better relations with Moscow — were dealt serious setbacks.
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The government insisted today that it had started to draw a line under the legacy of complicity in rendition and torture that it inherited from the Labour administration by settling claims brought by 16 former Guantánamo inmates.
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TSA’s activities provide substantial fodder for both citizen and professional journalists. YouTube is full of citizen-made videos of TSA agents engaging in questionable activities, like aggressively patting down a three year old child or pulling the pants off a wheelchair-bound, 71 year-old man to examine his knee implant.
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he man who spearheaded Silvio Berlusconi’s entry into politics was also an intermediary between the media magnate and the Sicilian mafia, judges in Palermo ruled last night.
In a lengthy written judgment on one of the Italian prime minister’s closest associates, the judges said that before entering politics Berlusconi paid “enormous sums of money” to Cosa Nostra for protection and later handed over funds to safeguard his network’s relay stations on Sicily.
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I am not prepared to subscribe to such an anti-democratic statement. But if we want to move towards peace, we undoubtedly have to remove this huge rock blocking the road. We must infuse the public with another belief – the belief that peace is possible, that it is essential for the future of Israel, that it depends mainly on us.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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South Africa is fighting an increasingly bloody war against poachers who have doubled the number of rhinos they have killed in a year to feed a soaring demand for rhino horn from Asian organised crime syndicates.
The number of rhinos killed by poachers this year has soared to 261, more than double the total for the whole of 2009. Now the national army has been urgently requested to patrol game parks and some rhino owners have been forced to hire ex-military security guards.
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A tiny bushbaby with over-sized ears and an almost blind dolphin that swims upside down have joined a list of the most unusual and important mammals that are teetering on the edge of extinction.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Throughout the course of the 2010 Congressional midterm campaigns, candidates threw out countless fibs, questionable assertions, whoppers and half-truths. These are our candidates for the most misleading campaign ads of 2010, what are yours?
Big Lie #1: Health Care Reform Guts Medicare
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Want to follow the money? Below, the 75 heaviest hitters in corporate campaign cash, 1989-2010.
1 AT&T
2 National Association of Realtors
3 Goldman Sachs
4 American Association for Justice
5 Citigroup
6 American Medical Association
7 National Automobile Dealers Association
[...]
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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An Egyptian blogger has been released after serving four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam and the president, a human rights group said on Wednesday.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, 26, known as Kareem Amer, was in bad health and was beaten by security officers before his release on Tuesday.
The Interior Ministry was not immediately available for comment.
Amer, a student at the state-run religious al-Azhar University, was arrested in 2006 on charges of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak in his blog posts. He was sentenced to four years in prison and expelled from the university.
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An international arrest warrant is being issued for the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, after Swedish prosecutors were today granted permission to detain him for questioning in a rape case.
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BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) is ready to allow Indian authorities access to the emails and messages of its most high-profile corporate customers, according to a ministry official in the country.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Internet service providers such as BT should be allowed to abandon net neutrality and prioritise users’ access to certain content providers, the communications minister Ed Vaizey said in a speech today.
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It’s too early to say for sure, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden could very well go down in the history books as the man who saved the Internet.
A bill that critics say would have given the government power to censor the Internet will not pass this year thanks to the Oregon Democrat, who announced his opposition during a recent committee hearing. Individual Senators can place holds on pending legislation, in this case meaning proponents of the bill will be forced to reintroduce the measure and will not be able to proceed until the next Congress convenes.
Nokia X7 00 Symbian^3 Nokiasaga com
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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The automatic creation of process groups should keep the desktop interface responsive even when a large number of processes are making the CPU sweat. Meanwhile, the development of 2.6.37 is in full swing, and new stable kernels replace their predecessors; 2.6.35, on the other hand, has reached the end of its life.
Last week, a small patch of only about 200 lines, designed to significantly increase the interactivity of desktop applications in some situations where a CPU works to capacity, sparked considerable debate in Linux circles. The discussions about the code modification had already started a month ago; a reworked version of the patch subsequently received extra attention when Linus Torvalds gave it a lot of praise last week, commenting that his system was clearly more interactive when compiling a kernel.
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Finland’s national brand strategy project released their report today on the Tehtävä Suomelle website. The basic idea is to promote the Finnish capability for getting things done, and the communal approach to problem solving.
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Graphics Stack
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When Wayland started out in 2008 it was very difficult to build and run this lightweight, next-generation display server. Wayland leverages the very latest Linux graphics technologies and at that time all of Wayland’s dependencies had to be patched or built from branched sources and Wayland even had its own EGL implementation at the time (Eagle) rather than Mesa and overall it was just a high barrier to entry. Wayland at that time also worked with only the open-source Intel driver, while now it can work with most any KMS / GEM / Mesa driver. It was not until recently that it became possible to build Wayland from mainline components beginning to ship in new Linux distributions, thereby making it much easier to experiment with the open-source display server. Now it’s to a point where you can just run a simple script and be up and running with a Wayland Display Server in just minutes.
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Applications
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Evolution is a little bit staid in the UI department – but don’t fix what isn’t broken right?
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…it’s now possible to do TrueHD, DTS-HD, and E-AC3 over HDMI on Linux via FFmpeg. The TrueHD/DTS-HD/E-AC3 support is added to one of FFmpeg muxers to allow HDMI pass-through for these formats. DTS-HD/DTS-HD MA audio up to this point hasn’t been supported under Linux and it’s used by a sizable portion of the Blu-ray media currently on the market.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I anticipated this being a slow Linux news day here in the United States with Thanksgiving being today and most US employees being on holiday this half of the week, but there ended up being an interesting email in my inbox this morning and it presents a new reason for Linux gamers to be thankful today: our favorite game company is soon to announce something to further embrace and support Linux game development.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE releases 4.6 beta1 of Workspaces, Applications and Development Frameworks, bringing significant improvements to desktop search, a revamped activity system and a significant performance boost to window management and desktop effects. Efforts all across the KDE codebase pay off by making KDE’s frameworks more suitable for usage on all devices. The release provides a testing base for a stable release in January 2011.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We also want to make it easier for new members to start working on Ubuntu. When a new member is interested in helping Ubuntu, they would like to help fix bugs in Ubuntu but are often lost.They do not dissociate Ubuntu from Upstream packages or projects. They just want to help Ubuntu and fix bugs. As a new member interested in fixing bugs in Ubuntu, where do they ask? Where do they start?
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It seems reasonable to assume that Mark Shuttleworth’s comments were targeted more in the direction of mobile devices. The leap by online authors to equate this with a total change of the Ubuntu development infrastructure seems rather foolish and let’s one wonder if this was one of those “Oops I did it again – let’s bash Ubuntu” attitudes again. In particular since such news could potentially confuse lots of partners, developers, and users of Ubuntu and could undermine its current strong position.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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John is not leaving Mozilla per se, although he won’t be around the office day-to-day anymore. As he joins Mozilla’s Board of Directors, his influence and guidance will continue.
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Databases
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When I joined the company over a year ago I was immediately involved in drafting a project plan for the Open Database Alliance and its relation to MariaDB. We wanted to imitate the model of the Linux Foundation and Linux project, where the MariaDB project would be hosted by a non-profit organization where multiple vendors would collaborate and contribute. We wanted MariaDB to be a true community project, like most successful open source projects are – such as all other parts of the LAMP stack.
So we went ahead and told about this vision when we promoted MariaDB and recruited users and contributors or customers to our company:
* In Monty’s keynote at this year’s MySQL conference we positioned MariaDB as a unifying force in the universe of competing MySQL forks.
* I have personally spoken abou this in public places, such as when Drupal was adding MariaDB support, using it as an obvious argument in favor of MariaDB.
* Most recently I defended MariaDB’s status as a community project vigorously on Brian Aker’s blog. Little did I know that while I was doing so, the plan had already been changed…
I’m sure there are other occasions too that I wasn’t involved in, like convincing Linux distributions that MariaDB is preferable to MySQL, or that we should get a free booth in the dot-org pavilion at a conference.
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Oracle
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Even worse, there’s no ETA — it’ll definitely take a week, but since this is a Thanksgiving weekend, it can take longer, Oracle said.
I find this situation plain unacceptable, and e-mails from the earlier migration effort made me doubt if the new infrastructure is any better. I also had a pleasure of working closely with CollabNet folks over the past years and I was also involved in some earlier conversation and experiments about the new java.net infrastructure, and when it comes to performance and monitoring, CollabNet folks really knew what they are doing. So I had multiple reasons to worry if the new infrastructure can handle the load of java.net, which the old CollabNet-hosted one couldn’t handle.
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Openness/Sharing
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The government yesterday launched a searchable database of business plans, structures, salaries and other data for its departments. The launch of the online transparency database is the latest move by government to shift power away from central government and increase its accountability to the public.
“We’re going to smash open state monopolies. We’re going to invite new providers in. And in one of the biggest blows for people power, we’re shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does. Because each of these Business Plans does not just specify the actions we will take. It also sets out the information we will publish so that people can hold us to account… Plain-English details about the progress of the reforms and the results they are achieving,” said Prime Minister David Cameron in a speech yesterday.
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Phrases I considered for this post’s title ranged from “surprising choice” to “sign of the apocalypse.” More than a few years ago, I remember buying my first piece of Sony hardware–a video camera. It was one of the first that also let you take digital stills, which it saved to a tiny, purple, proprietary Sony memory stick that was an expensive pain to replace or get a spare of. And that was how I first learned that Sony was mostly only interested in Sony.
[...]
Of course this isn’t the first surprise turn to openness from Sony. They launched their first Android-based handset just over a year ago, and rumors are that the “Playstation phone” likely to be announced December 9 will be Android-based as well. Interestingly enough, Android 3.0 (“Gingerbread”) will be released three days earlier on December 6. If all the rumors add up to be true, it could be a game-changer for gaming on Android.
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Open Data
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…and counting. Never could any of us have imagined that there would be so many stepping forward to organize an event in their cities.
The clear implication is that Open Data matters. To a lot of people.
To a lot of us.
If you are in the media, a politician or the civil service: pay attention. There are a growing number of people – not just computer programmers and hackers, but ordinary citizens – who’ve come to love and want to help build sites and applications like fixmystreet, wheredoesmymoneygo, emitter.ca or datamasher.
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In the melee of the last days of the Labour government, among the casualties were clauses in the digital economy bill that would have solved the intractable problems that stand in the way of giving public access to this country’s great archives of radio and television programmes.
Think of George Orwell and W H Auden, of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, of any British artist or musician you can name. The BBC’s archives are a treasure trove of their work, of interviews with them and discussions and documentaries about them.
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Open Access/Content
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The government was today accused of increasingly citing national security in court cases in order to justify suppressing potentially embarrassing information.
The charge was made in a letter to the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, from Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil rights group Liberty.
The letter followed many cases in which Chakrabarti said ministers and their lawyers abused their position by demanding unwarranted secrecy.
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Science
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Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.
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Fans of the film Blade Runner may remember a scene in which the maker of an artificial snake is identified by a microscopic serial number on one of its scales. Well, in a rare case of present-day technology actually surpassing that predicted in a movie, we’ve now gone one better – bar codes on embryos. Scientists from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), along with colleagues from the Spanish National Research Council, have successfully developed an identification system in which mouse embryos and oocytes (egg cells) are physically tagged with microscopic silicon bar code labels. They expect to try it out on human embryos and oocytes soon.
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Health/Nutrition
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In very worrisome news Tuesday, the Haitian Health Ministry estimated that the cholera outbreak in Haiti is resulting in an average of 32 deaths every 24 hours since the epidemic began on October 20.
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The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald’s and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Richard Holbrooke, America’s special envoy to South Asia, maintains that if the Taliban succeed in Afghanistan, “without any shadow of a doubt, Al Qaeda would move back into Afghanistan, set up a larger presence, recruit more people and pursue its objectives against the United States even more aggressively.” That, he insisted, is “the only justification for what we’re doing.” This is an especially ardent presentation of the “base camp,” or “safe haven,” myth. Stressed by virtually all promoters of the war, this key justification–indeed, the only one, according to Holbrooke–has gone almost entirely unexamined.
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A Los Angeles judge sentenced a former transit officer convicted of shooting an unarmed man on an Oakland train platform to two years in prison.
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Stephen Fry took just minutes to reiterate his offer to pay the fine of Paul Chambers, the 27-year-old man convicted of “menace” after making a Twitter joke about blowing up an airport.
Chambers today lost his appeal against the conviction and £1,000 fine, Judge Jacqueline Davies dismissing his case on every count. The former accountant’s offending tweet – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” – sent publicly to a Northern Ireland mother he met online, was found to be a menacing threat to security.
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Thursday was a bad day for free speech. It came to light that a plastic surgeon has been threatened with a libel action for expressing concerns and scepticism about a breast enhancement cream (no, really!) and we read reports of the RSPB being sued for libel by two people for criticisms one of its scientists made of a study they carried out on baby grouse in Wales (yes, seriously!).
But also in the crown court in Doncaster, Paul Chambers lost his appeal over a Twitter joke. The facts of this case have been well narrated by David Allen Green among others. His message, which appears on the screens of his 600 followers if they are watching, said: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!!”
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British officials say there is no evidence that waterboarding saved lives of UK citizens, as Bush claimed in his memoirs
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Now it appears that Decision Points is not so much the former president’s memoirs as other people’s cut and pasted memories.
Bush’s account is littered with anecdotes seemingly ripped off from other books and articles, even borrowing without attribution – some might say plagiarising – from critical accounts the White House had previously denounced as inaccurate.
The Huffington Post noted a remarkable similarity between previously published writings and Bush’s colourful anecdotes from events at which he had not been present.
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A Chinese court has handed down a two-and-a-half year jail sentence to a man who organised a website for parents of children who became ill from drinking tainted milk after his own son became sick.
The court found Zhao Lianhai guilty of “inciting social disorder”, his wife Li Xuemei told Reuters.
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The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.
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A special prosecutor cleared the CIA’s former top clandestine officer and others Tuesday of any charges for destroying agency videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects, but he continued an investigation into whether the harsh questioning went beyond legal boundaries.
The decision not to prosecute anyone in the videotape destruction came five years to the day after the CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being subjected to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. The deadline for prosecuting someone under most federal laws is five years.
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If the information recently acquired by Doug Hagmann of Northeast Intelligence Network is accurate, then something really big is happening in America right now – and it’s most certainly not a step towards individual liberty.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It is generally acknowledged that a warming world will harm the world’s forests. Higher temperatures mean water becomes more scarce, spelling death for plants – or perhaps not always.
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The next big offshore oil disaster could take place in the remote Arctic seas where hurricane-force winds, 30ft seas, sub-zero temperatures and winter darkness would overwhelm any clean-up attempts, a new report warns.
With the ban on offshore drilling lifted in the Gulf of Mexico, big oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell are pressing hard for the Obama administration to grant final approval to Arctic drilling. Shell has invested more than $2bn to drill off Alaska’s north coast, and is campaigning to begin next summer.
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The former boss of BP admitted last night that the oil giant had been completely unprepared for the Gulf of Mexico accident that nearly sank it financially.
When the crisis hit, BP was forced to make up its oil spill disaster response as it went along, something that made it look “fumbling” and “incompetent” in the eyes of the public, said Tony Hayward.
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In the weeks after BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf, a number of environmental groups and scientists began raising concerns about the huge volume of chemical dispersants the company was spreading in the water. These chemicals are used to break the oil into smaller globs, which causes them to sink and supposedly biodegrade faster.
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Prior to this year, I wrote about extinction only occasionally — since the direct impact of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on humanity seemed to me more than reason enough to act. But the mass extinctions we are causing will directly harm our children and grandchildren as much as sea level rise. In particular, I believe scientists have not been talking enough about the devastation we are causing to marine life (see “Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).
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An increase in the number of whales with sunburnt skin has been documented by scientists after they took photographs and tissue samples of the animals.
In the worst-hit species – the blue whale – researchers found that the numbers affected rose by 56 per cent between 2007 and 2009, which they said has “worrying” implications for their health.
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Vicky Pope, head of climate-change advice at the UK Met Office, agreed. “We are currently collecting vast sets of data for our studies of the climate and we are going to have make these available in forms that can be used by interested groups. They can then see for themselves that our analyses are sound and correct. It means a lot of extra work but if that is the price for making sure we demonstrate the dangers posed by climate change then we will have to pay it.”
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Indonesia plans to class large areas of its remaining natural forests as “degraded” land in order to cut them down and receive nearly $1bn of climate aid for replanting them with palm trees and biofuel crops, according to Greenpeace International.
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Finance
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PETER VICTOR is an economist who has been asking a heretical question: Can the Earth support endless growth?
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The rich are different from you and me; they get to hit and run, almost killing a cyclist, but get off without serious charges because it is hard to be money manager for Smith Barney if you have a record. District Attorney Mark Hurlbert is not charging Martin Joel Erzinger with a felony, because “Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession,” which is managing billions for rich people.
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Clegg 2.0 promised to protect the poor. Clegg 3.0 throws the poor out of their homes and makes it harder for them to go to university
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I’ve been trying to figure out whether I have anything to say about the “chairman’s mark” of the deficit commission report that was released today. In a sense, I don’t. This is not a piece of legislation, after all. Or a proposed piece of legislation. Or even a report from the deficit commission itself. It’s just a draft presentation put together by two guys. Do you know how many deficit reduction proposals are out there that have the backing of two guys? Thousands. Another one just doesn’t matter.
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Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful and divisive Republican lawmakers ever to come out of Texas, was convicted Wednesday of money-laundering charges in a state trial, five years after his indictment here forced him to resign as majority leader in the House of Representatives.
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Russia and the European Union struck a deal yesterday (24 November) to phase out Russian export tariffs on raw materials, paving the way for Moscow to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said.
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This post was published earlier. But Thanksgiving (in the US) seemed like a good time to think about the ideas again.
When I sat down to research this post, I thought I would write a post about barter, since it seemed like if our current financial system failed, barter would be one possible form of back-up. But when I started to research barter, the first thing I came across was this statement:
Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.
So I decided to step back a bit, and look into gift economies.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Search and Surveillance Bill, currently being considered by the Justice and Electoral Select Committee, has been presented as bringing together and modernising the laws surrounding state powers to search people and property, and conduct surveillance.
While there are some procedural improvements when state agencies conduct surveillance, with time limits and reporting procedures, the Bill as a whole is concerning. It extends state powers beyond Police and intelligence agencies to an array of other state agencies. This page aims to explains the problems presented by the Bill.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In his article Separating copyright fiction from facts about C-32’s TPM provisions, Barry Sookman once again avoids the issue. Curiously, the target of his tirade, Michael Geist also avoids the issue.
As I pointed out earlier this month in my article The TPM Provisions in Bill C-32 Are Not In Compliance With The WIPO Internet Treaties, neither of them seems willing to actually quote the clear wording of the treaty. Mihaly Ficsor, who supposedly was involved in drafting the treaty, never gets around to quoting it either, even when I blasted back at him three times (here, here, and here).
In fact the three of them have a record for inaccuracies that is totally unbelievable. I rather expect that most regular readers have noticed this by now. I don’t like lies of omission. Talking about a treaty, without quoting the treaty is a lie of omission in my eyes.
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Facebook is just a payment away from trademarking the word “Face.” As of today the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office has sent the social networking site a Notice of Allowance, which means they have agreed to grant the “Face” trademark to Facebook under certain conditions.
All Facebook needs to do is pay the issue fee within three months of today and the “Face” trademark will be issued and be published in the official USPTO gazette and everything.
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Copyrights
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Irked by an article published in PC Mag listing a number of alternative P2P services in the wake of the LimeWire shutdown, a number of music industry executive earlier this month sent the news outlet an angry letter that all but accused the publication of encouraging copyright infringement.
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One of the major problems we have with the way copyright law today is developed is how much of it is faith-based — with supporters insisting that more stringent copyright law is obviously “better,” without presenting any evidence to support that. The history of copyright law is filled with examples of this sort of argumentation in favor of stronger copyrights.
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ACTA
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Every so often, we get copyright system supporters here in the comments who, when they run out of arguments, go with something along the lines of “but it’s the law, and it’s your duty to respect the law.” It’s a rather authoritarian point of view and there are all sorts of reasons why that makes little sense. We don’t need to go into the full philosophical arguments, but one key one is that you should never respect something just because someone says you should — only because it has earned the respect. Glyn Moody has a fascinating post highlighting a new paper about ACTA that suggests the process by which ACTA was agreed upon has all sorts of problems. Moody calls out one paragraph in particular that I think is quite important:
there is the question of public perceptions as to the value and fairness of the agreement. A perception that it is fair as between stakeholders is important to IP law, which it is not readily self-enforcing. By this I mean that IP law requires people to self-consciously refrain from behaviours that are common, easy, and enjoyable: infringement is so easy to do and observing IP rights, particularly copyright, involves, particularly these days, some self-denial. IP law therefore needs support from the public in order to be effective, and in order to receive any such support IP law needs to address the needs of all stakeholders. 135 Treaties that strengthen enforcement without addressing the needs of users look unfair and will bring IP law further into disrepute.
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What’s really fascinating for me here is that it clearly describes the trend towards owning *every* piece of music and *every* film ever recorded. The concept of owning a few songs or films will become meaningless as people have routine access to everything. Against that background, the idea of “stopping” filesharing just misses the point completely: few will be swapping files – they will be swapping an entire corpus.
Woman Wears Bikini At TSA Airport Security
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The Boxee has been built with a simple goal in mind. Its creators say that “a lot of your favorite shows and movies are already available on the Internet. Boxee is a device that finds them and puts them on your TV. It’s easy to use and even better, there’s no monthly fee”. That’s the phrase that can be found on Boxee’s homepage. Boxee has been an early player that has generated a lot of buzz in the “Media Center” circle. The project has started as a software platform that can be installed on a PC, Mac or Linux computer. The main downside of that is that this becomes a fairly expensive proposition. The Boxee Box was brought to market to provide a hardware platform capable of running the Boxee software – for $199. Try to beat that by building your own computer. Now the question is: how does it perform, and how can it help you today? Let’s take a look.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The Ganymede project centralizes the source of truth for all the IT information, like the users, hosts and IP addresses of an organization.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Keith Packard has probably done more work to put the X Window System onto our desks than just about anybody else. With some 25 years of history, X has had a good run, but nothing is forever. Is that run coming to an end, and what might come after? In his Linux Plumbers Conference talk, Keith claimed to have no control over how things might go, but he did have some ideas. Those ideas add up to an interesting vision of our graphical future.
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Applications
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In this tutorial you will discover:
* The basics of fluid simulations
* How to create a splash effect
* Advanced settings to tweak for better results
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If you’re looking for a web TV player or a radio player for your Ubuntu Linux, beside Sopcast freetuxTV is a good choice for you to watch television channels from internet.
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Back In Time, a Free and Simple Backup Software for Linux: I’ve already tried and tested a good number of backup software for Linux, but I know there are still plenty of excellent backup tools that I missed so I always take time to search for more. Hence, I bumped into Back In Time, a simple backup utility for Linux that is inspired by Flyback and Timevault. One of the main goals of the project is to get and combine the best features of Flyback and Timevault and put them all on Back In Time.
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I reduced the DansGuardian user account and blacklist maintenance hassles with my previous two utilities but while working on whitelisting I found the need for a few more.
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Linux is one of the more configurable operating systems available. Unfortunately for new members, a great many of these options are buried in configuration files. Instead of being able to simply open up a program and
say, “I’d like this option, this option and this other option,” the user needs to either go into the Terminal and type esoteric commands, or else go to the configuration editor, which can at times be just as uncomfortable for the beginner. For new Linux users, there is a fantastic program called Ailurus. It’s directly aimed at “the newcomer to linux, e.g., the people who uses Linux for not more than one month.”
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Proprietary
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This might not be a news at all for most among you, but I was totally surprised when I first came to know about Nero Linux 4, a Linux version of Nero CD burning tool.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I’m happy to let you know that the GNU/Linux news and updates website Happypenguin.org aka The Linux Game Tome is back online.
For now this website is a bit outdated (it’s been offline for almost two months), but I have no doubt that it will resume it’s mad amount of updates and become updated as before.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Packages are offered for Ubuntu, and as such I decided to grab the Ubuntu Minimal ISO. Booting the CD, I chose to go with a command line installation. The installer finished without fuss. Rebooting into my minimalistic environment, I went ahead and grabbed my favorite editor (ne – the nice editor; apt-get install ne). You need to add the Trinity Ubuntu repositories to your sources.list, which isn’t difficult at all.
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Migrating the WYSIWYG Editor to WebKit in Blogilo. Twitter Lists support in Choqok. More work on KAccessible. KTorrent gains support for the Magnet protocol. Work in KRFB to allow more than one RFB server run at once. Better Valgrind 3.6.0 compatibility in KCacheGrind. Important progress on the Perl KDE bindings.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Foundation has been forced to change the rules for a design contest it is holding after one of its members objected to the exclusion of certain countries.
The contest, to design a new T-shirt, initially excluded people living in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma).
Those living in areas which are restricted by US export controls and sanctions were also not allowed to participate.
Developer Baptiste Mille-Mathias pointed out the hypocrisy of these rules, stating, “GNOME being based on people and openness, I wonder how a Free Software & Non-profit organisation would comply with such US embargo related laws.
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Whilst I’m not traditionally a GnoMenu fan even I can’t help but drool over ~Blitz-Bomb‘s 7Like theme for it.
Fusing elements of Ambiance with well-worn aspects of Windows 7′s start menu the theme has a whole lot to like in it.
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Beloved Faenza icon theme undergoes a major upgrade. Lots of new icons are included and improved Firefox and Google Chrome icons are absolutely beautiful IMO.
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Red Hat Family
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SmarTrend has detected shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) have bullishly opened above the pivot of $42.50 today and have reached the first resistance level of $43.05.
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Fedora
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A lot of refinements have been put into place behind the scenes including adding the BFS scheduler, and making the deadline IO scheduler default. I have also added a recent tweak that should improve availability and response time of a Fuduntu computer while users are compiling software, or doing other CPU intensive tasks in terminals.
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Besides the kernel side of things, there’s also work to be done in ensuring Fedora’s virtualization utilities (libvirt, virt-manager, etc) are still in good shape for Xen and that there’s an easy way to enable the Xen kernel support from GRUB without manually editing the boot-loader’s configuration file.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This script is obviously a work in progress. I already have some ideas to enhance it, but since it has already saved me significant hassle (and typing!) when installing new Ubuntu instances, I thought I’d share it.
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It looks like astronaut and tech magnate Mark Shuttleworth’s investment in the Ubuntu commercial Linux distribution is about to pay off. Ubuntu is taking off like a rocket, and the sale of Novell to Attachmate plus the higher prices Red Hat is charging for its Enterprise Linux 6 are probably going to fuel Ubuntu’s adoption even more in the data centers of the world.
The third Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 10.04, came out in April and seems to have been a turning point for the Ubuntu distribution. With that release, Canonical demonstrated that it could tame the Debian variant of Linux and put together a polished desktop and server operating system with commercial-grade support options like those available through Red Hat and Novell. On the server front, the server variant of the 10.04 LTS release had all of the new or impending x64 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices baked into it as well as a fully integrated variant of the Eucalyptus cloud framework for creating cloudy infrastructure for applications to romp around.
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But ok, I installed all required packages and it connected. Synced Tomboy notes from desktop and Conboy ones from my Nokia N900 so now I have them in sync (without a way to select which one I want where but that’s limit of apps). Then I decided to make use from synchronization of contacts. And here the fun begins… My phone is not supported by Funambol (syncml backend used by Ubuntu One) so sorry — all I can use is one bug on LaunchPad.
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While Google has successfully (so far) moved to a rapid release cycle for its Chrome browser, it’s hard to see this working very well for an entire Linux distribution. It might work for some packages that sit on top of the distro (like Firefox) but it just won’t work for the whole OS. This is especially true in the enterprise market where Canonical is trying to get a foothold. A rolling release cycle would not go over well on the server side. It wouldn’t work too well for OEMs, either. A rolling cycle for development is one thing, but as Canonical tries to capture bigger deals it’s a non-starter for any of the OEMs and ISVs that Canonical works with.
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Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today the signing of several significant partnerships following the release last month of Ubuntu 10.10.
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Flavours and Variants
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Battling to be classified as the most reliable open source operating system is the Linux Mint team, which apparently has put its plans to action by leveraging its existing and most popular product the Linux Mint and in turn has brought out a new and updated version of the same – Linux Mint 10 a.k.a. “Julia”. Considered the 2nd runner-up in the open source OS industry, Linux Mint 10 follows the lead of Ubuntu and Fedora who have dominated the open source market with products like Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora Project.
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Anders Electronics announced a diminutive COM (computer on module) featuring Marvell’s 1.2GHz Armada 510 CPU. The Linux-ready CM-A510 offers functionality including 1GB of DDR3 memory, up to 512MB of flash storage, a camera interface, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, and onboard Wi-Fi, the company says.
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Tablets
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Internet Connectivity and Networking (ICAN) has launched both a seven-inch and a 10-inch tablet running Android 2.1 on a 1GHz processor. The $400 ICAN! 7 and $500 ICAN! 10 ship with 16GB of internal storage, plus SD expansion, Wi-Fi, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, dual USB 2.0 ports, and HDMI ports, says the company.
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Web Browsers
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Have you ever encountered the situation where you have plenty of tabs open in your browser and one of them is blasting out loud advertisement video? Yes, I know, it is very irritating, especially when you don’t know which tab contains the annoying video and you have to flick through all the tabs to locate (and stop) the ad. With Chrome Toolbox, you can now easily mute all the tabs with a single click.
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SaaS
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According to my research, Google Docs is considered proprietary software even though saved items are kept on Linux-based storage. This demonstrates that Google is all too happy to utilize Linux for storage, yet it’s also not against using proprietary software when it meets its needs.
The odd part to this is that Google happens to be a huge supporter of various open source projects, often with no direct benefit for itself. The reasoning can go either way. One possibility is that Google wants to legitimately give back to the open source ecosystem that enabled it to succeed in the first place. The other possibility is that Google simply loves the great PR of being seen as the good guys.
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The cloud computing boom has brought a surge of opportunity to the open source world. Open source developers and users are taking advantage of these opportunities in three key ways.
First, many open source applications are now available on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis. For open source project owners, hosting apps in the cloud offers a new revenue stream. And for users, it means access to excellent programs and support without the need to maintain their own hardware or hire additional support personnel.
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Databases
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According to a report from the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations (OSOR), France’s social security system, the Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF), is now using the open source PostgreSQL database management system (DBMS). The IT firm Bull is assisting CNAF and says that the PostgreSQL system is currently running nearly one billion SQL queries each day on Red Hat Linux servers.
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CMS
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Social media: love it or hate it, but you can’t ignore it. During the past few years, social media — along with Facebook and Twitter — have grown by leaps and bounds in popularity. If you have a personal or professional blog, you are already part of the social media universe. A great way to increase the popularity of your blog is by using other forms of social media to promote it. WordPress has many plugins to help you with this endeavor.
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Business
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Government
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Health/Nutrition
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The government’s war on medical “price fixing” squelches speech without helping consumers.
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Security
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A Scottish man was sentenced today to 18 months in prison for spamming out e-mails laced with malware and stealing data.
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A jailbreak is available for the latest version of iOS, but for those not interested in jailbreaking, Apple’s update plugs a number of security holes.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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In new efforts to protect citisens against domestic and international terrorism, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has implemented body scanners at airports nationwide. In addition to metal detectors, these machines capture 3-D images of potential passengers and transmit the photos to agents responsible for analytics. Originally, the TSA claimed the “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded” but this claim has since been debunked.
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Amid the furore over airport security, Sam Wolanyk had a plan to avoid his second intrusive pat down in a week … he stripped off.
But Mr Wolanyk, who had previously campaigned for the right to openly carry guns, was arrested.
He stripped to his underwear at San Diego International Airport but refused a body scan and pat-down search because “it was obvious that my underwear left nothing to the imagination.”.
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Matt returned from Paris to Cincinnati, where he was given the choice of a pornoscanner or a bit of the old nutsack-fondling from the TSA. Instead, Matt insisted that it was his right as an American with a passport who was n ot suspected of any wrongdoing to enter his country. The TSA told him the airport cops would arrest him if he didn’t comply. The airport cops told him it was up to the TSA and clearly didn’t appreciate being made to do someone else’s dirty work. In the end, he was escorted out of the airport without having to submit to either procedure. He recorded much of the encounter on with his iPhone’s audio recorder, too.
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An airline passenger outfitted with a urine bag for medical reasons had to sit through his flight soaked in urine after a TSA agent dislodged his bag during an aggressive security pat-down. Nearly a month later, he finally received an apology from TSA chief John Pistole.
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Matt Welch has a nice post over at Reason, highlighting numerous editorials from some big time newspapers mocking people who are concerned about the TSA’s naked scans and/or groping procedures, beginning with the LA Times’ perfectly obnoxious shut up and be scanned. Most of the editorials take on the typical apologists’ line that “this is what we need to do to be secure.” This can be summarized by the claim in the Spokesman-Review, entitled “Discomfort a small price for security on airplanes.”
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Flying for Thanksgiving? Whether you plan to submit patriotically to a naked body scan, or opt instead for the full security grope, you can at least rest assured that the 43,000 Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) handling airport screening have benefited from the most rigorous and up-to-date training the U.S. government can provide.
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In this video, YouTube user SpinRemover adds subtitles to TSA boss John Pistole’s now-infamous Anderson Cooper interview, translating bureaucratese into plain English.
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The growing revolt against invasive TSA practices is encouraging to Americans who are fed up with federal government encroachment in their lives. In the case of air travelers, this encroachment is quite literally physical. But a deep-seated libertarian impulse still exists within the American people, and opposition to the new TSA full body scanner and groping searches is gathering momentum.
I introduced legislation last week that is based on a very simple principle: federal agents should be subject to the same laws as ordinary citizens. If you would face criminal prosecution or a lawsuit for groping someone, exposing them to unwelcome radiation, causing them emotional distress, or violating indecency laws, then TSA agents should similarly face sanctions for their actions.
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It’s hard to say. The TSA was unable to provide any comprehensive data covering all nine years of its existence on short notice, but it does publicize incidents on a weekly basis: From Nov. 8 to Nov. 14, for example, agents found six “artfully concealed prohibited items” and 11 firearms at checkpoints, and they arrested six passengers after investigations of suspicious behavior or fraudulent travel documents. (Those figures are close to the weekly average.) It’s not clear, however, whether any of these incidents represent attempted acts of terrorism or whether they were honest accidents. (Whoops, forgot I had that meat cleaver on me! Or, I had no idea flares weren’t allowed!)
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We already discussed Pistole’s testimony and why he’s actually lying. Contrary to what Pistole claims (and Altman bought without checking), the vast majority of people getting on planes in US airports are going through neither full body scans or “an uncomfortably thorough pat-down.” Most people are still just going through traditional metal detectors. Even in the airports that have the backscatter naked image scanners, most passengers still just go through traditional metal detectors. Claiming that all passengers now go through either the backscatter scans or get a thorough pat-down is a lie.
[...]
Altman may be right that people are overreacting but he didn’t help by simply repeating the claims of Pistole and a weak poll, when both have already been proven to be misleading at best and downright false at worst. Perhaps instead of rushing to mock “the internet” and its mythical “ephemeral obsessions,” Altman could have taken some time to actually research the issue and to inform people of the details rather than just repeating the misleading claims from the TSA. That’s the kind of thing that would actually build up trust in the press, rather than disdain for the press.
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The bad news: It’s not Orlando International but the much smaller Orlando Sanford International, which serves such popular destinations as Allentown, Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Ohio, and of course Iceland. So if you’re thinking about taking your next vacation in Reykjavik, rest easy — hopefully there’ll be no junk-touching for you.
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This comes on the heels of word – as shared in Alan Levin’s story in USA TODAY – that TSA Administrator John Pistole has told a Senate committee in Washington that more invasive pat-downs are necessary. The developments come in the wake of public outcry over the search techniques.
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‘This branch of Al Qaeda is very lethal and I believe them — in terms of what they say they’re trying to do (to attack the United States),’ Mullen told CNN television’s State of the Union programme.
The United States already stepped up airline passenger security after a Nigerian man tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit last December. AQAP had also claimed responsibility for that.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Police will effectively get more powers to censor websites under proposals being developed by Nominet, the company that controls the .uk domain registry.
Following lobbying by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Nominet wants to change the terms and conditions under which domain names are owned so that it can revoke them more easily in response to requests from law enforcement agencies.
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While I have no illusion that most of those who made such comments will ever come back and read this, it is important to make this point clearly, for those who are interested. There are many, many serious problems with the way COICA is written, but this post will highlight why it is a bill for censorship, and how it opens the door to wider censorship of speech online.
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Paul Levy wanted to know the answer to another question: why did both Google and Comcast cough up this guy’s identifying information without even giving him a chance to quash the subpoenas. He asked both companies and the answer he got is, basically, that they immediately cough up info if it’s a criminal subpoena rather than a civil one…
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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“I have heard a lot of ‘chatter’ from the communications bar, Wall Street analysts and reporters, just in the past 72 hours,” noted Federal Communications Commissioner Robert M. McDowell during a talk before the Federalist Society on Monday. “This morning, speculation abounds.”
McDowell was referring to the ample quantity of buzz out in Capitol Hill-land over whether the FCC is actually going to issue net neutrality rules in the near future.
“Let me say at the outset that, as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, appointed by two presidents and unanimously confirmed by the Senate each time,” he added. “I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen… or when… or even if.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Via Annie Mole (actually via IanVisits), we find this fun juxtaposition of two recent stories about the London Underground. Apparently, the organization that runs the famed London subway system has massively increased its legal spending — tripling it in the last five years.
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During the 2008 presidential campaign, CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs hosted his evening broadcast from the gymnasium of Freedom-South Riding High in Loudoun County. Painted on the wall was the school’s official logo – a black and gold eagle with wings spread open and flashing its talons.
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Eric Goldman points us to the news that the (notoriously litigious) Gibson guitar company is suing a whole bunch of companies for selling the new “Paper Jamz” paper multi-touch guitars. If you haven’t seen these things, they’re basically a “paper” (really plastic) guitar with a capacitive multi-touch surface that plays music in response to your touch. Here’s a video demonstrating the thing in action:
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This punkish intellectual property scofflaw was Johann Sebastian Bach, master of the baroque style, spiritual father of modern Western music, literal father of a family of musicians, and inspiration to working creators everywhere. He was also —maybe not coincidentally—a serial user of other people’s work. According to one legend, as a child Bach would jailbreak and copy music his family had locked away. Later, he came into his own as a composer in part by taking a large body of work by Antonio Vivaldi and transposing it for the keyboard.
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Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Thursday threatened to block legislation aimed at curbing piracy and counterfeiting on foreign Web sites, saying the bill is a heavy-handed solution to the problem.
“It seems to me the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act as written today, is the wrong medicine,” Wyden, the chairman of the Finance International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness Subcommittee, said during a hearing on international trade and the digital economy. “Deploying this statute to combat online copyright and infringement seems almost like a bunker buster cluster bomb when really what you need is a precision-guided missile.”
Wyden said that unless changes are made to the bill, introduced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to ensure it “no longer makes the global online marketplace more hazardous to consumers and American Internet companies, I’m going to do everything I can to take the necessary steps to stop it from passing the U.S. Senate.”
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United Brands Co., maker of Joose flavored malt beverage and beer products, has filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement, copyright infringement, unfair competition and related claims, against Anheuser-Busch Inc. and its competing flavored malt beverage called Tilt. United Brands has sold Joose since 2006 and is seeking to protect the brand integrity of Dragon Joose, one of its popular versions of Joose.
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The US bid committee hasn’t secured a commitment from the US government that it will give FIFA the right to act as its own copyright cops and takeover the legal system so it can do things like criminalize wearing orange clothes. As the full FIFA report (PDF) puts it: “However, as the required guarantees, undertakings and confirmations are not given as part of Government Guarantee No. 6 (Protection and Exploitation of Commercial Rights) and mere reference is made to existing general intellectual property laws in the USA, FIFA’s rights protection programme cannot be ensured.”
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Copyrights
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Billion-dollar record label EMI has asked a New York City federal judge to bar a non-profit legal rights group from filing a friend-of-the-court brief in a closely watched internet copyright case that could have broad implications for the future of cloud computing.
EMI says the brief filed last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups supporting MP3tunes’s argument that it’s not responsible for what music its users store on its servers should be barred because it is “a pure advocacy piece, not a ‘friend of the court.’” Amicus curiae briefs are often filed by interest groups and the government in cases that could set major precedents, in order to illustrate the broader ramifications of the case.
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This striking headline comes from a note received from Vivien Rörsch (De Brauw), on two recent and equally striking Dutch decisions handed down last week by the Court of Appeal of The Hague: in the two separate cases the court ruled that, since downloading from illegal sources for private use was permitted under Dutch law, this was to the copyright owner’s advantage.
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Major broadcast networks are taking two online video streaming services to court in order to keep them from streaming free over-the-air broadcasts to customers. Both companies, FilmOn and Ivi, contend they should have the right to stream the content under a compulsory license attached to some forms of content in the US Copyright Act. The networks contend that the companies are “unjustly profiting” off of networks’ programming.
ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC filed separate suits against FilmOn and Ivi in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York. A judge is considering a temporary restraining order against FilmOn while a similar hearing for a restraining order against Ivi is expected in the next few weeks.
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Two lawyers who chased people over illegally copied porn films and computer games are to appear before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for trying to use their positions of trust to take “unfair advantage of other persons”.
Davenport Lyons partners David Gore (who has represented Sting and Jonathan Dimbleby) and Brian Millar (who has since left the London firm), allegedly sent more than 6,000 letters to web users threatening legal action in what critics called a “bounty hunter” operation. But the data used by Davenport Lyons showed only who paid the internet bills, not who downloaded the content. On an unsecured Wi-Fi connection, that could be anyone.
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So far the US Copyright Group (USCG) has sued more than 16,000 people this year for sharing movies online. It has sued them anonymously based on their IP addresses, but has not managed to get most of their names and addresses yet.
However as Ars Technica points out, it has yet to take anyone to court.
Apparently when an ISP looks up the subscriber name associated with an IP address, USCG doesn’t immediately add their name to a lawsuit. Instead, like other law firms trying the same trick, it sends out a settlement letter, asking the person to pay a few thousand dollars in order not to be sued.
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As eMusic prepares to add 250,000 songs from Universal Music Group’s catalogue to its sizeable online music store—and make a major overhaul to its subscription pricing scheme—it appears to be having a falling-out with a large group of independent record labels. Those failed negotiations suggest that the digital-music service may not be able to strike licensing deals that satisfy both large and small music labels.
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While the RIAA has stopped its mass litigation campaign against file-swappers, cases in progress persist. Tanya Andersen’s is one of the oddest and most intriguing, and it’s set to proceed to trial against the RIAA next year on charges of “abuse of the judicial process.”
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Earlier this month, adult entertainment studio West Coast Prods sued 9,729 anonymous individuals for allegedly pirating the porn film Teen Anal Nightmare 2—setting an unofficial record for lumping numerous copyright defendants into a single case.
In the past year, targeting John Does en masse has become a popular technique in the war against piracy, and we’ll have more insight on the porn industry’s adoption of these mass lawsuits in an upcoming print issue of THR. But the West Coast Prods case is noteworthy for a reason other than its sheer size — those who want to see the legal documents are out of luck.
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Lovely misleading way to open the piece. In fact, many of the sites the MPAA has declared as “rogue” are nothing more than online forums. Some of them, yes, do involve people pointing each other to where they might obtain unauthorized copies of movies, but it’s overly dramatic (though, hardly Oscar-worthy) to claim that the only purpose they serve is to profit from “the stolen and counterfeited goods and ideas of others.”
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat – What’s New?
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“LPI seeks out and recruits organizations worldwide to become our Master Affiliates who have significant knowledge of the IT industry and the regional Linux and Open Source ecosystem where they operate. In this regard, GREEKLUG is an ideal partner for us as they have one of the oldest Linux computer labs in Greece and the necessary academic partnerships and human resources to promote the growth of LPI Certification,” said Jim Lacey, president and CEO of the Linux Professional Institute.
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Desktop
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It is due to the web analytic market share counters that the myth of “Linux is 1% of the market share” persists. We present three reasons below.
1. Totally off-the grid systems do not get counted.
* 1,494,500 deployed by One Laptop Per Child.
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktops, SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop, or Ubuntu desktops on corporate or government networks behind a firewall.
* Appliance deployments like cash registers.
2. Nor do research institutions and Universities get properly counted.
For example, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science uses Fedora on the desktop but it does not show up in Fedora’s update statistics. Why? The version of Fedora is so heavily customized to the environment that it needs its own update mechanism. None the less, with 26,307,719 unique ip addresses getting Fedora updates, Fedora alone must have have greater than 1% desktop market share.
3. I agree with Caitlyn Martin, with all of the netbook sales, something is not adding up.
A commenter asked for a 2009 and a 2010 market share report for netbooks. Here is one from November 2009 reporting 1/3 Linux market share. Regretfully, I have nothing for 2010 since the scoop is that netbooks are losing market share overall to iPad tablets. Never fear Linux Fans, The Android Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″ tablet has only been out for a month and has been selling nicely. By the way, Microsoft still lacks a significant market share in tablets.
We won’t stand for the lies behind the 1% myth any more.
We as non-Microsoft users need to stand up and say what we are using. If you use GNU/Linux, I urge you to participate in the Dudalibre “We > 1%” campaign. It takes one minute to say which distro you use.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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For those with some extra time this holiday week in the United States, perhaps you want to try out the ZFS file-system on Linux? As was said this week when publishing ZFS benchmarks on Linux using the native kernel module developed by LLNL/KQ Infotech, the public release of this kernel module wasn’t going to happen until the first week of January. Fortunately, we have been successful in overwhelming KQ Infotech with lots of interested users, so they have decided to go ahead and make the current beta ZFS Linux module available to the general public.
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Graphics Stack
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The good old X Server is finally getting a replacement. Wayland will provide a replacement but can co-exists along side X Server for compatibility and features. It will also reduce the complexity today where for 3D effect, we are running Compiz.
The X architecture has been around for a decades now. It has gone through many iterations and improvements, however it still suffers from complexities and performance issues. These become bigger challenges when you are working on smaller devices such as phones, where X becomes an over head.
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When publishing ATI Gallium3D benchmarks this week that compared the performance of the Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards with this next-generation driver architecture to the classic open-source Mesa driver and AMD’s high-performance proprietary Catalyst driver, the results were what one would mostly expect.
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Applications
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Even when dealing in FOSS, choosing a personal information manager is sometimes a matter of deciding which app’s personality issues you find least bothersome. KOrganizer is a complete organizer, but its menus and user interface often comes off as crowded. Getting Things Gnome has powerful features, but task windows are size-limited. And Chandler Note to Self’s intriguing offering is limited by its difficulty to install.
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Foobnix, a very interesting music player we’ve wrote about a while back (check out that post for a complete review) has been updated to version 0.2.2 and also it finally got an Ubuntu PPA.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For those of you outside the United States (like myself), Black Friday is the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday that marks the first official shopping day of Christmas. It is the day when retailers offer all kinds of incredible sales opportunities that they hope will put them in the black for the year (enabling them to finish the year with a profit).
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It’s been seven weeks since LGP’s server disaster where their single server with a single disk with lackluster backup capabilities suffered a massive failure. The disk suffered from firmware corruption, chemical degradation, and file-system damage, among other problems, and located on this drive were LGP’s web-sites, their online store, and their entire Digital Rights Management implementation for the games they ported to Linux. Fortunately, their services are starting to come back online.
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After getting sucked into Osmos last night when he should have been doing something far more useful, Andrew got to thinking about games on Linux. Osmos is beautiful, intelligent and original, but our neighbours on PC Format would likely scoff at anything less than the latest Assassin’s Creed or Counterstrike iteration.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools.
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Reviews
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The latest beta release of Pardus Linux sports a slew of tweaks and under-the-hood improvements. But does the new release make the distro a viable alternative to the Ubuntus and Fedoras of this world? Dmitri Popov investigates…
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Overall xPUD is a great example of Linux at its best: lean, lightweight and out of your way. I’m having a lot of fun imagining the possibilities of this distribution and hope you have fun with it too. Let me know of any successful experiments in the comments below.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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The Debian-Ubuntu relationships used to be a hot topic, but that’s no longer the case thanks to regular efforts made on both sides. Conflicts between individuals still happen, but there are multiple places where they can be reported and discussed (#debian-ubuntu channel, Derivatives Front Desk at derivatives@debian.org on the Debian side or debian@ubuntu.com on the Ubuntu side). Documentation and infrastructure are in place to make it easier for volunteers to do the right thing.
Despite all those process improvements, the best results still come out when people build personal relationships by discussing what they are doing. It often leads to tight cooperation, up to commit rights to the source repositories. Regular contacts help build a real sense of cooperation that no automated process can ever hope to achieve.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So there we have it: Ubuntu is not about to roll into instability but keeping up with the software Joneses may yet become that little bit easier.
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I previously posted about our continuous deployment efforts in Launchpad. Since then the project has come a long way. We can deploy to nearly all our services without downtime. The remaining services are a bit trickier – but we are working on them.
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The script was initially in Spanish, but I’ve translated it into English and I’ve also corrected 3 small errors which caused the script not to work.
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Sorry that I took a couple of days off to deal with other obligations, however I am back and hacking.
If you missed the last 2 days of Unity Place People adventure please take a look at:
1. Unity Place People – Day 1
2. Unity Place People – Day 2
What’s new:
1. Get Folks and Zeitgeist to play along allowing sorting results using Zeitgeist (Favorite/Most/Recent)
2. Find a nice grouping for the all section
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The Eee Note will run the Linux operating system and will include a headphone jack, voice recording and a built-in camera.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Android might get all the headlines, but MeeGo, the little Linux that could, may yet become an important Linux for your phones, netbooks, tablets, and cars.
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Android
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Rovio recently brought Angry Birds to the Android platform, but the popular (and oddly addictive) physics game is suffering performance problems on certain handsets with slow processors. In a blog entry published on Thursday, the company announced plans for a new “lightweight” version that will work better on legacy hardware.
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What happened was, for our recent South American tour I wanted an Android architecture overview graphic. I ran across, among the Android SDK documentation, a page entitled What is Android?, and it’s perfectly OK. Except for, I really disliked the picture — on purely aesthetic grounds, just not my kind of lettering and gradients and layouts — so I decided to make another one.
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Sub-notebooks
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System76 is shipping a new version of its Ubuntu Linux-ready Starling Netbook equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, starting at $384. Meanwhile the company has begun shipping to the U.K, and is contemplating developing a tablet PC.
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The next big thing in consumer computing is the cloud-based operating system. The most anticipated of these is Google’s Chrome OS, a Linux-based OS meant to be ideal for netbooks and tablet-like devices.
While Google makes promises about a release date for Chrome OS, others are already moving into this space.
One of the first is Jolicloud, which has already released a version 1.0 edition, is readying version 1.1 and has already announced a Jolicloud-based netbook in the UK. The so-called “Jolibook” will run version 1.1 of the cloud software.
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Community interest in continuing the development of Google’s Wave communication platform has led to a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the Apache Software Foundation (OSM). The proposal was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration.
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Gather the pitchforks and light the torches. Hordes of marketing men are gathering, intent on invading the free and open source software village armed with copyright assignment policies and turning everyone into mindless corporate contributors. As Michael Meeks (via LWN.net) has warned there is “‘a sustained marketing drive coming’ to push the copyright-assignment agenda” As you read this very post, faceless marketing drones are calling your bosses, spreading pernicious lies about the necessity of copyright assignment policies.
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In this new category we’re looking for examples of technology that is open source. This could be a publishing platform, a hardware toolset, a peer-to-peer communications service or software development tools. Well known examples of this could include Firefox or WordPress – but which developers are creating the next generation of open source tools which will transform the way we interact with the web?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Public perception is a commodity of which companies throw millions of dollars at a year, if not more. A company will have various sub-departments which handles their own perception in a different way, usually singing to the same finely tuned song of the directorship.
But over the years, instead of the more obvious targets being harassed as the “corporate bad guy” such as ammunition companies, licensed arms dealers and fossil fuel suppliers – those which have a wider cultural dent on society, the technology companies are getting the flak.
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The big things this week:
* Today is the KB code freeze!
* Current KB article freeze, Nov 29th 1AM PST
* KB Sprint happening Dec 2, 6AM – 2PM PST
* The Polish localization team is kicking ass!
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We just pushed out a new version of the F1 add-on and the F1 service. Existing users should upgrade their add-ons (click on “Find Updates” in the Add-On manager).
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I get nostalgic sometimes. I think back to the days of the Commodore 64, the Gameboy and other such simple consoles of the 1980s, and I wonder: can you play those games on a modern computer? Is it possible to relive the original Tetris, to play Giana Sisters or Elite all over again?
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Databases
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The open source database management system (DBMS) Postgresql is the new engine for France’s Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF). The organisation, responsible in 2009 for some 69 billion Euro in benefits distributed to 11 million claimants, earlier this year replaced its proprietary DBMS with the open source alternativ
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Oracle
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Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m94 is available for download.
DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.
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CMS
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Global Translator is a free and open source WordPress Plugin which is able to automatically translate your blog in 48 different languages:
Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese, Thai, Turkish, Hungarian, Belarus,Irish, Icelandic, Macedonian, Malay, Persian.
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Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business today, at least for a handful of invited participants.
“Every week, we’ll invite more people,” stated the developers behind the project, in a blog item posted Tuesday announcing the alpha release of the service. “By taking these baby steps, we’ll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible.”
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Education
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Most schools today involve rows of students seated at desks, looking toward a teacher. That teacher, who is the focus of all the students, holds the power in the classroom, but has little power to make structural changes within the school system. The educational system in the United States right now is set up to teach kids how to follow directions—and it’s not doing that very well, either. Our students learn how to break the rules and not get caught. Our schools teach kids ways to negotiate power so that they are able to achieve some sort of reward or avoid punishment, but never to be in power. Conformity and submission to authority are clear strategies for success in the public school system. Students see clear examples of “power over” and “power under,” but rarely “power with.” Our schools are educating for empire.
By not teaching children how to think critically, and not allowing students or teachers meaningful control over school environments or curriculum, our schools train workers who do not question authority in jobs or on battlefields. If students are unable to operate successfully in this system, they are often funneled into the prison industrial system. This connection between prisons and schools is becoming more and more transparent. Just last February a seventh grade girl in New York was arrested and taken directly to jail for writing on her desk in marker. The means by which schools operate are authoritarian and oppressive. Youth in schools do not experience a right of due process and are one of the only populations within the U.S. who to not have access to this right. There is no innocent-until-proven-guilty option in the principle’s office. This system invites little to no feedback from and does not empower those upon which it acts, whether students or teachers.
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Business
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Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.
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Project Releases
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The third beta of the OpenOffice.org fork ‘LibreOffice’ saw release this week.
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Well, after about two and a half years of work by hundreds of people, I’m proud to say that we have a Moodle 2.0 ready for you to download.
All the functional QA tests have passed, all the 3873 unit tests are passing, and enough people think it’s finished, so it must be finished. smile The last step was to take the (now traditional) Moodle version photo of my kids for this news post, which I did today.
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Government
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The Italian chamber of deputies on the 22th of September 2010 approved unanimously a motion to move on with the adoption of open standards in order to make office suite migrations a reality.
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The administration of the Polish city of Poznań is using many open source tools, allowing it to offer a variety of e-government services to its citizens, civil workers and politicians. “Free and open source software, open access and open standards allow us to create open government services.”
Examples include the streaming audio of city council sessions, using the Ogg Vorbis open standard. The city also offers websites that combine city maps with city planning and providing public Internet access points. Using open source furthermore allows Poznan’s citizens to submit information to the Municipal police, in combination with digital maps.
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Nichi Vendola is president both of south-eastern italian region Puglia and of the Italian left party Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL or “Left, Ecology, Freedom” in English).
Free Software is software that can save lots of public money. Even moms like Free Software like Linux, partly because it can be used without problems even by some disabled children. Besides, Free Software is such a good idea that European Parliament representatives of all colors like it !.
On its own website, SEL says “we believe that for a modern party speaking of copyleft, Free Software and Net Neutrality is as necessary as speaking of jobs, environment, economy and civil rights”. Among the more than 100 political candidates supporting Free Software at the latest regional elections in Italy there were several SEL representatives. The Florence section of SEL even presented a motion to promote Free Software in Florence http://www.sinistraeliberta.eu/articoli/sel-per-il-software-libero-al-comune-di-firenze] in January 2010.
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Licensing
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Somebody linked me to this reddit story about the fact that Viewsonic appear to be engaging in the currently fashionable trend of shipping Android devices without providing any source. This one’s more interesting though, in that Viewsonic appear to be entirely happy to publicly state that they have no intention of following their license obligations. I’ve pulled the kernel image for the device and confirmed that it contains code that’s not present in the generic Android Tegra tree, so I don’t think they have a leg to stand on here.
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Openness/Sharing
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In addition, some of the individual stories are released under the CC BY-NC-SA license, which allows you to translate and adapt the work as long as you abide by the noncommercial condition and release the derivative under the same license. Podcasts are also being created for all the stories, with three stories up so far.
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Open Data
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There is always progress to be made and the presumption to make data public and online (with teeth!) is an important cultural shift we hope to see soon. Just last week the United Kingdom took an unprecedented step to publicize all government spending over 25,0000 pounds. As governments around the world tighten their belts we think making the books fully transparent will allow citizens to be better informed about where their tax dollars go and how to move forward. Here in the US there is the Data.gov site (which could be greatly improved) and we are encouraged that the culture is shifting as we see folks like the United Nations, the World Bank, Russia, Spain, Finland, Australia and many others hopping on board.
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Open Access/Content
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The faculty of Harvard Divinity School (HDS) voted, in a meeting on November 15, to allow Harvard University to make electronic versions of their current scholarly articles available to the public. With the vote for open access, the Divinity School faculty joined five other Harvard schools in a commitment to disseminate faculty research and scholarship as widely as possible.
“While open access has grown more quickly in the sciences, the movement is of vital importance in all fields of scholarly inquiry,” said Laura Wood, librarian of Andover-Harvard Theological Library at HDS. “The HDS faculty has taken an important step—both practically and philosophically—toward broader dissemination of their scholarship.”
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Standards/Consortia
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An excellent example of governments working together on open standards like ODF: the Dutch government program ‘The Netherlands Open In Connection’ started a Dutch ODF usergroup while Fedict, the Belgian Federal Public Service ICT, publishes an ODF news letter in Dutch and French.
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On the one side, there’s Blekko, which debuted Nov. 1 after spending three years in development, using nearly $25 million in venture capital from some of Silicon Valley’s top investors to build a full-scale search infrastructure. Less than a month after the public launch, Blekko is attracting a million queries a day to its slashtag search system. Its algorithm searches only pre-approved sites in seven areas, including health, personal finance, cars and travel.
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A state representative said it was a misunderstanding when he parked his car in the Planned Parenthood lot in Highland Park and was later stopped by St. Paul police because of the revolver he was carrying near his waistband.
Thomas Hackbarth, 58, was stopped in his car on Nov. 16 after a security guard saw him with a gun in the parking lot about 5 p.m., an hour after the clinic closed. Police ordered him out of his car at gunpoint and handcuffed and questioned him before taking his gun and letting him go.
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This post rolls a few things into one in a kinda catchup way, since I’ve been a little lax in blogging and releasing screencasts recently. First thing to mention is that I appeared on the TechBytes audiocast with Roy and Tim as a guest speaking about Linux Mint and enjoyed it so much that I am now a regular co-host on the show. So far I’ve appeared on 5 shows.
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Intel is doomed, Hermann Hauser has claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal . If you don’t know who Hauser is, he happens to be one of the co-founders of ARM–possibly Intel’s most dangerous foe in the semiconductor marketplace, when also-rans like AMD and VIA are removed from the equation.
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SCIENTIFIC PAPERS written over 50 years ago by the brilliant British mathematician, cryptologist and computer scientist Alan Turing failed to meet their reserve at auction.
The papers were set to be at the heart of a bidding war when they were auctioned at Christie’s yesterday, however they failed to meet their apparently lofty reserve. This means that the campaign to keep the papers at Bletchley Park has a second chance at success.
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Security
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So just the leaking of a full or partial BGP table in itself isn’t too suspicious, although networks the size of China Telecom should know better. But doing so with the AS paths removed may be construed as a reason for a moderate level of suspicion by those so inclined.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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It doesn’t take a bureaucrat long to create an empire. John Pistole, the FBI agent who took over the Transportation Security Administration on July 1 told USA Today 16 days later that protecting trains and subways from terrorist attacks will be as high a priority for him as air travel.
It is difficult to imagine New Yorkers being porno-screened and sexually groped on crowed subway platforms or showing up an hour or two in advance for clearance for a 15 minute subway ride, but once bureaucrats get the bit in their teeth they take absurdity to its logical conclusion. Buses will be next, although it is even more difficult to imagine open air bus stops turned into security zones with screeners and gropers inspecting passengers before they board.
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There has been a call for people who are flying to be with family for Thanksgiving tomorrow to opt out of the BS Scanner process in protest. We’ll have to see what happens but there are a couple of comments I read on boingboing that bear repeating, so I wanted to include them here. And because boingboing (unlike, say, CBC) publishes under a Creative Commons License I can happily and legally reprint the words of others.
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And reader Benjamin Wang emails:
A disgusting thought, but I’ve never seen a TSA screener change gloves. It would be interesting to send in a HAZMAT team to test several sets of gloves and see what’s on them. And publicize the results.
Remember: The gloves are for their protection. Not yours.
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At best, the “BS Scanners” are an invasion of privacy, at worst, a serious health risk.
Clearly what is being done to citizens by the TSA contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Since 9/11, disenfranchised groups have been trying to get traction about our eroding civil rights while traveling, without much luck. That’s why I was delighted to see angry white guys finally reach the tipping point. They are even more potent a force in creating a media frenzy than Missing White Woman Syndrome. Now that white guys are being objectified, scrutinized, touched, and considered guilty until proven innocent, they are finally getting a taste of what an encounter with authority can be like for other groups on a daily basis, and not just when traveling. Welcome to our world, dudes!
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The Transportation Security Administration is feeling public heat these days over its combination of whole-body-image scanners and heavy-handed pat-down searches, and deservedly so.
There’s no question that reform is needed to curtail TSA’s excesses. We especially applaud the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s efforts to increase public awareness about the body scanners. But will the heat now being generated produce the kind of light we really need?
Consider, for instance, the all-too-common response that we need to
accept the indignity and invasiveness of the body scanners and pat-down searches in order to be safer. That response assumes that body scanners actually make us safer — a dubious assumption that we explore below.
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A TSA employee based at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport tried to kill himself after allegedly abducting a woman, sexually assaulting her then giving her a suicide note to deliver.
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Police have dispersed the final student demonstrators in central London after a day of protests against higher tuition fees and university cuts.
Police said 17 people were injured, including two officers as protesters were contained on Whitehall.
There have also been occupations in at least 12 universities, including Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
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This is yet another example of zero tolerance policy taken to an absurd level. Who knew that pencils were “materials to build weapons?” Are the school officials going to remove every last stone, rock and pebble from the school grounds, because they are materials to start a war?
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After two chaotic student protests in the space of a fortnight, the question police will be asking is: who are the new rebel leaders? The unfortunate answer for them is that there are none.
Unlike student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, actions developed organically, with social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, providing an ideal platform for grassroots organisation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The previously unseen creature has ‘arms’ growing from its head and swims by rhythmically beating its bristles
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Finance
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The impending collapse of the microcredit sector in India, in the context of lender and farmer suicides, makes it imperative to review the critiques of the model.
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I especially like the quote below from Tasini’s book (emphasis mine):
If you want to wring your hands about the bigger government deficit, don’t go pointing the finger at the president or Congress. Instead, you can thank Goldman Sachs, Angelo Mozilo, Robert Rubin and the rest of the smart boys who built a financial system that was a mix of a floating casino, Ponzi scheme and Fool’s Gold paradise—all patched together by lies, deceit and a healthy dose of massive public indoctrination of the wonders of the “free market”.
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The peoples’ oligarch Warren Buffett just wrote a thank you letter to “Uncle Sam” published in the New York Times. It is the height of cynicism. (Image)
Buffett has a carefully crafted public image as a brilliant but people-friendly master of investments. We hear about his regular table at an Omaha diner where he conducts business (just plain Warren) and we see his occasional public stands for reasonable policies like the inheritance tax.
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You can cause a Subprime-Mortgage-backed Securities Meltdown that demolished financial markets worldwide, and took down countries, like Iceland directly and Greece indirectly, but since you work at Goldman you get a bonus.
* Goldman Sachs was AIG’s biggest customer. Meaning, Goldman Sachs double-dipped on the bailout money. Goldman Sachs playing in Subprime fueled AIG’s demise.
If you work for Goldman Sachs…
You may be CEO when the Subprime Mess is brewing in the pot, but you can always move over to the US Treasury to mop up when the pot boils over the counter and onto the floor. Goldman Sachs, as the #1 recipient of the Wall Street $700 billion bailout, saw fit to thank the American Taxpayers by giving out more bonus money than the year before.
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A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment or praising Facebook for its commitment to privacy. During the past decade, Citi has become synonymous with financial misjudgment, reckless lending, and gargantuan losses: what might be termed asset denuding rather than asset building. In late 2008, the sprawling firm might well have collapsed but for a government bailout. Even today the U.S. taxpayer is Citigroup’s largest shareholder.
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Its official – Spain and Portugal will need to be bailed out soon. How do I know? In one of my favorite TV shows, Yes Minister, the all-knowing civil servant Sir Humphrey explains to cabinet minister Jim Hacker that you can never be certain that something will happen until the government denies it.
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Europe is gripped by a sense of alarm, now that Ireland has become the second euro-zone country to ask for a bailout. Pessimists claim that the crisis means the euro is finished. But that scenario is unrealistic — in reality, there is little to suggest that the common currency is about to disintegrate.
The mood in Europe is currently one of alarm — yet again. First, the EU’s member states had to pull Greece back from the precipice of bankruptcy. And now they are having to save Ireland from financial ruin.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Minnesota senator Al Franken is doing what he can to throw a wrench into the merger between cable giant Comcast and NBC, the network he once called home during his years on Saturday Night Live. Yesterday, he asked the Justice Department to investigate whether or not Comcast violated anti-trust laws when it announced who would fill the top positions in the acquired company, even though the deal has yet to get DOJ approval.
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In recent days, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has hinted in her clearest language yet that she is seriously considering a run for the presidency in 2012. Many observers have argued that Palin could never win because of her embarrassing lack of expertise, knowledge, or interest in foreign policy. Her appearance on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s radio show today, captured by Oliver Willis, suggests they may be right:
CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...]
PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –
CO-HOST: South Korean.
PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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It was Huang’s first experience with prison, but not with Communist Party repression. When he was an electrical engineering student at Shanghai’s Fudan University in the 1980s, Huang marched in the pro-democracy protests that roiled China. But the heady days in the streets came to a bloody end when the government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square. Huang wasn’t arrested, but some of his acquaintances disappeared. And he was shocked by the way the government’s ensuing propaganda barrage convinced many Chinese that the protesting students were themselves to blame for the bloodshed. Disillusioned, Huang left China, got his graduate degree at the University of Toronto, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1992. He spent most of the 1990s quietly living the immigrant-American dream, starting a family and building a career. Along the way, he also became one of the Bay Area’s hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners, leading study sessions and group exercises. So when Beijing launched its crackdown on the sect, it felt to Huang like 1989 all over again: The government was brutalizing a peaceful movement while painting its adherents as dangerous criminals. This time, he was determined to fight back. His aborted trip to China and frightening weeks in jail only left him more resolute. “My experience told me that the persecution was more severe than what we can imagine,” Huang says in accented English. “I felt I needed to do something.”
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A county council that faxed details of a child sex abuse case to a member of the public is to be fined £100,000 for breaching the Data Protection Act.
Hertfordshire County Council is one of two bodies fined by the Information Commissioner – both have apologised.
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Internet providers should create an “opt-in” system to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said.
Claire Perry wants age-checks to be attached to all such material to reduce exposure to it.
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Today saw the ICO announce the first use of its new powers granted in April 2010 – the new monetary penalty (essentially a fine to you and I) for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the Act). For many years data protection lawyers have waited for this moment to happen, as no longer is business going to be hit by adverse publicity it can potentially be hit very firmly on the bottom line. Whilst the fines are no where near are severe as that which can be handed down under the Competition Law regime (up to 10% of a businesses annual turn over), any loss of income in the current climate (as well as any competitive edge that your business did have pre breach) is a worry and concern.
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Amid recent reports that security researchers have experienced difficulties at the United States border after traveling abroad, we realized that it’s been awhile since we last discussed how to safeguard electronic devices and digital information during border searches. So just in time for holiday travel and the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, here’s EFF’s guide for protecting your devices and sensitive data at the United States border.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Bill C-32 legislative committee meets for the first time tomorrow with hearings likely to begin later this week. The digital lock provisions will undoubtedly be a major focus of discussion with all three opposition parties calling for changes to the current approach. Industry lobby groups will continue their effort to keep the C-32 lock provisions, one of the world’s most restrictive implementations of anti-circumvention legislation, unchanged.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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When copyright Bill C-32 passes, I will automatically become a criminal.
I suspect the bill will pass in its current form because it was written in a state of hysteria about people downloading things without paying for them, which is like total stealing, and American corporations are leaning on foreign governments to put a stop to it. If there was ever a Canadian prime minister more attentive to the corporate needs of the United (failing) States, it’s Stephen Harper.
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A strong coalition of two Dutch artists unions and the local consumer watchdog have submitted a proposal to permanently legalize file-sharing of music and movies. In exchange, the parties call for a levy on MP3-players and other devices that can play and record movies and music. In the future, this has to be changed to a general levy on Internet subscriptions.
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Graham Syfert, the lawyer who offered self-help to alleged BitTorrent downloaders of films such as Far Cry and The Hurt Locker, has been sued by the makers of the latter movie. On behalf of Voltage Pictures, the US Copyright Group (USCG) is seeking sanctions against Syfert and demand $5000 for the ‘work’ the self-help forms have caused them. in reponse, Syfert has requested sanctions against the plaintiffs because their filing is “completely insane.”
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How’s this for supreme irony?
The RIAA and MPAA recently published chapter-and-verse outlines of exactly where to find alleged ‘piracy’ purveyors not only online, but also off.
p2pnet ran both items in full, singly and together.
Shortly after the Big 4 record labels, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music used the US court system to shut down Limewire, PC Magazine posted an article suggesting six alternative P2P services and torrent trackers, saying “all of these services should be used for legal downloads, of course”.
According to Billboard, totally ignoring the detailed RIAA and MPAA contributions, a coterie of Big Music acolytes claimed, “The harm done to the creative community when people are encouraged to steal our music is immeasurable. Disclaimer or no, when you offer a list of alternative P2P sites to LimeWire – and include more of the serial offenders — PC Magazine is slyly encouraging people to steal more music … ”
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In a letter to those coordinating Operation Payback, the series of DDoS attacks carried out against pro-copyright outfits since September, the UK and US Pirate Party are calling for an end to hostilities. They reason that the continuation of the operation plays into the hands of organizations that wish to “pervert” copyright law for personal gain and hampers the progress of those seeking copyright reform through legitimate means.
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A 25-year-old Winnipeg businessman is the first Pirate Party of Canada candidate to run for federal election.
Jeff Coleman, a former ESL teacher who owns a design and 3-D company, is running in the upcoming federal by-election on November 29 in Winnipeg North.
His plan: to take to the streets of his home riding to engage voters in issues that surround the digital age.
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ACTA
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After 11 rounds of international negotiations, the final text of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has overcome its biggest hurdle yet when it was welcomed as a step in the right direction by the European Parliament, which voted 331-294, with 11 members abstaining, to approve the measure.
Although the Parliament has called for some reassurances from the European Commission, the vote means that in principle the final legal text can now be agreed to by the Commission at a meeting in Sydney from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Under the Lisbon Treaty, Members of the European Parliament were required to give their consent to the measure and there were fears right up until the vote that they might halt the deal altogether.
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Given that, by laying down the thresholds for injunctions, the EU acquis has struck a delicate balance between enforcement and fundamental rights safeguards, how will the Commission ensure that these safeguards under the current EU acquis are maintained?
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At 331 to 294 it was close, but the EPP and ECR (UK Conservatives) between them have backed the rights-holder industries and failed citizens.
Within the past hour, in a very tense vote, the European Parliament has adopted a weak and industry-favourable resolution, which supports the cover-ups that we have seen over ACTA and fails to address the issue within it. This has happened despite the efforts and hard work of many MEPs who oppose ACTA to obtain a stronger resolution.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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As reported by V3, a survey commissioned by the Internet Society found that 39 per cent of web users polled reckoned that meddling governments pose the greatest danger to the Internet.
While no specifics were listed, rushed through legislation like Mandelson’s Digital Economy Act and attempts to turn ISPs into Internet police have created a culture of fear. That can’t help in a world where governments are acting as pawns of the big media companies and genuinely fear the open nature of the Internet.
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Enable Wacom Tablet In GIMP – Fedora 13
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.24.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The difference between consumer needs and producer needs appear to be clearly understood everywhere else. You don’t sell a forklift to a soccer mom, and you don’t force a warehouse worker to try to drag pallets of boxes around in an SUV. I could go on with more examples, right? Everybody grasps the concept that the needs of a consumer and a producer are different?
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Desktop
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Better late than never, this Saturday Ubuntu Denmark finally got around to hand out Ubuntu 10.10 CDs in a mall in Aarhus.
It’s been more than a year since we did it the last time, and the LoCo team had undergone some fundamentally changes in the meantime, and has been quite inactive. So the event was of great importance – not only to the spread of Ubuntu, but to the local community in general as well.
The day was quite a success. We handed out about 120-130 CD’s which we’ve received from Canonical in the 6 hours we were there, and, just as importantly, showed the Ubuntu name and brand to thousands of people. I also think we “recruited” a lot of people to attend our bi-monthly Ubuntu meetups, where people can get technical help, listen to presentations and contributing to Ubuntu.
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Server
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In its work Weta uses several different software programs to create its special effects. The company uses PCs running Linux and most animation is done using Maya. To complement this, the company created its own software including Mari, which is used to “skin” characters and monsters using scans of rubber molds taken from actors. Mari lets animators use skin like a brush to coat each of their figures.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Karen and Bradley discuss the debates regarding Apple’s online store restrictions that make it impossible to distribute GPL’d software via Apple’s store. Then, they discuss question the usefulness of the term “Open Core”
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is a 7-inch tablet that looks a lot like an overgrown Galaxy S phone, without the phone functionality. It debuted in the U.S. this month and will be available from all four major U.S. wireless carriers. (Note: Versions of the device sold outside the U.S. do have phone functionality; this is a limitation imposed by the U.S. carriers.) Reviews ranged from glowing (”It’s a Tablet. It’s Gorgeous. It’s Costly“) to scathing (”A Pocketable Train Wreck“).
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While other hardware vendors are constantly improving their open-source support, this isn’t the case for all vendors. VIA’s open-source Linux support is still in very bad shape — two and a half years after they had envisioned themselves becoming open-source friendly.
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While the RadeonHD driver is no longer actively developed, obviously this can come across as offensive to those who vigorously worked on this open-source Linux driver. More importantly though it puts into question the security of the FreeDesktop.org infrastructure. It took three weeks to spot as the Git notification email was not sent to the appropriate mailing list. Luc has already written to the mailing list.
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The most demanding OpenGL test in this article is Nexuiz and here the Mesa 7.10-devel + Linux 2.6.37 kernel DRM struggled to compete with the proper Intel Windows 7 driver. On average, the Windows 7 driver was 56% faster than the open-source Mesa driver was and the gap widened at the higher resolutions.
The latest Intel/Mesa driver code on Linux has resulted in some performance improvements and has made it more competitive with their Windows graphics driver, but still we are finding the Intel Linux performance to be at a loss in the more demanding test environments. The Intel Windows stack is also compatible with more games and OpenGL applications than the Mesa-based Linux solution. It will be interesting to see how the Intel Sandy Bridge performance compares between Microsoft Windows and Linux once released early next year.
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Last night when checking to see if VIA has made any open-source / Linux progress that went unnoticed (they haven’t), that also led me to see what S3 Graphics is up to these days. S3 Graphics doesn’t back any open-source driver strategy and they don’t have many GPUs on the market, but their binary Linux driver claims to support OpenGL 3, VDPAU, and even kernel mode-setting since last year.
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Questioning the necessity for Wayland and the wiseness of the choice has become a phenomena, especially after Mark Shuttleworth annouced Ubuntu’s plans to eventually switch to Wayland. Following I will provide a concise reasoning why we want Wayland. At the end there are some more links for further reading.
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Applications
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At Lifehacker we love great software, but we especially love great free software. Many developers make our lives easier every day by providing their apps for free, so let’s give thanks to the free apps we’re most thankful for.
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A new release of virtual light-table and darkroom application Darktable is available for download.
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ing this script is better then copying some files in your Public Dropbox folder:
* because the script uses symbolic links, the files aren’t actually copied to your Dropbox public folder, so they won’t take the double amount of space
* all the links are automatically copied to the clipboard
* you can even share folders, even though Dropbox doesn’t allow this by default (the shared folder will have an “index.html” file and thus opening its link in a web browser, it can be easily accessed via a web browser)
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I carefully designed this dialog so that it made the workflow more efficient, not less (unlike some “stupid” wizards I’ve seen over the years). It should really have been named an “Assistant” or “Welcome” screen, because it’s not a linear druid/wizard. I would personally not have included a “Skip” button (see the bug report for the reasoning), but hey, we’re not that short on space (and this button will probably prevent me from being assaulted by angry geeks).
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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When I first started using Linux, I had heard about the CodeWeavers CrossOver software package that worked to run Windows applications in a Linux environment. However, I could not justify purchasing it (retail pricing starting at $40) because in my eyes, it did not offer any value. After all, it was based on the WINE project, and I saw it pointless to purchase something that was simply a re-branded version of something that was freely available. More recently, though, a few people have been telling me about the wonders of CrossOver and how it was so much more than the branded WINE package that I thought it was. For this reason, I decided to take the plunge and purchase CrossOver Linux Standard in order to run a few Windows applications in Linux.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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The Enlightenment Libraries haven’t even hit version 1.0 yet (though they’re getting close and in beta right now), but these libraries and other parts of Enlightenment are already in production use. Besides Samsung getting in bed with Enlightenment for their smart-phone Linux OS, this open-source software is now appearing in… refrigerators.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Yeouch. Hell, I’ve done everything I could to get Firefox to save space, and yet… ouch ouch ouch. Blogilo wins this one, even before you remove the toolbox.
The reasons are obvious. WordPress.com suffers all the weaknesses of trying to make an application out of a document-layouting language, while Blogilo benefits from the full power of modern-day desktop application toolkits: this is evidenced by the fact that, despite not having enough room for the Visual Editor tab’s toolbar, the toolkit knows how to properly manage that situation (hide some buttons at the end). Moreover, because you only ever open Blogilo to actually post something to your blog, that’s all it has to display: web interfaces also need tools and navigation for visiting your blog, managing comments, visiting other people’s blogs, managing your account, managing media etcetera, and that stuff scoffs space. The website looks, feels and works like… you guessed it – a website. On the other side of the fence, the desktop client looks, feels and works more like a document creator, which is good – since the focus is on the document and not the rest of the interface.
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So what’s new in 4.6 for Calendar Systems? Well, not much visible really. I had hoped to have the astronomical calendars (Chinese, Islamic, etc) done for 4.6, but I’m still in requirements gathering for that so it’s bumped to 4.7. Instead I’ve done some stuff to make date localization easy. If you’re looking for bling, you may as well skip to the next post (I’m sure someone has some nice Lenovo eye-candy to show off :-), but if you’re an app coder tired of how awkward date localization can be then stick around.
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I received no testing feedback from my last blog entry about multihead improvements for Plasma Desktop, which underscores the challenges we face with multihead support very nicely.
In any case, today I went through plasma-desktop and moved all the relevant code over to the new solution and committed all the changes to trunk. In theory this should improve plasma-desktop on multihead even further, with things like moving panels around with the mouse working as expected and what not.
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GNOME Desktop
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The code is not really clean enough for public consumption yet, and a bunch of features are missing. However, its now at the stage where it can be demoed and evaluated.
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A while back we’ve told you about an interesting Unity mockup for managing multiple workspaces that automatically creates the workspaces and always keeps an empty workspace so you don’t have to create the workspaces yourself (and you always have the number of workspaces that you actually need).
Unfortunately, Mark Shuttleworth didn’t like the idea (at least the way it was described back then) so it seems like we won’t have this in Unity. But on the other hand, it looks like we’ll have it in Gnome Shell (not exactly the same, but the same concept is being used). Read on!
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Lucidity theme. Chances are you’ve seen it in a screenshot at some point in your life.
The official blurb states that Lucidity is ‘set of themes which are smooth and subtle, while also being fairly high in contrast, and in which interactive elements are noticeable and responsive in order to deliver a lucid experience.’
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Reviews
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A while ago I noted that I have been exploring Lilliput, trying out a few of the lightweight distros that have been proliferating lately. A brand new one named Bodhi is currently being developed, and Susan Linton gave an alpha version of it a brief review on her OStatic blog under the title Just Another Ubuntu-based Distro or Something More. I gave Bodhi a try (just from the LiveCD so far), and I must say I definitely see it as Something More, a significantly new approach to providing a kit for making The Distro You Always Wanted.
[...]
My own impression is that Bodhi, by the time it reaches final release, could easily turn out to be a nearly ideal distro for someone who has come recently to Linux with no prior IT experience, but who has begun to show an interest in doing something more than simply using a ready-made OS.
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New Releases
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Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the release of version 3.3 of Tiny Core Linux. Based on the 2.6.33.3 Linux kernel, Tiny Core Linux 3.3 features updates to the Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK), such as a new integrated file manager and a minimal editor under System tools.
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Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, has announced the release of SimplyMepis 11.0 Alpha 3 just in time to mark the eighth anniversary of MEPIS on November 21. SimplyMepis usually takes quite a while to cook and no final release date has been given.
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Red Hat Family
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A day after the second-biggest Linux vendor, Novell (NOVL), was offered $2.2 billion to merge, Cowen & Co.’s Gregg Moskowitz initiated coverage of the biggest, Red Hat (RHT), with a Neutral rating, writing that while Red Hat’s business is rebounding, its stock is rich and some of its opportunities are not as verdant as they once were.
Red Hat has been very successful at turning users of the free Linux operating system into paying customers who receive support and upgrades on a subscription basis, creating a nice annuity revenue stream.
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Fedora
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I’m planning to make the move from Fedora 13 to 14. I’ve been running the Xfce spin for months now and have mostly enjoyed it. I still have Fedora 15′s release day plus one month of patches for Fedora 13 coming my way, but given that F14 isn’t a “landmark” release, I’m feeling more comfortable than usual in contemplating the upgrade.
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I decided to start early today and attempt the Fedora 13-to-14 upgrade on my main “production” laptop.
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Gareth Halfacree takes a look at the final release of Fedora 14, and sees if the Red Hat-based distro has what it takes to conquer the desktop market…
[...]
There’s a lot to recommend Fedora 14, from its well thought out security features to the wide variety of development tools available. An excellent installer caters to both end-users and power-users, but there are some issues with outdated software and SELinux that prevent us recommending it as a day-to-day OS for less technical users.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to Ostatic, Mark Shuttleworth, said that Ubuntu will likely be moving from its current six-month release schedule to daily updates which would make Ubuntu a rolling-release Linux distribution.
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Mark Shuttleworth recently told reporters that Ubuntu will likely be moving from its current six-month release schedule to daily updates. A step of this nature would help Ubuntu keep up with the rapidly changing and increasing complex software and hardware landscape. This is especially true as Ubuntu finds itself on more mobile and smartphone devices.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pinguy OS 10.10 falls somewhere between Linux Mint 10 and Ultimate Edition 2.8 in terms of features and software. While it’s not as well known as some of these other distros, it’s definitely worth a look if you crave more than generic Ubuntu.
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Phones
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Android
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Do a search for “Gingerbread” on Twitter and prepare to be jealous at the mass of people who are reporting that Google just pushed an update to their Nexus One with the latest version of the Android operating system. We’ve written about Gingerbread before, many times, but here’s pretty much all you need to know about why you should be excited:
NFC (Near Field Communication) support is coming, meaning that you’ll soon be able to tap on payment terminals when picking up your daily cup of coffee and croissant from the café. You’ll also be able to tap objects and get more information about them, from anything to pulling up a line of text, to a website, to initiating playback of a video. The best feature, at least for all the social butterflies out there, will be tap to exchange contact information. No more business cards!
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Last month we told you that Android became the No. 1 smartphone platform in the US, and now it’s time to take a look at how things are going in Asia.
Well, Google’s OS has done the same thing: it’s now the most popular smartpohne OS in Asia, too – at least according to market research company GfK.
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Sub-notebooks
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The One Laptop Per Child project begun in 2008 has turned out as badly as most said it would, including the many millions of baht spent on buying the toy-like portable computers involved; a study from Chiang Mai University’s engineering faculty confirmed that students issued the cute little machines failed to improve their school performances as OLPC advocates insisted would happen; on the other hand, their marks didn’t get worse, either, perhaps because most of the students had access to real computers at home; schools in the pilot project for free computers _ the OLPC machines are just like real computers only crippled _ live in Lampang, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Rayong and Nakhon Si Thammarat; lecturer Anand Sripitakkiat, who introduced the study, said students needed a new type of classroom atmosphere more than a small, free notebook; he added that students in a regular school with old-fashioned teaching systems would likely not benefit no matter what computer access he had.
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Tablets
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…three Android-based devices and one that runs Windows.
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I turned on my TV this morning to check the news before going to work to be greeted by a message informing me that my sky satellite box had been updated overnight and was now using some opensource software with a reference to this website for further information and instructions on how to obtain the software either by download or cd-rom.
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Open source has won. Oh, how time flies. When I started writing in Database in May 2003, my first column was about how the ICT Ministry had got the budget PC programme all wrong. ICT Minister Surapong had announced his great success at negotiating the inclusion of Windows XP and Office XP at just 1,500 baht, a 90 percent discount. He saw it as success. I saw it as capitulation.
Back then, Thailand had a chance to lead the world in breaking the Microsoft addiction. Instead, we capitulated. Would it be considered a success to negotiate a 90 percent discount on cocaine?
In those days, Thailand was on the map in the open source movement. Mark Shuttleworth, head honcho of Ubuntu Linux and the world’s second space tourist, came here a number of times to talk about how Ubuntu on the desktop was ready and talk with the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa) on a number of things that did not end well.
Back then, we had Microsoft’s Ballmer liking Linux to Communism. We had the Evil Empire sowing doubts about anyone allowing any GPL code in an organisation, telling its clients that it would spread like a tumour and that every piece of intellectual property it came in touch with would suddenly be property of the great unwashed masses.
No matter. Fast forward seven years and Linux has won. Open source is everywhere. The business model is well understood and no longer something for ultra-leftwing activists.
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The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an international standard for office documents like texts, presentations and spreadsheets. ODF is already widely adopted worldwide. Using ODF for all your office documents is by far the easiest, safest and most realistic way today to really free yourself from the cocain-like nature of Microsoft Office file formats. The fact that using secret file formats instead of ODF is what actually maintains the Microsoft monopoly in desktop computing is proved even by a Microsoft job offer.
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Sky boxes across the country have surprised their owners with a message about the benefits of open source software – apparently in a bid to head off a legal tussle from free software fans.
Sky+ HD boxes, used to receive the subscription-based satellite TV service, have tonight been flashing up a message when they are first switched on pointing their users at a page on Sky’s website about the values and benefits of open source software.
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When Rob O’Callahan moved home to New Zealand five years ago, there was a feeling of pride in this country’s small open source community at his achievements.
Like many of our top computer science students, O’Callahan had gone overseas to further his education.
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Graphics
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GIMP needs no introduction. GIMP is the Open Source answer for Adobe Photoshop, well, almost. We had already featured brilliant wallpapers made using Inkscape and now things are taking a ‘GIMP’ turn. Here is a nice and simple collection of wallpapers made using GIMP.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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I am happy to announce that Tab Candy is coming to Firefox 4. Starting today, Tab Candy will be called Firefox Panorama and be available as a feature in Firefox betas. Head to the Firefox 4 feature list, or watch the video below, to learn how to organize your tabs into groups and reclaim your browsing experience from clutter and information overload.
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SaaS
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I´m really happy with this release. Not only because we have a lot of new features and bugfixes but also because the ownCloud development team is growing and more and more people are contributing to ownCloud.
I gave several presentation about ownCloud in the last few month and I´m trilled by the positive reactions I get. People really seams to like to idea behind ownCloud.
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Oracle
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Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Hudson Open Source project woke up Monday morning and discovered he was no longer able to access the Source Code Repository to make commits. Oracle had decided to shut it down, as they are shutting down many projects in java.net to try to move it to their own infrastructure. Not only that, but the mailing lists were shut down as well. They said not to worry, they will have it up in a week.
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CMS
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For those who have been patiently waiting, the first round of Diaspora alpha invites has been distributed. They’re planning to first bring in those who contributed via Kickstarter way back when this all began. Next those on their mailing list will start receiving their invites.
Their stated goal with this rollout method is to “quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible.” That sounds a lot like the open source “release early, release often” methodology. But it also sounds a lot like the Google method of slowly bringing in new users through invites. And while that wasn’t so bad for GMail, it was a miserable failure for a Google project far more analogous to Diaspora–Wave. And we all know how well that’s gone.
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“Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the web,” Berners-Lee said in a Scientific American journal article. As Network World reports, Berners-Lee even singled out Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as examples of what he means.
We have made the point many times that the problem with the large, popular social networks is that they are walled gardens. At the last OSCON conference, today’s popular social networking services were compared to the closed systems of the 1990s. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon to, say, need to be on MCI Mail or CompuServe to be able to send another person on one of those services a message. They were closed e-mail systems. People didn’t tolerate that, and the current argument is that they won’t tolerate walled gardens among social networking services either.
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Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business today, at least for a handful of invited participants.
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BSD
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Warner Losh, of iXsystems, announced last week the availability of FreeNAS 8. Since there were some issues with the initial beta, ensure you’re downloading the latest version (r5605).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Brian Gough is one of the core developers of the GNU Scientific Library, which he has been contributing to for many years. He runs Network Theory Ltd., which publishes Freely licensed printed manuals and tutorials for Free Software projects, such as GCC, Perl, Python and PostgreSQL. He lives in Guildford in the United Kingdom, and regularly attends Free Software conferences and meetings.
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Government
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Last Friday, I went along to what I thought would be a pretty routine press conference about open data – just the latest in a continuing drip-feed of announcements in this area from the UK government. I was soon disabused.
One hint was the fact that I ended up sitting one chair away from Sir Tim Berners-Lee – and that the intervening chair was occupied by Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General; another clue was provided by the short but personalised video that David Cameron knocked up for the occasion.
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This week, Massachusetts became the first state to post an online database of payments from drug and medical device companies to the state’s health care providers. The searchable database covers reports from more than 280 companies and subsidiaries.
The new database, detailed on Monday by the Boston Globe — one of our Dollars for Docs partners — is a result of a 2008 state law regulating industry conduct. The database lists nearly $36 million spent from July through December of 2009 for speaking, consulting, food, educational programs, marketing studies and charitable donations.
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This is a pretty stunning press release from Access Info Europe concerning the French government’s response to the open data movement. Statist government’s were always going to struggle with the internet and open data… but this shows just how bad things can get.
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Openness/Sharing
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The significance of Creative Commons and its licenses is often overlooked, embedded as it is into the fabric of sharing culture on the web. The current superhero campaign attempts to bring CC’s role to the forefront, by highlighting people and organizations that have made extraordinary contributions to this culture. But there are many more excellent stories of people and projects employing our CC licenses for educational, humanitarian, scientific, artistic, and just plain interesting uses. Some of these are currently reflected in our Case Studies on the wiki, but there’s a lot of work left to be done in making these more accessible and useful to the rest of the world.
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When Molly Van Houweling ran Creative Commons back in 2001, she was the only staff member, working out of a small office on the third floor of the Stanford law school building. Her work there was mundane but critical: taking off from the pivotal meeting among the founders at the Harvard Berkman Center earlier that year, the once-advisee of Larry Lessig was doing paperwork and drafting the legal language that would become the foundation of Creative Commons.
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Open Data
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A new online, open access, collection of all World Development Reports since 1978 was launched today by the World Bank. The Complete World Development Report Online, which allows users to easily access and search across these World Bank annual flagship publications, is free and open to the public and may be accessed at http://wdronline.worldbank.org
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A shadow has been cast over the Indian media — the bastion of the nation’s democracy. A telecom and political scandal rocking the country has now sucked in top journalists but the media coverage of this new twist is timid — a simple Google search shows that.
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India’s fiercely competitive and hungry free press has become the rising nation’s watchdog, unearthing a long list of banking scandals, real-estate scams and most recently, extensive government corruption during the international Commonwealth Games.
But in recent days, Indian journalists have been accused of wrongdoing, including having inappropriate conversations with a corporate lobbyist and acting more like power brokers in recordings released as part of an investigation into an audacious multibillion swindle – considered the biggest scandal to hit the new India.
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Wu’s claim is that the modern “information monopolies” will be socially harmful. Consider the first quote above. These firms do not earn and keep their share by satisfying consumer demand from active consumers with preferences; it is “surrendered” by forces beyond the consumers’ control. And with the second, why would we be concerned about time limits if these concentrated markets (again, let’s assume arguendo the market definitions Wu has in mind for now) were generating competitive results?
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Andy Coulson will resign as Downing Street communications director within the next few weeks. When the moment comes, his powerful but embarrassed friends will breathe a sigh of relief. They want it to be the end of the phone hacking scandal. It is just the beginning.
For, as any investigative journalist will tell you, it’s always the cover up that sinks you. Senior executives have been clinging onto the line that “Clive Goodman was a rogue reporter” like it was a life belt on the Titanic. The unanswered questions are pouring in.
There is a police investigation and at least three court cases. There are two Parliamentary enquiries on top of a damning report by the media select committee. There are whistleblowers. Insiders are breaking ranks, beginning to talk. Shareholders are asking questions. Coulson may be on his way, but the story won’t go away, despite hardly being reported in some of the best-selling newspapers.
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A report on Twitter is saying that Google has donated $100,000 to Bletchley Park to help them in their campaign to buy mathematician Alan Turing’s papers which are to be auctioned at Christies today.
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Nicolas Sarkozy is on a pre-election charm offensive to show how calm and polite he is and draw a line under past outbursts, such as when he told a visitor to the Paris agricultural show: “Sod off, prick.”
But the jumpy French president is still finding it hard to keep a lid on his verbal assaults. During an off-the-record briefing at the Nato summit, Sarkozy lost his cool when asked about the “Karachigate” corruption scandal, which threatens to engulf him personally, calling the journalists questioning him “paedophiles”.
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Health/Nutrition
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Cheap, mass-produced pies from Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Little Caesars, and Domino’s have infiltrated our planet, making these companies very rich and billions of people too poor to afford a single slice. Is your appetite part of the problem?
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Fred Kaufman has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, and the New York Times Magazine among others. Periodically Fred sits down with Adventures to discuss his latest gastro work.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn’t have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces — the level of magical thinking here is amazing — and they’re going to do something else.
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Of course not. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one. What works is investigation and intelligence: security that works regardless of the terrorist tactic or target. Yes, the target matters too; all this airport security is only effective if the terrorists target airports. If they decide to bomb crowded shopping malls instead, we’ve wasted our money.
[...]
Neither the full-body scanners or the enhanced pat-downs are making anyone safer. They’re more a result of politicians and government appointees capitulating to a public that demands that “something must be done,” even when nothing should be done; and a government bureaucracy that is more concerned about the security of their careers if they fail to secure against the last attack than what happens if they fail anticipate the next one.
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How our government works:
1) Get a position in the government.
2) Hype up some scare and advocate a solution to it
3) Sell/convince the government on your proposed solution, leave your government position, and partner up with the company that provides that same solution.
4) Sit back and enjoy your new money.
Michael Chertoff, while he was the Head of Homeland Security under Bush, advocated and pushed for installation and implementation of these new full-body scanners at our airports. Once he was out of “public service”, Chertoff’s consulting company (Read: Lobbying Company) landed as a client (Surprise!), Rapsican, the company that makes the scanners
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It seems amazing to me that people are not considering the big picture. We’ve got UAVs and satellites using infrared to track who sleeps in our homes at night. We’ve got TSA taking nude photos and giving hand jobs before we get onto airplanes. We’ve got insane “zero-tolerance” policies in our schools. Now think about what happens when some Congressmember convinces his/her peers that these resources should be deployed against people who wear thong underwear or who believe in a creator or who voted for Ronald Reagan.
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Canada’s border guards could soon get new powers to strip search employees in airport and ports across Canada in a bid to crack down on the smuggling of illegal drugs, such as marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine.
CBSA officers also would be allowed to frisk employees and to use various types of scanners and detectors to examine goods in their possession.
The proposed regulations, which do not have to be passed by Parliament, are in a CBSA posting in the Canada Gazette. Interested parties have 30 days to give feedback.
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The TSA isn’t the most respected of governmental agencies right now, but at least it comes by the poor reputation honestly. The lack of standards, inconsistent application of searches and policies, and occasional rude agent all combine to make flying an unpleasant experience. It’s often derided as “security theater,” which describes the experience of Mythbuster Adam Savage before a recent flight.
Savage was put through the full-body scanner, and while he joked that it made his penis feel small, no one seemed to notice the items he was carrying on his person. The video tells the rest of the story.
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Paul Chambers has announced that he is seeking to go to the High Court to challenge his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.
He has instructed me to put the challenge together and I have, in turn, instructed Ben Emmerson QC, the leading human rights and criminal law barrister. The barristers who fought the Crown Court appeal — Stephen Ferguson and Sarah Przybylska — continue to be involved. There has been legal help from a number of other firms and individuals. This is a case which has attracted a great deal of support and offers of practical assistance.
Why? After all, it was just a £350 fine (although now with prosecution costs, Paul is being asked to pay £2,600). And there has been no custodial sentence.
But the case continues to cause concern about and widespread ridicule of the English criminal justice system. Writers as accomplished as Graham Linehan, Charlie Brooker, and Nick Cohen have brilliantly exposed the misconceived and illiberal nature of this prosecution and of the upheld conviction. And, although neither Paul nor I have encouraged the “#IAmSpartacus” movement (I personally prefer the use of the Betjeman line about dropping bombs on Slough), it is perhaps significant that Paul’s original tweet or variations of it seems now to have been tweeted over 18,000 times. However, it appears that only Paul will incur criminal liability for the words in question.
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It may seem absurd, but since 2005 that scenario or something like it was playing out with surprising regularity on public streets in Britain, where draconian anti-terror legislation declared photographers “suspicious” merely for carrying camera equipment.
At its height, a tweed-wearing photographer was branded a terrorist by a London Tube worker, police deleted a young Austrian tourist’s photos “to prevent terrorism,” an Italian student was arrested for filming in London’s financial district, and an architectural historian was detained for photographing a building designed by his grandfather.
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Finance
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Ireland is to be offered an €85bn (£72bn) loan from the IMF and the EU to bail out its banks and fund its public finances.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The image you see could get it’s photographer in serious legal trouble in Kuwait after authorities there have banned the use of DSLRs in public places unless you’re part of the press. Which is just ridiculous.
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Facebook is well on its way to becoming the most popular way that people share links, photos, and other content with their friends. For many sites it’s becoming a powerful new driver of traffic — get people to ‘Like’ your stuff, and Facebook’s network effects will expose it to dozens of their friends.
Just make sure not to do something that might make Facebook angry. Otherwise it might nuke every link to your site, choking off this river of traffic that you’ve worked so hard to build.
That’s the message Facebook sent today with its censorship of links to Lamebook, a humor site that posts lewd conversations spotted on the social network. Facebook has confirmed that it is automatically blocking all links to Lamebook and that it has also removed the company’s ‘Fan’ page. Not because the content was offensive, mind you, but because Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook.
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Human rights activists may no longer be able to raise actions against companies in US courts
The US court decision came as a bombshell. Corporate liability is not recognised under international law and therefore multinational corporations are no longer susceptible to human rights claims filed by victims living outside US borders.
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A service set up to enable millions of patients to email their GPs and access their Summary Care Records online has proved to be unwanted by the vast majority of potential users, according to a major new study.
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EFF and the plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit over a notorious case of illegal government spying urged the U.S. Supreme Court last week to reject a government attempt to have the Court address constitutional questions about the state secrets privilege in a contract dispute case involving the privilege.
The state secrets privilege is a doctrine that allows the Executive to block evidence from being presented in a court on the grounds that national security requires the information to remain secret, and it’s been employed in both of EFF’s ongoing lawsuits over illegal domestic surveillance. Another lawsuit that’s had long-running battles over state secrets questions is Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, and we joined together with the Al Haramain plaintiffs in an amicus brief filed in this case: General Dynamics Corporation v. United States.
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Privacy lovers in Germany have egg on their house faces, thanks to a crew of Google-loving vigilantes. Google launched Street View in Germany last month, but allowed those uncomfortable with the service to blur their homes. About 3% of Germans opted to do so.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Independent developers are having a tough time when it comes to dealing with piracy and DRM. If you include DRM, people complain. If you don’t, people pirate your game. It happened to World of Goo and it happened to Machinarium. But CD Projekt, the developer behind the upcoming The Witcher 2, has an idea about how to fight back: legal action.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Background excerpted from a paper by Jack Kloppenburg:
“The specific mechanism Michaels goes on to propose is a “General Public License for Plant Germplasm (GPLPG)” that is explicitly modeled on the GPL developed by the FOSS movement for software…”
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Copyrights
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A federal judge in Las Vegas is examining whether another Righthaven online copyright infringement lawsuit should be dismissed on fair use grounds.
Righthaven LLC is the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner that since March has sued at least 172 website operators and bloggers throughout North America in federal court in Las Vegas, charging material from the Review-Journal was posted on their sites without authorization.
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In yet another sign that things may not be looking so good for copyright lawsuit machine Righthaven, a judge has asked Righthaven to explain why a non-profit organization reposting an article isn’t fair use. There are two reasons why this is interesting. First, to date, most of the “fair use” claims in Righthaven cases have involved sites posting snippets of articles, rather than the full articles (Righthaven has recently said it will only sue for full articles going forward). However, this is a full article, and the judge is still considering whether or not it’s fair use. As we’ve noted in the past, there are certainly cases where using the entirety of a work still constitutes fair use, and this may be one of them.
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A recurring question in discussions of digital copyright is how creators and their investors (that is, labels, movie studios, publishers, etc) will earn a living in the digital era.
But though I’ve had that question posed to me thousands of times, no one has ever said which creators and which investors are to earn a living, and what constitutes “a living”.
Copyright is in tremendous flux at the moment; governments all over the world are considering what their copyright systems should look like in the 21st century, and it’s probably a good idea to nail down what we want copyright to do. Otherwise the question “Is copyright working?” becomes as meaningless as “How long is a piece of string?”
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Why did Plato argue that remixing should be banned by the state? What threats did jazz and rock ‘n roll pose? And what does all of that mean for the conflicts between artists and copyright today?
Those are the questions Jennifer Jenkins, James Boyle, and Keith Aoki answer in layman-friendly language in Theft! A History of Music, a graphic novel expected next spring. The three have a previous comic book, Bound by Law, which (like Theft!) attempts to translate complex legal concepts to make them accessible to a wider audience through a friendlier format.
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Sarah Schmidt is reporting that the C-32 Legislative Committee will meet only for four hours a week, not the 16 hours suggested by the Government members. This means that that the Bill cannot get through the House of Commons until well into next year.
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1.Will Bill C-32 give education institutions the right to engage in massive uncompensated copying?
No. The inclusion of education as a fair dealing category will not mean that any educational copying will be free. It will only mean that educational copying will be eligible for analysis under a six-part test developed by the Supreme Court of Canada to determine whether the copying qualifies as fair dealing. The changes in Bill C-32 are more modest than often claimed as they merely fill some gaps in the existing list of fair dealing categories.
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ACTA
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After last week’s release of the final version of the ACTA text, the European Parliament is about to adopt a resolution preparing the upcoming ratification process, during a plenary session scheduled tomorrow. This vote must be an opportunity for European lawmakers to restate their opposition to this agreement, which is bound to spread internationally some of the most extremist provisions regarding the civil and criminal enforcement of copyright, trademarks and patents. Disturbingly, the conservative EPP group tabled an isolated resolution, which gives up on the Parliament’s prerogatives.
MeeGo installation Process On a Dell Mini 1012|Booredatwork
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.23.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“I’m thankful for Android phones providing real competition for iPhones — and keeping Windows Phones at bay,” Slashdot blogger yagu exclaimed over a fresh Peppermint Penguin, for example.
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Desktop
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System76 is shipping a new version of its Ubuntu Linux-ready Starling Netbook equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, starting at $384. Meanwhile the company has begun shipping to the U.K, and is contemplating developing a tablet PC.
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Rumblings from Brazil suggest that the mighty Microsoft may have lost out in a landmark Windows licence row.
A post on Techrights.org, said to be from Dr Roy Schestowitz, claims that a lowly consumer has gone to the small claims court in Brazil over not wanting to pay for a licence for Windows XP. And they’ve won.
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- PCLinuxOS 2010.10: The clear winner in this case. This was the only Linux distribution which loaded on the Lenovo S10-3s without any problem, and on which absolutely everything I have tested works – CPU, graphics, wired/wireless/bluetooth networking, touchpad (including buttons and tapping), camera, Fn-keys for brightness and sound, and everything else. This will be the distribution I will be primarily using on this netbook.” rel=”nofollow”>Linux on the Lenovo S10-3s: Scorecard (Rap Sheet?)
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Ballnux
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The Korea Herald is reporting that Samsung’s first Android-powered tablet device, the Galaxy Tab, has launched to a considerable fanfare, selling 600,000 units since launch and heading towards Samsung’s own target of one million units sold by the end of the year.
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Kernel Space
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In August we delivered the news that Linux was soon to receive a native ZFS Linux kernel module. The Sun (now Oracle) ZFS file-system has long been sought after for Linux, though less now since Btrfs has emerged, but incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL licenses have barred such support from entering the mainline Linux kernel. There has been ZFS-FUSE to run the ZFS file-system in user-space, but it comes with slow performance. There has also been work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in porting ZFS to Linux as a native Linux kernel module. This LLNL ZFS work though is incomplete but still progressing due to a US Department of Energy contract. It is though via this work that developers in India at KQ Infotech have made working a Linux kernel module for ZFS. In this article are some new details on KQ Infotech’s ZFS kernel module and our results from testing out the ZFS file-system on Linux.
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In terms of our ZFS on Linux benchmarks, if you have desired this Sun-created file-system on Linux, hopefully it is not because of the performance expectations for this file-system. As these results illustrate, this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux is not superior to the Linux popular file-systems like EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS. There are a few areas where the ZFS Linux disk performance was competitive, but overall it was noticeably slower than the big three Linux file-systems in a common single disk configuration. That though is not to say ZFS on Linux will be useless as the performance is at least acceptable and clearly superior to that of ZFS-FUSE. More importantly, there are a number of technical merits to the ZFS file-system that makes it one of the most interesting file-systems around.
When KQ Infotech releases these ZFS packages to the public in January and rebases them against a later version of ZFS/Zpool, we will publish more benchmarks.
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Earlier today we put out benchmarks of ZFS on Linux via a native kernel module that will be made publicly available to bring this Sun/Oracle file-system over to more Linux users. Now though as a bonus we happen to have new benchmarks of the latest OpenSolaris-based distributions, including OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and Augustiner-Schweinshaxe, compared to PC-BSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu.
[...]
PC-BSD 8.1 pulled out another win. This time it was with LZMA compression where it ran in front of the Linux operating systems and well in front of the OpenSolaris alternatives.
There you have it, the performance of the latest OpenSolaris distributions against PC-BSD/FreeBSD and two of the most popular Linux distributions. The Fedora and Ubuntu operating systems won most of the tests, but there were a few leads for PC-BSD while the OpenSolaris operating systems just one won test (Local Adaptive Thresholding via GraphicsMagick) at least for our benchmarking selection and workload. If you are using an OpenSolaris-based operating system hopefully you are not using it for a performance critical environment but rather to take advantage of its technical features like DTrace, ZFS (though that is becoming moot with its availability on PC-BSD/FreeBSD and even Linux), etc.
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This month saw the final release of kernel 2.6.36, and the closing of the following ‘merge window’ for new features to be merged into what will become the 2.6.37 kernel (more details about the latter in a moment). The 2.6.36 kernel features concurrency-managed workqueues, preliminary support for the fanotify mechanism discussed here in the past, final merging of the AppArmor security system used by some distributions for many years, and support for a new architecture, among many dozens of other significant improvements. The new kernel received patches from over 1,100 engineers for a total of nearly 11,000 changesets (collections of related changes to various kernel files) overall.
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Graphics Stack
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A month ago there was the surprising work done by Christian König to bring XvMC and VDPAU support to the open-source ATI Radeon “R600g” Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards. The XvMC state tracker with Gallium3D began working shortly thereafter for accelerating XvMC using shaders with this ATI Gallium3D driver, however, iDCT support was not implemented. Christian though has now added support for inverse discrete cosine transforms to this X-Video Motion Compensation code for Gallium3D.
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Besides needing to get the various tool-kits and other libraries ported to run atop the Wayland Display Server, another requirement limiting the adoption of this X11 Server alternative so far has been the specialized graphics requirements. From the beginning, Wayland was designed for GPU drivers that support kernel mode-setting (KMS), Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) buffers, and OpenGL ES, among some other smaller requirements. Originally only the Intel Linux driver would work, but since then the various branches needed to support Wayland have been merged to their mainline code-bases and it’s possible to run Wayland with the open-source ATI Radeon and Nouveau drivers too. But those using the proprietary ATI or NVIDIA drivers have not been able to run Wayland nor those people utilizing the VESA driver or any of the other obscure graphics drivers that lack any of the needed GPU driver capabilities. This though has now changed as it’s been proved possible that Wayland in fact can run off a Linux frame-buffer.
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While we have already published two exciting articles today looking at the native ZFS file-system for Linux and also new benchmarks of OpenSolaris / BSD / Linux, here’s a third article for the day. We might as well test our new Phoronix serving infrastructure while already having excess load today due to Slashdot, etc (it’s good practice for OpenBenchmarking.org), so here are benchmarks of AMD’s newest Gallium3D driver compared to their classic open-source Mesa driver and also their proprietary Catalyst driver. Oh yeah, a fourth article is also in the queue for today or the very near future when AMD has a major Linux driver announcement to share.
[...]
The performance though of these open-source ATI drivers is still years behind that of the Catalyst driver, but at least there is open-source support and for these less demanding games, it is able to produce a playable experience. With the Gallium3D-based drivers there are also other interesting possibilities that emerge with state trackers, XvMC video playback via shaders, etc. It will also be exciting if the Radeon HD 6000 series open-source acceleration support is built upon the success of this R600g driver. The Gallium3D driver performance will also improve once the latest color tiling and page-flipping patches have been merged, which should happen soon. Another article is planned at this time looking at the Radeon page-flipping performance as it may bring sizable performance boosts.
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Wayland has experienced a surge in development activities from new developers since it was announced Ubuntu will deploy the Wayland Display Server with patches coming in from various developers that address issues from bugs to letting it run on a Linux frame-buffer. Wayland up to this point has been licensed under the MIT / GPLv2 code licenses (depending upon the component), but Kristian Høgsberg has now decided to change the licenses before it’s too late and complicated.
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While we are still waiting on open-source support for the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series of graphics cards that were released last month, today AMD is releasing their initial open-source support for their Ontario hardware. AMD’s Ontario is their low-powered Fusion processor designed for use in netbooks and other such devices. This dual-core chip with integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics is only starting to ship now, but the open-source support for this first AMD Fusion chip is now available to Linux users, complete with 3D support.
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As with most things only time will tell if Ubuntu’s (and Fedora’s) transition to Wayland will be a success (or a death sentence) for the respective distros. In the mean time want to give Wayland a try? Well, currently it is barely functional and only works on a limited amount of hardware. That means, in addition to all the concerns above, a good deal of time, funding, and man power is going to have to be invested in Wayland just to make the project functional for a desktop operating system such as Ubuntu.
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Applications
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In this guest post, Jason DeRose of Novacut team explains about the design focus for their upcoming video editor.
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In my search for a clean Desktop (because I got tired of cleaning it manually), I came across “Directory cleaner and files organizer”, a script (with Zenity for a GUI) that automatically cleans any directory (and thus the Desktop folder) by moving the files to various folders such as all the pictures into ~/Pictures, the archives into ~/Archives, documents into ~/Documents and so on.
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As you can glean from above, my requirements are:
* IMAP for Gmail
* POP or IMAP or some method for Hotmail that isn’t too gnarly a hack
* GPG encryption/signing – bonus points for integrating with Seahorse/KGPG
* Auto-filters for organizing my email into folders
* Preferred (almost required): Message Threading (sorting messages like Gmail)
* Preferred: Ability to import/export from Evolution and other FLOSS email program formats
* Bonus (not a deal breaker): Integrates with Gnome/KDE popups to let me know when I have a new email
For completion’s sake, I thought I’d do a bit of research and give my impressions based on experience/websites before I actually try out the email programs.
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The one editor I’ve found that provides the level of introspection I expect yet otherwise stays out of the way is KDevelop 4.1. It basically takes the Kate text editor, with awesome syntax highlighting and standard editing features, and adds some of the best auto-completion I’ve seen for C or C++. It’s fast too, and doesn’t require a ridiculous manual scan or gigabyte symbol database. It just works – automatically.
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Chalk another one up people for the latest developer builds of Clementine now supports the Ubuntu sound menu.
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Linux/Windows: Based on GRUB but many shades beyond it in the looks department, Burg is a quick install for Linux users that lets anyone theme their multi-OS selection screen, or customize their own theme. It’s becoming install-ready on Windows and Mac, too.
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Proprietary
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Last week we already introduced you to some new features in Opera 11. Today we release Opera 11 beta with a new surprise feature: tab stacking.
How do you like your tabs? Many of us like tabs and lots of them.
We’ve added functionality to enhance your tab experience. Tab stacking allows you to organize your browsing, optimize the space on your tab bar, and keep yet even more tabs handy for use.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I have written before that I strongly object at LXC userland to be considered production-ready and now I have another example for you.
Let’s not even dig into the fact that the buildsystem for the userland tools is quite objectionable, as it “avoids” using libtool by using silly hacks into Makefile.am. Let’s not even spend much to say that they have no announcement-only mailing list, and they stopped using the SF.net File Release System (that has an RSS feed of the changes, and a number of mirrors) in favour of a simple download directory since that’s just project administration gone wrong.
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Games
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Last week we reported on the situation where LGP has been without its server for a month and a half after their single server lost its lone hard drive used to host the Linux Game Publishing web-site (along with the LGP-owned Tux Games and Happy Penguin web-sites), their online store, and their Digital Rights Management platform for their Linux games. LGP didn’t keep around any recent backups and this server was not mirrored but just running with an off-the-shelf Serial ATA hard drive that evidently failed and then additionally suffered from firmware corruption, chemical degradation, and file-system damage, according to Michael Simms, the CEO of LGP.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Recently the Kubuntu developers received a donation of some terrific Genesi Efika MX devices featuring an ARM CPU.
Some of them will be devoted to Kubuntu related porting work with regards to the ARM CPU, and others to continuously test build KDE trunk. Getting a KDE buildbot for ARM is very important because most KDE developers do not have access to an ARM device (or they would not want to test building their software on it, because it would be tediously slow), so we try our best to provide KDE the means to get notified about changes that are not compatible with the ARM architecture, so that it can be fixed.
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This is a reminder that the various KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but did not know how to do it, this is your chance, join the KDE Translation team!
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Sebastian Kügler, Release Manager of KDE and member of the Board holds a lecture about managing a reference community for the Commons such as the KDE. He will also tackle how to manage code contributed by big communities and how to manage a community itself.
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In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..
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Anyway, it’s been a while since I last blogged about Bangarang development so I figured I should share a little (or long) insight into what to expect for the 2.0 release with a few screenshots to help explain.
Before anything else, I need to mention that Stefan has been totally kick-ass with just about everything he’s tackled. He is the only other longer term coding contributor to the project and there’s absolutely no way I could list all the stuff he’s worked on, but I’ll mention a few: Lot’s of work on DVD support including subtitles, angles and audio channel support; Excellent star rating renderer that’s used all through out Bangarang; Shortcuts support and configuration; Filter support on the media list and playlist views; Tons of bug fixing, improvements and cleanup.
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This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more.
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GNOME Desktop
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A new Gnome Shell mockup shows how the old Gnome Shell behavior (which is actually still the current Gnome Shell behavior) and the new Overview-Layout Gnome Shell branch can work together…
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Last week I sat down and implemented some of the gnome-control-center mockups for GNOME 3.
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If you haven’t used Screenlets in your Ubuntu yet, it is an excellent application to experiment with. And hundreds of useful third party user contributed screenlets are available for free. Here is a quick review of some of the best user contributed screenlets available for Ubuntu GNOME.
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Not so long after Florian cleaned up the overview-relayout branch to accommodate the visual tweaks initiated by Allan, here we are again to move the target a bit (engineers love me).
Initially shell exposed two views. A tiled view for an overview of your workspaces (something we can’t expect majority will want to manage). A linear view that presents application windows for easier switching (and dropping documents on). Exposing the mode switch to the user wasn’t good design and even if we presented the tiled view only when rearranging windows or selections of windows across workspaces, it felt like too much of an odd case.
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New Releases
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FreeDiams is a drug prescribing assistant that manages drug-drug interactions, patients allergies, intolerances and high quality printing. FreeDiams is a free and open source application, GPLv3.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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New York, November 22nd (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading day at $41.87 close to its 50 day moving average currently set at $40.62. Red Hat’s price action is just above this important support level translating into a trading opportunity.
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Fedora
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Well… all good things must come to an end, and so — very regretfully, I should add — I parted ways with Mandriva. I’d been a Mandrake user since ’99 or so, and a die hard fan and evangelist since not long after.
Today I switched my work(horse) desktop from MDV to Fedora. The upgrade went amazingly smoothly, partly because ever since I started using git, almost everything I have except “documents” is in git; all I really did was restore my repos, my mail, and a “workdata” directory that contained all the ODT/ODP/ODS junk. A few commands here and there and it’s all set. Pidgin, FF, TB, all setup exactly as they were before.
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Debian Family
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* An initial development snapshot of Firebird 3 is packaged and available from Debian Experimental. More information.
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A new Debian release is coming… someday. One of the key components of the Debian 6.0 release, also known as “Squeeze,” is the Debian Installer, which entered beta at the end of October. Debian’s installer has improved, but still needs a bit of work before it can be considered user-friendly.
Long before there was an Ubuntu, or even a Stormix, I was a devout Slackware user and kept hearing wonderful things about Debian. But almost every person I talked to cautioned that the installation was painful. As it turns out, it wasn’t that bad — at least, I didn’t find it any harder to install than Slackware and I was quickly sold on APT.
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Sorry for the delay in posting everyone. I needed a little time off to make an informed choice as to which distro I was going to switch over to. I haven’t been happy with Canonical in the past few months. Its pushing forward with Unity, Ubuntu One, and other such proprietary products.
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I have been asked how Ubuntu relates to Debian, and how packages flow from one to the other. So here’s my attempt at clarifying the whole picture.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Interested in Ubuntu cloud community ? Want to help ? Awesome! here is your chance
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This week we have zkriesse in the interview series. In my opinion, zkriesse is one of the Ubuntu community members who may not be well known, but certainly keeps things going as smoothly as possible. He’s involved in a great number of things, including the Ubuntu Beginners Team.
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we all know how important code review is for Ubuntu. It’s not only about spotting mistakes, but also about teaching new contributors how things are done. There’s always been busier times when we fell back in terms of code review and times where we did better.
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As many of you will know, Ahmed Kamal is one of the horsemen, and he is focusing his community building skills on creating a rocking Ubuntu Cloud community. We have awesome technology for harnessing public, private. and personal clouds, and Ahmed is here to build a community of both users and contributors.
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Planet Ubuntu has had a facelift and its taken on the same theme as the other Ubuntu properties. Looks great!
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YouTuber yankeyan shows off real-time lightsaber (Yes, lightsaber) tracking and rendering using nothing more than Kinect and Ubuntu.
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Release Manager Neil McGovern gave an update for the upcoming Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” stable release. As “Squeeze is almost in its final form” he calls for upgrade and installation tests (see also the separate announcement for that). He also notes that even (experienced) users who have no systems available for installation or upgrade tests can help by triaging installation reports and upgrade reports, or propose text for the release notes.
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Ubuntu Software Center is getting updates almost everyday. The latest one brings in more paid applications into Ubuntu Software Center. And it’s good to see Canonical slowly waking up to one of its most important revenue making opportunity.
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Shortly after Ubuntu 10.10 was released Canonical managed to shore up some pretty hefty partners. Seven new partnerships, to be exact, and these sponsors all seem to point to one thing: enterprise. When you read through the list (patience now) it becomes very clear that Canonical has yet another trick up its sleeve.
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Canonical owner and former cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth has found a new landing pad.
Ubuntu king Mark Shuttleworth has bought a condo in Manhattan’s Superior Ink building for a record $31.5m, according to the New York Post.
Other residents of Superior Ink – a 68-unit, 17-floor building – include actress Hilary Swank, fashion designer Marc Jacobs, and Showtime CEO Matthew Blank.
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Owners include [...] South African Internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth
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Emmet HIKORY has announced on the Ubuntu Developers mailing list that Ken VanDine (kenvandine) and Alessio Treglia (quadrispro) have become one of the Ubuntu Core Developers.
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Ubuntu is one of the much loved GNU/Linux based operating systems. It has created a cult around it. But what is Ubuntu — a product or a project?
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Flavours and Variants
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In this Screencast I show you how to use the default painting application in Lubuntu mtpaint to create a nice looking wallpaper.
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Amlogic has begun sampling a new system-on-chip (SoC) that combines a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, an ARM Mali-400 GPU, and Amlogic’s proprietary HD video decoding engine. Targeting next-generation consumer electronics running Linux and Android 2.2, the AML8726-M supports full 1080p HD video capabilities and a range of connectivity options, says the company.
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The TS-x19P+ NAS servers provide file sharing, backup, and UPnP-compliant media streaming between PCs, Macs, Linux, and UNIX-based computers, says Qnap. The devices ship with version 3.3 of Qnap’s Linux-based Turbo NAS firmware (see farther below).
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Phones
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Don’t expect HP’s webOS 2.0 to be tied to an HVGA screen for long — come “early 2011,” the company will introduce a number of “really interesting new form factors,” including tablets and phones. That was the message driven home at Palm’s Developer Day this year, according to PreCentral’s Dieter Bohn, and the software that’s going to make that shift possible is a little something called Enyo.
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Are menus starting to disappear from the Linux desktop? A survey of the alternatives suggests that, at the very least, menus seem to be evolving out of recognition in response to modern trends, particularly the effort to make workstation and laptop desktops more like mobile interfaces. Ask usability experts, and the unexamined assumption is that the classic menu needs improvement — although whether users feel that way seems less clear.
Ten years ago, desktop menus were straightforward. They listed most of the desktop applications, with sub-menus spilling across the desktop to help organize them. The most extreme case is the famous — or infamous — Debian menu, which descends four or five sub-levels, but contains every application installed on the system, if only you had the patience to keep searching. The Debian menu remains popular with some users today, including me.
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Sub-notebooks
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French company Jolicloud has finally started to sell its Jolibook netbook courtesy of Amazon but direct from Taiwanese manufacturer Vye.
Amazon says that the device will usually be delivered (for free) within one to three months which might cause some potential customers to think twice.
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s cloud-oriented Chrome Operating System for netbooks has been delayed for several months. Google won’t say why, but analysts speculate that the Linux-based Chrome OS may have been delayed due to the huge success of the search giant’s own Android OS as well as the Apple iPad.
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Tablets
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Usage time is even worse. We “used” the device as best we could for as long as possible, and the battery usually only gave us an hour or less before dying out. (Yes, there were times when we got less than an hour from a full charge.) This was usually with WiFi on, though as we noted in the Usage section, just because the device says WiFi is on doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.
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One item on my shopping list this holiday season is a Linux based tablet device. I decided to check the Sunday ad section and put together this list of Black Friday 2010 Linux Tablet Deals.
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Microsoft defined the building blocks for 90% of all presentations people create in a bad way (Powerpoint, anyone?), but that is not my point. My point is Microsoft focused on the tools customers need to solve problems because that is what they sell. The less of a standard there is, the better the conventional software market works. Enter the Cloud. Fantastic! All of a sudden standard data makes sense for vendors.
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I was watching a presentation about business intelligence by one of my fellow faculty members the other day, and as one of his examples for the crowd of undergrads, he cited last year’s developer contest conducted by Netflix to build a better algorithm for their users’ movie preferences.
The contest, long over, awarded US$1 million to the team that could “substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences.”
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As open source software becomes more mainstream, it’s easy to forget how amazing it is. Countless individuals, donating their time and sharing their brainpower, work to build a shared infrastructure on which the world’s computing is done. Amazing. Even more amazing, in survey after survey, the big reason open source contributors give for their participation is that it’s “fun.” Even more amazing than that is the rate at which this technology improves because people are having fun building it.
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Packt Publishing has announced the winners of its inaugural Open Source Awards. According to Packt, the aim of the contest is to “encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects”. Awards were presented in six software categories: Open Source CMS, Hall of Fame CMS, Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source JavaScript Libraries, Open Source E-Commerce Applications and Open Source Graphics Software.
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Too often open source software is portrayed as an all-or-nothing option. In reality a mixed environment is the first step to a successful migration.
Free and open source software is famously versatile. Think of just about any piece of software your business uses and chances are there is an open source alternative. And if there isn’t then there probably will be within the year.
Being so versatile open source software can be used in almost any situation, from desktop applications to cloud computing servers, which can often entice businesses down the path of a wholesale open source migration. The savings, flexibility and versatility of open source software are simply too good to miss out on. There are, however, risks in suddenly switching all of your systems over to open source software and a gradual, mixed-environment approach is often a better way to go about it.
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LibreOffice/OOo
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Finland’s ministry of Justice, its state legal aid offices, the court houses, the probation services and its prisons offer scientific proof of the advantages of open source and open standards. Martti Karjalainen, who studied one of Europe’s largest open source transitions, concludes that a large-scale migration to an open source office suite is feasible, resulting in substantial benefits, including cost savings.
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to support our open and transparent approach, the Steering Committee of The Document Foundation has opened up a blog at
http://blog.documentfoundation.org
It will be used by members of the Steering Committee and their deputies to share news and insight about our progress with the Foundation and about the future developments of LibreOffice. The blog enhances the public Steering Committee phone conferences [1], the public marketing phone conferences [2] as well as the public Steering Committee discussion list [3] and makes the work of the Foundation even more transparent.
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Web Browsers
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Anyhow, Javascript benchmarking is all nice and well, but it has nothing to do with reality. For all practical purposes, you can have guinea pig powering your browser. Stop wasting your time worrying and caring about nonsense and focus on important things, like browser W3C compliance and stability. Now, you’re talking business.
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Mozilla
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For those of you on Planet Mozilla who are interested in learning more about China and trends in the Chinese Internet, I’d like to recommend the Sinica Podcast. There’s a lot of great websites out there covering China but not many good podcasts. This one is the best, imo (at least in English.)
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Yesterday we mentioned that Firefox 4 Beta for Linux now boasts a ‘menu’ button rather than a menu bar. Whilst it’s undoubtedly welcome it doesn’t look as good as it could – nor should.
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Design Jams challenge teams to solve a design challenge within a day. All in all come to think of it – it is a pretty intense time-frame within a highly concentrated environment!
The general format of the day comprised of:
* a welcome talk outlining the format of the day
* an introduction of the days design challenge topic
* team formation with a maximum of five (5) per team
* x3 design phases & x2 presentation slots
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The big outlets are reporting that the revenues to Mozilla were up for 2009, 34 percent higher than for the 2008 year. The chairman for Mozilla has stated that Mozilla is an underdog, however, possibly to soften the blows when the results for 2010 come in.
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Education
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DoceboLMS 4.0.2, open source e-learning platform written in PHP and MYSQL, is online, scope of this release is to integrate new web training scenario like social training and third party applications interfacement. Platform is used on major hospitals and pharma companies.
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Healthcare
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Fully tested, fully operational open-platform EHR/EMR software for health professionals and IT developers.
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BSD
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When looking at OpenBSD and evaluating it, I think it’s important to keep in mind what the project’s goals are. This isn’t a project trying to make a great desktop OS (though I have talked with people who happily use OpenBSD on their desktops) and it’s not making the most powerful server system. The OpenBSD team is interested in producing correct, secure code and they do that. Fortunately their work boils over into other areas of the open source world — OpenSSH being an excellent example. The operating system is small and simple, resulting in low-resource requirements and a responsive environment. I don’t think that many people would accuse OpenBSD of being intuitive, but the community does have sound documentation and the project’s processes are very open. These characteristics make OpenBSD not only a good firewall or server, but also a great teaching tool. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys building their system from the ground up, OpenBSD is a suitable place to begin. My only complaint while trying out the new release was in regards to hardware. I wasn’t able to get OpenBSD running in VirtualBox, nor on my laptop and, so far, I don’t have sound on my desktop. Otherwise it was a good adventure and I applaud the developers for producing another solid release.
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The NetBSD development team has announced the arrival of the first feature update to the 5.0 release branch, NetBSD 5.1. According to the developers, the major release includes a variety of critical security and bug fixes, as well as better hardware support and new features.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As part of an article for the forthcoming FSF bulletin, here are the latest numbers for GNU contributors, broken down by country.
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Project Releases
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Government
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“The United States government is the world’s largest purchaser of information technology, with an annual IT budget over (US)$80 billion,” Federal CIO Vivek Kundra told the World Economic Forum in early November.
Just fractions of that amount are attractive to vendors, for whatever IT specialty they offer — including open source solutions.
“We don’t really focus on an overall market figure, since open source can’t be described as a monolithic entity. We prefer to emphasize the value it creates in a specific application,” Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist at Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), told LinuxInsider.
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Licensing
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Fusion Garage have put up a website containing the source code for the kernel, bootloader and some miscellaneous tools (including their recovery system). As far as I can tell (by inspection – I haven’t tried building binaries) it corresponds to what they were distributing, which is excellent. On the other hand, that’s all the source they’ve provided.
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Openness/Sharing
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People are increasingly using social media as a way to communicate with the members of the European Parliament and MEPs seem convinced that Twitter is the way to go, a new public affairs survey has found.
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David Cameron often speaks about openness in government, but a Downing Street innovation to encourage greater public participation has been quietly shelved. Officially, the infamous No 10 e-petitions website, launched by the previous government, is under review.
Senior Whitehall sources insist it will not return, however, partly because of the negative publicity it generated. Online petitions were used to embarrass Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Shortly after the site’s debut, 1.6 million people signed a petition demanding an end to road pricing, and nearly 100,000 used it to demand Brown’s resignation in April last year. “[Cameron's communications chief] Andy Coulson does not want to see a repeat of that,” said a Whitehall insider.
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The coalition appears to have shelved plans to introduce new protections for public sector workers who blow the whistle on dangerous, corrupt or incompetent practices, the Guardian has learned.
A promise to protect whistleblowers in the public sector was one of a series in the coalition’s plans designed to make government more transparent. It follows concerns that people have been too afraid to speak up when things are going wrong in government, schools, hospitals or social services, for fear of later being penalised.
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And very importantly we now know what the scale is. Let’s say we have 20 million possible books (a very rough guess as books in major libraries are counted with a tape measure). A gigatriple. This shouldn’t frighten us today. The main thing is that the web is scaling up for RDF and there are many potential suppliers and providers.
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Open Data
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In short, The OU (with the active and welcome involvement of JISC) is exposing its data (which could be anything, but think staff details, courses, research interests, I think) as Linked Open Data. I’ll post some snippets and then say why I think this is critical.
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The British Library has released three million records from the British National Bibliography into the public domain using the CC0 public domain waiver. The British National Bibliography contains data on publishing activity from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland since 1950. JISC OpenBibliography has made this set downloadable at CKAN; in addition, the Internet Archive also offers the data for download.
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As part of its work to open its metadata to wider use beyond the traditional library community, the British Library is making copies of its main catalogue and British National Bibliography datasets available for research purposes. Files are initially being made available in RDF/XML (see sample) and are distributed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication licence.
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Open Access/Content
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There are two distinct paths followed to provide open access, though they do occasionally intersect. The “Green” road is where authors provide access to their published work through self-archiving (on a personal website or a public or institutional repository). This path is readily accepted by a larger number of academics, because it enables them to publish in many highly prestigious journals that are not open access, while also providing their work to the general public.
According to a study by Muluken W. Alemayehu, at the University of Oslo 32 out of 45 professors surveyed “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that the scholarly research results from the university should be available to the public in an institutional repository, 12 were “neutral” on the idea, and only one disagreed. Of the 45, 31 were previously unaware of the concept of an institutional repository, and of those 22 were from among the 32 who agreed with making the research available there. Five respondents were interested in adding other types of content to the repository but not their scholarly articles, citing conflicts with the publishers and other concerns.
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Open Access is an aspect of free culture that I have not fully evaluated yet. I want to be able to take a position on the subject, should the question come up, so this week I’m making a concerted effort to understand what Open Access (capitalized) is, what its major tenets and who its major supporters are. I don’t want to take a knee-jerk reaction to it and say “I think free software is ethical, therefore open access is ethical.” That’s a little short-sighted. Furthermore, although I agree with certain arguments from open access immediately (scientists should make their data and source code available), I certainly don’t want to ally myself with a movement that I don’t understand. People could end up thinking I want to take away their jobs, and that might not be true.
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The book challenges the conventional wisdom that the internet has undermined business models by claiming there is no correlation between internet usage and newspaper profitability.
The work, commissioned by the Oxford-based Reuters (NYSE: TRI) Institute for the Study of Journalism, examined newspaper industries in several countries, including the US, UK, Germany and Brazil.
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Our lead story this week, on Dentons suing its former India head Gauri Advani following the allegation of a bribe (something she strongly denies) and costs of a subsequent court case, is a preview of the future for law firms.
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Despite mounting pressure from the European Union to open its ports and airports to the Greek half of Cyprus, Turkey will not be doing so until a settlement on the divided island is reached, a senior state official has said.
Turkey strongly believes that the EU has not been constructive in its efforts for a permanent solution on the island and has rejected out of hand a proposal to open two more chapters of negotiation if Turkey complies with the EU’s demand. Turkey started its accession talks in 2005, but progress has been slow, largely because of the dispute over Cyprus. Turkey refuses to open its ports and airports to traffic from Greek Cyprus, urging the EU to first end the isolation of Turkish Cyprus as it promised back in 2004, following a referendum on a UN reunification plan in both parts of the island — accepted by the Turkish Cypriots and rejected by the Greek Cypriots.
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Science
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Who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn’s engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the “first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer.” But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?
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The European Space Agency’s (Esa) new intake of astronauts have completed their basic training.
The six individuals – two Italians, a German, a Frenchman, a Dane and a Briton – received their graduation certificates at a special ceremony in Cologne, Germany.
They are the first group of candidates Esa has put through a training programme of its own design.
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Security
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How did a hacker in Malaysia manage to penetrate a computer network operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland?
And what was the same accused cybercriminal doing this summer when he allegedly tapped into the secure computers of a large Defense Department contractor that managed systems for military transport movements and other U.S. military operations?
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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No surprise there. Of course, what he didn’t mention is that he just got done traveling with the CEO of OSI, the parent company of Rapiscan, the makers of the main naked scanner that is being purchased and put into all these airports. Apparently, OSI CEO, Deepak Chopra (no, not the new agey guy), “was selected to accompany US President, Barack Obama, to Mumbai and attended the US India Business Entrepreneurship meeting…”
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With all the “junk-touching” and pat-downs required by new TSA rules that arrived just in time for the holidays, it was inevitable that at the first possible opportunity some intrepid reporter would bring the subject up to President Obama. Taking questions at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, the President attempted to explain the logic behind the pat-downs, but prefaced his reasoning with a disclaimer that he has never and will likely never experience such a thing.
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How did an agency created to protect the public become the target of so much public scorn?
After nine years of funneling travelers into ever longer lines with orders to have shoes off, sippy cups empty and laptops out for inspection, the most surprising thing about increasingly heated frustration with the federal Transportation Security Administration may be that it took so long to boil over.
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U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a scientist and the Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, says the “TSA’s current obsession with fielding body imaging technology is misguided, counterproductive, and potentially dangerous.”
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Late last week, the Transportation Security Administration, bowing to controversy and the threat of lawsuits, ruled that airline pilots will no longer be subject to the backscatter body scanners and invasive pat-downs at TSA airport checkpoints.
For pilots like myself this is good news, though at least for the time being we remain subject to the rest of the checkpoint inspection, including the X-raying of luggage and the metal detector walk-through. Eventually, we are told, the implementation of so-called CrewPASS will allow us to skirt the checkpoint more or less entirely.
Not everybody agrees that air crews deserve this special treatment. That’s not an unreasonable point of view, and I don’t disagree with it, necessarily. As security experts like Bruce Schneier point out, if you are going to screen at all, it is important to screen everybody, lest the system become overly complicated and prone to exploitable loopholes.
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WikiLeaks has announced an important release on its Twitter account, claiming it’ll be seven times bigger than the Iraq war logs, which are widely considered to be the biggest military leak in history.
“Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. intense pressure over it for months. Keep us strong” was the message posted to the Wikileaks Twitter account earlier today.
The message was followed by an even bolder statement two hours later: “The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.”
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Our client Paul Chambers has decided today to proceed with a High Court challenge to his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. Paul was convicted on 10 May 2010 by Doncaster Magistrates’ Court and his appeal was turned down by Doncaster Crown Court on 11 November 2010.
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We already covered the guy who was arrested after stripping down for the TSA, highlighting how one of the charges was his failure to complete the security procedure (after stripping down, he pointed out there was no need for a pat down…). However, there was a second charge that was even more troubling that actually deserves a separate post, which is that he was also charged with “illegally recording the San Diego Airport Authority.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Emissions of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are roaring ahead again after a smaller-than-expected dip due to the worldwide recession. Scientists are forecasting that CO2 emissions from burning coal, oil and gas will reach their highest in history this year.
Levels of the man-made greenhouse gas being dumped into the atmosphere have never been higher and are once again accelerating. Scientists have revised their figures on global CO2 emissions, showing that levels fell by just 1.3 per cent in 2009 – less than half of what was expected. This year they are likely to increase by more than 3 per cent, greater than the average annual increase for the last decade.
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Finance
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If I was a billionaire, I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write. Firstly, because my training, and especially my experience of getting richer in a growth based economy would have taught me that these ‘perfect storms’ when resource/financial bottlenecks supposedly loomed, historically worked out to be opportunities that spiked my digital wealth and incremental social power. Secondly, if I were a billionaire I wouldn’t believe what Im about to write because all my peers, advisors and friends would tell me that it’s caca. And lastly I wouldn’t believe what Im about to write as the implications would be too threatening, at least on the surface, to comprehend let alone integrate into my world view. All the same, if I were a billionaire, based on my understanding of our particular juncture of history, likely on the verge of transitioning away from marker claims back to real capital, here is what I would do….
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The average 2009 college grad had $24,000 in student loan debt. But in today’s debt-wracked world, some have it much worse. Meet one of the outliers: 23 years old, more than $200,000 in student loans, begging for help.
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“Based on the daily knowledge of our needs, we can speed up exchanges between our countries,” Gracia said.
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Corporate welfare is a term describing a government’s bestowal of money grants, tax breaks, or other special favorable treatment on corporations or selected corporations.
The term compares corporate subsidies and welfare payments to the poor, and implies that corporations are much less needy of such treatment than the poor.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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At a time when memory is being erased and the political relevance of education is dismissed in the language of measurement and quantification, it is all the more important to remember the legacy and work of Paulo Freire. Freire is one of the most important educators of the 20th century and is considered one of the most important theorists of “critical pedagogy” – the educational movement guided by both passion and principle to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency, justice and democracy. His groundbreaking book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” has sold more than a million copies and is deservedly being commemorated this year – the 40th anniversary of its appearance in English translation – after having exerted its influence over generations of teachers and intellectuals in the Americas and abroad.
Since the 1980s, there have been too few intellectuals on the North American educational scene who have matched Freire’s theoretical rigor, civic courage and sense of moral responsibility. And his example is more important now than ever before: with institutions of public and higher education increasingly under siege by a host of neoliberal and conservative forces, it is imperative for educators to acknowledge Freire’s understanding of the empowering and democratic potential of education. Critical pedagogy currently offers the very best, perhaps the only, chance for young people to develop and assert a sense of their rights and responsibilities to participate in governing, and not simply being governed by prevailing ideological and material forces.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Children in Islamic schools are being taught antisemitic and homophobic views from textbooks, the BBC’s Panorama will claim tonight.
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Have you ever noticed that projects like Aadhar, national intelligence grid (Natgrid), crime and criminal tracking network & systems (CCTNS), etc have some common features? The first is that they all have great potentials to violate civil liberties of Indians like privacy rights. Another common feature is that all of them are projects related to law and order and intelligence gathering, irrespective what government claims, thus promoting the e-surveillance capabilities of India.
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EFF recently participated in the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Vilnius, Lithuania, advocating for the respect of citizens’ fundamental rights online. The IGF is an experimental and influential multi-stakeholder policy forum convened by the United Nations Secretary General in 2006, where civil society, industry, the technical community, and decision makers discuss key aspects of Internet governance issues on an equal footing. The informal nature of the IGF is designed to promote the full and frank exchange of ideas on important Internet policy issues without the knock-down-and-dragged-out conflicts that characterize other international fora where recommendations or binding treaties are made. This year, IGF brought together over 1,400 participants from around the world. Videos and transcripts of all the official meetings are now online and make for interesting viewing.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The communications minister, Ed Vaizey, has insisted to the Guardian that he is in favour of net neutrality, and that his speech on the subject has been misinterpreted.
Ed Vaizey, who last week gave a speech on the internet and regulation (PDF) to an FT conference, told the Guardian that “I say ‘don’t block input’ [to the internet]. It’s my first principle.” He added that he thought people who criticise him for abandoning net neutrality haven’t read his speech: “I say the same as Berners-Lee.”
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There is one bright spot in all this, though. Amazon’s business model offers us the clearest possible demonstration that we should not allow the law to treat the products of creative expression in the same way as we do physical property.
The idea of “intellectual property” deliberately conflates the two and allows politicians to pretend that laws about physical property should extend to digital downloads. We need to challenge this unjustifiable elision if we are to think seriously about copyright and business models in the age of electronics.
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The saga of Illadore (Monica Gaudio) and Cooks Source Magazine (Judith Griggs) draws to an end, with the closing of Cooks Source Magazine.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Now for the glass half full perspective. Music is special. It speaks to us all. We all want to hear a great song and share the ones we love with others. We are fans of music and we value it. We spend money and/or time hunting for and listening to music that moves us.
Despite all the challenges, mischaracterizations and confusion, the music industry is finally beginning to reach its full potential.
More people in the world are choosing to hear and engage with more music and more artists then ever before. More music is being used in the ever-expanding video outlets of TV, Webisodes, Films, YouTube, Video Games and other User Generated Content websites.
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A key test of digital copyright law will soon be heard in New York federal court over whether online music storage services and search engines can be held liable when users upload copyrighted material. The outcome could have far-reaching implications for so-called “cloud-based” services, which allow users to store their content on remote servers accessible via the Internet.
Among the key issues is the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects Internet service providers like Google, Yahoo and Facebook from copyright liability if they promptly remove infringing content upon notification. Last Tuesday several influential digital rights groups filed a brief supporting the defendant in the case, MP3Tunes, urging the court to uphold the “safe harbor” provision, lest online innovation be stifled.
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It’s another model that would be good to see utilised elsewhere, ideally with the results being put into the public domain.
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This striking headline comes from a note received from Vivien Rörsch (De Brauw), on two recent and equally striking Dutch decisions handed down last week by the Court of Appeal of The Hague: in the two separate cases the court ruled that, since downloading from illegal sources for private use was permitted under Dutch law, this was to the copyright owner’s advantage.
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According to Hollywood’s MPAA and various associated spin outfits, the US economy would be in tatters were it not for the major movie companies.
So state subsidies are essential, say Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios, and Warner Bros Entertainment
But that’s not the case, says a new report, drawing a furious retort from an MPAA talking head.
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ACTA
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ACTA will make copyright law less fair and even more unreasonable. The inevitable consequence will be that people will respect its laws even less, and feel even more justified in doing so. And so we have a paradox: the more that ACTA is put into practice, the more it will weaken the edifice it was supposed to buttress.
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Contrary to Commission statements, ACTA is inconsistent with the EU acquis. Moreover, by still including patents and harsh criminal measures, ACTA threatens legitimate businesses as detailed below. We urge the European Parliament to exclude patents from the scope of ACTA and to obtain the opinion of the Court of Justice as to whether ACTA is compatible with the Treaties.
ACTA is inconsistent with the EU acquis. The most explicit example regards Council Regulation (EC) No. 1383/2003 concerning customs action against goods suspected of infringing certain intellectual property rights (BMR). With regards to trademark goods, the BMR is limited to counterfeit goods. ACTA’s border measures section is, with regards to trademark goods, not limited to counterfeit goods. This has implications on access to medicine. [1] A second example regards damages. ACTA’s damages (suggested retail price) are higher than the acquis, the EU Enforcement Directive sets damages as lost profit or royalties. [2] Especially in combination with the Union patent, which will make litigation more profitable, we may see, in the ICT sector, the same patent litigation battlefield in Europe as in the United States. This will be harmful for European SMEs. [3] We believe an independent assessment on the relationship between ACTA and the EU acquis is needed.
Ron Paul: Why Sacrifice our Liberties for the Illusion of Perfect Safety?
Credit: TinyOgg
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